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The band reflects on 20 years of wrestling with spirituality and faith and making music.

There has never been a Christian band like mewithoutYou. Then again, there’s no such thing as a Christian band, and mewithoutYou doesn’t actually exist.

I mean, yes, there’s a group of men who have been playing music under this name for the last 20 years, who recently announced their intention to disband, and who will play the first two of a hoped-for series of farewell shows this weekend. Both live shows sold out in Philadelphia, their hometown, but are available via livestream on the web.

Ask the band’s singer, Aaron Weiss (whom critics are legally required to refer to as “enigmatic”) what the end of mewithoutYou means to him, and he’ll tell you, “We aren’t breaking up. We never were really a band. That’s not a real thing. We never existed to begin with, and yet we will continue to exist in another respect after our last show has been played.”

To him, “‘2001 to 2020, 21, 22’—it’s all totally arbitrary. To me it feels very artificial,” he said in an interview. “I don’t begrudge anyone if they would like to have a kind of a tombstone to give it a lifespan, but it’s a very arbitrary way of looking at whatever it is that we are.”

mewithoutYou came to prominence in the mid-2000s during what some call the golden age of Tooth and Nail records, the Seattle-based indie record label most closely associated with Christian independent rock for the last thirty years.

At first glance, the band was seemingly peers with other rising stars in the Christian screamo scene, like the bands Emery and Underoath, though its particular brand of fractured post-punk fronted by Weiss’s unhinged, spoken/screamed poetry made …

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Barna study shows Christians age 13 to 18 are skeptical of evangelism, but they’re having deep and personal peer-to-peer conversations.

Treyson West doesn’t have a name for it, but if you want to call it evangelism, that’s fine.

He doesn’t think he has a strategy or model for trying to change people’s beliefs, though. He’s just interested in friendship and reliance on the Holy Spirit.

“The big thing is showing somebody what their identity could be through Christ,” says the 19-year-old high school graduate in the suburbs of Dallas. “Everybody is pushing you to be polarized. And ultimately that just pushes you deeper into a sense of not belonging, and Gen Z digs deeper into loneliness.”

That’s why, when West wants to tell a teenager about Jesus, he doesn’t tell them. He listens, and asks questions to get to know them, showing that he cares. And when God becomes real to one of his friends, he likes to point that out.

Recently, West was sitting with a friend in a car in front of the friend’s house, and the friend was talking about his life and struggles and whether he could believe in God. West asked him how he felt right at that moment, talking about God in the car.

“My heart feels, like, warm,” the friend said.

“Dude, that’s the Holy Spirit,” West said. “That’s God, right there.”

The friend accepted Jesus before he got out of the car.

A new Barna Group study, set to be announced on Monday, says that West’s approach isn’t unusual for younger Christians. Gen Z believers want to share about Jesus, and they are having deep, personal conversations about their faith with their friends. But they have reservations about the idea of evangelism and are skeptical of evangelistic strategies.

According to Reviving Evangelism in the Next Generation, …

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Early reactions from evangelical, mainline, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish leaders.

Facebook already asks for your thoughts. Now it wants your prayers.

The social media giant has rolled out a new prayer request feature, a tool embraced by some religious leaders as a cutting-edge way to engage the faithful online. Others are eyeing it warily as they weigh its usefulness against the privacy and security concerns they have with Facebook.

In Facebook Groups employing the feature, members can use it to rally prayer power for upcoming job interviews, illnesses, and other personal challenges big and small. After they create a post, other users can tap an “I prayed” button, respond with a “like” or other reaction, leave a comment, or send a direct message.

Facebook began testing it in the US in December as part of an ongoing effort to support faith communities, according to a statement attributed to a company spokesperson.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic we’ve seen many faith and spirituality communities using our services to connect, so we’re starting to explore new tools to support them,” it said.

Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas, a Southern Baptist megachurch, was among the pastors enthusiastically welcoming of the prayer feature.

“Facebook and other social media platforms continue to be tremendous tools to spread the Gospel of Christ and connect believers with one another—especially during this pandemic,” he said. “While any tool can be misused, I support any effort like this that encourages people to turn to the one true God in our time of need.”

Adeel Zeb, a Muslim chaplain at The Claremont Colleges in California, also was upbeat.

“As long as these companies initiate proper precautions and protocols to ensure the safety …

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Conversations about equality often lack goodwill. Part of the problem is a newfound fear of common grace.

This piece is the second installment in a two-part series on racial justice debates. Read the first article here.

The words critical race theory, systemic racism, woke, and social justice are case studies in language confusion. People define these terms in radically different ways and use those definitions to distort the views of others.

To some, systemic racism means that discrimination exists in different social, political, and legal structures to varying degrees and intensities. Others think of systemic racism as the idea that all of society is irredeemably racist.

Most scholars define critical race theory (CRT) as a legal movement examining how racism impacts laws, customs, and practices in the United States, despite the gains of the civil rights movement. Critics often use the term CRT broadly enough to include nearly all left-leaning discourse on race and injustice in the United States.

The Book of Common Prayer defines the work of social justice as contending “fearlessly against evil and [making] no peace with oppression; and [helping] us use our freedom rightly in the establishment of justice in our communities and among the nations.” In this reading, social justice is the work of resisting evil and injustice where we discover it locally and nationally. Others contend that social justice is a Marxist idea rooted in the false belief that we can establish a utopia on earth through human actions.

When I was growing up in the Black community, woke simply meant a person who became more aware of our history and more socially conscious as a result. This social consciousness led us to encourage pride in Black achievement and to spur our youth on to greater success. We even had a habit of chiding people who got “super …

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How “redemptive entrepreneurship” can multiply the impact of cash-strapped ministries.

For good reason, we tend not to picture Jesus as a redemptive entrepreneur or a venture philanthropist. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so averse to thinking this way.

He did, after all, multiply loaves and fishes in a way that would impress VC firms like Sequoia Capital. He one-upped Silicon Valley happiness theorists by turning water into wine at a wedding. More visionary than Steve Jobs in a black turtleneck, Jesus told the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30), challenging his followers to see resources as tools for good, not just gold.

It’s this portrait of Jesus, as redemptive entrepreneur, that pastor and financial consultant Mark Elsdon presents in We Aren’t Broke: Uncovering Hidden Resources for Mission and Ministry. Elsdon’s thesis is that the church shouldn’t wallow in self-pity over its declining membership figures and shrinking pool of financial resources. Rather, he proposes creative ways to use property, endowment coffers, and other assets as vehicles for multiplying impact.

Elsdon critiques the church’s historic “two-pocket” approach, which involves receiving money in one pocket via business, investing, tithes, and other sources and then giving money away from a second pocket in the form of philanthropy, donations, or almsgiving. “The real question we should be considering in the church,” he writes, “is this: What is the purpose of our capital? What is the purpose of the money and property that the church owns? Is it to make more money? Is it something else?”

Elsdon is motivated by a mixture of MBA studies in social enterprise, theological education at Princeton Theological Seminary, and his work for the University of Wisconsin campus …

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A tribute to the late author of “The Book of the Dun Cow,” “Jesus: A Novel,” and “Water, Come Down!”

Last week, Walter Wangerin Jr. passed away, and a unique voice fell silent. His wife Thanne (short for Ruth Anne), his family, and a few close friends from Valparaiso University were with him when he died.

I first encountered Walter as a speaker at a conference in which we both participated. A slender man with a handsome, angular face and a shock of dark hair, he stalked the stage like a Shakespearean actor. I thought of the accounts of Charles Dickens sitting onstage in the great halls of England, reading his stories to a mesmerized audience.

Yet Wangerin was neither reading nor sitting. He was performing in the purest sense of the word, weaving stories and concepts together in erudite prose, directing our minds and emotions much as a conductor directs an orchestra’s sounds—now meditative and melodic, now electrifying and bombastic.

We got to know each other mainly through the Chrysostom Society, a group comprising 20 or so writers of faith. Walt usually sat quietly on the margins, stroking his then-shaven chin while observing everything around him with piercing blue eyes. He rarely showed emotion, and when he spoke, he acted as a peacemaker, calming the heated arguments that sometimes emerged from the gaggle of writers. A pastor by profession and calling, he seemed thrilled simply to be in the company of writers.

A few years before, he had written The Book of the Dun Cow. At the time, he was trying to support his family on the salary provided by his predominantly African American church, and his days were filled with counseling, parenting, social work, and the many tasks of an inner-city pastor.

To his surprise more than anyone’s, his first book won the National Book Award in the science fiction category, …

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Michael Bird offers a trusty primer on reading and understanding God’s Word.

At my seminary, I regularly teach a course on biblical interpretation, and I always begin in the same way: by showing students a picture of the “Bible Bar.” This was a real product (no longer available, I believe) that claimed to offer a truly “biblical” snacking experience.

Each Bible Bar contained only seven ingredients, the seven foods mentioned in Deuteronomy 8:8, which were thought to be plentiful in the Promised Land: wheat, barley, vines (raisins), figs, pomegranates, olive oil, and honey. (Personally, I’m glad they didn’t add any milk from the land flowing with milk and honey, since I’m lactose intolerant, but having sampled the bar once, I can only conclude that it’s a shame Deuteronomy 8:8 doesn’t mention salt.)

Every semester, after introducing the Bible Bar, I ask my students a series of questions: Is this what we are meant to glean (pun intended!) from Deuteronomy? Is the inspired text of Deuteronomy 8:8 a recipe book for the best on-the-go energy boost? Were these foods the only things growing in Canaan? Do these foods alone have “spiritual” significance?

Because our Bibles don’t come with an instruction booklet, readers sometimes come up with unusual uses and applications. When I was in high school, the latest craze was a book called The Bible Code. In it, Michael Drosnin argued that the Hebrew Bible contained crossword puzzle–like codes that supposedly embedded terms like “Hitler” and “Pearl Harbor.”

For a brief time, The Bible Code was a sensation, but it was quickly forgotten for obvious reasons. God doesn’t want us to read behind the text for hidden codes. He wants us to read the Bible carefully and …

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Spirit-filled content creators test theological limits on social media.

Michael Paul Corder says he “cut his teeth” praying in public by going around to grocery stores and striking up conversations, asking folks if they wanted to pray. But even in the Bible Belt of East Tennessee, he found people were often hesitant or embarrassed.

Not so, he said, on TikTok.

Corder does a livestream open prayer every day, in which he prays for the hundreds of people who hop into the virtual chatroom without embarrassment. Many of his nearly 165,000 followers who join express feeling relief or calm when he prays for them. Their pain or healing is not something that can be verified, Corder admits, but still, he believes their presence testifies to something missing from their churches.

“At those churches, they’re not praying for the sick, or if they are, they’re not seeing results. At mainstream churches, you get more of a philosophical lecture,” Corder told Religion News Service.

Sometimes on his livestreams, Corder will pray in tongues—a practice popular among charismatic and Pentecostal Christians who say the unknown language is a gift from the Holy Spirit, as described in Acts 2.

“I think words are not the greatest at describing the sensation,” Corder said. “It’s being filled, it’s being baptized.”

“It’s a little mysterious,” he added, saying he speaks in tongues when the Holy Spirit moves him.

Pentecostal or charismatic TikTok is a thriving community of diverse Christians. It’s multilingual and multicultural and spans generations. Its hashtags have millions of views. Here, Christians who identify as charismatic, nondenominational, Assemblies of God, or Pentecostal all gather to share encouragement and witness for …

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Olympic dreams inspire countless millions to pursue goals they’ll never achieve. Here’s why that’s a good thing.

I still remember how it felt when I first saw it. The year was 1984, and the Olympics were held in Los Angeles. Families around the globe gathered around their glowing televisions as stories of striving and victory flooded into their living rooms.

I was eight years old, and enraptured. The torch relay, the opening ceremonies, the extraordinary accomplishments of Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses and Mary Lou Retton, and the succession of medal ceremonies where the American flag unfurled and tear-stricken athletes sang our national anthem—all captivated me. Most captivating of all was the men’s gymnastics team winning the gold medal. My soul was elevated.

Perhaps you’ve seen a seagull on a pier over the ocean. When the wind is right, the bird has only to stretch out its wings and it will rise on the streams of the air. That’s the way it felt. It was a dream and a yearning and a flight of the soul all at once.

That yearning set the spheres of my life in motion. It inspired me to begin a career in gymnastics. It filled my mind with brilliant images when I lay down to sleep. It sustained me through countless hours of training and an excruciating series of injuries. It took me all around the country and even over the oceans, as I became a junior national all-around champion and member of the national team. It even took me to a college I could never have afforded otherwise, and an NCAA championship in my freshman year at Stanford University.

Then it came crashing down. A few months before the Olympic Trials in 1996, I fell from the horizontal bar and broke my neck. In a blink, my gymnastics career ended in failure and a lifelong sentence of spinal damage and chronic pain.

As a person of faith, I believe that history …

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Class action alleges apologetics organization misrepresented the ministry and “bilked” faithful Christian donors.

An NFL football player and his wife are suing Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), claiming the world’s largest apologetics ministry “deceived faithful Christians” and “bilked tens—if not hundreds—of millions of dollars from well-meaning donors.”

Derek Carrier, a tight end for the Las Vegas Raiders, and his wife Dora Carrier were regular listeners to RZIM podcasts and gave the ministry $30,000 in January 2020.

They supported RZIM’s mission to “touch both the heart and the intellect of the thinkers and opinion-makers of society with the truth of the gospel” and trusted the integrity of the ministry’s leadership. They didn’t know that Zacharias had owned multiple spas where he sexually abused employees and had been credibly accused of preying on women in multiple countries.

Now the Carriers say they believe Zacharias and the leadership of RZIM “misrepresented the true nature of their ministry and the use of funds donated in support of their stated purpose.” Ravi Zacharias’s estate, administered by his widow Margaret, is also named as a defendent.

The lawsuit, filed in Atlanta on Thursday, asks the federal court to certify the Carriers as representatives of a class of donors harmed by RZIM. According to their lawyers, the class would include people like the Carriers who gave large sums to support apologetics, but also donors who gave $5, $10, or $100.

“I would imagine the vast majority of donors gave under $100,” Kim Johnson, an attorney representing the Carriers, told CT. “Nobody is going to file a claim for $100. Nobody can bear the costs of going to court for such a small amount. A class action allows us to represent …

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