Transubstantiate

How is the church meant to heed Paul’s directive to pray for “those in authority”?

This Sunday, hundreds of Christian leaders and congregations across the US will join Franklin Graham in a special day of prayer for President Donald Trump.

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association president, who prayed at Trump’s inauguration, said that the president needs prayer to “protect, strengthen, encourage, and guide” him in the face of political attacks.

He cited the call to pray for leaders from 1 Timothy 2:

I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. (v. 1–4)

Beyond a designated day of prayer, many congregations include political leaders in their weekly petitions during Sunday gatherings. As they pray, leaders often emphasize God’s sovereignty over earthly kingdoms, unity in the body of Christ, and our desire to see goodness and flourishing in our country.

Some US Christians have questioned whether national calls to prayer around certain issues or leaders “politicize” prayer to partisan ends. Each year around holidays such as Memorial Day and Independence Day, leaders caution against conflating patriotism and worship. (This year, the National Association of Evangelicals has focused on the Great Commandment [Matt. 22:37–39] for its “Pray Together Sunday” over the July 4 weekend.)

Many of the president’s evangelical advisers have signed on to Sunday’s day of prayer, including James Dobson, Jerry Falwell Jr., Jack Graham, Robert Jeffress, and Paula White, who …

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“There is a much greater openness to the gospel among Jewish people in North America, Eastern Europe, and also in Israel today.”

Ed: How long have you been involved with the Lausanne Movement, and what is your current role?

Tuvya: I was at the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism in Switzerland, although I was just 27 years old. I’d come to faith in Christ just three years earlier from a background in Judaism. That was my first exposure to the idea of world evangelism.

In 1980, Lausanne sponsored a conference on unreached people groups in Pattaya, Thailand. I wasn’t at that meeting, but it’s where the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism (LCJE) was initiated. It is now among the most mature Lausanne special interest networks and the only one today serving Jewish evangelism globally.

Since 1999, I have served as President of the LCJE International Coordinating Committee. I’m also a Lausanne Catalyst for Jewish evangelism as a bridge between the Lausanne Movement and the LCJE network.

Ed: Tell me about your current roll and what you do.

Tuvya: As a Lausanne Catalyst for Jewish evangelism, I’m one of the representatives of the Jewish evangelism network to the international Lausanne Movement. Membership in our network asks for substantial agreement in principle with the Lausanne Covenant. As President of the LCJE International Coordinating Committee, I’m providing network leadership and focus around the purposes of our network.

The primary work of that ICC is planning and hosting international consultations every four years. We do the same for our LCJE CEO conferences every two years. Our bulletin is now published three times a year, available in print and online. I also liaise our network with the larger Lausanne Movement

The Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism is a voluntary and elected position. My full-time …

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It takes more than a pulpit to train up your people in the way they should go.

The woman was patient and gracious, but clearly concerned.

“Why are we showing this movie, and why aren’t we presenting the gospel as part of the event?”

This friend from our congregation was referring to what had recently become an annual tradition at our church to show the movie The Polar Express on a weekend before Christmas. Each year we welcomed hundreds of excited, pajama-clad children, their parents, and their grandparents into our auditorium for a family movie night. Dozens of volunteers dressed as conductors and engineers, strategically interrupting the movie with ice cream, hot chocolate, and jingle bells to create an evening to remember. The event was intended to be a simple welcome point for families in our community, who were invited to return to our church for Christmas services.

From my perspective, the movie night had a clear purpose. But as I listened to this godly woman voice her concerns, I realized the communication to our congregation had not been as clear as I thought. Our church prided itself on being a “teaching church,” but we had been neglecting numerous teaching opportunities on and off the platform.

Our church describes itself as a “teaching church” because we value the teaching and preaching of Scripture. And of course, churches should absolutely teach the Bible. But as we have discovered, we also need to teach values and behaviors—and that teaching needs to extend beyond the pulpit.

Every church develops a set of underlying, deeply held corporate values about how and why it exists and operates. These values are usually determined by the church’s senior leadership. However, if these values are not regularly and repeatedly taught throughout the …

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It seems like foolishness to us, but it was one of Jesus’ greatest strengths.

Of all the Beatitudes, I’d guess that “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth” is the most misunderstood, mistrusted, and neglected. I think the reason why is because we don’t understand the virtue of meekness and tend to think it indicates weakness.

Certainly, meekness didn’t fit in with the values of the Greco-Roman world of the first century, where humility wasn’t generally lauded as a virtue. Nietzsche, a great admirer of the Greeks, thought meekness was exactly the sort of false virtue that the weak would applaud because, well, it’s about the only virtue they could actually pull off. Since the weak can’t win by the standard rules, they change the rules.

I think most of us are far more Nietzschean than we’d like to admit. At least I am. When I hear the word meek, it seems too insipid, too accommodating, too spineless to be a virtue.

Yet the Scriptures call us to meekness. Besides the beatitude, Moses is held out as a model for being the meekest man on earth (Num. 12:3), Jesus tells us to come learn from him because he is meek and humble of heart (Matt. 11:29), and Paul encourages us to put on meekness like clothing (Col. 3:12). This is not something any Christian interested in following Jesus can afford to ignore.

What, then, is meekness? Well, it can’t be weakness or a lack of courage. Jesus was no pushover—he flipped tables in the temple, showed up in cities where he faced outstanding warrants, and coolly stared down governors and kings threatening him with death.

According to medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, meekness is a gentleness that restrains us from anger or from expressing our anger easily. Reformer John Calvin calls it a “mild …

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Evangelical faith is no longer characterized by its initial passion.

The longing to know and love God, to bask in his presence, is core to evangelical life and faith as I understand it. The famous Bebbington quadrilateral describes evangelicals as those who emphasize the authority of Scripture, Christ’s death on the cross, the need for conversion, and a life of service, in both word and deed. That is good as far as it goes, but it does not go deep enough, in my view. There is something that energizes our action, that initiates our first and sustains our ongoing conversion, that draws us repeatedly to the Cross, that compels us to read and obey Scripture. That something deeper is the yearning to know God. (My previous essay, “Monomaniacs for God,” outlines what that looks like in Scripture and church history.)

One can still find this passion in our movement today, to be sure. But it is no longer something that characterizes us. It is not what we’re known for.

One reason I believe desire for God, as such, is core to what it means to be evangelical is what happened at our birth, when the desire for God did indeed characterize the movement. The following historical survey is woefully inadequate to prove this and the subsequent decline of our desire. But I nonetheless believe that, in broad strokes, it is a fair summary of where we’ve been and where we are today.

‘The town seemed to be full of the presence of God’

In the beginning, the American evangelical movement sprung up when, in the 1730s and ’40s, George Whitefield and John Wesley began preaching about the need to be born again. Their preaching revived a dying portion of Jesus’ church, which reanimated a people so that they might enjoy a vital, living, and loving relationship with our Savior. …

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A recent report suggests that highly religious couples have better relationships and better sex. Domestic violence, however, is the same for them as their less religious neighbors.

Charlie and Marty Coe recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in front of a joyful crowd of family and friends, but things weren’t always so good in their marriage. Although they were very much in love in the early years, by the time they reached their early 30s, they had grown “cold and distant” and were “living the life of married singles.” As they put it, they were “a train wreck waiting to happen,” and though they never discussed it, the threat of divorce “loomed large.” At the time, they attended church but were not living out their faith in their marriage.

All that changed about 38 years ago when the couple attended a Worldwide Marriage Encounter (WWME) weekend they heard about through a friend at church. During the event, an unhappy Marty found the courage to tell Charlie he needed to shoulder a much larger share of the care of their two children. The WWME community also jumpstarted their faith and their marriage, prompting them to pray with and for one another on a daily basis and to become more active leaders in their church. Since then, they’ve enjoyed a vibrant marriage that they continue to share about through their marriage ministry.

This couple’s experience is illustrative of some of the key findings from a new report from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) and the Wheatley Institution, The Ties That Bind. It finds that “lukewarm” couples—those who attend church infrequently—do not enjoy better relationship quality than secular couples who never attend church, and on some measures, such as men’s infidelity and women’s relationship quality, they actually do worse than secular couples. But couples …

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Four leaders share their vision for what demonstrating pro-life convictions really looks like.

The recent debates over anti-abortion legislation advancing in states like Alabama, Missouri, and Georgia—some of the strictest bans in the country, seen as precursors to efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade—put the pro-life movement on the spot.

Critics have pushed back against what they perceived as a pro-life position to uphold life by barring abortion but offering little other support for struggling women and families. That’s a common counterpoint from pro-choice advocates, and it’s a stance convicted pro-life Christians aren’t satisfied with either. There is far more to a biblical and moral defense of life and dignity than a political position on abortion.

CT asked four pro-life leaders to share how they believe Christians can build trust in the movement in the face of current critique, cynicism, and challenges. Their responses appear below.

Kelly Rosati, consultant, foster care advocate, former Focus on the Family vice president:

We must walk our talk and care about all life, born and unborn. If we are as serious as we say we are about saving the lives of unborn children, we must come to terms with the reasons for women’s abortion decisions. At the top of the list are two glaring ones Christians could help change: an inability to care for dependents and an inability to afford a baby.

Well-meaning Christians often point out the great work of pregnancy resource centers and churches with outreaches to abortion-risk women. That work is fantastic, but those involved will be the first to tell you it isn’t even close to enough to support the needs of all the women in the US facing an abortion decision. They need what all moms need: sufficient food and clothing for their children, access to …

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“We must learn to enjoy Christ, to see the clear sunbeams of the heart of God the Father, shining on us.”

Ed: How long have you been involved in Lausanne International, and what is your current role?

Justin: I have been serving as director of executive projects for the past five years. Our CEO, Michael Oh, recruited me when he was preparing to take on leadership of the Movement.

Ed: Tell me about your current roll and what you do.

Justin: I help design and launch new initiatives within the movement. In that process, we determine what the end goal is and how to get there. We wrestle over: who else needs to be at the table with us? Who needs to speak into this initiative? With whom should we partner?

Typically, it also means building a team or recruiting a long-term director for the initiative, and seeing it through to launch. Every project is different, which makes it both fun and frustrating. I’ve gotten to help launch recent initiatives like Lausanne Global Classroom, Younger Leaders Generation and initiatives within that, and am now working on an initiative to see affordable, robust theological education made available to anyone, anywhere. Pray for me and for Lausanne.

Ed: Tell me about the gospel and the church in your part of the world.

Justin: After serving on the mission field, I am now in Tulsa, OK. Tulsa is in need of reformation. The leadership of my church here often says that, as a city, it is “over-churched, but under-gospeled.”

Being in the Bible Belt, it’s common to see men and women looking for salvation in all sorts of places – usually drastic departures from the living, good, triune God and the faith we find in Scripture.

Some confuse Christianity with being American – a cultural Christianity. So, you get a politicized, ethnocentric faith. Others have been taught that Jesus wants to make …

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When it seems the whole world suffers, animals are still offering praise.

There’s no shortage of ugliness in our world. A quick scan of today’s environmental headlines reveals any number of horrors: burnt-out Californian forests, flooded Midwestern plains. It’s hard to pause to appreciate the wildflowers in bloom when dead whales wash ashore with plastic-engorged stomachs on beaches all over the world.

Perhaps it helps to know that when we fail to see the beauty around us, other creatures don’t. Some scientists now believe that animals appreciate beauty for its own sake.

Usually, the first (and most common) purpose ascribed to beauty is its functionality. Beauty can alert us to healthfulness or the presence of fertility, a useful and vital role in producing healthy offspring. In this scientific view, beauty serves no other purpose than as a genetic signpost.

But another potential exists. Some scientists recently proposed that beauty in the natural world might sometimes exist just for aesthetic purposes. In his book The Evolution of Beauty, ornithologist Richard Prum suggests that some animals may appreciate beauty outside of any reproductive purposes and may choose mates based on an aesthetic sense alone, a phenomenon known as sexual selection. He cites the laborious process a male bowerbird undertakes when building his bower, or nest. “The bower serves no physical purpose other than as a location where courtship takes place,” he says, indicating that this artistic demonstration is meant solely for the female bowerbird’s aesthetic enjoyment.

Jeff Schloss, a professor of biology at Westmont College, said in an interview that Prum’s theories have further inflamed an “ongoing debate” in the scientific world. Schloss, who studies the evolution …

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Telling the uncomfortable story of “desolate” Tamar positions us to show a kind of compassion King David didn’t.

For the past year, I’ve been teaching the Book of Samuel to a group of women at my church. We go through it chapter by chapter, verse by verse, and I challenge them to think critically about what they are reading. The Book of Samuel is filled with stories that ask us to grapple with the sovereignty of God and the severity of sin. But perhaps none is so jarring as the story of Tamar and Amnon in 2 Samuel 13.

I’m sure you know it. Amnon, one of David’s sons, violates his own sister and then casts her aside. When her brother Absalom learns what Amnon has done, he tells her, “Has Amnon your brother been with you? Be quiet for now, my sister. He is your brother; do not take this thing to heart.” Absalom’s shushing and dismissing are certainly vile, but it is David’s reaction that stuns: “When King David heard all this, he was furious” (vv. 20–21).

Furious. That’s it. No public denouncement of Amnon, no vindication of Tamar. No justice, no words of comfort or kindness for his daughter, just impotent, mute anger. David is silent. He takes no action against Amnon, opening the door for Absalom to have his brother murdered in revenge. And Tamar is left desolate.

Why does David’s anger translate into silence and inaction? Because David sees in his sons an amplification of his own grievous sins. David sacrificed Bathsheba to his lust and then murdered her husband to cover his tracks. Now his two sons fulfill God’s prophecy of judgment by committing heightened versions of his own sins within their own family.

David’s guilt renders him silent. Tamar’s plea to Amnon as he overpowers her rings in the ears of the reader: As for me, where could I carry my …

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