Transubstantiate

This verse can be misconstrued as a justification for systemic poverty. But what does it really mean?

In some Christian circles, whenever an argument is made in favor of eliminating poverty, someone is bound to retort, “Have you never read Matthew 26:11? The poor will always be among us!”

Thus saith the Lord—case closed.

When read in a certain light, this verse can be misinterpreted and even weaponized as a justification of wealth accumulation or apathy toward the plight of the poor. So, what did Jesus really mean when he said the poor would always be among us?

First, let’s consider the structure of the statement. Jewish teachers in first-century Judea would often quote just the first line of a text, and their studious disciples would immediately understand the reference.

Take, for instance, Jesus’ words on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is decidedly not a desperate cry of despair. Jesus is not saying that God has abandoned him, nor is he questioning his faith. In fact, he is doing the exact opposite. Jesus is quoting verbatim the first line of Psalm 22—a beautiful declaration of surrender, trust, and faith that God wins in the end. To the Roman guards, Christ’s words would have sounded like defeat. For the disciples, however, it was a cry of victory.

When Jesus says, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” in Matthew 9:13, he’s telling the Pharisees they’ve neglected the Old Testament teaching found in Hosea 6:6. When Jesus says, “From the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah” in Matthew 23:35, he’s referring to the entire Old Testament canon from start to finish.

Likewise, for Deuteronomy 6:4–5—one of the most famous and frequently recited Jewish …

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Jam out this season to highlife, Afrobeats, jazz, a cappella, R & B, rap, dance, and hip-hop artists from Nigeria, South Africa, and more.

Having listened to hours of African Christmas music, I can safely say that these albums and songs will put your heart in a worshipful mood and set your feet tapping and your body grooving. While globally, African music may be best known for the highlife and Afrobeat genres, artists across the continent incorporate jazz, a cappella, R & B, rap, dance, and hip-hop into their music.

As a British Ghanaian now living in the United States who has sung in choirs and led worship, I count these among my favorite African Christmas gospel songs, largely from the Anglophone world, representing these wide-ranging music styles and showcasing collaborations with other world-class artists.

If we missed any of your favorites, send us an email at ctafrica@christianitytoday.com!

Florocka is a Nigerian gospel artist and producer who has been in the music and production industry for over 27 years and is a multiple award–winning singer and producer. He has collaborated with other well-known Nigerian artists, including Helen Yawson and Sammie Okposo.

Florocka’s 2021 album, Another Christmas According to Florocka, is a dance album (think J Moss–type songs, especially “Keresimesi”) featuring pop and hip-hop tracks alongside songs like “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” which somehow mashes up Middle Eastern music with rock and a rap bridge.

Jehovah Shalom Acapella is a six-member Ugandan band that released the five-track EP Joy to the World in 2020. The title track, an adaptation of Isaac Watts’s classic, begins in English before transitioning to Luganda, and the song “Enkya Ennungi Esembedde” (“I’m Telling the World about His Love”) is entirely in the Bantu language.

Last year, …

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I learned how to mourn when my mom lost her mind, and then her life, to dementia.

When my mother passed away last winter, I discovered the gift of grief.

In the span of a single year, my mother went from a vibrant, constant presence in my life—through phone calls, texts, and when we could, in-person visits—to a swift decline in mental and physical health.

The first sign, for me, was an unexpected call at 5 a.m. one morning. Mom had many skills but being active at 5 a.m. was not one of them. Calls at 10 a.m., lunchtime, or late in the evening were much more likely. I immediately answered, thinking something had to be urgent.

“Mom, is everything okay?” I asked, pretending I had been up for hours while clearing the cobwebs from my mind and the frog from my throat.

“Oh, I’m just calling to see how you are doing,” she said, “but I hope I’m not interrupting dinner for you guys.”

Maybe she’s just confused. Maybe she had a bad night’s sleep, I thought. I didn’t want to believe this was what my sister, Laura, had been gently warning me about. My sister and her husband had recently moved back to Illinois to live near my parents. And in recent weeks, they had told me that Mom had forgotten how to write a check. Well, that’s not that crazy. Who writes checks anymore? I had rationalized at the time.

“Mom, you do know that it’s five o’clock in the morning, right?” I offered.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. You know, I keep getting my times mixed up, with daylight savings and all,” she replied, though we were nowhere near a time change. After talking a bit more, we ended the call. When I told my sister about it, she said these sorts of incidents were becoming more common.

A few days later, I got another call from …

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How Christian outreach has come to look like the YMCA, call center ministries, and the “Christward” movement model.

India’s swift urbanization is reshaping the nation’s identity, with over one-third of the population now in major cities. For many missiologists, this new demographic reality calls for a recalibration of the church’s approach, one that moves beyond traditional rural missions to address the complexities of urban life.

In recognition of this shift, in 2014 the Evangelical Fellowship of India created the National Centre for Urban Transformation (NCUT) to educate and train Christian leaders to reach migrants, professionals, the poor, women, and students in urban environments. NCUT develops urban ministry courses for Bible colleges and seminaries, conducts research, and is working in 32 of the country’s cities with populations ranging between 500,000 to 9 million residents.

This September, the organization released Rethinking Urban Mission and Ministry in India, edited by urban missiologists Atul Aghamkar, who is also NCUT’s national director, and James Patole.

CT spoke to Aghamkar about India’s shift from village to city life, how Christians are reaching call center employees and other professionals, and why the rest of the world should pay attention to “Christward” movement models.

How have Christians historically engaged cities?

Christian missions historically began in cities, evident with the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries in Tharangambadi (a coastal city in southeastern India) and William Carey’s leadership in Kolkata (the capital of West Bengal State). Recognizing the strategic importance of cities, missionaries established their bases there, initially focused on reaching the upper castes, especially Brahmins. When this strategy struggled to take hold, they …

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Faith is dividing families. What does lament look like in our relationships to God and our loved ones?

Traditionally, the phrase “home for the holidays” has conjured up feelings of warmth and welcome. So much so that advertisers give us an annual slate of commercials linking their particular product to our shared longing for family connection and tenderness.

But increasingly, the holiday table is marked by frustration as families live out the demographic realities of an increasingly divided society. The holidays can be especially fraught for those questioning their religious upbringings—the very upbringings that the people sitting across from them were key to creating.

At first glance, religious deconstruction appears to be a question of changing one’s beliefs. Because evangelicals tend to center the experience of conversion, de-conversion also takes center stage. As scholar Karen Swallow Prior observes in her new book, The Evangelical Imagination, “what experience gives, experience can take away.”

But faith is a complex matrix of believing, doing, and belonging. Yes, we confess certain things as true, but we also act in ways that accord with them and live in relationship with like-minded people who bolster our confession. As a result, exvangelicals are not simply dealing with changing beliefs—they also face shifts in community, with family relationships often taking a direct hit.

As an elder millennial leading a multi-generational congregation, pastor Ben Marsh finds himself in the unique position of walking with families through this process. “I just sat in a room with several of my older members who shared the pain of separation from their children who have cut them off,” he recently posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. “When …

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From the builders of Genesis 11 to the architects of the modern world, we’ve forgotten who makes our name great.

An excerpt from CT’s Book of the Year. Learn about CT’s 2024 Book Awards here.)

The tale of the Tower of Babel is a story of judgment and a story of autonomy. The events are presented in two acts: the people’s provocation and God’s response.

The curtain lifts for the first act on the scene of a communal building project:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” (Gen. 11:1–4)

So what is the problem here? Is it not sensible to live together in cities, with all the benefits of security and the division of labor that urban life brings? Yet there are clues that the main intention is something other than establishing a stable society.

The first humans were commanded by God in Genesis 1:28 to “fill the earth,” but the builders of Babel want to construct a single city, lest they are “scattered over the face of the whole earth.” They want to assert their own autonomous identity, captured in the language of “so that we may make a name for ourselves.” In biblical thinking, to name something is to have authority over it. In Genesis 1, God systematically names the elements of creation as he makes them. To seek to make a name for oneself is to assert one’s independence, ignoring the one who gives you “life and breath …

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Our picks for the books most likely to shape evangelical life, thought, and culture.

Think of something big and important happening in the world—some cultural trend, political movement, or social craze. Chances are that someone, somewhere, has proposed giving it a distinctly “Christian” or “biblical” framing. Some of these efforts, aimed at glorifying God in all things, supply helpful correctives to secular errors. Others, smacking more of anxious attempts at hopping aboard a moving train, add little beyond a thin spiritual gloss.

Thankfully, CT’s book of the year, Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, belongs to the first category. Some might wince at the mention of critical theory, with its perceived reputation for nonsense jargon or radical politics. Critical theory comes in many flavors, of course, some guiltier than others of cramming messy human particulars into ideological straitjackets. But the late Tim Keller, in his foreword, suggests another view, observing that a good theory “make[s] visible the deep structures of a culture in order to expose and change them.”

As Watkin contends, Scripture does this better than anything else. Other critical theories—derived from deep analyses of race, gender, psychology, language, and law—might apply useful lenses to reality. But all are clouded or cracked to some degree, requiring a higher wisdom and a truer story to polish off the smudges and patch together the broken shards. God’s Word, in this sense, does more than explain God to the world. In unsurpassed fashion, it explains the world to itself.

Like Biblical Critical Theory, all of our award winners contain insight and beauty on their own. And like all …

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The Cru film ministry is working on a next-generation remake of the iconic 1979 movie seen by millions.

Hair isn’t the biggest problem. But it is a problem when you’re trying to animate Jesus and the 12 disciples plus the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and all the people in the crowds in the gospel story.

“Maybe we could make them all bald!” joked Dominic Carola, director of forthcoming animated remake of the iconic 1979 Cru film, Jesus.

“It’d be so much easier if these were clean-shaven people,” he said. “But we can’t do it! That’s not how it was, and we’re leaning into historical accuracy.”

Carola and his team at Premise Entertainment have, in fact, spent so much time on the historical details of the biblical story that their animation studio in Orlando, Florida, has sometimes looked like the world’s nerdiest Bible study.

They’ve done research on the difference between the second floors of first-century homes in Jerusalem and Capernaum. They’ve looked at the exact hue of the colors of the noonday shadows in the Holy Land, the ethnic diversity in the area at the time, and the way the layers of period-accurate clothing would fall on a person’s body.

Not to mention beards and mustaches.

And, of course, getting the look right is just the start for an animated film production.

“We could be on the phone for a week if I were to go through all the challenges this movie presents,” Carola said in an interview with CT. “You’re telling the greatest story ever told. And you have 90 minutes to tell it in.”

Plans for the new film were announced Thursday night at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, and at two simultaneous events in Seoul, South Korea, and Kampala, Uganda. The animated Jesus is scheduled for release …

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Adults with intellectual disabilities can have robust spiritual lives. Are we learning from them?

Every Sunday afternoon, my daughter and I join a Zoom call with her friend and her friend’s mom, who live a few hours away—for a special time we’ve come to call “God Talk.”

My 17-year-old daughter, Penny, and her 18-year-old friend, Rachel, both have Down syndrome. A while back, Rachel noticed us praying before meals and asked if she could join us. This led to a few conversations about what it looks like to follow Jesus. And eventually, as Rachel’s mother, Ginny, told me a few weeks later, every night Rachel extended her hands and said, “Thank you, God, for having us.”

That’s when the four of us decided to start reading The Jesus Storybook Bible together over Zoom. In our first chat ever, I asked the girls how God sees us—and without hesitation, Rachel said, “God just loves us to pieces.” The truth of God’s love and welcome seemed to sink into her being, as if we had simply given words to something she had subconsciously known all along.

I’m a 46-year-old woman with a master of divinity and credentials as a pastor—and I learn something new every week from reading and praying with Penny and Rachel. They have taught me a more expansive way to encounter God through the Bible.

I think about the time Penny hid her face when we moved from the story of the Crucifixion to the Resurrection because, in her words, she didn’t want to give away “the best part.” Or when we were reading about Jesus asleep in the boat during the storm, Rachel linked the chaos of the sea’s raging waters with Pharaoh in Egypt and the snake in the garden.

At the time, I happened to be listening to a podcast with Tim Mackie, …

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Christians have every reason to reduce light pollution.

It’s hard not to be sentimental about a Northern Hemisphere December, with its snow (or in the American South, where I live, its relative cool), its coziness, and of course, the Christmas decorations. Twinkling lights transform city streets into galaxies, and an ornamented Christmas tree fills my living room with the scent of pine needles.

On top of that tree rests a star. Some people cap their trees with an angel, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve gravitated toward the star, which represents one of the more enigmatic elements of the already peculiar narratives about Jesus’ birth.

Matthew’s gospel tells us that after Jesus was born, wise men from the East traveled to Bethlehem to worship him. Unlike the shepherds, who received a divine birth announcement from a company of angels, the wise men identified a single star rising in the sky as the impetus for their pilgrimage: “We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him” (2:2).

It’s a detail that raises far more questions than it answers. Theologians and astronomers alike continue to contemplate Yuletide mysteries like the star of Bethlehem, but a different question is at the forefront of my mind this Christmas season: If that same star appeared in the night sky today, would we even be able to see it?

I first began to think about stars and their place in our modern world while studying another passage of Scripture in which celestial bodies play a prominent role. In Genesis 12, God makes a covenant with a man named Abram.

God promises to make Abram into a great nation, a promise that seems improbable since Abram has no children and his wife is barren.

Years pass, and Abram’s nomadic household has yet to resemble anything …

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