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 J U N E 2019 VOLU ME 63, N U MBER 5

CONTENTS
7 Editor’s Note
Andy Olsen on a problem
VIEWS
with private property.

11 Reply All 23 Where We Stand

Readers respond to Ted Olsen encourages a
the April issue. joy-producing summer for
harvesting gospel fruit.

NEWS 26 Beginning of
Wisdom
Jen Wilkin teaches on the
importance of Tamar’s story
in today’s church.
15 Headlines
Religious freedom advocacy
in Muslim nations, and saving 28 Confessing God
languages through Bible Derek Rishmawy explores
translation. the courage and strength of
being meek like Jesus.

17 Go Figure
Does true forgiveness require
forgetting? REVIEWS
18 Gleanings
Hong Kong pastor convicted
for pro-democracy protests, 71 Books
evangelicals sign AI Samuel Perry’s Addicted
statement, Sudan churches to Lust reviewed by Mark

30 
cheer regime change. COVER STORY Regnerus
PETROLEUM PRODIGALS
Interview: J P. Moreland’s
How to recover from too much of a Finding Quiet interview by
good thing. Ken Baake Eric Johnson

Jen Pollack Michel’s

Surprised by Paradox

38 
reviewed by Kristen Deede
Johnson
HOLY RUMBLINGS
Meet the advocates, survivors, and leaders who
changed how Southern Baptists treat ministry abuse.
80 Testimony
Kate Shellnutt
Allen Langham was a

46 
professional rugby player
DO THE DEAD STILL RISE? turned addict and criminal.
In a world of fake news, real resurrections do Then he received a sign
from God.
happen. We should accept no substitutes.
Craig Keener

52 
TO SAVE THE ANIMALS,
SAVE THE POACHERS
A Christian approach to wildlife conservation starts
COVER PHOTO BY STUDIOBARCELONA / GETTY

with people. Eli J. Knapp

“To love the

poor as God
58 
THE EVERLASTING DESIRE
Why the greatest commandment is a wonderful
does, we impossibility. Mark Galli

must care
enough to
64 
FAITH THROUGH THE TIANANMEN GATE ONLINE
Check out the latest
Thirty years after the deadly massacre, two
know them.” dissidents reflect on hope for China.
news, essays,
analysis, and more at
p. 56 Interview by Jenny McGill ChristianityToday.com

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 PRINT AND ONLINE GLOBAL MEDIA MINISTRY

EDITOR IN CHIEF Mark Galli PUBLISHER Jacob Walsh

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 BECOME THE MAN GOD MADE YOU TO BE
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 J U N E 2019

EDITOR’S NOTE

M
y children have “safe” spaces where they hide toys they don’t want
their siblings to touch. This behavior comes naturally. They, like
most of us, believe instinctively that they’ll take better care of their
things than someone else will. This attitude is probably at the heart
of capitalism’s triumph over the past century as the world’s dominant economic
system. Its core tenet, the affirmation of private property rights, appeals to our
inborn view of the world.

Christians of all people know, however, that human instinct alone quickly reaches
its limits as a guiding principle for life, and the subject of ownership is a case in
point. For starters, there’s the Bible and its nettlesome insistence that nothing is
really ours because “everything under heaven” is in fact God’s (Job 41:11). I’ve never
met a good Christian who disagreed with this, at least in theory (even if our credit
card statements betray less-than-complete fealty to that theory).

Christians in the West tend to reconcile our contradictory beliefs in pri-

vate ownership and divine ownership by leaning hard into the principles
of personal stewardship. Yes, Genesis 2 commissions man in general to
care for God’s resources, but it especially commissions man individually WHAT’S
MINE IS
to care for the lot God has entrusted to him. So we’ve received ample for-
mation in, say, stewarding our personal finances. We know what we’re

NOT MINE
supposed to do with the harvest from our proverbial garden: tithe, give,
save, and wisely spend what’s left.

Where we lose our footing is communal stewardship. We’re much less

sure about the rules of the garden if not only I depend on it but every-
The difficult details of
one else does too. This, the classic “tragedy of the commons,” is difficult
stewarding God’s things.
enough to solve as it is. But what if we add a twist and say that, with every
ANDY OLSEN Managing Editor
piece of fruit picked, the garden dies some imperceptible amount?

Two stories in this month’s issue broach these and other challenges as part of a
larger exploration of Christian approaches to conservation. As our cover story (p.
30) argues, the church unquestionably has something significant to contribute to
debates over how we should steward oil and other fossil fuels, regardless of our
individual views on contentious topics such as climate change.

Certainly, the solutions can feel complex and elusive. But as a starting point, Chris-
tians can feel confident enough in God’s providence that we don’t have to panic.
As researcher Eli Knapp’s surprising insights into East African poachers suggest
(p. 52), environmental stewardship may require sacrifice, but it is not a zero-sum Follow
ANDY OLSEN
game. Joyfully, in the Creator’s genius, we find that what’s good for man and what’s on Twitter
good for the earth are often, in fact, the same thing. @AndyROlsen

SUPPORT THOUGHTFUL CHRISTIAN JOURNALISM: Give a tax-deductible gift online at ChristianityToday.com/donate or by check
(US dollars only) to: Christianity Today Fund, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188. Christianity Today is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

6_EditorsNote P7.indd 7 5/1/19 10:01 AM

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CT/LE_FP.indd 1 4/24/19 10:15 AM
 J U N E 2019

REPLY ALL
R E SPONSE S TO OU R A PR I L ISSU E

Go and Count Disciples p. 28

What an encouraging read on the church in Thailand growing. Been praying for
revival in Thailand for over 20 years. Thank you, Lord!
@EDDIEBYUN

This article would have warmed the heart of the late Donald A. McGavran, founder
of the School of World Mission and Institute of Church Growth at Fuller Theologi-
cal Seminary. He emphasized the keeping of accurate church statistics (“shepherds
count their sheep” was a mantra of his), and the setting of goals (“a church in every
village”) was one of his strong emphases. This article portrays how applying these
principles can lead to amazing church growth. I was moved by the fact that in the
past, church growth in Thailand was agonizingly slow, but now, through an indig-
enous church movement, it is amazingly rapid. The news from Cambodia was also
encouraging. May the Holy Spirit continue to raise up movements like these.
LEONARD TUGGY Naperville, IL

I grew up as a missionary kid in Japan somewhere along the way we under-

in the 1950s and early 1960s. I spent the
last 17 years prior to retirement working
with organizations in the area of organi-
zational effectiveness, quality, strategic
planning, processes, and identifying key
performance indicators. Your article
showed the importance of measuring
performance not only to know the cur-
rent status but, more importantly, to
show if there is improvement. The best
organizations have linked their perfor-
mance indicators to their strategic plan,
if they have one. Peter Drucker, called
the “inventor of modern management,”
stated, “What gets measured gets man-
aged.” Your article is a confirmation of
his statement.
JIM YOUNGQUIST Suntree (Melbourne), FL
Freedom Isn’t Just for
Christians p. 21
It’s immoral and sinful to think that reli-
gious freedom only pertains to Chris-
tians. We freely love Christ, because
COMMENTS? QUESTIONS? Our editors would love to hear from you at cteditor@christianitytoday.com
or Fax: 630.260.9401 Address Changes, Subscriptions: help@christianitytoday.com
stood that he loves us. We should give
everyone that same opportunity.
@IVANLANDJR
Is the Cross Enough? p. 46
This reminds me that we have to rely
on God’s strength to forgive and trust
that he alone knows what is best for
us despite our feelings. I’ve delayed or
withdrawn forgiveness because I never
feel like it, but God calls us to forgive
over and over as he did to us. He wants This is an excellent
us to forgive and so much so that it
becomes second nature.
well-articulated
LEAH KERR Buffalo, NY article, filled with the
truth of the gospel.
Theology of the Future I totally agree with
p. 50
I’m delighted to hear about the birth
Kelly Kapic on his
of the Logos Institute. My time in observations. This is
St Andrews from 1998–2001 when I
pursued a PhD in theology there was
a resource I will save
enriched considerably by the growing for future reference.
PAUL ENGLAND Glendora, CA
Is the Cross Enough? p. 46

11

6_ReplyAll P11.indd 11 5/1/19 10:03 AM

 interdisciplinary interactions between
theologians, biblical scholars, and phi-
losophers. I’m glad to hear that this tra-
jectory has increased, become solidified,
and is now being attached to the great
problems of our world.
TODD POKRIFKA Pasadena, CA
Lessons from
Evangelicalism’s
PR Guru p. 54
I enjoyed Mark DeMoss’s reflection on
his work in public relations for many
churches and Christian organizations.
As a long-time PR pro (including for
a Christian NGO) and PR educator, I
would add that PR and Christianity are
often misunderstood as image and what
one says when, in fact, both are about
relationship and what is in one’s heart.
TIM PENNING Spring Lake, MI
This article reminded me that the way
people view Christ is dependent on me,
not the church alone.
@TINRAVEN326
The Bionic Man and the
Body of Christ p. 63
This is a very insightful piece from @ahc
in the latest edition of @CTmagazine
on #transhumanism. Careful thinking
among Christians around how to react
to the ideas and innovations in this area
will be vital in years to come.
@CAREFORNI
Good thoughts per usual from @ahc on
two recent books on transhumanism
and how to think Christocentrically
about it.
@RACHAELSTARKE
I Got Smart and Took a
Chance on God p. 72
I’ve long admired the work of MIT scien-
tist @RosalindPicard. Strong religious
beliefs are less common in our top uni-
versities than in the general public. But
truly uncommon (in my experience) is
forthright discussion of such beliefs.
@NACHRISTAKIS
So grateful for this woman’s testimony
as a fellow MIT alumnus. It was at MIT
during the early ’70s that the gospel,
through Park Street Church, had a pow-
erful influence on my life. I was in a mas-
ter’s program studying aeronautics and
astronautics. After graduating, I helped
found the US Center for World Mission
and later went to serve in India as a
missionary.
BRUCE GRAHAM Pasadena, CA
I love the testimonies! It is one of the
first articles I read, and I often share the
stories in my preaching. Thanks for the
diversity and excellence of these stories.
KRIS VOS Lake Worth, FL

Could this be
the Burial Cloth of Jesus?
International Conference on the
Shroud of Turin, Aug. 14-17, 2019
Redeemer University College
Ancaster, Ontario, Canada, 905-648-2139 x4241
The Shroud of Turin contains full size front and back images,
without pigment, of a man that was crucified exactly as Jesus
was crucified. Ancient tradition claims it is the authentic burial
cloth of Jesus. To determine whether this could be true, more
research has been done on the Shroud than on any other
ancient artifact. This conference will include the latest research
on the Shroud. Presentation abstracts due by May 13.
custance.wpengine.com/conference/science-theology-and-the-turin-shroud
or shroudresearch.net, 509-375-4770, Photo©1978 Barrie M. Schwortz Collection, STERA, Inc.

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 NEWS
REPORTING FROM THE CHURCH WORLDWIDE

SHOULD
SPEAK PRAISE YOUR
IN THIS SECTION MINISTRY
TO POWER? BE A
Forgive and Forget? p. 17 ‘CHURCH’?
Christians in Muslim nations say it’s an
important part of persecution advocacy.
Gleanings p. 18
Why more ministries are telling the government
Bible Translations’ BY JAYSON
they’re CASPER
not like other nonprofits.
Saving Words p. 19 ILLUSTRATION BY CORNELIA LI

BY TIM TOWNSEND
ART BY JONATHAN BARTLETT

15

6_News P15.indd 15 5/1/19 10:09 AM

 N E W S HEADLINES | MIDDLE EAST
I
Imad Shehadeh’s phone would not stop
ringing. His American guest, part of a
delegation invited by the king of Jordan,
had called his royal host a bigot.
In November 2017, the president of
Jordan Evangelical Theological Semi-
nary had facilitated a sit-down between
local evangelicals and an American
delegation bound for a meeting with
King Abdullah. Headed by novelist Joel
Rosenberg, the US group included sev-
eral pro-Israel Christians close to Pres-
ident Donald Trump, as well as Mike
Evans, a self-proclaimed Christian Zion-
ist leader and founder of the Friends of
Zion Heritage Center in Israel.
The Jordanians were somewhat
wary. Though Jordan has a peace treaty
with Israel, both Muslims and tradi-
tional Christians oppose normalizing
relations until the Palestinian issue is
solved. Jordanian evangelicals, while
legally registered and in fair standing
with the government, have not been
admitted into the National Council of
Churches and are often regarded with
suspicion over American links.
Meanwhile, Rosenberg was also cul-
tivating a relationship—even friend-
ship—with King Abdullah, coming at
his direct invitation. The Americans
conveyed Jordanian evangelicals’ great
appreciation for Abdullah’s leadership
but also politely spoke of a few issues
facing the minority community.
One year later, the king was awarded
the $1.3 million Templeton Prize for
his pioneering efforts to denounce ter-
rorism while strengthening relations
between Muslims and Christians.
Evans responded with an op-ed in
the Jerusalem Post calling out Abdullah
16 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_News P15.indd 16
for hypocrisy. Intelligence agents were infil-
trating Bible studies and denying visa renewal
to evangelical Christian pastors, he wrote. And
a Jordanian Baptist was having his ministry
dismantled amid accusations of proselytizing.
Shehadeh responded quickly to support
Abdullah. Rosenberg was livid at the op-ed and
says he reached out to apologize to the king. But
Evans says he spent a year communicating with
the royal court behind the scenes only to watch
matters get worse.
“What do I want more? Access to King
Abdullah or to stand up for what is right?”
Evans said in an interview with CT. “In the
world of power, you can easily become blinded
and excuse things.”
Evans said this access was granted because
of the king’s hope to gain influence through the
delegation’s proximity to Trump. He did not
want the relationship to be one-sided while
watching Abdullah praised for his tolerance.
Shehadeh says Jordanian evangelicals, by
contrast, have had very limited access to the
king. Rosenberg’s delegation of American evan-
gelicals represented something new—contro-
versial, yet promising.
“I WANT THE REGION TO REFORM—BUT
FROM WITHIN, IN COLLABORATION WITH
LOCAL CHRISTIANS.” JOHNNIE MOORE
“Christians need to be more thankful for
the privileges they have,” Shehadeh said, “but
also be more patient to obtain rights they feel
they do not have.”
The ancient diplomatic questions over car-
rots and sticks, praise and criticism, are com-
mon to advocacy efforts in the Muslim world,
suggested Johnnie Moore of the US Commis-
sion on International Religious Freedom.
“In my experience, whenever things get
complicated, it is due to a misunderstanding,”
he said. “Everything in the Middle East has to
do with trust. It is of greater currency than oil.”
Humility is key, he said. Often Moore dis-
covers his private recommendations would
create additional problems. Working behind
the scenes over time produces the best out-
comes, he said.
Andy Thompson, a British evangelical Angli-
can, had regular contact with Emirati royalty in
Abu Dhabi while overseeing 45 congregations
JUNE 2019
of 10,000 worshipers represent-
ing 17 languages. He witnessed
the expansion of church build-
ing and religious freedom, cul-
minating in the visit of Pope
Francis and the declaration of
2019 as the Year of Tolerance.
Pleased with evangelical out-
reach to the region, he urges con-
cerned Christians to understand
that in an honor-shame culture,
the worst sin is to publicly point
out faults.
Does such a stance let Muslim
leaders get away with persecu-
tion? Some evangelical leaders
in the UAE suggest it does, not-
ing that the country still bars
everyone from “proselytizing”
and Emiratis from converting.
The tension over praising
limited gains is also a factor in
Uzbekistan, a Muslim-majority
secular nation whose citizens
have the right to convert but
which the United States has des-
ignated a Country of Particular
Concern (CPC) since 2006 over
religious freedom violations.
At the US State Depart-
ment’s inaugural Ministerial
for Advancing Religious Free-
dom in July 2018, Uzbek leaders
outlined how they were stream-
lining registration for religious
groups and reviewing a law that
restricted religion. Last Decem-
ber, the Central Asian nation
was removed from the CPC
list—only the second nation
to ever come off—and put on a
watch list instead. But it ranks
No. 17 on Open Doors’ list of
countries where it’s hardest to
be Christian.
Chris Seiple, president emer-
itus of the Institute for Global
5/2/19 9:12 AM
 GO FIGURE

Engagement, has worked behind the

scenes for 20 years to promote religious Forgetting What Lies Behind?
freedom in the nation he did his disser- The old adage for moving on tells us to “forgive and forget,” but does that line
tation on. He says activists should pub- up with the church’s understanding of forgiveness? Does showing mercy really
lish a list of nations showing the most require that we no longer remember the wrongdoing?
progress, not just the greatest offenders.
Relational diplomacy involves pub- Pastors are half as likely as their congregations to say that real forgiveness
lic praise for small, tangible steps to requires forgetting, and more likely than those in the pews to say it’s about
build trust while communicating prac- “restoring a relationship but not forgetting.” Either way, forgiveness can be
tical ways to improve in private, he said. difficult for us to extend—around a quarter of practicing Christians know some-
There is a secret to engaging authori- one they can’t or don’t want to forgive.
tarian contexts: create a rumor so that
reality follows.
When Uzbek president Shavkat Mir-
ziyoyev took office in 2016 following the IN THE CHURCH, SHOULD WE FORGIVE AND FORGET?
25-year dictatorship of Islam Karimov, Which of the following defines real forgiveness? Check all that apply.
Seiple reached out to his network of
Uzbek and American friends suggesting
that there was an opportunity to move
Uzbekistan off the list.
FORGETTING RESTORING THE REPAIRING NOT SEEKING TRYING TO TRYING TO
With no power but that of suggestion, WHAT WAS RELATIONSHIP FRIENDSHIP PUNISHMENT LESSEN OR LESSEN OR
he helped to connect dots and to steward DONE BUT NOT OR OR RELIEVE THE RELIEVE
a common vision that culminated in the FORGETTING RELATIONSHIP RETRIBUTION OFFENDER’S MY OWN
SUFFERING SUFFERING
Uzbeks being the only delegation from a
CPC country invited to the DC ministe- 40% 18% 24% 36% 70% 70% 59% 60% 43% 35% 32% 31%
rial. As each side encouraged the other,
reforms were put in motion.
How did Seiple know Uzbekistan
PASTORS

would follow through?

“In discerning deeper dynamics, you
can never know—especially in the early
PRACTICING CHRISTIANS

stages of engagement,” he said. “But in

contexts where everyone is lying, if you
keep your word it makes a huge differ-
ence. And then they will trust you when
putting forward your concerns and your
win-win plan for all parties.”
But sometimes public shame
achieves results, too. A decade earlier FORGIVE AS YOU’VE BEEN FORGIVEN
in Jordan, a similar article to Evans’s Percent of practicing Christians who identify with each experience.
reversed several visa denials to Chris-
tian workers. Gulf policies on migrant
workers have improved after years
of being hammered by human rights
complaints. And in Uzbekistan, officials
apologized for a raid on a Baptist church
as they asked how they could get off the
CPC list, and they admitted to overly
restricting religion in a Diplomat op-ed.
55% 38% 27% 23% 22% 15%
“Activism plays an important role, RECEIVED HAVE NOT KNOW KNOW STRUGGLE HAVE NOT
but we need relationship building behind UNCONDITIONAL RECEIVED SOMEONE THEY SOMEONE THEY TO RECEIVE OFFERED
the scenes,” Moore said. “I want the FORGIVENESS UNCONDITIONAL DON’T WANT TO CAN’T FORGIVE FORGIVENESS UNCONDITIONAL
FROM SOMEONE FORGIVENESS FORGIVE FOR SOMETHING FORGIVENESS
region to reform—but from within, in
collaboration with local Christians.”
SOURCE: BARNA GROUP
JAYSON CASPER is Middle East corre-
Practicing Christians are defined as those who self-identify as Christians, say their faith is very important,
spondent for Christianity Today. and have attended a worship service within the past month.

17

6_News P15.indd 17 5/1/19 10:10 AM

 N E W S GLEANINGS

SRI L ANKA STIFLED SERMONS

Easter bombings deadliest in
South Asia
The terrorist attacks that killed around 300
people in churches and hotels in Sri Lanka
on Easter morning have been considered
the worst to target South Asian Christians
and the deadliest in recent memory. Two
Catholic churches around the capital city
of Colombo and an evangelical congrega-
tion on the opposite side of the island in
Batticaloa suffered bloody blasts from sui-
cide bombers. The attackers are believed
to be from the radical Islamist group
National Thowheeth Jama’ath. Christians
make up less than 10 percent of the popu-
lation in the mostly Buddhist island nation,
which last year saw an uptick in religious
freedom violations.
BOLIVIA
Evangelicals secure religious
freedom protections
After several tumultuous years for evan-
gelicals in Bolivia, President Evo Morales
came through on promises to extend reli-
gious freedom for the country’s Protestant
minority. A new law offers their churches
and ministries equal rights as Catholic
groups. Morales, the Andean nation’s first
indigenous president, began consulting
with Protestant leaders about the legisla-
tion as far back as 2010, and the National
Association of Evangelicals of Bolivia cele-
brated that the law was finally approved in
April. Last year, evangelicals decried a gov-
ernment move to criminalize evangelism.
Sovereign Grace deems
outside investigation
‘impossible’
Sovereign Grace Churches (SGC)—previ-
ously Sovereign Grace Ministries—turned
down ongoing calls for an independent,
third-party investigation into the network’s
response to abuse allegations, citing prac-
tical and ecclesiological concerns.
HONG KONG
Baptist pastor convicted for
pro-democracy protests
Pastor Chu Yiu-ming was among nine
activists found guilty of “public nuisance”
for their role in the Occupy Central and
Umbrella Movement protests to rally for
voting rights in Hong Kong. Prior to sus-
pending his 16-month prison sentence,
While half of pastors worry about how their remarks on
moral and social issues will be received, pastors from non-mainline,
evangelical traditions are less likely to limit their message as a result.
Does the pressure to avoid offense cause you to hold back?
RARELY/NEVER
OCCASIONALLY/FREQUENTLY
62%
50% 50%
39%
ALL CHRISTIAN NON-MAINLINE
CLERGY PROTESTANTS
SOURCE: BARNA GROUP
the longtime pastor of Chai
Wan Baptist Church shared
his testimony with the court-
room in what he called the
most wide-reaching sermon
of his career. Chu, 75, argued
that human rights are “a God-
given gift, never to be arbi-
trarily taken away by any
political regime” and quoted
Matthew 5:10, “Blessed are the
persecuted.”
Evangelicals claim
their place in AI
debate
More than 65 church and min-
istry leaders signed on the
Evangelical Statement of Prin-
ciples on Artificial Intelligence,
the first major document to
consider AI’s ethical and moral
challenges for Christians.
Championed as “a pioneering
move” by faith and technology
experts, the statement lays out
driving beliefs—such as God
as Creator and humans’ role
as image-bearers—to inform
potential applications of bur-
geoning technology. The doc-
ument explicitly condemns
the use of artificial intelligen-
ceI for sexual pleasure as well
as “manipulative and coercive”
data collection.
68%
60%
40%
31%
MAINLINE CATHOLIC
PROTESTANTS
Pastor parking may cost
churches in taxes
Nonprofits—including churches—are not
exempt from a 21 percent tax on cer-
tain employee benefits under tax reforms
enacted last year. The Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) now treats employee parking
as a taxable income and requires churches
who spend over $1,000 on the portion of
their lot used for employee parking to file
a form 990-T to report it. Churches that
remove reserved parking signs by this
April, or that do not spend much on main-
tenance, will not be subject to the new pro-
vision. Evangelical leaders and lawmakers
have decried the unprecedented tax mea-
sure as a religious liberty concern and
financial hassle.
SUDAN
North African Christians cheer
regime changes
Sudan’s persecuted Christian population
was called the “heart of the revolution” to
oust Islamist president Omar al-Bashir in
April. In a revolution likened to 2010’s Arab
Spring, leaders from the northeast African
country’s Evangelical Presbyterian, Baptist,
and Church of Christ denominations joined
protests as civilian leaders condemned
the regime’s sectarian restrictions. Weeks
earlier, protests erupted in Algeria, where
Christians asked that the Lord would inter-
vene and bring peace as the military
removed 82-year-old President Abdelaziz
Bouteflika.

18 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M JUNE 2019

6_News P15.indd 18 5/6/19 8:24 AM

 N E W S HE ADLINES | MINISTRY
CHRISTIAN REFUGEES WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW STACKHOUSE CANADA’S INDIGENOUS HOW CHURCHES CAN INSIDE THE PARLIAMENT LEARNING TO

Keeping the Word

CALLING CANADA HOME BE PENTECOSTAL? THE ABOUT CHRISTIAN ON CHRISTIAN PRISON CHAPLAIN COMMUNICATE WHEN OF THE WORLD’S PRAY FROM
P.39 FT INTERVIEW P.30 CAMPS P.44 JARGON P.54 P.13 THINGS GO WRONG P.35 RELIGIONS P.44 KING DAVID P.37
MARCH / APRIL 2019 JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2019

THE GRACE OF
AGING
How Bible translation projects preserve CRISIS
The experience
of growing old

RESPONSE
is as unique
as we are.

endangered languages.
p.34
How your church can help when
disaster or tragedy strikes
in Canada p.28

www.FaithToday.ca www.FaithToday.ca
CANADA $5.95 CANADA $5.95

B
PM 40069336 PM 40069336

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HOW TO GROW: WHY CHURCH MISSION AGENCIES WILL WE STOPPING SEXUAL EFFECTIVE OUTREACH ISAIAH CALLS US HARRY POTTER
AN INTERVIEW WITH COOKBOOKS PACK REFLECT ON THEIR RUN OUT OF HARASSMENT IN REQUIRES YOUNG TO RELATIONSHIP PIANO MEDLEY
DARRYL DASH P.30 SUCH A PUNCH P.38 YEAR P.56 CLERGY? P.44 CHURCHES P.28 + P.38 LEADERS P.42 REPAIR P.45 P.48

NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2018 SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

ible translators have example of best practice in ensuring

made it a priority to give language survival.” KEEPING

people around the world Around a third of the 7,111 lan- THE
FAITH
the chance to study Scrip- guages spoken today are consid- New Canadian
WHEN PEOPLE
ture in their “heart language.” ered endangered, having dwindled
research reveals
strategies that can
WALK AWAY encourage youth to
keep the faith after

Even if Christians are able to to fewer than 1,000 speakers. Glo-

A call to meaningful engagement
with those who have turned away
high school p.33
from the faith p.34
www.FaithToday.ca www.FaithToday.ca
CANADA $5.95 CANADA $5.95

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are significant benefits to hearing speakers to use popular languages,

2018_FT_NOV_DEC_COVER.indd 1 2018-10-16 8:49 PM 2018_FT_SEPT_OCT_COVER.indd 1 2018-08-20 3:10 PM

the gospel in one’s mother tongue. It making them less likely to pass on
makes it easier to grasp theological their own “heart language” to a new
concepts and builds a deeper emo- generation.
tional connection to the message. “Language endangerment is the
But over the past several decades, flip side of language dominance,”
these heart language translations said Gary Simons, chief research
haven’t only changed how Christians officer at SIL, a Christian linguistics
from various cultural backgrounds organization that has come to domi-
IS CANADA MORE NEW RESEARCH SHOWS WHAT CALLING MEANS SEXUAL ETHICS
RELIGIOUS THAN THE WHY SOME CHURCHES AFTER RETIREMENT P.44 IN A CONFUSED
U.S.? P.21 FLOURISH P.41 CULTURE P.24
JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2018

approach their faith; they have also nate the field with its comprehensive
affected how believers view their catalog and research on the world’s
familial language. languages. “What we
need is a new
story. A fresh

“As they begin to read the Bible “Small language groups are no
beginning.”
Here is what
we are called
to do. And
here is how

in their own language, pray in their longer isolated and monolingual

we can do it.
p.28

own language, and worship in their but are embedded in a national and www.FaithToday.ca
CANADA $5.95

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I can do these things, maybe I could larger languages are dominant,” he

LORNA DUECK: WHY WE THE CHURCH THAT NEW STUDY: ARE OVERCOMING 500 YEARS ON: WHY FT INTERVIEW: HOW TO BE A HELPING KIDS
NEED CHRISTIAN VOICES PRAYED OUT REV. LIM CHRISTIAN CAMPUSES SMARTPHONE THE REFORMATION SHAILA VISSER AND THE FEARLESS CHURCH IN COPE WITH
IN THE MEDIA P.30 P.52 SAFER? P.36 DISTRACTION P.39 STILL MATTERS P.46 HEART OF ALPHA P.30 CANADA P.40 DIVORCE P.48
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2017 SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2017

do even more,’‚” said Andy Keener, said. “In order to participate in com-
executive vice president for global merce on the regional level or to
WELCOMING
partnerships at Wycliffe Bible take advantage of national services— THE MYSTERY OF THE
REFUGEES
INCARNATION

2
Translators. like education, health care, banking,
Waves of refugees
fleeing South Sudan’s
Why God becoming flesh is the paramount turmoil have landed
in camps across the
teaching of the Christian faith p.33 border in northern
Uganda. Faith Today

Across continents, Bible transla- even national church denomina-

went to see the
situation firsthand.
p.34

tion teams have watched how their tions—they have to learn and use a www.FaithToday.ca
CANADA $5.40
www.FaithToday.ca
CANADA $5.40

work—sometimes creating an alpha- dominant language.”

Children at the
Bidi Bidi refugee
settlement in
Northern Uganda.
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bet for the language or documenting
its written form for the first time—
can change the trajectory of the
tongue itself.
“Bible translation is transfor-
mative for a language, especially
during the life of the project itself,
when it engages some of the best
minds of the community in solv-
ing formidably difficult problems
in semantic mapping, orthography,
metaphor, and language standard-
ization,” linguist K. David Harrison
wrote in a foreword to a recent aca-
demic volume on the effects of Bible
translation on language. “But it also
extends in influence far beyond the
original project, and shines as an
With more than 2,600 languages FREE
in danger of dying out (often because
ISSUES
they are spoken only face-to-face or
just by the oldest generations), the
United Nations declared 2019 the
International Year of Indigenous
Languages, spurring dozens of new
initiatives. Simons and SIL point out
Read North.
that some projections about the rate Join in on Canada’s evangelical
of languages dying out have been conversation.
overblown; they find that about nine
languages fade from use each year— In a rapidly secularizing culture,
one every 40 days—though the rate Canada’s Christian magazine –
is quickening. and the stories we tell – are more
Summer camps immerse indig- important than ever.
enous youth in their native lan-
guages, and smartphone apps and www.FaithToday.ca/USA
YouTube video series train speakers
SPECIAL OFFER ENDS JULY 4, 2019:
New U.S. subscribers get two bonus issues.
19

6_News P15.indd 19 2019_FT_CT_onethird_May.indd 1 2019-04-03 4:40

5/1/19 10:13 AMPM
 N E W S HE ADLINES | MINISTRY
in endangered dialects. Meanwhile,
Enter discou
C FC
nt
T”
SEPT Bible translation projects in many
co de “T cultures have long contributed to the
at registra
tion 12-14 outlook for indigenous languages,
to save 10%
2019 either by preserving a language spo-
ken by a small group or reversing the
threat of decline.
“We find that when we start to
Gather
work on a language, people who were
starting to shift away from it may
actually come back and gain strength
Practice
because people have a better self-
image about speaking that lan-
guage,” Keener said.
Witness In a multilingual context, people
become trained to think of domi-
nant languages as more functional
a journey toward hope and professional and assume their
“THE TRANSLATION PROJECT WILL BREATHE
The Colossian Forum NEW LIFE INTO THIS THREATENED TONGUE.”
Annual Conference LINGUIST K. DAVID HARRISON
Featured Speakers
Dr. Ruth Haley Barton mother tongue can’t do as much.
Founding President/CEO, “Some will say, ‘My language can’t
Transforming Center
be written.’ When they find out that it
“
can, there’s a sense of pride,” Keener
Dr. Bungishabaku Katho
said, recalling how tribal leaders in
Professor of Biblical Studies,
Shalom University of Bunia, Panama beamed when they wrote
Democratic Republic of their tribe’s name in their language
Congo for the first time, special dots and all,
on the side of their medical building.
Dr. Robert Chao Romero He partnered with local translators
Professor of Chicano/Latino
to develop a written Telibe language
Studies, UCLA
for the first time. “Some people don’t
realize how rich their language is.”
Rev. Michael Gulker
For endangered tongues, Bible
President, The Colossian translations offer resources to
Forum document and preserve the lan-
guage—through written forms, oral
Join a growing community of Christians recordings, or both—but they often
who see conflict as an opportunity to do much more than that, Harrison
display the reconciling power of the wrote in Language Vitality Through
gospel in our polarized culture. Bible Translation.
Early Bird registration ends June 14. “A Bible translation will bring
For an additional 10% off, enter discount prestige and respect,” he said. “Pres-
code “TCFCT” at registration. tige is a key—yet intangible—variable
in language resilience and survival,
colossianforum.org/conference
and factors into young people’s
decisions to keep or abandon a lan-
guage. So the translation project will
breathe new life into this threatened
tongue, while also serving the . . .
20 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_News P15.indd 20
community’s spiritual needs.”
As Bible translation equips
more people to read in their heart
languages, schools have followed
suit by adopting a “first language
first” approach in public education.
Keener said that the Panama govern-
ment shifted to a bilingual approach
for tribal students several years
after Wycliffe’s translation project
there. (CT has reported on mission
groups’ role in popularizing “mother
tongue–based multilingual” educa-
tion in places like the Philippines.)
The late Aroga Bessong, a transla-
tion consultant for the United Bible
Societies in West Africa, echoed
the UN’s statement that linguistic
rights are human rights, defending
the place of mother-tongue educa-
tion and resources in Africa.
From the Hixkaryana and Pau-
marí in the Amazonian rainforests
of Brazil to Caucasian Albanian and
Old Georgian in Eastern Europe,
dozens of languages would likely
have no written documentation
today if not for Bible translation.
Taken together, this linguistic
diversity reminds many believers
of God’s love across cultures and
his promise to bring “every nation,
tribe, people, and language” before
his throne (Rev. 7:9).
“God has given us each of us, indi-
vidually and each culture and lan-
guage, different glimpses of him,”
said Keener, who flips between
English Scriptures and the Telibe
Bible translation available in You-
Version’s Bible app. “There are
truths that I uncovered myself while
working on a language project that
helped me better understand what
the Scriptures meant.”
KATE SHELLNUTT is senior news
editor for Christianity Today.
JUNE 2019
5/1/19 10:14 AM
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 VIEWS
O P I N I O N S A N D I S S U E S FAC I N G T H E C H U R C H

SEIZE THE
IN THIS SECTION SUMMER
Where We Stand by
A moment’s forethought,
Ted Olsen p. 24
prayer, and planning now
Beginning of Wisdom by can lead to much summer fruit.
Jen Wilkin p. 26
BY TED OLSEN
Confessing God by ILLUSTRATION BY CORNELIA LI
Derek Rishmawy p. 28

23

6_Views_Editorial P23.indd 23 5/1/19 10:16 AM

 V I E W S W H E R E W E S TA N D
S
Summer, wrote A.W. Tozer, is “the
period of full power when life multi-
plies, and it is hard to believe that it can
ever end.”
But summer’s lease truly hath all too
short a date. So here at the beginning of
the season, it’s worth asking: What do I
really want this summer to be like? How
can this season be one where I grow with
God and with my neighbor?
That’s an invitation, not an impo-
sition. Christian leaders who read CT
can imagine as well as we can the early
summer sermon they’re uninterested
in hearing: “Go to the ant, you slug-
gard; consider its ways and be wise!
. . . [I]t stores its provisions in sum-
mer and gathers its food at harvest.”
It’s a wise (and inspired!) proverb, but
the assumed application has always
sounded unpleasant: Work harder for
Jesus! Trade your summer rest for
ministry!
Sure, some of us may need the prov-
erb’s admonition to get up off our beds.
But many CT readers are already fairly
antlike in the summer: volunteering at
Vacation Bible Schools, arranging sum-
mer mission trips and service projects,
picking up the slack as fellow church vol-
unteers travel . . . And for many Chris-
tians, summer is not mostly a time of
recreation but of finding seasonal work
to supplement a meager income.
The question we want to ask this
June, then, is not: What more can you
add this summer? Rather, it’s this: What
are you looking forward to? What brings
you joy about this season? And how can
24 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Views_Editorial P23.indd 24
it be more of a blessing to you and to
others? What provisions come in sum-
mer that can be harvested for a lifetime?
Perhaps you love summer’s longer
days. Seize them! It’s much easier to
start or rekindle a habit of morning
prayer when awakened by songbirds
and early sunlight.
Or perhaps you’re a student who sees
summer as the joyous season of finally
sleeping in: This may be a time to reflect
on what intentional Sabbath days of rest
can mean for you or in finding special
unhurried times of reading Scripture
before you’re out of your pajamas.
Maybe you love the summer grilling
season. Pull your portable grill to the
front yard some Friday evening and
invite passing neighbors to enjoy some
free hotdogs or burgers. Or are you too
introverted for that kind of project?
Invite that one family you’ve wanted to
know better for an informal backyard
barbecue.
HOW CAN THIS SEASON BE ONE
WHERE I GROW WITH GOD AND
WITH MY NEIGHBOR? THAT’S AN
INVITATION, NOT AN IMPOSITION.
Again, this is not a to-do list. One
person’s gardening joy can be another
person’s yardwork burden; the idea here
is not to come up with additional chores
or to indulge in a self-improvement
campaign. Consider the ant not merely
in its labor but in its planning. Early
summer is full of wishes and ideas. Too
frequently we find ourselves ruefully
flipping the calendar to September with
a litany of missed opportunities.
One of the great joys of being part
of a global body of Christ is that wher-
ever we are, we have family members
meeting weekly in worship. So many of
JUNE 2019
us give a passing thought to attending a
church service while we’re on a family
road trip. So few of us—even those of
us who love planning trips!—actually
sit down to Google local congregation
service times as vigorously as we search
out motel rooms.
Meanwhile, we have family mem-
bers in our own congregations who are
lonely, sorrowing, or isolated. Don’t
spend the summer searching for the
saddest people to turn into seasonal
“projects.” Rather, you might simply
spend a few moments in prayer telling
God, “I’m looking forward to going to a
ball game this summer. Please show me
someone to invite along.” He’s surpris-
ingly good at answering that prayer. And
he’s looking to grow joy at that game, not
to dampen it (John 15:11).
True, inviting God into your sum-
mer joys is a risky endeavor. Summer
is a time of growing and of harvesting—
and growing in the Lord can bring its
own pains even as it brings greater joys.
But we needn’t go looking for greater
toil this summer; if it comes, God will
provide opportunity for joy in it. All we
need to do here in these early weeks of
warmer, brighter days is to pray, to pre-
pare, and to plan. We invite God into our
hikes, our picnics, our stargazing, our
kite flying, our hammock reading, our
seashell beachcombing, our zoo trips,
and our campfires as we ask him what
summer joys he has invited us into.
TED OLSEN is editorial director of
Christianity Today.
5/1/19 10:16 AM
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 V I E W S BEGINNING OF WISDOM | JEN WILKIN
No Desolate Women
The church needs to teach about Tamar and offer the women
among us a better advocate than King David.
F
or the past year, I’ve been teach-
ing the Book of Samuel to a group
of women at my church. We go
through it chapter by chapter, verse by
verse, and I challenge them to think crit-
ically about what they are reading. The
Book of Samuel is filled with stories that
ask us to grapple with the sovereignty of
God and the severity of sin. But perhaps
none is so jarring as the story of Tamar
and Amnon in 2 Samuel 13.
I’m sure you know it. Amnon, one of
David’s sons, violates his own sister and
then casts her aside. When her brother
Absalom learns what Amnon has done,
he tells her, “Has Amnon your brother
been with you? Be quiet for now, my
sister. He is your brother; do not take
this thing to heart.” Absalom’s shushing
and dismissing are certainly vile, but it
is David’s reaction that stuns: “When
King David heard all this, he was furi-
ous” (vv. 20–21).
Furious. That’s it. No public
denouncement of Amnon, no vindi-
cation of Tamar. No justice, no words
of comfort or kindness for his daugh-
ter, just impotent, mute anger. David
is silent. He takes no action against
Amnon, opening the door for Absalom
to have his brother murdered in revenge.
And Tamar is left desolate.
Why does David’s anger translate
into silence and inaction? Because
David sees in his sons an amplification
of his own grievous sins. David sacrificed
Bathsheba to his lust and then mur-
dered her husband to cover his tracks.
Now his two sons fulfill God’s prophecy
of judgment by committing heightened
versions of his own sins within their
own family.
David’s guilt renders him silent.
26 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Views_Wilkin P26.indd 26
Tamar’s plea to Amnon as he overpow-
ers her rings in the ears of the reader: As
for me, where could I carry my shame?
And David’s profound silence gives us
our answer: Nowhere.
The thing about teaching entire
books of the Bible line by line is that you
can’t skip over the uncomfortable parts.
People notice. So we pressed through
the passage, knowing it was bound to
be a tender subject for women among
us with similar experiences and offering
help to anyone who needed it. My heart
was crushed by how common Tamar’s
story turned out to be.
Her story is common. But telling her
story is not.
It occurred to me that in all my years
in the church, I had never heard a ser-
mon about Tamar. The other women
on my teaching team couldn’t recall
hearing it preached either. And no won-
der—it is hardly “proper” subject matter
for Sunday morning. Tamar makes only
the rarest of appearances in sermons
or teachings, and when she does, her
story tends to be subsumed, muffled, or
downplayed by our concerns to preserve
David’s reputation as “a man after God’s
own heart.”
DAVID’S INACTION
SHOULD SPUR US
TO ACT. DAVID’S
SPEECHLESSNESS
SHOULD PROMPT
US TO SPEAK.
JUNE 2019
There is a line we often hear
attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God
will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is
to speak. Not to act is to act.
That silence from our pulpits and
lecterns speaks to women who share
Tamar’s history: Your shame is mer-
ited. Your story is shocking and lewd.
It causes us discomfort, and we wish
to pass it by.
By teaching faithfully, forthrightly,
and compassionately about Tamar, we
communicate the opposite to women:
Your story deserves a hearing. Your grief
is our grief. Your shame is undeserved.
We will help you carry it to the cross.
Tamar was defiled and cast off by the
son of David, and none came to her aid.
The true Son of David was defiled and
cast off for us, that no daughter in the
family of God should ever carry shame
for abuse she has suffered.
David’s inaction should spur us to
act. David’s speechlessness should
prompt us to speak.
There should be no desolate women
in the church, only daughters of God
who are seen and cherished.
By speaking of Tamar, we are speak-
ing to the women in our churches whose
voices have grown silent beneath their
shame. We are inviting them to tell and
to heal.
When we tell Tamar’s story aloud,
we dignify her grief. And we begin to
become for our sisters the advocates
Tamar should have had.
JEN WILKIN is a wife, mom, and Bible
teacher with a passion to see women
become committed followers of Christ.
She is the author of None Like Him.
4/29/19 9:23 AM
 IF THE KJV IS YOUR BIBLE,
WE HAVE YOUR BIBLE STUDY.

Bible Studies for Life: Adults studies are based on the eight
disciplines commonly practiced by maturing disciples, which helps
ensure that participants get a balanced understanding of discipleship.
And starting in fall 2019, Bible Studies for Life will have three
resource options that use the KJV translation.

KJV ADULTS

SENIOR ADULTS
(KJV)

DAILY DISCIPLESHIP
GUIDE (KJV)

See free previews at BibleStudiesforLife.com/KJV

472153_BSFL KJV
CT/LE_FP.indd 1 Christianity Today ad.indd 1 4/17/19 2:30
4/23/19 9:33 PM
AM
 V I E W S C O N F E S S I N G G O D | D E R E K R I S H M AW Y
Meekness Is
Not Weakness
It seems like foolishness to us, but it was one of Jesus’ greatest strengths.
O
f all the Beatitudes, I’d guess
that “blessed are the meek for
they shall inherit the earth” is
the most misunderstood, mistrusted,
and neglected. I think the reason why is
because we don’t understand the virtue
of meekness and tend to think it indi-
cates weakness.
Certainly, meekness didn’t fit in with
the values of the Greco-Roman world of
the first century, where humility wasn’t
generally lauded as a virtue. Nietzsche,
a great admirer of the Greeks, thought
meekness was exactly the sort of false
virtue that the weak would applaud
because, well, it’s about the only virtue
they could actually pull off. Since the
weak can’t win by the standard rules,
they change the rules.
I think most of us are far more Nietzs-
chean than we’d like to admit. At least I
am. When I hear the word meek, it seems
too insipid, too accommodating, too
spineless to be a virtue.
Yet the Scriptures call us to meek-
ness. Besides the beatitude, Moses is
held out as a model for being the meek-
est man on earth (Num. 12:3), Jesus tells
us to come learn from him because he is
meek and humble of heart (Matt. 11:29),
and Paul encourages us to put on meek-
ness like clothing (Col. 3:12). This is not
something any Christian interested in
following Jesus can afford to ignore.
What, then, is meekness? Well, it
can’t be weakness or a lack of courage.
Jesus was no pushover—he flipped tables
in the temple, showed up in cities where
he faced outstanding warrants, and
coolly stared down governors and kings
threatening him with death.
According to medieval theolo-
gian Thomas Aquinas, meekness is a
28 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Views_Rishmawy P28.indd 28
gentleness that restrains us from anger
or from expressing our anger easily.
Reformer John Calvin calls it a “mild
and gentle disposition” that means
you’re not easily provoked by personal
injury or ready to take offense. It’s a
heart that doesn’t strain or strive to
exact the revenge or the payment it
could and is “prepared to endure any-
thing rather than do the like actions to
wicked men.” It is humility before God,
exercised toward our neighbors.
In that sense, true meekness shows
a strength and courage that is hard to
muster of ourselves—it makes no earthly
sense. Deep in our bones, most of us
agree with Omar Little, the stick-up man
in HBO’s The Wire: “The game is out
there, and it’s either play or get played.”
We live on edge, poised to strike back, tit
for tat, to defend our rights no matter
the cost. It’s an anxious, irritated, and
miserable existence.
By contrast, to strive for meekness
means a willingness to lose what you
could preserve—standing, power, a
good name, or the material goods (the
“earth”) in which our life consists.
Meekness depends upon a deep con-
tentment and hope in God.
TRUE MEEKNESS
SHOWS A STRENGTH
AND COURAGE THAT IS
HARD TO MUSTER OF
OURSELVES—IT MAKES
NO EARTHLY SENSE.
JUNE 2019
Only if we are content with God right
now are we willing to risk the loss of
goods in the present. And only if we trust
that God can deal righteously in the
future will we be able to wait patiently
for him in the present (Ps. 37:7). As
Augustine says, “Then wilt thou truly
possess the earth, when thou dost cleave
to Him who made heaven and earth.”
Meekness is an eschatological virtue.
And precisely for that reason, we
need to appreciate the Beatitudes as
what they are: supernatural blessings
pronounced upon us by a gracious God.
Meekness is not something we can
achieve in our own earthly strength. It is
something only Jesus can give—through
the cross and resurrection, his definitive
work of saving meekness.
In his suffering and death upon the
cross, Jesus was the strong one who, in
an exertion of heroic meekness, bore up
under the assault of the arrogant and the
proud and took on the sins of the slan-
derers and accusers in order to obey his
Father. And it is precisely in that meek-
ness that Jesus achieved our salvation.
On the other side of his death, he has
received the good inheritance of the res-
urrection. This resurrection is both the
vindication of his righteousness against
all the lies of his enemies, as well as the
firstfruits of the promised New Creation
(1 Cor. 15:20). Therefore, all who look to
him in faith and hope will inherit the
new heavens and new earth in their own
resurrection.
Only as we come to know this truth
can we gain the strength to walk in the
powerful meekness of Jesus.
DEREK RISHMAWY is a doctoral candi-
date at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
4/29/19 9:14 AM
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 COV E R STO RY

30

6_Baake P30.indd 30 5/2/19 9:18 AM

 HOW TO RECOV ER

F R O M TO O M UC H

O F A G O O D T HING .

PETROLEUM

PRODIGALS

BY KEN BAAKE

31

6_Baake P30.indd 31 5/1/19 9:24 AM

 BY AU G UST 2 7, 1 8 5 9, New England
B
railroad conductor Edwin L. Drake had
been spending borrowed money for
months, and it was running out. His
steam-powered drill had bored 69 feet
into the rock near Titusville, Pennsyl-
vania, at the rate of three feet a day, and
he had yet to strike oil. His employer,
America’s first petroleum exploration
company, had given up on him. When
Drake and his crew went home for the
night, they were already accustomed to
being the punchline of local jokes.
The next day, one of Drake’s men
spotted black liquid bubbling up in their
well, and they began pumping it by hand
into a washtub. What followed was argu-
ably the most rapid economic and cul-
tural transformation of the world.
The oil boom Drake triggered was
accompanied by a flood of superlatives
about the wonders, mysteries, and
splendor of what was known at first as
“rock oil.” Most immediately, Drake’s
discovery offered America and the
world affordable light. Kerosene—which
DRAKE (RIGHT) IN FRONT OF HIS FIRST OIL WELL
32
6_Baake P30.indd 32
could be made from petroleum—rapidly
became the low-cost choice for lamp oil
(its main competitor was pricey whale
oil). Within two decades, kerosene had
brought artificial lighting to city streets
and to nearly every home in America.
Celebratory language continued into
the early 20th century, as petroleum
products found revolutionary new uses
as lubricant and, eventually, as fuel for
motor vehicles. Geologists, business-
men, politicians, poets, and songwriters
speculated on what this new discovery
meant for America and humankind.
Pastors and theologians weighed in,
too. For Presbyterian minister S.–J.–M.
Eaton of Franklin, Pennsylvania, the
sudden profusion of drilling sites along
nearby Oil Creek was not the result of
chance. In Eaton’s view, God put vast
pools of oil in the ground but kept it from
man until just when we needed it to lift
us out of the sin and trauma of the Civil
War. In his 1866 book, Petroleum: A His-
tory of the Oil Region of Venango County
Pennsylvania, Eaton wrote: “Who can
doubt but that in the wise operations
of God’s Providence, the immense oil
resources of the country have been
OIL REFINERY BY SHAUNL / GETTY / VETTA
developed at this particular time, to aid
in the solution of the mighty problem of
the nation’s destiny?”
The year after Drake’s discovery,
another historian named Thomas A.
Gale published a book on oil that opened
with a quotation from the Book of Job,
where the tormented Job was longing
for the return of God’s blessings, “when
my steps were washed with milk, and
the rock poured out for me streams
of oil” (29:6, RSV). The verse proba- PREVIOUS SPREAD: OIL SPILL PHOTO BY STUDIOBARCELONA / GETTY
bly references olive oil, but for early
celebrants of petroleum, it seemed to
apply far more directly to their divine
gift from the ground. Historian Darren
Dochuk, whose new book Anointed With
Oil chronicles the intertwining paths of
Christianity and crude, has noted that
“many of the aspiring men who moved to
the oil region of Western Pennsylvania
after the Civil War did so armed with a
certainty that they were chasing some-
thing from God.”
Nineteenth- and early 20th-cen-
tury adults in Chautauqua assemblies,
the era’s equivalent of TED Talks,
learned from Alexander Winchell’s 1890
5/2/19 9:18 AM
 geology text that coal—the fossil fuel
that launched the industrial revolu-
tion—was also a gift from God. It was laid
down, according to Winchell’s Walks
and Talks in the Geologic Field, for the
benefit of man, who “is the fulfillment
of the prophecy of the ages.”
Within a century of Drake’s discov-
ery, America had powered itself to world
dominance—with oil fueling the engine
of its growth and prosperity. Of course,
the blessings of oil have never been equi-
tably enjoyed. In an economy as diverse
as that of the United States, extractable
fossil fuels and minerals have generally
been a boon for most of the population.
In countries with less diverse econo-
mies or with more authoritarian lead-
ers—think the Democratic Republic
of the Congo or Iraq—abundant nat-
ural resources have more often been
linked to conflict and widespread pov-
erty, a phenomenon economists call the
“resource curse.”
Nonetheless it is difficult to fault
early optimism about the potential
of fossil fuels to lift mankind to new
heights of flourishing, because they did.
After biblical times, the earth’s popula-
tion edged slowly upward to around a
billion until the late 18th century, when
economic and technological advance-
ments, enabled by coal and then oil,
lengthened life expectancies and sent
the population soaring on a near vertical
OIL SLICK PHOTO BY ISTOCK / GETTY
trajectory to 7.7 billion today.
Unquestionably, for our forebears
and for so many of us, oil indeed has
been a gift from God. Why then, in the
public square today, are oil and other
fossil fuels increasingly spoken of as the
source of looming catastrophe, like an
addictive substance from which we are
anxious to wean ourselves?
Last year, 13 government agencies
DRAKE PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
from NASA to the Department of Com-
merce endorsed a report with dire warn-
ings that the carbon dioxide byproduct
of burning fossil fuels is layering the
earth with a heat-trapping blanket, rais-
ing temperatures and sea levels. In 2016,
United Nations member countries rati-
fied a new approach to fighting poverty
that, in part, prioritized helping the poor
in countries without the resources to
adapt to a warming earth.
Americans are far from unified on
6_Baake P30.indd 33
our views of climate change. Yet various OIL SLICK FROM THE USS ARIZONA IN PEARL HARBOR
surveys show a growing majority are
both worried about the trend and see
human activity as its likely cause. Evan-
gelical Christians, on the whole, remain
skeptical but are becoming less so; half
say that global warming is happening
and a quarter say humans are partially
to blame, according to 2015 research by
Pew. (A 2013 LifeWay study found that
more than four in ten Protestant pastors
“believe global warming is real and man
made.”) And in a 2015 encyclical letter
both lauded and criticized by Christian
communities, Pope Francis suggested
that ignoring climate change is tanta-
mount to ignoring the poor.
Concerns about climate change
aside, our consumption of oil products
in particular has had a host of other
less-disputed consequences. Plastic
waste from our packaging-laden econ-
omies is filling our oceans to the tune of
between 5.3 million and 14 million tons a
year by some estimates—most of it from
trash dumped on the ground and in riv-
ers in developing countries. Research-
ers are only beginning to glimpse the
impacts of microplastics, barely visible
particles that are swirling in the oceans
and that researchers this year found
raining from the air in France. IF ANYTHING, WE
Even our well-intended efforts at
recycling—the fallback creation care
practice for so many of us (“At least I LO ST S I G H T O F O I L’ S
recycle”)—appear to be failing. China,
where we sent most of our recyclables
until now, announced major restrictions M I R AC U LO U S A N D
last year on how much paper and mixed
plastics it would accept. The move has
left much of America with almost no G I F T- L I K E N AT U R E
market for recyclables, prompting some
cities to stop recycling altogether.
If we take a step back from our daily A N D C A M E T O TA K E I T
dependence on oil and our partisan
views toward its place in our lives, the
larger story arc is difficult to miss: As the FOR GRANTED.
God-appointed stewards of creation, we
were handed one of the most priceless
treasures from the depths of the earth
and we fell in love with it. In ways delib-
erate and unwitting, we placed more and
more of our hopes in its potential, until
our union with oil became so intimate
that it stretched our technological, theo-
logical, and social imaginations to think
we could ever exist otherwise.
33
5/1/19 9:51 AM
 OIL IN OUR BLOOD
Every one of us is a child of oil and its
material offspring. The moment we
are born in a modern hospital, we are
wrapped not in swaddling clothes, as
Jesus was, but in oil, notes environ-
mental scholar Vaclav Smil in his book,
Oil. The first things we likely encounter
as newborns are surgical gloves, flex-
ible tubing, catheters, IV containers,
and other trappings of sanitary health
care—all made of oil-based plastics, as
is the housing of the many computers
and electronic instruments that mon-
itor our well-being.
Our trip from the hospital to a well-
lit and heated home will likely be in a
car fueled by gasoline on roads paved
with asphalt. Unless we are organic and
local-food movement devotees, what we
eat will have come from crops fertilized
with fossil fuel derivatives and delivered
to our homes on trucks or giant cargo
ships from distant lands.
There is no denying oil’s awesome
power, harnessed from solar energy
sequestered in simple ocean organ-
isms that sank over eons to the sea
floor. Under intense pressure, this
dead carbon formed deposits that when
mined and refined have such pent-up
strength—as petroleum engineers like
to tell it—that a mere teacup of gasoline
can move a 1,000-pound vehicle a mile
up a mountain road.
6_Baake P30.indd 34
But as the 20th century brought
population growth, technological and
agricultural wonders, and wars on
unprecedented scale, oil became less
of a marvel and more of a “given” in
our society. If anything, we lost sight of
its miraculous and gift-like nature and
came to take it for granted.
Instead, Americans celebrated the
automobile and the freedom and mobil-
ity it brought. Popular songs lauding
the “Merry Oldsmobile” of the early
20th century and the “Little GTO” of
the postwar baby boom sounded almost
like psalms of praise for the almighty car.
Such hymns persist today in musical
worship of the iconic truck. “Thank God
for the red words Jesus said,” sings Kyle
Thomas Nunn in a hard-driving country
anthem. “Thank God for trucks.”
Iconic images of the oil industry
itself have become fundamental parts
of American identity. “They don’t wash
out with the mud,” asserts Montana
country music singer-songwriter Eli
Hundley, proclaiming his love for oil-
field work. “It’s in our American blood.”
And yet that oil-rich “blood” is no
longer reserved for the developed world.
Beijing, New Delhi, Bangkok, and many
other Asian cities are choked with dan-
gerous smog as the region’s growing
middle class plays catch-up with the
West in consumption. The Asia Pacific
region has already overtaken the West
in carbon dioxide emissions, which
many experts see as a tipping point of
sorts toward inevitable sea-level rise,
droughts, and what Texas Tech climate
scientist Katharine Hayhoe and others
refer to as “weather on steroids.”
Hayhoe and her husband, Andrew
Farley, are evangelicals whose book A
Climate for Change argues that God’s
gift was in creating a planet whose atmo-
sphere was perfectly suited to human
life. But by pouring greenhouse gasses
into that atmosphere, we have upset
the balance, essentially defiling the gift.
F RU I T O F T H E S P I R I T,
FRUIT OF THE EARTH
Assuming, for argument’s sake, that the
vast majority of climate scientists are
correct in their view that humans are
warming the world, it’s difficult then not
to ask: Could we have done anything dif-
ferently up to this point? After all, seri-
ous research into atmospheric warming
didn’t begin until the mid-1900s, so
it would be uncharitable to accuse
19th-century industrialized nations of
willfully disregarding the global conse-
quences of carbon emissions.
Humans were polluting the air for
hundreds of years before the Industrial
Revolution, and history suggests we
have long had an intuitive—if unscien-
tific—sense that it was bad for us. The
dangers of dirty air were contemplated
as early as A.D. 61, when Seneca wrote
about the “oppressive atmosphere” of
smoke shrouding ancient Rome. The
Romans allowed smoke pollution law-
suits, and more than a thousand years
later, England made modest attempts
to limit the burning of coal under Queen
Elizabeth I. Large-scale organized cam-
paigns to curb air pollution eventually
materialized in the mid-1800s, when the
coal-hungry steam engine was super-
charging the world’s economy and coat-
ing neighborhoods in London, Chicago,
and St. Louis with black soot.
Still, clean air concerns were almost
entirely localized until recent decades.
The notion that emissions could
threaten the entire planet has only
recently gone mainstream. But even if
science and popular perception failed
to raise sufficient alarms about climate
change, was there nothing else to check
our consumption of fossil fuels—and
in particular our consumption of them
as Christians?
There probably was. In the throes of
the energy crisis in 1980, a man named
George Sweeting, then president of
Moody Bible Institute, sat down to
write an essay for this magazine urg-
ing Christians to consume less. Like
many Americans, Sweeting was wor-
ried that the world would soon run out
of oil. Advances in oil extraction tech-
PHOTO BY RALUCOHN / ISTOCK / GETTY
nology have deferred such concerns
today, but his call feels just as timely as
climate change and mounting waste
dominate conversations.
“We buy things that are convenient.
We eat more than we need. Expen-
sive packages and containers become
trash,” Sweeting wrote. “As victims of
an easy lifestyle we have unthinkingly
5/2/19 9:19 AM

STANDARD OIL REFINERY NO. 1 IN CLEVELAND, OHIO, 1897
perpetuated a problem that is fast
becoming a crisis. Somehow, we have
to convince ourselves that even though
things seem right, something is very
wrong.”
Whether intentional or not, Sweet-
ing’s essay was informed by the apos-
tle Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit
in Galatians 5:22–23, arguably the
simplest and most all-encompassing
description of true Christian charac-
ter. Paul not only makes the case that
a life of love, joy, peace, patience, kind-
ness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,
and self-control is the ultimate goal of
the Christian but also that such a life is
only fully possible through the inner
work of the Spirit. These postures are
to govern our every relationship—with
one another, with God himself, with our
resources, and with the created world
around us. And when our behaviors stem
from these postures, Paul says, we’ll
have no need for laws to tell us what to
do because we’ll already be outperform-
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
ing the law.
If Paul is correct, then the fruit of the
Spirit may be the gold standard govern-
ing how we consume God’s most pre-
cious natural gifts, such as fossil fuels
and metals—or how we use any treasure,
for that matter, such as an unexpected
inheritance or a suddenly valuable piece
of land on which a church building sits.
A loving posture toward our
6_Baake P30.indd 35
neighbors, for instance, would among
other things certainly rule out binging
on precious resources for our own ben-
efit at the expense of others. “Wasting
energy is as much an act of violence
against the poor as refusing to feed the
hungry,” Sweeting wrote. Along the
lines of self-control, Sweeting argued
that Christians must be examples of
those “who restrain our self-desires.”
Seeming to make the case for patience,
Sweeting argued that exploitation is
the natural result of “greed and haste”
when we “take too much too fast.” In an
essay accompanying Sweeting’s in the
same 1980 issue, evangelical philoso-
phy professor Loren Wilkinson seemed
to also have an attitude of patience in
mind, writing:
Good stewardship does not place
on the future greater debts than it
inherited from the past. This prin-
ciple is particularly important in
considering our use of nonrenew-
able resources like metals and fossil
fuels. It suggests that if we use those
things, part of their use should be
diverted to establishing a substitute
the future can use.
One could probably extend Sweet-
ing’s and Wilkinson’s logic today and
argue, for example, that an outlook of joy
and contentment would ask whether we
really need that jet-fueled international
vacation this year, whether we really
need quite so large a house to heat and
cool, or whether we really need the lat-
est cellphone.
ACTS OF THE FLESH
Whether or not we have individually
demonstrated the fruit of the Spirit in
our consumption of fossil fuels over
the past two centuries, the story of the
oil industry itself is replete with “the
acts of the flesh”—what Paul posed as
the opposite of Christian living. His-
tory echoes Old Testament accounts
of gold and other treasure that, in the
service of corrupt kings and ordinary
human greed, became idols that even-
tually invited God’s wrath.
The first oil king was John D. Rocke-
feller. Born 1839 in upstate New York
to a pious mother and an unscrupu-
lous cad of a father, Rockefeller was a
devout Baptist. He launched and quickly
dominated the oil refining and trans-
portation businesses. But Rockefel-
ler was a flawed godly king, accused by
critics of poor labor practices and cut-
throat and deceptive business dealings.
He consumed everything in his path
like the giant octopus portraying him
in newspaper cartoons of the day, and
eventually his Standard Oil Co. was dis-
mantled by the US Supreme Court as an
illegal monopoly.
Many others were overcome with “oil
fever” and turned away from God. Tales
of stock swindles, oil field murders, and
boom-and-bust town chicanery reveal a
people embracing false idols, bewitched
by the promise of wealth. Only six years
after Drake’s discovery, William Wright
was lamenting in an 1865 book, The Oil
Regions of Pennsylvania, that “in Petro-
lia, the church universally believed in is
an engine-house, with a derrick for its
tower, a well for its Bible, and a two-inch
tube for its preacher.”
As with our stewardship of most of
God’s good gifts, of course, our relation-
ship with oil is a complex mix of vice
and virtue. The oil industry has been
exploited by some but, at the same time,
it birthed a new era of philanthropy in
the United States. Rockefeller’s char-
itable giving to public health, higher
35
5/1/19 9:52 AM
 education, and Baptist missions helped
transform entire segments of American
society. So too did the philanthropy of
other oil barons, including J. Howard
Pew, whose contributions supported
seminaries and Billy Graham’s ministry
and subsidized the founding of Christi-
anity Today.
That the oil industry has done so
much good may explain, in part, why
calls for environmental stewardship
are often met with claims that to leave
fossil fuels in the ground is tantamount
to rejecting the bounty that a divine cre-
ator put there for our use. Energy writer
Alex Epstein argues in The Moral Case
for Fossil Fuels that turning away from
oil would deny people in the developing
world the same gifts that built and suc-
cored the West. The Cornwall Alliance,
a right-of-center network of Christian
scholars in diverse fields, affirms on
its website “that one way of exercising
godly dominion is by transforming raw
materials into resources and using them
to meet human needs.” To leave such
bounty in the earth, the group asserts, is
as wrong as it was for the laborer in the
Gospel of Matthew who hid his wages in
the ground rather than investing them
in a quest for abundance (25:14–30).
GREENER IDOLS
The Cornwall Alliance’s arguments are
persuasive in many ways: There’s no
denying that the gifts of oil and other
fossil fuels have enabled countless other
“good and perfect” gifts that, as Scrip-
ture points out, came in some way or
another from God. Their critique of car-
bon haters is that to suddenly change the
rules of the energy game and deprive the
rest of the world the quality of life that
Americans enjoy is not especially loving.
Outside some extreme voices, how-
ever, the green energy crowd isn’t exactly
preaching a message of privation. Their
rhetoric often rings with almost the
same blessing-for-all euphoria as 19th-
and 20th-century celebrations of oil.
The Sierra Club’s summary of a congres-
sional proposal for a “Green New Deal”
is an example. The excited rhetoric with
which Eaton described oil in 1866—mar-
shaling words like “bounty,” “immense,”
and “mighty”—can be heard echoing in
36 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Baake P30.indd 36
an online Sierra Club explainer titled
“What is a Green New Deal?” The plan
is “a big, bold transformation of the
economy to tackle the twin crises of
W E W I L L H AV E T O
inequality and climate change,” the
group writes. “It would mobilize vast
public resources to help us transition
T R E AT O U R G I F T S
from an economy built on exploitation
and fossil fuels to one driven by dignified
work and clean energy.”
FROM GOD—WHETHER
Green New Deal evangelists root
their hope less in a particular resource
than in human ingenuity. In this, many
N AT U R A L R E S O U R C E S ,
climate activists and climate skeptics
share a common belief: Whether man-
kind must act now to save the planet or
M AT E R I A L W E L L- B E I N G ,
whether, guided by market forces, man-
kind will eventually adapt to whatever
the earth serves up, human progress
OR PERSONAL AND
will prevail.
But even if we do someday innovate
a door to a distant, carbon-lite future,
S O C I E TA L F R E E D O M S —
we’ll be just as prone to turn whatever
miraculous new gifts it holds into idols.
In truth, while wind turbines and solar
WITH REVERENCE
panels and electric cars are also good
gifts from God, our excited anticipation
of such technologies is often as much
R AT H E R T H A N A B A N D O N .
about dodging the need for self-con-
straint as it is about caring for creation.
We are eager for anything that doesn’t
disrupt our consumer lifestyles.
Economic analysts suggest that at
least some greater transition to alter-
native fuels is increasingly viable.
Renewable energy has finally become
cost-competitive with conventional
fuels, and even oil giant British Petro-
leum is in what its CEO calls “a race to
lower greenhouse gas emissions” as its
own scientists expect renewable energy
to overtake traditional sources within
two decades.
But as Christians debate the risks of
climate change and the need for action,
we must be careful not to replace adula-
tion of oil and the progress it fueled with
adulation for new technological innova-
tions. Alternative energy certainly is an
important tool in the creation care tool-
box, but the hope that yesterday’s tech-
nology will easily be replaced with acres
of solar panels and wind farms may lead
to disappointment and missed opportu-
nities to adopt a more prudent lifestyle.
Baptist Theological Seminary Bible
professor Mark Biddle offers perhaps
JUNE 2019
5/1/19 9:53 AM
 the best warning for those who would
substitute temples to oil with temples
to new technology: “Christianity does
not offer a utopian vision of perfected
human society,” Biddle writes in his
2005 book, Missing the Mark: Sin and
Its Consequences in Biblical Theology. “It
issues a call to the kingdom of God.” For
Biddle, progress is the myth of a society
“marked by arrogant overconfidence in
human capabilities.”
Human overconfidence is not just a
religious concern but also a technolog-
ical one. Manufacturing wind turbines
takes massive amounts of energy, and
BOTTOM: A&J FOTOS / GETTY
transporting the blades, steel, and con-
crete to building sites requires large,
diesel-fueled trucks. Likewise, the man-
ufacture of alternative transportation
sources, such as electric and hybrid cars,
demands staggering amounts of energy
and rare earth metals whose produc-
tion has particularly nasty environ-
TOP PHOTO: MYCTERIA / ISTOCK
mental side effects. And many forms of
green energy and transportation remain
expensive and out of reach for low- and
middle-income Americans.
Clearly, we will not be given solu-
tions to climate change or to the global
trash epidemic absent hard choices and
6_Baake P30.indd 37
sacrifices. And no sacrifice from the
church alone will be enough to turn the
tide without significant efforts from
industry and the massive global supply
chains that are only responding to cur-
rent consumer habits and even govern-
ment regulations. (Who has ever bought
supermarket blueberries in anything
other than those clear clam shells that,
in fact, aren’t very recyclable but do
deliver a healthy and fresh product?)
But Sweeting, the former Moody
president, argued that the church is
God’s “living, small-scale demonstra-
tion of the world as it should be.” He
felt that Christians did not have to be
alarmist because “our confidence is in
the Lord,” and rather than try to solve
every problem, we should seek “God’s
help to be examples to the world.”
Confidence in God will be as neces-
sary for any changes we make today as it
was for the Israelites during the Exodus
from Egypt. This is something Evangel-
ical Environmental Network president
Mitchell Hescox knows, having come
from a family of Pennsylvania coal min-
ers. People of faith understand that cli-
mate change is real and dangerous, he
says. But he adds in his book with mete-
orologist Paul Douglas: “We know how
life was in Egypt, but we’re scared of the
future going into the Promised Land.”
Is it possible that the very process of
choosing to live more simply could free
us, through acts of humility, to lay hold
of something better than ourselves? To
paraphrase Paul in his letter to the Phi-
lippians, we must not look to our own
interests but instead suffer the loss of
things in exchange for the knowledge
of Christ.
S L AV E S T O O N E
ANOTHER, NOT
TO OUR STUFF
When the prophet Isaiah foretold the
breakup of Israel and Judea, he refer-
enced their abundant wealth and even
their transportation, whose “land is full
of silver and gold,” where “there is no
end to their treasures,” and where “there
is no end to their chariots” (Isa. 2:7–8).
Writers paint similar pictures of
American society. In 1996, environ-
mental writer Bill McKibben wrote a
Christianity Today cover story subtitled
“Why spending less and turning off TV
should be part of the church’s mission
to the world.” McKibben proclaimed
that our consumer ethos was like “a
tree whose canopy spreads so wide that
it blots out the sun, that it blots out the
quiet word of God. . . . We are led daily,
hourly, into temptation.”
Five years later, John de Graaf and
his co-authors reported in their book,
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic,
that four million pounds of raw mate-
rial such as mined metals and oil are
necessary to provide for one average
American family’s annual consumption.
Americans spend more on trash bags in a
year than 90 of the world’s 210 countries
spend for everything.
While consumption is a major com-
ponent of the hallowed gross domestic
product by which many politicians and
economists measure goodness, it seems
undeniable that Americans, including
Christians, will eventually have to learn
to live with less. We will have to treat
our gifts from God—whether natural
resources, material well-being, or per-
sonal and societal freedoms—with rev-
erence rather than abandon.
We may need to turn again to Paul.
When he wrote to the Galatians and
made his case for the fruit of the Spirit,
he set up his argument just a few sen-
tences earlier with an admonition that
surely was not written with our modern
levels of material consumption in mind
but whose application rings eerily pre-
scient in our day:
You, my brothers and sisters, were
called to be free. But do not use
your freedom to indulge the flesh;
rather, serve one another humbly in
love. For the entire law is fulfilled in
keeping this one command: “Love
your neighbor as yourself.” If you
bite and devour each other, watch
out or you will be destroyed by each
other. (5:13–15)
KEN BAAKE is associate professor of
English and of the Climate Center at Texas
Tech University. He specializes in the
rhetoric of scientific literature. Managing
editor Andy Olsen contributed to this piece.
37
5/1/19 9:53 AM
 PROFILE
F
M E E T T H E A DVO C AT E S ,
S U R V I VO R S , A N D L E A D E R S
W H O C H A N G E D H OW
SOUTHERN BAPTISTS
T R E AT M I N I S T RY A B U S E .
BY KAT E S H E L L N U T T
P HOTO GRAPHY BY MELANIE GRIZZ EL
38
6_Shellnutt P38.indd 38
HOLY
RUMBLINGS
or many years, even as revelations of
sexual abuse by clergy had been com-
ing to light for decades in the Catholic
church, the evangelical church had not
had “eyes to see” or “ears to hear” the
extent of its own abuse crisis. In the
words of Bible teacher Beth Moore, “By
and large, the naïve couldn’t fathom it,
the knowledgeable wouldn’t risk it, the
perpetrators were good at it, and the
victims were blamed and shamed for it.”
But in 2018 and 2019, women brought
new attention to the silent suffering
of those whose stories were ignored,
stifled, and left untold. Among South-
ern Baptists in particular, advocates in
churches and ministries platformed the
cause and supported survivors pursuing
justice, healing, and reform.
Faced with a growing wave of survi-
vor stories and a newspaper investiga-
tion unearthing more than 700 victims,
the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)
is no longer downplaying the problem.
SBC president J.‹D. Greear said the body
of churches needs to “repent of a culture
that has made abuse, cover-ups, and
evading accountability far too easy,”
months after launching a study group to
develop new resources and recommend
policy changes.
In the SBC, pastors, professors,
senior leaders, and even a prominent
seminary president—Paige Patterson
at Southwestern Baptist Theological
Seminary—have lost their positions
over mishandled allegations or their
own misconduct. Some congregations
facing scrutiny over abuse have with-
drawn from the SBC. Southern Baptists
will vote at their June annual meeting on
whether to add a provision threatening
to disfellowship churches without ade-
quate protocols for addressing abuse.
More broadly, two states have con-
sidered bills inspired by recent accounts
of pastoral abuse: Maine proposed mak-
ing it a crime for religious leaders to have
sex with congregants, and Texas offered
a measure to help prevent abusive lead-
ers from finding other ministry jobs.
Many of these women—the ones who
helped bring abuse to the forefront of
the nation’s largest Protestant denom-
ination—agreed to talk with CT about
what motivates them and about the
still-unfolding impact of their work.
Because of their voices, more Christians
have recognized the depth of this crisis
and the need for better resources to care
for the survivors in their midst and keep
abusers out of leadership.
And, if their prayers are answered,
fewer will feel like they have no place
to go with the trauma and shame of
their abuse.
5/2/19 9:23 AM
 JULES WOODSON
S B C A B U S E S U RV I VO R

LY
Before the #MeToo movement, dozens
of women had gone online to disclose
sexual abuse in the church, only to
receive little attention outside circles

GS
of watchdog bloggers and fellow sur-
vivors. Then in early 2018, Jules Wood-
son alleged that her Southern Baptist
youth pastor Andy Savage had abused
her two decades earlier in Texas, in a
pickup one night after church. The rev-
elation elicited a surprising response
from her abuser, who confessed the
“sexual incident” from the stage of his
church and received a standing ovation.
Then, Woodson’s story spread through
Christian and secular media, right up to
The New York Times, and she became
the face of the #ChurchToo movement.
“This is so much bigger than me,” she
told CT. “When I went public, I said, ‘Not
only am I doing this for healing and
closure for myself, I’m doing this to let
other survivors know they’re not alone
and that they have a voice.’‰”
Last year, Woodson found herself
devastated, frustrated, and traumatized
all over again, especially knowing one
of the pastors to whom she reported
the abuse back in 1998 remained in an
SBC pulpit. (Savage and another pastor
had resigned.) But her high-profile case
also put her in the position to connect
with fellow survivors coming forward
with heartbreakingly similar stories.
“That brought me to a healing I
never even thought possible and a
sense of relief that it was not all in
vain opening myself up,” said Wood-
son, a 38-year-old flight attendant
and mother of three, who has taken
on advocacy as part of her life’s calling.
Woodson will once again join efforts to
rally for a stronger anti-abuse response
from the SBC during its annual meeting,
including a database of known offend-
ers. “I do want to create change in the
church. I’m still a believer, and I feel
like God has used my story in ways I
never even imagined,” Woodson said.
“He has allowed my story and the hor-
rible responses and everything that’s
happened to open up this chapter, and
it has been a catalyst for so many others
to feel safe to share their stories.”

6_Shellnutt P38.indd 39 5/1/19 9:56 AM

 MEGAN LIVELY
S B C A B U S E S U RV I VO R

One of the incidents that led to

Paige Patterson’s firing came
from a former Southeastern
Baptist Theological Seminary
(SEBTS) student who recounted
in May 2018 how Patterson dis-
couraged her from reporting
being raped 15 years before and
instead told her to forgive the
man responsible. A week after
sharing her story anonymously
with the Washington Post, Megan
Lively tweeted, “I am the woman
you read about, #SEBTS 2003,
not afraid, ashamed, or fearful. I
am proud to be #SBC, bc of how
many have responded with com-
passion & love.” Current SEBTS
leadership found Lively’s file and
corroborated her story. Her pastor
listened and recommended pro-
fessional help as her trauma led
to a mental breakdown, insomnia,
and a period of psychosis.
Lively continues to work with
SBC leaders, the sexual abuse
study group, and survivors who
now turn to her with their stories.
“My biggest passion and the way I
heal is by serving and by helping,”
said Lively, a 40-year-old social
media consultant in North Caro-
lina. “I’m more of a behind-the-
scenes person.” It was a dramatic
change, in a matter of weeks, to
find herself at the intersection of
the SBC and #MeToo, part of a
public reckoning with one of its
most powerful leaders. In the past
year, Lively has seen redemp-
tion unfold in her life and in her
denomination. She finally com-
pleted her master’s at SEBTS in
May and launched a new venture,
returning to ministry after feeling
held back for years. Lively cheers
the changes taking place among
Southern Baptists. “When some-
one in the SBC or someone who’s
a Christian leader gets it right, I’m
going to point that out,” she said.
“I believe ultimately that points
people to Jesus and points people
to the church.”

40 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M JUNE 2019

6_Shellnutt P38.indd 40 5/2/19 9:25 AM

 MARY DEMUTH
AU T H O R A N D A DVO C AT E

Mary DeMuth watched as the questions around

sexual abuse that she had been raising for decades
recently made their way into the mainstream. Since
the 1990s, long before hashtags and viral testimo-
nies spread the movement, DeMuth had written
about her recovery as a survivor of child sex abuse
and advocated for others, all the while wonder-
ing, “When would anyone ever talk about it?” The
answer finally came as #MeToo and #ChurchToo
uncovered stories of ministry abuse. DeMuth
praised Southern Baptist president J.†D. Greear
for his willingness to skip knee-jerk defenses and
look deeply at the issue, but she knows it’s just a
first step. “I have to be patient with the process . . .
but there’s a holy rumbling,” said DeMuth, a mem-
ber of Lake Pointe Church, an SBC congregation in
suburban Dallas. “This is a groundswell.”
DeMuth, 52, understands why people are fed
up with inadequate responses over the years but
also sees the church’s potential—and its calling as
the body of Christ—to offer profound healing to
the hurt, beyond “easy forgiveism” or feel-good
platitudes. As more Christian leaders turn to this
issue, she wrote We Too: How the Church Can
Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis,
due out this August. “People who are broken and
hurting are tutors to lead us to Christ,” she said. “As
you love someone who’s broken, you are being like
Christ to them, but you’re also discovering Christ in
them because he only shows up in the weak and the
broken—his power is made perfect in our weakness.
. . . Instead of looking at someone as a project, look
at them as the projection of the beauty of Christ.”

RACHAEL DENHOLLANDER AT TO R N E Y A N D A DVO C AT E

Rachael Denhollander’s brave witness
as the first of more than 150 victims
to publicly accuse former USA Gym-
nastics doctor Larry Nassar of sexual
assault made her a prominent figure in
the #MeToo movement, celebrated by
ESPN and Glamour magazine. It was her
thoroughly Christian call for her pedo-
phile assailant to repent and seek God’s
forgiveness that put the 34-year-old
survivor, advocate, and attorney in the
evangelical spotlight in January 2018.
From there, she has led the church to
face its own scandals, including chron-
icling a case against Sovereign Grace
Churches (which has denied allegations
of wrongdoing or cover-ups) and con-
sulting with SBC leaders as part of their
sexual abuse advisory group.
Unlike secular institutions that cave
to financial pressures and hurt reputa-
tions, she said, churches too often view
allegations as attacks and double down
in defense. “That makes it more difficult
to change the tide of an organization,”
Denhollander told CT. “We have a lot of
leaders who are saying the right things:
‘We need to make change. We need to
deal with these problems. Abuse is a ter-
rible thing.’ What I’m not hearing many
leaders say yet is ‘I need to learn. Where
do I go to learn?’†” While she celebrates a
“general awakening among leadership”
and care for victims, the mother of four
emphasizes the need for churches to rely
on outside expertise. Before leaders can
adopt solutions, she said, “They need to
be looking for where the problems are
and repenting.” As Denhollander contin-
ues to stand for “sister survivors” both in
sports and in the church, Tyndale House
will release her memoir, What Is a Girl
Worth?—named for a line in her Nassar
testimony—plus a kid’s book, How Much
Is a Little Girl Worth?, in September.

41

6_Shellnutt P38.indd 41 5/1/19 9:59 AM

 TRILLIA NEWBELL
S B C L E A D E R A N D A DVO C AT E

When #MeToo movement hit in 2017, Tril-

lia Newbell urged the church to look in on
itself, to ensure leaders were providing
outlets where victims’ stories were heard
with care, reported to authorities, and met
with Christ’s healing. Fellow leaders at the
Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission
(ERLC), where she serves as community
outreach director, shared her concerns.
Then, Rachael Denhollander’s comments
and the Houston Chronicle investigation in
particular intensified their response.
“These things have been going on for
years, but now we know, more fully, the
extent of the problem,” she told CT. “We
can’t deny it anymore. We shouldn’t have
been doing that in the first place.”
The ERLC will host a “candid conver-
sation” on abuse on the eve of the denomi-
nation’s annual meeting in June, featuring
SBC president J.ŽD. Greear, ERLC president
Russell Moore, Bible teacher Beth Moore,
and Denhollander. Asked why so many of
the prominent survivor stories come from
white women, Newbell, herself a survivor,
said that because these issues affect the
majority culture “there definitely could be a
bias there, and that could explain the lack of
focus on women of color. But we do need to
remember that abuse happens to everyone.”
She believes that God’s redemptive hand
is at work as victims become more willing
to step forward and pastors become more
equipped to minister to them. “I’m grate-
ful that we are seeing a rise in the conver-
sation because it needed to happen to help
all women who have been victims of abuse.”

DIANE LANGBERG P SYC H O LO G I ST A N D A DVO C AT E

As an early woman in professional coun-
seling, Diane Langberg has been hear-
ing from victims of sexual abuse in the
church since before there were terms or
diagnoses to capture their suffering. The
kinds of stories she’s encountered for 46
years in private have made their way into
the headlines and public confessions,
forcing evangelical leaders to grieve
and respond to the church’s failure to
offer them a safe refuge. “I have come
to believe that the voice of the victims
speaking the truth to his church is a pro-
phetic voice,” the Christian psychologist
said. “It’s the voice of God to his people,
saying, ‘You have not obeyed me. You
have cloaked things in darkness that I
call to the light.’Ž”
Langberg brought her expertise in
trauma healing to the SBC abuse study
group appointed by J.ŽD. Greear, which
created a free curriculum for churches
and SBC entities. The problem, as she
sees it, requires churches to address an
underlying complacency with sin itself.
As Langberg advises SBC leaders as well
as other denominations, she knows the
true test will be how they respond to
or implement her lessons. Necessary
reforms won’t come easy; no course
or program can correct this problem.
Instead, change will require an ongoing,
incarnational commitment to listen-
ing—really listening—to the survivors
in their midst. “There is no quick fix, but
there is quick attentiveness,” she said.

42 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M JUNE 2019

6_Shellnutt P38.indd 42 5/1/19 9:59 AM

 JENNIFER LYELL
S B C A B U S E S U RV I VO R

Last year, Jennifer Lyell saw

how Rachael Denhollander’s
gospel-tinged testimony in a
secular courtroom stirred up
a new empathy for abuse sur-
vivors among American evan-
gelicals. Months later, she read
about Megan Lively’s mishandled
allegations at SEBTS. As a fellow
SBC seminary alumna, an SBC
church member, and a vice pres-
ident at SBC-affiliated LifeWay
Christian Resources, Lyell cared
deeply about her denomination,
but she also saw the Lord at work
in these voices. She told herself,
“God is purifying his church. God
be glorified,” and then she too
spoke up—first privately last
spring, then publicly this March—
to share her own story of sexual
abuse by her former profes-
sor at Southern Baptist Theo-
logical Seminary. Her alleged
abuser resigned shortly after
but has not publicly addressed
the accusations.
Lyell views her case as rep-
resenting both the care and
responsiveness of today’s South-
ern Baptist leaders and the short-
comings the denomination still
needs to address. “It is my hope
that my story, one in which an
SBC entity and its leaders acted
swiftly and justly to remove an
abuser, but in which that same
individual was also in a ministry
position only months later, will
also help to illustrate the need for
some form of a reporting tool,”
her March statement said. She
also has advocated for more
pastors and church leaders to
publicly address the issue. “My
biggest concern for the church is
that we will see the abuse revela-
tions and resulting conversations
as some sort of cultural phe-
nomenon that we need to ride
out instead of recognizing it as
a movement of God to purify and
protect his bride,” Lyell told CT.

43

6_Shellnutt P38.indd 43 5/1/19 9:59 AM

 ANNE MARIE
MILLER
S B C A B U S E S U RV I VO R

A decade ago, Anne Marie Miller (then

Anne Jackson) built a following as a
popular Christian blogger and author
who didn’t shy away from topics like
church burnout, mental health, and
fear. After a writing hiatus, she began
to consider coming forward last year
with the most difficult disclosure of
her life: the story of her own abuse,
which started when she was 16, by a
man who went onto become an Inter-
national Mission Board (IMB) mission-
ary. “I felt in my spirit that things would
be changing and changing fast,” Miller
said, having followed Jules Wood-
son and Megan Lively’s stories. “I
knew that with the spotlight on this
topic, it was time to go public with
my story and that there would be a
lot of spiritual warfare in doing so.”
Miller reported her abuse to the police
last spring, when she realized that the
IMB—though it investigated their rela-
tionship in 2007 and sided with her
account—failed to do so. Her abuser,
Mark Aderholt, continued to serve in
SBC churches and entities until last
summer. He was indicted in Decem-
ber in Texas on four sex abuse felonies.
Over the past year, Miller went
through a dual healing process: her
abuse recovery coupled with a devas-
tating injury from when she was acci-
dentally hit by a thrown softball bat at
a trauma rehab facility. Bolstered by
support and prayers from strangers
in the moments when her faith was
“barely hanging on,” the 39-year-old
has kept advocating for herself, push-
ing the IMB for a fuller acknowledg-
ment of missteps in her case, and has
turned her experience into a way to
help others. Miller’s new book Heal-
ing Together: A Guide to Supporting
Sexual Abuse Survivors draws from
her research into the ongoing emo-
tional, relational, and financial costs of
recovery (which she hopes churches
and ministries will help bear). Since
cases were kept in the dark for so long,
Miller said she sees the SBC’s current
abuse conversation as “good and sad
at the same time.”

44 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M JUNE 2019

6_Shellnutt P38.indd 44 5/1/19 10:00 AM

 KELSEY HENCY
E D I TO R , B I B L E T E AC H E R , A N D A DVO C AT E

When Southern Baptist leaders began to defend

and debate Paige Patterson’s remarks and stances,
Kelsey Hency knew it was her chance to do some-
thing. A recent seminary graduate, she recognized
how sexist pressures could undercut women’s theo-
logical pursuits and saw the two-time seminary
president as part of a larger problem. “Our semi-
naries are the places where we want to see women
grow, be cultivated, and be taken as seriously as
the men who are going to be leading our churches,”
said Hency, who teaches and leads women’s Bible
study at The Village Church in Dallas. “Advocating
for the women who were currently in seminary
and the women who wanted to go to seminary felt
incredibly important to me.”
Hency signed onto a viral petition of SBC women
calling for Patterson’s removal, and she spoke up
on behalf of women like Megan Lively who had
endured misogyny and mistreatment. “As soon as it
comes up, you hate that it has happened, but you’re
glad that it’s in the light because there’s nothing you
can do about it until it’s seen,” she said. As editor
in chief of the online magazine Fathom, Hency
launched a series featuring the voices of abuse sur-
vivors, including Woodson, believing in the power
of personal narrative to draw Christians to see God
reflected in their stories. A member of the ERLC’s
leadership council, Hency noticed new awareness
and change come to SBC churches in just a couple
short years. She prays that not only will congrega-
tions offer clearer pathways for abuse victims to
report and seek care—but that male leaders will
involve women in their processes from the start.

BETH MOORE M I N I S T RY L E A D E R A N D A DVO C AT E

It’s apt that the Southern Baptist Con-
vention’s best-known Bible teacher,
Beth Moore, would become a leading
voice calling the church to treat women
with more Christlike care and esteem.
“By no means are all victims female, but
we will make virtually no progress in
dealing with sexual abuse in a Christlike
manner until we boldly face the reality
that women are not, and have not been,
treated in many of our environments
with the same value as men,” she said.
“Neither gender has flourished in the
Lord over this disparity.”
The Living Proof Ministries founder
has been outspoken on behalf of women
and survivors in the church—and male
leaders in the SBC are listening. Last
spring, she posted an open letter describ-
ing the misogyny she experienced as a
woman in ministry over the decades. In
a session around the 2018 SBC annual
meeting, Moore addressed the need
for pastors to recognize how the power
dynamics in churches can intimidate
women and encouraged them to bring
in female advocates to be with survivors
who come forward with their stories.
Following the Houston Chronicle
investigation in February, Moore, 61,
shared on Twitter a childhood photo
from around the time of her abuse by a
family member, spurring dozens to do
the same. She replied over and over: I’m
so sorry. You were so precious, and you
are still so precious. My heart is broken.
“In short form, I think that, tragically,
the whole issue of sexual abuse was too
messy to deal with until it was unavoid-
able. It is now unavoidable,” she told
CT. “Our natural human tendency is to
tweak a little and hope for a lot, but it
just doesn’t work that way. We need real,
live lasting transformation only Jesus
can bring.”

45

6_Shellnutt P38.indd 45 5/1/19 10:00 AM

6_Keener P46.indd 46
THEOLOGY

DO
THE
THE
DEAD
DEAD
DEAD
STILL
STILL
STILL

RISE?
RISE?
RISE?
RISE?

4/30/19 11:44 AM
 A
ROUND 1960, in the Republic of Congo,
a two-year-old girl named Thérèse was
bitten by a snake. She cried out for help,
but by the time her mother, Antoinette,
reached her, Thérèse was unresponsive
and seemed to have stopped breathing.
No medical help was available to them
in their village, so Antoinette strapped
little Thérèse to her back and ran to a
neighboring village.
According to the US National Library
of Medicine, brain cells start dying less
than five minutes after their oxygen sup-
ply is removed, an event called hypoxia.
After six minutes, lack of oxygen can
cause severe brain damage or death.
Antoinette estimates that, given the
distance and the terrain, it probably
took about three hours to reach the next
village. By the time they arrived, her
daughter was likely either dead or had
sustained significant brain damage.
Antoinette immediately sought out a
family friend, Coco Ngoma Moyise, who
was an evangelist in the neighboring vil-
lage. They prayed over the lifeless girl
and immediately she started breathing
again. By the next day, she was fine—no
long-term harm and no brain damage.
Today, Thérèse has a master’s degree
and is a pastor in Congo.
When I heard this story, as a West-
erner I was naturally tempted toward
skepticism, but it was hard to deny.
Thérèse is my sister-in-law and Antoi-
nette was my mother-in-law.
By contrast, in February, a video of
WE SHOULD ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES.

South African preacher Alph Lukau

drew widespread attention for what
appeared to be someone raised from
IN A WORLD OF FAKE NEWS, REAL

the dead in his church. Lukau claims

he simply prayed for the unconscious
RESURRECTIONS DO HAPPEN.

man in the coffin, but regardless of who

is responsible, the situation was clearly
designed to deceive. The coffin was pur-
chased from one funeral parlor by cus-
tomers allegedly posing as workers from
another funeral parlor, and the hearse
BY CRAIG KEENER

was borrowed from yet a third. Criti-

cally, none of the funeral parlors ever
saw the body of the supposed deceased.
The video of this apparent resurrec-
tion was quickly unmasked, and Lukau
was condemned by numerous African
church leaders. Nevertheless, questions
and concerns remain.

47

6_Keener P46.indd 47 4/30/19 11:44 AM

 I’m married to an African, have
spent time teaching in Africa, and count
many African Christians as relatives
and friends. I’ve learned much from
them and their approach to miracles
challenges me in good ways. African
Christianity has a tradition of prophetic
leaders, and there is great respect among
Africans across the continent for a “man
of God.” But because miracles draw
crowds, many leaders compete in mir-
acle narratives. The internet democ-
ratizes access, so leaders who publicly
demonstrate their miracle prowess can
become wildly successful. Churches
can control the setting and potentially
any staging. The opportunity for fak-
ery abounds and my miracle-believing,
African Pentecostal friends lament the
spread of fraudulent miracle-workers.
Is there a way we can distinguish
between fabricated miracle reports and
the genuine article?
MISPLACED CYNICISM
MISPLACED CYNICISM
Christians use the word miracle in dif-
ferent ways. Because we believe that God
works through his creation, we are right
to thank God for recoveries from sick-
ness or injury, dramatic or not. When
we offer thanksgiving for a successful
surgery or an effective immune system,
we don’t need to claim it happened only
by miraculous means.
Neither should we limit the term
exclusively to what lacks possible nat-
ural causes. The Bible says that God
parted the Red Sea using a strong east
wind that blew all night (Ex. 14:21). But
just because we recognize the natural
components of this event, we would be
wrong to conclude it was merely a for-
tuitous coincidence that allowed the
Israelites to cross on dry ground.
So how can we evaluate popular
accounts of miracles? When we don’t
know the witnesses and lack other
evidence, we have to live with varying
amounts of uncertainty. But examining
credible examples can help us under-
stand how to approach miracles while
being neither gullible nor faithless.
If some African Christians accept
miracle claims too quickly, many of us
in the secular West indulge the opposite
48 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Keener P46.indd 48
cultural temptation. Our heritage of
antisupernaturalism, stemming from
18th-century Deists and the naturalist
philosophy of David Hume, predisposes
us to dismiss all miracles. That way,
at least, we cannot be embarrassed by
claims that turn out to be fraudulent.
Resurrection reports appear through
much of church history. In the late sec-
ond century, Irenaeus, for example,
reproached Gnostics’ lack of miracles
by noting an orthodox church in France
where, he reported, raisings were fre-
quent. Raisings were also among the
documented miracles Augustine sur-
veyed in book 22 of The City of God. John
Wesley offered a firsthand account of
an apparently dead man being revived
THE WITNESS OF MEDICAL
PROFESSIONALS PUSHES
AGAINST KNEE-JERK
SKEPTICISM ABOUT RAISINGS.
through prayer, recorded on the day it
occurred, December 25, 1742.
Most early 20th-century testimo-
nies are impossible to verify today, but
occasionally some evidence remains.
For example, in 1907, one year after the
beginning of the early Pentecostal Azusa
Street Revival, the revival’s newspaper
The Apostolic Faith reported the raising
of one Eula Wilson, whose blindness was
also healed in the process.
I was initially skeptical, but The
Apostolic Faith cited its source, The Naz-
arene Messenger, another newspaper
that recounted the same story but left
out the healing from blindness. My first
instinct was to suppose that The Apos-
tolic Faith was embellishing the initial
report. While such embellishments hap-
pen, in this case The Nazarene Messen-
ger also had a source, The Wichita Eagle.
This report, from within days of the
event itself, included testimony from
the attending physician and included
Wilson’s healing from blindness.
Some recent Western raising reports
have become Christian films, such as
those of Annabel Beam (Miracles from
Heaven) and Baptist minister Don Piper
(90 Minutes in Heaven). Both stories are
inspiring but neither is triumphalistic:
Beam experienced incredible suffer-
ing before her remarkable healing, and
Piper suffered greatly along the road to
recovery. If a testimony is being used
for fundraising or a particular minis-
ter’s glory, caution is the wiser instinct.
But in cases like these, no obvious self-
aggrandizing motive is in view.
JUNE 2019
4/29/19 10:01 AM
 Thérèse (right),
with her mother,
Antoinette
(middle), and
the author’s wife,
Medine (left).
Another raising film, Breakthrough,
released this past Easter. Based on Joyce
Smith’s book The Impossible, the film
recounts the experience of Joyce’s teen-
age son John. Unable to revive John
after the boy drowned, physician Kent
Sutterer had abandoned hope when
John’s desperate mother started pray-
ing. At that moment, John’s heart
restarted. Doctors deemed his subse-
quent full recovery remarkable.
The witness of a medical professional
like Sutterer further pushes against
knee-jerk skepticism about raisings.
Chauncey Crandall, a cardiologist in
West Palm Beach, felt led to pray for a
man who had already been unresponsive
for some 40 minutes. Crandall assumed
the man, Jeff Markin, was beyond help.
Although the death certificate had
been signed and Markin’s extremi-
ties were already turning black, Cran-
dall prayed aloud for Markin. Then
he urged a colleague to shock Markin
with defibrillator paddles one more
time; after the jolt of electricity, Mar-
kin’s heart immediately began beating.
Markin made a full recovery, became a
believer in Christ himself, and now tes-
tifies alongside Crandall to what God
did for him.
This is an impressive story, but it
PHOTO COURTESY OF CRAIG KEENER
has some important context. This was
not the first time Crandall had prayed
for a raising. Previously, his own son,
Chad, died from leukemia. Crandall
prayed in faith for Chad’s raising. Chad
did not revive. In the face of crushing
disappointment, Crandall had to decide
whether to distance himself from God or
6_Keener P46.indd 49
trust him no matter what. He chose the
latter, and so he was ready when God
called him to pray for Markin.
And it’s not just that doctors wit-
ness raisings. Sometimes, they are the
ones raised. On October 24, 2008, Sean
George, head of general medicine at Kal-
goorlie Hospital in Australia, suffered
a fatal heart attack. He was in cardiac
arrest for an hour and 25 minutes and
even flatlined for 37 minutes. His wife,
also a physician, arrived and prayed for
him and, abruptly, his heart restarted.
After recovering, he returned to his
medical practice. George has the full
medical documentation online.
RAISINGS IN AFRICA
RAISINGS IN AFRICA
What about raisings reported outside
the West? Are there credible African
resurrection stories?
Lack of medical facilities in many
locations makes miracles both more
necessary and harder to document. Still,
people in traditional cultures are often
familiar with signs of death, such as rigor
mortis or lack of pulse and respiration,
because they are less insulated from it
than Westerners are. So while we may
not be able to say how dead a person was
in a clinical sense, such cases still seem
significant, whatever the terminology
used to describe them.
One friend I worked with during my
first three summers in Nigeria was Leo
Bawa, a missions researcher who now
holds a PhD from the Oxford Centre for
Mission Studies. When I was conducting
research for a book on miracles, I asked
Bawa if he knew of any. “Not many,” he
replied, before giving me seven pages of
eyewitness accounts.
One experience in particular caught
my eye: In a village where Bawa had
been doing research, some non-Chris-
tian neighbors brought him their dead
child, asking if he could help. He prayed
for a couple of hours and then handed
the child back to them alive. Reasoning
it may have been a misdiagnosed death,
I asked how often he prayed for dead
persons. He said he had done so only one
other time; he prayed for his best friend
after his death, and the friend stayed
dead. In this non-Christian village,
however, Bawa believes God answered
his prayer for the honor of Christ.
Other miracles seem to have hap-
pened without any prayer at all. I know
Timothy Olonade from my time in Nige-
ria, a man who had a prominent scar that
I never asked about. Years after I first
met him, some mutual friends, including
my doctor in Nigeria, told me Olonade’s
story and I followed up with him.
In December 1985, Olonade was
killed in a head-on traffic accident.
After being pronounced dead in the
hospital, he was sent to the morgue.
Hours later, as a worker went in to move
some bodies, he found Olonade mov-
ing. Dumbfounded, the doctor at the
hospital expected that Olonade would
at least have irreparable brain dam-
age. But he fully recovered, something
his maxillofacial surgeon described as
miraculous. Now an Anglican priest,
Olonade is a leader in the Nigerian mis-
sions movement.
Some stories have come to me unbid-
den. I was in an academic meeting with
Ayodeji Adewuya, who has a PhD from
the University of Manchester, when I
shared some global miracle accounts. A
few Western professors in the meeting
understandably questioned me, then
Adewuya stood up and shared his own
experience. His son was pronounced
dead at birth in 1981. After half an
hour of prayer, however, the child was
restored with no brain damage. This
same son now has a master’s degree
from University College of London and
another from Cornell.
My wife is from the Republic of
Congo (the smaller of the two African
countries named Congo) and I’ve inter-
viewed her friends and family with cred-
ible accounts, frequently corroborated
by multiple, independent witnesses.
Take, for instance, the story of Albert
Bissouessoue. A deacon in the Evangeli-
cal Church of Congo, Bissouessoue is my
wife’s brother’s father-in-law. When he
was a school inspector in Etoumbi, in
the north of Congo, people knew him as
a strong Christian. A crowd brought to
his residence a girl’s body, reporting that
she died some eight hours earlier. They
had taken her first to traditional prac-
titioners, who sacrificed animals and
smeared blood on her in vain attempts
49
4/29/19 10:02 AM
 to revive her. After reproaching them
for not coming first to the living God,
Bissouessoue prayed for half an hour,
and the child revived.
As you might expect, this caused
quite a stir in Etoumbi. So, when another
child died, people came looking for Bis-
souessoue. Unfortunately, he was out of
town, so they drafted his wife, Julienne,
to pray. When she prayed, this second
child revived immediately. Julienne
herself was shocked, reporting that God
simply gave her faith in that moment.
When I asked Albert and Julienne if
they had ever prayed for anyone else
who was dead, they reported that these
were the only two occasions. They con-
sider it something special that God was
doing for his witness in that community.
And of course, there is the story from
my own mother-in-law and sister-in-
law, Antoinette and Thérèse. Because
of how well I know them, their story,
more than any other account, forced
me to reconsider my Western cynicism.
THE PLACE OF MIRACLES
THE PLACE OF MIRACLES
The antidote to false miracle claims is
not to reject miracles altogether. We
must take care when we hear of (or even
experience) a miraculous event that we
neither accept all miracles as true nor
dismiss them all as fake. The reality is
much more complex.
But how do we exercise the appro-
priate amount of caution? While no
formula allows us to verify all miracle
stories, I have noticed a pattern.
Fraudulent miracles tend to flour-
ish where they profit their purveyors.
This is what we see in the Lukau story
from South Africa. Yes, some Christians
downplay miracles too much, but others
need to stop exalting them as the highest
ministry or as a sign of divine approval,
especially where leadership and teach-
ing are concerned.
When Paul lists spiritual gifts in 1
Corinthians 12:28, he actually ranks
teaching higher than miracles. The
Greek text of Ephesians 4:11 links pas-
tors with teachers, and the Pastoral
Epistles make teaching ability a pre-
requisite for ministry (1 Tim. 3:2, 2 Tim.
2:24, Titus 1:9). Miracles are nowhere
50 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Keener P46.indd 50
a priest (Mark 1:44), it is appropriate
FRAUDULENT MIRACLES
TEND TO FLOURISH
WHERE THEY PROFIT
THEIR PURVEYORS.
for us to verify miracles when possible.
This way open-minded people who do
not know the witnesses well enough to
take their word for it can still experience
the awe of seeing God at work.
Additional layers of evaluation help.
For example, false teachers often exploit
people for money (Jer. 6:13, Micah 3:11,
2 Pet. 2:3) and tell them whatever they
want to hear (2 Tim. 4:3–4). Jesus
warned us to discern prophets by their
fruits, not by their gifts (Matt. 7:15–23).
What is the outcome of a particular mir-
acle? God’s gifts are good, but their main
purpose is building up Christ’s body,
not our reputations (note 1 Cor. 12–14).
Most of Jesus’ miracles, such as healing
sickness, expelling spirits, and stilling
storms, demonstrated compassion as
well as power.
Moreover, genuine gifts should
honor Jesus (1 Cor. 12:3, 1 John 4:1–
6). The Book of Acts shows that Jesus’
name should get the credit for miracles,
because they attest to his gospel, not
the miracle worker (Acts 3:12–13; 14:3).
Indeed, Scripture offers many exam-
ples of those gifted by God’s Spirit who
a biblical requirement (or necessary were disobeying God, such as Balaam
endorsement) for ministry. Someone and Samson. One of the most striking
might even have a gift of miracles but examples is Saul, who, on an errand
not be a good teacher. One can have to try to kill David, ended up falling
both kinds of gifts (Acts 19:9–12), but down and prophesying. This was not
one does not necessarily entail the other. because Saul was godly, but because
By contrast, credible dramatic signs God’s Spirit was strong in that place (1
are most frequent where the gospel is Sam. 19:20–24).
breaking fresh ground—as in the Gos- Not every claim to a miraculous rais-
pels and Acts. In these situations, the ing today is authentic. Everywhere in
miracles tend to advance the cause of the world, most people who die stay
faith, not the will or needs of a partic- dead. Even those resuscitated mirac-
ular person or group. Miracles are a ulously, such as Lazarus, die again; all
wonderful foretaste of the coming king- healing in our mortal bodies is by defi-
dom. Thus Jesus’ exorcisms revealed the nition temporary. Such miracles do,
kingdom’s nearness (Luke 11:20), and however, remind us that Jesus Christ,
Jesus describes his healings in language who raised the dead during his earthly
that invokes Isaiah’s description of the ministry, is the risen and exalted Lord.
ultimate restoration (Luke 7:22). Never- Sometimes he continues to grant signs
theless, the kingdom’s fullness remains of the future, reminders of the resurrec-
future. Even genuine gifts are limited: tion hope that in him awaits us all.
Paul says that we know in part, and we
prophesy in part (1 Cor. 13:9). CRAIG KEENER is F. M. and Ada Thomp-
When God acts in our lives, we should son Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury
testify about it, but when possible we Theological Seminary. His most recent book
should also offer verification. If Jesus is Galatians: A Commentary from the New
urged a leper to follow the scriptural Cambridge Bible Commentaries series
prescription to verify his healing with (Baker Academic, 2019).
JUNE 2019
4/29/19 10:02 AM
 15 MINDDBLOWING STATISTICS ABOUT
PORNOGRAPHY AND THE CHURCH
Statistics reveal that the rapid spread of
pornography cannot be ignored. But it is not
just a problem affecting men. Women,
teenagers, and children are also being caught
in the web of pornography at alarming rates.
Many Christians may assume that the
church is immune. They see the smiling
faces of the people who attend their church.
“Certainly, such godly folks could not be
viewing pornography.”
Bu many studies and reports have come
But
out over the last several years that show
quite a disturbing picture. Not only has
pornography invaded churches, but in
many cases, the statistics show that
Christians – and even church pastors –
engage in viewing porn at almost the same
ra as the secular population.
rates
What The Numbers Show
56% of American divorces
involve one party having an
7 “obsessive interest” in
pornographic websites.
70% of Christian youth pastors
report that they have had at least
8 one teen come to them for help
in dealing with pornography in
the past 12 months.
68% of church-going men and
over 50% of pastors view porn
9 on a regular basis. Of young
Christian adults 18-24 years old,
76% actively search for porn.
59% of pastors said that
10 married men seek their help
for porn use.
33% of women aged
The next step is to put a program and
process in place. A Barna study revealed that
93% of pastors see porn as an increasing
problem in the church, but only 7% have any
plan to deal with it. Talking about the issue in
a sermon series is a start, but in order for real
healing to take place there needs to be
on
ongoing discipleship on this subject.
A Powerful Weapon Against Pornography
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The research studies, primarily by the Barna

Group and Covenant Eyes, reveal that initial
exposure to porn begins in childhood and
progresses.
Access to porn is increasingly easy due to the
internet and wide variety of formats now
available, such as printed materials, DVDs,
television, and more.
Let’s look at some data to see the scope and
effects of porn in society and the church.
Over 40 million Americans are
regular visitors to porn sites. The
1 average visit lasts 6 minutes and
29 seconds
11 25-and-under search for porn
at least once per month.
If you’re struggling with porn, or know
someone who is, then order the Conquer
Only 13% of self identi ed Series. Use it in your men’s small group. If
Christian women say they you think it wasn’t worth the investment,
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55% of married men and 25% Help your church set a new statistic of men
13 of married women say they watch
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57% of pastors say porn and the Film Director of the Conquer Series.
addiction is the most damaging
14 issue in their congregation. And
69% say porn has adversely
impacted the church.
15

There are around 42 million Only 7% of pastors say

2 porn websites, which totals
around 370 million pages of porn.
The porn industry’s annual
revenue is more than the NFL,
3 NBA, and MLB combined. It is
also more than the combined
revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.
47% of families in the United
4 States reported that pornography
is a problem in their home.
Pornography use increases the
5 marital in delity rate by more
than 300%.
Eleven is the average age that a
child is rst exposed to porn, and
6 94% of children will see porn by
the age of 14.
their church has a program
to help people struggling
with pornography.
So What Should We Do?
These statistics can be overwhelming.
The fact that pornography has such a
tight grip on our society does not mean
the church is helpless to ght against it.
Instead, Christian leaders must stand up
and lead their churches through the battle.
First, leaders must be willing to admit the
problem exists in their churches. You can’t
treat a disease until you know it’s there.
Realize that the disease of pornography is
growing within your church’s body.

CT/LE_FP.indd 1 4/24/19 1:13 PM

 SCIENCE

BY E L I J. K N A P P
I L LU ST R AT I O N BY M A L L O RY R E N T S C H

52 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M JUNE 2019

6_Knapp P52.indd 52 5/2/19 9:31 AM

 TO

T H E A N I M A L S,

T H E P OA C H E R S

A C H R I S T I A N A P P R OA C H T O
W I L D L I F E C O N S E RVAT I O N
S TA RT S W I T H P E O P L E .

6_Knapp P52.indd 53 5/2/19 9:32 AM


W
We sat in the slivered shade of the aca-
cia tree outside of Serengeti National
Park. Deus, a 30-something Lutheran
pastor, used a stick in the sand to tally
the income he generated per month
from poaching. He paused after drawing
an equal sign. “I preach in church every
week,” he said, smiling. “Except when
I’m hunting, of course.”
“Church?” I asked. “Doesn’t your
denomination see poaching as sin?”
“Oh no,” he replied. “God gives us
every animal.”
I stared at him, and he sensed my
unease at his benediction of an illegal
activity. “Don’t worry,” he said, patting
my knee reassuringly. “I pray over every
animal I kill. I thank God for each and
every one.”
Of course, I knew that God loved the
world, but it dawned on me then that
Deus’s comment exemplified Thomas
Moore’s simple idea in Care of the Soul.
“If you don’t love things in particu-
lar, you cannot love the world,” Moore
wrote, “because the world doesn’t exist
except in individual things.”
I was idealistic when I met Deus
during my research on human-wildlife
interactions in 2007, and the particular
thing I loved was wilderness—one unen-
croached on by poachers. John Muir
and Henry David Thoreau’s wilderness:
large landscapes unspoiled by human
habitation and development. Places
to escape to, to unclutter the mind and
rejuvenate. Jesus valued wilderness, I
54 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Knapp P52.indd 54
“ I P R AY OV E R E V E RY
ANIMAL I KILL. I THANK
G O D FO R E A C H A N D
E V E RY O N E .”
LU T H E R A N PA S T O R A N D P OA C H E R
reasoned, seeking it out on several occa-
sions. So as a grad student in my mid-
20s, I sought it out myself in Tanzania,
embarking on a research expedition in
the unspoiled wilderness of sub-Saha-
ran Africa.
EVERYBODY POACHES
When I first began interviewing sub-
jects four years earlier, I asked a village
chairman if I could interview poachers.
He chortled and said, “Nobody poaches!
So how can you find them to interview?”
Without poachers to interview,
I settled on agriculturalists. For this,
he assigned me a guide named Ken-
yatta and sent us off with a wave. Out
of earshot of the chairman, I turned to
Kenyatta. “When did people stop poach-
ing?” I asked.
“Stop poaching?” he said. “They hav-
en’t. Everybody poaches.”
“But the chairman said . . .”
“Everybody poaches,” he repeated,
his eyes twinkling. “Even me.”
Two hours later, my first respondent,
Juma, who boasted a decade of hunting
experience, was upending prior assump-
tions I’d held. For starters, he helped me
to see that poaching isn’t some reckless,
irrational activity.
The rationality of poaching is simple.
Juma’s great-grandfather hunted. His
grandfather hunted. His father hunted.
For much of this time, legality was a
JUNE 2019
moot issue; bushmeat harvesting was
widespread in and around what would
eventually become Serengeti National
Park. A vast commons surrounded
Juma’s village, bursting with more than
a million wildebeest and almost half
as many zebra. Locals supplemented
crops—corn, millet, and cassava—with
wild-caught game. Neighbors in other
villages sought ivory as a means to put
food on the table.
Then the preservationists swept in—
first the British colonial government in
the early 20th century, then later the
Tanzanian government. Authorities
appropriated village land and restricted
villagers’ activities. Grazing, firewood
collection, and hunting were limited.
Restrictions tightened over the decades.
Livelihood options were slowly taken
away and no alternatives were added.
After the park’s official establish-
ment in 1951, elephants could leave the
protected area to eat or trample Juma’s
crops just outside the park. It left him
without recourse—or food. From Juma’s
perspective, and that of most of the vil-
lagers now squeezed outside the newly
formed Serengeti Park, the govern-
ment’s actions seemed, well, arbitrary.
AMERICA’S BEST IDEA
This simplified account fits into a larger
arc: the creation of national parks in gen-
eral. When Serengeti was designated, it
5/6/19 8:25 AM
 was the first one in Tanzania. Now there
are 16. Many of them have involved forc-
ible relocations, or, as in Juma’s case,
the appropriation of hunting land. The
plight of such people—called “conserva-
tion refugees”—has long been ignored,
according to journalist Mark Dowie.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to Africa,
nor did it start there. It traces back to
1872 with the creation of Yellowstone
National Park.
Like many Americans, I grew up
believing an ethnocentric myth that
Yellowstone was the world’s first. In fact,
Bogd Khan Mountain National Park in
Mongolia was. Bogd Khan was first pro-
tected in 1778, nearly 100 years before
Yellowstone. Other evidence suggests
protected areas went back even further,
one as early as 1294. The Yellowstone
myth I learned is popularly traced to
painter George Catlin. In the 1830s,
Catlin traversed the American West tell-
ing everybody he came across about the
government’s prerogative to preserve:
in their pristine beauty and wildness
. . . where the world could see for
ages to come, the native Indian in
his classic attire, galloping his wild
horse . . . amid the fleeting herds
of elks and buffalos. [This could
become a] nation’s Park containing
man and beast, in all the wild fresh-
ness of their nature’s beauty.
The Catlin origin story proved a far
more captivating tale that fit the nation’s
desire to find features portraying its
greatness. It froze Native Americans in
time and space, ignoring their vast local
knowledge. Paternalistic? Yes. But the
Catlin story took root, finding its way
into some of the most popular conser-
vation literature. History professor and
influential environmentalist Roder-
ick Nash equated national parks with
progress, propping them up as “Amer-
ica’s best idea” in a seminal 1967 book
6_Knapp P52.indd 55
about wilderness—an expression later
coined by Wallace Stegner. The rest of
the world quickly caught on, argued
Nash, especially in the latter half of the
20th century. Today, more than 100,000
protected areas exist, covering nearly
12 percent of the world’s land surface.
National parks are easy to champion.
Setting land aside “for the benefit and
enjoyment of the people” is a demo-
cratic-sounding mission. But irony lies
behind Catlin’s vision, too. To him, parks
were a modern Garden of Eden, but their
rapid worldwide spread occurred in the
context of European colonialism. The
prevailing mindset reflected the inter-
ests of a narrow group of Western elites
rather than local people living in or near
the places being conserved.
Although Catlin wanted people in his
parks, many folks—both in Catlin’s time
and today—believe this is an oxymoron,
that pristine beauty is sacrificed the sec-
ond people show up. At the headwaters
of this thinking, Thoreau prescribed
nature as a remedy to the ills of ever-
encroaching civilization. He advocated
for large expanses of nature to be sealed
off from development. If people are
allowed into such areas, it should only
be as tourists. “In wildness is the pres-
ervation of the world,” Thoreau wrote.
Wilderness adherents appropriated
their patron saint’s words; all landscapes
that included people were viewed as less
valuable, sullied even.
 for Christians hasn’t been very clearly
Much of the world, of course, has
people. Ignoring peopled landscapes
and all their attendant biodiversity is
myopic. This, said environmental his-
torian William Cronon, “is the trouble
with wilderness.”
Creating a park on paper isn’t
enough. Ironically, to empty a place of
people and to keep others out requires
the actions of large numbers of peo-
ple—powerful people. After Yellowstone
was designated, wanton slaughter of
bison and elk continued apace. It took
the arrival of the US Army to stop the
carnage. Laws and enforcement were
needed, leading to the creation of the
National Park Service in 1916.
Calls for vigorous defense in the
face of relentless human encroachment
continue. In his 2004 book, ecologist
John Terborgh called for an interna-
tional conservation fund and policing
force to protect the world’s parks. This
force should carry arms, make arrests,
and provide a final defense against the
incoming tide of humanity. Parks, for
nature protectors like Terborgh, are a
clear and impassable “line in the sand.”
A THEOCENTRIC ETHIC
The supposed conservation ethic of
Christians has been accused of grave
harm. In 1967, the historian Lynn White
Jr. wrote a five-page essay in the journal
Science in which he declared unequivo-
cally: “Christianity is the most anthro-
pocentric religion the world has ever
seen.” White saw Christianity as the
cause of the world’s ecological crisis.
Like Catlin’s words perpetuated the
Yellowstone myth, White’s simple the-
sis resonated with the secular late-’60s
ethos. It spread as quickly, soon appear-
ing as standard fare in ecological text-
books across the country.
But in fact, a conservation ethic
defined. Like many Christians who have
read White’s article, I felt defensive. But
it also got me thinking. If Christianity
isn’t anthropocentric, what is it? Yes,
Genesis sets humans in nature. But it
also sets them apart. Fred Van Dyke,
director of the Au Sable Institute of
Environmental Studies, offers a better
alternative to White’s accusation. Actu-
ally, Van Dyke suggests, a Christian ethic
is theocentric: God is the center, not
humans or nature.
To this idea, contemporary writer
55
5/6/19 8:26 AM
 A. J. Swoboda adds his own framework
for biblically grounded creation care.
“Theology is centered on God’s image in
humanity,” Swoboda writes, “and God’s
cultural mandate to humanity as stew-
ards of his creation.”
On one of Swoboda’s recent tours, I
invited him to speak in my conservation
biology class at Houghton College. “Cre-
ation care,” he stated, “is not about polar
bears. It’s about the poor.” Swoboda is
right; the tendency—even among con-
temporary conservationists—to exclude
local people from nature is strong.
His axiom is backed by many recent
actions. In Dowie’s reporting on con-
servation refugees, he focuses on the
Batwe of Uganda, whose ancestral home
is the forests of three national parks
that feature the charismatic silverback
gorilla. In the 1990s, once the World
Bank began funding conservation, the
tribe was forcibly removed under pres-
sure from Western conservationists,
who suspected that they were poaching
(the tribe, which feels kinship with the
gorilla, insists it was not).
Before I interviewed my first poacher,
I attended a conference in 2003 of about
50 scientists in Serengeti National Park,
gathered with the aim of conserving
the park more effectively. At the con-
cluding session, I sat in the back, one
of four wide-eyed graduate students,
madly scribbling notes in my journal.
The researcher Craig Packer stood up
and drew a diagram, a large flattened
X, separating the human and natu-
ral worlds. At the X’s center, he wrote
my name, announcing to the audience
that I would be studying the intersec-
tion between the human and natural
worlds. I copied the diagram carefully,
flattered to feel so central in such an
important endeavor.
My enthusiasm didn’t last long. On
the way back to our lodge, my doctoral
adviser slid into my seat on the minibus.
“Did you take notes on that meeting?”
she asked gravely.
“Yes,” I said, somewhat proudly.
“Let me see your notes,” she
demanded. I fished the small notebook
out of my pocket and handed it to her.
Pulling a pen from her handbag, she
56 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Knapp P52.indd 56
scribbled out the diagram and drew
a large circle on the facing page. In it
she wrote two words, humans and
nature. “This is how the world works,”
she said, handing my notebook back.
“It’s all one system.”
Suddenly, the full truth of “God so
loved the world” from John 3:16 snapped
into focus, at least as it related to the
wilds of sub-Saharan Africa all around
me. “There is no natural world,” author
David Quammen wrote recently. “There
is only the world.”
Theologian Sallie McFague points to
the incarnation as the example of how
much God loved the world—he became
a part of it. “But now it takes on new
meaning and depth as we realize the
radical interrelationship and interde-
pendence of all forms of life,” she said.
“In sum, we are not called to love God
or the world. Rather, we are called to
love God in the world. We love God by
loving the world. We love God through
and with the world. But this turns out to
be a kenotic, a sacrificial love.”
If a Christian ethic of conservation
is theocentric, then it starts with what
God loves. To protect creation, we must
find a way to protect the image-bearers
who steward it. Conservation is about
people, touts a well-known axiom. It’s
about the poor.
WALKING WITH THE POOR
To love the poor as God does, we must
care enough to know them. Few people
have modeled this better than anthro-
pologist and physician Seth Holmes,
who wrote a book detailing how he
walked with migrant workers to under-
stand why they risk so much to enter the
United States.
After building trust with migrant
workers, Holmes traveled with them
on their hazardous journey north from
Mexico to the US, even being arrested
and detained alongside them. Along the
way, he discovered the power of pov-
erty—how it can drive people to take
inordinate risks. Holmes described
what he saw as structural violence, vio-
lence that arises from social inequalities
JUNE 2019
that have “injurious effects on bodies
similar to the violence of a stabbing or
shooting.” Similarly, when we fail to
recognize these inequalities, or when
we dismiss them as “natural,” we com-
mit what Holmes and others call sym-
bolic violence.
When I started my research on
poachers, I lacked Holmes’s tenacity
and the helpful concepts of structural
and symbolic violence. But Holmes’s
portrayal of real lives to illustrate the
relevance of these concepts now gives
meaning to my own learning experience.
After 418 two-hour interviews, I
began to construct a story of the liveli-
hood difficulties faced by the people liv-
ing along the margins of Serengeti. My
relationship with Kenyatta deepened
until, eventually, he became my lucky
break: a key informant willing to bring
his fellow poachers in to talk.
He had me follow a map drawn on a
napkin to arrive at a nondescript loca-
tion under an old acacia tree. I’d need
help finding the road again, but that
didn’t matter now. Just as Kenyatta
predicted, sinewy men in faded trousers
and flip-flops emerged from the sur-
rounding scrub and we got acquainted.
With my knees near my chin and a clip-
board in my lap, these men schooled me
in the harsh social realities that Holmes
defined as structural violence.
Questions were hardly necessary;
stories followed stories. I wrote con-
stantly, my hands cramping, filling the
margins of my questionnaires and flip-
ping them over for more space. Some-
times I interrupted my respondents.
I needed quantities, durations, and
extent. I constructed household econ-
omies, categorized their hunting strat-
egies and discerned their motivations.
Tediously I plumbed their memories
for the species they killed, the amounts
for which they sold them, and the times
they’d been caught. Sometimes I’d put
my pen down, enthralled.
Contrary to accounts that portray
poachers as eager lawbreakers bent on
profit, the guys I conversed with embod-
ied reluctance. Poaching was hard. To
evade patrols, they entered the park
at night, overlapping their schedules
5/6/19 8:26 AM

P E O P L E P OA C H E D
N O T B E CAU S E
T H E Y WA N T E D
T O, B U T B E CAU S E
T H E Y H A D T O.
with those of lions, leopards, elephants,
hippo, and buffalo. Their flashlights, if
they could afford batteries, were ineffec-
tual. Flip-flops were the only protection
from snakes and scorpions. They hunted
with wire snares. Sometimes lions and
leopards became inadvertently trapped.
If they weren’t caught themselves, they
were often nearby, hoping to dispatch
one of the dying animals that was.
If a poacher successfully killed an
animal, they butchered and smoked
it, hoping the smoke wouldn’t attract
park rangers. If luck held, they hauled
heavy loads of meat out of the park
and began discreetly distributing it. If
detected, they’d run, leaving their hard-
earned meat. Usually they outran their
pursuers, hiding in dense mosquito-
ridden thickets, or worse, in rivers with
hippos and crocodiles. If caught, they
faced fines. If they couldn’t pay, prison.
If locked up and deprived of meat and
income, a poacher’s family faced even
leaner months ahead.
People poached not because they
wanted to, but because they had to. Job-
less and with mouths to feed, these were
the configurations of social inequalities
created by misguided colonialism and
poor government policies—similar to
the structural violence that Holmes
found with his migrant workers. Had
I divorced the human and the natural
worlds and focused only on arrests and
carcass counts, I would have missed it.
Even research, I realized, has lots of
room for symbolic violence—our failure
to notice inequality.
6_Knapp P52.indd 57
Living out a holistic Christian ethic
to conservation required time. Time
for storytelling. After weeks of listen-
ing, a theme emerged. All 104 poach-
ers I spoke with were unequivocal: If
they had any other source of income or
employment, they would stop poaching
immediately.
THE SOLUTION
ISN’T MINE
Since completing my research, I’ve
entered tens of thousands of data
points, published half a dozen papers,
and thrown every statistical test I can at
the poaching problem. I’ve championed
the causes of employment and develop-
ment, led subsequent research endeav-
ors with squadrons of my own college
students and quibbled endlessly with
other scholars about the merits of my,
and other, Western interventions. As a
researcher, I continue to probe for more
data, ever hopeful to tease out meaning-
ful patterns and solutions.
However, within my field, the num-
ber of issues and their intractability can
easily feel overwhelming. Sovereignty
issues in Bear’s Ears, pipeline conflicts
in Standing Rock, oil exploration on
federal lands, ranchers’ rights in Chile,
rising seas affecting the Sami reindeer
herders. The list is long.
However, the longer I study, the
leerier I’m becoming of solutions, espe-
cially simplistic interventions with pat
answers. I’ve read and assigned Garrett
Hardin’s classic essay Tragedy of the
Commons countless times, but only
recently did I realize the profundity
of his rarely mentioned subtitle. “The
population problem has no technical
solution,” he wrote. “It requires a fun-
damental extension in morality.”
Buried within the essay is a short
paragraph on the game of tic-tac-toe.
If both players understand the rules,
there is no technical solution to the
game. You cannot win. Hardin sug-
gests that winning can only occur by
hitting an opponent over the head or
drugging them.
I’m convinced that conservation
around national parks resembles tic-
tac-toe. In the past we’ve been perfectly
willing to clobber our opponents—local
people. Yet today, when the stakes are
just as high, we’re abandoning the game
or refusing to play altogether.
What I’ve grown more confident in
is my theocentric ethic. I know one day
God will make all things new (Rev. 21:5).
His purposes for his creation will be
accomplished, addressing the systems
that perpetrate violence today against
people like poachers in Tanzania, as
well as the threatened wildlife suffer-
ing from poor stewardship. This is the
ultimate solution.
For now, Hardin’s “fundamental
extension in morality” seems apt—we
cannot abandon the game. Leaning into
a theocentric ethic, we work knowing
that a change in human values and per-
spective is more vital than any “solu-
tion” stemming from the sciences.
Wherever my research goes and no
matter how much I love wildlife and
wilderness, I’m reminded of the face of
Deus, the devout Lutheran pastor who
poached as fervently as he preached.
While I must start with what God loves—
particular poachers and the particular
animals they hunt—I remember that
Deus’s visage is embedded within a
grand landscape. It’s all one world.
ELI KNAPP is an assistant professor of
intercultural studies, biology, and earth
science at Houghton College. He directs
the Houghton-East Africa study abroad
program and recently published The
Delightful Horror of Family Birding.
57
5/6/19 8:27 AM
 DISCIPLESHIP

58 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M JUNE 2019

6_Galli P58.indd 58 4/29/19 9:31 AM

 G
N
I
T

I
L
L
S

A
G
A

K
R
A
L

M
E

Y
E

B
R

R
H

I
T

S
E

E
D

W
H
C Y
O T
IS M H
M E
A A G
IM W N R
D E
P O M A
O N E T
S D N E
S E T S
IB R T
IL F
U
IT L
Y
.

I
n our current cultural climate, when
people think about the church, they
tend to think of it as a human institu-
tion whose chief object is the love of
neighbor. Some Christians are seen as
activists of the socialist variety. Pente-
ID

costals are said to advocate a health and wealth

E
R

gospel. Conservative white evangelicals are

N
E
K

seen in purely political terms now, as one of

C
E

the worst parts of the Republican party. In each

R
B
IA

case, the subset of the church is seen as promot-

L
JU

ing an agenda that is about human flourishing.

Y
B

Sometimes that flourishing looks like a socialist

N
IO

utopia, in other cases a libertarian one where

T
A

government “intrusion” is absent. Sometimes

R
ST

it’s about maximizing material prosperity, at

LU
IL

other times championing the simple life.

59

6_Galli P58.indd 59 4/29/19 9:31 AM

 My impression gained over a lifetime of observation is
that few think first and foremost about Christians as people
who, more than anything else, are utterly and completely
devoted to God. The reasons for that are complex, but one is
because something fundamental has gone awry in American
Christianity. It was summed up by the great novelist Alex-
ander Solzhenitsyn decades ago. He named the problem in
his speech upon receiving the Templeton Prize in Religion
in 1983. He was talking about Western culture when he used
it, but I believe it also applies to the American church: We
have forgotten God.
Rather than try to prove that here (I try to do so in an
online series “The Elusive Presence”), let me outline what
it looks like for a people to remember God, or more particu-
larly, to desire God above everything else, a desire so intense
it sometimes looks like drunkenness or even madness. That
description alone should suggest by way of contrast how much
we have forgotten.
DESIRE FROM BEGINNING TO END
The most vivid example of desire for God is King David. David
was known as a man of action, a military leader, a nation’s
king, someone busy with the affairs of state. But the charac-
teristic that seems to have earned him the label “a man after
God’s own heart” (Acts 13:22) was the fact that he sought God
with all his heart:
You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.
I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you. (Ps. 63:1–3)
Other examples abound. But David isn’t the only psalmist
to yearn for God’s palpable presence. Psalm 42 was written by
a descendant “of Korah” and famously begins:
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. (vv. 1–2)
The psalmists were driven by a desire to know God. Not
just do his will. Not just to be wise or righteous. But to know
God, to be with God, to bask in his presence.
Persons of a stoic nature, like me, are tempted to assume
such passion is only for highly emotional personalities.
Frankly, at times, David and the other psalmists seem like
emotional wrecks, either lamenting their sorry state or beg-
ging desperately for divine aid or longing passionately for God.
My instinct is to tell them to chill out.
60 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M JUNE 2019
6_Galli P58.indd 60
In fact, this over-the-top passion to know and love God is
found so often in Scripture that it makes me doubt my sto-
icism. We see it also in Isaiah the prophet: “My soul yearns for
you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you” (26:9).
We see it in Paul:
Everything else is worthless when compared with the
infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake
I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage,
so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. (Phil.
3:8–9, NLT)
And we see it in Jesus’ life and ministry, not in yearning to
be one with God (that would be absurd for the one in whom
God fully dwelled) but in his teaching, especially in what he
said was the greatest commandment: “Love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). That pretty
much covers the emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental
landscape of human life.
To put it another way, Jesus tells us we are to be mono-
maniacs for God.
People like me—who strive to keep emotions in check, to
navigate life on an even keel, to take things in stride—try to
squirm out of this by saying that this first and greatest com-
mandment is merely about obeying God’s commands. We
demonstrate our love for him by doing what he commands, like
caring for others in practical ways. Doing favors for friends,
listening attentively to a troubled coworker, serving at the food
pantry, and maybe even standing in a prayer vigil at an abor-
tion clinic or joining a protest march against racial injustice.
Doing stuff that helps others—that’s what it means to love God.
That’s certainly part of it. But here’s the rub: Jesus didn’t
say that loving our neighbor is the way we show we love God.
He said the first commandment is to love God, and then he
announced a second commandment—as if it were in a differ-
ent category—to love others. This was not a commentary on
the first commandment.
Add to that the unique character of the first commandment.
There is something extraordinary about the love of God: We’re
commanded to love God with the complete range of emotion,
with the full measure of spiritual fervor, with unending intel-
lectual effort, and with every calorie of energy.
Jesus, as was his custom, is trafficking in hyperbole, because
if we were to love God like this we wouldn’t have anything
left for the neighbor. But the point is made. Jesus is simply
putting into command form the passion eloquently found in
the Psalms: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has
nothing I desire besides you” (73:25). This is the deep and
abiding desire he calls us to pursue.
STA RV I N G FO R G O D
Scripture employs a variety of metaphors to drive home the
intensity of this desire. One set traffics in the idea of bodily
nourishment—hunger and thirst.
4/30/19 11:45 AM
 to sustain, nurture, and become one with us. And if we want
such an intimate and life-sustaining union, we will hunger
IS
O D and thirst for it like nothing else.
G Most of us reading such words live in lands of abundance,
O R G
F IN so the biblical metaphor does not quite register. Our pangs
R E L L of hunger needn’t last but for a few minutes. Within ready
E SI FA HE
D E T reach—in a refrigerator or store or vending machine—is some-
K
E LI RE E thing to nourish us. Hunger for us is mere inconvenience, and
TH U N H E S IR food an entertainment. We watch reality TV shows that revel
T
E,
W DE TO
NO V C K T .
in the abundance of food and in the creativity of chefs, and
LO RU BU ED some of us pride ourselves in being “foodies.”
I N S T S E V
E- EL O The biblical writers knew little of the affluence we enjoy.
V G B EL It was not uncommon for them to endure periods of drought
L O N E
T HI TH
or famine. They would much more likely identify with the
NO IT
H sufferers of modern-day famines. In Love, Poverty, and War,
W British author Christopher Hitchens describes one such fam-
BE ine on a trip to North Korea:

In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of

We see this first in the Exodus account, where Moses drives
home one lesson from the miracle of manna:
He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding
you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had
known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone
but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
(Deut. 8:3)
This is the very verse Jesus quotes when tempted by Satan
to break his fast. On another occasion, he was explaining to a
crowd that in the desert his Father was responsible for feeding
the Israelites with bread from heaven, but he now he offers
“the true bread from heaven.”
To this his listeners reply, “Give us that bread every day.”
In response, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. Whoever
comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me
will never be thirsty” (John 6:35).
When his listeners became increasingly disturbed by this
teaching, Jesus only doubled down, saying something that no
doubt shocked them:
Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of
Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. . . . For my
flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats
my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.
(vv. 53, 55–56)
rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look
pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in
the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read
the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the
coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as
‘duck.’ One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew,
which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn’t tell me
the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished
by the realization that I hadn’t seen a domestic animal, not
even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there.
The psalmist, among others, believes he is starved and
dehydrated without God, one whose bones suck on his skin and
expose his skeleton, whose listlessness fuels his despair, who
scours the ground for even a single grain of rice. The psalm-
ist so desires to know God and his love—and here’s where the
nourishment metaphor is ironically transcended—that he
says it is better than life itself (Ps. 63:3).
THE ROMANCE OF GOD
Romantic love is another biblical metaphor about desire for
God. We usually think of Song of Solomon as a celebration
of romantic love between a man and a woman, as well we
should. But for centuries, the church has also rightly under-
stood romantic love as a symbol of the love between God and
his people—for example, Bernard of Clairvaux published 86
sermons on this biblical book on just this theme.
Bernard came by this interpretation honestly and bibli-
cally. Perhaps the most well-known use of the metaphor is
found in the apostle Paul’s discussion of marital love, saying
that in some ways it pictures the love between God and us:

It is a violent, frankly cannibalistic allusion meant to shock “For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and
them into a deeper reality—the intense and personal nature of be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”
our union with God. As much as food and drink nourish and This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ
sustain us and become part of our bodies, so Jesus is needed and the church. (Eph. 5:31–32)

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 And he uses the metaphor elsewhere, as well: “I am jeal- In short, the desire for God is not unlike falling in love,
ous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one hus- where the love-struck desire nothing else but to be with the
band, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin beloved. It’s like the physical passion young lovers feel for
to him” (2 Cor. 11:2). one another. And it’s like the ecstasy of sexual union that
Paul came by this metaphor honestly as well, drawing on momentarily satisfies ever so deeply, but before long grows
the many Old Testament passages that pictured Israel as the into a desire to know the ecstasy again.
bride and God as the bridegroom. Take, for example, this from
the prophet Isaiah:
D E S I R E T H AT N E V E R E N D S
For your Maker is your husband—
the Lord Almighty is his name— Bernard is one of many proto-evangelicals in his emphasis
the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; on the personal, intimate, and passionate relationship we
he is called the God of all the earth. can have with God. As he put it in On Loving God: “He is all
The Lord will call you back that I need, all that I long for. My God and my help, I will love
as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit— Thee for Thy great goodness; not so much as I might, surely,
a wife who married young, but as much as I can.”
only to be rejected,” says your God. (54:5–6) Many a saint has experienced this reality, if not in a direct,
overwhelming vision, certainly in some encounter that they
Perhaps the most famous and extended use of the meta- can never shake. They can never shake it because of the second
phor comes from Hosea: reality that accompanies an encounter with the living God—
its insatiableness. In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis talked about
I will betroth you to me forever, such an experience as an encounter with joy.
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
in love and compassion. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation
I will betroth you in faithfulness, which came over me. . . . It was a sensation, of course, of
and you will acknowledge the Lord. (2:19–20) desire; but desire for what? . . . An unsatisfied desire which
is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it
Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply dis-
tinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my
sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in com-
mon with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced
AN it will want it again.
EN
W CO
IT UN The cardinal mistake in some evangelism is telling peo-
H TE ple that knowing God will bring them peace. Yes, in the sense
US GO
NO D R of knowing forgiveness and purpose in life. But in a deeper
SA T B RI sense, an encounter with God brings us not only satisfaction
TI ON NG
SF LY S but also deep dissatisfaction, not just fulfillment but also long-
BU AC ing, and a longing that can never be fulfilled. In Revelations
T TI
DI AL ON of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich said, “If he graciously lets
SS S O us see something of himself, then we are moved by the same
AT DE
NO IS EP grace to seek with a great longing to see him more fully.” She
T FA then puts it succinctly: “I saw him and I sought him, I had him
FU J US CT
IO and I wanted him.”
LF T
IL N, We are longing for the infinite, for that which all other
AL LM
SO EN
desires only point. And when our desires are fulfilled, how-
A LO T ever briefly, we recognize how much more there is in God’s
LO NG BU beauty and wonder and love. We can never exhaust its won-
CA N G I N T
N IN G, der and glory—and for that very reason it is the most precious
NE G AN of longings.
BE TH D
VE A Again, a person like me is tempted to say that longing is
FU R T
LF given only to a few highly spiritual people. They have a unique
IL desire for God as such, but most of us desire concrete reali-
LE
D. ties and have special passions for, perhaps, food and drink,
or romance and love, or fine music or fine art, or to be in the
splendor of creation. To each his own. This spiritual passion
isn’t for everybody.

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 And yet Jesus says it is, in that he commands that we all
pursue the love of God and pursue it the fullest extent. This,
like all commands, is not as much a “should” as it is a promise:
Do this, and you shall live. Really live.
In our restlessness, we flit from one thing to another as
we follow our desires, hoping against hope to find something,
anything that will satisfy our longings. Everything we pursue—
financial security, love, fulfillment in a calling, the joy of a hobby
or pastime, and so forth—are mere pointers to something more
true, more good, and more beautiful. We remain restless pre-
cisely because we mistake these shadows for the real thing,
when they are but signposts to our ultimate destination.
At our worst, we make idols out of the penultimate things
we desire. At our most innocent, we are like confused travel-
ers who rejoice in reaching a milestone as if we’ve arrived at
our glorious destination. In either case, there is something
better that awaits us. The great Augustine, in reflecting on his
youth, said, “I sought pleasure, nobility, and truth not in God
but in the beings He had created, myself and others. Thus I
fell into sorrow and confusion and error. Thanks be to Thee,
my Joy and my Glory and my Hope and my God: Thanks be
to Thee for thy gifts.”
In commenting on this, Augustine scholar Michael Foley
noted that this passage outlines Augustine’s theology of desire:
“The appetite for physical pleasure is ultimately a groaning for
happiness in God, and thus the attempt to satisfy it with cre-
ated goods instead of the Creator ends in sorrow rather than
BY THE TRUTH
C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M / B I B L E S T U D I E S
6_Galli P58.indd 63
joy.” The same applies to the yearning for nobility and truth.
Thus there is no one who is not “into God,” so to speak. The
only thing at issue is whether we are aware of what our desires
are for and where they are designed to lead us. As Augustine
famously and succinctly put it, “Our hearts are restless until
they find their rest in thee.”
To desire God—this is the sum and substance of life. It’s
not just one injunction of many, but the greatest command-
ment. It’s not merely a duty to fulfill but the fulfillment of life
itself—to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind,
and all our strength. There is no greater blessing than to give
oneself to this pursuit, and to enjoy the everlasting longing
it produces in us. This is what the Westminster Catechism
is getting at when it says that the chief purpose of men and
women is “to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.”
So the psalmist is not neurotic or an emotional wreck, but
the sanest of human creatures. If it is a mental illness, then let
us all share in it. The church is not only a hospital for sinners
or headquarters for social activism. More than anything else,
it is an asylum for those disturbed saints who are monomani-
acs for God, who want nothing but to seek after him, knowing
full well that the pursuit will never end and yet knowing too
that there is nothing better to do with one’s life—“I saw him
and I sought him, I had him and I wanted him.”
MARK GALLI is editor in chief of Christianity Today. For more on
this theme, visit morect.com/theelusivepresence.
BE TRANSFORMED
5/1/19 10:30 AM
 C T I N T E RV I E W

FA I T H T H R O U G H

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G H T H E T I A N A N M E N G AT E

THIRTY YEARS AFTER

T H E D E A D LY M A S S A C R E ,

TWO DISSIDENTS REFLECT

ON HOPE FOR CHINA.

INTERVIEW BY JENNY MCGILL

65

6_McGill P64.indd 65 4/30/19 11:38 AM

 THOUGH TIANANMEN
T R A N S L AT E S A S
“ T H E G AT E O F
H E AV E N LY P E A C E , ”
the Beijing city square is known for something
utterly destructive: the June 4, 1989, massacre
where Chinese troops fired on nonviolent student
demonstrators, killing thousands—deaths that the
government still has not publicly acknowledged.
The historic event came amid a national move-
ment for democracy and freedom and set off a
spiritual awakening for the Chinese, according to
sociologist Yang Fenggang.
Among the young activists who stood in Tianan-
men Square 30 years ago were Zhang Boli and Zhou
Fengsuo. Both landed on China’s most-wanted list,
were imprisoned, fled the country, and live in exile.
The pair are also among at least 4 of the 21 most-
wanted student activists to come to faith in Christ,
with Zhang serving as the pastor of Harvest Chinese
Christian Church, a multisite church with locations
around the world, and Zhou leading Humanitarian
China, which advocates on behalf of political pris-
oners in his homeland.
“Of the Tiananmen Square student leaders who
have converted to Christianity, they tend to see
evangelism as the priority,” said Yang, director of
the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Pur-
due University. “A priority of their social activism
is humanitarian aid to people in China or exiled in
the US, including political dissidents, human rights
lawyers, and Christian leaders who have been per-
secuted for their leadership in the house churches.”
Zhang and Zhou’s historic involvement gives
them a unique perspective on the Communist gov-
ernment’s crackdown on China’s growing house
church movement, whose leaders were inspired
by the Tiananmen activism decades ago.
“We may forget that there was this Tiananmen
moment of hope, but for the future of China, it’s so
important to remember,” Zhou said. “Commemo-
rating is a way of resistance.”
This month’s 30th anniversary of the massacre
offers the global church a chance to consider the
spiritual significance of the ongoing fight for basic
freedoms and human rights. “With theological
reflections, we can strive to be better prepared for
future social activism and social transformation,”
Yang said. “Without theological depth, social and
political movements will only bring more chaos,
violence, and bloodshed.”
Yang—who projects the country will be home to
66 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_McGill P64.indd 66
more Christians than any other by 2030—wants to see evan-
gelicals partner more closely with the house churches oper-
ating outside of China’s government-sanctioned Three-Self
Patriotic Movement.
Zhang and Zhou (the former responding through a trans-
lator) talked to Jenny McGill about how their Christian faith
spurs their fight for freedom. This interview has been edited
for length and clarity.
TAKE US BACK TO TIANANMEN SQUARE. WHAT
HAPPENED IN YOUR LIFE THAT LED YOU TO
PARTICIPATE, AND WHAT DID YOU HOPE THE
OUTCOME WOULD BE?
ZHANG: I was a writer and wanted to go to Tiananmen Square
to record the events and turn it into a book. I was also a stu-
TIANANMEN PHOTO BY CATHERINE HENRIETTE / GETTY
dent at Peking University and joined the other students who
were going. I was a speaker at the square and led others in a
hunger strike.
We wanted to commemorate [former general secretary
of the Communist Party] Hu Yaobang’s death. The govern-
ment thought we were being unruly, and we disagreed with
this depiction. We wanted democracy, freedom, and human
rights respected.
ZHOU: It was a gradual process. I started as a participant and
went with my friends in the same dormitory. We were the first
ones to openly commemorate Hu Yaobang, the party leader
who lost his post for being sympathetic with students a few
years before. When he died, that triggered the whole event,
the protests.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: PORTRAITS COURTESY OF ZHANG BOLI AND ZHOU FENGSUO
China was much more open at that time. [The Chinese]
were looking out to the Western world for ideas, new tech-
nology, people, everything. There were broad discussions
in public. I really loved to read the history of America. I was
inspired when I was learning English and reading the Decla-
ration of Independence and the story of Abraham Lincoln. In
that generation, we were very much in love with the idea of
freedom and democracy for China. Our two most immediate
demands were freedom of the press and the disclosure of the
assets of the government officials. . . . These were very popu-
lar, gaining support of the Chinese people very quickly. That’s
why it spread out like fire into the whole society all over China.
WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU AFTER THE PROTEST?
ZHANG: Of those participating in Tiananmen, they began to
arrest so many, so I fled to the Soviet Union. The KGB soon
arrested me because I had entered the country illegally. I was
in prison for two months before they returned me to China. I
was able to escape at the border of China and the Soviet Union.
JUNE 2019
4/30/19 11:38 AM

I hid from the Chinese government for two years,
staying in Heilongjiang in the northeast of China
and later traveling south.
In 1991, I was smuggled onto a boat to Hong
Kong, went to the US Embassy, and applied for asy-
lum, which was granted that day. [Other dissidents
escaped from China through Operation Yellowbird,
deftly organized by a group of Hong Kong sympa-
thizers. One of those sympathizers was pastor Chu
Yiu-ming, among those arrested and convicted for
their part in the Hong Kong Occupy Central and
Umbrella Movement of 2014.]
ZHOU: Because I was a member of the leading stu-
dent organization at Tsinghua University, I was No.
5 on China’s most-wanted list of 21 student lead-
ers. It was very shocking to everyone, including
me, to become a leader of the movement. To me,
the movement was mostly spontaneous, an outcry
from people’s hearts.
I was arrested ten days after the massacre. Let
me correct the record here. My sister and brother-
in-law never intended to turn me in—they were try-
ing to help me. The government changed the story
[to say] they had turned me in. I was detained for the
year without trial in the top security prison in China,
Qincheng, famous for holding government officials.
I was released at the one-year anniversary
of Tiananmen along with a lot of people, mostly
because of pressure from the US. At the time, every
June, Congress had to approve China’s “most-
favored nation” status. I was sent to a re-education
PHOTOS COURTESY OF ZHANG BOLI
program to change my thinking in one of the poorest
rural places [Yangyuan, Hebei province]. The condi-
tion was if I went through the three-year program,
I would be able to resume my studies. I rejected
that after a year. I never completed my bachelor’s
degree. My school was trying to help me and gave
me an associate’s degree. Being banned from leaving
China for a couple of years, I came to the US in 1995.
6_McGill P64.indd 67
Zhang Boli protesting in 1989.
Top: China’s most wanted list.
HOW DID YOU COME TO CHRISTIAN FAITH?
ZHANG: I was raised with no God, no religion, nothing—well,
other than believing in the Communist Party. When I was hid-
ing out in Heilongjiang for those two years, I met an old lady
farmer who introduced me to Christianity and talked with
me about Jesus. She had the Gospel of John, not even the full
Bible, which had been hand copied onto paper. She was illit-
erate actually, so she gave it to me to read aloud and then she
would explain it to me. In about a year, I became a Christian.
I was brought up in an atheist educational system, and
after reading John’s gospel I realized that every person needs
a god, something to believe in. They can’t save themselves. I
realized that my involvement in Tiananmen Square was no
coincidence; I was being influenced and guided by God. Tian-
anmen led me to escape, my imprisonment, and ultimately to
meet this old woman. I think this was all arranged.
ZHOU: I read the Bible in high school, but I didn’t understand
it. Later, after prison while I was in China, I read the Bible,
and there were people trying to bring me to faith. In June
1995, my first Tiananmen anniversary in the United States,
I was looking for a place to commemorate, so I walked into a
church in San Antonio. That left a big impression on me. I was
welcomed. I felt a connection and relief from the pain while
I was at the church. It was the first time after the massacre
for me to think, “Is there a God? Why would God allow Tian-
anmen?” The values we believed in China at that time were
based on patriotism, love of country, but the government, the
country, betrayed us. Where is this value of our life? This was
the turning point.
After I moved to Chicago for business school, this brother
from the church in Texas kept writing to me, saying that he
was praying for me. I remember him asking me every time:
“Are you ready to believe in Jesus?” I just tried to dodge the
question. After business school, I thought if I could find a job,
I would believe in God. But when I found a pretty good job at a
Wall Street firm [Bear Stearns], I forgot all about that, think-
ing this is all my own achievement.
Later, my life began to stabilize, and I could feel this void
in my heart. I was always following what was happening in
67
4/30/19 11:38 AM
 China, the Tiananmen movement, the people who
were still in prison, and China’s political situation.
As the years dragged on, it seemed hopeless. I was
filled with hatred toward Communists because of
the injustice, of what they did to us, to me. I couldn’t
see that it could change. I felt powerless. That’s the
other reason I turned to God. In 2003, we went to a
church. When the pastor gave a very good sermon
and afterward, he asked, “Are you ready to believe?”
I raised my hand. That moment I felt a big burden
coming off my shoulders.
HOW HAS YOUR FAITH CHANGED HOW YOU
VIEW WHAT HAPPENED AT TIANANMEN?
ZHANG: I feel like God used what happened in 1989
to help us recognize what’s going on in China. If
came from reading the Bible, from prayer, from follow-
ing examples of believers ahead of me. My activism is the
way of following Jesus: to care for the persecuted and the
underprivileged and to bring love and peace when there’s
suppression by the government.
Humanitarian China is not a Christian ministry, but it
has a very deep Christian connection and motivation. We
are intimately connected to house churches in China to
give them any support they need and gain awareness of
their situations. There’s a particular connection between
the Tiananmen movement and the Christian church today
in China. Many of the leaders in the house church commu-
nity were influenced by the Tiananmen movement. Some
of them were protestors themselves, and some were the
second wave, like [imprisoned house church] pastor Wang
Yi who was in high school then. This was his inspiration

PHOTO COURTESY OF ZHOU FENGSUO

the Tiananmen massacre had not occurred, for the and formed a basic foundation for his worldview. This
Chinese people, the Communist Party would have happened for lots of people like Yu Jie, the famous writer.
been their god. The event helped people realize that
the Communist Party was a ghost. HOW DO YOU VIEW THE STATE OF THE
ZHOU: To me, I think the most important change CHURCH IN CHINA TODAY?
is the hope that we have through God. What we ZHANG: Before 1989, China had about 5 million Christians.
couldn’t get in this world, we have from God. It’s so Estimates now range from 50 million to 80 million. The
comforting, and it gives me strength to face all the Communist government seeks to limit the development
difficulties and challenges in human rights activ-
ism. At the same time that I became a Christian, I
began to donate money to help political prisoners in
China. Quickly, that activity evolved into Humani-
tarian China, a nonprofit organization dedicated to
promoting human rights and providing for families
of political prisoners and persecuted Christians.

HAS YOUR FAITH CHANGED YOUR

PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIAL ACTIVISM?
HOW DO THEY RELATE?
ZHANG: They really go together. Freedom, human
rights—they come from God. The democracy move-
ment wasn’t just about politics alone; it was also
about lifestyle. People realize that Jesus and free-
dom, they go together, and I hope that this is the
future for the Chinese people. For Chinese people
to achieve democracy, they need to have some kind
of religious belief. They need to have choices in
life. They should have freedom in their thinking
and lifestyle.
ZHOU: Fundamentally, I think it’s the same now,
my faith as a Christian and my activism. For me,
they’re an integral part of my life. My inspiration

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6_McGill P64.indd 68 4/30/19 11:39 AM

 and growth of Christianity in China, but I don’t
think this is working very well. God is at work.
In the Henan province, the government has
torn down numerous churches. In Wenzhou, a
city in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, also.
Attending activities of these churches, you could
be arrested or imprisoned. Your children could
be punished or restricted. You could be fired from
your company if the government contacts them
about your involvement in Christianity. The gov-
ernment certainly doesn’t approve of nationals of
other countries bringing in Christian materials,
and if you get caught, they can hinder your return
to China. This has actually become more serious
over the last year, restricting the practice of Chris-
tianity more than they ever have before.
ZHOU: The growth of Chinese churches, partic-
ularly house churches, is one of the most funda-
mental changes and important features in Chinese
society in the last 30 years, its impact still to be seen
and to be understood.
There’s a significant portion of Chinese who
are Christians [almost 8 percent, according to
Operation World]. House churches are probably
MANY OF THE LEADERS
IN THE HOUSE CHURCH
COMMUNITY WERE
INFLUENCED BY THE
T I A N A N M E N M O V E M E N T.
ZHOU FENGSUO
Zhou Fengsuo in front of the Tiananmen
Monument erected this year in the US. “64”
references the date of the massacre, June 4.
6_McGill P64.indd 69
the only form of an independent organization not under gov-
ernment control. For this totalitarian regime, this is a very
strong challenge to its control. That’s why they are the target
of the persecution.
Also, most of the house churches, even though they were
under persecution, were not socially active. To protect them-
selves, most of them tried to stay away from attention. Some,
like Early Rain Covenant Church and Shouwang and Zion
churches in Beijing, are under attack now and need a lot of
help. In the end, persecution in the past has never succeeded
in repressing people’s faith. The struggle for the freedom to
believe is very important in Chinese people’s pursuit of free-
dom against the Communist Party.
HOW CAN NORTH AMERICAN CHURCHES BEST SERVE
THE PERSECUTED RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN CHINA?
ZHANG: The first way is to share physical materials like Bibles
with them. If the church in China is being persecuted by the
government and they are not receiving support and encour-
agement from the US church, they could lose morale. I’m
referring to all churches in North America, not just Chinese
Christian churches. The churches in the US should use their
religious freedom to help give a voice to Christians in other
countries who might not have those freedoms, especially in
China. American churches have the moral duty to assist those
persecuted and to pressure the Chinese government to allow
its citizens religious freedom.
ZHOU: Most of the Chinese churches [in the US] are too quiet
on the issues. There’s not enough of a voice for the persecuted
church in China. International support from Western society,
in particular from churches, is very important and encourag-
ing to Chinese believers. Humanitarian China started because
we were trying to fill a vacuum. . . . After the Tiananmen mas-
sacre, politically, China has been going backward. It’s pretty
clear that it cannot coexist with freedom and democracy. The
world needs to be alerted to this.
China is so strong now with its economic reach and tech-
nological power that it’s a threat to everyone. We have to con-
front it. In the way it treats its own people, it cannot be a force
of peace and prosperity. . . . On the other hand, the Christian
church is definitely a light to many people. The value and acts
of the house churches are providing alternatives to the total-
itarian society.
JENNY MCGILL is a pastor’s wife and a dean at Indiana Wesleyan
University. She holds a PhD from King’s College London, and her
books include The Self Examined and Walk with Me: Learning to
Love and Follow Jesus, a discipleship resource for women.
69
4/30/19 11:50 AM
 What it means
to LIVE GIVEN
In Given, Tina Boesch’s
journey into the world of
blessing will take you across
countries, cultures, and
centuries of church history. It
will expand your paradigm of
a word ripe with significance
and equip you to begin the
practice of being given by
God as a blessing.

Includes a reading and

reflection guide to equip
you to begin the practice of
blessing in tangible ways.

“Reading this book will

awaken the spirit to the
power of words of blessing.”
– Gary D. Chapman, author of
The 5 Love Languages

www.navpress.com

OTHER FAVORITES

Real people. Authentic faith.

CT/LE_FP.indd 1 4/24/19 10:27 AM

 REVIEWS
BOOKS , MOVIES , AND THE ARTS

IN THIS SECTION
Eric Johnson interviews
J.P. Moreland p. 74
Surprised by Paradox reviewed
by Kristen Deede Johnson p. 76
Five books for blessing others p. 77
ALONE WITH
OUR LUSTS
Why evangelical porn users are especially
prone to strugging with isolation and despair.
BY MARK REGNERUS
ILLUSTRATION BY CORNELIA LI

71

6_Reviews P71.indd 71 4/29/19 8:56 AM

 REVIEWS

the world “a more humane and equitable place.” spiritual condition in terms
Perry and I agree that we have overestimated of whether they have looked
addiction to pornography. Genuine addiction at porn and/or masturbated
interrupts daily life. It’s hard to make the case that recently.” In other words,
a habit hidden for years applies here. When dad’s when someone asks how
an alcoholic, on the other hand, everyone in the you are doing spiritually,
family knows it. Elsewhere in his copious publica- you tend to hear the under-

P
tion history, Perry has wondered whether the real lying question as how you are
problem is how pornography fosters masturbation, doing sexually. It’s hard to
taking control over one’s solitary sexual existence. know if Perry’s right about
I happen to think he’s right. In other words, when this, although I suspect he
we fixate on porn, we are apt to miss the bigger is. This is not, however, a
picture—that sexual expression is becoming more phenomenon exclusive to
characteristic of the individual life rather than a evangelicals. The problem
life together. with accountability struc-
Gratefully, very few Americans think porn is tures, though often helpful
an obvious good. It is never linked with positive in reducing the frequency
marital outcomes. But being a committed, con- of unwanted behavior, is
servative Christian makes matters worse, Perry that they unwittingly make
holds. Why? Because porn causes a social problem porn and masturbation the
for evangelicals, not just a personal one. “No one primary concerns of one’s
wants to be the wife of a known porn addict,” one spiritual life. Mix in a dose
Porn appears to be overrunning Chris- interviewee observed. of Calvinist pietism, and
tian cultures. Some have quietly capit- you have the recipe for
ulated. Evangelicalism, however, has SEXUAL EXCEPTIONALISM more despair and isolation.
not. But conservative Christians are no Evangelicals suffer from moral incongruence over As “David,” an interviewee,
longer on the offensive against “obscen- porn. That is, they say it’s bad but look at it anyway. put it, “I don’t think I have
ity,” as they were in the 1970s and ’80s. Addicted to Lust explores how this incongruence— much to offer in terms of
Today, they’re in survival mode. That’s which is neither surprising nor novel—plays out in spiritual maturity. . . . I cer-
one lesson we learn from Addicted to their lives and within their culture. tainly couldn’t hold anyone
Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conser- How bad is it? “Hell hath no fury like a woman else accountable.” American
vative Protestants ★★★★★, a new book scorned,” wrote a 17th-century playwright in an era men are failing to counsel
from University of Oklahoma sociolo- that could scarcely fathom our own pornified times. and guide their boys in part
gist Samuel Perry. Evangelical wives react to revelations of spousal because they feel so inept
Evangelicals have a dilemma on their porn use with greater intensity, anger, and anguish themselves. This is not good.
hands. For good reason, Perry surmises, than others, Perry claims. They’re more apt to clas- Po r n m ay b e “ e ve r y
“there can be no truce with pornogra- sify porn use as on par with adultery. The reason, man’s battle,” but it’s not
phy.” But the battlefield’s casualty list is Perry posits, is “sexual exceptionalism”—the evan- only a man’s battle. Evangel-
fast mounting, even while the enemy’s gelical tendency to accord sexual sin greater gravity ical women, like many other
weaponry is becoming more powerful than nearly every other transgression. Believers, of women in the world, wonder
and sophisticated. What to do? Surren- course, have Scripture on their side. Sexual sin is why they’re “not enough” for
der? Desert? And what of the walking different: As Paul states in 1 Corinthians, it’s against their husbands. Many men,
wounded—leave them to the enemy? your own body (6:18). Ironi-
The language of war pervades evangel- cally, most of the wives Perry
ical discussions of pornography because interviews confess that their
resisting its siren call is hard. husbands’ revelations—tor-
WHEN WE FIXATE ON
Addicted to Lust is about as close to menting though they were—
a page-turner as you’ll get with a schol- tended to yield good fruit in PORN, WE ARE APT TO MISS
arly book. Perry gets the players and their marriages over the long
THE BIGGER PICTURE—
the tensions right. He’s fair. He knows run. Confronting sin creates
the science can be biased because it’s opportunities to know the THAT SEXUAL EXPRESSION
conducted by scientists—humans—who real persons to whom we are
IS BECOMING MORE
often have a stake in the answers to their married.
questions. While he seeks to avoid root- A c c o r d i n g t o Pe r r y, CHARACTERISTIC OF THE
ing for one side—a noble effort to remain evangelical sexual excep-
INDIVIDUAL LIFE RATHER
an impartial observer—he nevertheless tionalism compels men
acknowledges that porn has not made to “evaluate their entire THAN A LIFE TOGETHER.

72 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M JUNE 2019

6_Reviews P71.indd 72 4/29/19 8:56 AM

 writes Perry, “wish their wives wouldn’t take it so
personally.” That’s a tough sell, since porn use “just
feels more personal and violating to [Christian]
women.” Amid this, Perry describes how women
who look at porn are simply left out. Such women
feel twice scorned—by their peers, for acting “like
a man,” and by their pastors, who feel ill-equipped
to counsel a sex addict who is a woman.
The issue of masturbation, in particular, high-
lights the challenges of living by sola scriptura.
Most evangelical leaders refuse to pronounce
authoritatively on matters the Bible doesn’t explic-
itly address. But to say nothing is not to signal noth-
ing. (The Latin phrase qui tacet consentire videtur
translates as “He who is silent is understood to con-
sent.”) This poses problems. Given the free market
in faith upon which evangelicalism thrives, it is
simple to locate disagreements about the moral-
ity of masturbation but difficult to resolve them.
The absence of authoritative interpretations
is obvious. One man told Perry he brings seduc-
tive photos of his wife on trips so that he can “take
care of that myself (masturbate) whenever I feel
tempted.” Others perform the strange gymnas-
tics of masturbating without lustful thoughts, a
path, Perry notes, that some commend. But that
route still tends to leave its practitioners lonely.
Several pastors held that masturbation was wrong
“because it was self-centered and they believe God
intends sexuality to be self-giving.” Our bodies are
meant for another, as a gift.
All this suggests the body itself has a discernible
meaning. What does the Bible say? That we’re to
honor God with our bodies, which are not meant
for “sexual immorality,” a term scrutinized like few
others in Scripture. Perry notes that there is noth-
ing like a “theology of the body” for evangelicals to
consult. True. But what he doesn’t mention is that
the only developed theology of the body derives
from the thought and writing of a Catholic pope,
John Paul II. Instead of depending exclusively on
the Bible, it hinges on the living authority of the
Catholic church which, perhaps most importantly
here, bluntly labels masturbation “an intrinsically
and gravely disordered action.” If Perry thinks
evangelicals need to lighten up—and to his credit,
it’s not obvious what he thinks—be careful what
you wish for.
FUMBLING TOWARD PROGRESS
While there is no evangelical theology of the body,
there is what Perry labels the “purity industrial
complex,” a phrase borrowed many times over
from President Eisenhower’s original 1961 warning
about the military’s post-war collaboration with
industrial profiteering. There remains an active
abstinence movement within evangelicalism,
6_Reviews P71.indd 73
but the financial gains from fighting pornography
strike me as comparatively modest. I don’t know
how profitable successful web-filtering companies
like Covenant Eyes are, but they appear to meet a
perceived need for help. Do they work? The book
doesn’t explore the effectiveness of solutions—that
would require a different kind of data. It focuses
instead on the squabble Perry perceives among
three different levels of solution-seekers: evangeli-
cal thought leaders, pastors, and the scores of men
and women who just want their solitary behavior
to be better tomorrow than it was yesterday. It
highlights the tension between being right and
being helpful.
Evangelical leaders, Perry argues, promote quite
different ways out for the beleaguered. Theologians
and famous pastors, he observes, tend to stick to
the Bible and encourage “leaning in” to biblical
wisdom for reinforcement. Therapeutic counsel-
ing that relies on secular psychological technique
remains suspect in the eyes of many such leaders.
Addicted to
Lust: Pornogra- If the heart doesn’t change, they hold, behavioral
phy in the Lives changes just won’t stick. Endorsing non-scriptural
of Conservative
Protestants methods of resistance strikes leaders as risky to
SAMUEL their reputation as respected expositors of the
L. PERRY
Oxford Word. Perry notes this with thinly veiled ambiva-
University Press lence. Guilt, for the record, is a terrible motivator.
And lust, according to a Covenant Eyes developer,
“is simply learned behavior.”
But there are no great conclusions here. Success,
however measured, is more apt to come through a
combination of openness, discussion, and curb-
ing access. Perry does note, as a sociologist might,
that “it seems to be through those close personal
relationships that one’s communion with God
can have an effect.” Is that enough? Ultimately,
Addicted to Lust is about how sinners—and their
spiritual guides—fumble their way toward prog-
ress. Christians are better than their failures and
collapses. They’re wooed by warring interests, only
one of which offers sustained happiness. (They
know this.) Years spent duking it out with the flesh
remind us that the stain of sin remains. Every man
and woman who’s stared at porn for any length of
time knows they can remember things that, in their
lucidity, they would rather forget.
Digesting this book won’t give readers exact
guidance on what to do next. Good sociology isn’t
like that. They will, however, have a good deal more
insight into the contours of the problem. Walking
in that light—and under the Spirit’s power—they
might just discover a path out of the darkness.
MARK REGNERUS teaches sociology at the Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Cheap Sex:
The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy
(Oxford University Press).
73
4/29/19 8:57 AM
 R E V I E W S I N T E R V I E W | J .  P. M O R E L A N D
The Anxious Apologist
J.P. Moreland opens up about his battles with mental illness.
I
n public, J.P. Moreland is best known
for battling in the arena of Christian
apologetics. But privately, he has waged
a personal struggle against occasion-
ally debilitating mental illness. The long-
time Biola University philosophy professor
opens up about this side of his life in Find-
ing Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety
and the Practices that Brought Peace. Eric L.
Johnson, director of the Gideon Institute
of Christian Psychology and Counseling
at Houston Baptist University, spoke with
Moreland about the spiritual and psycho-
logical lessons he’s learned.
Finding Quiet is centered on the story of
your journey of recovery from anxiety and
depression. Tell us some of that story.
I was born into a family with a genetic pre-
disposition, on my mother’s side, toward an
anxiety disorder. I went through life with
periods of anxiety, but in 2004, following
my most stressful year as a professor, I had
a complete nervous breakdown, complete
with daily panic attacks and irrational fears.
I was afraid when the phone rang, afraid to
check my email. This lasted seven months,
before therapy, medication, and other mea-
sures helped me regain stability. Then, ten
years later, the same thing happened. By fall
I was unable to teach my classes because I
was completely dysfunctional. I couldn’t
even let my grandchildren visit because it
was too much stimulation.
After recovering once more, I began
reading everything I could about dealing
with anxiety, along with many books about
spiritual formation. From this, I learned
that anxiety was largely a habit—though
of course not entirely a habit. So I began
practicing habit-forming disciplines to help
reprogram my brain, heart, and nervous
systems, as well as my soul. It changed me
radically. Even after I was diagnosed with
74 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Reviews P71.indd 74
INTERVIEW BY ERIC L. JOHNSON
cancer, I was so peaceful and full of joy that my
wife, daughters, and friends were asking what was
different. I wrote this book because I wanted des-
perately to share what I had learned.
How do you define the heart, and why do you
consider it such an important factor in the path to
recovery from an anxiety or depressive disorder?
J.P. Moreland is
For me, the heart refers to all the faculties of the professor of
soul—the mind, the will, and the emotions—in philosophy at
Talbot School
their deepest parts and most hidden recesses. It of Theology.
is interesting, and in my opinion not accidental,
that the Bible uses Hebrew and Greek words for
heart instead of some other organ, because the
heart muscle has a substantial role to play in our
spiritual transformation.
In the book, I show that the body’s different
organs and regions are extremely important in
this regard. They are what contain the habituated
“grooves” that trigger us to feeling and acting in
certain ways, which produces habits. C.S. Lewis
talked about individuals who had no chests. In the
Middle Ages, the chest represented the area where
an individual engaged in moral perception. The
soul literally used the chest area as a vehicle for
perceiving God’s reality.
Some Christian therapists practice just like sec-
ular therapists, whereas others are Bible-only
and reject secular therapy entirely. Your book is
unique, in that it appropriates a few secular ther-
apy models but also relies strongly on Scripture,
the Holy Spirit, and the practice of contemplative
prayer. What about you and your story made pos-
sible this synthesis?
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F J .  P. M O R E L A N D
When I first became a Christian, I noticed that
there was truth relevant to Christianity and moral-
ity outside the Bible. There was, for example, evi-
dence for the Resurrection that came from fields
like archeology. As long as something didn’t contra-
dict Scripture, then I could accept it as true based
on the evidence. When dealing with anxiety and
depression, I want to use everything at my disposal,
including all the tremendously helpful insights
JUNE 2019
4/29/19 8:57 AM
 from psychology, medicine, spiritual
formation literature, you name it.
There is no cause for embarrassment
if you need to take medication. It does
not mean that you are not spiritually
What role do you think the body and
brain play in disorders like anxiety and
strong. Sometimes anxiety and depres-
sion get bad enough that it becomes
depression? a brain chemistry issue rather than a
We have to begin with a biblical view of spiritual or psychological issue. At that
the body. In Romans 6, Paul says, “For point you need to address the biological
just as you once presented your mem- side of it. You need to take medication.
bers as slaves to impurity and to law- These medications are essentially
lessness leading to more lawlessness, so food for the brain. They restore sero-
now present your members as slaves to tonin and other chemicals you can’t
righteousness leading to sanctification” produce for yourself. Now, there are side
(v. 19, ESV). He doesn’t just mean this in effects to discuss with your doctor. But
a moral sense but in a more expansive the good news is that these medications
sense of the “members” of our bodies can help you return to a point of being
functioning the way God meant them able to deal with your issues on a spir-
to function. How do you, say, present itual and a psychological level, because
your stomach to God as an instrument the pain isn’t making you dysfunctional.
of sanctification? You engage in certain It is hard to work on joy in the Lord when
practices, like fasting, over and over your thumb is being hit with a hammer.
again, until you “re-groove” the muscle You have to lower the pain level to a
memory or the nervous system patterns certain point and then you can go back
in that organ, so that instead of automat- and rejoice.
ically triggering sinful or self-destruc-
tive behavior, they orient you toward You focus primarily on anxiety and
righteousness and flourishing. sadness. However, shame and guilt are
With anxiety and depression, the also important emotions in the Chris-
brain and the heart muscle are the two tian scheme of things, and they are
most important organs to often correlated with anx-
present to God. There are iety and depression. Have
cells called neurons in the you thought about how
heart muscle and the brain, shame and guilt might also
and they can fire as a group. contribute to psychologi-
When this happens, they cal problems and how the
wire together and form a net- gospel especially helps
work, or “groove,” which can Christians address these
become deeper and deeper. emotions?
So negative thoughts liter- Issues of guilt and shame are
ally reshape the brain struc- absolutely huge. Research-
Finding Quiet:
ture to form negative neural My Story of ers have discovered that if
patterns. The solution is to Overcoming you do not feel forgiven and
Anxiety and the
present my brain to God as an Practices that shame-free and are unable
instrument of righteousness Brought Peace to extend forgiveness to oth-
J.ŽP. MORELAND
by recognizing negative self- Zondervan ers, you are apt to die of heart
talk and turning away from it, disease more quickly, your
while moving toward some- blood pressure can increase,
thing that takes my attention and there is greater risk of
in a better direction. Analysts have done psychological damage. The problem is:
brain scans showing that, after time, this Where will I find forgiveness, and how
can shift your default condition back to can I deal with the shame that I actually
joy and peace rather than negativity, deserve? That is where the gospel comes
anxiety, and depression. in. I return often to Romans 8:1 and to
Colossians 2:14, which speaks of our sins
How do you respond to Christians being nailed to the cross. Those ideas
who criticize the use of psychotropic are so powerful to me, and they play an
medication? important role in our healing.
6_Reviews P71.indd 75
NEW &
NOTEWORTHY
FICTION
Chosen by Shawn Smucker,
author of The Day the Angels
Fell (Revell).
The Atlas of Reds and Blues
DEVI S. LASKAR COUNTERPOINT
As a child, I was intrigued by the idea that
just before death, scenes from my life would
flash before my eyes. In The Atlas of Reds
and Blues, the main character, “Mother,”
finds herself in this very situation. She is an
American-born daughter of Bengali immi-
grants, shot by police in her own driveway.
In a series of stunning vignettes, Laskar tells
the story of Mother lying quietly, bleeding,
and reflecting on her life: “She lies on the
concrete, wanting to laugh but can’t, but
the corners of her mouth turn upward. Gift
from God echoes inside her. Her name means
‘Gift from God.’Ž”
The Night Tiger
YANGSZE CHOO FLATIRON BOOKS
Ji Lin, a spunky teenage girl growing up in
1930s Malaya, is surrounded by unattainable
things. Her stepfather blocks her ambitions
to enter nursing or teaching, her stepbrother
is elusive, and her mother’s Mahjong debt
is crippling. Meanwhile, Ren, an 11-year-old
Chinese servant, has been tasked by his de-
ceased British master with finding the old
man’s severed finger and returning it to his
grave, thus freeing his spirit to travel into
the afterlife. Choo intertwines a mystical
Asian culture with the more skeptical British
Empire, creating a magical setting in which
Ji Lin and Ren spin closer and closer to one
another. An enthralling read.
The Care and Feeding of
Ravenously Hungry Girls
ANISSA GRAY BERKLEY
Althea and her husband, Proctor, are arrested
for financially fleecing their own community,
and Althea’s sisters, Viola and Lillian, try to
hold everything together. (“Everything” in-
cludes Althea’s two daughters, one of whom
turned in her parents.) The converging char-
acters bring the past with them, and as the
grandmother says, “Hungry ghosts got to be
fed.” Gray’s book is a gritty, raw study in how
the past shapes the present—how it influences
our ability (or inability) to change. As Lillian
says, “We may not be gods anymore, but
we do still have to have some power. Over
ourselves. To do what’s right.”
75
4/29/19 8:57 AM
 REVIEWS
Don’t Miss
the Mystery
Jen Pollock Michel traces the paradoxical shape
of God and his grace. BY KRISTEN DEEDE JOHNSON
O
ne Sunday not long ago, I
was leading children’s wor-
ship in our church. During
the weekly prayer time,
we sat in a circle with the kids taking
turns holding a cross that designates
their moment to pray, either silently
or out loud. I couldn’t help but smile
at the “prayer face” some kids made
when their turn arrived. Upon receiving
the cross, they would scrunch up their
closed eyes and assume a very serious
demeanor. This was the posture they
thought God wanted to see.
Watching them reminded me of Jen
Pollock Michel’s words in Surprised by
Paradox: The Promise of “And” in an
Either-Or World ★★★★★: “There is a
great deal of polite praying in church. I
am guilty of it myself. We are pious and
solicitous with God. . . . Prayer seems
to be a lot of saying what we think God
wants to hear.”
As Michel observes, God wants to
hear not our polite prayers but our raw-
est expressions of grief, complaint, and
hurt. This is one of the surprising par-
adoxes her book invites us to explore—
that prayers of lament can function as
confessions of faith. While they may
seem impolite and impious, they still
involve faith. “Maybe mustard seed
faith, maybe angry faith,” she writes,
but a form of faith nonetheless.
These kinds of prayers are deeply
biblical. Indeed, Michel points out
that Scripture contains more psalms
of lament than psalms of thanksgiv-
ing and praise. Even Christ himself,
nailed to the cross, prays the words of
Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have
76 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M
6_Reviews P71.indd 76
you forsaken me?” As Michel puts it,
“God did not simply author the songs
of lament: he sang them.”
It is clear that Michel’s words on
lament carry a deep familiarity with
grief, suffering, and the questions they
raise, even as they are equally soaked
in Scripture. Again and again, the book
points us to God’s words and God’s wis-
dom, keeping the biblical story prom-
inent while offering glimpses into the
author’s own life and faith.
Surprised by Paradox considers three
other biblical motifs—incarnation, king-
dom, and grace—that aren’t as straight-
forward as we imagine. Reflecting on
the Incarnation, Michel marvels at how
the God of glory chose to make his glory
known by having his Son enter the world
as a tiny baby. The Incarnation opens
a rich vein of reflection on the rela-
tionship of the material world to our
spiritual lives, which Michel draws out
by beautifully tracing the significance
of food throughout the biblical story.
In today’s world, we’re often preoccu-
pied with “finding ourselves,” but the
Incarnation reminds us that this only
happens by looking to Jesus, the one
who reclaimed humanity’s glory as he
offered his life for our sin. In union with
Surprised by Paradox:
The Promise of “And”
in an Either-Or World
JEN POLLOCK MICHEL
InterVarsity Press
JUNE 2019
Christ, we are saved from the clutches of
pride so that, as Michel writes, we might
“burst into glorious flame,” glorifying
God as we bear his image in the world.
Turning to the kingdom of God,
Michel notes how we often overlook
this theme, despite Jesus launching
his public ministry by pronouncing
that “the kingdom of heaven has come
near” (Matt. 4:17). Even though Jesus
offered many teachings about the king-
dom, she observes, his earliest followers
had trouble understanding its upside-
down nature. And today, even though
we may regularly pray, “let your king-
dom come,” we can still find ourselves
in thrall to notions of individual salva-
tion that neglect how, in Michel’s words,
“the kingdom of God involves a reality
much bigger than the private affairs of
our lives.”
Regarding the paradox of grace,
Michel explores the strange truth that
the good news of God’s grace can be the
hardest gift to truly receive. She looks,
too, at the paradoxical reality that grace,
though it isn’t earned by obedience to
God’s commands, still commits us to
strive for obedient living. Sanctification,
made possible by God’s ongoing grace
in our lives, likewise entails work and
effort on our part, even as we remem-
ber that our work and effort are always
grace-empowered.
Centuries ago, the Danish philoso-
pher Søren Kierkegaard drew attention
to the paradoxes of Christianity. He was
concerned that believers in his culture
had not fully comprehended the myster-
ies of their faith. One of his most famous
books is titled Either/Or, although in
truth he wanted readers to reject the
“either-or” options represented within
the book. Like Kierkegaard, Surprised
by Paradox asks us to reject an either-or
approach to certain irreducible myster-
ies of Christian faith, assuming instead
a posture of humility and wonder as we
contemplate the fathomless riches of
God and his grace.
KRISTEN DEEDE JOHNSON is profes-
sor of theology and Christian formation at
Western Theological Seminary. She is the
co-author, with Bethany Hoang, of The Jus-
tice Calling: Where Passion Meets Persever-
ance (Brazos).
4/29/19 9:05 AM
 Top Five Books That Help Us
Give Blessings to Others
CHOSEN BY TINA BOESCH, author of Given: The Forgotten
Meaning and Practice of Blessing (NavPress).

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The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the

Religious Imagination ESTHER DE WAAL
In the late 19th century, Alexander Carmichael traveled
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prayers, and hymns passed down orally for generations. His-
torian Esther de Waal draws from his collection in this beau-
tiful volume. There are blessings for activities as diverse and
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churning, weaving, and sleeping.

Gilead MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Robinson’s novel features a series of confessional letters
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D. A. CARSON
Blessing is a relational form of intercession that seeks the good
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The Center for Adult Learning and
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JOHN O’DONOHUE University offers a practical way for adults
Poet John O’Donohue’s collection of modern blessings speaks to complete a bachelors degree by
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meaningfully into moments of celebration and pain. Blessings
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Though O’Donohue’s blessings are not explicitly Christian, BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
they are informed by Christian faith. Readers drawn to the CHRISTIAN MINISTRY
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PSYCHOLOGY

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77

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 TESTIMONY
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 80
pain. I loved sports and showed poten-
tial from an early age. And on Sundays, I
would venture out on my own to attend
church. At home I was fatherless and
abused, but there I felt safe and at peace.
One morning, alerted by the shrieks
of my eldest sister, I came downstairs
to find my mother dead on the sofa, the
victim of a cerebral hemorrhage. Some-
thing snapped in me that day—I was only
14—that put me on the road to destruc-
tion for the next 20 years.
I went to three schools, getting
expelled from the first two for unman-
ageable behavior. By the time I left home
at 16, I was a ticking time bomb—angry,
bitter, and lost. My sister ran pubs, and
I started down the path of drinking,
gambling, and fighting, emulating the
“gangster” lifestyle. This was my idea
of what it meant to be a man.
But I excelled at rugby, and at 17 I
signed a professional contract with
Sheffield Eagles. Soon enough, I had far
more money than good sense. Craving
acceptance from members of the crim-
inal underworld I perversely thought of
as “family,” I began fighting for money,
selling drugs, collecting debts for deal-
ers, and generally bullying and intim-
idating my way through life. I walked
into my first prison term as a lost little
boy trapped inside a professional rugby
player’s body.
A HOSTILE WORLD
It didn’t take long for prison to turn
me into a hardened criminal. It was
a hostile world—physically, mentally,
and emotionally—where only the fittest
survived. In prison I developed a heroin
addiction, which left me alienated from
my firstborn daughter and her mother.
Between sentences, I went chasing
the bright lights of London but ended
up sleeping on the streets of the Strand.
Without the “good fortune” of being
sent back, I might have died. Back in
custody, spurred forward by a picture of
my daughter on my cell wall, I resolved
to rebuild my life. During the next two
years, I caught up on my schooling and
got clean from heroin. But after the
next release, I soon returned to my old
ways. The vicious merry-go-round kept
6_Testimony P80.indd 79
spinning: drinking, drugs (now cocaine),
partying, violence, sex, and before long,
a trip back to the slammer.
During my stints in prison, I was
always drawn to the chapel. I considered
it a place of refuge, just as church had
offered a safe haven from the tumult of
my childhood. Over the years, I exper-
imented with everything: Buddhism,
Hinduism, spiritualism, counseling,
course after course, medication—but
nothing worked. I was still a wreck.
Despite my burning desire to change,
I couldn’t find any peace or stability.
Eventually, after stabbing a number
of fellow inmates, I landed in Belmarsh,
a top-security prison in southeast Lon-
don. I hated who I had become. With my
violent outbursts and paranoid behav-
ior, I had pushed away anyone I ever
cared for—and put my family through
hell. I was mentally, emotionally, and
spiritually broken. Outwardly, I sought
“respect” by lashing out against anyone
or anything in my way. But on the inside,
I remained a lost little boy in desperate
need of love and acceptance.
While awaiting trial in a kidnapping
and hostage-taking case, I finally hit
rock bottom and decided to commit
suicide. With tears streaming down my
face, I dropped to my knees and made
one final plea to God: “If you’re real and
you hear me, put a white dove outside
my prison window. Show me you are
with me!” At the time, I had no concep-
tion of the dove being a symbol for the
Holy Spirit. I was only looking for some
sign of hope and new beginnings.
The next morning, when a flock of
pigeons lifted off the nearby ledge, I saw
the dove sitting there. Something inside
me jumped, and tears of joy replaced
tears of despair.
After transferring to another prison
in Leeds, I began praying and studying
I walked into my first
prison term as a lost
little boy trapped
inside a professional
rugby player’s body.
the Bible in earnest. Reading Joyce Mey-
er’s Battlefield of the Mind, I stumbled
across a chapter where Meyer describes
taking the sexual abuse she suffered at
the hands of her father, rolling it into a
ball, and laying it at Jesus’ feet. I decided
to do the same with my rage. Before
going to sleep, I closed my eyes, imag-
ined Jesus on the cross, balled up my
rage, and surrendered it to him. When
I awoke, I felt peace like never before.
THE LONG REFINING
Being a Christian—and turning away
from drinking, drugs, and sleeping
around—hasn’t been easy. (It’s tough
having a functioning conscience!) At
first I was on fire for Christ, and my zeal
would outrun my better judgment. I
would strike up conversations with com-
plete strangers and probably put them
off forever. I would go to pubs to tell peo-
ple about Jesus and—still enslaved to old
habits—end up drinking to excess. On
one occasion, I found myself in bed with
a woman after trying to share the gospel
with her. I needed serious refining.
But God, in his patience, kept using
this broken vessel for his purposes. He
has given me the privilege of going into
prisons—at first under the supervision
of more mature Christians, then increas-
ingly on my own—and testifying to the
hope and forgiveness he offers. I have
spoken to rooms full of men convicted
of the most heinous crimes, including
pedophiles and murderers, and seen
them reduced to tears. At a key moment
when I wondered where my life was
going, God helped me launch a ministry
(Steps to Freedom) that reaches out to
young people abandoned by society. He
let me return to my first love, sports, as a
chaplain serving several teams.
Miraculously, God has even given me
my family back. It has taken years, but
one by one he has repaired broken rela-
tionships with my sisters and their fam-
ilies, with my three children, and with
the father who deserted us so long ago.
The refining process has been long
and hard. But bit by bit, it’s polishing me
into a trophy of God’s grace.
ALLEN LANGHAM is the author of
Taming of a Villain: A Message of Hope
(Lion Hudson).
79
4/29/19 9:29 AM
 J U N E 2019

TESTIMONY

Jesus Gave Me What

My Fists Couldn’t
I was a boozer, a brawler, and a hardened criminal.
Then I received a miraculous sign of hope and peace.
By Allen Langham
PHOTO BY ROSS WOODHALL

S
ix years ago—lost, broken, alone, and suicidal—I was
the empty shell of a once-promising rugby player,
shuffling around an exercise yard in a London prison.
I was a man of extreme violence who had done seven
stretches behind bars.
One morning around that time, I watched a flock of birds
take off from a ledge outside my cell. Right then, I knew God
was real—and that he had reached down to rescue me from
the pit of hell.
A TICKING TIME BOMB
As a child, there was violence everywhere I turned. My mother
had been widowed by her first husband, abused for 20 years
by her second, and deserted by my father (whom she never
married) when I was eight months old. She and my two sisters
surrounded me with love—I was the little favorite of the family.
But she was also a harsh disciplinarian and liberally wielded
what we called “the Allen stick” to keep me under control.
Throbbing with anger and resentment toward my absent
father, I was constantly getting into scraps with neighborhood
bullies, hoping to earn their respect. I was also abused several
times: by a family friend, by a boy across the road, and by a
man I can’t say much about because I’ve blocked the worst
details from my memory.
I had some means of escape. Often I would skip school to
go fishing or run off to the woods and dress up as an Army
sergeant major, shouting commands at the other kids and
exerting control to hide my inner CONTINUED ON PRECEDING PAGE

80 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M JUNE 2019

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 2019 THEOLOGICAL LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE
“Where Theology and Practice Intersect”

SEPTEMBER 5-7
N.T. WRIGHT

Olivet Nazarene University’s School of Theology

and Christian Ministry welcomes renowned,
New Testament theologian, N.T. Wright, to this
year’s Theological Leadership Conference where
he will be presenting on Presence and Promise:
The Challenge of the Temple.

The conference will be held at:

College Church of the Nazarene University Avenue,
200 University Ave., Bourbonnais, IL 60914

Sponsored by the Chair for Wesleyan-Arminian

Studies and featuring the Fruin Holiness Lectures.

For registration details, visit olivet.edu/events or call The Office of Church Relations at 815-928-5651.

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