Transubstantiate

“Rise and Fall” producer Mike Cosper takes listeners backstage to answer questions about production delays, his personal experience, and more.

Last week, CT’s director of podcasts Mike Cosper posted the much-anticipated final episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. CT editor Stefani McDade sat down with him to talk about the stress and joy of unexpected interviews, how exvangelicals and other groups responded to the series, and what listeners can expect from bonus episodes and future projects.

How do you feel about the overall reception of the podcast and its wide audience?

If you had asked me, “Who’s gonna listen to the podcast?” I would have said, “I think pastors and church leaders, Gen X men, aged 35 to 50, who were part of this phenomenon.” And then, you know, some broader interests beyond that. The fact that it’s had millions of downloads is not something we would have imagined at all from the beginning. I mean, we were back in the top 10 in Apple podcasts yesterday, you know?

You had some significant delays in production. Tell us about that.

With this influx of unexpected interviews and conversations, we decided to just roll with moving forward. By the end of July, we were like, “This is going to be a problem.” It took this storyline that was kind of a straight line and just kept expanding it and opening it up—“Let’s follow this thread, let’s follow this thread.” And then, you know, there were a couple of stories that just came at the last minute, stories that we really wanted to have. We thought, “This is worth pressing pause. This is important.”

What do you think made all these people change their minds and decide to talk to you at the last second, especially with the final episode?

There were just a few things that happened in a handful of episodes that built …

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Their plight moved a (mostly prayerless) war correspondent to prayer and mourning.

“Islamic fundamentalist groups, in particular ISIS, have ravaged parts of Iraq and Syria and brought those countries’ already decimated Christian population to the verge of extinction. In Egypt, Christian Copts face legal and societal discrimination. In Gaza, which in the fourth century was entirely Christian, fewer than one thousand Christians remain.”

Sobering statistics like these set a grim backdrop for The Vanishing, war journalist Janine di Giovanni’s fearless account of what the book’s subtitle calls “Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets.” There can be few better suited or equipped to tell this story than di Giovanni, who has previously reported on the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Syria and is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

The Vanishing is neither a chronological record of Christian withdrawal nor a geopolitical analysis of religious trends. Instead, di Giovanni offers a kind of requiem for a disappearing religious culture, a tale rendered all the more heart-wrenching for having been written during some of the worst months of the COVID-19 crisis. The book skillfully manages to combine an overview of the rise and precipitous fall of Christianity in its ancient homelands, moving accounts from believers sticking it out there, and a deeply personal grieving over the withdrawal of the faith from its birthplace.

Di Giovanni’s narrative begins and ends amid the lockdown in Paris: “I light a candle,” she writes. “I pray for those who are sick and for those who have died. Ordinarily, I am not a prayerful person. I am a proud sinner, in fact. But faith is coming back to me …

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Release after seven weeks of captivity comes as Christian Aid Ministries starts three days of prayer and fasting.

A Christian aid group based in Ohio announced Monday that a violent gang in Haiti has released three more hostages, while another 12 remain abducted.

The statement from Christian Aid Ministries (CAM) said the people were released on Sunday in Haiti and are “safe and seem to be in good spirits.” The group provided no further details.

On November 21, CAM announced that the 400 Mawozo gang had released the first two hostages of a group of 17 kidnapped in mid-October after visiting an orphanage. There are 12 adults and five children in the group of 16 US citizens and one Canadian, including an 8-month-old.

The leader of the 400 Mawozo gang has threatened to kill the hostages unless his demands are met. Authorities have said the gang was seeking $1 million per person, although it wasn’t immediately clear that included the children in the group.

“We are thankful to God that three more hostages were released last night,” stated CAM, an Anabaptist missions organization based in Berlin, Ohio. “As with the previous release, we are not able to provide the names of the people released, the circumstances of the release, or any other details.”

The group reiterated its request—proposed by “a Haitian brother in Christ”—for supporters to devote Monday through Wednesday as days of prayer and fasting “to intercede for those who are still being held as well as those who have been released.” (Editor’s note: Throughout the ordeal, the prayers of CAM’s Anabaptist supporters have been noteworthy.)

“We recognize the power of prayer and fasting,” stated CAM. “We believe that it is Satan’s goal to destroy the work of God through strongholds …

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A journalist pieces together the messy lives of Norma McCorvey, her family, and other central figures from the case.

The life of “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade was not what it seemed.

When Norma McCorvey, using the alias “Jane Roe,” sued Dallas district attorney Henry Wade for the right to an abortion that Texas law prohibited, she won plaudits from pro-choice feminists throughout the nation. Years later, in the late 1980s, McCorvey abandoned the anonymity of her alias and became a public advocate of abortion rights and a sought-out speaker on the pro-choice lecture circuit.

But in 1995, McCorvey took an action that made her a hero to a very different group of people: pro-life Christians. She renounced most of her earlier support for abortion rights and converted to evangelical Christianity. A photo that was widely reprinted in many evangelical publications showed an ecstatic Flip Benham—the director of Operation Rescue and the pastor of a Free Methodist church—baptizing a beaming McCorvey. Three years later, McCorvey converted to Catholicism, an action that may have linked her even more strongly to the pro-life cause. Yet in the last two years of her life, McCorvey distanced herself from organized religion, said that she supported abortion rights in at least the first trimester, and told a documentary filmmaker that her work for the pro-life movement had merely been an act.

So, which version of McCorvey was the real one? What does her complicated story tell us about the 50-year political battle over abortion rights in America? And what does it tell us about the Christians who have been caught up in that struggle?

Joshua Prager’s The Family Roe: An American Story is a masterpiece of journalistic research that uncovers the story not only of McCorvey but also her entire family, as well as a number of other …

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What happens to your faith when your church is torn apart?

Five days after resigning as lead pastor of Mars Hill Church, Mark Driscoll was once again in front of a crowd—this time, a packed conference of pastors who offered him a standing ovation in support. It only took 474 days for him to announce he was planting a new church in Scottsdale, Arizona.

But while Driscoll wielded his own force of personality to get as much distance from Mars Hill as possible, life in Seattle was a different story. A confused and hurting church was displaced, hundreds of people were out of their jobs, and the fiercest critics of the church practically threw a party.

In our series finale, we follow a few of those threads, which led some people to new ministries, others to new careers, and still others out of the church altogether. We’ll revisit the legacy of Driscoll’s teaching on gender, and we’ll ask whether or not he really preached good news and freedom.

We’ll also look for the presence of Christ, working in surprising and unseen ways to bring beauty out of the ashes of what was once Mars Hill Church.

As we end 2021, we’d love to invite you to join us as we continue to try to tell stories like this. Subscriptions are a great way to do that, and we’d love if you considered us with your end-of-year giving.

“The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” is a production of Christianity Today

Executive produced by Erik Petrik

Produced, written, and edited by Mike Cosper

Joy Beth Smith is our associate producer.

Music and sound design by Kate Siefker and Mike Cosper

Our theme song for this finale is “Resplendent” by Bill Mallonee and the Vigilantes of Love.

The closing song this week is “All My Favorite People” by Over the Rhine.

Special thanks to …

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The history of Christian celibacy is more complicated than we’d like to think.

Lately, Christians have cast their minds and social media musings back to the early church on the topics of singleness and sexuality. Much of the conversation centers on past spiritual practices of celibacy and claims about what early church leaders taught about singleness.

Some suggest that early church leaders enthusiastically ‘tore down’ the centrality of marriage within the church. Others argue that the way we understand the (so-called) “gift of singleness” today is a direct inheritance from apostles and the church’s earliest centuries.

As a history nerd, practical theologian, and never-married Christian woman, I may not agree with every supposition, but I’m delighted by the revitalized discussion about how we can see ancient ideas about singleness in a new light. After all, church history is our history, and this ancient era is ripe with fascinating insights (and quite a few conundrums) about singleness—many of which are still relevant to discussions on faith and church life today.

The lessons we can learn from the ancient church about singleness are many and mighty, but they are neither simple nor straightforward. In fact, early church leaders do not offer us a singular narrative about being single. However, when we examine the Christian history of celibacy on its own terms, the conversation yields something far more complex and interesting.

So what does it look like for us to approach this past honestly?

First, a proper historical methodology involves observing the details and nuances of the past, rather than painting it with broad brush strokes.

We must keep in mind that the early church era spanned almost 500 years and multiple continents. In that time and space, there was a great …

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Does Scripture warn about Big Pharma? Endorse mask-wearing? Christians Googled for answers in 2021.

As the pandemic first hit in 2020, Christians sought out Scripture about fear, comfort, and healing. A year later, their Bible searching habits reflect ongoing clashes around COVID-19 responses.

The fastest-growing search term on Bible Gateway in the past year was “sorcery,” which drew 193 percent more queries than in 2020. The boost was inspired not by the recent rise in witchcraft but by arguments against the COVID-19 vaccine.

“The increase in sorceries is related to heightened interest in the Greek word pharmakeia, which, according to the Mounce Concise Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament means ‘employment of drugs for any purpose; sorcery, magic, enchantment,’” wrote Jonathan Peterson, content manager for Bible Gateway. Analysis of Bible Gateway’s annual trends came from Stephen Smith, senior director of digital projects on the site and the Bible tech guru behind OpenBible.info.

Some Christians have brought up the term when claiming that Scripture prophetically warns against the vaccine and vaccine mandates, since it shares a root with the word pharmaceuticals.

Pharmakeia is used in Galatians 5:20, Peterson noted, where it is listed among the “acts of the flesh” that Paul advises against. In the vaccine debates, Christians are more likely to point out its use in Revelation 18:23, where it’s translated as “magic spell” in a declaration made against Babylon: “Your merchants were the world’s important people. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.”

The pharmakeia argument tends to come up in among certain Christians with a focus on end …

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The conservative-majority Supreme Court appeared willing to side with Mississippi’s abortion ban, which restricts beyond what “Roe v. Wade” allows.

After a long-awaited challenge to Roe v. Wade made it to the US Supreme Court on Wednesday, pro-life evangelicals who had rallied for the cause for decades were encouraged that the conservative-leaning court appeared willing to uphold a contentious Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks.

The justices’ decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, due in late June, could overturn the country’s landmark abortion rights cases, making way for more restrictive state laws protecting the rights of fetuses in the womb.

White evangelicals—who are twice as likely than the average American to want to make abortion illegal—gathered outside the high court in Washington and, across the country, listened to the oral arguments streamed online due to the pandemic.

But the two-hour discussion—the greatest threat to abortion policy in 50 years of prayer and advocacy—largely skipped over familiar evangelical talking points to focus on the legal grounds for the case.

“Personhood” came up twice in the oral arguments; “mother” and “motherhood” just three times. But “stare decisis,” a legal term meaning the court would stand by historic precedent, got nearly 50 mentions.

“The discussion was purely legal—purely legal in a way that might have surprised some,” said Notre Dame law professor Sherif Girgis in a discussion convened by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC). “It was really just focused on: Is there a doctrinal path to a middle ground?”

The middle ground Gergis references is whether the court can somehow uphold the Mississippi law banning abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy without overturning Roe v. …

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The widow’s mite story is about more than her sacrificial giving.

These days, Ira Glass is famous for inspiring an infinite number of podcasts that want to be just like his public radio show This American Life. But back in the mid-1990s, Glass’s initial claim to fame was for raising money during public radio pledge drives. Glass initially grew his show by telling station program directors that they could have his pledge spots so long as they carried his program. They still do: He remains public radio’s most effective fundraiser by far, with his earnest pleas to “give selfishly” to keep listeners’ favorite shows on the air and reminding them why they love public radio.

Churches have an Ira Glass too—a ringer guaranteed to bring the checkbooks out every time. And what makes her even more remarkable than Ira Glass is that she doesn’t even say a word. She just throws two small coins into an offering box and walks away.

The “poor widow” of Mark 12 and Luke 21 gets more homiletical airtime than most of the apostles. She’s there for every Stewardship Sunday, front and center of every capital campaign. Her two small coins have inspired billions of additional gifts as she’s served as an example of the kind of giving God desires.

And so far as they go, the lessons we’ve taken from the story of the widow’s mite are true: God cares not about the size of the gift but about the size of the sacrifice. What matters is not the amount that one gives but the amount that one keeps for oneself.

But this isn’t the story where Jesus commands, Sell all you have and give. This is the story where Jesus commands, Watch out! Perhaps this story isn’t so much about how we should be more like the widow. Perhaps it’s more about …

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Let’s dispense with our worries that Christmas as we know it isn’t Christian.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a Christian at Christmas. Okay, it’s not that hard. After all, we do it every year. Still, it seems harder than it ought to be. Why does a holiday that is supposed to put the focus on faith often seem tinged with doubt? Why does a celebration of peace on earth seem to bring with it so much anxiety and fear? How can we somehow simultaneously worry both that Christmas has become overblown and that it is being canceled? Where are you, Christmas? Why can’t I find you?

I once heard a psychologist lecture on how avoidance increases anxiety. This happened to a friend. She began to refuse to go on trips that involved an expressway. The more she avoided getting out and about, the more restrictions accumulated. Eventually, she did not want to leave the house at all. Avoidance doesn’t work; it is time to face our ambient anxieties about Christmas. When we look them straight in the eye, they turn out not to be as frightening as we thought. There is a kind twinkle in that eye.

Let’s begin with doubt. There are a lot of improbable things in the Nativity story: the star, the angels, the Magi, and of course, the Virgin Birth. If you have never doubted the Virgin Birth, then you have probably never really thought about it.

And it’s not a bad thing to really think about it. The Virgin Birth is meant to make you wonder. It is a deliberate, divine provocation. Like the burning bush, it is intended to draw you in because you cannot resist engaging with it, even if your first response is doubt.

There’s a scriptural parallel to Mary’s conception of Jesus in Hannah’s conception of Samuel (1 Sam. 1). The high priest Eli is a busy man who is not easily distracted from his …

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