Transubstantiate

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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After trials and turmoil, the first Black lead pastor at the DC-area megachurch will be commissioned with a nod to his heritage.

Weeks before his installation as the first Black lead pastor at one of the most influential churches in the Washington, DC, area, Mike Kelsey came across a dissertation written by a distant relative, theologian and social ethicist George D. Kelsey.

His great-great-great-uncle detailed the clashes around race and integration among Southern Baptists half a century ago. A professor at Morehouse College, he wrote about how racism was especially problematic within Christian communities, disrupting the neighborly love that was supposed to draw together the body of Christ.

As the younger Kelsey steps up to lead McLean Bible Church, he represents an exceptional case in today’s US evangelical landscape—perhaps the most prominent example of a Black minister rising to the top position at a historically white megachurch. But he’s also lived through a contemporary version of the faith and justice fights chronicled by his forebear.

Over Kelsey’s 16 years preaching and pastoring at McLean, he watched the nondenominational congregation and its leadership grow more diverse as DC did. Across five locations, McLean counts members from over a hundred countries now. There were answered prayers, lessons learned, and moments of unity along the way, but it didn’t come easy. His wife remembers that even just a handful of years ago, people were saying Kelsey could never lead the church.

From the start, Kelsey experienced the culture shock of the megachurch setting. He felt the sting of congregants who dismissed Barack Obama’s election to the White House, the pressure of preaching boldly amid a string of high-profile Black deaths and the Black Lives Matter movement, and the tension from internal church conflict spurred …

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The next generation values open-mindedness and is highly skeptical of religious institutions. But they haven’t given up on God.

In 2021, Springtide Research Institute put out a report on the “State of Religion and Young People.” From the data, the institute identified a trend they called “faith unbundled.”

• 53% of young people said, “I agree with some, but not all, of the things my religion teaches.”
• 55% of young people said, “I don’t feel like I need to be connected to a specific religion.”
• 47% of young people said, “I feel like I could fit in with many different religions.”

These figures weren’t a surprise to me. Gen Z is at once the most racially and ethnically diverse and the least religious age cohort in American history. In 2019, the polling firm Barna Group found that, among practicing Christians, millennials “report an average (median) of four close friends or family members who practice a faith other than Christianity; most of their Boomer parents and grandparents, by comparison, have just one.” I’d presume this figure is even higher among my Christians peers, as we find ourselves in community with those of other faiths and with “nones.”

Data also shows that members of Gen Z are wary of traditional religious spaces. From the Springtide report:

• 55% of young people said, “I don’t feel like I can be my full self in a religious congregation.”
• 45% of young people said, “I don’t feel safe within religious or faith institutions.”
• 47% of young people said, “I don’t trust religion, faith, or religious leaders in those kinds of organizations.”
• Almost 50% of young people told Springtide they don’t turn to faith communities due to a lack of trust in the people, beliefs, and systems of organized religion.

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When we picture ourselves as heroes, we often forget our humanity.

It seems to me that many of us read the parable of the Good Samaritan with an unstated understanding that its basic message is “For crying out loud, just don’t be a jerk.”

The Sunday school storyboard unfolds in our mind’s eye. A poor, innocent guy has been brutally beaten, and any reasonably moral person would be horrified. The priest and the Levite see him and pass by on the other side of the road. We are astonished by their callous behavior. Surely this is not what any decent human being would do! How can they bear to leave the poor man lying on the side of the road? We unimaginatively insert ourselves into the story in the role of the Good Samaritan, certain that if this event were ever to present itself in our daily lives, we would obviously do the right thing.

In my own experience, living this out went quite differently.

I am driving back to my home in the rural interior of the East African country of Burundi, where I live and work as a missionary physician. The past few days have been a marathon of high-stress cross-cultural and multilingual meetings regarding an international accreditation for our medical school. Preparing for my three-hour trip home, I am utterly spent. I want nothing more than to see my family and share the takeout food that is currently sitting on my passenger seat’s floorboard.

My car winds up the narrow mountain roads lined with banana and palm nut trees. This dangerous journey, with its steep drop-offs and limited visibility, was a terror for the first few years that I lived here, but now it is more or less commonplace. As I drive, I pray that the hours of the trip lighten a bit of the load that I’m feeling.

As the road turns yet again, I see a commotion in front …

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In the commercial capital of Malawi, Pentecostal pastors and churches face fines or removal for making a joyful noise.

Loud Pentecostal worship is part of the soundtrack of Africa’s major cities. From Johannesburg, South Africa, to Lagos, Nigeria, booming preaching and boisterous worship rings through the alleys, apartments, and street corners.

But in Blantyre—the commercial capital of Malawi—church noise is conspicuously absent.

Though located in one of the poorest nations in Africa and the world, Blantyre’s central business district contains one of the largest concentrations of investment banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, and posh restaurants on the continent.

Banks like National Bank of Malawi tussle for space in the district with foreign behemoths like Standard Bank Group (Africa’s richest by assets) and the domineering skyscraper of the Reserve Bank of Malawi, the country’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve.

“It is a Wall Street of the Southern Africa region. The city is just artificially too clean, too smart, and designed for banks,” said Susan Mani, one of a few highly regulated mobile chefs who serve suited bankers and hedge fund managers rice and chicken during a two-hour lunch window.

“The thinking of the city fathers is, ‘Do you want some noisy, prayerful African church beating drums in the basement when hedge fund investors from Singapore or Dubai are meeting in the boardroom of a bank atop?’”

City officials have made it clear their answer is no. While quieter Anglican and Adventist congregations dot the streets of Blantyre, noisy African-initiated churches are unwanted. They face fines or possible removal from the district for their traditional style of worship.

“It’s costly to be caught leading a church where bass drums, loud prayers, and the …

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