Transubstantiate

Evangelical attitudes on foreign policy are more complicated than the warmonger stereotype suggests.

Since the 1980s, white evangelicals have been among the most ardent supporters of the Republican Party and an aggressive foreign policy. From Ronald Reagan confronting the Soviet Union to George W. Bush and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, they have been more likely to applaud the use of force than their fellow Americans. There have been dissenters—Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo come to mind—but these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

We can speak with some certainty about evangelical views on these matters after 1980 because social scientists have been conducting increasingly sophisticated surveys of this demographic. In Swords and Plowshares: American Evangelicals on War, 1937-1973, Timothy Padgett explores how white evangelicals (hereafter simply “evangelicals”) thought about war and related matters before such surveys existed. Padgett, managing editor of Breakpoint.org, approaches his subject primarily by analyzing articles and editorials in Moody Monthly, Christianity Today, Christian Herald, Our Hope, and Southern Presbyterian Journal (renamed Presbyterian Journal in 1959). He recognizes that this list includes no specifically Baptist, Wesleyan, or Pentecostal journals, and, of course, his study is biased toward the views of the evangelical elites who write for these periodicals.

In spite of these limitations, Swords and Plowshares offers a thorough, accurate, and well-documented account of how evangelicals thought about war and other issues in the mid-20th century. The core of Padgett’s book consists of eight chronological chapters, each of which considers how evangelicals portrayed America’s enemies, described their own country, evaluated the use of military force, and related …

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Australian worship movement flourishes in both post-communist Budapest and post-church Seattle because it confronts the historical establishment.

“What are you saying? What are you thinking? What are you doing?” The man on stage flashes a toothy smile as he scans the thousands of concertgoers on a chilly November evening at Overlake Christian Church, a nondenominational megachurch pastored by Mike Howerton and located east of Seattle, near the headquarters of Microsoft. Last fall, Brian Houston, cofounder and global senior pastor of Hillsong Church, headlined the US-based There Is More tour, incidentally also the name of his 2018 Christian living title and worship album, recorded live at the Sydney, Australia, location.

The Hillsong music itself, with such singable titles as “Mighty to Save” or “I Surrender,” cuts across denominational lines. But in certain cultural or geopolitical contexts beyond Seattle or Sydney, the music has also served to subvert church and state confines. Kinga Povedák, a religion research fellow in Szegad, Hungary, notes how Hillsong’s music fueled an alternative, faith-based youth movement that resisted the tenets of socialism in her country in recent decades.

Through extensive interviews with Hungarian worship leaders and ethnographic study of Pentecostal and charismatic churches, Povedák notes the emergence of Hillsong lyrics in believers’ personal faith stories, as well as within the practices of congregations and religious rituals across various denominations. Young people, from Catholic to Baptist, all sing the same Hillsong tunes that they heard from Hillsong London’s team at a live festival or watched via YouTube, crossing lines that the government and decades of bitter rivalry had reinforced. Povedák labels it a “doubly alternative movement,” sparking …

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Is it possible to build willpower like a muscle?

Mark was one of the most talented pastors our church had ever hired. He had two advanced degrees (two more than anyone else on staff), but he was no out-of-touch academic. Gregarious and personable, he was equally confident preaching or leading worship. But preaching is where he excelled.

One time, our senior pastor was scheduled to speak at a retirement home in our community, but he came down with bronchitis. He called Mark. Could he fill in? The residents of the retirement home were expecting a sermon on heaven, and the service was starting in an hour.

Forty-five minutes later, Mark showed up at the retirement center with a Bible tucked under his arm. Our senior pastor stuck around, hoping Mark could deliver a passable sermon on the spot. He didn’t.

“It was incredible,” the senior pastor recalled. “It was one of the best sermons I’d heard on the topic. By the end, I was ready to go to heaven right then and there!”

Unfortunately Mark’s surplus of talent hid an insidious deficit: a lack of self-control. Though he was married with two children, Mark seemed to look at every woman except his wife. He couldn’t resist making inappropriate comments. “What kind of underwear do you think she’s wearing?” he once asked a parishioner, pointing to a woman across the foyer. One Sunday after church a colleague asked Mark how he thought the service had gone. “I don’t know,” he responded. “I was too busy undressing all the women with my eyes.”

More than Moral Failings

Within a year, Mark was exactly where he needed to be: out of the ministry, a reminder that capability can never replace character. I wish I could say Mark’s story is unusual, but …

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The Civil Rights leader’s life and legacy embodies the revolutionary ethic Jesus Christ.

“Martin Luther King Jr. is dead.”

These solemn words were uttered by King’s distant friend and spiritual mentor, Howard Thurman, as he eulogized over a San Francisco radio station on the evening of King’s assassination. The world was shaken. Riots were taking place across 110 cities. King’s murder was declared “a national disaster.” Stokely Carmichael, the civil rights leader who first used the slogan “black power,” went as far as to say, “When white America killed Dr. King, she declared war on us.”

As “pastor of the civil rights movement,” Thurman knew he needed to speak words of comfort and hope but he felt there were no words that could possibly do justice to King’s life and legacy. Still, he knew he must say something.

Weighing on Thurman’s mind was the awareness that King’s assassination “reveals the cleft deep in the psyche of the American people, the profound ambivalence and ambiguity of our way of life.” Just a few hours ago King’s voice could be heard preaching freedom and hope in his majestic sermon, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” Now there was only the voice of anguish crying out from “the heart of our cities, from the firesides of the humble and the mighty, from the cells of a thousand prisons, from the deep central place in the soul of America.”

In Thurman’s estimation, King’s greatest contribution was the way he embodied the epitome of Christianity and its ethical implications in America. He was able “to put at the center of his own personal religious experience a searching ethical awareness.” He embodied the revolutionary ethic of the religion …

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Three tips from my own experience as a church planting leader.

Many frequently joke about the turnover rate in church planting leadership. It seems that whenever I’m at a conference or church event, someone new will come up and say, “Hey, Ed. I’m the new leader of church planting at [insert denomination name].”

To be fair, this issue happens across denominations—it’s not just certain ones in certain parts of the country. It happens at the district, network, and denominational levels.

Church planting requires a certain set of skills—organization, initiative, patience, and passion, just to name a few. These skills are especially required for a church planting leader. To last long term in this capacity without burnout requires some forethought and consideration. Here are some thoughts on how to lead well in this position

First, dedicate yourself to being an advocate.

As a leader of church planting, it’s important to remember that you are not actually a church planter; the roles are different. You aren’t the official doer of all things church planting—you are, by definition, the one who helps organize and oversee the work being done by church planters out on the field.

Church planting leaders who enter into the territory of their church planters in a micromanaging sort of way ultimately undermine their own authority at one time or another. Simply put, if you find yourself frequently saying to the church planters you oversee, “this is what you should do” or “this is how I did it” and “this is how I’m going to do it,” know that this approach is unhelpful in the long term.

For many who work under the leadership of a denomination, your advocacy has to be directed upwards. It’s your job to work …

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The answer is both.

Today, there are 844 million people around the world without access to clean water; 2.5 billion do not use a toilet to manage their waste. And 3.4 billion people are unreached with the gospel.

The intersection of all three of these is predominately rural villages dominated by animism and other folk religions. What should be our priority as Christians? Provide communities with access to clean water and improved health, or proclaim the transforming truth of the gospel?

As the leader of a Christian water organization, I’ve struggled with this dilemma for years. I firmly believe that we must serve the whole person (body and soul), and I also believe that Christ must be central to all our efforts. If we solely preach the gospel, we ignore their basic physical needs. If we only give them water, teach about hygiene, and build toilets at schools, we feel like we’ve neglected the Christian nature of our work.

How can we meaningfully address people’s physical needs while fulfilling the Great Commission? Here are some guiding principles we have found helpful:

First, clarify our categories.

I don’t believe drilling a well, installing a pump, and teaching people to wash their hands fulfills the Great Commission. It is important work worthy of our support. It can drastically improve people’s lives. However, by itself, it isn’t what Christ commissions the church to do.

I also don’t believe preaching the gospel while ignoring the crisis and hurt people are experiencing is consistent with biblical ethics. Jesus makes it clear that we have a responsibility to help the person who has been attacked by robbers and left for dead (Luke 10:25-37). To simply walk past is not consistent with the teaching of Jesus …

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Before racial reconciliation can happen, says Jemar Tisby, American believers need to reckon honestly with the sins of the past.

At the climax of the 1992 classic A Few Good Men, Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) famously screams, “You can’t handle the truth!” Responding to questions from Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) about a military cover-up, he confirms his role in the scandal but maintains that the public would rather not know the ugly and gory details of his job. In The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby (president of the black Christian collective The Witness) adopts the posture of Lt. Kaffee, demanding that American Christians learn and teach the hard truth about the church’s complicity in racial injustice.

For far too long, some in the church have assumed the defiant pose of Col. Jessup. Because this history is so painful to remember, many believers would rather bury it. Others, confronted with the church’s inadequate response, shift attention to a multiracial cast of heroic figures—like William Wilberforce, Francis Grimke, or Martin Luther King Jr.—whose contributions paint the church in a better light.

Of course, as Tisby points out, that these exemplars were small in number and greatly abused by fellow Christians for speaking against racial bigotry. And admirable as they are, they can’t be allowed to obscure the underlying truth: Many white Christians actively participated in racism, and many more sat idly by as it infected every inch of American life. Brutal racial injustice would not have persisted as long as it did, Tisby writes, without “the relative silence, if not outright support, of one of the most significant institutions in America—the Christian church.”

The Path of Least Resistance

The Color of Compromise corrects the record by surveying key points in American …

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Why treating the female body like property misses the gospel and fails the unborn.

Modern feminism has spent the last century fighting to give women the freedom to have jurisdiction over their voting rights, their ambitions, and their bodies. Some of the movement has done great good. But some of it has done great harm by reinforcing a common and problematic idea: that women’s rights ought to be understood in terms of property rights. “Owning your own body” seems like a natural enough freedom—who wouldn’t want it?—but in fact, it delivers a reductionistic conception of human flourishing that fails both women and the unborn.

We see this most clearly in the abortion debate, vaulted into the public square 46 years ago with the landmark Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade. Both this ruling and the subsequent Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision codify an ownership view of the self. Women’s bodies are a form of property, and with this property comes the constitutional “right of privacy,” wrote Roe’s majority Court. In practice, that means a man is given a temporary invitation to trespass, and the fruit of that act (if any) belongs to the woman—at least until the child crosses from womb to world.

You don’t have to search far to find arguments for ownership. In response to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, Planned Parenthood put out a statement that women deserve “the right to control [their] own bodies.” The hallways of Twitter have echoed with a related imperative—that men should “stop controlling women’s bodies.” And the third annual Women’s March will re-up the familiar rally cry, “My body, my choice.”

Advocates of the private ownership view claim that it …

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China’s church raids drew headlines, but 26 countries—including India—treated Christians worse in 2018.

Christian persecution has worsened in the most populous countries in the world, China and India, putting millions more believers at risk for their faith.

The two Asian nations moved up on Open Doors’s annual ranking of the 50 countries where it’s hardest to be a Christian. India entered the World Watch List’s top 10 for the first time, due to a growing Hindu nationalist threat stirring anti-Christian sentiments. Meanwhile China, where the Communist government continues closing major congregations and detaining Christian leaders, climbed from No. 43rd to No. 27 on the list.

Researchers calculate that 1 in 3 Asian Christians now experience high levels of persecution for their faith.

Year after year, Open Doors has reported on the decline of religious freedom for Christians worldwide—measuring persecution through government restrictions, social pressures, and outright violence.

“In the north and Middle Belt of Nigeria … at least 3,700 Christians were killed for their faith—almost double the number of a year ago (an estimated 2,000)—with villages completely abandoned by Christians forced to flee, as their armed attackers then move in to settle, with impunity,” wrote World Watch Monitor in its analysis of the list. The news service noted that “of the 4,136 deaths for Christian faith that the List reports, Nigeria alone accounts for about 90% (3,731).”

Overall, 1 in 6 African Christians now experience high levels of persecution for their faith, according to Open Doors researchers.

The latest World Watch List indicates that religious freedom restrictions have also become more widespread, affecting 1 in 9 Christians worldwide. An estimated 245 million Christians in the …

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As abuse awareness grows, pastors are searching for ways to protect the vulnerable and care for survivors.

Last summer Stephanie Lobdell, co-lead pastor at Mountain Home Church of the Nazarene in Idaho, started a sermon series on the forgotten characters of Scripture. One of the subjects she wanted to cover was Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, who was raped by a Hivite prince. Her sexual assault ultimately spurred her brothers to massacre the royal’s people (Gen. 34).

Lobdell’s co-pastor and husband, Tommy, was apprehensive about her decision to broach Dinah’s story. “He said, ‘Why are you preaching about rape? It’s such a vile topic. It’s such a sensitive area. Why are you taking that risk?’” said Lobdell. “He felt anxious, like, What’s going to happen when we open this door?”

But Lobdell was beginning to feel burdened by sermons in which women’s suffering was “a little side note to what pastors really want to talk about.”

“It was one of those subtle promptings of the Holy Spirit: ‘Here’s a story that gets skipped over. You have a gap in your schedule. What could you put there?’” said Lobdell. “I trusted the Spirit’s guidance.”

Naming Dinah’s experience from the pulpit caused an unexpected chain reaction. “After the sermon,” said Lobdell, “several people shared their own stories with me and expressed gratitude for giving voice to Dinah’s experience. This sermon allowed women to find their stories expressed in Scripture.”

Shortly after Lobdell broached that subject with her congregation, The New York Times released a report on Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual misconduct. That report launched another, much larger chain reaction: the #MeToo …

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