Transubstantiate

A debate over “untethered empathy” underscores how departing leaders, including John Piper’s successor, approached hot-button issues like race and abuse.

This was supposed to be a landmark year for Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, as the historic congregation, best known for John Piper’s 33-year tenure as pastor, marked its 150th anniversary.

Bethlehem College and Seminary (BCS)—which grew from the church’s lay training institute to an accredited program—also has reason to celebrate. This fall, the school will inaugurate its second president, 10 years after its first graduating class.

Ahead of the commemorations, though, the community finds itself in the midst of what current leaders have called “a confusing and challenging time” and “a hard and difficult season in the life of our church.” Three pastors and a staff member resigned from the downtown campus of Bethlehem Baptist Church in recent months, alongside dozens of lay members. Another four faculty and staff left the college and seminary in the past year.

Some of the faces that appear in the compilation video of “150 God’s Grace at Bethlehem” no longer belong to the multisite Twin Cities church—most prominently Jason Meyer, Piper’s successor and Bethlehem’s pastor for preaching and vision. Members who spent 10, 20, or even 30 years worshiping and serving there, who expected they would be part of Bethlehem for the rest of their lives, said goodbye to their spiritual home.

“Bethlehem was the plan until we were going to be in Jesus’ arms. We can’t even think about what’s next,” said Debby Pickering, whose family left when her husband, Bryan, resigned his position as pastor. While he was trying to work for resolution, she didn’t know where to go with her own frustration and anxiety. “Nothing in …

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As the world debates the US withdrawal, 15 leaders reflect on how they are applying their faith to understand how to best advocate for justice in the aftermath.

It will be hard to forget the images of Afghans mobbing outgoing aircraft, some clinging on to planes with their bare hands, in their desperation to leave their country following the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul.

President Joe Biden’s follow-through on former President Donald Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban’s prompt takeover, and the seeming lack of coordination and planning to evacuate translators and others at risk of persecution have sparked intense outrage and sadness worldwide.

Christians both inside and outside the United States disagree on what the US government and military should have done. But they are trying to apply their faith to help them understand how to best advocate for justice in the aftermath.

CT surveyed 15 leaders on what they are lamenting about the American withdrawal and Taliban takeover; how they’re praying for Afghanistan’s future; what they think American Christians can learn from the war; how they see the long-term impact on the mission field; and whether the decades of investment by Americans troops and foreign Christian workers were worthwhile or wasted.

Click to navigate through the following questions:

• What do you lament the most about the American withdrawal and the Taliban takeover?
• How are you praying for Afghanistan’s future?
• How should American Christians reflect on this war?
• If the US entered an unwise war to begin with, was it best to stop and fully withdraw, as a sign of repentance?
• What type of longterm impact do you think this will have on the mission field in Afghanistan and surrounding region?
• To what extent were the decades of investment by American forces and foreign Christian workers worth it or all for naught?
• Anything else?

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World Relief joins five fellow refugee resettlement groups in lamenting the “devastating” impact of problems with the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa process.

As most Americans absorbed the shock of the Taliban’s full takeover of Afghanistan over the weekend, officials at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service followed the rapidly deteriorating situation with resignation, knowing it could have gone differently.

In May, leaders at LIRS, one of several faith-based agencies contracted with the US government to resettle refugees in the United States, sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting it remove Afghan civilians (and their families) who have worked with the US before its planned troop withdrawal.

Anyone familiar with the “bureaucratic maze” that is the country’s Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) process knew the State Department visa office wouldn’t be agile enough to respond to the urgent need for evacuations, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of LIRS.

“We’ve been screaming from the rooftops for months now that we need to get these allies to Guam or another US territory,” Vignarajah said.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from RNS.

The US began evacuating Afghans in the final stages of the SIV process about a month ago before canceling additional flights out of Kabul because of security concerns, according to Jenny Yang, senior vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, another one of the faith-based organizations that partners with the US government on refugee resettlement.

In June, most of those organizations—including LIRS, World Relief, Church World Service (CWS), the Episcopal Church (which resettles refugees through Episcopal Migration Ministries), and HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)—urged President Joe Biden to implement plans …

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US forces are withdrawing after 20 years, but the story of Christian aid work goes far beyond military conflict.

Our September issue went to press before the stunningly rapid fall of Afghanistan’s government. This month’s cover honors the history of faithful, unseen service in Afghanistan on the part of local believers and Christian aid workers. With US troops largely gone from the country and the Taliban now firmly in control, it’s easy to forget that the church was at work there long before America’s “forever war” began—and will remain at work there, in whatever form it takes, now that the war has ended.

Like so many, Arley Loewen knows exactly where he was when 9/11 happened. He was in Islamabad, Pakistan, working with Afghan refugees as an educator, and he had to evacuate the area for safety.

But as a foreign aid worker, there are also other dates he thinks about, memorializing other deaths. Those who spent time on humanitarian work in Afghanistan in the past 20 years get emotional remembering the Afghan and foreign friends, coworkers, and neighbors who died.

On March 27, 2003, a Red Cross engineer was executed by unknown gunmen.

On June 2, 2004, five Médecins Sans Frontières staff were killed on the road between Khair Khana and Qala-i-Naw.

On January 14, 2008, an attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul killed six.

On July 24, 2014, two Finnish women with International Assistance Mission were shot and killed.

On October 3, 2015, a US airstrike hit a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital and killed 42.

On November 24, 2019, a roadside bomb killed a California man with the UN Development Program and wounded five others.

There are other dark dates, and Loewen, who currently lives in Manitoba and teaches Bible and Muslim-Christian relations at a small Christian college, regularly …

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Why this Christian scholar may be the most important person you don’t know.

Historian Andrew Walls—known for recentering contemporary Christian history in the Southern hemisphere and, along with the late Lamin Sanneh, promoting the voices of African, Latin American, and Asian Christians—has died at age 93. This profile, originally published in CT’s February 2007 issue, dove deep into the significance of his life’s work.

* * *

Andrew Walls was mildly incredulous when I phoned him in Aberdeen, Scotland, to ask for an interview. Of course he would gladly help me, he said in a restrained Scotch brogue, but was I sure I had the right person? He couldn’t understand why Christianity Today would want to write about him.

The reason is simple: Andrew Walls may be the most important person you don’t know. Most Americans and Europeans think of Christianity as a Western religion. Prominent leaders of the last 50 years, like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Pope John Paul II, are known primarily for their influence in the West, though in fact each of them has played a significant role in wider, global Christianity. But the most important development for the church in the 20th and 21st centuries has not been in the West at all, but in the astonishing shift of Christianity’s center of gravity from the Western industrialized nations to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In a short time, Christianity has been transformed from a European religion to a global one.

Andrew Walls is the person to help us understand what this means. One of the first scholars to notice and study the shift, he combines exhaustive knowledge of the worldwide church with a deep historical and theological vision. Scholars who know his work (almost all published in obscure journals) speak of him with something like …

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The band reflects on 20 years of wrestling with spirituality and faith and making music.

There has never been a Christian band like mewithoutYou. Then again, there’s no such thing as a Christian band, and mewithoutYou doesn’t actually exist.

I mean, yes, there’s a group of men who have been playing music under this name for the last 20 years, who recently announced their intention to disband, and who will play the first two of a hoped-for series of farewell shows this weekend. Both live shows sold out in Philadelphia, their hometown, but are available via livestream on the web.

Ask the band’s singer, Aaron Weiss (whom critics are legally required to refer to as “enigmatic”) what the end of mewithoutYou means to him, and he’ll tell you, “We aren’t breaking up. We never were really a band. That’s not a real thing. We never existed to begin with, and yet we will continue to exist in another respect after our last show has been played.”

To him, “‘2001 to 2020, 21, 22’—it’s all totally arbitrary. To me it feels very artificial,” he said in an interview. “I don’t begrudge anyone if they would like to have a kind of a tombstone to give it a lifespan, but it’s a very arbitrary way of looking at whatever it is that we are.”

mewithoutYou came to prominence in the mid-2000s during what some call the golden age of Tooth and Nail records, the Seattle-based indie record label most closely associated with Christian independent rock for the last thirty years.

At first glance, the band was seemingly peers with other rising stars in the Christian screamo scene, like the bands Emery and Underoath, though its particular brand of fractured post-punk fronted by Weiss’s unhinged, spoken/screamed poetry made …

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Barna study shows Christians age 13 to 18 are skeptical of evangelism, but they’re having deep and personal peer-to-peer conversations.

Treyson West doesn’t have a name for it, but if you want to call it evangelism, that’s fine.

He doesn’t think he has a strategy or model for trying to change people’s beliefs, though. He’s just interested in friendship and reliance on the Holy Spirit.

“The big thing is showing somebody what their identity could be through Christ,” says the 19-year-old high school graduate in the suburbs of Dallas. “Everybody is pushing you to be polarized. And ultimately that just pushes you deeper into a sense of not belonging, and Gen Z digs deeper into loneliness.”

That’s why, when West wants to tell a teenager about Jesus, he doesn’t tell them. He listens, and asks questions to get to know them, showing that he cares. And when God becomes real to one of his friends, he likes to point that out.

Recently, West was sitting with a friend in a car in front of the friend’s house, and the friend was talking about his life and struggles and whether he could believe in God. West asked him how he felt right at that moment, talking about God in the car.

“My heart feels, like, warm,” the friend said.

“Dude, that’s the Holy Spirit,” West said. “That’s God, right there.”

The friend accepted Jesus before he got out of the car.

A new Barna Group study, set to be announced on Monday, says that West’s approach isn’t unusual for younger Christians. Gen Z believers want to share about Jesus, and they are having deep, personal conversations about their faith with their friends. But they have reservations about the idea of evangelism and are skeptical of evangelistic strategies.

According to Reviving Evangelism in the Next Generation, …

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Early reactions from evangelical, mainline, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish leaders.

Facebook already asks for your thoughts. Now it wants your prayers.

The social media giant has rolled out a new prayer request feature, a tool embraced by some religious leaders as a cutting-edge way to engage the faithful online. Others are eyeing it warily as they weigh its usefulness against the privacy and security concerns they have with Facebook.

In Facebook Groups employing the feature, members can use it to rally prayer power for upcoming job interviews, illnesses, and other personal challenges big and small. After they create a post, other users can tap an “I prayed” button, respond with a “like” or other reaction, leave a comment, or send a direct message.

Facebook began testing it in the US in December as part of an ongoing effort to support faith communities, according to a statement attributed to a company spokesperson.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic we’ve seen many faith and spirituality communities using our services to connect, so we’re starting to explore new tools to support them,” it said.

Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas, a Southern Baptist megachurch, was among the pastors enthusiastically welcoming of the prayer feature.

“Facebook and other social media platforms continue to be tremendous tools to spread the Gospel of Christ and connect believers with one another—especially during this pandemic,” he said. “While any tool can be misused, I support any effort like this that encourages people to turn to the one true God in our time of need.”

Adeel Zeb, a Muslim chaplain at The Claremont Colleges in California, also was upbeat.

“As long as these companies initiate proper precautions and protocols to ensure the safety …

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Conversations about equality often lack goodwill. Part of the problem is a newfound fear of common grace.

This piece is the second installment in a two-part series on racial justice debates. Read the first article here.

The words critical race theory, systemic racism, woke, and social justice are case studies in language confusion. People define these terms in radically different ways and use those definitions to distort the views of others.

To some, systemic racism means that discrimination exists in different social, political, and legal structures to varying degrees and intensities. Others think of systemic racism as the idea that all of society is irredeemably racist.

Most scholars define critical race theory (CRT) as a legal movement examining how racism impacts laws, customs, and practices in the United States, despite the gains of the civil rights movement. Critics often use the term CRT broadly enough to include nearly all left-leaning discourse on race and injustice in the United States.

The Book of Common Prayer defines the work of social justice as contending “fearlessly against evil and [making] no peace with oppression; and [helping] us use our freedom rightly in the establishment of justice in our communities and among the nations.” In this reading, social justice is the work of resisting evil and injustice where we discover it locally and nationally. Others contend that social justice is a Marxist idea rooted in the false belief that we can establish a utopia on earth through human actions.

When I was growing up in the Black community, woke simply meant a person who became more aware of our history and more socially conscious as a result. This social consciousness led us to encourage pride in Black achievement and to spur our youth on to greater success. We even had a habit of chiding people who got “super …

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How “redemptive entrepreneurship” can multiply the impact of cash-strapped ministries.

For good reason, we tend not to picture Jesus as a redemptive entrepreneur or a venture philanthropist. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so averse to thinking this way.

He did, after all, multiply loaves and fishes in a way that would impress VC firms like Sequoia Capital. He one-upped Silicon Valley happiness theorists by turning water into wine at a wedding. More visionary than Steve Jobs in a black turtleneck, Jesus told the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30), challenging his followers to see resources as tools for good, not just gold.

It’s this portrait of Jesus, as redemptive entrepreneur, that pastor and financial consultant Mark Elsdon presents in We Aren’t Broke: Uncovering Hidden Resources for Mission and Ministry. Elsdon’s thesis is that the church shouldn’t wallow in self-pity over its declining membership figures and shrinking pool of financial resources. Rather, he proposes creative ways to use property, endowment coffers, and other assets as vehicles for multiplying impact.

Elsdon critiques the church’s historic “two-pocket” approach, which involves receiving money in one pocket via business, investing, tithes, and other sources and then giving money away from a second pocket in the form of philanthropy, donations, or almsgiving. “The real question we should be considering in the church,” he writes, “is this: What is the purpose of our capital? What is the purpose of the money and property that the church owns? Is it to make more money? Is it something else?”

Elsdon is motivated by a mixture of MBA studies in social enterprise, theological education at Princeton Theological Seminary, and his work for the University of Wisconsin campus …

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