Nicky Gumbel’s Fitting Farewell to HTB Church: ‘The Best Is Yet to Come’

Retirement sermon and celebration of Holy Trinity Brompton vicar and Alpha Course pioneer reminds us that good and faithful servants still exist.

What does a lifetime of fruitful public ministry look like? Last Sunday, Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) tried to answer this question in a video montage marking the end of Nicky Gumbel’s 46 years of leadership at the London multisite church.

Images of people whose lives had been impacted by the senior pastor and author flashed across the screen as one incredible statistic after another scrolled past: 30 million people introduced to the Christian faith through the Alpha Course, across 140 countries and 170 languages; 2 million people fed spiritually by a Bible reading app; and 2 million meals delivered during the pandemic from HTB alone.

The July 24 video was a fitting homage to a nowadays unusual career, spanning almost five decades in the same congregation. It is rare in Anglican churches in the United Kingdom for a trainee leadership position to last more than the minimum requirement of three years, with many moving regularly to the next parish. But Nicky sat under the tutelage of HTB’s then senior leader, bishop Sandy Millar, for 19 years. He was 49 years old when he took over the church, and admitted to uncertainty about it all—feeling both too young and too old to do so.

Humility is carved into Nicky’s resume. He likes to remind people that he did not start the Alpha course he is most famously associated with. Before it was transformed into the world’s most widely-used and effective evangelistic tool, it already existed as a short course to help believers ground their faith. Nicky once admitted to me that he had been resistant to Alpha going online during the pandemic; however, when he saw how effective it was, he was excited, quoting a favorite line from G. K. Chesterton: “In order to ...

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Died: Carey Latimore IV, Historian who Held Up Black Christians’ Unshakable Faith

He saw African American history as a “window into the essence of the gospel.”

Carey Latimore IV, a Baptist minister and a historian who studied how Black people persevered by faith, died unexpectedly on Tuesday at the age of 46.

Latimore was a beloved professor at Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas, where he taught on the African American experience. Students were drawn to his enthusiasm and were frequently found in his office, discussing what they were learning in his classes and in the research projects he organized, like an oral history of race relations in San Antonio.

Latimore also actively found ways to bring his scholarship to the public. He appeared frequently on local TV, started a civil rights institute in downtown San Antonio before the pandemic, worked with the Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee, and wrote devotionals for Our Daily Bread.

In the last few years, he became an important resource for those seeking to understand the significance of Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery in America. Latimore was especially adept at explaining the religious significance and encouraging Christians and the church to embrace Juneteenth.

“I think Black people in their faith were kind of presenting a mirror and a window into the essence of the gospels that many people have forgotten or left behind,” he told Rasool Berry, pastor of The Bridge Church in Brooklyn, New York, on the Christianity Today podcast Where Ya From? “On Juneteenth, people start talking about what we can be, what we can do. What we have done. It’s an inspiring moment because we think of the possibilities.”

The people who worked with Latimore were shocked by the news of his death. They mourned both loss of a public scholar and a personal friend.

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Seattle Pacific University Sues Washington State Over LGBT Hiring Investigation

School claims attorney general is “interfering in the religious decisions of a Christian university.”

Seattle Pacific University, a private school associated with the Free Methodist Church, was the site of daily protests for more than a month earlier this summer as students challenged a school policy that prohibited the hiring of LGBT people. Dissenting students called the policy homophobic and discriminatory.

Now, the university says its rights are being violated by Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, whose office launched an investigation into the school’s hiring practices.

Seattle Pacific University is suing Ferguson, claiming his probe aims to influence the university “in its application and understanding of church teaching,” according to the claim filed Wednesday, July 27, in US District Court for the Western District of Washington. The university is represented by Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Becket Senior Counsel Lori Windham, in a statement, said Ferguson singled out the university “because of its Christian beliefs, demanding information about the school’s religious hiring practices and employees.” She said the university is asking a federal court to stop him from “interfering in the religious decisions of a Christian university seeking to remain true to its faith and mission.”

Ferguson’s office did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Students and others fighting against the hiring policy said in a statement that the lawsuit shows “the university is still painting a portrait of a school that is being persecuted by outside forces for practicing their faith.”

“We know this is not an issue of religious freedoms; rather it’s an issue of the people in power failing to uphold the university’s commitment to it’s ...

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Beyond Pope’s Apology, Indigenous Christians Carve Own Path to Healing

Recovering languages and contextualizing theology help Canada's First Nations communities reconcile faith and culture after residential schools made them "hate the name of Jesus."

Three weeks before Pope Francis visited Canada to apologize for the church’s involvement in indigenous residential schools, Christina Dawson’s church in Vancouver, British Columbia, burned down.

The fire was eerily reminiscent of the more than 50 churches that were defaced or destroyed across the country a year ago, weeks after the discoveries of the remains of residential school students began making international headlines.

This month’s fire started in a back alley on July 6, according to Dawson. By the next morning, the church’s two-story building was completely ravaged. Fire inspectors are still investigating the incident to determine whether the blaze was deliberately set.

Dawson is from the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations on the western end of Vancouver Island. She serves as lead pastor of Street Church, which is part of the Foursquare network of churches in Canada and was founded by an indigenous person. Its pastoral team are all alumni of First Nations Bible College.

The pope’s apology has galvanized Dawson’s desire to share Christ with other indigenous peoples. “I find it more urgent than ever to find a new building [for my church],” she said.

“What the priests and nuns at these residential schools did to us was evil,” Dawson said. “But the worst thing they did to us: They made us indigenous people hate the name of Jesus.”

A mixed reception

On Monday (July 24), Francis apologized for the Catholic church’s role in setting up Canada’s residential schools and perpetuating decades of abuse against First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children.

The pope’s weeklong trip ...

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Faithful Orthodoxy Requires Reading Widely

Evangelicals should humbly learn from all Christian tradition—yet many are ignorant or suspicious of pre-Protestant theology.

Recently, one of my students asked me how long I’ve been teaching theology. “Ten years,” I said. And as I walked back to my office and sat down at my desk, a question hovered in my head: What have I left my students with after a decade?

In my self-centeredness, I had assumed I was the one bestowing the gift of knowledge to my students. But in truth, one of the best things I have done is send my students into modern ministry’s stormy seas with time-tested wisdom from an experienced crew from church history.

The longer I teach, the more I resonate with C. S. Lewis’s admonition, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” And yet there remains notable deserts in the world of seminary education, particularly when it comes to incorporating large swaths of Christianity’s Great Tradition.

Years ago, as a PhD theology student at a Protestant seminary, I was handed a list of required reading. Out of 128 books, only three of them (!) were by premodern authors (written from the first century to the 15th century).

Even when I crossed into history with my degree, seminars skipped from the church fathers to the Reformers, only to progress into American history. And since half—yes, half—of church history lies in the Middle Ages, this gap in my education felt like a Grand Canyon. So, I petitioned the school to invent my own independent study of medieval theology and history.

Has anything changed today?

Christopher Cleveland chronicles how evangelical seminaries sought to replace liberal with conservative theologians, and in the process—due to either neglect or avoidance—“a generation of evangelical scholars arose who had no ...

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Died: Ron Sider, Evangelical Who Pushed for Social Action

Author of ‘Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger’ argued poverty was a moral issue.

Ronald J. Sider, organizer of the evangelical left and author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, died on Wednesday at 82. His son told followers that Sider had suffered from a sudden cardiac arrest.

For nearly 50 years, Sider called evangelicals to care about the poor and see poverty as a moral issue. He argued for an expanded understanding of sin to include social structures that perpetuate inequality and injustice, and urged Christians to see how their salvation should compel them to care for their neighbors.

“Salvation is a lot more than just a new right relationship with God through forgiveness of sins. It’s a new, transformed lifestyle that you can see visible in the body of believers,” he said. “Sin is a biblical category. Given a careful reading of the world and the Bible and our giving patterns, how can we come to any other conclusion than to say that we are flatly disobeying what the God of the Bible says about the way he wants his people to care for the poor?”

Sider was a key facilitator of the born-again left that emerged in the 1970s but lived to see American evangelicals largely turn away from concerns about war, racism, and inequality. He continued to speak out, however, and became, as a Christianity Today writer once described it, the “burr in the ethical saddle” of the white evangelical horse.

His landmark book inspired generations of young Christians, selling 400,000 copies in nine languages. CT ranked it as one of the most influential evangelical titles of the 20th century, right after J. I. Packer’s Knowing God and Kenneth Taylor’s TheLiving Bible.

Sider was born in Fort ...

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Could the Climate Crisis Make Religion Even Crazier?

Extreme weather changes can prompt people to seek out extreme solutions and saviors.

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

After several weeks of heat waves all over the world, I’m finding that the first thing I end up talking with anyone about, no matter where the person is from, is the weather. And then, almost every time, —the conversation turns to how “crazy” and angry everything seems right now—whether in the world, the nation, or the church.

What if those two conversations turn out to be strangely related? That’s the argument of a new book, Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval, which has prompted me to ask some different questions about what’s next for the church.

The book caught my attention because it was written by Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins, whose insights have proven themselves repeatedly. When the consensus seemed to be that the world was headed toward an inevitable secularization, Jenkins pointed to the data to show us what was happening with the surge of Christianity in the Global South.

When others downplayed secularization in an American context, Jenkins warned—and was proved right—about the emergence of the religiously unaffiliated, often called the “nones.” And now Jenkins asks us to pay attention to something else most of us have noticed: that a changing climate just might change religion.

In making his case, Jenkins points to world history regarding climate-driven crises. Some, of course, have referenced previous epochs of warming and cooling to suggest that our current climate situation is merely cyclical, not caused substantially by human activity. Jenkins does not hold this view but instead accepts ...

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The Gospel Is the Giver of Salvation, Not Just the Gift

Too often, our (mis)understanding of the Good News devalues a vital, life-shaping, world-changing relationship with God himself.

When I was a teenager, my church trained the youth on door-to-door evangelism. We would knock on a door and ask the person, “How confident are you that you are going to heaven when you die?” Most people were not 100 percent sure, and this opened an opportunity to share what Jesus had done for them. At the time, I would have summarized the main message of the Bible like this: You can avoid hell and go to heaven if you pray the sinner’s prayer, accept Jesus into your heart, and go to church. As far as I knew, that was the gospel.

Klyne Snodgrass, a theologian and New Testament scholar, probably had someone like me (or at least the 16-year-old me) in mind as he wrote You Need a Better Gospel: Reclaiming the Good News of Participation with Christ. Snodgrass’s basic argument is that too many Christians and churches—even pastors (who should know better)—have bought into a cheap and counterfeit gospel. The real message of salvation, he claims, is not about going to heaven or claiming a get-out-of-jail-free card but about knowing Christ himself, the Giver as well as the Gift.

Those who have studied Paul’s theology will quickly recognize that Snodgrass stakes his claim on a particular theory about Paul’s understanding of salvation. Some scholars favor a justification-by-faith emphasis, focusing on the language and imagery of imputation (the transfer of Christ’s righteousness to sinners) and the appeasement of God’s wrath. Others highlight the victory of Christ over evil or, in Pauline parlance, over “sin and death.”

Snodgrass, for his part, identifies with those who center the idea of participation in Christ. (It’s unclear why Snodgrass’s subtitle references ...

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Hot Takes Don’t Belong in Church

Crafting public political statements can detract from the church’s true call.

Is the church going to make a statement?”

“Are you going to speak out?”

“What does the church have to say about this?”

These are text messages I have received since 2016 following various political events. Some of them filled me with excitement (because I did have something to say), others filled me with dread (because I had nothing to say), and others filled me with confusion (because I wasn’t sure what was going on).

Fifteen years ago, when I started in pastoral ministry, I was expected to refrain from commenting on political issues. Now, my congregation expects that I comment on every political issue. If pastors don’t make a public statement in reaction to the news, we’re not doing our jobs.

The pastor and the church sit in a strange place. Pastors often function as mediators of the Word for the lives of their congregants. But this has been twisted. In a time of political obsession, pastors and churches are no longer “mediators” of a mystery but public relations representatives for the American church.

Many look to the church to provide and maintain a favorable public image of God or to take a hard stance in an increasingly polarized world. We likely chose our church because of shared values; so we want our pastors to tell us how we are feeling and to reflect our feelings back to us—to say what we cannot say. Many of our expectations come from a misunderstanding of what the church is and what the pastor’s role should be.

Public relations serve to maintain image and brand. Those in PR are interested in supplying a kind of language that satisfies a consumer—the public. Public relations firms spin messaging to convince someone of something that (most ...

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US Religious Liberty Firm Goes Global with 1,500 International Cases

The Christian legal advocates with Alliance Defending Freedom are now working in over a hundred countries.

Religious liberty won a victory this month in the United Kingdom.

Prosecutors there dropped charges against 76-year-old Rosa Lalor, who was arrested in 2021 for praying silently outside an abortion clinic. A police officer said Lalor, though socially distanced, masked, and outside, was protesting and didn’t have a “reasonable excuse” to be outdoors during COVID-19 restrictions. She was put in a police car and fined for violating public health measures.

But the British grandmother only had her penalty dismissed after a yearlong legal battle in which Lalor was represented by the religious freedom advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI).

“The right to express faith in a public space, including silent prayer, is a fundamental right protected in both domestic and international law,” said ADF UK legal counsel Jeremiah Igunnubole. “Whether under coronavirus regulations or any other law, it is the duty of police to uphold, rather than erode, the rights and freedoms of women like Rosa.”

Lalor’s case isn’t an isolated incident. Though Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has drawn more publicity for bringing religious liberty cases to the US Supreme Court , its international arm has won more than 1,500 cases in 104 countries since 2010.

Following its first decade of work in the US, ADF began receiving requests for help on international violations of religious liberty.

“We simply did not, at that time, have the network and the resources to deal with all these complaints because we were very US-focused in our advocacy,” said Lorcan Price, European legal counsel for ADFI. “There was a sense that something had to be done about that. Particularly the whole ...

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Jesus Frees Men and Women to Ask ‘How Can I Serve?,’ Not ‘Who’s in Charge?’

Our view of gender roles and relations should begin with Christ’s pattern of humility.

Jesus’ own disciples frequently missed what he was doing. James and John wanted preeminent posts in his kingdom, advocating for places of power, prestige, and authority. Jesus responded by essentially telling them they were missing the point. His kingdom didn’t operate like the kingdoms of the nations.

For Elyse Fitzpatrick and Eric Schumacher, the intra-evangelical debates around gender and gender roles in the last few decades seem to repeat the mistaken focus of James and John, concentrating on questions of who gets to be in charge and missing the humble and lowly pattern of power exercised by Jesus. In Jesus and Gender: Living as Sisters and Brothers in Christ, Fitzpatrick and Schumacher attempt to move beyond the decades-old framework of complementarian versus egalitarian when it comes to matters of gender and gender roles in marriage, the church, and society.

Avoiding most of the standard terms that characterize much of this debate, they focus on a “Christic” paradigm, arguing that the gospel and the shape of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension show that true power manifests itself in service and that true authority validates itself through self-giving humility. The good news of Jesus shapes everything, including how women and men relate to each other.

Joint authority

In the first three chapters, the authors provide the theological foundations for their approach. Jesus should be at the center of our theory and practice of gender and gender roles, and if we fail to catch the way he reframes power and authority, we’re likely to import a worldly definition of those matters into our lives. Forgetting the centrality of Jesus, they point out, has devastating impacts on marriages ...

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With Gen Z, Women Are No Longer More Religious than Men

Younger generations see female nones on the rise.

For decades, we’ve thought of women as more religious than men.

Survey results, conventional wisdom, and anecdotal glimpses across our own congregations have shown us how women care more about their faith, though researchers haven’t been able to fully untangle the underlying causes for the gender gap across religious traditions and across the globe.

Now, recent data shows the long-held trend may finally be flipping: In the United States, young women are less likely to identify with religion than young men.

The findings could have a profound impact on the future of the American church.

As recently as last year, the religion gender gap has persisted among older Americans. Survey data from October 2021 found that among those born in 1950, about a quarter of men identified as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, compared to just 20 percent of women of the same age. That same five-point gap is evident among those born in 1960 and 1970 as well.

For millennials and Generation Z, it’s a different story. Among those born in 1980, the gap begins to narrow to about two percentage points. By 1990, the gap disappears, and with those born in 2000 or later, women are clearly more likely to be nones than men.

Among 18- to 25-year-olds, 49 percent of women are nones, compared to just 46 percent of men.

There’s also a gender gap in church attendance. This pattern has been so stark that Pew Research Center found in 2016 that Christian women around the world are on average 7 percentage points more likely than men to attend services; there are no countries where men are significantly more likely than to be religiously affiliated than women.

In the US, older men are more likely to say they never attend church services ...

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Did the Best Chess Player in the World Just Give Up?

Magnus Carlsen challenges our understanding of both human greatness and limitation.

Magnus Carlsen, the reigning world chess champion for 11 years, announced last week that he would not defend his champion title next year. That shocked the chess world, even though Carlsen (who is usually referred to simply as Magnus) has been saying for a while that he wouldn’t defend the title unless an up-and-comer like 19-year-old Alireza Firouzja was challenging him.

Fans talk about Magnus as the “greatest of all time,” and some reacting to his news said he couldn’t achieve that status without surpassing Garry Kasparov’s record of six championship titles. (Magnus has five, though the measure of these titles in history has varied a little.)

Magnus decided he doesn’t care, at least at this moment in time. He explained that he enjoys playing tournaments, but not the championship. He has always made it a point to say how important enjoyment of chess is to him. And it is enjoyable to watch Magnus enjoy chess.

“I am not motivated to play another match. I simply feel that I don’t have a lot to gain. I don’t particularly like it, and although I’m sure a match would be interesting for historical reasons and all of that, I don’t have any inclination to play,” he said in announcing his decision.

Some said that showed he was bored or giving up. Some speculated that Magnus would lose his competitive edge without the championship; others, that he was shirking his duties to the game.

“Walking away from what everyone expects, or demands, you do takes courage,” said chess great Kasparov on Twitter about Magnus’s decision.

Peter Heine Nielsen, Magnus’s longtime coach, said on The Chicken Chess Club podcast that Magnus wants “to do different ...

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Nigerian Christians Protest Muslim-Muslim Ticket as a ‘Declaration of War’

Major political parties try to maximize northern Muslim vote in order to rule Africa’s most-populous nation. Will third-party presidential candidate reap the benefit of Christian frustration?

The field is set for Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election, leaving its Christian citizens in a quandary.

In selecting candidates to replace the current head of state, Muhammadu Buhari, one dominant political party ignored customary protocols ensuring geographic rotation of power while the other party—in the face of severe warnings—abandoned the customary commitment to religious representation.

Believers may desert them both.

Africa’s most populous nation is roughly divided between a majority Muslim north and a majority Christian south. An unwritten agreement has rotated the presidency between the two regions. Buhari, a Muslim, hails from Borno state in the northeast.

The first transgression, by geography, was the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which in May nominated Atiku Abubakar from Adamawa state, also in Nigeria’s northeast. A Muslim, he chose as his vice-presidential running mate Ifeanyi Okowa, the Christian governor of Delta state in the south.

One month later, the incumbent All Progressives Congress (APC) nominated Bola Tinubu, the Muslim former governor of Lagos state in the south. But since he hailed from a Christian region, fears were raised that his Muslim rival for president might sweep the north—viewed by many as a more reliable voting bloc. Speculation was rampant he would choose a Muslim vice-presidential candidate to compensate.

“We will consider such action as a declaration of war,” warned the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), an umbrella body representing the nation’s evangelicals, Catholics, and charismatics. “[We] will mobilize politically against any political party that sows the seed of religious conflict.”

CAN spoke ...

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Why Taiwan Loves This Canadian Missionary Dentist

George Leslie Mackay arrived in Taiwan 150 years ago and is still beloved there today.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay’s arrival in Taiwan. Perhaps the country’s most beloved 19th-century Westerner, Mackay has been celebrated by Taiwan through children’s books, stamps, statues, paintings, a manga, a puppet production, and an opera. Churches have reenacted his arrival, and several books are being published about the pioneer missionary. (The Taiwan government even has a bio of him on their website.) So what made this foreigner worthy of this level of affection more than 100 years after his death?

In 1872, the Canadian Presbyterian missionary arrived in northern Taiwan (then called Formosa). Over the next 29 years, Mackay planted more than 60 churches throughout northern Taiwan and baptized more than 3,000 people. He started Oxford College, a school he named for his home county, which today has become Aletheia University and Taiwan Graduate School of Theology. Mackay Memorial Hospital, named in his honor, is now a large downtown hospital in Taipei with two branch hospitals.

Beyond these accomplishments, Mackay’s legacy cemented itself through his insistence on identifying with Taiwan and the Taiwanese. Mackay spent more than half of the 57 years of his life on the island. Upon his arrival in Taiwan, he realized how important learning to speak fluent Taiwanese would be for his mission and immediately began learning the language from the local boys herding water buffalo. Unlike most Western missionaries, he married a local woman, Tiuⁿ Chhang-miâ (often known as “Minnie Mackay”), and they had three children. Embracing Taiwan as his adopted homeland, he touched the hearts of many Taiwanese and contributed to the conversion of ...

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At 100, Hymn Society Considers How Worship Evolves

Gathering for the first time since the pandemic, the interdenominational group discussed the importance of global churches finding their own rhythms.

Rahel Daulay, a Methodist who had traveled from Indonesia, was explaining the proper way to dance while singing a hymn she had brought from Southeast Asia—bending knees slightly “to humble yourself” and turning toward one’s neighbors, palms together at the chest. Then turn forward, lift up the arms and hold the hands upward.

For the 300-some members of the Hymn Society in the US and Canada, who hadn’t met in person for three years, it was a liberation.

“Let us come and worship our creator,” they sang as they swayed and danced at Catholic University’s Edward J. Pryzbyla University Center last week. The organization comprises representatives from more than 50 denominations who speak as many as six languages. Some had traveled as many as 8,000 miles to attend.

Since COVID-19 hit, many of the academics and music practitioners in attendance have not been able to sing out even in their home churches, as congregational singing has been stifled in many houses of worship for fear of spreading the virus.

Though masking was enforced, the pandemic had lifted just enough this year for organizers to go ahead with the 2022 in-person meeting, celebrating the society’s 100th year of existence.

“For the past three years, it’s been so nice to see all of your faces on screen and be together in that way, but there is nothing like seeing your faces out here and being together to sing,” said Executive Director J. Michael McMahon in greeting last Monday.

With the theme “Sing the World God Imagines,” the gathering demonstrated the powerful influence hymns have, not only on faith communities but also on politics and society at large across the globe, as lecture sessions ...

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Here I Am to Sound Check

Church tech teams kept worship plugged-in and streaming during the pandemic. But when does the job become too much for volunteers?

The pivot to online services in 2020 put the pressure on church tech and production teams.

“COVID-19 really grabbed churches by the ankles and shook all the change out of their pockets,” said Van Metschke, a ministry and church production veteran who now works for an audiovisual tech design firm in California.

The shift to streaming forced churches to make difficult choices over whether to allocate resources to improve the production level for online worshipers. Even if churches could afford new audiovisual equipment, they had to find people to run it.

“Money isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem,” said Metschke. “Good gear doesn’t fix organizational problems.”

Metschke, cohost of the Green Room Church Tech podcast, has seen a growing number of young people in church technology and production leave their roles over the past two years. Paid tech staff are overwhelmed by the demands of managing volunteers. Volunteers are overutilized, undertrained, and afraid to make a mistake that could derail a carefully orchestrated service.

As in other areas of ministry, tech volunteers want to offer their abilities and interests to serve their congregation. But some churches struggle to delegate duties to volunteers without taking advantage of their enthusiasm. They end up asking them to do what a paid professional should, like troubleshooting when something goes wrong with a computer or camera or wireless microphone, navigating streaming on multiple platforms, or editing video and creating graphics to produce a high-quality recorded service.

Prior to 2020, it was already difficult to recruit, train, and retain enough production and tech volunteers to make services run smoothly. Some tasks ...

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Single, Evangelical Women Are Counting the Cost of Staying in Church

A sociologist explores some of the factors driving them away, but her “accrued resentments” get in the way of a fair picture.

Evangelical women have long attended church at higher rates than evangelical men. But today that gap is narrowing, not because more men are coming but because more women are leaving. Such women are increasingly likely to “deconstruct” their faith or identify as “nones”—a rising population of the religiously disaffiliated.

Many grew up in strict or more fundamentalist traditions, where hard questions were discouraged, women were undervalued, and denominational subcultures shaped their resentments in young adulthood. Speaking with a variety of spiritual coaches focused on deconstruction earlier this year, I learned that clients are often ex-Mormons or women hailing from harsh, patriarchal churches where their voices were silenced.

Katie Gaddini is a pastor’s kid who departed evangelicalism years ago, but the fingerprints of her past remain. She began to untangle the reasons behind her own discomfort in the church and the resentment she saw from others while doing research for her new book, The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church.

A kinship and a disconnect

Gaddini is a sociologist at the Social Research Institute, which is part of University College London. To prepare for writing her book, she embedded herself within a close-knit community of single, evangelical women for over four years, marinating in the culture she once knew so well. As a single woman herself, her study centers on what she describes as “irreconcilable” differences between faith and feminism, religious patriarchy, and inequality for women within the church.

These factors and more drive the book’s mission to uncover why so many single, evangelical women are leaving. While the ...

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Oh ‘Baby Baby’: CCM Icon Amy Grant Named a Kennedy Center Honoree

She will become the first contemporary Christian artist to receive the annual award, given to recognize her place as the “Queen of Christian pop.”

Contemporary Christian musician Amy Grant has been named one of the Kennedy Center’s five honorees for 2022.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine ever receiving this prestigious Kennedy Center Honors,” Grant said in a statement. “I cannot wait to celebrate with my fellow honorees, friends, and family. Thank you for widening the circle to include all of us.”

The center plans to fete Grant in its 45th class of honorees that also includes actor George Clooney, singer Gladys Knight, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León, and the rock band U2.

Kennedy Center Chairman David M. Rubenstein lauded Grant, saying in a statement that she “became the first artist to bring contemporary Christian music to the forefront of American culture, then equally thrived after crossing over into mainstream pop with hit after hit, and today is revered as the ‘Queen of Christian Pop.’”

Over more than four decades, Grant has had album sales exceeding 30 million and more than a billion global streams, earning three multiplatinum albums, six platinum albums and four gold albums. She was the first contemporary Christian musician to have a No. 1 hit on the pop charts with “Next Time I Fall,” a 1986 duet with Peter Cetera of the band Chicago, and the first to perform at the Grammy Awards, eventually becoming a six-time Grammy winner.

“Baby, Baby,” a hit from her 1991 platinum album “Heart in Motion,” helped spread her fame. As she marked its 30th anniversary last year, she told Religion News Service it was both an overwhelming and joyful experience.

“It’s like the jumping through the ring of fire,” Grant recalled in the RNS interview. “Pretty ...

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Interview: Let’s Talk About Race like Believers, Not Babel-ers

In Christ, we can handle even the toughest conversations without speaking past one another.

About as often as people call for engaging in long-needed, long-avoided conversations on racial injustice, they lament the shape of the conversations actually taking place. The loudest, most unforgiving voices fill the arena, while others stay on the sidelines, either because they fear saying the wrong thing or because the whole problem seems too uncomfortable or intractable.

It doesn’t have to be this way, says Isaac Adams, especially among those calling themselves brothers and sisters in Christ. In Talking About Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations, Adams, a pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, offers biblical and pastoral guidance on speaking (and hearing) racial truth in love. Timothy Muehlhoff, a communication professor at Biola University and codirector of Biola’s Winsome Conviction Project, spoke with Adams about the keys to Christ-exalting conversations on race.

In explaining your motivation to write the book, you state, “Originally, I set out to write a different book on giving biblical and practical guidance on where Christians could begin to combat racism.” What changed?

As I was preparing the book proposal, I didn’t know that the news of Ahmaud Arbery was going to break. It made me think, How will we talk about his murder? If we understood the smaller problem of dysfunctional communication across racial lines, we would understand the much bigger problem, the racial strife that has so long divided our churches, our communities, and our nation. The book is, in some sense, a theology of speech applied to the topic of race.

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Fantasy Role-Playing Is Hurting America

How the cult of imagined heroism is bringing down our nation’s institutions.

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

As a kid in the 1980s, I heard dire warnings from my evangelical elders about the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. It was, we were told, a foothold of the occult.

Although I never played D&D, I didn’t take these admonitions all that seriously, because I reasoned that the same logic could be applied to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

Now, in the 2020s, I am wondering if my evangelical elders weren’t partly right about the way fantasy role-playing can paganize a culture—just not in the way they expected.

In this month’s Atlantic, Jennifer Senior explores a similar thought in relation to nationalist political strategist/right-wing media personality Steve Bannon, who is currently indicted on charges of contempt of Congress regarding his alleged role in the January 6 insurrection.

Putting aside what I think about Bannon himself, I was struck by one section of the article that explains much of what’s happening in America right now.

Senior points to a 2018 documentary in which Bannon explains to a filmmaker how, when working in the internet gaming industry, he was surprised to learn just how many people are devoted to playing multiplayer online games. Bannon interprets this intensity through the grid of a hypothetical man, Dave from accounts payable, in the days after his death.

“Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers. And that’s Dave,” Bannon says. He contrasts this boring, real-life Dave from accounts payable with Dave’s online gaming ...

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At Religious Schools, Gen Z Students Are Breaking Mental Health Stigmas

Survey finds they seek counseling and support at higher rates than in secular schools.

The high levels of involvement by teachers and professors at Christian schools have correlated with more referrals for mental health care during the pandemic.

Students at faith-based schools may be more willing to seek support because they are encouraged to do so by teachers or professors, said Stephen Brand, a licensed professional counselor in private practice and outpatient therapist at Renew Counseling Center at Southern Nazarene University (SNU) in Oklahoma.

Brand said the smaller student-to-professor ratio at schools like SNU means students develop more personal relationships with professors and often open up about difficulties in their lives. Scott Secor, who codirects the SNU center, said many of the students they treat are referred by residence life staff, professors, and coaches.

During the last school year, up to 30 percent of Gen Z students received mental health support from their schools, according to a new study from Springtide Research Institute. At religious schools, they sought out that support and said they felt cared for by the adults who worked there at higher rates.

Between fall 2021 and spring 2022, Springtide surveyed 3,139 students aged 13–25, including 313 students at religious (primarily Christian) secondary schools and colleges. The survey has a margin of error of 3 percent and 5 percent for the religious schools subgroup.

According to the Springtide research, 59 percent students at religious schools reported that they had talked with a mental health counselor for help, compared with 46 percent at nonreligious schools, according to Springtide.

Teens and young adults at religious schools were also more likely to see their schools as places where adults care about them; three quarters said adults ...

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Why We Shouldn’t Practice Liturgy ‘A La Carte’

Stripping historical traditions from their theological context is trendy but problematic.

If you told an evangelical pastor in 2005 that the Book of Common Prayer might soon be trendier than church-lobby coffee shops, he would almost certainly have laughed.

It was not so long ago that countless evangelical churches abandoned the use of prayer books and traded their hymnals for high-resolution projectors. The use of the historical church calendar to order services became a rarity as most churches began to develop thematic sermon series or preach through the Bible one book at a time.

Liturgical prayer and call-and-response confession fell by the wayside, and even the names of churches changed in ways that distanced congregations from their denominational roots—as many a Hometown Baptist Church became a Wellspring Christian Community.

In short, the rhythms, readings, patterns, and prayers of historical liturgies fell decidedly out of style.

Over the past several years, however, a new trend has begun to emerge. Anyone who spends time among Christians in their 20s or early 30s has likely noticed a major uptick in the use of the word liturgy, which has become commonplace in both corporate worship and private spiritual practice.

Even some nondenominational churches who sought to distance themselves from formal traditions a decade or so ago have begun consistently ending services with the Doxology or adopting the use of simple, longstanding call-and-response formulas like “This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.”

Many young Christians are encountering spiritual vitality and constancy where they would have least expected it, and there is much to celebrate in this retrieval of the beautiful prayers and practices of our forefathers in the faith.

This trend, however, is not without ...

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Pastors Still Need Seminary Degrees

Despite recent trends, formal theological training still plays an important role in the evangelical church.

Gordon-Conwell is selling its main campus—where I live and go to school—after their enrollment has steadily declined by over 50 percent in the last 10 years.

As over a third of Americans continue to identify as evangelical, the decline of their seminaries is somewhat of a riddle. One explanation is the way some evangelicals think of seminary: as an obstacle—and increasingly, an unnecessary one.

I was invited to sit in on a local church plant’s Monday morning meeting in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of undergrad. The morale was strong, as they had just hit an all-time high with their Sunday morning attendance. Looking through visitor cards, they remarked in astonishment that, just one year in, this had been their “most successful Sunday yet.”

As a young, aspiring pastor, I was curious about how churches track and measure progress. So, I asked, “How do y’all know this is a good thing?” The pastor thought for a minute and then responded, “Well, healthy things grow. That’s our philosophy.”

If this guy’s right—that getting bigger is undoubtedly and invariably a sign of spiritual growth—then we may as well assume that Gordon-Conwell is headed for the grave. But if we seriously believe that the spiritual value of a thing cannot be determined in an Excel spreadsheet, then we need a new framework for thinking about what it means to grow and thrive. Rather, we need an old framework—the cross—where death becomes the site of life and defeat is the site of triumph.

Gordon-Conwell may be shrinking, both in enrollment and budget, but it’s still a place where living things grow, where souls become attentive and come ...

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Grave Excavation Begins at One of the Oldest Black Churches in the US

Founded by an enslaved minister in 1776, the historic Baptist site had been covered by a museum parking lot.

It’s different when you get down to the bone.

Jack Gray, director of archaeology at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, can get excited talking about the excavation of old post holes and brick foundations. He’s thrilled when his team finds bits of bottles, old coins, and the porcelain foot of a long-lost baby doll, giving them a glimpse of what life was like at a historic Baptist church where enslaved Black people lifted their voices to God.

But the buried remains of these faithful Christians—once covered over by a parking lot—reveal their full humanity.

“It doesn’t hit you until you see a bone you recognize: That’s a piece of a person. You are touching another human,” Gray told CT.

The Colonial Williamsburg archaeologist and his team started excavating the 40 or 41 graves at the church on Monday, slowly and carefully removing about a foot of soil from the first three sites. They believe it is one of the oldest Black congregations in America, founded at the time of the Declaration of Independence by an enslaved man named Gowan Pamphlet, who was a given special allowance for ordination by the woman who owned him.

The building that housed the congregation was demolished in the 1950s as part of the ongoing reconstruction and restoration of the former capital of colonial Virginia. No one in authority at the time appears to have thought the church was an important enough part of that history to preserve, continuing the generations-long practice of diminishing or even erasing Black people from the American story.

Connie Matthews Harshaw, a descendent of the Christians who worshiped there, started pushing and organizing for the recovery of the church in 2019. She convinced Cliff Fleet, ...

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Saving Local Media Outlets Is a Way to Love Your Neighbor

As Good News people, these Christians are fighting to revive community-centered journalism.

In 2015, as local newspapers were folding right and left, a community paper in Pflugerville, Texas, made the surprising announcement that it planned to construct a 36,000-square-foot facility with a new printing press.

At the time, Community Impact Newspaper, a hyperlocal monthly newspaper founded by John Garrett, had 20 editions covering communities in Austin, Houston, and Dallas. Printing and production costs for the papers, delivered free to each home in the community, totaled nearly $5 million a year, so he began scheming about owning his own printing presses.

Garrett flew to New York to look at a new Goss press, which would be a $10 million investment, not including constructing the facility, hiring workers, and purchasing the other equipment needed.

“It was the biggest, craziest thing I could imagine,” Garrett said. “I’m just praying, ‘God, I need you to show up in a way that only you can. … I need you to do your thing, because this is too big.’”

The day he flew home, he heard that the Austin-American Statesman would stop its press and outsource its printing. To Garrett, that confirmed God’s timing: The Statesman was one of the few operators in the Southwest that could print Garrett’s newspaper. It was a wakeup call that he couldn’t rely on other printing presses; his company needed its own. He signed the paperwork for the new press.

Then came a second sign: Garrett received a call from the Statesman asking to hire their press operators. The machines required specialized skills that few still possessed. The pressmen’s six-month severance pay ended exactly when Community Impact’s presses would be up and running.

“Everyone is running away ...

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Survey: Most Pastors Don’t See Deconstruction in the Pews

“It may be easier to find people in the midst of deconstructing their faith on social media than within churches.”

A Lifeway Research study of US Protestant pastors finds almost 3 in 4 are familiar with the concept of deconstruction, and more than a quarter of those say people in their churches have deconstructed their faith.

When asked how familiar they are with “the concept of an individual deconstructing their faith in which they systematically dissect and often reject Christian beliefs they grew up with,” 25 percent of pastors say they are very familiar, 21 percent say familiar and 27 percent say somewhat familiar. While 12 percent say they’re not that familiar with the concept, 14 percent say they haven’t heard the term before, and 1 percent aren’t sure.

“In recent years, many Americans have stopped associating themselves with Christian churches,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. “While surveys have shown that many who don’t attend or claim to belong to a church still maintain many Christian beliefs, for a noticeable minority, the journey away from the Christian church begins with a change in beliefs.”

Age and education are key indicators of how knowledgeable a pastor may be about the concept. Younger pastors, those 18–44, are the most likely to say they’re very familiar with deconstruction (36%), while pastors 65 and older are the least likely to possess that same level of familiarity (12%). Pastors with doctoral degrees are the education level most likely to be very familiar (43%), and those with no college degree are the least likely (8%). Pastors without a college degree are also the most likely to say they’ve never heard the term before (27%).

Additionally, African American pastors (24%) are more likely than white pastors ...

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Blame David, Not Bathsheba. The Prophet Nathan Did.

In the Book of Samuel, three key voices say he’s the guilty one, not her.

The story of David and Bathsheba has a lot of gaps. It's a brilliantly told narrative that requires us to draw conclusions based on what we already know. The downside to this sophisticated mode of storytelling is that readers will make unjustified assumptions to fill in the gaps.

As Sara Koenig notes in Bathsheba Survives, the history of this passage’s interpretation makes a fascinating case study of how each generation thinks about sexuality.

Today is no exception.

In the age of #metoo and #churchtoo, the conversation is trending again on Twitter. (As far as I can tell, #sbctoo sparked this latest round.) Once again, various personalities are arguing that David committed adultery, not rape, or vice versa.

Those arguing that David committed adultery often try to pin blame on Bathsheba for bathing in public, thereby seducing David, while those arguing that David raped her point to the uneven power dynamics between them.

But here’s the problem: We think of “adultery” as consensual by definition, while the Bible defines it as the responsibility of the male head of the household to keep his hands off his neighbor’s wife (Ex. 20:14).

That doesn’t mean a woman can’t sin sexually. However, the Ten Commandments are addressed to men by default. They were called to restrain their strength for the sake of community.

It’s hard to think of another Old Testament story that fits the bill more precisely. Bathsheba is literally David’s neighbor’s wife, which means she’s totally off limits to him.

She’s also off limits because of David’s warfare practices.

We learn in 1 Samuel 21:4–5 that he prohibited sexual relations during battles or ...

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Cupboards Not Quite Bare as Food Pantries Struggle Against Inflation

Record price increases put pressure on churches trying to meet rising need.

Grant Hasty sees the impact of inflation in the increasing requests for food at Crossroads Community Baptist Church in Stearns, Kentucky. And he feels it every time he fills up the truck the ministry uses.

“It’s about double what it was a year ago just for the fuel to pick up the food to give away,” the pastor told CT.

According to a July 13 report from the United States government, inflation has gone up more in the last year than any time since 1981. The cost of cereal has increased about 14 percent in the last 12 months, and fruits and vegetables are up more than 8 percent. The cost of butter and margarine increased by 26 percent.

Gasoline prices have increased more than they have at any time since 1980, going up nearly 60 percent from June 2021 to June 2022.

In Stearns, Kentucky, that means a lot more people are asking for help. The church has seen people from all age demographics hit hard, but particularly those on fixed income.

“Their fixed income hasn’t risen the way the cost of everything else has,” Hasty said.

Yet isn’t only individuals, struggling with inflation. Ministries have been hard hit too. Church food pantries and soup kitchens across the country are trying to meet the increasing need, while at the same time they are also forced to pay more and more for food, gas, electricity, and other operational expenses.

Northside Food Pantry, at a Presbyterian church in Indianapolis, told CT it was spending about $6,500 per month on food in the spring of 2021. The ministry spent another $1,000 on household and hygiene items to give away to people in need.

This spring, the ministry spent an average of $12,000 per month—a spike driven by both need and increased costs.

“We’ve ...

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Preach the Gospel Everywhere. When Necessary, Use Laundromats.

A different kind of “third place” ministry creates community and connections with washers and dryers.

Some come with track marks from years of drug abuse. Others come with children in tow. Some are struggling through a bad week. Others, a bad decade. All bring their dirty laundry.

They wash it and dry it for free at church-run laundry services throughout the United States.

“Christ said we should feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and I think those clothes should be clean,” said Catherine Ambos, a volunteer at one such ministry in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Of course, it’s not really about hygiene, but dignity.

“If someone is dirty, unkempt, you tend not to look at them. You don’t want to meet their eye,” Ambos said. “If you can’t afford to wash your clothes and you’re a budding teenager, it’s an embarrassment.”

Churches have been washing clothes across the US since at least 1997, when a minister at First United Methodist Church of Arlington, Texas, started doing a circuit around the city’s coin-operated laundries, passing out change. There may well have been others before this. Today, these ministries exist across the country, run by churches of all traditions and sizes.

They’re not as common or as well known as church-run coffee shops, which have been promoted as “third places,” locations separate from work and home where people create community. But a growing number of churches see laundry ministries as a better way to connect with their neighbors and witness to the gospel.

Some churches buy their own washers and dryers, renovate a space so it has enough electrical outlets, and open a church-run laundry. Others, like Christ Episcopal Church in New Brunswick, send out volunteers with quarters. Ambos started doing that four years ago.

They ...

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The Struggle for Sri Lanka’s Second Birth

Christians have served well as our society fell apart amid economic crisis. But we still have work to do.

Chaotic scenes unfolded before an incredulous world last weekend in an Indian Ocean island the size of West Virginia yet with a population ten times larger. Since July 9, global media outlets have been running lead stories on the dramatic social ferment in Sri Lanka.

A massive citizen mobilization pushed President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the most powerful Sri Lankan leader since the days of the country’s ancient kings, to unceremoniously leave by a back door to escape the wrath of hundreds of thousands of protesters that came calling at his presidential palace this past Saturday. He fled Wednesday out to deep sea aboard a naval vessel, next to the Maldives on board a military jet, then to Singapore on a commercial airline. From there he sent his belated resignation Thursday, which enabled some closure so that the nation could look to rebuild from here.

Lonely Planet listed this middle-income country and tropical tourist hotspot as the world’s best place to visit in 2019. Later that year, Rajapaksa became president by a landslide. He used his military background to great effect to coerce the masses haunted by memories still fresh of the horrific Easter attacks of April 2019. In less than three years, though, he succeeded in presiding over a catastrophic economic collapse that defies belief.

Experts call it a man-made humanitarian disaster caused by a deadly cocktail of ego, corruption, and reckless government policies in the face of the pandemic. By January, Sri Lanka ran out of foreign reserves and became incapable of sustaining essential imports or servicing its international debt obligations. By April, the Central Bank officially announced that the second-strongest Asian economy of 1948 was effectively bankrupt.

By ...

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Indian Christian Day Uses Martyrdom of Apostle Thomas to Unite the Diaspora

One in five Indian Americans is now Christian. But they remain divided by language, doctrine, and generation.

July 3 has long been observed as Saint Thomas Day, commemorating the death of the apostle considered by many to be the patron saint of India.

Now it is also celebrated as Indian Christian Day (Yeshu Bhakti Divas), an annual opportunity for Jesus followers of Asian Indian origin to preserve their distinctive identity and their global presence by uniting across their many languages, denominations, regions, customs, and creeds.

This month, ICD celebrations were carried out in cities across India, including New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru, as well as Indian diaspora locations around the world, including New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Dallas, San Francisco, London, Durban, and Singapore. This Saturday (July 16), Indian Christians in the Chicago region will gather for an evening of ethnic worship and prayer at Wheaton College, led by Indian worship leader Vijay Benedict from Mumbai.

Last year, the grassroots organizers chose the martyrdom of Thomas, one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, to celebrate the ancient heritage and rich legacy of Christianity in India because the ancient Syrian Christian community of India traces its origin to the apostle. And it’s not just Catholics that revere Thomas. So does my own reformed evangelical denomination, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church.

According to reliable traditions and well-known Christian historians, Thomas came to the Malabar Coast in Kerala in A.D. 52 and was martyred near Chennai in Tamil Nadu in A.D. 72. Thus, this month marks the 1,950th anniversary of his martyrdom in southern India.

Followers of Jesus Christ have lived in the Indian subcontinent for nearly 2,000 years. They have lived in peace and harmony with their diverse religious neighbors and have played a significant ...

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