Transubstantiate

Christian faith calls not for indulgence or self-denial but something else entirely.

A few decades ago, you might have found me taking pot-shots at John the Baptist’s “I must decrease” (John 3:30). Having witnessed the havoc it wreaked upon Christian women prone to self-abnegation, as well as the license it gave to authoritarian leaders prone to spiritual abuse, I was not a fan of this particular phrase.

That changed when I happened upon my 12-year-old daughter’s Pinterest board titled “Self Care” (alongside “Cute Animals” and “Cool Outfits”). I opened it and discovered bubble bath recipes, sassy girl-power quotes, yoga poses, pampering skin care routines, and promos for self-care products (read: luxury goods). Harmless? I wasn’t so certain.

It made me wonder if I had traded in John the Baptist’s camelhair tunic for luxury camelhair boots.

Christian theologians have always had revolutionary messages about the self, which are often paradoxical and profoundly countercultural. They take their cue from Jesus, who talked about losing one’s self in order to find it. About coming to serve, not be served. About death being the doorway to life. In none of these messages is Jesus downgrading the self. He is simply giving our selfhood a new foundation.

The early church followed in his footsteps, baptizing people and proclaiming the termination of a selfhood that was already leading to death. They remodeled Roman mausoleums into baptistries, sending a clear message through the architecture: You are going here to die. A deceased person is being buried here. Sin killed you—you were already dead—you are just enacting a death that has already happened.

When the convert rose from the clear waters of baptism, they were raised into a revolutionary …

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In our effort to honor all of Scripture, let’s not forget that Jesus is at the heart of it.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

I remember standing in a convention hall once, arguing with an elderly lady about the song “Jesus Loves Me.” Let me first say that I would thoroughly rebuke my 20-year-ago self for my overconfidence in the theological correctness of my “tribe.”

I even felt bad at the time—this woman reminded me of all the Southern Baptist ladies who taught me Sunday school (and “Jesus Loves Me”!), right down to the bouffant hairdo. I’ll bet she had peppermints in her purse, too. I was annoyingly polemical, and she would have had every right to pat me on the head, say, “Bless your heart,” and send me on my way.

We were on opposite sides of what was then a big doctrinal schism in my denominational tradition, and we were debating one of the points of contention in that controversy. I asked for her interpretation of a biblical passage dealing with whatever the subject was, and she said, “That’s Paul; that’s not Jesus. Jesus never said anything about that.”

When I turned back to another passage, she said, “That’s the difference between you and me. Your authority is the Bible; mine’s Jesus.” I responded, “But what do you know about Jesus apart from the Bible?” And she said, “I know everything I need to know: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know!’” And to that I said, “… for the Bible tells me so.”

I cringe when I think about how proud I was of “winning” that debate. When this woman walked away, I assumed it was because she couldn’t respond to my retort. Now I know she was probably thinking, Who is this …

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My Russian-born son enlisting reminded me of my identity in Christ.

“He’s like a little soldier!”

Those were among the first words my wife, Maria, and I spoke when meeting a little baby in a Russian orphanage almost 20 years ago. As we walked into the room, this tiny-but-scrappy fellow climbed up against the slats in his crib, straight-backed as though standing at attention. Every day we would visit the room there, and Maxim—soon to be renamed Ben—was always silent and dignified, even as he clung to the back of my hair while I held him. He wasn’t alone in his silence.

As I wrote at Christianity Today shortly afterward, the entire place was that way. Though filled with babies, the orphanage was utterly soundless. Over time, we learned that this was not uncommon in such settings. Infants cry, after all, to communicate: “I’m hungry!” “I’m scared!” “I’m wet!” After enough time with no response, they will eventually stop crying.

As we left the room, knowing it would be several months before we were allowed to return, I could only say, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18). And then we walked out and shut the door. We could hear little Maxim falling down in his crib, screaming. Between my own sobs, I said, “That’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. He’s crying because he knows we will hear him. He knows he has parents now. He knows he is loved.”

Ben doesn’t remember the orphanage. But I couldn’t help but think of it late last year as I watched him stand at attention before the American flag while being sworn in to the United States Air Force. When the officer asked the new recruits why they had joined, several of them said, …

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The imprecatory psalms give us permission to push boldly against evil.

I saw an image last week that I cannot shake: a Ukrainian father gripping the face of his young son’s lifeless body, which is entirely covered in a blood-stained sheet except for a halo of blond hair. This grief-stricken father presses his face against his son’s hair, clinging to him, desperate and broken. I close my eyes to pray and I see this image.

When I think of it, I am heartbroken. But I also feel angry. I brush up against something like a maternal sense of rage. An innocent child was violently killed because Russia’s leader decided that he wanted a neighboring sovereign country as his own.

The violence in Ukraine makes me, like many of us, feel powerless. I watch helplessly as tanks roll into cities, as civilian targets are shelled, as the lives of whole families are viciously snuffed out. What do I do with this anger and heartbreak?

As I discussed recently with David French and Curtis Chang, I find myself turning again and again to the imprecatory psalms. Each morning I’m praying Psalm 7:14–16 with Vladimir Putin in mind: “Behold, the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies. He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends” (ESV).

An imprecation is a curse. The imprecatory psalms are those that call down destruction, calamity, and God’s judgment on enemies. Honestly, I don’t usually know what to do with them. I pray them simply as a rote practice. But I gravitate toward more even-keeled promises of God’s presence and mercy. I am often uncomfortable with the violence and self-assured righteousness found in these …

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Churches in the “Wheaton of Ukraine,” a suburb of Kyiv, help residents escape war as one member gives his life trying to save a fleeing family.

Anatoly, a 26-year-old member of Irpin Bible Church (IBC), is with the Lord.

His last act on earth was to carry the suitcase of a young mother and her two children, hurrying them across Irpin’s collapsed bridge to safety from Russian shelling.

All four died, when a bombshell landed in the middle of their would-be humanitarian corridor. Eight total died in the suburb of Kyiv yesterday, as Russian troops pressed hard to encircle the Ukrainian capital.

“Anatoly was deeply spiritual, with a good Christian character,” said his pastor, Mykola Romanuk. “When he saw a need, he tried to help.”

Negotiations over the weekend led to several ceasefires for civilian evacuation, only to be quickly broken. Each side blamed the other, and Russia has denied targeting civilians.

But Ukrainian sources describe cities now littered with bombed schools, hospitals, and residential districts—not least in Irpin, known in evangelical circles as the “Wheaton of Ukraine.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s “evangelical patriarch” Gregory Kommendant invited Christian ministries to join him in his hometown, 16 miles northwest of the capital, where he served as president of the All-Ukraine Baptist Union.

As of a few days ago, about 25 ministries operated out of Irpin, including Child Evangelism Fellowship, Youth With a Mission, Youth for Christ, the International Fellowship for Evangelical Students, and Samaritan’s Purse.

Once home to a single evangelical church, Irpin now boasts 13.

“We were here for 20 years, and neighbors never set foot in our church,” said Romanuk. “Now they are living in our basement, praying with us, and have become our friends.”

Describing …

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Thanks to air raid sirens, neighbors and refugees are hearing more about the gospel than ever.

We are now a full week into open war with Russia. Of course, Russia has been warring against Ukraine since 2014, but this is an unprecedented phase. Still, it’s amazing how quickly one gets used to the mundane realities of war.

On day one, the news of other cities being bombed caused great anxiety in the city of Svitlovodsk, where my family and I live. Of course, the fact that the news woke us up before dawn and was very unexpected made it much worse. The intent to cause panic seemed planned.

Now, on day seven, the adrenaline has worn off. We are used to the 8 p.m. curfew and sitting in a dark apartment at night. We find ourselves ignoring some of the air raid sirens—especially the ones in the middle of the night, since we’re so exhausted. We’ve also learned that not every siren means a bomb might drop on our heads.

But whenever we do head to the bomb shelter, my family and I take the opportunity to share the hope of Christ with our neighbors.

“Bomb shelter ministry” is, I must admit, not a ministry profile I thought I’d ever have. And yet, we are already seeing how fruitful it’s been. Our neighbors have heard more about Christ, heard more Scripture, and been led in more prayer in the last week than most of them probably have in their lives.

In addition to the “Our Father” prayer, I’ve taken to reading various Psalms with them—a particularly fitting book for us in Ukraine, as David often cries out amid being hunted by his enemies.

One of our neighbors is the equivalent of our building superintendent. The other night in the bomb shelter, she said with tears in her eyes how thankful she was to have neighbors like us. She said she can’t …

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Homer Rodeheaver was an unexceptional trombonist. But he had an ear for great songs and a knack for promoting them.

Like most kids growing up in mainstream Protestant denominations in the mid-20th century, I associated the name Homer Rodeheaver—if it came up at all—with hymnals and gospel songs, most notably my grandmother Allie’s beloved “The Old Rugged Cross.” As an adult immersed in Black gospel music, I’ve paid little attention to the mostly sketchy scholarship on Rodeheaver. His Billy Sunday–styled revivalism, mass community sings (involving mostly white singers), and trombone-heavy stylings seemed to barely intersect with my work. His association with Sunday was especially troublesome in an Elmer Gantry sort of way.

As it turns out, I was wrong on nearly every count.

Homer Rodeheaver has quite a lot to do with all kinds of gospel music, as Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo demonstrate in their fascinating, eminently readable biography of a wildly underrated and rarely appreciated figure who made a significant impact on sacred music, Black and white. Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry introduces readers to a man who was clearly long overdue for a scholarly reappraisal.

Mungons is a well-respected writer and researcher; Yeo a master of the trombone, having performed with major symphonies and taught at the university level. Together, they untangle a number of personal, professional, and musical knots in Rodeheaver’s fast-paced, eventful, and woefully underdocumented life.

Barnstorming the nation

In the authors’ telling, Rodeheaver emerges as a complex, creative, entrepreneurial marvel, capable of predicting (and profiting from) future trends in sacred music. They reveal how he was able to promote African Americans and their gospel songs even as he (apparently) turned …

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While some church leaders are concerned that online religion restrictions may scare off Christians, others hope Chinese believers will continue to sow the digital mission field.

China’s new internet regulations went into effect March 1, laying out broad restrictions on religious communication, teaching, and evangelism.

The new rules put into writing unofficial penalties that some Christians already faced for their online activity, so Chinese believers aren’t sure how the rules will be implemented and how much it could hamper missions.

The regulations were announced at the end of last year by China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs (SARA) and allow only religious groups with government approval to share information on the internet. According to the new Measures on the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services:

Organizations and individuals must not proselytize online and must not carry out religious education or training, publish preaching, or repost or link to related content; must not organize the carrying out of religious activities online; and must not broadcast religious rites … through means such as text, images, audio, or video either live or in recordings.

On February 28, the Chinese government issued a press release answering questions about the new regulation, stating the government “will have close and thorough cooperation to ensure the implementation of the measures.”

How will the implementation of these new measures affect the use of the internet for evangelism and mission by Chinese Christians? Will Christians in China no longer be able to do anything online? As the new measures come into force during the ongoing pandemic, where will the internet mission of Chinese churches in China and overseas now go?

CT Asia editor Sean Cheng interviewed several Chinese pastors and Christians (for security reasons, the names of Christians in …

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Ukrainian evangelicals demand more Bonhoeffers, as Russian evangelicals debate whether public protest under Putin can achieve more than prayer.

Ukrainian evangelicals have had enough.

Battered by a week of war, they have heard numerous prayers for peace uttered by their Russian colleagues. But they did not hear condemnation.

“Your unions have congratulated Putin, giving thanks for freedom of belief,” said Taras Dyatlik, the Overseas Council regional director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia. “The time has come to make use of that freedom.”

As Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, and other cities have suffered missile strikes, the United Nations reports the death of more than 200 civilians. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reports more than 2,000. The military casualties are disputed, with both nations claiming thousands of fatalities among the other’s ranks.

But rather than focusing on the numbers, Dyatlik, who coordinates a regional network of dozens of Protestant seminaries, turned to the Bible.

“Remember Mordechai and Esther,” he wrote March 1 in an open letter. “Do not be like Jehoshaphat, who entered into an alliance with Ahab, and was silent when God spoke through the prophet Micaiah.”

Dyatlik accused his Russian colleagues of buying into national rhetoric—first in 2014, when Russian-backed forces invaded the eastern region of Donbas—and again today. But “begging on my knees,” he leveraged his reputation with the heads of Russia’s evangelical unions—while acknowledging their difficult reality.

“You fear prison,” he said. “[But] do not be faithful to Putin. Be faithful to the body of Christ.”

A new draft law proposes a 15-year prison sentence for “fake” claims about the violence in Ukraine, as authorities crack down on Russians who call the “military …

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Dying is a fact of life. It’s also the enemy we’re called to resist.

I’ve never seen so many headlines about death.

Over the past two pandemic years, newspaper obituary sections grew fat with tributes, and my online feeds—keyed up to search for terms like pastor and minister—were filled with local news stories about churches who lost their leaders during the pandemic.

The death tolls we’re reaching now are the worst-case scenarios we couldn’t even imagine when COVID-19 first hit. As the United States commemorated 800,000 dead in late 2021, The Atlantic writer Clint Smith called it a number “so enormous that we risk becoming numb to its implications.”

There’s a sense of resignation in the way people, even fellow Christians, speak of the COVID-19 dead. Depending on their positions on vaccination, they may suggest that the unvaccinated put themselves at risk, or, on the other side, that it simply must have been their time to die.

On Ash Wednesday, Christians traditionally repeat a line aimed to remind each other of our mortality, that we will all die and “to dust we shall return.” We hardly need the reminder in the midst of a pandemic that has taken more than 5.7 million lives around the world.

It would be hard for that level of loss to not shift our conception of death, or move it further in the direction it was already headed.

We have seen a creeping fatalism toward the critically ill. The medically vulnerable have too often been reduced to their COVID-19 “risk factors” and “comorbidities,” as if such conditions justify another life lost.

Governments around the world are moving toward policies to sanction euthanasia. In Australia and the UK, politicians are lobbying to legalize “assisted dying,” and Switzerland …

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