Transubstantiate

Five reasons for the current crisis, three signs of hope, and three prayers for what is needed next.

Recent news from Myanmar, beset by both civil conflict and the pandemic, is heart-breaking.

According to my contacts in Yangon, COVID-19 is rife. The confirmed death toll has risen sharply to hundreds per day. Few are vaccinated. Almost a third of public hospitals are or have been closed. Relatives, friends, and aid providers risk being shot or detained as they queue to try to get oxygen cylinders to the sick under curfew.

It seemed the Southeast Asian nation was inching toward a more democratic regime. In the November 2020 election, there was yet another landslide vote for the National League for Democracy (NLD) party.

But the military junta, which rules Myanmar, was unable to contemplate more power-sharing. Citing election fraud, they declared a year-long state of emergency on February 1. The patience of the normally peace-loving people snapped and fury was unleashed.

Ominously the military’s 77th light infantry division, which was at the forefront of brutally repelling the Rohingya Muslims back in 2017, was deployed to deal with the protesters in Yangon, Naypyidaw, and Mandalay. First with tear gas and rubber bullets, and then with live rounds and even air attacks, as shown by mobile phone footage, soldiers gunned down unarmed students, teachers, and even medical workers. More than 900 civilians have been killed by security forces and over 5,000 more detained or sentenced.

In the plaintive words of one Burmese youth on the streets of Yangon: “We were just learning to fly, and now they have broken our wings.” What chance is there that the fledgling bird of Myanmar will fly again?

Falling in love with Burma

As a British teenager, I met a beautiful Burmese girl on the school bus. She and her family self-exiled …

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Judy Dabler built a career helping reconcile conflict within ministries including RZIM and Mars Hill. But a new investigation says she abused her authority to protect those with power.

A leading Christian conciliator who was involved in handling abuse allegations and training at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), Mars Hill Church, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), and dozens of other churches and ministries over the past 15 years, has been found unfit for counseling, coaching, or conciliation.

Judy Dabler founded two popular organizations for Christians needing a third party to help navigate conflict and broken relationships: Live at Peace Ministries (LAPM) and Creative Conciliation. She also taught more than 10,000 people how to do conciliation, which she described in presentations as the only biblical option for dealing with conflict.

In her conciliation work, though, Dabler consistently favored the person paying the bills, siding with the leader or big-name institution. Again and again, interviews and documents obtained by CT show, it was the less powerful party—the victim of sexual harassment, the beleaguered employee, the hurt congregant—who was pressured to make confessions they weren’t comfortable with and settle for agreements they thought were unfair.

Former clients and colleagues say Dabler protected and perpetuated power imbalances through mediation, all while appealing to Scripture and her authority as an experienced conciliator who had seen behind the curtain of the worst dysfunction in contemporary Christian ministry.

The renowned peacemaker also perpetuated abuses herself, according to interviews and documents. She bullied, belittled, and shamed her staff, and she sexually abused two seminarians she taught, supervised, and employed from 2007 to 2011.

“What you have to understand is that Judy is very gifted,” said Paul Vazquez, who worked with …

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So let’s make sure we’re teaching sound doctrine in worship.

Before you read this article, start by reciting the alphabet in your head.

There is a reason you just fought a strong temptation to hum. It’s the same reason you can remember jingles from childhood and lyrics to your favorite rock anthem, but not the security password you set up last week.

If you can name all 50 states or all 66 books of the Bible, my guess is it’s because of a song. Sunday school teachers, marketers, hymn writers, rock stars, and kindergarten teachers are all well aware that “what is learned in song is remembered long.”

And neuroscience backs this up. Pairing information with music helps our hippocampus retrieve that information with ease. Music is a powerful teaching tool, and before the discipline of neuroscience existed, the followers of Yahweh employed that tool.

Miriam’s Song of the Sea in Exodus 15 was composed to stamp the memory of God’s transcendence onto his people’s consciousness. The 150 psalms, whose words by themselves are perfectly potent, were written to be sung. The children of God understood their need to be reminded by sacred words set to melodies. After all, ours is a long history of forgetting and being summoned back to remembrance. Music plus words equals recall.

But recall is not all that music aids. Words set to music have a profoundly formative effect. Any lyric we hear or sing can yield us either well-formed or malformed, depending on the content of that lyric.

In my youth group in the 1980s, we were urged to destroy the records and cassettes that might train us in the paths of secular music. If you’ve ever downloaded the clean version of a song instead of the explicit version, you recognize the formative power of lyrics. Sacred or secular, …

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Homeless ministries are preparing for higher costs and greater demand, while publishers and distributors relying on overseas shipping are also affected.

Wheeler Mission in Indianapolis usually produces tens of thousands of Thanksgiving meals for the hungry. Their motto: “Fill plates with food and lives with the hope of Christ.” This year, they may run out of the former before everyone is served.

Sam Brown, head chef at the Christian social services and homeless ministry, said he’s worried about having enough turkeys. From California to Chicago, there are nationwide reports of turkey shortages and massive price increases, both of which will affect nonprofit organizations feeding folks this season.

Shipping orders are blowing past delivery deadlines due to difficulty finding truck drivers. The ministry is short-staffed and is still trying to hire a dishwasher.

Hundreds of charities across the country are feeling the crunch of the global supply chain crisis, which is coming to national attention ahead of the holiday season. New research shows that nearly half of churches and faith organizations are involved in feeding the hungry, and this year they’re forced to shift processes based on longer wait times, product shortages, and unstable market expectations.

In some cases, ministries have been able to move forward with plans as normal. In other cases, depending on demand and access to resources, they’ve seen how the supply chain issues have gone on to impact those they’re trying to serve—from feeding the hungry in their own neighborhoods to sending Christian resources around the world.

The current struggles aren’t due to a lack of community generosity. Despite last year’s economic downturn, Americans actually donated more money in 2020 than they did in 2019. Though numbers for 2021 are not yet released, the Chronicle of Philanthropy …

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Christopher Stokes on how the Romantic poets propelled a new view of personal devotion.

The language of prayer and the language of poetry share strong similarities. Prayer, like poetry, allows for, and even invites, the interplay between truth and beauty. A new book explores this connection between rational thought and aesthetic expression. Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773–1832 (Oxford University Press, 2021), by Christopher Stokes, senior lecturer in Romantic literature with the University of Exeter, is a scholarly examination of several key poets of the British Romantic period, from pre-Romantic William Cowper to second-generation Romantics Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and a range of poets in between.

The poets examined in this book reflect shifts in forms of religious devotion. Stokes argues that the theology of prayer reflected in this age and its poets parallels the growing importance of individual practices in religious life, when devotion became as much about doing as believing. Poetry, likewise, was increasingly becoming a personal practice, not merely an objective art.

Living in a time of ongoing and culminating secularization, these poets illustrate the ways Christianity helped birth secularity, as debates about the modes of Christianity evolved into debates about Christianity itself. Even so, as Stokes shows, poetry can be a way to preserve and practice religious faith amid growing skepticism.

You call prayer “an organ of faith” because of the way it “imprints” an understanding of God in the one who prays. Poetry, too, is a language that forms or imprints itself on us. The foundation of your analysis is that the language of prayer and the language of poetry are deeply connected. How are they connected?

There’s certainly a deep historical connection …

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It wasn’t one thing that ended Mars Hill. It was one thing after another, after another, after another…

Mars Hill grew dramatically in 2012, and it seemed like nothing could stop the church’s ever-widening expansion. Pastor Mark Driscoll’s book Real Marriage released that January, hit The New York Times Best Seller list, and launched a book tour and a series of television appearances that brought him into countless new homes and churches. But in the next two years, the church would experience endless controversy, turn over almost all of their staff, and discover that no efforts at PR or spin could hide the rot of a deeply dysfunctional culture of leadership.

The second-to-last episode of this series is a two-and-a-half-hour look at those final two years, especially between October 2013 and October 2014, to look at exactly what brought down one of America’s fastest-growing churches, and how some of the characters whose lives we’ve followed in this series weathered the turmoil.

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

It’s executive produced by Erik Petrik

It’s produced, written, and edited by Mike Cosper

Additional editing by Resonate Recordings and Matt Linder

Joy Beth Smith is our associate producer

Music, sound design, and mixing by Kate Siefker

Our theme song is “Sticks and Stones” by King’s Kaleidescope

The closing song this week is “O How the Mighty Have Fallen” by The Choir

Special thanks to Ben Vandermeer

Graphic design by Bryan Todd

Social media by Morgan Lee and Kara Bettis

Editorial consulting by Andrea Palpant Dilley

CT’s Editor in Chief is Timothy Dalrymple

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The norms of working across the aisle are changing. So is the church’s attitude about it.

Last Friday, both chambers of Congress passed an infrastructure bill that will commit more than one trillion dollars to America’s deteriorating roads and bridges, making life easier for pedestrians and bikers, improving broadband access, and renovating suffering public transit systems.

This bill has been closely tied to Biden’s Build Better Back, legislation that would invest heavily in climate change and social policies. While the bill had passed the Senate in July, Progressive Democrats in the House had wanted to hold out on passing the bill until Build Better Back first passed.

But mustering support for that initiative has been challenging for Democrats, including from within their own party. Last week, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin suggested his refusal to support the bill was because it didn’t share enough of the other side’s interests.

“While I’ve worked hard to find a path to compromise, it’s obvious: Compromise is not good enough for a lot of my colleagues in Congress. It’s all or nothing, and their position doesn’t seem to change unless we agree to everything,” Manchin said in a press conference.

Though Manchin and fellow Democrat Arizona senator Krysten Sinema have insisted that their holding out is part of a commitment to look out for the interests of everyone, some suggest that their posture is actually selfish.

“It is simply not fair, not right that one or two people say: My way or the highway,” said Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

Amy E. Black is professor of political science at Wheaton College and author of several books, including Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching Politics with Humility, Grace, and Reason.

Black joined global media manager Morgan …

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We long to be known and loved. But false community won’t get us there.

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

Unlike Macaulay Culkin, the ten-year-old who starred in the famous Christmas movie Home Alone, his younger brother Kieran Culkin turned down multiple opportunities to be a child star. He learned by observation that he didn’t want a life of fame—knowing it could lead to things like substance abuse, court guardianship battles, and the like.

We might be tempted to view the life choices of famous people like the Culkin brothers from a distance. But maybe we’re looking into a collective mirror. Today, fame is not just something that happens to stars, child or otherwise. Thanks to the age of social media, many of us are turning into mini-stars, with the only real difference being the size of our audience.

The recently leaked “Facebook Files,” which discuss the inner workings of the social media company, include data about the harm Instagram usage inflicts on the self-image of adolescents, especially teenage girls. Every child or teen faces a fear of judgment from their peers. They also fear being exiled from their social group. (This also why very few of us would ever wish to time travel back to our middle school days.)

However, the world of social media seems to heighten these dynamics—where almost everyone is followed by a kind of paparazzi, exposing and subjecting us to the approval or disapproval of our peers, acquaintances, and often complete strangers.

Philosopher Alain de Botton argued in his book The School of Life that one way to gauge your parenting is to ask your child whether they aspire to be famous. He says the quest for fame is different from other (equally risky) aspirations to acquire wealth, power, or …

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A short guide to the exvangelical movement.

Deconstruction is a buzzword these days. The term exvangelical has emerged as an identity marker and an activist movement. People’s faith stories—and their “losing faith” stories—are often emotional and vulnerable. They grow out of biography and experiences, so Christians struggling with faith need love and listening ears, not merely argument.

Still, we have a responsibility as a church to thoughtfully engage wider cultural conversations around deconstruction. Jesus is the truth that sets us free. Asking hard questions about faith is normal. It’s a necessary part of Christian maturity. But there are better and worse ways to critically assess claims to truth. So take these as helpful guidelines:

First, distinguish between deconstruction and reform. The church is a Christ-made institution, but it is also a sinful institution. It always needs reform. If a person’s frustration with the church arises from the biblical vision of community, that’s not deconstruction. It’s calling the church back to the gospel.

There have always been reformers in the church, and we did not call them deconstructors. This is not merely semantics. To call something to reform (as opposed to simply destroying it) is to implicitly recognize the integrity of its original design.

As an example, I am often dismayed by the misogyny I see in the church. But I also recognize that the notion of women’s intrinsic dignity is given to me by the church itself. Compared to the pagan world around it, the early church elevated the status of women. The idea of innate human equality emerges out of the best of Christian thought. We can’t deconstruct the church while drawing from its very logic, beliefs, and …

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Alan Noble analyzes the unbearable burdens that result from believing we belong to ourselves.

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, we find one of the greatest dialogues in British literature. As Satan rallies some angels to rebel against God, one stalwart angel, Abdiel, objects on the grounds that God created them and they belong to him. Satan guilefully mocks this “strange” and “new” claim, insisting that the angels created themselves and were “possessed before by none.” When he’s later exiled to Earth, Satan uses a similar lie to convince Eve that she and Adam don’t need God: They can become their own gods and live a “life more perfect” than their Creator meant for them.

From this inauspicious start until today, “humanity’s fundamental rebellion against God has been a rebellion of autonomy,” writes Alan Noble in his latest book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. As the subtitle suggests, Noble’s premise is that modern society is fundamentally inhuman and that this inhumanity stems from the lie that we belong to ourselves. Like Adam and Eve, we believe that accepting our creaturely limits will likewise limit our happiness, so we reject God’s authority and end up experiencing what they did: distance from God, each other, and even ourselves.

Because this rebellion dates back to Eden, Noble doesn’t make the sky-is-falling claim that our society is doing something new. Instead, he diagnoses some contemporary forms of inhumanity, and he shows how these social cancers have metastasized from that primordial lie of self-ownership. The cure, says Noble, comes from acknowledging what and whose we are: creatures who belong to our good Creator.

Crushing responsibilities

In arguing that our society is fundamentally …

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