Missionary Deaths Mark End of Era

Ann Hill and Dan Coker were the vanguard of Churches of Christ missions to Latin America.

Sixty years after a Churches of Christ missions team first went to Guatemala, two of its pioneering missionaries died within one week of each other. Ann Roberts Hill died in Abilene, Texas, on September 12 at the age of 87. Dan Coker died in Tyler, Texas, on September 18 at the age of 82.

Part of a boom in international missions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hill and Coker helped transform the Churches of Christ’s approach to spreading the gospel abroad. They launched some of the denomination’s earliest congregations in Latin America and modeled a new team approach to missions.

As their friends and colleagues reflected on their legacy, however, they also mourned the passing of an age of missions.

“I just have a fear that this is it,” Jim Frazier, a longtime friend of Hill and Coker and a retired Churches of Christ missionary, told Christianity Today. “This generation, the younger generation, missions is not their thing. They don’t go.”

Telltale signs of change

The Churches of Christ don’t have a denominational board to keep track of missionary numbers, but there are telltale signs of the change.

Great Cities Missions, a group that trains and supports Churches of Christ missionaries to Latin America, has not been able to recruit a North American team in the last few years. A series of annual lectures on Latin American missions—run by Frazier, Coker, and fellow missionary Howard Norton—ended in 2018 because of sharply declining interest. A foundation that supports Churches of Christ missionaries has seen requests for funding drop by more than half in the last decade.

The trends within their denomination, which numbers nearly 12,000 congregations in the US, seem to reflect ...

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One-on-One with Greg Stier on Dare 2 Share LIVE

“If teenagers share their faith consistently over the short term, they’re more likely to keep their faith over the long term.”

Ed: Tell us a little bit about Dare 2 Share.

Greg: Dare 2 Share is all about raising up teenagers to reach their generation with the hope of Jesus.

I started Dare 2 Share Ministries 28 years ago. I ran Dare 2 Share part-time while working as a pastor of a church in Arvada, Colorado. After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, I said “Enough is enough” and shifted my focus on Dare 2 Share full-time.

I am convinced that stopping school shootings is not a matter of political intervention, but spiritual transformation. Nothing transforms like the message of Jesus. I witnessed this firsthand as a child when inner city, violent family members, one by one, were transformed by the power of the gospel. They went from street fighters to street preachers almost overnight.

It was in this setting that, as a fatherless kid in a crime-ridden part of the city, I got my calling to reach teens. Since that fateful day in 1999, Dare 2 Share has impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of teenagers across the country, motivating and equipping them to relationally reach out to those who don’t know Jesus with the gospel message of hope.

Ed: Why is there an urgency to reach teenagers with the message of the gospel now more than ever?

The idea is that if teenagers share their faith consistently over the short term, they’re more likely to keep their faith over the long term.

What motivates me the most is not just retention of the current and coming generation of Christian teenagers raised in Christian families, but also the possibility of exponential growth of the church through teenagers reaching their generation for Jesus.

What if we did more than retain teenagers in the church? What if we gained more teenagers in the faith ...

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Is Racial Justice Becoming a Priority for Evangelical Voters?

LifeWay Research measures political support for the issue for the first time.

Most evangelicals don’t consider themselves single-issue voters, and new data suggests that racial justice may be playing a bigger role in political conversations among believers.

According to a LifeWay Research survey, a majority of evangelicals by belief consider both pro-life values and a commitment to racial justice political dealbreakers.

In the report released today, 52 percent said they “will only support a candidate who a wants to make abortion illegal” and 64 percent said they “will only support a candidate who will fight racial injustice.” Self-identified evangelicals reported similar stances, with 52 percent requiring a pro-life candidate and 66 percent requiring one against racial injustice.

Lead researcher Scott McConnell noted that abortion still outranks racial justice on a short list of significant issues for evangelicals. (LifeWay’s designations represent a multiethnic sample.) Yet, Christians on both sides of the political spectrum agreed that growing attention around racial justice as a political priority would represent a shift for white evangelicals in particular.

“It would be an invited change,” said Justin Giboney, a Democratic political strategist and cofounder of the AND Campaign, an effort calling Christians to advocate both social justice and “values-based policy.”

Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, said evangelicals care about racial justice, but it’s a “false dichotomy” to suggest Christians “are going to try to fight for social justice instead of the rights of the unborn.” He predicted Trump’s evangelical support will increase in the 2020 election, based in part ...

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Go and Make Disciples. But First, Stop.

The crucial first step of ministry begins with the Holy Spirit.

Twelve years ago, I was an energetic campus minister leading outreach to college students at Fresno State. I longed to see their lives transformed by Jesus the way that he’d transformed mine. But in my eagerness, I pushed one particular student to explore her faith in connection with her ethnic identity as a Mexican American. When she said she wasn’t interested in growing in that area, I misinterpreted it as a lack of teachability rather than as a “not now” from the Holy Spirit. Eventually, trust was broken and she left the fellowship to join another ministry. I was heartbroken. Where had I gone wrong?

Years later, I became the Latino student outreach coordinator for central California and Las Vegas. In that season, wise Latino mentors coached me to grow in listening to the Lord. They encouraged me to take time to pray with students and listen to the Lord’s yearning for their lives. This time, I began to approach ministry differently. I listened and waited on the Holy Spirit for strategy and vision. By the end of three years, we had reached over 100 Latino students in our ministry.

How often do we minister out of our own insights or impulses rather than relying on the Holy Spirit’s guidance, however long it takes to discern? Waiting is countercultural; it’s antithetical to the pace of our daily lives. The technological age we live in values efficiency and urgency. As a culture, we abhor waiting. Our world is not designed to help us stop and reflect on the presence of God at any given moment. Listening and waiting, thus, are disciplines we must exercise regularly—especially when it comes to partnering with the Holy Spirit.

I’ve learned—and I’m still learning—that ...

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Church Planting Series: How Can Your Church Get Involved in Church Planting?

While planning is key, there are a variety of imaginative ways to begin.

For the past few years, I’ve been working primarily outside of the church, mostly in research or academic roles. The last time I served as a full-time senior pastor was in Erie, PA.

In my last article, I wrote about the last time I served as a senior pastor. I was a volunteer senior pastor at a new church in Nashville, Tennessee. I wrote about how we wanted to be involved in church planting from the first service— taking up our first offering and announcing we were going to be a church planting church.

At another church plant early in my career in Erie, Pennsylvania, we had a commitment to plant our first church within three years. (I had been told that was the optimal time— later, I would try to be involved from year one.)

It was through these experiences where I learned important lessons about what it means to plant churches in healthy ways, which is crucial for the sake of the mother and child church.

Sending People Out

Anyway, we had grown our church in Nashville from 3 to 400 after three years, so we decided to be bold. We decided to start two churches on the same day. We figured, if we’re going to start one, we might as well start another. Right?

It was bold, but we believed it was what God had called us to do, but in the first few weeks of planting two daughter churches, we sent many members of our church to the new churches. Actually, about 15% of our church were sent out— around 50 people.

An entire worship team went out to one church plant— and we were glad they did!

But there were times we were uncertain. People at the mother church were nervous, questioning if we’d made a mistake. We reminded them that planting had been a good idea and that God would work in all three of the ...

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Another Look at the ‘Least Religious Generation’

American twentysomethings have their frustrations with the church, but they are far more faith-friendly than commonly supposed.

Narratives of decline surround American evangelicalism and American religion more broadly. Within these narratives, a special sort of skepticism is reserved for twentysomethings. Much has been said about their flight from the pews, the rise of the “nones,” and the lack of institutional commitment among millennials. While we’ve been wringing our hands about the millennial generation, we must acknowledge that Generation Z snuck up on us. They are increasingly filling the ranks of the twentysomething cohort.

As a Gen Xer, I remember a similar fretting for my generation of youth. We were the “latchkey kids”: A lack of supervision inevitably turned us into the sort of rebellious teens depicted in films like The Breakfast Club.

Given the relative novelty of emerging adulthood as a developmental stage, it’s easy to come down hard on twentysomethings. This new phase in the American experience, marked by delays in attaining traditional markers of adulthood (marriage, home ownership, full-time employment, and so on), provides fodder for sweeping critiques of twentysomethings, including their faith.

In The Twentysomething Soul: Understanding the Religious and Secular Lives of American Young Adults, sociologist Tim Clydesdale and religion scholar Kathleen Garces-Foley acknowledge the prevailing stereotypes: “Today’s twentysomethings,” they write, “have been labeled the ‘lost generation’—for their presumed inability to identify and lead fulfilling lives, ‘kidults’—for their alleged refusal to ‘grow up’ and accept adult responsibilities—and the ‘least religious generation’—for their purported disinterest in ...

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Armed Security at Churches Is Becoming a New Normal

Congregations adjust to shifting gun policies and the threat of active shooters.

Warren Mitchell, a veteran police officer and member of a prominent African American congregation in Dallas, has seen the lines blur between his work and church life over the past several years.

On Sundays, “you just can’t sit comfortably, especially from my seat, because I know I’m responsible for the security of the church,” said Mitchell, who leads a 75-member security team at the Friendship-West Baptist Church.

His congregation—like others across the country—has been forced to shift strategies and ramp up training in the wake of recent threats.

After a white supremacist killed nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, Mitchell’s 12,000-member megachurch expanded active shooter drills to other ministry teams beyond security, including hospitality teams and ushers. “Everybody needed to be a part of providing a safe environment,” Mitchell said.

Then the church’s pastor, Frederick D. Haynes III, reportedly appeared on a hit list alongside several progressive politicians who received pipe bombs in the mail last year, and the congregation was on alert once again.

Attacks on US churches by angry outsiders remain relatively rare. But they have been happening more frequently and more prominently.

An estimated 617 worshipers have been killed in violent incidents in the US since 1999, and the number of attacks at houses of worship has risen almost every year, according to data from the Faith-Based Security Network (FBSN).

This November will be the second anniversary of the deadliest church shooting in modern history: the ambush on tiny First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, that killed 26 people. Since then, ...

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