Transubstantiate

Grief and God have been part of U2’s story from the start.

We got this invitation once,” Bono tells me. He speaks the next sentence with a tone of reverence: “The Reverend Billy Graham would love to meet the band and offer a blessing.”

We’re on a video call, and the frontman for U2 is sitting on the floor in front of a green couch, his computer on the coffee table in front of him. It’s golden hour in Dublin, and the just-setting sun makes the room glow. It’s almost theatrical. There’s a twinkle in his eye, too. He knows he has a good story.

“He’s the founder of Christianity Today,” he reminds me, grinning. “I didn’t know that then, but I still wanted the blessing. And I was trying to convince the band into coming with me, but for various reasons they couldn’t. It was difficult with the schedule, but I just found a way.”

This was in March 2002, just a few weeks after U2 played their legendary Super Bowl halftime show and days after their single “Walk On” won the Grammy for Record of the Year.

“His son Franklin picked me up at the airport,” Bono says, “and Franklin was doing very effective work with Samaritan’s Purse. But he wasn’t sure about his cargo.” He laughs. “On the way to meet his father, he kept asking me questions.”

Bono reenacts the conversation for me:

“You … you really love the Lord?”
“Yep.”
“Okay, you do. Are you saved?”
“Yep, and saving.”
He doesn’t laugh. No laugh.
“Have you given your life? Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?”
“Oh, I know Jesus Christ, and I try not to use him just as my personal Savior. But, you know, yes.”
“Why …

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First came Vietnam, then drug addiction. Somehow, God helped me survive.

I was born in Alabama in 1948, during the time of Jim Crow. My grandfather had been a slave there, and my father a sharecropper.

I grew up during the time of the Great Migration, when millions of Blacks left the American South to settle in the Northern, Midwestern, and Western states. My dad’s cousin found freedom from sharecropping in the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio.

My father followed soon thereafter, saving enough money to eventually bring our entire seven-member family as well. I don’t remember much about that 1951 journey, but my parents told me about the lean and hard times we faced while living in a one-room apartment.

I don’t know when it began, but my father fell prey to alcoholism. I remember coming home from school and finding him passed out on the front porch of the four-room apartment we eventually inhabited. My mother drank during parties, but her real problem was rage.

When I was a kindergartner, I carried a prized drawing home to show my mom, and as I rushed in the door, I saw her kissing a man who wasn’t my father. In shock and confusion, I ran to my room. When my father arrived, I told him what I saw, and he went verbally ballistic on my mom. Dad left the house and abandoned me to my mother’s previously unseen rage.

As she beat me bloody with an extension cord, she yelled, “Don’t you ever tell on me again!” Afterward, she threw me into a closet, and as I cried, she warned me, “Shut up. If you don’t, I’ll beat you again.”

Fighting to survive

So began many beatings throughout my adolescence. My older brothers bullied me too. I realized my survival depended on my ability to fight.

Oddly, through it all, I loved my mom and knew she loved me. …

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As partisan fighting turns into physical attacks against public figures, evangelicals lack consensus on when political violence is justified.

This past summer, two weeks after a man allegedly attempted an assassination of US Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh over abortion and gun control, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) at its general assembly debated a statement condemning political violence.

The statement noted, in part, a “a growing number of personal threats to public officials” and condemned “the destruction of property and the infliction of bodily violence against political opponents.”

Elders on the debate floor objected to the resolution. One elder speaking against the statement said that without political violence, the Protestant Reformation and American Revolution wouldn’t have happened. “We’d all still be genuflecting and using holy water,” he said.

A pastor in Florida went to the microphone and noted his Cuban roots, saying that sometimes it’s right to “pick up the sword.”

“This statement would condemn the very existence of this country,” said Aldo Leon. “It’s important to be very, very clear about this in the kind of country we live right now, with a … growing tendency for an overextended federal power.”

The denomination voted down the statement, with 75 percent opposing it.

“A resolution to condemn political violence in a functioning democracy? That would be pretty easy!” political philosopher Michael Walzer told CT. “You wouldn’t be opposing the American Revolution; you wouldn’t be opposing any of the Reformation activists.”

American Christians don’t have clear thinking about when political violence is justified, according to historians, theologians, and pastors who have studied the subject and followed …

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But use it to praise God’s goodness, not a romanticized past.

This time of year, I’m seeing double. I view things as they are and as they used to be. The school bus up ahead flicks out its stop sign, and there I am, disembarking as a child. But really, I’m driving an SUV, impatiently waiting for it to move. The apple crisp I eat for breakfast tastes like it did last year, and five years ago, and 20 years ago. There is again that familiar desire to institute routines, buy clothes, and cut my hair.

But something about that desire is different. I’m not a kid or a student anymore, embarking on a new curriculum or moving into a new dorm room. I know more about what to expect. And I understand how unexpected—sometimes terribly unexpected—this life can be.

Times were simpler then, when I didn’t know what was coming and didn’t believe it could possibly be difficult. I just knew sheets washed by someone else. After-school celery spread with peanut butter. The happy uncertainty of what to be for Halloween.

Beware, believer, of becoming nostalgic.

Our faith is about the future. We look to the Resurrection and the life of the world to come. We remember, yes, but largely because remembering is essential to testimony. Our story doesn’t stall out in the past but takes us right up to the present. What God has done becomes what God will do, and that promise provides evidence of impending blessing . We are located in the “already but not yet,” and the “not yet” is somewhere up ahead. The best is yet to come.

Yes, I want that newness. I want the “not yet” right now. But I also want the old: scratching a pencil down a column of algebra or folding the corner of a chapter book. A roommate making brisket the last fall before either …

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Study finds new immigrants in about half of hospitable congregations.

The apartment buildings were built for workers in the waning days of the East German Republic—formidable buildings assembled from prefabricated concrete slabs. But today, the Plattenbauen, as they are often called, are home to migrant families from Ukraine and Eritrea, Afghanistan and Romania, Nigeria and Syria.

“Each apartment block has its own community, its own dynamics, its own culture,” said Ute Paul, a German Christian, as she walked through the Gotha, Germany, suburb.

As she reached Coburger Place, a central square with shops and a small casino that serves as the neighborhood’s main hangout spot, Paul pointed out another sign of change and new life.

There was a small storefront with words written across the window: “From dark to light.”

The shop is the principal gathering place for the Mustard Seed District Mission. There, for the past seven years, Michael Weinmann and his wife, Christiane, have been “experimenting with new forms of community in Gotha-West,” Paul said. She and her husband, Frank, joined the Weinmanns last year.

Since the Mustard Seed team started trying to minister to new arrivals in Gotha, they’ve had to relinquish a lot of what is assumed about mission and adapt to the everyday realities of those God has given them to serve. Now, they focus less on events and more on “relationships, ‘accidental’ encounters, and natural life in the district,” she said.

The result, Paul said, has been the creation of “a vibrant network of relationships between people of different backgrounds and origins from across the world.”

Mustard Seed is just one example of how the movement of asylum seekers, economic migrants, and internally displaced …

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Worse than what “missing the mark” does to our soul is what it does to our neighbors.

Eight-year-old Aryanna Schneeberg was playing in her backyard when she was struck in the back with an arrow. A neighbor was attempting to shoot a squirrel, but his weapon missed its intended target and instead penetrated the child’s lung, spleen, stomach, and liver. She bears the scars that come with surviving such an injury. We ought to think of Aryanna every time we hear a preacher explaining the Greek word for sin, hamartia, as “missing the mark.”

Like most pulpit clichés, this one points to something that’s partly right. The problem, though, is that most Western Christians’ imaginations, shaped by Robin Hood, exceed their actual experience with archery. We think of a bucolic setting where we are shooting our arrows toward a target on a bale of hay. The metaphor is almost comforting: We see ourselves not as criminals or rebels but as being off our game now and then. We reach into our quiver for one more chance to get it right.

That’s not how the Bible describes sin. The Bible says sin is lawlessness (1 John 3:4). When it categorizes sins, it consistently does so in terms that imply both perpetrators and victims: enmity, dissension, oppression of orphans and widows, adultery, covetousness.

In that light, sin is less like target practice on some isolated piece of countryside and more like loosing arrows on a city sidewalk in the midst of a pressing crowd. All around us are bodies, writhing or dead, struck down by our errant arrows.

In a sermon on sin, a preacher might also quote the Puritan John Owen: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” That’s true too. And yet it doesn’t quite say enough: Our sin might also be killing those around us. “The wages …

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An artistic record challenges the idea that Christian leadership was always restricted to men.

The Bible tells us of the important place of women in the early church. Women were the first to reach the empty tomb and to proclaim the Resurrection (Matt. 28:1–10; Mark 16:1–8; Luke 23:55–24:10; John 20:1–2, 11–18). They contended for the gospel alongside Paul (Phil. 4:2–3), taught new converts (Acts 18:24–28), prophesied (Acts 21:9), had churches in their homes (Acts 16:14–15, 40; 1 Cor. 16:19), served the church (Rom. 16:1), delivered Paul’s epistles (v. 2), and were considered “outstanding among the apostles” (v. 7).

There is also a lesser-known visual record of women in ministry in Italy’s oldest churches. From around the time of the First Council of Nicaea down to the 12th century, Christians created depictions of women preaching, women marked as clergy, and even one carrying a Communion chalice, with which believers have always recalled Christ’s words “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28).

Radha Vyas, a photographer and a student at Dallas Theological Seminary, takes us on a tour of this artistic record of women in ministry.

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Christian pro-life activists have their eyes on a record-high number of ballot measures, including state constitutional amendments.

For decades, pro-life advocates argued that overturning Roe v. Wade would enable each state to determine its own abortion policy. Abortion measures will appear on five state ballots on Election Day this year, the most in US history.

But the country got its first glimpse at post-Roe abortion referendums months before November 8. Back in August, Kansas became the first state to vote on abortion rights, rejecting a ballot measure declaring the state constitution “does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion.”

Activists saw the outcome, fueled by record turnout from young women, as a sign of enthusiasm from pro-choice voters. Last week, Pew Research Forum released its latest polls, which show that Democratic voters are nearly twice as likely as Republicans to consider abortion a very important issue (55% to 29%).

Soon, voters in Michigan, California, Vermont, Montana, and Kentucky will also vote on the issue of abortion rights without a federal abortion law in place.

“My hope is that the Kansas amendment’s failure can serve as a reminder that the deliberate and thoughtful work of the pro-life movement must continue as we change one heart at a time, state by state,” Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Brent Leatherwood said in August.

While some states could bolster the legal rights of the unborn and infants born alive at any stage of development, voters in other states could codify a woman’s right to reproductive choice in the state constitution and allow abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

Christian pro-life advocates warn the proposed changes up for vote in Michigan and California go far beyond the right to an …

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A New Testament “scholar on fire,” he believed Scripture was an encounter with God.

Gordon Fee once told his students on the first day of a New Testament class at Wheaton College that they would—someday—come across a headline saying “Gordon Fee Is Dead.”

“Do not believe it!” he said, standing atop a desk. “He is singing with his Lord and his king.”

Then, instead of handing out the syllabus like a normal professor, he led the class in Charles Wesley’s hymn, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

Fee, a widely influential New Testament teacher who believed that reading the Bible, teaching the Bible, and interpreting the Bible should bring people into an encounter with a living God, described himself as a “scholar on fire.” He died on Tuesday at the age of 88—although, as those who encountered him in the classroom or in his many books know, that’s not how he would have described it.

Fee co-wrote How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth with Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary colleague Douglas Stuart in the early 1980s. The book is now in its fourth edition and has sold around 1 million copies, becoming for many the standard text on the best way to approach Scripture. Fee also wrote a widely used handbook on biblical interpretation, several well-regarded commentaries on New Testament epistles, and groundbreaking academic research on the place of the Holy Spirit in the life and work of the Apostle Paul.

“If you had asked Paul to define what a Christian is,” Fee once told CT, “he would not have said, ‘A Christian is a person who believes X and Y doctrines about Christ,’ but ‘A Christian is a person who walks in the Spirit, who knows Christ.’”

In the same way, Fee argued that studying …

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The editor of “Voices of Lament” on how public injustice demands public sorrow.

In the fall of 2019, author and speaker Natasha Sistrunk Robinson moved to Alabama with her husband and daughter. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, she found herself doubly isolated in a new location.

After reading the book of Jeremiah, a particular passage “really jumped out at me,” says Robinson. It was 9:17–21, “where God tells the prophet Jeremiah to call the wailing women to wail until they are exhausted from crying so much. They’re wailing because the men have been taken out of the public square, and the children have been taken out of the streets, and ‘death has climbed in through our windows.’”

The story seemed very relevant to the moment. “Death was a thief climbing into our windows too,” says Robinson. “It was all around us, with the reality of the pandemic on top of all the racial injustice of that year.”

Inspired by the Old Testament model of lament, she started working on a book titled Voices of Lament (Baker Publishing Group, 2022), which features 29 women of color writing on themes of longing, injustice, and suffering.

Robinson, who now lives in North Carolina with her husband and daughter, hosts the podcast A Sojourner’s Truth and runs T3 Leadership Solutions and Leadership LINKS. She is currently a doctoral candidate in urban leadership ministry through a joint program between North Park and Fuller Theological Seminaries.

CT spoke recently with Robinson about her latest book and the community of women who contributed to it.

During the summer of 2020, you were reading through Jeremiah and the Psalms and thinking about lament and injustice. Tell us more about that journey.

As a Black woman, I was thinking about all the ways that our …

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