Transubstantiate

Why the best church small groups might take their cues from the Twelve Steps.

I used to tell my wife and friends that I needed a “non-small-group small group.” Then I began to wonder if I just needed an AA group. I am not an alcoholic. Alcohol just doesn’t do it for me. But Alcoholics Anonymous does. I attended an AA group while writing a book called Addiction and Virtue, and I’ve missed it ever since.

I am a Christian, or at least I am trying to be. I want to be a disciple of Jesus. But small groups just don’t interest me. I’ve attended many and they have all been more or less disappointing.

I know I’m not the only person who has encountered something spiritually vital in AA that is missing from small groups. My students at Biola University, where I teach a class on addiction that requires their attendance at AA meetings, often express this sentiment. Despite being immersed in the evangelical subculture of our university, most of them describe AA as the most spiritually “real” community they’ve ever witnessed.

This is not an especially new insight. Devotionals and leadership books and church bloggers have long tipped their hats to lessons that can be learned from AA. This magazine, too, has featured an ongoing conversation about the spiritual power of AA.

But in my teaching and research I have yet to see anyone take the comparison between AA and Christian community all the way, indulging it and carrying it to its full conclusion: If we took AA as our guide—all of it—how would we do small groups differently? What, if anything, would change? The question is not too farfetched, since AA began as an offshoot of a once-potent Christian discipleship movement.

AA and transformation

AA founders Bill Wilson and Bob Smith were acolytes of the …

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The historical Christian doctrine helps us to see the goodness of God in Good Friday.

Good Friday sermons aren’t always easy to sit through. They’re even tougher to preach. Never have I been more moved or more likely to squirm in my seat in church than on Good Friday. Perhaps that’s because they invite us to sit in the midnight passages of Scripture, caught up with suffering, death, and the purposes of God. For many of us, it is a trial to read Good Friday texts and still see God as good.

Might I suggest that the careful use of historical Christian doctrine can help?

Take Isaiah 53’s shadowy prophecy of the Suffering Servant. In its own context, mystery lies thick around the Servant. A disturbing portrait of travail and torment mystifies and perplexes, even as it enthralls. In the earlier Songs of the Servant in Isaiah, he is clearly a communal figure for Israel in exile. But in this chapter, the communal figure becomes a concrete individual—an enigmatic and tragic one. Despised and rejected by men, oppressed and led away to death by his enemies, he seems among men the most to be pitied.

The worst of his lot lies not in the abuse by his enemies, or even the rejection of his friends—it is his treatment by God that is most unnerving. Even though he was innocent and there was no “deceit in his mouth,” it seems “it was the Lord’s will to crush him” in order to make “his life an offering for sin” and bring about the salvation of many (Isa. 53:10).

But how could it serve the purposes of Israel’s God to see this righteous one crushed? What does it tell us about the way God treats his servants, his elect? These are truly dark sayings. A gleam of light begins to shine, though, not only when we recognize their fulfillment in Jesus, the …

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Christians end Holy Week shaken after coordinated attacks at three churches and three hotels across the island nation.

The joy of Easter quickly turned into terror and grief for Christians in Sri Lanka this morning, where bombers conducted coordinated attacks on at least three churches and three high-end hotels, killing more than 200 people.

The government has urged citizens to resist speculating whether radicalized Muslims are to blame for the violence, which mostly took place in or around the capital city of Colombo. Experts say if the bombings end up being religiously motivated, they represent the bloodiest sectarian attacks in decades in the island nation, located southeast of India, where civil war ended in 2009.

At Zion Church, rows of Easter lilies remained in front of a sanctuary as victims fled the blast, leaving behind hymnals, Bibles, and debris across the floor. Initial reports indicated that 25 worshipers had been killed and another 27 injured at Zion—according to its website, a charismatic church belonging to the Fellowship of Free Churches of Sri Lanka and located on the opposite side of the island in Batticaloa.

Other attacks took place at two Catholic churches, St. Anthony’s Shrine in Kochchikade and St. Sebastian’s Church in Katana, and three hotels in Colombo, all around 8:45 a.m. local time.

St. Sebastian, where initial reports indicated that 50 worshipers had been killed, posted a brief plea on Facebook inviting the community to “come and help” after the bombing, along with photos of rows of disheveled pews covered in roof tiles, the church’s ceiling blown out, and blood splattered on the walls.

“We are dismayed by this turn of events,” Prabodith Mihindukulasuriya, a faculty member at Colombo Theological Seminary, told CT. “After 10 years of carefree existence, we are …

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The Evangelical Council of Venezuela is seeking a new way of societal accord, peace, and reconciliation.

Venezuela, with the oil wealth of Saudi Aribia, today looks more like Syria, noted a journalist. With the country in free fall, it is hard to imagine how it can last much longer. In daily updates, we listen to multiplying horror stories of no food, empty medicine shelves, stunning numbers of kidnappings, and the hemorrhaging of ten percent of its population in a matter of months.

This incredibly beautiful and rich-in-resource Latin American country is the paradigm of ideological delusion, bureaucratic dissonance, governmental piracy, police intimidation, and outright robbing of the public pursue.

Keep in mind what we are talking about. With 30 million in population, about the size of Canada, it is harbored on the northeast coast of South America. Colonized by the Spanish in the 1500s, it became independent in 1881. Long the bastion of caudillos or military “strongmen,” in the 1950s and following, a series of elected governments ruled, ending in 1993 with Hugo Chávez becoming president. He died in 2013.

During his rule, Venezuela, with more natural oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, came unglued. Mirroring Cuba, its economic management drove it to financial ruin, with shortages in almost everything and millions fleeing the country for survival.

Its current president, Maduro, a former bus driver, has turned his failing country into a kind of police state, merging dire economic realities with religious intimidation, social fiascos and an unending litany of debilitating stories of starvation, needless deaths from lack of medicine, and a citizenry fatigued by dishonesty and failed governance.

Responding to resistance with authoritarianism and repression, day to day its precarious status teeters on the edge of utter …

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According to the gospel of John, the cross casts us into community.

We Americans tend to be a sentimental people. This makes it difficult for us to look directly into the horror, shame, and degradation of a death by crucifixion. When Jesus says to Mary, “Woman, behold thy son” and to John “Behold thy Mother,” we often interpret this saying of our Lord as a sentimental invitation to take good care of your mother. I am a mother, and I definitely want to be taken care of! But this is not what the Fourth Evangelist, John, wants us to understand. In the Fourth Gospel, the mother of our Lord plays a quite different role.

In the side aisle of the chapel where I often worship, there’s a beautiful, unusual altarpiece. It depicts one of John’s memorable stories, the marriage feast at Cana where Jesus says to his mother, “Woman, what have you to do with me? My hour is not yet come” (John 2:4, RSV throughout). In English, this sounds very rude. In Greek it is more respectful, but we notice that Jesus does not call her “Mother,” and she responds to him not as his mother but as one of his followers—one who is beginning to have a glimmer of an idea about who he is.

She says to the servant, “Do whatever he tells you” (v. 5). She is learning to be his disciple. That’s what Mary represents in the Gospel of John. She does not appear again in the Fourth Gospel—except in passing and in company with others—until his hour actually does come and he is crucified. From the cross, once again Jesus calls her “woman” rather than “Mother.” Her identity as Jesus’ mother is not important to John.

In John’s gospel, Mary stands out as a particularly faithful disciple, one who follows Jesus through …

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The truth of the gospel requires telling the whole story.

Sitting across the table from me, he picks up a crumpled napkin. Amid our lively conversation, my friend—who is a pastor—explains his sermon preparation. He is brilliant and creative, deeply concerned with the Bible and why it matters to his congregation. Flattening out the napkin, he writes an X in one corner to represent the biblical text. Then he draws a giant cross in the middle of the square. Finally he adds an arrow moving from the X to and through the cross. Whether preaching from Ecclesiastes or Philemon, he explains, “after I sit with a text for a while, I always ask, how does the cross relate to this?”

The napkin cross is a fruitful approach to sermon-writing. As Christians, we believe that all of the Bible points to Christ and that he, as the focus of the Scriptures, gives us the best vantage point for understanding what the sacred writings are about. More specifically, if the cross is the focal point of Christ’s life and work, then interpreting a text through that focus seems like a good idea. Here we see the love of the Father at work, forgiving our sins and reconciling us to himself. The apostle Paul tells us that he preaches only Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:1–2). He makes it clear he will never boast in anything but the cross (Gal 6:14). So, we’re good, right? If we have the cross, what could possibly be missing?

This cross-centered viewpoint shows us a lot. But if we go by the Bible, it doesn’t go far enough. The New Testament doesn’t end its account of Jesus’ work with a description of his burial. Instead, it makes quite a big deal of Easter. Limiting our interpretations to the cross is like a golf swing with no follow-through: The ball doesn’t …

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Even in the midst of the sorrow, pain, and shame of the cross, Good Friday is still very good.

I do not look forward to Good Friday. I’m an upbeat kind of guy. A negative situation is always an opportunity, not a problem. The glass is always half full, and more is probably on the way.

But all that changes on Good Friday. Sure I feel down and out other days of the year. The waves of life will do that to you. But Good Friday plunges me into a much darker place. Waves of sadness, emptiness, and hopelessness come crashing in on Good Friday.

For many years, I took part a Tenebrae service on Good Friday (from a Latin word meaning “darkness”). During the service, a candle is extinguished after each reading of the last seven words of Jesus on his way to the cross. The sanctuary gets progressively darker and darker. After Jesus’ last words from the cross are read, the last candle is put out, plunging the sanctuary into darkness. The last words hanging in the air are the question, “What is to become of the light of the world?”

We left in silence contemplating a world where God never came to save, where the light never shined into darkness, where all was death and silence forever. We left still burdened with our sin and lost in our brokenness. The reality of it all was devastating.

The Abyss

After a Good Friday service like this, even the most affable of people cannot resist the pull toward the abyss. Alcoholism, addictions, anger, violence, or any kind of struggle to overcome a world made meaningless all make sense to me on Good Friday. I can understand why people respond to the darkness of the world with more darkness, more destruction, more death. Why not? What else is there to do?

And yet for Jesus, for the one who died that Good Friday death, Hebrews 12:2 tells us that it was “for the …

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The cathedral’s famous Gothic form, which proclaimed Christ in shape and structure, will never die.

Gothic architecture has long reached where Christian missionaries would go but are not permitted: the minds and hearts of the faithless. The world’s grief over the flames at Notre-Dame de Paris revealed its power as far more than architectural style.

For the great medieval commentator William Durandus (d. 1296), the Gothic church took the shape of Christ’s body: the chancel the head, the transepts the arms, the altar the heart. And if the Gothic church symbolizes the body of Christ, to see Notre Dame burn this Monday was to experience Good Friday early.

It was excruciating to watch its spire fall. But at the risk of saying this too soon, the Gothic style represented by Notre-Dame de Paris cannot be stopped by fire. This style has given the church a theology of glass and stone, a model that has spread to Catholic and Protestant structures across the centuries and around the world.

Fifty miles from Paris, the greatest and most complete of Gothic cathedrals, Chartres, was itself born of fire, built and rebuilt after blazes in 1020, 1134, and 1194. It is no different with the delicate stonework of Reims, France’s great coronation cathedral—the result of a fire in 1208. Gothic architecture, like the art of pottery, does quite well with flames.

The Gothic style first emerged in the mid-12th century at the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis just north of Paris. Abbot Suger’s innovation there was the equivalent, the art historian Erwin Panofsky once commented, of a new president remaking the White House in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. And his bold architectural risk paid off.

The plain evidence for Gothic’s theological and liturgical inspiration is unavoidable. Over the door of Saint-Denis, Abbot Suger …

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Four years of political spats on campus have prepared us for partisan divides and controversy.

Taylor University recently made national news with its announcement that Vice President Mike Pence will deliver this year’s commencement address—spurring backlash from students, alumni, parents, and faculty.

This is not the only recent political clash to put the small evangelical college in the spotlight. Last year, an anonymous newspaper titled Excalibur was created and distributed by a group of Taylor faculty who wanted to take a stand against the increasing liberalization that they perceived on campus.

In many ways, it is fitting that the 2019 commencement has become so controversial. During their time at Taylor, this graduating class has experienced a trial by fire that few others have. As a member of the class of 2020, I have watched the class before me face these issues with conviction, dedicated pursuit of the truth, and a growing sense of grace and love for those holding the opposite view.

Generations of college students have encountered political issues and passions anew on campus, but the past four years have been particularly politicized. As freshmen, they were thrown into the chaos of the primaries, then the election of one of the most polarizing leaders in US history. President Trump’s election has led to debates and soul-searching among young evangelicals in particular.

Students still tell stories of the ugly conversations that took place during those years, as they debated the NFL’s Take a Knee movement—which led to controversy over dozens of undergrads kneeling at a basketball game—and conflicting approaches to addressing racism—with dueling campus newspaper op-eds on whether our discussions of race actually make a difference.

As emotional wounds slowly healed, the stitches …

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What Jesus’ arrest and trial can teach us about facing opposition.

“So again Pilate asked him, ‘Aren’t you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of’” (Mark 15:4).

When we approach Easter, there are many things we think about: Jesus’ death in our place, the disciples’ lack of understanding, God’s choice to have women be the first witnesses to the empty tomb, resurrection hope. There is a multitude of directions to go when thinking about the end of this most significant week in history.

But there is one we rarely consider: how Jesus got through that experience. Yes, we note Gethsemane where he wrestled with his coming fate and eventually handed it all over to God. But what did that mean for him? Is there anything for us to learn from how Christ faced the intense rejection by the world that the Cross represented?

During the entire second half of his ministry, Jesus taught his disciples that they would face opposition, resistance, and rejection just as he did. Their spiritual development depended upon how to cope with this reality—a reality our churches today are struggling with as we move into an increasingly post-Christian context. John O’Sullivan, former editor of the National Review, defines it this way: “A post-Christian society is not merely a society in which agnosticism or atheism is the prevailing fundamental belief. It is a society rooted in the history, culture, and practices of Christianity but in which the religious beliefs of Christianity have either been rejected or worse, forgotten.”

What can Jesus’ arrest and trial teach us about our own calling in such a world? How do we best remember what many in the world have forgotten?

Jesus was betrayed by one of his own. He was examined about …

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