M AY 2017

TRUMP’S SOUL MATTHEW, WHY THE

AFTER 100 DAYS PLUTARCH, LUKE, CHURCH NEEDS
IN OFFICE P. 27 AND JOHN P. 42 INFERTILITY P. 48

C H R I S T I A N I T Y TO DAY

FOR I DO N OT DO
THE G OO D I WA N T
TO DO, B U T T H E
EV IL I DO N OT
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I K E E P O N DO I NG .
A Christian sociologist looks at
new research on temptation,
self-control, and willpower.
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 M AY 2017 VOLU ME 61, N U MBER 4

CONTENTS
STANDARD-VIEW MAGAZINE REPLICA VIEW

7 Editor’s Note
Ted Olsen briefly
VIEWS
considers the new wars
over willpower research.
27 Where We Stand
9 Reply All Mark Galli on how to think
Readers respond to about the state of President
the March issue via Trump's soul.
letters, tweets, and
Facebook posts.
30 Confessing God
Derek Rishmawy on the
Christian calling to be
NEWS more than just “decent.”

32 Beginning of
Wisdom
13 Headlines Jen Wilkin on sibling rivalry
What maintains mainline and friendship in the body
churches most, the future of Christ.
of Christian health care
sharing after Obamacare,
and Bible translators unite.
REVIEWS
15 Go Figure
Americans warm up to
TEXT-ONLY every religious group—
59 Books
except evangelicals.
Mark Amstutz’s Just
Immigration reviewed
16 Gleanings by Samuel D. James
TEXT-ONLY FOR EASE OF READING China kicks out Korean
missionaries, free Christian Interview: Jen Pollock
college finds a taker, Michel’s Keeping Place,
and Southern Baptists’ interview by A. J. Swoboda

34
uncooperative funders. COVER STORY
Tony Reinke’s 12 Ways Your
CAN YOU CONTROL YOURSELF? Phone Is Changing You
New research suggests you may have more reviewed by Jeff Haanen
willpower and self-control than you think.
Bradley Wright with David Carreon My Top 5: Matthew Farrelly’s
USING THIS PDF top five overlooked classics
that high schoolers should
be reading.

TAP TO CHANGE VIEW

EITHER VIEW CAN BE
42 WHY DON’T THE GOSPEL WRITERS TELL
THE SAME STORY?
New Testament scholar and apologist Michael Licona’s new book
80 Testimony
Eden Chen was a teenage
VIEWED VERTICAL shoplifter and competitive
argues that ancient literary devices are the answer—and that’s a
gamer. Then he found
OR HORIZONTAL good thing for Christians. Interview by Caleb Lindgren purpose beyond possessions.

➔
BOTH VIEWS CAN
BE ENLARGED
BY PINCH AND COVER PHOTO BY GILLAN VAN NIEKERK / STOCKSY
48 THE CALLING OF THE INFERTILE WHO HOPE
Why the church needs the testimony of marriages without
offspring. Matthew Lee Anderson
ENLARGE METHOD.

For best reader experience use

iBooks on the iPad and use
“Hope is a
virtue that
54 RADICAL ISLAM IS NOT THE NIGERIAN
CHURCH’S GREATEST THREAT
Why one of Africa’s leading Christian thinkers believes the real
Acrobat Reader on Android tablets.
is born from danger is among Christians. Sunday Bobai Agang ONLINE
Check out the latest
pain, sorrow, news, essays,

and loss. ” p. 52
analysis, and more at
ChristianityToday.com

STANDARD-VIEW
3
 It’s not just about
identifying lost souls.
It’s greater
than that.
It’s about helping families heal.
It’s about a team of Baylor
anthropologists, forensic
scientists and students working
to identify the poor, the
anonymous and the forgotten
buried in unmarked graves
along the Mexican border.
It’s about leveraging 3D scans,
DNA coding and leading edge
analysis to give them a name
and to return them to their loved
ones. It’s about a curriculum
where learning is magnified
by doing. Where world-class
resources meet real world
needs. And where the pursuit
of knowledge is measured in
the difference it makes in the
lives of the people it touches.

www.baylor.edu/about/research
 PRINT AND ONLINE GLOBAL MEDIA MINISTRY
Draw Closer.
Connect with God daily with
EDITOR IN CHIEF Mark Galli PUBLISHER Jacob Walsh

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Ted Olsen Alecia Sharp
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6 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M M AY 2 0 1 7

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6 TEXT-ONLY
M AY 2017
EDITOR’S NOTE
As Paul talked about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment
to come, Felix was afraid and said, “That’s enough for now! You may
T
leave. When I find it convenient, I will send for you.” (Acts 24:25)
alk about righteousness, self-control, and judgment often elicits strong
responses. But rather than avoiding further discussion as Felix did, dis-
putants sometimes behave more like the riot at Ephesus. Few topics in
social science right now are hotter than willpower and self-control, con-
sidering both the number of studies on the subject and the disputes over their validity.
“I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the very concept of willpower,” clinical
psychologist Carl Erik Fisher wrote in the popular science journal Nautilus as we
were finishing this issue. “It’s time to get rid of it altogether.” Academic discussions
of self-control, he argued, are too wrapped up in “roots in Judeo-Christian ideas
about resisting sinful impulses” and “Victorian moralizing.”
Meanwhile, some key studies on willpower, self-control, and “ego depletion” are
at the center of what some are calling a replication crisis. Some
efforts to repeat major experiments in this field haven’t been able
to reproduce the studies’ findings. Then again, other efforts are
working just fine. WHITHER
Granted, some of those disputed findings were weird in the first
place. One peer-reviewed paper that got a lot of attention in 2012
WILLPOWER?
reported that just gargling sugar water could significantly boost
short-term self-control. (The thinking is that glucose alerts motiva-
When entering disputed territory,
tional centers in the brain; spitting it out avoids the negative effects
you need a good guide.
sugar has on self-control.) There’s still a lot of research surrounding TED OLSEN Editorial Director
the relationship between sugar and self-control, but scientists these
days are mostly skeptical about the promises of glucose gargling.
I first talked about exploring some of these issues with University of Connecticut
sociologist Brad Wright as he worked on his CT cover story on how churches wel-
come people of different ethnicities (“Pastor, Can I Come to Your Church?” July/
August 2015). It turned out that he had his own self-control study planned, so he
was deeply aware of the debates. With that study now published in the Journal of
Social and Clinical Psychology, he guides CT readers through what social science
really has learned about self-control and willpower. I’m grateful that Wright knows
where the social science is solid and where it’s murky. But more importantly, I’m
glad that he actually believes those “Judeo-Christian ideas about resisting sinful
impulses.” Likewise, I’m glad that it’s not about “Victorian moralizing” for him, but
about rightly receiving gifts from God. It’s less about the judgment to come and less
about putting ourselves under our own self’s control than it is about bringing our- Follow
TED OLSEN
selves under the control of the one who has saved us from judgment. That’s enough on Twitter
for now! Go read Brad’s article. @TedOlsen
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7
 M AY 2 017

REPLY ALL
R E SPONSE S TO OU R M A RCH ISSU E

Another name for the Benedict Option is the Great Fundamentalist

Retreat of the early 20th century, when we abandoned the culture to
secular forces. A better choice is the Wesleyan Option. Following their
founder’s dictum—“Practical holiness throughout the land”—the Wes-
leyans transformed 18th-century Britain. From the bottom, they
evangelized and created small discipleship and fellowship groups.
From the top, they elected Wilberforce and others to Parliament, end-
ed slavery, and enacted other transforming legislation. We do not
need to retreat but to respond like the Wesleyans. Evangelicals and
other social conservatives must promote more constructive policies
than the secular hedonists.
LESLIE CONWAY COOMER Oakland City, IN

The Idea of a Christian I believe Dreher’s thinking is flawed.

Village p. 34
I consider The Rule of Saint Benedict
one of the most powerful and practical
handbooks on pastoral leadership ever
written, allowing that some of what he
suggested was specific to his time and
not ours. So I read about the Benedict
Option with great interest and antic-
ipation. However, I was disappointed
in three ways. First, that the rationale
introducing the idea was cast in terms
of recent culture wars and seemed to
reflect a nostalgia for a “Christian”
America that never existed rather than
a vigorous pursuit of Christian disciple-
ship. Second, that it did not include any
interaction with how the Anabaptist tra-
dition has wrestled with these issues nor
any of the other voices from intentional
Christian communities. And third, that
it felt like a withdrawal into an insular
fortress rather than challenging lead-
ership that presents the larger society
with attractive alternate ways to live.
NORMAN STOLPE Milwaukee, WI
Jesus prepared his disciples for con-
frontation and its consequences, not
strategic withdrawal. In the Gospels,
Jesus confronted the Jewish leaders,
the powers of darkness, and the sick-
nesses of the human body, and com-
manded his disciples to do the same. In
John 13–17, Jesus’ last lecture, he covers
the disciples’ rules of engagement, the
consequences of that engagement, and
the resources available for that engage-
ment. The disciples aggressively con- Intentional
fronted the world “while God added
his testimony through signs, wonders,
communal
various miracles, and gifts of the Holy
Spirit distributed according to his will”
living may mean
(Heb. 2:4, ISV).
PAUL LLORET Lancaster, SC
Christians living
A good look at what living in Christian
more monastic
community would practically look like. lives. Perfect piece
by @roddreher.
CHISMYOUNG
Rod Dreher states that “the sixth-cen-
tury father of Western monasticism JONMINNEMA

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

TEXT-ONLY 9
responded to the collapse of Roman civ- media, and local church community. as our ultimate standard. In fact, I see
ilization by founding a monastic order.” M_Y_EMERSON many who have read helpful Christian
responded
That to the collapse
is not completely of Roman
correct. civ-
Bene- media, and local church community. as our ultimate
books standard.
but have not In fact,
read their I see
Bible.
ilization by founding a monastic order.”
dict’s Rule is a composite of several ear- M_Y_EMERSON
I grew up in a caring community of many who have read
LISA VOOGD SIKKEMAhelpful Christian
That
lier is notAugustine’s
“rules.” completelyrule
correct. Bene-
was widely Christ followers but spent most of my books but have not read their Bible.
dict’s Rule is a composite of several
used at least 120 years before the Rule ear- I grew
life upat
living inaadistance
caring community
from them. ofI LISA VOOGD SIKKEMA
lier “rules.” Augustine’s
of Saint Benedict emerged. rule was widely Christ followers but spent most
wanted something more exciting. Yet, of my
used at least 120 years before the Rule
BOB GILBERT Kennesaw, Georgia
life living at a distance from them.
as I turn to Scripture, I realize God I
of Saint Benedict emerged. wanted
uses the something
normal andmore excithe
not just ting.excit-
Yet,
BOB GILBERT Kennesaw, Georgia as I turn to Scripture, I realize God
The heightened polarity of our times is ing. I’ve started going to the Internet
uses the normal and not just the excit-
revealing the broken leg on which this less for community and have found
The heightened polarity of our times is ing. I’ve started going to the Internet
strain of evangelicalism is standing. To [community] among these imperfect,
revealing the broken leg on which this less for community and have found
suggest that a movement toward monas- awkward people who have loved me
strain of evangelicalism is standing. To [community] among these imperfect,
tic-type communities is a truer reflec- even when they didn’t understand me.
suggest that a movement toward monas- awkward people who have loved me
tion of Christ’s church is a far greater Thank you for this article, CT. May
tic-type communities is a truer reflec- even when they didn’t understand me.
danger than a culture that is hostile you guys be a voice of peace and faith- I disagree. Any time you discuss and
tion of Christ’s church is a far greater Thank you for this article, CT. May
to our faith. By example to his disci- fulness to the broken in an age of cyni- read Scripture, it’s Bible study. Guides
danger than a culture that is hostile you guys be a voice of peace and faith- I disagree. Any time you discuss and
ples, Jesus was continually prompted by cism and doubt. can be helpful. Let’s not complicate it.
to our faith. By example to his disci- fulness to the broken in an age of cyni- read Scripture, it’s Bible study. Guides
compassion to move toward those out- DANIEL MACLEAN JILL CUMMINGS
ples, Jesus was continually prompted by cism and doubt. can be helpful. Let’s not complicate it.
side the boundaries with grace, mercy,
compassion to move toward those out- DANIEL MACLEAN JILL CUMMINGS
and love.
side the boundaries with grace, mercy,
ERIC BRANSTROM San Clemente, CA
and love. Let Bible Studies Be When God Does the
ERIC BRANSTROM San Clemente, CA
Bible Studies
Let Bible Studies
p. 26 Be Unexpected
When God Does p. 52 the
BibleWhile
Amen. Studies p. 26 books may Unexpected
these other I loved the @krishkp.excerpt
52 in @CTmag-
Our First Community p. 23
Ourword
Good First
fromCommunity
@TheRichardClark
p. 23
be helpful,
Amen.
resistance
I amthese
While
be helpful, to
seeing
holding
I am
more
other
seeing them
and more
books
up to
more and
may
the
more
Iazine. Who
loved the
thing to
azine.
knew Habakkuk
@krishk
sayknew
Who to Trump’s
had some-
excerpt in @CTmag-
America?
Habakkuk had some-
STAY WHERE YOU ARE.
inGood
@CTmagazine
word fromon technology, social
@TheRichardClark light of Scripture
resistance and keeping
to holding Scripture
them up to the JUST_INPAUL
thing to say to Trump’s America?
in @CTmagazine on technology, social light of Scripture and keeping Scripture
TEXT-ONLY
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 NEWS
REPORTING FROM THE CHURCH WORLDWIDE

“A M UST-READ FOR
ANYONE WANT ING
T O TAKE B IB LE
ST UDY SERIOUSLY.”
F RA N C I S C H A N , New York Times best-selling
author, Crazy Love and Forgotten God

Best-selling author John Piper teaches us how to read

the Bible in light of its unique ability to reveal God’s
glory in a way that overcomes our spiritual blindness
and transforms our hearts.

“I cannot imagine a serious Christian who would not benefit

from a thoughtful reading of this book.”

D. A. CARSON, Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity

Evangelical Divinity School; Cofounder, The Gospel Coalition

“Reading the Bible Supernaturally will move you to captivated

and awestruck worship at the Divine’s plan for his Word as an
instrument to magnify his unrivaled glory.”

LOUIE GIGLIO, Pastor, Passion City Church, Atlanta; Founder,

Passion Conferences

“John Piper stokes the urgency of our calling as the church of

Jesus Christ to deepen our appreciation for the Word that God
uses toward a missional end—his global and eternal glory.”

MICHAEL OH, Global Executive Director, The Lausanne Movement

THE MAINLINE’S
CROSSWAY.ORG
IN THIS SECTION SAVING GRACE?
Taking the Temperature of Even in secular Canada’s declining
Faith Groups p. 15
denominations, conservative theology
Gleanings p. 16 correlates with church growth.

The Future of Christian Health BY KATE SHELLNUTT

Care Sharing p. 18 ART BY BRIAN TAYLOR

Bible Translators Unite p. 20

12 TEXT-ONLY 13
N E W S HEADLINES | THEOLOGY
A
Amid the decades-long decline in main-
line Protestantism in North America,
researchers in Canada recently found
an “elusive sample” of congregations
whose growth has bucked the trend.
The key characteristic these excep-
tional Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran,
and United churches had in common?
Evangelical theology.
With fewer evangelicals and more
secular surroundings than their breth-
ren in the United States, Canada’s main-
line denominations collectively lost
half of their members over the past 50
years. Last year, a team of sociologists
suggested that conservative theological
beliefs—including emphasis on Scrip-
ture as the “actual word of God” and
belief in the power of prayer—may be
the saving grace keeping attendance
up at 9 of 22 Ontario churches studied.
“Most people, especially academics,
are hesitant to say one type of belief sys-
tem is better than another,” said David
Millard Haskell, the study’s lead author.
“But if we are talking solely about which
belief system is more likely to lead to
numerical growth among Protestant
churches, the evidence suggests con-
servative Protestant theology is the
clear winner.”
The mainline congregations that
kept growing by at least 2 percent a
year emphasized markers typically
associated with evangelical beliefs.
For example, such churches described
evangelism as the main mission of their
church, were more committed to per-
sonal spiritual disciplines such as Bible
reading, and saw Scripture as a singular
authority.
14
Haskell’s study was one of the most popu-
lar papers published in the Review of Religious
Research last year. His findings among Cana-
dian churches echo trends that researchers in
the US have been tracking for decades.
“Clearer theology leads to clearer practice.
You know what you’re hanging on to,” said
Jennifer McKinney, a Seattle Pacific Univer-
sity sociologist who studied mainline renewal.
“Conservative churches are the ones that grow,
and that’s still happening in the US.”
The new research, conducted by a team out
of Wilfrid Laurier University and Redeemer
University College in Ontario, indicated that
among growing mainline churches, 93 per-
cent of pastors and 83 percent of attendees
agreed that “Jesus rose from the dead with a
real flesh-and-blood body, leaving behind an
empty tomb,” compared with only 56 percent
of pastors and 67 percent of attendees in strug-
gling ones.
The thriving congregations were also more
likely to affirm that “God performs miracles in
answer to prayers” than were congregations in
decline (pastors: 100% vs. 44%; attendees: 90%
vs. 80%). Across survey measures, pastors of
“THE EVIDENCE SUGGESTS
CONSERVATIVE PROTESTANT
THEOLOGY IS THE CLEAR WINNER.”
DAVID HASKELL, RESEARCHER
churches with declining attendance were the
least conservative.
Rodney Stark, codirector of Baylor Univer-
sity’s Institute for Studies of Religion, noted
similar findings in the US. His data shows that
“there are pastors who are conservative, and
their congregations are growing while their
denominations decline,” the sociologist said.
Conservative theology fosters greater com-
mitment, which leads to a greater sense of per-
sonal happiness and stronger bonds between
church members, the Canadian researchers
concluded. Christians at Ontario’s thriving
mainline churches—on average, significantly
younger than attendees in their denomina-
tions as a whole, with two-thirds under age
60—proved to be more evangelical in belief
and in practice than fellow mainline attendees.
However, David Roozen argues that given
TEXT-ONLY
the concentrated sample of 22
congregations, the researchers’
conclusions do not apply more
broadly. Roozen, an expert on
national religious trends and
mainline Protestantism at the
Hartford Institute of Religious
Research, says other factors such
as age and the use of contempo-
rary worship may account in part
for the appeal.
According to Roozen, the
study’s analysis predicts the
traits of individuals, not churches
themselves. So the data shows
that “people who are conserva-
tive go to growing congregations,
not that growing congregations
are conservative,” he said.
Roozen’s own research
through the Faith Communi-
ties Today study, which includes
more than 5,000 mainline
churches in the US, has found
that “theology had no effect.”
Congregations on both theolog-
ical extremes were more likely
to still be growing.
Haskell says liberal and con-
servative doctrines necessar-
ily produce different outcomes.
“All the growing church clergy in
our study, because of their theo-
logical outlook, held the convic-
tion that it was ‘very important
to encourage non-Christians to
become Christians,’ ” he said.
“Conversely, half the clergy at
the declining churches held the
opposite conviction, believing
it was not desirable to convert
non-Christians. . . . Which do you
think is more likely to generate
church growth?”
Like Stark and other fellow
GO FIGURE
researchers tracking denominational
decline, Roozen observed how theo- That Loving Feeling
logical shifts make it harder for main-
line churches to assert their value In recent years, Americans have developed warmer feelings toward every religious
over non-religious progressive worl- group—except evangelicals. Even more striking: Only 61 percent of all Americans
dviews. “If you’ve got a younger gen- (and 55 percent of non-evangelicals) personally know someone who is evangeli-
eration that are asking, ‘What good is cal, down 9 percentage points from 2014. It was the biggest decline of any group.
religion?’—what do liberal Protestants Jews warmed to evangelicals the most, while black Protestants cooled the most.
say to them?” Roozen noted that with-
out focused teachings on the uniqueness
of Jesus or belief in heaven and hell, for HOW HOW
example, mainline congregations find AMERICANS FAITH GROUPS
themselves in competition with human- RATE RATE
itarian and secular groups.
“The challenge to liberal Protestant-
FAITH GROUPS EVANGELICALS
ism is not conservative Protestantism,” (FROM JUNE 2014 (FROM JUNE 2014
he said. “It’s secularity.” TO JANUARY 2017) TO JANUARY 2017)
While the Canada study offers a new 90⁰ 90⁰
and rather unexpected source of inspi-
ration for Christians concerned about
declining church attendance, discussion
over the counterintuitive appeal of con- White Evangelicals
servative theology in a secularizing cul- 80⁰ 80⁰
ture dates back to at least the 1970s. Dean
Kelley’s Why Conservative Churches Are
Growing, and the related research that Black Protestants
ensued, suggested that the “strictness” 70⁰ 70⁰
of conservative religious communities Mainline
corresponded to church growth. (not asked in 2014)
Since then, Kelley’s notion has been Non-evangelical
Jews
Catholics
Protestants
challenged by demographic analysis— White Mainline
Evangelicals
including family size among evangel-
60⁰ 60⁰
icals—and conflicting trends. Critics
Catholics
have asked: If conservative theology
is such a major draw, what explains Buddhists Non-evangelical
the megachurch boom around pastors 50⁰ Americans 50⁰
Hindus
like Joel Osteen? Or the recent record Mormons
decline among Southern Baptists? “Nothing in
Roger Finke, the sociologist who Particular”
directs the Association of Religion Data Atheists All Unaffiliated
Muslims 40⁰ 40⁰
Archives, found that even conservative
denominations, including the South- Agnostics
ern Baptist Convention and Lutheran Jews
Church–Missouri Synod, have had to con-
tinue to innovate to maintain their vitality. 30⁰ 30⁰
“In short, the conservative groups Atheists
often retain the core teachings that are
valued so highly by the membership.
But members want much more than the 20⁰ 20⁰
retention of valued teachings,” he said.
“In areas that are not core teachings,
churches must continually search for
innovative ways to reach, activate, and
serve members.” MEAN 0 to 33 degrees = negative
THERMOMETER 34 to 66 degrees = neutral
RATINGS 67 to 100 degrees = positive
KATE SHELLNUTT is online associate
editor for CT. PEW RESEARCH CENTER
TEXT-ONLY TEXT-ONLY 15
N E W S GLEANINGS
Southern Baptists’
uncooperative funds
Some churches in the Southern Baptist
Convention (SBC) aren’t happy with recent
decisions by denominational leaders and
are showing their displeasure by closing
their wallets. After Ethics and Religious
Liberty Commission (ERLC) president
Russell Moore’s repeated public criticisms
of Donald Trump and his evangelical sup-
porters, Prestonwood Baptist Church in
Texas—led by Trump adviser and former
SBC president Jack Graham—decided to
escrow money marked for denominational
programs. The church gave $500,000
to the Cooperative Program in 2015; the
program’s annual budget is about $190
million. Another megachurch in Tennessee
is holding back funds over the decision
by both the ERLC and the International
Mission Board (IMB) to support a Muslim
community’s right to build a mosque
in New Jersey. The IMB apologized and
changed its policy to “speak only into situ-
ations that are directly tied to our mission.”
The SBC executive committee formed
a task force to “study and recommend
redemptive solutions” by September.
CHINA
Korean missionaries kicked out
More than 30 Protestant missionaries from
South Korea have been expelled from
northeastern China, where some had been
working for more than a decade. Along
with evangelizing, the missionaries had
been helping defectors from North Korea.
Some linked the expulsion to China’s objec-
tion to South Korea’s agreement to host
a US missile defense system. The radar is
meant to help protect the country from
North Korea but is capable of reaching into
Chinese territory. China has expressed its
displeasure by canceling appearances by
South Korean performers and taking mea-
sures against some companies. Others
point to China’s increased regulations on
Christianity, including 26 new restrictions
that were passed in October.
Free Christian college finally
finds a taker
After eight years and several false starts, the
Massachusetts campus that once housed
evangelist D. L. Moody’s school for girls will
finally be used again. In 2009, the cam-
pus was purchased from the school by the
16
HOW HISPANIC CHRISTIANS FEEL
IN TRUMP’S AMERICA
WORRIED ABOUT DEPORTATION:
(for themselves, family, or friends)
PROTESTANTS 25% A LOT
CATHOLICS
MY PLACE IN AMERICA:
I HAVE SERIOUS CONCERNS
PROTESTANTS
CATHOLICS
I FEEL CONFIDENT
PROTESTANTS
CATHOLICS
PEW RESEARCH CENTER
Green family, who own the
Hobby Lobby franchise. They
spent $5 million sprucing it up
with the aim of donating it to a
Christian institution. But when
they offered it to Christian col-
leges, almost all balked. The
campus—40 buildings on 200
acres—may be free, but it costs a
lot to maintain. The eventual will-
ing recipients: a small Catholic
college in California looking for a
second campus and the Moody
Center museum. The National
Christian Foundation has created
a $5 million matching grant fund
to help both with expenses.
Bob Jones regains tax-
exempt status
More than three decades ago,
the US Supreme Court con-
firmed the IRS’s decision to
strip Bob Jones University
(BJU) of its tax-exempt sta-
tus due to its policy of denying
admission to those in an inter-
racial marriage or known to
support interracial romantic
relationships. The university
dropped the policy in 2000
and apologized for its racial
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tax exemption again until it began to
reorganize in 2014. Since the university
moved under the tax-exempt umbrella
of its elementary school, it doesn’t need
separate IRS approval to take the exemp-
tion. Spokesman Randy Page told The
Greenville News the move allows BJU
donors to write off their gifts and makes
BJU a more attractive recipient for grants.
Ex-Muslim can’t sue church
over baptism
When a Muslim man converted and was
privately baptized by an Oklahoma church
in 2012, he says the church promised
to keep it quiet. But while he was visit-
ing his home country of Syria, the church
published his baptism on its website.
Islamist extremists in Damascus, aided by
a relative, kidnapped and tortured him,
according to a lawsuit he filed against the
church. The man had to escape by killing At Liberty’s Rawlings School of Divinity, we will help you develop the
his relative and now can’t return to Syria,
he said. He sued the church for $75,000 knowledge to teach, the compassion to relate, and the skills to serve.
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 N E W S HEADLINES | CHURCH LIFE

Bearing Burdens care

caresharing
munity
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costslikelikemam-
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worksthat
thatbegan
beganas assmall-scale,
small-scale,rel-
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mogramsand andcolonoscopies,
colonoscopies,long- long-
the Affordable Care Act nizations like Samaritan Ministries atively
ativelyunknown
unknownoperations
operationsin inthe
the term
termprescriptions,
prescriptions,mental mentalhealth,health,
(ACA) enacted by President Barack and Medi-Share match each month’s late
late’80s
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early’90s
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nowflflourish
ourish and
andmanymanyother otherexpenses
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asAmericans
Americansrethink
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bytraditional
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uals across health care sharing min- households that have major medi- ship
shipwith
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andeach
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other. must
mustbe becovered
coveredby bythe
thepatient.
patient.
istries surpassed 625,000 this year. cal expenses arise. “People
“Peoplewill willhear
hearabout
aboutthe thelowlow
Christians who swap health insur- In the New Testament, “there are cost,
cost,andandthat
thatmaymaybe bewhat
whatgetsgetsthem
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18%
ance premiums to cover each other’s lots of signs about this kind of care to
topick
pickup uptheir
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expenses instead usually find them- and awareness; where one body has it’s
it’sreally
reallytheir
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faiththat
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selves with lower payments than needs, others in the body are sup- them,”
them,”saidsaidGardner.
Gardner.His HisMedi-Share
Medi-Share
they’d have for policies purchased posed to step up,” said Darrell Bock, a network
networkhas hascovered
covered$1.4 $1.4billion
billionin in
through the ACA exchanges. But as Dallas Theological Seminary profes- medical
medicalbills billssince
sinceititbegan
beganin in1993.
1993.
President Donald Trump pledges to sor who has authored commentaries WHITE
WHITEEVANGELICALS
EVANGELICALSWHO
WHO Many
Many health
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APPROVE
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OFOBAMACARE
OBAMACARE

47%
dismantle Obamacare—starting with on Luke and Acts. up
uptotoavoid
avoidthe theyear-over-year
year-over-yearprice price
the individual mandate requiring Compared to contemporary jumps.
jumps.Obamacare
Obamacarepremiums premiumsrose rose
coverage—many health care sharers efforts for Christians to pay for each by
byabout
about25 25percent
percentfor for2017,
2017,withwith
are committed to staying put. other’s heart surgeries, births, bro- certain
certainstates
statesadopting
adoptinghikes hikesthat that
“With all the talk of health care ken bones, and cancer treatments, “I amount
amountto to$1,000
$1,000to to$2,000
$2,000increases
increases
reform and ‘What do we do? How do think the sentiment and the approach for
for families
families who who don’t
don’t qualify
qualify for for
ALL
ALLCHRISTIANS
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WHO
we fix this mess?’ the solution will is actually somewhat parallel,” Bock subsidies,
subsidies,according
accordingto toTime.
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OFOBAMACARE
OBAMACARE
not come from regulations and man- said. “In Acts, it shows the nature and Members
Membersof ofhealth
healthcare caresharing
sharing
dates,” said Anthony Hopp, spokes- depth of the community. But it’s not PPEEWW RREESSEEAARRCCHH CCEENNTTEERR ministries
ministries(provided
(providedthe theorganiza-
organiza-
man for Samaritan Ministries, one something that’s commanded.” tions
tionshavehavebeen beenfunctioning
functioningsince since
of the biggest health care sharing Like most acts of generosity 1999)
1999) are are exempt
exempt from from the the ACA’s
ACA’s
networks. “We’re going to have to described in the Bible, providing Health
Healthcare
caresharing
sharingorganizations
organizationsdo do individual
individualmandate,
mandate,which whichpenalizes
penalizes
think biblically.” for needs within the church should not
notoperate
operateas asinsurance
insuranceand anddon’t
don’t Americans
Americans without without health
health insur-
insur-
Groups like Samaritan Minis- be done voluntarily, scholars say. guarantee
guaranteecoverage.
coverage.Yet Yetititdoesn’t
doesn’t ance.
ance.Days
Daysafter
afterTrump
Trumptook tookoffi
office
ce in
in
tries (whose enrollment jumped In Acts 2, the same chapter that seem
seemas asstrange
strangeto tocount
countononthethegen-
gen- January,
January,adviser
adviserKellyanne
KellyanneConway Conway
from 65,000 to 224,000 individuals chronicles Pentecost, Luke describes erosity
erosityofofneighbors
neighborsnow nowthat
thatcrowd-
crowd- indicated
indicatedthat thatthethePresident
Presidentwould would
over the past five years) and Medi- sharing within the church body and funding
fundingis ison
onthetherise;
rise;hundreds
hundredsof of not
notbe beenforcing
enforcingthe themandate
mandateany any
Share (up from 46,000 to 222,000 uses language affiliated with ancient thousands
thousandsof ofAmericans
Americanshave haveturned
turned longer.
longer.The Theeventual
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theindi-
indi-
during the same period) take their utopias, according to Craig Keener, a to
toonline
onlinecampaigns
campaignson onsites
siteslike
likeYou-
You- vidual
vidualmandate
mandatewill willdodoaway
awaywith withthethe
cues from the New Testament call to biblical studies professor at Asbury Caring
CaringandandGoFundMe
GoFundMein inorder
ordertoto need
needfor foraareligious
religiousexemption.
exemption.
“bear one another’s burdens.” Theological Seminary. “Luke sees it cover
coverunexpected
unexpectedmedicalmedicalcosts.
costs. “Things
“Thingsare aredefi nitely in
definitely inmotion,
motion,
“We hear from a lot of church as an ideal,” he said. “It follows the While
While thethe Enlightenment
Enlightenment and and but
butwe weanticipated
anticipatedthat thatwith
withTrump,”
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organizations and religious nonprof- outpouring of the Spirit, so he sees Reformation
ReformationbroughtbroughtProtestants
Protestantsaa said
said Hopp,
Hopp, following
following Conway’s
Conway’s
its,” said Michael Gardner, spokes- it as a good thing.” greater
greatersense
senseof ofindividualism,
individualism,“the “the announcement
announcementand andthethePresident’s
President’s
man for Medi-Share. The booming Daniel Coughlin said joining a cultures
culturesof ofthe
theBible
Biblewere
werecollectiv-
collectiv- executive
executiveorder orderurging
urgingagencie
agencies s to
to
network, which opened a branch health care sharing network taught ist—group
ist—groupfifirst,
rst, individual
individualsecond,”
second,” ease
ease ACAACA requirements.
requirements. “Health “Health
office in Colorado Springs last year, him to trust the Christian commu- said
saidBen
BenWitherington
WitheringtonIII, III,another
another care
care sharing
sharing ministries
ministries existed existed
is considering creating group plans nity. “Samaritan Ministries is more New
NewTestament
Testamentscholar scholarat atAsbury.
Asbury. before
beforethe theACA;ACA;God-willing,
God-willing,they they
that Christian organizations can than an inexpensive way to provide Believing
Believingthat
thatGodGodwas wasthe
theowner
ownerof of thrived
thrived during
during the the ACA;
ACA; and and they
they
offer employees. “We want to meet for my health care,” said Coughlin, all
allthings,
things,the
theJerusalem
Jerusalemchurch
churchwas was will
willsurvive
surviveafter.”
after.”
their needs as well.” who survived cancer at 25 and whose “prepared
“preparedto toshare
shareas asneeded,”
needed,”he hesaid.
said.
These ministries say their prin- medical history long prevented him For
ForChristians,
Christians,healthhealthcare
careshar-
shar- KATE
KATE SHELLNUTT
SHELLNUTTisisonline
onlineassociate
associate
ciples go back to the early church: from obtaining insurance. “Health ing
ingmay
maytake
takethe theplace
placeofofinsurance
insurance editor
editorfor
forCT.
CT.

18 TEXT-ONLY TEXT-ONLY 19
19
N E W S H E A D L I N E S | C H U R C H I N AC T I O N
Together for
the Gospels
Unprecedented unity among Bible translators
is transforming Christian giving, too.
T
his fall, ten Bible transla-
tion agencies—from Wycliffe
Bible Translators to Pio-
neer Bible Translators to the
United Bible Societies—will invite givers
to visit a single website to see how Bible
translation is progressing around the
world and to join in this effort by making
their contributions. Rather than com-
peting against one another for website
visitors, the agencies will allow the col-
laborative site to connect visitors to the
initiatives and organizations that best fit
their interests.
That sort of others-centered coop-
eration is unprecedented in the Bible
translation sector, said Dal Ander-
son, former chief operating officer of
Seed Company and Every Tribe Every
Nation. As of late 2016, this network of
ten heavyweight Bible translation agen-
cies and several resource partners was
involved in 90 percent of the translation
work done globally. “Those of us work-
ing in the Bible translation world know
how big of a miracle this is.”
The dramatic shift toward collab-
oration has delighted givers, who are
looking for proven leadership, extraor-
dinary vision, and clear momentum,
said David Wills, president emeritus of
the National Christian Foundation, one
of the largest privately funded nonprof-
its in the United States.
“If you add collaboration to the mix,
the attraction and potential for growth
becomes exponential,” he said.
In fact, this time the givers led the way.
“The investors have really challenged
us on this,” said Bob Creson, president
and CEO of Wycliffe Bible Translators.
In some cases, large givers were being
pitched by several translation agencies
20
for nearly the same work.
“They patiently said, ‘I love what
you’re doing. Please get your act
together,’ ” he said.
The vision of an opportunity larger
than any agency could accomplish alone
was first articulated by Mart Green, who
founded Mardel Christian Bookstores
and chairs the Hobby Lobby board.
He gathered several big givers and the
heads of three Bible translation agen-
cies, then laid out a vision for a central
digital Bible library. That way, all trans-
lations of Scripture would be available
to anyone, instead of siloed in separate
systems.
While working on the library, the
agencies learned to trust each other, and
“THOSE OF US WORKING IN THE
BIBLE TRANSLATION WORLD KNOW
HOW BIG OF A MIRACLE THIS IS.”
DAL ANDERSON
givers were intrigued, Green said. The
library launched in 2010; since then, it
has gathered more than 1,100 Scripture
portions and versions.
“It [didn’t] take too long for them to
figure out, ‘Okay, I’m sure glad we didn’t
build 10 digital libraries,’ ” he said.
Meanwhile, Todd Peterson, a for-
mer professional football kicker who
was Seed Company’s interim CEO and
former board chair, was also communi-
cating a bigger goal.
“I got a clear vision for inviting our
TEXT-ONLY
most influential, affluent friends to join
us for a weekend and really be chal-
lenged with the huge vision of provid-
ing for Bible-less people,” he said. (Of
the more than 7,000 languages in the
world, just over 3,000 now have some
Scripture. Just 636 have complete trans-
lations, but those languages account for
nearly 70 percent of the population.)
At the first weekend gathering, Seed
Company financial partners raised a
few million dollars, and the organiza-
tion repeated the event over the fol-
lowing few years. In 2014, celebrating
the beginning of the 1,000th language
project, more than 100 couples gave a
total of $21 million.
“That had never been seen before
in the fundraising world for missions,”
Peterson said.
Part of the gathering’s success was
its focus on those without access to the
Bible and on Jesus’ kingdom instead of
the Seed Company’s needs or the fame of
its staff, speakers, or musicians, he said.
And that sparked an idea in Peterson.
“That was a paradigm shift. I said,
‘This isn’t about Seed Company.’ ”
Peterson suggested that Seed Com-
pany share its weekend gathering format
and community of substantial givers
with the larger translation network,
banding with them to cast a unifying
vision of working together to translate
the gospel into every existing language.
He called Green to start a dialogue.
“There’s no way Seed Company will
go for it,” Green told him. “But you’re
the former chair and acting CEO, so I
guess if anybody could get away with it,
you could.”
In 2015, Seed Company opened
up the event—which is now its best
fundraiser—to fellow translation
CONTINUED ON PAGE 22
N E W S H E A D L I N E S | C H U R C H I N AC T I O N
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20
organizations. At the gathering, donors
would be exposed to the global need for
translation and matched with the most
appropriate translation agency based on
their passions for particular regions or
people groups, even if that agency was
not Seed Company.
Building the level of trust to pull off
such an event took countless monthly
meetings on the part of a steering com-
mittee, consisting of agency CEOs and
other influencers, directing the coali-
tion. A commitment to transparency
“[GOD] BROUGHT UNITY WE
HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE. AND
ALL OF A SUDDEN, THE DONOR
COMMUNITY WAS RESPONDING WITH
STUNNING GENEROSITY.”
TODD PETERSON
was key in an environment where add-
ing an agency to the alliance or even a
change in executive leadership could
throw off trust. “Transparency goes out
the window, and people are reluctant to
talk,” Anderson said.
Trust was also built through a com-
mitment to working together through
snags and disagreements that has now
trickled down to efforts to cooperate at
the implementation level.
Today, the coalition’s magnetism has
introduced an unanticipated problem,
Anderson said. Forming a partnership
with the coalition can be more attrac-
tive to field partners—the individual
missionaries, local churches, and other
organizations on the front lines of Bible
translation work—than working with
one of the organizations alone. So the
group has had to choose its engagements
carefully, he said. For example, consid-
eration of one prospective partnership
continued over a year, with members
of the team holding different positions.
22
“At the end of the day, it’s an envi-
ronment that looks for unity more than
plurality,” Anderson said. The coalition
chooses its commitments and endorse-
ments unanimously, or not at all.
The unity on display at the 2015 joint
fundraiser clearly inspired givers. Of
those who attended, roughly 60 cou-
ples gave just under $20 million—about
half the attendance but nearly the same
amount of money as the 1,000th lan-
guage celebration the year before.
That means the average gift of
$200,000 to one agency in 2014 rose
to an average of $300,000 toward Bible
translation in 2015, Peterson said. “We
saw a $75,000 commitment from the
2014 weekend turn into $600,000 in
2015. We saw $300,000 turn into $1.5
million, and $1 million turn into $3
million.”
The rising tide lifted all of the trans-
lation agencies involved, Peterson said.
“That was a miracle. God had given us a
fresh new vision. He brought unity we
had never seen before. And all of a sud-
den, the donor community was respond-
ing with stunning generosity.”
The collaboration popularized a
name—illumiNations, a reference to
the foretelling of nations coming to the
light in Isaiah 60:3—and is still picking
up steam. The cooperative agencies are
joining their efforts to create a software
system to track in real time which lan-
guages are being translated and how
much of the work is left to do, which
will be added to the coalition’s website,
www.illuminations.bible. They’ll also
have a presence at the Museum of the
TEXT-ONLY
Bible that will open in Washington, DC,
in the fall of 2017.
“We’ve adopted a ‘better quality,
faster, cheaper’ mindset,” Peterson
said. “Everybody in the conversation
is saying, ‘We’ve got to do this excel-
lently because this is God’s Word. But
we also have to do it as quickly as possi-
ble because people are dying every year.
And also inexpensively, because that’s
just good stewardship.’ ”
Collaboration, not competition, is
the best way to achieve that, he said.
Some ministry sectors have been
cooperating for a while, such as the
International Sports Coalition (ISC),
founded in 1987, and the Accord Net-
work (formerly the Association of
Evangelical Relief and Development
Organizations), founded in 1978. But
today collaborations are rising in popu-
larity, with networks like illumiNations
and the International Orality Network
MEET
(founded in 2004) popping up more fre-
quently, Wills said.
THE CLARKS
“ISC and this Bible translation col-
laboration are extraordinarily powerful
because all points of the triangle—inves-
tors, the people doing the ministry, and
those receiving the ministry—are all
engaged in a collaborative effort,” Wills
said. “That’s explosive.”
A key ingredient is humility, he said. NEWLYWEDS, SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHERS AND PARENTS TO
So is having an abundance mentality. “It SAM, ONE OF THE #CATSOFINSTAGRAM — THEY’RE FOCUSED ON
means that you’re trying to make some-
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one else successful.”
In a room full of type-A leaders with THEIR GOAL: INVEST THEMSELVES IN THEIR OWN COMMUNITY
strong personalities, “it’s a God thing
when it happens,” Wills said. “You look
at it and say, ‘Wow. Our primary respon-
sibility is to not get in the way of what
1.5
God is doing.’ ”
The illumiNations template could be
applied to other areas like clean water,
anti-abortion efforts, or poverty relief,
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rogative, but there is a lot of biblical ver-
nacular here—generosity, humility, and Using their ECCU Visa card, Josh and Claire receive cash back on purchases of everything from cat food to
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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

FOCUSED
VISION
COURAGEOUS
MISSION

REDEFINING THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE,

IN-PERSON AND LIVE-STREAMING

WHAT TO MAKE
IN THIS SECTION OF DONALD TRUMP’S
Where We Stand
by Mark Galli p. 28
SOUL
Confessing God And how that might shape our response to his presidency.
by Derek Rishmawy p. 30
BY MARK GALLI
Beginning of Wisdom ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN TAYLOR
by Jen Wilkin p. 32

LE AR N M O R E AT S EM I NARY. ED U
TEXT-ONLY 27
V I E W S W H E R E W E S TA N D
I
It has been customary to give a new
president 100 days before evaluating his
administration. With President Donald
Trump, many could not wait even 100
hours—and for good reason. Trump
and his team tripped out of the starting
block and fell flat on their collective
faces. The President’s executive order
temporarily suspending refugee reset-
tlement and banning travelers from
seven Muslim-majority countries was
an administrative and legal disaster.
His every cabinet pick has faced fierce
opposition. And amid reports of a White
House staff in chaos, the President has
only amplified his critique of the press.
Before and after the election, CT
has also weighed in on our political or
moral concerns about Trump. He has
promoted policies and appointed people
who work against matters we have edi-
torialized on—his callousness toward
refugees and his seeming indifference
to the environment are two examples.
And while evangelicals may disagree
about the President’s policies on such
matters, few would argue that Trump
is a moral exemplar. Both the Left and
the Right have noted vices and ethical
problems, from utter self-centeredness
to cruel remarks to blatant conflicts of
interest, and more.
One dimension that has been mostly
neglected, though, especially among
Christians, is a matter of some con-
sequence. To understand its gravity,
28
we must begin with the most positive
of theological statements: Trump is a
man whom God loves. He is a sinner for
whom Christ died. Despite his evident
moral failings, Trump nonetheless has
been created in the image of God. He
may be a political and moral enemy for
many of our readers, but that is all the
more reason we are called to love him
and pray for him (Matt. 5:44).
To love such a man surely includes
challenging the policies and moral tenor
of his administration. But this prophetic
work too easily slips into “rejoicing in
evil” (1 Cor. 13:6). We note this espe-
cially among late-night comedians (and
their viewers) who delight in mocking
Trump’s every misstep to the reward
of soaring television ratings. Humor is
a divine gift designed, in part, to relieve
unbearable tension—which today is at
a breaking point politically. So these
comedians play an important role
in a democracy. Still, a fine line runs
between righteous satire and rejoicing
in the foolishness of others, and when
INSTEAD OF BEING QUICK TO
SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER, WE
MIGHT ALSO, FROM TIME TO TIME,
SPEAK MERCY TO THE IMMORAL.
it is crossed, it does not bode well for
Christian witness or for the health of
the republic.
What might better characterize our
reaction is less satire and more lament.
Blessed are those who mourn their sins
(Matt. 5:4), and because they see them-
selves in solidarity with all sinners, who
also mourn the sins of others.
And, more shocking still (given the
current climate), instead of being quick
to speak truth to power, we might also,
from time to time, speak mercy to the
immoral. And if there is anyone who
needs mercy, it is Trump.
TEXT-ONLY
Some believe that Trump is a baby
Christian who is making his way in the
faith. While we would never presume
to judge another’s heart, we are deeply
troubled by what is observable about
Trump’s spiritual health. Aside from his
ethical breaches and questionable char-
acter, his attitude toward the sacred has
been confused and cavalier. He says he
“reveres” Jesus not for his death and
resurrection on our behalf, but mainly
for his “bravery and courage.” In Iowa,
“
he spoke of the Lord’s Supper, saying,
“I drink my little wine . . . and have my
little cracker.” He is reputed to have
said he has no need of forgiveness, but Your life can change
he qualified that in an interview with
Cal Thomas: “I will be asking for for-
in an instant.”
giveness, but hopefully I won’t have
to be asking for much forgiveness.” He
fundamentally sees himself not as a
sinner in need of mercy but as an “hon-
orable man.”
Again, it is for God alone to judge the
state of the heart. But the gospel of Jesus
Christ casts the behavior of Trump in a
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and women who know themselves and
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teous God, who will brook no evil—and West Des Moines, Iowa 50265 | 1-800-233-2690
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anity Today.
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
The Church Isn’t
Called to Be ‘Decent’
We’re called to something more.
W
hen asked why it was import-
ant to him to have a cabinet
that was 50 percent female,
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
coolly responded, “Because it’s 2015.” In
other words, “It should just be obvious to
any decent, thinking person.”
In 2017, this sort of rhetorical flour-
ish is even more common. Online dis-
course is littered with listicles like “9
Steps to Becoming a Decent Human
Being.” A quick Google search for the
phrase “being a decent person doesn’t
cost you anything” yields dozens of
unique memes.
How did the charge to be a “decent
human being” become so persuasive?
In his book A Secular Age, Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor suggests
we are making up for the motivation
gap in what he calls the “modern moral
order.” At its heart is a sort of “secular-
ized agape,” a universal benevolence
and moral burden towards all people.
This burden is rooted not necessarily
in God or the divine but in our shared
sense of dignity. Recognizing the uni-
versal dignity of all becomes essential
to affirming our own.
The shared acknowledgement of
mutual human dignity is an undeniably
positive development. It has motivated
and reinforced international human-
itarian efforts, anti-racism initiatives,
and other beneficial movements.
But Taylor questions whether this
source of moral energy is really enough
to sustain our universal “benevolence.”
After all, Taylor notes, “never before
have people been asked to stretch out
so far . . . as a matter of course, to the
stranger outside the gates.” In the long
term, without the fundamental energy
30
of the gospel, what would broadly fuel
these measures?
The answer is shame.
One way to gin up moral energy is
by thinking of these standards as what
it takes to be a “decent human being.”
If you fail to meet these standards, it’s
not that you’ve tried to achieve a great
undertaking and stumbled. You’re just
someone who doesn’t measure up to the
basics of being a decent person in 2017.
As Taylor notes, with shame as the
main motivator of moral behavior, our
efforts at justice are “vulnerable to the
shifting fashion of media attention,”
because we need to be seen as decent
people above all. Sadly, the church isn’t
immune from this tendency.
While well intended, focusing on
being decent human beings as a way
to effect change underestimates the
difficulty of accomplishing “secular-
ized agape.” It is not a simple matter
to overcome the ingrained prejudices
of generations. It involves much more
than simply knowing what year it is
and acting accordingly. Enlightenment
or not, we have yet to evolve past the
basic narcissism woven into our hearts
since the Garden of Eden. Our fail-
ure to understand this ends up trans-
forming prophetic truth-telling into
self-satisfied, self-righteous scorn at
the predictable failure of so many to
THE CHURCH CAN
SPEAK A WORD OF
GRACE TO A WORLD
WORN DOWN BY SHAME.
TEXT-ONLY
live up to a popularly defined standard
of “decency.”
But this is precisely where the
church can speak a word of grace to a
world worn down by shame. We worship
Jesus Christ, who preaches the high call
of the Sermon on the Mount, proclaim-
ing the eschatological moral order of the
kingdom of God, but who also invites the
spiritually poor into it (Matt. 5:3). Jesus
does not come for the decent—after all,
“It is not the healthy who need a doctor,
but the sick” (Mark 2:17).
The church has the space to embrace
the redemptive tension that leads to real
moral transformation, rather than lean-
ing on the limited resources of shame.
We don’t lower the moral bar for “those
sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 1:2).
We’re not just saved to be “holy and
blameless before God” (Eph. 1:4). Our
salvation inspires lives such that even
the “pagans” who “accuse us of doing
wrong” will see our good works and
glorify God (1 Pet. 2:12). Christian agape
calls us to be not decent, but Christlike.
At the same time, God calls us to con-
fess that none is without sin (1 John 1:8).
Along with being a prophetic community,
Jesus calls us to be a priestly one, forgiv-
ing each other’s inevitable failures “just
as in Christ God forgave” us (Eph. 4:32).
Because we have his Spirit, we bear one
another’s burdens and restore each other
“in a spirit of gentleness” (Gal. 6:1, ESV).
As a community dependent on the
gracious, empowering agape of the tri-
une God, we can offer hope for change
beyond mere shame for failure.
DEREK RISHMAWY is a doctoral student LEADER IN CHRISTIAN TRAVEL SINCE 1981
in systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School.
CST #2069059-40
V I E W S BEGINNING OF WISDOM | JEN WILKIN
How to Overcome
Sibling Rivalry
Deep friendship in the body of Christ starts at home.
S
ibling friendship is a countercul-
tural notion. TV shows, movies,
and books rarely portray siblings
as allies. Sibling rivalry has been ele-
vated from an occasional challenge to
the cultural norm.
Under this norm, parents function as
referees and judges—breaking up fights,
assigning blame, and steering siblings
to leave each other alone. But the Bible
indicates that siblinghood (both spiri-
tual and physical) consists of more than
simply tolerating each other.
I’ve been pondering Proverbs 18:24:
“One who has unreliable friends soon
comes to ruin, but there is a friend
who sticks closer than a brother.” True
friendship is a gift of the rarest kind.
When the writer of Proverbs wants us to
conceive of the deepest form of friend-
ship, he says, in essence, “Imagine a
depth of friendship that exceeds even
that between siblings.” He points to sib-
linghood as the gold standard.
I came to parenthood with no vision
for my children to be friends. I grew up
the only girl among four brothers, and
“adversarial” does not come close to
capturing the dynamic among us. Our
fights explored the full range of verbal,
physical, and psychological aggression.
We loved each other, but we didn’t really
learn to like each other until later in life.
By contrast, my husband has called
his sister, Emily, his best friend for his
whole life. At first, I thought he must be
lying. But there was evidence—pictures
of them holding hands (holding hands!)
on a trip to Disney as teenagers, full-
body hugging at a family gathering, and
heading to a dance together her senior
year when she didn’t have a date.
I wanted to scoff, to say they were a
32
statistical anomaly. But I also wanted
to hope: What if Jeff and I could raise
our four kids to be best friends? Despite
the overwhelming consensus that it
couldn’t be done, we began crafting a
plan to try. We consulted Jeff’s parents.
We quizzed older parents whose kids
were friends. We scoured parenting
books. And we assembled a handful of
principles to guide us:
No favorites. Sibling rivalry can
grow from a perception (right or
wrong) that one child is more favored
than another by Mom and Dad. We
told the kids they were each our favor-
ites in unique ways. We did not love
them equally, but uniquely with equal
intensity.
No teasing. This one was hard for
me. I had grown up with sarcasm and
teasing, and I was world class at both.
By not allowing them, our home became
a place where the kids felt safe from the
verbal aggression that was the norm
elsewhere. Instead, we prioritized affir-
mation, setting aside times to verbalize
what we genuinely liked about each
other.
Frequent reminders. When con-
flict arose, we reminded them, “Your
sibling is your best friend.” When peace
reigned, we reminded them, too. We
WHEN CONFLICT
AROSE, WE REMINDED
THEM, “YOUR SIBLING
IS YOUR BEST FRIEND.”
TEXT-ONLY
repeated what we wanted to be true
between them until it became what they
expected to be true.
Together versus apart. Rather
than separate fighters, we pushed them
closer, assigning them a shared conse-
quence (like a chore) to do together.
It was not our job to “break it up” but
to “bring it together.” If conflict con- Earn an Online MBA from PLNU
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Why do we discount the vision of
our kids as each others’ dearest friends?
Why do we settle for rivalry? Frankly, as
a parent, it’s easier to be a referee than
a reconciler. It’s easier to separate than
to shepherd—at least in the short-term.
But as I witness the deep friendship
that has grown between my kids, I affirm
that the long-term benefit was worth the
effort. A friend who sticks closer than a
brother is a rare gem. A sibling who is a
best friend is a treasure for a lifetime.
And a Christian family filled with sib-
lings who are friends bears compelling
testimony to the gospel of peace.
JEN WILKIN is a wife, mom, and Bible
teacher. She is the author of Women of the
Word and None Like Him.
THE FERMANIAN SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
ONLINE MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
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 COV E R STO RY

CAN YOU
CONTROL
YOURSELF?
NE W RE S E A RC H S UGGE STS YO U
M AY H AV E M O RE W I L L P OW E R A N D
S E L F- CO N T RO L T H A N YO U T H I NK .

PHOTO BY GILLAN VAN NIEKERK / STOCKSY

BY BRADLEY WRIGHT
W I T H D AV I D C A R R E O N

34 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M M AY 2 0 1 7
TEXT-ONLY 35

A
As a Christian, I have often wondered about my
failures of self-control. Why is it that I can know
what I want to do, carefully plan to do it, and then
do something completely different—something
unhelpful and often directly opposed to my beliefs?
As Paul wrote, “I do not understand what I do. For
what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”
(Rom. 7:15). To make matters worse, for the longest
time I had no idea how to change the situation other
than to try again and hope for the best.
In this context, I discovered social science
research on self-control—and it turns out there’s
a lot of it. Studies on self-control have boomed in
the past two decades, and self-control is a really
good thing to have. Research has found, for exam-
ple, that people with more self-control live longer,
are happier, get better grades, are less depressed,
are more physically active, have lower resting heart
rates, have less alcohol abuse, have more stable
emotions, are more helpful to others, get better
jobs, earn more money, have better marriages, are
more faithful in marriage, and sleep better at night.
But psychologists, sociologists, and other scien-
tists aren’t just interested in self-control’s practi-
cal benefits. They want to know what it is, how it
works, and why some people seem to be better at
it than others.
Let’s start with definitions. Self-control regu-
lates desires and impulses. It involves wanting to
do one thing but choosing to do another. We sub-
stitute responses to a situation, like wanting to eat
a bag of chips but instead picking up an apple. That
definition may seem obvious, but thinking about
self-control this way helps us avoid less accurate
or more vague ways of thinking about self-control,
36 TEXT-ONLY
like “being a good person.” We use self-control to
regulate what we think, what we do, and even how
we express our emotions. Willpower is the emo-
tional and mental energy used to exert self-control.
Christianity frequently asks us to substitute one
response for another. Self-control was a prominent
virtue in the Greco-Roman culture. The Hellenis-
tic world emphasized the self of self-control and
often portrayed ascetic avoidance of pleasure as
high holiness. The biblical writers, by contrast, saw
many of the world’s pleasures as God’s good gifts to
be enjoyed and believed that self-control was the
fruit of submission to God rather than autonomy.
Nevertheless, the idea that we are to substitute
one response for another, regulating our desires
and impulses, lies behind every biblical command
to obey when we are tempted. We want to worry,
but we are to pray. We want to curse, but we are to
bless. We want to hate, but we are to love.
How we think self-control works matters. I used
to think that self-control worked like a fire extin-
guisher—to be used in emergency situations to fight
back the flames of temptation. Or maybe it was like
a power switch, to be turned on when needed. But
research paints a different picture.
MORE A MUSCLE THAN A BATTERY
One key recent discovery is that self-control is an
exhaustible but buildable resource. Psychologist
Roy Baumeister demonstrated this with a clever
experiment. He had college students skip a meal,
so that they felt hungry, and then sit at a table. The
table had freshly baked chocolate chip cookies,
candy, and radishes. The first group of students—
the lucky ones—could eat whatever they wanted. Of
course, they only ate the sweets. The second group
had the same food in front of them, but they were
told to leave the sweets alone, and they could only
eat the radishes. The third group had no food in
front of them at all. (It was the control group.) After
the students sat at their tables for a while, they were
given a complex geometry problem to solve. The
trick was that the problem was unsolvable; what
mattered was how long they worked on it before
giving up. The students in groups 1 and 3 worked
for about 20 minutes. But, the students in group 2
worked only about 8 minutes. Why such a big dif-
ference? The students in group 2 had already used
up a lot of self-control resisting the sweets, so they
had less energy left over for working on the geom-
etry problem. Researchers call this ego depletion
(and there’s a lively debate in the research litera-
ture about how much we experience it).
Does this mean that self-control, once it’s used,
is gone forever? Not at all. It recharges with rest. In
fact, the more often self-control is used, the stron-
ger it gets. One study demonstrated this by having
right-handed students use only their left hand to
open doors. This required intentional thought and
effort—self-control—to override natural inclina-
tion. After subjects had done this for a while, they
had more overall self-control.
Self-control is like a muscle. It weakens imme-
diately after use but strengthens with frequent use.
WHO’S BEHIND THE WHEEL?
A second key discovery regards the interplay
between self-control and habits. Most of our daily
actions are automated. We do them with little
thought or energy. Think of driving your car to
work: You back out of the driveway, and before
you know it, you are there. Likewise, we “auto-
matically” comb our hair, climb stairs, and do the
dishes. The basal ganglia, located deep inside the
brain, help to coordinate automated behaviors.
We also engage in controlled behaviors. These
behaviors require conscious thought and effort.
Think of driving in a foreign country, where cars
are on the “wrong” side of the road. Or assembling
a piece of furniture with confusing instructions, or
using a software program for the first time. Con-
trolled behaviors are directed by the prefrontal
cortex, which is located right behind the forehead.
Automated and controlled behaviors make a
I USED TO THINK
T H AT S E L F - C O N T R O L
WORKED LIKE A LIKE
A FIRE EXTINGUISHER
OR A POWER SWITCH.
R E S E A R C H PA I N T S A
DIFFERENT PICTURE.
TEXT-ONLY
great team. Automated behaviors allow us to do
many activities easily, but they don’t work well with
new or difficult actions or anything that requires
long-term planning. In contrast, controlled behav-
iors enable us to do new and difficult things, but
they require a lot of willpower. If we had only auto-
mated behaviors, we would be like simple robots,
mindlessly repeating the same actions every time.
But, if we had only controlled behaviors, we’d have
to intentionally plan and execute every single thing
that we do.
Now imagine an elephant with a rider on its
back. It’s a strong animal, weighing six tons and
working tirelessly. It’s also prone to wander off in
search of food or whatever else catches its eye. The
rider is smart—he knows what needs to be done
and is good at planning. The rider is also weak, at
least compared to the elephant. For a short period
of time, the rider can control the elephant using
muscle, but this never lasts long, no matter how
hard the rider works. The rider soon tires, and then
the elephant can do what it wants. But the rider can
train the elephant so it does what it should with
little effort from the rider.
This general metaphor of an animal with a rider
on its back dates back to Plato, and it has been
recently popularized by social psychologist Jon-
athan Haidt. The elephant is automated behav-
ior—strong, powerful, but not good at planning
and prone to stray. The rider is controlled behavior,
who knows what needs to be done but struggles to
control the elephant. Willpower is the strength of
the rider. The power of this metaphor is that it gives
us insights on how to strategically use self-control.
But before we get to that, let’s look at the relation-
ship between self-control and Christianity.
CULTIVATING AND COUNTING FRUIT
The Bible speaks of self-control as a good thing.
Self-control is a fruit of the spirit (Gal. 5:23). A
person who lacks it is like a city without walls
(Prov. 25:28). It’s something that church elders
should have (Titus 1:8). The practice of Christian-
ity requires self-control. Think of a typical Sun-
day service—you stand up, sit down, kneel, shake
hands, shut your eyes, open your eyes, listen, talk,
and sing—all at the right times. We don’t necessar-
ily think of these actions as moral decisions, but
they use the same self-control resources, the same
37

combination of automated and controlled behav-
iors, as self-control as we normally think about it.
And that “normal” sense of self-control kicks in
when we leave the sanctuary, when the hard work
of the faith starts. Whatever their theology about
the relationship between law and grace, Christians
agree that holy living requires self-control in every
AVERAGE SCORE FOR TRAIT SELF-CONTROL
area of their lives. There are sins of omission and
sins of commission. The Ten Commandments is the
best known list of self-control challenges in history.
Because Christianity requires self-control, it
logically follows that it also builds it, and thus we
can expect active Christians to have relatively high
levels of self-control. And we can test this expecta-
tion with data. Several colleagues and I conducted
SoulPulse, a large-scale study of self-control and
spirituality funded by the John Templeton Foun-
dation. This study (which you can learn more
about at SoulPulse.org) had participants use their
smartphones to answer survey questions twice a
day for two weeks. It measured trait-level self-con-
trol using a standard scale that included questions
about resisting temptation, refusing things that are
bad, and acting without thinking.
We compared the self-control levels of Chris-
tians with those of people who have no religious
affiliation. Protestants and Catholics both aver-
aged higher levels of self-control (Fig. 1). Then we
looked at how self-control varies among Christians
by church attendance (Fig. 2). Christians who go to
church most often also had the most self-control.
Two caveats: The analyses don’t include peo-
AVERAGE SCORE FOR TRAIT SELF-CONTROL
ple of other religions because of data limitations.
I would assume that they too have high self-con-
trol because every religion has its own self-control
tasks. (Think of Muslims fasting during Ramadan
or Buddhists sitting in meditation.) Also, while reli-
gion can promote self-control, it could also be the
case that self-control promotes religiosity.
So far, we have an interesting (albeit abstract)
treatment of self-control. How can we use this
knowledge to live out our faith more fully? We’ve
found four general strategies.
LOOK FOR WHAT’S NOT THERE
The first strategy is simply being aware of our
capacity for self-control and willpower throughout
the day. Keep an eye on the gas gauge. It gives us a
sense of what is possible. Knowing our willpower
38 TEXT-ONLY
SELF-CONTROL IS
LIKE A MUSCLE.
IT WEAKENS
SE LF- CO N TR O L I M M E D I A T E LY
BY R E LI G I O U S A F F I LI ATI O N
(FIG. 1)
AFTER USE, BUT IT
STRENGTHENS WITH
65
FREQUENT USE.
60
55
level tells us when it might be a good time to take
50 on new challenges, or when we should stop and
refill. It lets us know when we are most vulnerable
to moral failure.
45 How do we monitor our willpower? It is most
PROTESTANTS CATHOLICS UNAFFILIATED apparent in its absence. That is, we are most aware
of our willpower level when we are low on it. One
symptom of low willpower is difficulty making deci-
sions, even small ones. Last summer, my wife, son,
and I spent the day cleaning, and as a reward, we
went out to eat at a new restaurant. When we got
there, it had a 90-minute wait. Choosing a different
restaurant should have been an easy decision for
us: There were a dozen restaurants within a few
C H R I STI A NS’ SE LF- CO N TR O L
BY C H U R C H ATTE N DA NC E
blocks, a couple even in sight. But we just stood
(FIG. 2) there for a minute with dazed expressions, unable
to compare options to decide where else to go. It
65 just felt too hard.
Another symptom is that things bother us more
than they usually do. We use self-control to regu-
60 late our emotions, so negative emotions surface
easily when it’s low. We become irritable, and rou-
tine events become provocations. When somebody
55 walks by our house, our 14-pound miniature poo-
dle barks at them a few times. Usually I don’t even
notice this barking, or I think it’s funny. But when
50 I’m depleted, I end up yelling (the human form of
barking) at her to stop.
A third symptom is that temptation becomes
45 more alluring. Something like this happened to me
NEVER YEARLY MONTHLY WEEKLY yesterday morning before going to church. I walked
into the kitchen and saw a pan of double-chocolate
fudge brownies on the counter. They were there the
Participants were surveyed on a wide array of activities, attitudes, behaviors, day before, and I hadn’t given them much attention.
and other factors, including self-control traits. They scored on a 100-point scale But after a fitful night worrying about an upcoming
based on their answers to such questions as “I am good at resisting temptation” deadline, I was low in self-control. The room got
and “Pleasure and fun sometimes keep me from getting work done.” quiet, and the brownies, though all the way across
TEXT-ONLY
the room, somehow filled my field of vision. Soon
one brownie after another made its way from the
pan to my mouth, and I sat through church with a
stomachache.
GROW POWER WHILE YOU SLEEP
The second strategy is to do things that increase
our self-control. Resting our self-control means
just that: A good night’s sleep bolsters self-control
the entire next day. Studies have found that work-
ers who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to
act unethically and take credit for other people’s
work. Likewise, experimental subjects randomly
assigned to less sleep are more likely to cheat on
tasks the next day. In the SoulPulse study, we found
that the participants had a lot more willpower after
they had slept well than they had on their usual
sleep schedule.
Food also matters. The brain consumes a dispro-
portionate amount of the glucose in our blood, so
when blood sugar is low, we have less mental energy
for self-control. The worst foods for self-control are
refined sugars and processed grains. These foods
break down quickly when eaten and spike our
blood sugar. This prompts the release of insulin,
which lowers our blood sugar. Low-glycemic foods,
those that keep steady blood sugar levels, are best
for self-control. In the SoulPulse data, participants
had somewhat less state-level willpower after they
had eaten sweets in the previous two hours.
HASTE DOES MAKE WASTE
A third strategy for managing self-control is to not
waste it. Years ago, my wife and I discovered Dave
Ramsey’s financial program, and we tracked all of
our expenses. We were astonished at the many little
ways that we were wasting our money. We even had
automatic withdrawals for things that we no longer
used. Getting rid of these money wasters gave our
finances a quick boost.
Something similar has happened to me with
self-control. Once I started paying attention, I
noticed the ways that I exercised it unnecessarily.
Getting rid of these willpower wasters has given me
more self-control for the things that matter. Some
willpower wasters use up emotional energy. When
I hurry to drive somewhere, I get anxious and have
39

to pay more attention to what I’m doing. I start
scanning the lanes to figure out which is fastest,
and I get upset with red lights and slow drivers. In
contrast, when I leave with time to spare, the drive
is relaxing, the passing scenery is interesting, and
I arrive ready for what is next. SoulPulse partici-
pants had less willpower when they were rushing
at the time of a survey.
Another drain on emotional energy is inter-
personal conflict. Conflict is sometimes necessary
and healthy, but often it arises out of impatience,
carelessness, or our shortcomings. I’m rarely as dis-
tracted and upset as when I’ve gone a few rounds
squabbling with a loved one. In this way, being kind
and patient with others preserves self-control. The
SoulPulse participants had less willpower when
they had argued with a loved one in the previous
12 hours.
Other willpower wasters squander cognitive
energy. Take multitasking, for example. Multitask-
ing is a myth. Our brains can’t pay close attention
to two things at once. Yes, we can carry on a con-
versation while we walk, but that’s because walking
usually doesn’t require much attention. We can’t
carry on the same conversation while we are also
doing long division in our head, because that also
requires attention. When faced with simultaneous
attention tasks, our brain may appear to be multi-
tasking, but it is in fact quickly switching back and
forth between them. This switching takes energy.
Imagine trying to write two thank-you letters at
the same time. You write a couple of words on the
first note, then quickly move your hand to the sec-
ond note and write a couple of words. You go back
to the first note, back and forth until it’s done. It
would be exhausting. Likewise, SoulPulse partic-
ipants had somewhat less willpower when they
were multitasking.
Another cognitive energy waster is frequent
use of email and social media. Each time we check
an account, we have to decide what to do with the
message, post, snap, or tweet that we just looked at.
Do we delete it, store it, respond to it, pass it along?
Decisions, even this small, require willpower. Even
if we do nothing with what we’ve read, we might still
think about it for some time afterward. Many peo-
ple, myself included, need to check email for work.
Maybe we do it more often than needed. I used to
check my email 8–10 times a day, but now I am down
to once or twice a day. The SoulPulse participants
had slightly less willpower when, in the previous
40 TEXT-ONLY
“ V I R T U E I S W H AT
HAPPENS WHEN WISE
AND COURAGEOUS
CHOICES BECOME
S E C O N D N AT U R E .”
N .   T. W R I G H T
hour, they had checked their Facebook account.
TRAIN THE ELEPHANT
The fourth strategy differs from the first three.
Using the metaphor of the elephant with a rider,
the first three focus on keeping the rider strong
(i.e., maintaining higher levels of self-control).
This strategy trains the elephant. The elephant is
a strong and tireless animal, so if it can be trained
to do our important work without the rider having
to push and pull, good things happen. We can use
willpower to make habits out of the thoughts, feel-
ings, and behaviors that we want in our lives. Once
they are habits, they become routine and auto-
matic. This is the single best use of willpower, bet-
ter than fighting temptation or making ourselves
do things we don’t want to do. Sometimes we have
to do these, of course, but temptation will return,
and an unpleasant task today will still be unpleas-
ant tomorrow. In contrast, habits can make the
things that we value happen regularly and easily.
In the first half of my career, I would agonize
over writing: when to do it, how much to do, and
so on. Over time, I’ve made it into a habit. Now, on
most weekdays, at 7:30 a.m. sharp, I sit in the com-
fortable leather recliner in my home office, throw
a favorite blanket over my legs, pick up a blue gel
pen and a pad of paper, and write until 11:30 a.m.,
with a few breaks interspersed. When done, I feel
good about what I’ve accomplished and go on with
my day. Here’s why this habit is important to me:
It allows me to write or rewrite about 1,500 words
each day with little thought about what I should be
doing. It just happens. The elephant gets a lot done
without the rider exerting much effort. A habit has
three components: a behavior (what is done), a cue
(when it is done), and a reward (why it is done).
When we put these components together, and
practice them regularly, a habit emerges.
Making a habit out of a small, simple behav-
ior is straightforward—just do the new behavior,
with a cue and a reward, consistently, and it will
become routine. This “just do it” approach, how-
ever, doesn’t work as well with big, challenging
changes. Common advice is to just do the challeng-
ing behavior for 30 days in a row and it will become
a habit. The problem is that some habits take much
longer than 30 days to form. And, frankly, if it’s a big
change, I probably can’t do it for 30 days straight.
That requires too much effort and self-control.
Here’s a better way to make big changes. Start
with what behavioral scientist B. J. Fogg calls a
“tiny habit.” Think of the big change you want to
make, and then pick one small behavior from it.
This behavior should be so small that it feels triv-
ial. This ensures that it’s easy to do. Start doing this
small behavior consistently until it becomes rou-
tine, and then, when you feel ready, add another
behavior from the big change until it, too, is routine.
Then add another and another until the whole big
change has become a habit. This approach requires
patience, but it works surprisingly well.
Recently, I decided to start doing an exercise
routine first thing in the morning as a way of get-
ting myself going. I picked 12 exercises to do for
one minute each. The problem is that I don’t like
doing any of them, especially early in the morning.
If I had approached this as I have past exercise res-
olutions, I would have psyched myself up, called
on determination, and planned to do the whole
routine every day. I might have also posted inspi-
rational quotes on the refrigerator and asked my
friends to hold me accountable. With this “just do
it” approach, I would get off to a good start because
of my high motivation. But inevitably, I would start
to falter after a week or two as other demands in
life asserted themselves, and soon I would be back
at square one. This time, however, I started with
a tiny habit. Every morning, after I took my vita-
mins (the cue), I walked to the sun room, and did
one, single burpee (the behavior). That’s it. One
repetition of one exercise. When I finished, I told
myself, out loud, “Good job!” (The reward). My goal
in doing one repetition was not to get good exercise.
It was, after all, only one repetition. My goal was to
starting building the habit of good exercise. Since
I started awhile ago, this habit has steadily grown,
and it won’t be too long before I’m doing all of the
exercises every morning without a second thought.
TEXT-ONLY
As I integrate these strategies into my life, I
manage and use self-control more effectively. Over
several years, I have given myself a habit makeover.
I have formed or am forming new habits with exer-
cise, eating, sleeping, paying attention to my wife,
helping my son with school work, praying, being
grateful, photographing nature, cleaning the house,
meeting people at church, learning about my faith,
and other things that matter to me.
N. T. Wright describes this process as virtue:
“Virtue is what happens when someone has made
a thousand small choices requiring effort and con-
centration to do something which is good and right,
but which doesn’t come naturally. And then, on the
thousand and first time, when it really matters, they
find that they do what’s required automatically.
Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous
choices become second nature.” Intentional habit
formation is central to the New Testament’s call to
holiness and sanctification.
This process has given me a sense of hope. Hav-
ing been a Christian for several decades now, I have
had self-control failures in many shapes and sizes.
I understand that I’m saved by grace, and that I
don’t have to have good habits to be loved by God.
And that’s one of the big reasons that I want to have
good habits—it’s not a matter of fear or duty. But
even so, those self-control failures are aggravat-
ing and discouraging. Somewhere along the line,
I concluded that these failures proved that there
is something wrong with me. If self-control is like
a power switch, then I wasn’t turning it on, and
therefore I was either incompetent or defective in
these areas of my life. If it was only a fruit that I had
no role in cultivating, it wasn’t growing very well.
Understanding self-control better has led me
to a more encouraging conclusion. Sometimes I
fail because I’m simply an exhausted rider. Other
times, I’m a rider on an untrained elephant. This
gives me hope for the future. I don’t have to simply
accept my regular shortcomings; instead, I have an
effective way to work on them. I will face self-con-
trol challenges and sometimes fail. And there is
still evil and sin, as well as the Spirit and grace. But,
slowly, I am becoming a strong, skilled rider atop a
well-trained elephant.
BRADLEY WRIGHT (brewright.com) is a sociologist
at the University of Connecticut. DAVID CARREON
is a psychiatry resident and neuroscientist at Stanford
University.
41
T H E C T I N T E RV I E W

Why Don’t the

Gospel Writers Tell
the Same Story?
New Testament
scholar and apologist
Michael Licona’s
new book argues that
ancient literary devices
are the answer—and
that’s a good thing
for Christians.
I N T E RV I EW BY CA LE B LI N DGRE N | P H OTO GRA P H Y BY RYA N G IB S ON

42 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M M AY 2 0 1 7
TEXT-ONLY 43

Though Michael Licona became
a Christian at a young age, he
experienced strong doubts
while working on a master’s
degree in religious studies at
Liberty University. That led him
to explore the evidence for the
resurrection of Jesus in his PhD
work, and to engage in public
debates with leading skeptics
and atheists. Driven by a desire
to follow the evidence wherever
it led, Licona understood that
journey might lead him away
from Christianity.
In 2010, Licona released
his book The Resurrection of
Jesus: A New Historiographi-
cal Approach, which showed
that the evidence for the his-
torical resurrection of Jesus is
much stronger than any com-
peting explanations, such as the
idea that Jesus’ body was stolen
by his followers or by his ene-
mies, or that the disciples simply
experienced hallucinations of
the resurrected Jesus.
Licona, formerly apologet-
ics coordinator at the North
American Missions Board, is
now teaching at Houston Bap-
tist University and has founded
RisenJesus.com. He recently
released a new book, Why Are
There Differences in the Gos-
pels?: What We Can Learn from
Ancient Biography (Oxford Uni-
versity Press).
44
What was your upbringing like? Did
you grow up as a Christian?
My parents were Catholic and split up
when I was five. My mom remarried
and we started attending a Presbyte-
rian church. When I was very young, I
was obsessed with getting to heaven.
I was always asking, “How do I get to
heaven, Mom?” And she said, “You just
have to do more good than bad.” So, I
was constantly thinking, Where am I
on that scale?
When I was ten years old, the Pres-
byterian church had a combined youth
group event and they brought this
Christian magician in. He did magic to
illustrate the message of the gospel. He
focused on what God had done, not what
I was supposed to do. And for the first
time I understood the gospel: It wasn’t
what I did; it was what Christ did. They
gave an invitation to come forward and
make a profession of faith. I went for-
ward to become a Christian; it was what
I’d been looking for.
How did you become interested in
apologetics?
Toward the end of my graduate studies,
I started doubting my Christian faith. I
believed I had a relationship with the
Lord, that the Bible was true. But what
if I was wrong? Don’t people from other
religions say the same thing? How could
I know that I’m not a Christian because
that’s what I learned from my parents?
These questions bothered me. I knew
it could mean the eternal destiny of my
soul if I got it wrong. So I was determined
to be open-minded and seek truth. That
led me into apologetics, which I had no
interest in before. But even that wasn’t
enough. I quickly realized that I was just
seeking the answers I wanted to find,
which led to further doubts and more
investigation. I was studying the Resur-
rection for my PhD at the time, initially
just wanting to find another way to prove
it. But I became interested in approach-
ing the Resurrection differently, as a his-
torian. If we subjected the resurrection
of Jesus to strictly controlled scrutiny
using the historical method, what would
it look like? What would it yield for us?
My goal was to answer these questions.
Is this what led to the public debates
TEXT-ONLY
you’ve had with prominent skeptics
like Bart Ehrman and Evan Fales?
I intentionally got involved with debates
with the leading skeptics out there
because I knew that someone like Bart
[Ehrman], who’s more intelligent than
me, who’d been doing this a whole lot
longer than me, would be likely to find
any weaknesses in my arguments. I had
to cross every t, dot every i, and be very
careful not to overstate my conclusions,
because he was going to challenge every-
thing I said. It was all meant to test my
ideas, to find the truth.
I prayed before each debate. I did
believe God existed. But I prayed, “If
Christianity is false, I want to know.
Please show me. Even if you have to
humiliate me, show me it’s false and I’ll
follow you wherever it leads me.”
After each debate, I would go back,
consider their objections, and see what
legitimate things they had to say. If my
case needed adjustment, I adjusted it.
If a portion needed to be abandoned,
I would abandon it. If I had concluded
that the evidence pointed against the
resurrection of Jesus, I would have left
Christianity.
Where did that lead? Were your doubts
ever settled?
I had studied the historical evidence for
Jesus’ resurrection enough to know that
it’s pretty good. But I didn’t know at the
time how good it really was. I did my best
to bracket my desired outcome while
my investigation proceeded, which took
deliberate and sustained effort. I wasn’t
surprised that the Resurrection came
out on top, but I was surprised at how
much it outdistanced other theories. So,
yes, it settled many of my doubts.
Is the evidence as good for the bodily
Resurrection as it is for the disciples’
experiences of the Resurrection?
One thing that virtually all scholars
agree on is that Jesus’ disciples had
experiences that they sincerely inter-
preted as the risen Jesus appearing to
them. So, I weighed the hypothesis that
Jesus’ actual resurrection is the expla-
nation for those experiences against
competing explanations, and the resur-
rection hypothesis came out way ahead.
And after looking into it, I believe the
evidence is actually incontrovertible
that they claimed Jesus was raised
bodily. Not only is this crystal clear in
the Gospels, but we get this even in Paul.
Since Gospel harmonization is not
exactly a new field, what makes your
new book, Why Are There Differences
in the Gospels?, different?
If we want to understand the Gospels
properly, it’s best to understand the
genre in which they were written. For
nearly two decades now, the majority
of New Testament scholars have agreed
that the Gospels belong to the genre of
Greco-Roman biography, or at least they
share a lot in common with it.
Most scholars admit that ancient
biographers had a flexible way of report-
ing events. In my book, I explore some
of those flexibilities to see if they can
explain the differences in the gospel
accounts. This differs from harmoniza-
tion efforts, which sometimes subject
the Gospels to a sort of hermeneutical
waterboarding until they tell the har-
monizer what he wants to hear.
I think whatever view of the Scrip-
tures we choose to have should be
in concert with what we observe in
Scripture. I like the way Mark Strauss
describes it, reading Scripture “from
the bottom up.” We read Scripture and
we base our view of Scripture on what
we observe. In contrast, a “top down”
approach begins with a certain view of
Scripture, then reads Scripture with that
assumed view in mind. I take the “bot-
tom up” approach, because I think if I
am truly to have a high view of Scripture,
then I must submit to Scripture, love
Scripture, and accept Scripture as God
has given it to us rather than forcing it
into a mold. If I fail to do this, I deceive
myself, claiming to have a high view of
Scripture when in reality I would have a
high view of my view of Scripture.
What my book does is look at how one
TEXT-ONLY
I PRAYED,
“IF CHRISTIANITY
IS FALSE,
I WANT TO KNOW.
PLEASE SHOW ME.
EVEN IF YOU HAVE
TO HUMILIATE
ME, SHOW ME
IT’S FALSE AND
I’LL FOLLOW YOU
WHEREVER IT
LEADS ME.”
of the most highly regarded biographers
of antiquity—Plutarch—reported the
same events differently. By looking at
those different accounts, I can identify
patterns in those differences, infer com-
positional devices from those patterns,
and then read the Gospels with those
devices in mind. It’s truly amazing to see
the Gospel authors using many of the
same compositional devices employed
by Plutarch!
Can you give me an example?
Here’s one that I didn’t find mentioned
by classicists. I call it literary spotlight-
ing. Imagine you’re viewing a theatrical
performance. You’ve got multiple actors
on the stage. All of a sudden the lights go
out and a spotlight shines on one of the
actors, who starts to give a monologue.
You know other actors are there on stage
but you can’t see them because the spot-
light is focused on that one character.
Literary spotlighting is when an author
45
mentions
mentionsonly onlyone person
one person performing
performing anan
tomb.
tomb. In In
LukeLuke andand
John,
John,youyouhave two.two. understanding
have understanding the the
biographical
biographicalgenre genre
action,
action,even
evenwhen
whenhehe isis
aware
aware ofof
several
Could
several
Could it be that
it be Mark,
that Mark,followed
followed by Mat-
by Mat- of that era era
of that becomes
becomesimportant.
important.
characters
characterswho whoareareinvolved.
involved. thew,
thew,is shining
is shining hishis
literary spotlight
literary on on
spotlight
In
In63
63BC BCthere
therewaswasa Roman
a Roman senator
thethe
senatorangel
angelwho’s
who’s announcing
announcing thatthat
Jesus
Jesus Does thisthis
Does affect
affthe
ect historical reliabil-
the historical reliabil-
named
namedLucius
LuciusSergius
SergiusCatilina
Catilinawhowhowas
has been
was
has been raised,
raised,even though
even though they know
they know ity of itythe Gospels?
of the Gospels?
planning
planninga arebellion.
rebellion. Letters
Letters describing
of of
another
describing another angel
angelwho waswas
who present?
present?SomeSome MyMy book doesn’t
book argue
doesn’t one one
argue way way
or theor the
the
theplot
plotreached
reacheda famous
a famous general,
general,Cras-
scholars
Cras-
scholars would
would saysay
that Luke
that LukeandandJohnJohn other about
other the the
about historical reliability
historical of of
reliability
sus.
sus.SoSoCrassus,
Crassus,with
withtwotwo other
otherpromi-
embellished
promi-
embellished thethe
story by adding
story by adding a second
a second the the
Gospels. I wasI was
Gospels. looking to gain
looking a deeper
to gain a deeper
nent
nentRoman
Romansenators,
senators,wentwent toto
Cicero’s
angel.
Cicero’s
angel.But Butembellishment
embellishment is certainly
is certainly understanding
understanding of the
ofbiographical
the biographicalgenre genre
home
homethatthatnight
nightandanddelivered
delivered the let-
notnot
the a tendency
let- a tendency of Luke. Spotlighting
of Luke. Spotlighting waswas of the Gospels,
of the so that
Gospels, we can
so that we read themthem
can read
ters. Cicero was the most powerful
ters. Cicero was the most powerful per- per-
a common
a common practice andand
practice explains
explainsthethe
dif-dif- closer to how
closer their
to how authors
their intended
authors intended
son
sonininRome
Romethat thatyear,
year,serving
serving asas
lead
ference better, in my opinion.
ference better, in my opinion.
lead us to.
us to.
consul. The following morning, Cicero We can see probable literary spot- That said, those who want to argue
consul. The following morning, Cicero We can see probable literary spot- That said, those who want to argue
called the senate together and alerted lighting several more times in the Res- against the historical reliability of the
called the senate together and alerted lighting several more times in the Res- against the historical reliability of the
them to the conspiracy. That is what is urrection narratives, with the number of Gospels on account of contradictions in
them to the conspiracy. That is what is urrection narratives, with the number of Gospels on account of contradictions in
reported in Plutarch’s Life of Cicero. But women who went to the tomb and how them are going to find that is no longer
reported in Plutarch’s Life of Cicero. But women who went to the tomb and how them are going to find that is no longer
when you read Plutarch’s Life of Crassus, many disciples went to confirm what the a legitimate argument—if it ever was.
when you read Plutarch’s Life of Crassus, many disciples went to confirm what the a legitimate argument—if it ever was.
he shines a spotlight on his main char- women had seen. Most ancient biographers were trying
he shines a spotlight on his main char- women had seen. Most ancient biographers were trying
acter, Crassus, and there is no mention Every book and letter of the Bible to be accurate. I disagree with the claim
acter, Crassus, and there is no mention Every book and letter of the Bible to be accurate. I disagree with the claim
of the two senators who accompanied was written within various genres that that the Gospel authors did not intend
of the two senators who accompanied
Crassus to the home of Cicero.
was written within various genres that that the Gospel authors did not intend
were contemporary to the authors. We to report historical events accurately.
Crassus to the home of Cicero. canwere
eithercontemporary
think that God todeparted
the authors.
fromWe Althoughto report historical
ancient events did
biographers accurately.
not
So this same sort of “spotlighting” can either think that God departed from Although ancient
the rest of Scripture and had the Gospels have the same commitment of reporting biographers did not
So this same
appears in the sort of “spotlighting”
Gospels as well? the rest
written inof Scripture
a genre uniqueandto had the Gospels withhave
Scripture, the the same commitment
precision of reporting
we expect in modern
appears in the Gospels as well? written in a genre unique to Scripture, with the
Yes. Take, for example, the Resurrection or we can think that the Gospel authors biography, most of them were commit- precision we expect in modern
Yes. Take, for example, the Resurrection or we can think that the Gospel authors biography,
narratives. In Matthew and Mark, there were writing biographies of Jesus. If you ted to preserving accurate portraits most of them were commit-
of
narratives. In Matthew and Mark, there were writing biographies of Jesus. If you
is one angel who is mentioned at the view the Gospels as biographies, then their main character. ted to preserving accurate portraits of
is one angel who is mentioned at the view the Gospels as biographies, then their main character.
TEXT-ONLY

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 S P I R I T UA L I T Y

THE
Why the church

CALLING
needs the

OF THE
testimony of

INFERTILE
marriages without

WHO
offspring.
PHOTO BY MICHAEL H / GETTY IMAGES

HOPE
BY M AT T H E W LE E A N D E R S O N

48 TEXT-ONLY 49

AT THE CENTER OF THE
REMARKABLE MONTAGE
NEAR THE OPENING OF
PIXAR’S UP STANDS THE
SORROW OF INFERTILITY.
On one side lie the joys of a budding marriage, and on the
other the delights of its twilight. In the hour of crisis, Carl
sees Ellie sitting in the garden facing the sun with a forlorn
look, feeling the devastation of their joint barrenness. Nei-
ther character speaks throughout the montage, but here
their silence is particularly apt: the wordlessness of grief
weighs heavily upon them, and upon us. Relief begins when
Carl, who is by no means immune to their sadness, places
Ellie’s “adventure book”—which has many more pages in
it for them to fill—in her lap. It is the most beautiful depic-
tion of infertility I know of; it is among the most tender
five minutes of film I have ever seen.
But the adventures Carl and Ellie are given in the latter
half of their lives are not the grand, exotic drama they had
wanted. They hoped to someday live on top of a water-
fall. Instead, car tires go flat, the roof needs replacing,
and bones are broken. At every turn, the ordinary chal-
lenges of living in this world prevent them from pursuing
the dreams of their youth. Yet if their adventure book is
incomplete when Ellie dies, it is not empty; we glimpse
the fullness of their love and feel like it is enough. The
sadness at their separation stems not from their inability
to live out their dream, but from the reality that they are
no longer together.
While the montage is widely regarded as one of the
most moving parts of the film, it almost failed make the
final cut. Director Pete Docter said the studio was leery
of showing their infertility because it was “going too far.”
But the filmmakers had no real choice: Carl and Ellie’s lives
lacked emotional depth when their pain was removed.
The audience would not care for them quite as much if it
were gone, and the rest of the plot would not pack as much
punch. Carl’s subsequent adventures include making
friends with an eight-year-old who is reminiscent of Carl
himself as a young boy, a relationship that would not be
nearly as interesting without knowing their infertility. And
so the sweet and sad montage stayed, infertility and all.
BEYOND SENSITIVITY
It is easy to cast a pall over our society’s ritual celebrations
of family and fertility by offering cautions that not every-
one shares in the fun the same way. Pleas to remember the
pain of the infertile are common these days. Such exhor-
tations for care and concern certainly have their place,
as infertility can be a heavy, unwelcome, and suffocating
burden. It is impossible for those who face it to avoid the
pervasive reminders that some of their deepest desires
are frustrated.
But such cautions must be more than trigger warnings
that one person’s joy might exacerbate another person’s
sorrow. If we offer nothing beyond these admonitions, our
view of both fertility and infertility will be too impover-
ished, too weak. We will obscure the gifts such couples have
for each other. The infertile offer the church far more than
a shadow over its joy at the gift of life. They ensure through
their mourning and laments that biological children are
not reduced from gifts to idols. Their presence helps the
church learn endurance in the face of what feels like the
endless rejection of our deepest earthly desires. Those who
are infertile and have allowed hope to grow within their
soul orient marriages toward their true end, the eschato-
logical kingdom of God, in a way that not even the celibate
can. All these are facts, and as the novelist Charles Williams
suggested, all facts are facts of joy. We cannot excuse the
fertile from mourning with those who mourn. But neither
can we excuse infertile couples from rejoicing with those
who rejoice. Both must stand or fall together: We need the
joy and the sorrow, both, to illuminate and interpret the
other. This is the way the tragic glory of the gospel takes
embodied form in our churches.
It is no secret that procreation structures the lives of
infertile unions as much as any couple’s. Such an absence
will almost certainly be met with tears, as it should be.
Sometimes it is accepted with a quiet resignation. But it
may also become a gift for the infertile couple, and when
the hours of sadness and emptiness finally grow thin, may
be adopted as a vocation, a way of bearing witness to goods
that the church risks forgetting otherwise.
QUESTION ASSUMED ANSWERS
Couples have sought medical and technical interventions
to help them procreate since at least the time of Rachel,
who wanted mandrakes from Leah to help her conceive
(Gen. 30:14). Yet there is no doubt that the success of in-vi- marriages to have children through any means possible,
tro fertilization (IVF) and other treatments has raised the and hold on instead to infertility as a unique and irre-
stakes for couples who are infertile, rendering the default placeable witness within its inner life. It is easy to look at
path one of aggressive intervention—hormone injections, such sadness and think that if we can avoid it, we are best
the harvesting of eggs, endless semen samples. Our new- off doing so. But the church might lose something crucial
found ability to create babies in the lab generates the if there are no childless marriages in our midst. That we
expectation that infertile couples will. can make children through IVF does not entail that we
The widespread and uncritical adoption of reproduc- should. But widespread acceptance of IVF means that we
tive technologies among evangelicals has thus had the risk forgetting both the struggles of permanent barrenness
effect of rendering infertility even less visible among our and its unique virtues. The special vocation of the infertile
communities than it would otherwise be. The lovely mon- means recalling the church to goods that our technolog-
tage from Up could hardly be set in our own time and might ically sophisticated world has forgotten and obscured.
not make sense to our grandchildren. The film’s plot turns
on what is rapidly becoming a relic of a bygone era. The
sorrow that marks infertility is overcome these days not
by taking up an adventure book, but by constant visits to WHAT INFERTILITY OFFERS
fertility specialists, hormonal treatments, surgeries, and
(almost literally) whatever else the exhausting regime What goods might infertile couples bear witness to? In
of “making” a baby in the modern era demands. Many his magisterial work of moral theology, Resurrection and
of those efforts are understandable—Rachel sought her Moral Order, Oliver O’Donovan suggests the early church
mandrakes, remember. But they also can consume the construed “marriage and singleness as alternative voca-
infertile couple. tions, each a worthy form of life, the two together [com-
Within the church, the pressure to have children is posing] the whole Christian witness to the nature of the
compounded by the rapidly expand- affectionate community.” The one bore
ing adoption movement. The correla- witness to the original goodness of cre-
tion of infertility and God’s calling to ation through sanctioning sex and pro-
adopt is sometimes left implied, but is creation, while the other looks forward
more frequently overt and direct. But Infertility reminds to the glory of the eschaton. But neither
as writer Kevin White has observed, captures the distinctive contribution
there is more good that needs doing the church that that the barren make to the church’s
in this world than each of us are com- moral witness on marriage.
manded to accomplish. The general One aspect of the vocation of the
exhortation to love one’s neighbor may the satisfaction infertile is that the frustrated will-
sometimes require a couple to adopt, ingness to bear children reminds the
but sometimes it may not; infertility marriage offers is church that our children are gifts from
does not on its own make adoption Providence. The glad assumption of
obligatory. In fact, infertile couples given ultimately not sorrow and lament—a paradoxical, but
might be uniquely at risk of treating necessary form of life—by those who
adopted children as a means of fulfill- are barren testifies within the church
ing their own frustrated desires for a through childbirth (and beyond) that the power to make
biological child, reducing them to an new life comes from God and not from
instrument of the parents’ happiness. but in the resurrection ourselves. Children are not made;
It is tempting to view adoption as a path they are given. Man and woman throw
toward alleviating our own suffering from the dead. themselves upon the grace of fate in
and emptiness, rather than an expres- trying to bring a child into the world.
sion of charity toward the child. In its The emergence of new human life is
ideal form, the call to adopt expands the a miracle, as the infertile well know.
horizons of a couple’s imaginations for Infertility also expands the church’s
their lives. Yet in its institutionalized expression, it risks moral imagination, and reminds us that the satisfaction
reducing adoption to an obligation upon the infertile, marriage offers comes ultimately not by childbirth but in
which would undermine its gratuitous character. the resurrection from the dead. The sadness that often
Which is not to say that those who choose medical inter- marks infertile couples is fertile soil in which a deeper
vention or adoption are selfish. By no means! But like any and more pervasive joy in our resurrection can take root.
good, they can tempt toward idolatry, transforming human Those who groan in their infertility, who know only the
life and God’s graciousness from a gift to an earned reward vanity of striving but never encounter the gladness of
for years of hard work and pain. birth, participate in the groaning all creation suffers as
The church might want to resist the pressure for it awaits the revelation of the sons of God (Rom. 8:22).

50 TEXT-ONLY TEXT-ONLY 51
Those who are infertile remind the church that even its
songs of triumph must sometimes be sung in a minor key.
They bear a cross, that others may know the source and
end of their crown. They remind the church that the joy
of resurrection sits alongside a painful, frustrating “not
yet,” pleading patience and endurance and good cheer in
the face of hardship. They thus bear witness to a form of
marriage characteristic to a fallen world, a form of mar-
riage under judgment—and grace.
More practically, though, infertile couples help expand
the scope of familial love. Like adoptive couples, their
ongoing hope bears witness to the
church that the most basic character
of parenthood is not biological. But
unlike adoptive couples, the infertile We need visions
must extend their marital and parental
love outside the family itself. Maternal of paternal and
and paternal love are not given only
to mothers and fathers, biological or
otherwise. They are the mature form maternal love that
of married love, and thus are available
to any couple, fertile or not. The glory take their form
of the union of man and woman can be
given to others through non-biological, beyond the walls of
non-procreative means—as Carl from
Up discovers as he develops a fatherly
affection for his young friend. Infertil- the family.
ity does not free a couple from the duty
and delight of learning the love mothers
and fathers know so well.
But the infertile also uniquely challenge the church to
remain vigilant against a natalism that reduces marriage’s
perfection to the presence of biological children. The
celibate stand outside marriage, testifying that it is not
necessary for the Christian. But the infertile stand within
marriage and announce the eschatological character of
the children who are given to it. As gifts from God, chil-
dren are to be returned to God. The non-familial expres-
sion of maternal and paternal love thus orients marriage
toward its eschatological perfection, offering both a yes
to marriage itself and a no to limiting marriage’s point to
biological children.
THE CHILD FOR THE CHILDLESS
Christianity does not merely admit the tragedy of infer-
tility but positively sanctions it. It knows the tragedy of
infertility as well as it knows the tragedy of the Cross.
Those whose marriages are infertile should drink the cup
of mourning to its final drop; they have been authorized
by their Savior to do no less.
A child will not answer that tragedy. Only the Christ
Child, who comes into the world through the Virgin Birth
and is born again on the third day, can meet our procreative
sorrows with the satisfaction we demand. The infertile
52
TEXT-ONLY
sound such a witness by reminding the church that the
biological children born within it are echoes and foretastes
of the power of the Resurrection—but are only echoes and
foretastes, and not the substance itself. By naming their
tragedy, infertile couples deepen the church’s mourning
and prepare it for the joy that comes with the dawn. We
can no more tell the story of marriage in the church with-
Savings in Bloom
out infertility than the makers of Up could tell Carl and
Ellie’s story without it.
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 DISCIPLESHIP

RADICAL
ISLAM IS NOT
THE NIGERIAN

A
CHURCH’S
GREATEST
THREAT
Why one of Africa’s
leading Christian thinkers
believes the real danger
is among Christians.
BY SUNDAY BOBAI AGANG
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER

good pickpocket works with a partner who will distract the “mark” while the
pickpocket steals his wallet, camera, or passport. Sometimes the distraction
will be an unwanted conversation, an aggressive sales pitch, or an “acciden-
tal” collision in a crowded area—at which point the pickpocket does his work.
Right now, Christians are being swindled.
We hear a lot about the threat of radical fundamentalist Islam. Some believe
there is an “Islamization agenda” at work that is trying to undermine tradi-
tional institutions and replace them with a new Islamic order. To be sure, many
horrible acts have been committed under the banner of radical Islam, and
there is a real danger. But the truth is this: Overblown fears about a supposed
“Islamization agenda” may actually be distracting Christians from the true
threat that is stealing away the authentic witness and authority of Christianity.

54 C H R I S T I A N I T Y T O D AY. C O M M AY 2 0 1 7
TEXT-ONLY 55
THE ISLAMIZATION AGENDA
Like in many other countries in Africa, the belief in an
Islamization agenda is potent, alive, and well in Nigeria.
Since the early 1980s, Nigerian Christians have been
deeply concerned about the possibility of a secret plan
to conform the country to the dictates of Islam.
The seed of this idea goes back to the jihad led by
Usman dan Fodio in 1804. His goal was to “dip the
Qur’an into the Atlantic Ocean,” meaning that he
intended to impose Islam upon the entire nation of
Nigeria. Although he died without realizing his vision,
dan Fodio left a legacy that the Muslim umma (com-
munity) in Nigeria has continued to pursue. Many
Nigerian Christians believe that any time a Muslim is
president of Nigeria, the Muslims will use that as a plat-
form to pursue their agenda and intensify their efforts
to impose Islam on the entire country.
The rhetoric around this conspiracy theory is cur-
rently at a fever pitch because the current president of
Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, is a Muslim. Some Christians have pointed
out that his past statements indicate that he is a radical Muslim. Every-
where one turns, Christians are talking about a secret plan to supplant
Christianity with Islam in Nigeria. For example, pastor Isaac Valentine
Olori writes, “We are apprehensive because [President] Buhari’s agenda
is tilted towards Islamization of this country.” Olori contends that “[a]ny
Christian who thinks he is safe from the terror of the sword of Islam is
joking.” To those peddling the conspiracy theories, the recent activities of
Fulani herdsmen, the prevalence of Boko Haram sects, and the opening of
Islamic banks across the nation are seen as confirmation of Islamization.
Recently, a learned colleague wanted to know my take on this con-
cern. I reflected carefully because this was the latest of a growing num-
ber of well-respected statesmen and stateswomen in the country who
have expressed concern that the Islamization agenda might be true. I
cautiously responded that I think Christians in Nigeria should be afraid
of something more dangerous than the Islamization agenda: the ethical
and moral decadence eroding Christian public life.
It is not that I don’t believe in the possibility of the Muslims plan-
ning to Islamize the world. We Christians are often concerned about
our political influence, so why should we expect any different from
Muslims? Rather, I worry more about the serious moral decadence and
ethical decline which now characterize Christianity in Nigeria and the
African continent at large.
Today, many Christians are deeply involved in corruption and flaunt
decadent and immoral lifestyles. Our greatest threat is the sin in our
own lives. That sin—any sin—is indeed lethal. We need to put our house
in order. History is filled with narratives of great empires and churches
that fell due to self-indulgence and moral excess. So, when faced with
fears of Islamization, we must not forget the greater danger of sin.
SLIDING INTO DECAY
Christians in Nigeria are dancing on the brink of moral and ethical col-
lapse. Many Christians who hold public office have become corrupt or
immoral, betraying their public Christian testimony. They lack integrity
and cannot present a strong moral and ethical witness. They lack the
56 TEXT-ONLY
ALONGSIDE
RELIGIOSITY,
CORRUPTION
IN ITS MANY
SHAPES
AND SIZES
IS BOOMING
IN NIGERIA.
virtue of honesty in public life.
Nigeria is considered a very religious country.
Christianity is not limited to churches and prayer
meetings. Prayer and Bible readings are found in
boardrooms and government offices. Billboards
announce upcoming crusades, and exclamations like
“to God be the glory” and “praise the Lord” easily fall
from the lips of Nigerian Christians, even in public.
But as the well-known and respected Catholic
priest George Ehusani has noted,
Alongside religiosity, corruption in its many
shapes and sizes is booming in Nigeria—from
the petty bribery taken by the clerk in the office
or the policeman at the checkpoint, to the grand
corruption by which huge project contracts
are hurriedly awarded, not for the sake of the
common good, but because of the greed of the
awarding official, who requires some money via
contract “kickbacks.”
He also notes that activities like embezzling
and cheating—ranging from school children to
high-profile public figures—often go hand in hand
with outward expressions of piety. Many Nigerians
obtain fraudulent medical certificates, as well as
fake birth and citizenship certificates, to be admit-
ted to good schools or to get choice jobs. They evade
taxes, over- and under-invoice customers, perform
fake audits, and on and on. He concludes, “All these
practices are so commonplace and so widespread
that many young Nigerians are unable to distinguish
between good and evil or between right and wrong.”
Father Ehusani is merely describing what is
common knowledge to all Nigerians. These mat-
ters are more lethal to the Christian faith than any
Islamization agenda.
THE CORRUPTION OF
PROSPERITY
In the 20th century, indigenously founded
churches sprang up across Africa, particularly in
Nigeria. After the Nigerian civil war (1967–70),
Christians who saw the conflict as a sign of the end
times embarked on a massive campaign to spread
the Good News of Christ across Nigeria. Student
associations and missionary movements sprang up.
Nigerian Christians were determined to re-enact
what happened in the Book of Acts: turning “the
world upside down” (17:6 ESV).
Sadly, today the story has changed. Both main-
line and Pentecostal Christianity in Nigeria are
still committed to reaching out to the unreached,
but the undue emphasis on health and wealth has
permanently changed the face of Christianity in
Africa and the world at large. Pastors and church
members are now more interested in building
beautiful and massive edifices than in reaching
out to the unreached people groups of the world.
Many pastors are obsessed with material posses-
sions, sometimes owning one or more private jets!
The corruption of Christian moral values has now
given way to the worship of materialism and plea-
sure. Our real god is now mammon (Matt. 6:24). We
have become devoted to what American theologian
and social critic Reinhold Niebuhr called self-love,
self-interest, and the will to power.
A Nigerian critic of the church spoke the truth
when he summarized this problem:
Thieves are offered the front seats in church;
recognition is accorded based on the size of
one’s tithes and offerings; pastors now spec-
ify the exact amount of offerings they want,
and members run over themselves to be the
first to make the payments and “claim” their
blessings. . . . Pastors have peddled the notion,
to their own advantage, that prosperity and
well-being are determined by how faithfully
members pay their tithes and offerings; the
amount of material possessions that one has
is now perceived to be an indicator of one’s
spiritual well-being.
Even more troubling are accusations of witch-
craft that Christians perpetuate against one
another. Investigating this disturbing trend in
2010, CNN interviewed Lucky Inyang, a project
coordinator for Stepping Stones Ministry, dedi-
cated to helping street children, who said,
Religious leaders capitalize on the ignorance
of some parents in the villages just to make
some money off them. They can say your child
is a witch and if you bring the child to the church, we can deliver the
child, but eventually they don’t deliver the children. . . . The parents
go back to the pastor and say, “Why is it you have not been able to
deliver the child?” and the pastor says, “Oh, this one has gone past
deliverance; they’ve eaten too much flesh so you have to throw the
child out.”
The CNN report found that most pastors charge a fee for deliver-
ance—anywhere from $300 to $2,000.
So, African Christians are treading on costly contradictions when we
speak of guarding our Christian faith against Islamization while simul-
taneously wallowing in deep immorality, materialism, and paganism.
THE FUTURE OF AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY
In 2015, the Pew Research Center published a thorough study which pro-
jected a massive, worldwide religious shift by 2050. The study states that
“Christianity has been the 800-pound gorilla on the world stage,” but is
now “losing its edge.” The study projects that by 2050 Christianity will
be only slightly larger than Islam, and by 2070 Islam will eclipse Chris-
tianity as the number one world religion.
Just because today Africa is the center of gravity for Christianity is
no guarantee that it will continue to be so. Historically, Christianity has
always been on the move. Yes, Christianity will increasingly become an
African religion. Yes, Africa is already the largest Christian continent.
But, in a 2011 study, the Pew Research Center documented the historical
movement of Christianity from one location to another and predicted
that it will continue.
I appreciate our Christian patriotic interest in guarding the Christian
faith from being supplanted by Islam. However, the church should not
allow that concern to distract it from keeping its house in order. God does
not call us to compete with Islam. Rather, he calls us to holy living. “It is
written, ‘Be holy, because I am holy’ ” (1 Pet. 1:16). As it is, the Christian
faith in Nigeria is suffering public disgrace and disrepute because of our
lack of self-control, ungodly living, and compromised integrity.
Jesus declared that he is the truth, the way to eternal life (John
14:6). Christians can be confident in our salvation by faith in our resur-
rected Lord Jesus Christ; we have nothing to fear. Our source of power
and authority is God, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead
(Eph. 1:18–20). We are given power and authority to combat satanic and
demonic oppression, to destroy the works of the flesh, to heal obsession
with material things, and to create just structures and systems that guar-
antee human flourishing. By the power and authority God has vested in
us, we have nothing to fear and no excuse for failure. We have in us what
we need to create fertile environments for social and spiritual transfor-
mation, in Nigeria and around the world.
The fear of an Islamization agenda is very real, but it must not be
allowed to distract us from our primary concern: Christlikeness, holy
living, hard work, and moral integrity. If we are concerned about the
spread of Islam, let us be equally concerned about the lack of Christian
public integrity and witness in our society. We must not allow fearmon-
gering or conspiracy theories to prevent us from recognizing the true
threat.
SUNDAY BOBAI AGANG is professor of Christian theology, ethics, and public
policy at ECWA Theological Seminary in Kagoro, Kaduna State, Nigeria.
TEXT-ONLY 57
REVIEWS
BOOKS , MOVIES , AND THE ARTS
IN THIS SECTION
Just Immigration reviewed by
Samuel D. James p. 60
A. J. Swoboda interviews
Jen Pollock Michel p. 62
Jeff Haanen reviews 12 Ways Your
Phone Is Changing You p. 64
Top 5 from Matthew Farrelly p. 65
WELCOMING THE
STRANGER . . . AND
UPHOLDING THE LAW
How Christians should weigh the many complexities of
immigration reform.
BY SAMUEL D. JAMES
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN TAYLOR
TEXT-ONLY 59
REVIEWS
E
Early in his new book, Just Immigration:
American Policy in Christian Perspec-
tive HHHHH, Mark Amstutz recounts
the story of a young man in California
who had completed law school and was
seeking admission to the state bar. But
his aspiration was so controversial that
he eventually found himself in front of
the California Supreme Court.
The problem? This young man was
not an American citizen. His parents
had brought him from Mexico to the
United States when he was just a boy,
and he was undocumented. In a sur-
prising decision, the California Supreme
Court ruled that even though the man
was not authorized to be in the United
States, he nonetheless could be admit-
ted to the state bar and practice law.
Amstutz, professor of political sci-
ence at Wheaton College, cites this story
as an example of the incoherence and
double-mindedness of US immigration
policy. It certainly is that. But in a way,
it’s also symbolic. What could better
epitomize our national immigration
debate than the image of a young man,
on the threshold of fulfilling his Ameri-
can dream, facing the reality that he was
never an American? On one side, hope
for a better life. On the other, demands
of justice and the rule of law. What
should we make of this?  bute of representative government;
It’s this moral and political knot
that Amstutz, who has researched and
taught for nearly 30 years on the inter-
section of Christian ethics and pub-
lic policy, wants to help untangle. Just
Immigration is an admirably thorough,
60
well-researched overview of the United States’
immigration policy. It’s also an explicitly
Christian look at the ethical dimensions of
national immigration laws and practice. Ams-
tutz aims to reshape how American believers
approach these intertwined issues.
MONSTROUSLY COMPLEX  ing to Amstutz, because it gets
Just Immigration is really two books in one.
First comes a roughly 100-page explainer on
the American immigration system, combined
with a brief summary on immigration theory
and ethics. Amstutz does a deep dive into the
governmental infrastructure of immigration.
From relevant federal legislation to dozens of
agencies and departments to the varied and
intensive processes of migrant admission, he
provides a glimpse of a monstrously complex
political mechanism. This complexity is not
just incidental, according to Amstutz; it is a
root cause of difficulties and failures of Amer-
ica’s immigration system.  and the freedom of migrants to
One example is the inconsistency with
which legislators and officials enforce exist-
ing law. Arguably the most obvious problem
in American immigration is the high number
of unauthorized migrants, and the question of
the government’s response. Even though offi-
cial directives for responding to illegal immi-
gration exist, they are often ignored by those
most able to enforce them, especially since,
as Amstutz writes, “the economic demand for
low-wage workers far exceeds the supply of
native workers who are able and willing to do
the work.” In other words, the economic ben-
efits of being able to pay workers low wages
with minimal protections are often more
attractive than the prospects of enforcing
immigration law.
The conflict between the rule of law and
cheap labor doesn’t just reflect an exploitive
way of treating immigrants. It also under-
mines the state’s moral authority. Ams-
tutz argues that the inconsistency and
opportunism that often characterize
the response to illegal immigration are
a serious threat to the legal and politi-
cal integrity of the entire government:  WHILE IT’S COMMON
The rule of law is not an ancillary attri-
rather, it is the moral foundation of
legitimate governmental rule based on
consent. To be sure, legal compliance
is never fully fulfilled. But when a sig-
nificant portion of a people disregard a
law, this failure not only undermines a
TEXT-ONLY
specific statute but can also
call into question the cred-
ibility of the government’s
ability to ensure legal com-
pliance with any law.
This point is crucial, accord-
to the heart of why so many
responses to illegal immigra-
tion, especially from the Chris-
tian community, fall short.
Amstutz outlines a “commu-
nitarian” political philosophy,
which acknowledges the legit-
imacy of sovereign nations,
borders, and cultural cohesion.
Communitarianism stands in
contrast to “cosmopolitanism,”
which emphasizes global citi-
zenship, universal human rights,
live where they choose. “For
the communitarian,” Amstutz
explains, “states are the pri-
mary institutions for protecting
human rights. Advancing basic
rights, including freedom and
equality, is only feasible within
a strong state, where the rule of
law is institutionalized.”
In other words, meaning-
ful laws that govern immigra-
tion—and enforcement of those
laws—are essential to human
flourishing.
HUMAN DIGNITY AND
THE RULE OF LAW  cerning the National Association of Evangelicals’
Amstutz’s case for communitar-
ianism is compelling. While it’s
common for many today to speak
FOR MANY TODAY
TO SPEAK OF BEING
A “CITIZEN OF THE
WORLD,” HUMAN
BEINGS SIMPLY DO
NOT LIVE THAT WAY.
of being a “citizen of the world,” human beings sim-
ply do not live that way. We do not relate to “the
world” in some airy-fairy abstract sense; instead,
we live in relationship with specific people (those
around us) and specific places (our homes and com-
munities). Thus, we are not dealing with “citizens
of the world,” but citizens of actual nations—and
the social coherence that comes from belonging
to a specific place with a specific social contract is
legitimate and good for human flourishing.  spends most of the chapter (again) critiquing the
So what does this mean for the immigration
debate? For Amstutz, it means that a truly just and
fair immigration system must take seriously both
the human dignity of the migrant and the rule of
law. Since Christians believe both that governmen-
tal authority is legitimate (Rom. 13) and that human
beings have intrinsic worth and dignity, being made
in God’s image (Gen. 1:27), they should articulate
a political ethic that preserves the human dignity
of the migrant while taking civil authority and jus-
tice seriously.  Eerdmans
It’s here, unfortunately, that Amstutz finds fault
with his fellow Christians. The “second book” of
Just Immigration is an admirably thorough analysis
and critique of major Christian views on immigra-
tion reform. Amstutz devotes nearly 100 pages to
evaluating encyclicals, denominational statements,
and other major documents from Roman Catholics,
evangelicals, and mainline Protestants. Interest-
ingly, Amstutz finds that Catholics, evangelicals,
and many other traditions all share a common flaw
in their calls for immigration reform: lack of respect
for the rule of law.  cism toward mass deportation, for instance, is not
Amstutz’s critique is clear, if only because it
appears so frequently. For example, Amstutz writes
that “the Catholic Church’s approach to US immi-
gration policy fails to accurately represent the
complexity of the moral dilemma involved.” Con-
“Immigration 2009” statement, Amstutz like-
wise remarks that the document “oversimplifies
a complex issue and fails to illuminate the funda-
mental tradeoffs among competing values.” He sim-
ilarly chastises the Southern Baptist Convention’s
2011 resolution “On Immigration and the Gospel,”
calling its request for a pathway toward legalization
“startling” and criticizing SBC leaders for failing
to “offer a rationale for such an initiative on either
biblical or moral grounds.”  dview to public policy. What the book lacks is a
Amstutz is right to call for a more robust polit-
ical ethic. As his book demonstrates, immigration
policy is indeed an exhaustingly complex issue,
and deserves more than slogans and simplistic
narratives. To the extent that religious leaders talk
down the complexity of the immigration issue, they
deserve criticism.
But do they? Are Roman Catholics, evangelicals,
and other Christians really as guilty of one-eye-
closed reductionism as Amstutz alleges? While the
book criticizes religious leaders for not producing a
more theologically and politically mature perspec-
tive, it doesn’t actually tell us what this would look
like. The final chapter, “Strengthening the Chris-
tian Witness on Immigration,” doesn’t put forth
any explicit policy proposals. Nor does it articulate
a full-orbed political ethic of immigration. Amstutz
simplistic solutions offered by most Christian tra-
ditions, and listing an assortment of questions that
a serious theological approach to immigration must
consider. While these questions are helpful, they
do not constitute an example of the intellectually
serious political ethics that Amstutz accuses most
Just Immigra- Christian groups of missing.
tion: American
Policy in Chris-
tian Perspective THE MORAL LEVEL 
MARK AMSTUTZ This absence isn’t just disappointing. It under-
mines many of Amstutz’s criticisms of Christian
immigration statements. For example, in summing
up the shortcomings of evangelical immigration
activism, Amstutz chides evangelicals for focusing
on “policy advocacy, not moral education. This is
regrettable because the most important contri-
bution churches can make to policy debates is at
the moral level.”
But evangelicals, as well as Roman Catholics
and others, have based their calls for immigration
reform on Christian moral teaching—Amstutz
simply disagrees with their conclusions. Skepti-
a failure to think morally about immigration; it is
one of many possible applications of morals to the
policy issue. Amstutz never explicitly advocates
mass deportation of undocumented immigrants,
but his dismissive response to calls for a humane
and legally coherent path toward legalization
seems to warrant a more explicit treatment of that
and other policy questions. Unfortunately, that
never happens.
This failure handcuffs a potentially game-chang-
ing book on Christians and immigration. Just
Immigration is sober and knowledgeable about
the competing values at work in the immigration
debate. It’s also a timely call for Christians to take
seriously the intellectual task of applying our worl-
positive case for reform that incorporates biblical
principles of both human dignity and the legiti-
macy of civic law. Just Immigration is enormously
helpful, but incomplete.
SAMUEL D. JAMES is a writer and editor who serves
in the office of the president at the Southern Baptist
Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
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R E V I E W S INTERVIEW | JEN POLLOCK MICHEL
God Is a Homemaker
How that truth gives hope to a broken, inhospitable world. INTERVIEW BY A. J. SWOBODA
H
ome sweet home. Home is where the heart
is. Human beings have crafted a multi-
tude of expressions that testify to an
innate desire for rootedness, comfort,
and belonging. In Keeping Place: Reflections on the
Meaning of Home, writer Jen Pollock Michel (also
the author of Teach Us to Want, CT’s 2015 Book of
the Year) explores this universal longing through
biblical, theological, and practical lenses. A. J. Swo-
boda, author of The Dusty Ones: Why Wandering
Deepens Your Faith, spoke with Michel about our
“spiritual homelessness” and the God who prepares
a place for us (John 14:3).
Why do you argue that all human beings are spiri-
tually homeless?
It is easy for us to say that those inside the church
are spiritually “homed,” while those outside the
church are spiritually homeless. I see us all as spir-
itually homeless in this world. The home that God
wants us to have is not fully realized. We may gloss
over spiritual homelessness by saying that we have
God and then moving on. But we are not home yet.
We live in a broken, inhospitable world. I believe
the church can do a better job of sympathizing with
the condition of homelessness in our world, par-
ticularly among our neighbors, but we also need to
identify it in ourselves.
You write at length about the “spirituality of
housekeeping.” I was reminded of Brother Law-
rence’s description of “the God of the pots and
pans.” Can we find Jesus while doing the dishes?
It means demolishing the divide between the sacred
and the secular. Even just last evening, around the
dinner table, my family and I were talking about
Christ’s call to serve in John 13: How do you serve?
Whom do you serve? What are the qualities of
Christian service? My daughter asked who I served.
I answered, “My readers.” And she said, “Well, that’s
not fair. You get paid to do that.” So we had this con-
versation about whether it counts as serving if you
get paid. But that represents the kind of secular/
sacred divide that shapes so much of our thinking.
62
This idea of housekeeping means that there is
no secular part of our lives. There is no place where
we are not called to serve. There is no corner of the
universe where God’s presence cannot be found. So,
finding God in the pots and pans is a call to embodi-
ment and being placed. The call to love is often very
menial and mundane. Those things that we do over
and over again are so important for our maturity
and development in Christ.
The American church likes to praise people who
“go, go, go” into the world—what you call the
“valorization of missionary service.” Certainly
Jesus tells us to “go.” But what does that look
like for someone who’s physically limited or for a
stay-at-home mom or dad?
When I think of the Great Commission, I think
everybody gets a Jerusalem. Everybody gets a place
that God is reaching. One of the disadvantages of
the valorization of “going” is how it leaves out all
those people who can’t realistically go. Can we go
and still stay? The Great Commission says yes:
We can be “here” because we are “sent” by God
Keeping Place:
Reflections on
to be here. Everybody has a neighbor. Everybody
the Meaning of has someone to love and serve—and someone who
Home
JEN POLLOCK
needs to hear the Good News.
MICHEL That “going by staying” takes many different
InterVarsity Press forms. One way the church can grow is in recover-
ing the diversity of what “go” and “serve” and “love”
can look like. There is no one narrative.
In an age of what Eugene Peterson calls “eccle-
sial pornography,” with people constantly moving
from church to church, how can we become more
rooted?
We must remember that the church is an imperfect
place. So long as we expect that the church will meet
all of our needs, we will be afoot, always looking for
the next best church. We need to be honest and see
that the church has contributed to this crisis. We
have become so busy selling experience, event, and
spectacle rather than the slower and quieter disci-
plines, like being formed into the image of Christ
and living together as one community.
TEXT-ONLY
It’s easy to suggest
simple answers to com-
plicated issues. I recently
heard Eugene Peterson
say that we should find
the closest church and
just stay there. Well, the
church that is four doors
Jen Pollock
Michel is an down from my home does
author and not believe in the bodily
speaker living
in Toronto. resurrection of Christ. I
don’t have any interest in
going there. But perhaps
when you do find a suitable church, do
all that you can to stay. That requires
resilience, forgiveness, and ultimately
confidence that Jesus is the head of his
church. He said the gates of hell will not
prevail against it.
That does not mean that the church
has no issues or problems. But it does
mean that Jesus does not give up on
his church. I honestly don’t have much
patience for people who only have crit-
icism for the church. Ultimately, we
should be optimistic—after all, Christ is.
How do contemporary patterns of
church mobility affect our spiritual
lives?
It leaves us ever-restless. This could be
said for geographical mobility, church
mobility, you name it—any time we think
that better is “out there,” it’s always pos-
PHOTO COURTESY OF INTERVARSITY PRESS
sible we’re just fooling ourselves. That
doesn’t mean we should never plant a
new church. But let’s do it with a realis-
tic mindset. One way or another, we’re
still going to feel this sense of spiritual
homelessness.
This is one more reason why we need
to acknowledge our common experience
of homelessness: so we can have the
right orientation to the world. So that
TEXT-ONLY
we have the ability to say, “The church
doesn’t have to give me everything.”
And neither does my marriage, my fam-
ily, or my job. Being present in the here
and now comes packaged with the lim-
itations of the world we find ourselves
in—the chronic brokenness of things.
Why do you insist so pointedly that
the God of Scripture “does women’s
work”?
I’m encouraged, in Scripture, when I
see God doing work that I know inti-
mately. He is portrayed as preparing
food, raising children, and giving birth.
This helps me really feel that God knows
me. And it dignifies this work that is so
often ignored in the world, and even in
many churches.
I grew up in traditions that don’t
highlight the God who does women’s
work. And that leaves me sometimes
feeling left out of the story. If we don’t
talk about the God who does women’s
work, who does that leave out? The
beauty of the Bible is that everyone gets
to find themselves there. Everyone is
part of this story—men and women, rich
and poor, powerful and marginalized.
I was really influenced by Lauren
Winner’s book Wearing God, which
focuses on many images we tend to
ignore in our reading of Scripture. Let’s
talk about the God who pants in labor
for his children. Let’s talk about the God
who prepares the feast. Let’s talk about
the God who weans us as children—an
image so totally arresting that I might
be writing my next book about it. It has
really enriched my view of Scripture to
pay closer and better attention to the
concrete images. And when I do that, I
can’t help but see a God who does wom-
en’s work.
NEW &
NOTEWORTHY
Compiled by Matt Reynolds
The Most Misused Stories in the Bible
Surprising Ways Popular Bible Stories Are
Misunderstood
ERIC J. BARGERHUFF BETHANY HOUSE
Anyone with experience in a small-group Bible
study knows the pattern: You read a passage
of Scripture together, go around the room to
find out what everyone thinks . . . and end up
with nearly as many interpretations as there are
interpreters! This book—a follow-up to Barger-
huff’s 2012 effort, The Most Misused Verses in
the Bible—reviews common mishandlings of
stories from the Old and New Testaments, such
as Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, and the
parable of the “rich fool.”
Torn Asunder
Children, the Myth of the Good Divorce, and
the Recovery of Origins
EDITED BY MARGARET HARPER MCCARTHY
EERDMANS
When parents divorce, their children often
bear emotional scars. Even when the split is
reasonably free of acrimony, there remains a
haunting sense of confusion and insecurity—“a
wound,” writes McCarthy in her introduction
to this volume, “that affects them at the very
level of their being.” Torn Asunder gathers more
than a dozen essays, written by Protestants and
Catholics, examining divorce through the lenses
of theology, philosophy, politics, law, and psy-
chology. The authors survey the damage done
to children of divorce and reflect on what it will
take to rebuild a durable culture of marriage.
Theologies of the American
Revivalists
From Whitefield to Finney
ROBERT W. CALDWELL IVP ACADEMIC
The First and Second Great Awakenings were
times of incredible spiritual fervor, as thou-
sands flocked to open-air revivals and reported
born-again experiences. But they were also
times of intense debate among preachers and
theologians over different understandings of
Christian commitment. What does it mean to
be saved? How exactly should a conversion
experience unfold? How should preachers
present the gospel so as to usher hearers into
an authentic encounter with God? Caldwell,
who teaches church history at Southwestern
Baptist Theological Seminary, maps out the
theological traditions that emerged from these
debates—traditions that have shaped American
Christianity ever since.
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REVIEWS
“If you’ve ever
We struggle with “fear of missing had the desire to
out,” or “FOMO,” yet the scope of
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Clayton King is founder
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source. Even though I clicked on dozens of articles, admirable attempt at bringing of living within proper boundaries. seen
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JOHNSTEINBECK
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tly, our phones are changing us. comes from God (Rom. 2:29). ting new boundaries, I found myself Published
Published in 1952, East
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isonly
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man.”It Itretells
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Genesis ClaytonKing.com
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families,who
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12 Ways Your
We’re a hazard to others. Texting and driv- Phone Is (James 1:17). Salinas
SalinasValley,
Valley,in
inCalifornia.
California.The
Thenovel
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probesthe
thedepths
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TONY REINKE
accident. Crossway JEFF HAANEN is executive director its
itsability
abilityto
todeeply
deeplytransform
transformthe thereader.
reader.
We crave approval. Each social media moment
is another scene in our “incessant autobiography.”
of Denver Institute for Faith & Work and
founder of the 5280 Fellowship.
B
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 Special Higher Education Section Sponsored by SeminaryGradSchool.com

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Special Higher Education Section
BALANCING THE
DEMANDS OF LEADERSHIP ROLES
with family and other responsibilities is
a challenge for anyone in ministry. Now
add the time, energy, and cost of pur-
suing a seminary or graduate degree.
For many seminary students, this goal
would be much farther out of reach
without the increasing availability of
distance learning programs.
“The online trend has continued to
climb year after year. What once was a
casual inquiry is now a default expecta-
tion,” says Tommy Lister, Fuller Semi-
nary’s director of distributed learning.
“Our students are often serving in min-
istry, working to provide for their fami-
lies, and pursuing their academic goals
all at once.” In an attempt to reach these
students who are firmly planted in their
lives but are still seeking educational
opportunities, colleges and universities
are striving to provide more and better
distance learning options.
Some institutions offer fully online
programs that enroll students from
nearly anywhere in the world. Other
schools offer hybrid programs with both
online and on-campus components.
These degrees may require students
to take a certain number of classes on
campus or to come to campus for a few
days of in-person study or planned activ-
ities that enable students to connect
more personally with classmates and
professors.
Whatever the format, seminary stu-
dents note a primary benefit of distance
learning is the flexibility it offers. By
pursuing their degrees through distance
68
learning, participants can continue
their ministry involvement and accom-
modate families, careers, geographical
constraints, and life changes.
A PROG R AM THAT
LE TS YO U D O IT ALL
“Being a distance learning student has
enriched my vocational and personal
life by giving me the freedom to pursue
both,” says Josh Friend, an associate
pastor in Alberta, Canada, who is pur-
suing a master of divinity from Calvin
Theological Seminary.
Friend preaches monthly, plans and
organizes worship, helps with the chil-
dren’s program, and leads a weekly wor-
ship service for those with special needs.
Because his role changes from week to
week, the flexibility of his hybrid pro-
gram is key. “I was worried it would be
impossible to manage working full time
and being in school full time. Two of our
children were born while I studied as
well,” Friend says. “Yet, here we are with
the end in sight, and we have managed.”
As Friend’s story implies, the ability
to continue nurturing both a ministry
and a family is one of the main reasons
students choose distance learning.
Cari Fydirchuk, who is also working
on a master of divinity at Calvin, echoes
Friend’s thoughts: “Seminary is not an
TEXT-ONLY
Sponsored by SeminaryGradSchool.com
individual journey—it has been a family
IMAGE BY RAWPIXEL / ISTOCK
journey.” Fydirchuk continues, “My full-
time job is as a wife and mother. We’ve
had to learn how to work as a team in
order to balance family life, work life,
and study.”
Fydirchuk serves on the leader-
ship team of her church in Alberta. She
enrolled in Calvin’s distance learning
program to prepare for a vocation as pas-
tor. In addition to the flexibility of the
program, she has appreciated the oppor-
tunity to integrate what she’s learning
into her ministry. “This is what sets RTS IS NOW IN
DALLAS
distance learning apart from other semi-
nary programs,” says Fydirchuk. “You’re
able to live into your studies as a pastor,
and you don’t have to wait until you’re
finished to engage in a ministry setting.”
Friend has experienced similar ben-
efits. “All of the study and preparation
was like having the right tool on my hip
Prepare for a lifetime of ministry in a community of truth and grace, close to home.
at the right time,” he says. “This has been
true not just in preaching or teaching
but also in leading premarital courses,
counseling others, and establishing my
own personal disciplines.”
In addition to needing help from fam-
ily and friends, both students emphasize
the importance of receiving encourage-
ment from their respective distance
learning communities.
Apply Now for Fall 2017 • rts.edu/apply
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Special Higher Education Section
program, Fydirchuk says what stands
out is the “amazing support” of profes-
sors and colleagues: “Although this is a
distance program, you don’t feel alone.
There’s a great community of support
to plug into. I will leave with lifelong
friendships and great mentors.”
Jill Hatcher is a student at Fuller
Seminary pursuing a master of arts
in theology and ministry through the
online hybrid program. She and her
husband, Kirk, have been married for 22
years and have 3 sons. Working as a part-
time grant writer and consultant while
attending seminary has been an adjust-
ment—and a source of family bonding:
My college-aged son and I bemoan
lengthy papers and late nights
while confessing our latest Netflix
binges. My high school son and I
trade random facts that cross over
from church history into world his-
tory. My middle school son and I
sneak off to lunch at least once a
week. And my husband appreci-
ates my ‘you gotta see this’ from
the brilliant professors and semi-
narians who now make up my daily
community.
As Hatcher’s experience reflects, the
ability to continue nurturing both a min-
istry and a family is one of the main rea-
sons students choose distance learning.
B EN EFITS O F A
G LO BAL CL A S S RO O M
Although Dominique J. Pettway lives
near Dallas Theological Seminary
(DTS), she appreciates the flexibility of
distance learning, which allows her to
work, serve her community, and visit
campus as needed. Pettway is pursuing a
master of arts in biblical counseling. The
hybrid program’s counseling classes are
held on campus with Bible and theology
classes offered primarily online.
“I find it a huge advantage to be able
to watch lectures at 11 p.m. when I’m off
from work,” she says. “This gives me the
freedom to make sure my heart is ready
to receive whatever I’m about to hear in
a lecture, rather than going into a lecture
at a scheduled time with a million other
things on my mind.”
Pettway is involved in a number of
70
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multiethnic small groups, and she serves
in a ministry that offers free support
groups to families affected by divorce.
Same classes
“Because my DTS courses help me
think through deep theological issues
and formulate reasons for the beliefs I Same professors
hold, I’m able to apply that in the groups
I’m involved with,” she says. “Talking
to people is literally what I’m earning
my degree in, so having the theology to
Same degree
back up a basic understanding of human
functioning is essential to any ministry.”
In addition to staying engaged with
her home church and community, Pett-
IMAGE BY TIM GOUW / UNSPLASH
way has also taken advantage of the prox-
imity of the DTS campus. While taking
an online course, Pettway decided she
would benefit from more one-on-one
discussion with the professor: “Since
I live in Dallas, we were able to meet
and have a wonderful conversation that
spurred me on to dig even deeper.”
In a world of constant change,
it’s nice to know that some things are the same.
12:1
NO MATTER Dallas Baptist University offers more than 60 completely
THE PHYSICAL online degrees. DBU’s online classes are taught by the
LOCATION OF same professors that teach in our classrooms, so you get
EITHER THE the same experience and the same degree as on-campus STUDENT-TO-FACULTY RATIO
INSTITUTION OR students. Since they are the same, you can also take classes
THE STUDENT,
20+
on campus anytime you choose.
DISTANCE
LEARNING With DBU’s online offerings, you will experience a
CREATES transformative education and a responsive faculty who will
A GLOBAL work closely with you to achieve your educational goals.
UNDERGRADUATE DEGREES
CLASSROOM.
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You will also discover a unique community of fellow
students and professors who share your passion to advance
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No matter the physical location of
either the institution or the student, dis- MASTER’S DEGREES
tance learning creates a global classroom. God has placed a new journey in front of you,
M O R E THAN and we are there to help. Let’s get going.
J US T A S TU D ENT
John Dyer, executive director of com-
munications and educational technol-
ogy at DTS, says that upon completion
of their undergraduate work, many
distance learners immediately begin
training for pastorates or counseling. dbu.edu/myonlinedegree
But other students are part of an older 1.800.460.8188
TEXT-ONLY
Special Higher Education Section
demographic who are already serving in ministry
and want to further their education or add to their
credentials.
Friend also sees this trend in his program at Cal-
vin and says this demographic benefits everyone.
“Many of us are older, some even grandparents
returning to school to pursue a new vocation, and
AS MOST DISTANCE
LEARNERS WILL
ATTEST, THE DEPTH OF
CARE AND SUPPORT
THEY EXPERIENCE IS
NOT DEPENDENT ON
DAILY FACE-TO-FACE
INTERACTION.
many of us are pastors in churches,” says Friend.
“The confluence of in-the-church experience and
seminary education make it a more profitable
learning experience.”
Although he hadn’t been in school for more than
20 years, Glen Hammons says the transition into the
master of arts in theological studies hybrid program
at Assemblies of God Theological Seminary (AGTS)
was easier than he anticipated.
“Students are initially discouraged about the
logistics,” says Hammons. “They think, What if I
have a question? What if I get lost in the material?
Then they contemplate the costs and think, What
if I blow this? But classes progress one day at a time,
and AGTS takes care of you.”
This care, Hammons notes, is built into the pro-
gram structure. Students glean from a facilitator and
message board, class questions and discourse, and
72
the availability of professors,
either by phone or over lunch-
time conversations during the
on-campus classes.
In his sixth year as a lead
pastor, Hammons enrolled
specifically for the purpose
of enhancing his effective-
ness in a new program he and
his team started three years
ago. The program provides
local and overseas college
students the opportunity to
shadow ministry leaders and
attend classes at his church
for an entire semester. “As I
was leading this ministry, I
found that to best facilitate
it, I had to be a step ahead,”
says Hammons. “I’m not
looking for a master’s degree
to advance me but to benefit
the church.”
Not only has Hammons’s
online education supported
TEXT-ONLY
Sponsored by SeminaryGradSchool.com
his work with his church’s program, his
Discover Your Purpose
studies have also affected his pastoral
ministry. Last semester, Hammons took
a missiology course that spurred him to
refocus the church’s emphasis on mis-
sions: “The class caused me to repent of
the limited vision I had of missio dei.”
When Beth Wolff started the master
of arts in theology program at Fuller,
she was working as a pastor of the birth-
through-college ministries and oversee-
ing a staff of seven. “I was being pulled
Discover Regent
in the direction to teach, and I felt I
needed to build a stronger foundation
and understanding of where my faith
was coming from,” she says.
She would come to appreciate even
more the flexibility of the program when
she was offered a new full-time position
as the campus and teaching pastor in a
different state.
“Distance learning helped with that
transition,” Wolff says. “I was concerned
about finishing my degree, but the new
position couldn’t wait.”
Due to the program’s hybrid format,
however, Wolff was able to continue tak-
IMAGE BY JEREMY ELLSWORTH / LIGHTSTOCK
ing classes online and could attend the
on-campus classes at Fuller’s Phoenix
campus. In addition to the flexibility
of the program aiding in her transi-
tion, Wolff says the courses themselves
Change the World
became a “guide rail through the chaos”
of moving to a new job and state: “After
the move, I experienced a huge identity
crisis as I went from a large church to a
small one and from confidence in the way
I facilitate ministry to an environment
in which the way I did things didn’t work
the same.”
As a testament to the real-life sup-
port of her program’s virtual commu-
nity, Wolff received wise counsel from
her assigned group leader, who advised
her to take a quarter off school to rebuild
You want to excel in your career and live a significant life. Regent University will prepare you. For 40 years we’ve
her foundation and put newly learned
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spiritual practices into place during her
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 Special Higher Education Section Sponsored by SeminaryGradSchool.com

face-to-face interaction.
Chris Gilmore, who recently gradu-
ated from Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary (SBTS) with a master of divin-

From
ity, had been enrolled for a year when his
wife died unexpectedly and he needed
to take time off of school to mourn and
focus his attention on his infant son. He

Louisville
says the SBTS community surrounded
him with support.
Later, when Gilmore eventually
remarried and moved to Ohio, he re-en-

to Lima
rolled in SBTS’s hybrid program. During
that time, he and his wife were leading a
couple’s class and a small group address-
ing the topic of grief. He also began to
search for a full-time pastorate position.
“The huge benefit of Southern Baptist’s
program is its mature believers and fac-
Southern Seminary’s Global Campus is available any ulty,” Gilmore says. “Classes are taught
not only by professors but by pastors.”
time and any place. You now have the flexibility of
For Gilmore, the online format was
completing an M.Div. in any format you choose, either its own challenge: “As much as I love
on the campus in Louisville, Kentucky, or through online coursework and technology, I’m a
face-to-face kind of person. It’s difficult
globally accessible options including online, modular, to not be in the classroom.” However, he
extension, and conference courses. says interpersonal connections were conversation once we were all back in and thought about ministry,” he says.
still made possible with the seminary’s our online forums.” “Most of all, it has been affirming to
online communities, video lectures, and Friend’s experience at Calvin encom- know that there’s much to learn and
sbts.edu/globalcampus recorded classroom lessons. passes the benefits of distance learning experience when one is called to a life

IMAGE BY JEFF SHELDON / UNSPLASH

Initially, Wolff had the opposite reac-
tion to the in-person sessions in her
hybrid program. “When I first started at
Fuller, I was frustrated with the on-cam-
pus requirement, but later I found those
portions so enriching,” she says. “For
me, the sessions transformed each
username into a real person. There was
now a touchpoint that created a better
in the proverbial nutshell: “I find a close
bond with people hundreds of miles
away, including mentors who care for
me and pray for me. My children have
studied alongside me as they under-
stand that Daddy is also in school. The
things I bring home, both in experiences
and new information from Calvin, have
shaped how my wife and I have talked
of ministry.”
AMANDA CLEARY EASTEP is a free-
lance marketing writer focusing on higher
education and business. Her essays have
been published by Think Christian and
Topology magazines. She blogs about faith
and the midlife adventure at
amandaclearyeastep.wordpress.com.

WANT TO K N OW M O RE ?
Here are the websites of the schools advertising in this issue. You can also find more information about these schools
at ChristianCollegeGuide.net and SeminaryGradSchool.com.

Asbury Theological Seminary (KY)........ asburyseminary.edu

Baylor University (TX) ............................. baylor.edu
Biola University (CA) ................................ biola.edu
Dallas Theological Seminary (TX) ......... dts.edu
Dallas Baptist University (TX)................ dbu.edu
Gateway Seminary (CA)............................ gs.edu
Liberty University (VA)............................. liberty.edu
Moody Bible Institute (IL)....................... moody.edu
Northern Seminary (IL).................................seminary.edu
South Florida Bible
College & Seminary (FL)................................sfbc.edu
Reformed Theological Seminary (NC)......... rts.edu
Regent University (VA)..................................regent.edu
Southern Seminary (KY)...............................sbts.edu
Trinity International University (IL).........tiu.edu

Global Campus
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 TESTIMONY
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 80
APPETITE FOR GOD
At age 16, I began attending church
again, hoping to find another source
for friends and fun. Instead, I found
myself slowly developing an appetite
for God. I had always believed that God
existed. From my perspective, it seemed
likelier that nature and human creativ-
ity resulted from creation, rather than
MOTHER’S DAY KIT
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After attending church for a while,
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from Christianity would require more
faith than running toward it. I felt that
the gospel offered the most compelling
answers to life’s most important ques-
tions: Where does all of the good in the
world come from? Where does all the
evil in the world come from? How do I
deal with personal guilt over the way I
have lived my life?
888.910.MOPS reachyoungfamilies@mops.org mops.org/mothersday Other factors were decisive in my
embrace of Christian faith. The first
was my dissatisfaction with the idea of
karma and many similar concepts found
in Eastern religions. Getting the sort of
life you deserve sounded too good to be
true, and it didn’t line up with my expe-
riences. In real life, the wicked often
escape punishment, and the righteous
often live with pain and suffering. The
Bible presents a more realistic view
of the wicked when the psalmist says
they are “always free of care, they go on
amassing wealth” (Ps. 73:12).
This got me to thinking: If a concept
like karma is not true, how do we explain
suffering and the problem of injustice?
The gospel presents a fascinating solu-
tion. In the instant someone accepts
that they are a sinner and that Jesus
is Lord, they are made righteous not
because of what they have, but because
of what Jesus did on the Cross. That was
the most simple and complete solution
to the problem of how God can punish
sin without crippling sinners—that is,
all of us—with guilt and condemnation.
Finally, the character of Jesus fasci-
nated me. Jesus grew up in a remote vil-
lage in the Middle East, and he became
the most influential person in human
history. His Word has shaped every-
thing, from literature to art to politics—
down to the curiosities of how we name
our kids and our cities. Jesus has trans-
formed billions of people over the last
2,000 years, even though he spent most
of his time on earth serving the poor and
downtrodden with a group of 12 people
who would have been regarded, in their
day, as losers and outcasts. It seemed
utterly improbable that someone with
such a lowly social profile could have
altered the course of history so radically.
But as Lewis remarked in Mere
Christianity, “Reality, in fact, is usually
On a weekly basis,
my friends and I
would compete to
see who could walk
out of the mall with
the highest dollar
value of stolen goods.
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something you could not have guessed.
That is one of the reasons I believe
Christianity. It is a religion you could
not have guessed. If it offered us just
the kind of universe we had always
expected, I should feel we were mak-
ing it up.” Gradually, it dawned on me
that Jesus couldn’t have just been crazy
and lucky. He had to be exactly who he
claimed to be—God’s only begotten Son.
STAYING GROUNDED
There wasn’t one specific moment
that led me to become a Christian. It
was God’s pursuit, month after month,
that slowly broke through to my skep-
tical soul. Of course, I’ve had periods
of growth and periods of failure. Like
the actor of my childhood dreams,
I’ve bounced around between differ-
ent career “roles,” uncertain which
one I wanted to embrace. First, I pur-
sued youth ministry in college. Then I
detoured into a career in finance, work-
ing as an investment banker and then as
a hedge fund manager.
I realized that God had given me an
ability to provide wise counsel to others
in business—and hence a platform to
share and reflect the love of Christ. But
on many occasions, I found myself put-
ting this “ministry” ahead of my actual
faith. The business world was influenc-
ing me more than I was influencing it.
To stay grounded, I kept pursuing
missions opportunities in low-income
environments. I ministered in the proj-
ects of Washington, DC; Philadelphia’s
West Kensington neighborhood; and in
South Central Los Angeles. A little over
two years ago, my wife and I moved to a
home in South Central because we felt
that God was present in the diversity
and humbleness of its people.
Today, I head up a creative agency
called Fishermen Labs. We make vir-
tual- and augmented-reality experi-
ences, apps, websites, and emerging
technology for startups and Fortune
100 companies. We hope to emulate the
12 fishermen that Jesus called to follow
him—the most influential band of mis-
fits in the history of the world.
EDEN CHEN is the co-founder of
Fishermen Labs. He and his wife live in
Los Angeles.
79
 M AY 2017

TESTIMONY

A Former Shoplifter
Takes Stock
How a young tech entrepreneur repented of his teenage hedonism.
from the brink of suicide, now: pastor, pfrimmer’s chapel umc.

Tim Johnson
By Eden Chen sharing god’s love, purpose and freedom in nine services weekly.
PHOTO BY ZACHARY BAKO
asbury seminary master of divinity, 2001.

G
rowing up, I was something of a nomad. I spent the
first years of my life in the Maryland suburbs of
Washington, DC. Then, at age six, I moved to Hong
Kong, where I would remain until the third grade
before moving back to Maryland. I grew up speaking Chinese
at home but learned to master English at school. At a young
age, I became adept at adapting to different environments.  hung around with a community of hackers and pro gamers,
My ambitions were as quirky and unorthodox as my
upbringing. Since I loved watching movies and morphing
go to asbury.to/voices to read tim’s story.
lay elsewhere. I was obsessed with four things in particular:
video games, sports, acquiring material things, and chasing
women (at one point, I found myself trying to see three dif-
ferent girls at once).
On the court, I loved playing basketball and tennis. But I
really excelled with the video game controller in my hand. I Are you CALLED Download your free ebook
Called, from Asbury Seminary.
and at one point, I was one of the top 10 Warcraft 3 players
in the United States.
to join God in Visit: asbury.to/LL

into different personas, I thought I might like to become an
actor someday.
My dad was a musician, and my mom was a journalist.
They raised my brother and me in the church, but they gave
us a long leash to explore. By the time we returned from Hong
Kong, both of us had stopped going. In any event, my priorities
His mission?
But my grades were suffering. And meanwhile, I had begun
regularly shoplifting at the mall. On a weekly basis, my friends
and I would compete to see who could walk out of the mall
with the highest dollar value of stolen goods. Thankfully,
God wouldn’t let me drift too far down this dangerous road.
CONTINUED ON PRECEDING PAGE
Kentucky • Orlando • Memphis • Online

80 TEXT-ONLY
MAY 2017

EDITOR’S NOTE

WHITHER WILLPOWER?
When entering disputed territory, you need a good guide

Ted Olsen Editorial Director

As Paul talked about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come, Felix was
afraid and said, “That’s enough for now! You may leave. When I find it convenient, I will
send for you.” (Acts 24:25)

Talk about righteousness, self-control, and judgment often elicits strong responses. But
rather than avoiding further discussion as Felix did, disputants sometimes behave more
like the riot at Ephesus. Few topics in social science right now are hotter than willpower
and self-control, considering both the number of studies on the subject and the disputes
over their validity.
“I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the very concept of willpower,” clinical psy-
chologist Carl Erik Fisher wrote in the popular science journal Nautilus as we were fin-
ishing this issue. “It’s time to get rid of it altogether.” Academic discussions of self-control,
he argued, are too wrapped up in “roots in Judeo-Christian ideas about resisting sinful
impulses” and “Victorian moralizing.”
Meanwhile, some key studies on willpower, self-control, and “ego depletion” are at the
center of what some are calling a replication crisis. Some efforts to repeat major experi-
ments in this field haven’t been able to reproduce the studies’ findings. Then again, other
efforts are working just fine.
Granted, some of those disputed findings were weird in the first place. One peer-reviewed
paper that got a lot of attention in 2012 reported that just gargling sugar water could sig-
nificantly boost short-term self-control. (The thinking is that glucose alerts motivational
centers in the brain; spitting it out avoids the negative effects sugar has on self-control.)
There’s still a lot of research surrounding the relationship between sugar and self-con-
trol, but scientists these days are mostly skeptical about the promises of glucose gargling.
I first talked about exploring some of these issues with University of Connecticut sociol-
ogist Brad Wright as he worked on his CT cover story on how churches welcome people of
different ethnicities (“Pastor, Can I Come to Your Church?” July/August 2015). It turned
out that he had his own self-control study planned, so he was deeply aware of the debates.
With that study now published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, he guides
CT readers through what social science really has learned about self-control and willpower.
I’m grateful that Wright knows where the social science is solid and where it’s murky. But
more importantly, I’m glad that he actually believes those “Judeo-Christian ideas about
resisting sinful impulses.” Likewise, I’m glad that it’s not about “Victorian moralizing” for
him, but about rightly receiving gifts from God. It’s less about the judgment to come and

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less about putting ourselves under our own self’s control than it is about bringing our-
selves under the control of the one who has saved us from judgment. That’s enough for
now! Go read Brad’s article.

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R E P LY A L L

Responses to our March issue

Another name for the Benedict Option is the Great Fundamentalist Retreat of the early
20th century, when we abandoned the culture to secular forces. A better choice is the Wes-
leyan Option. Following their founder’s dictum—“Practical holiness throughout the land”—
the Wesleyans transformed 18th-century Britain. From the bottom, they evangelized and
created small discipleship and fellowship groups. From the top, they elected Wilberforce
and others to Parliament, ended slavery, and enacted other transforming legislation. We
do not need to retreat but to respond like the Wesleyans. Evangelicals and other social
conservatives must promote more constructive policies than the secular hedonists.
Leslie Conway Coomer Oakland City, IN

The Idea of a Christian Village

I consider The Rule of Saint Benedict one of the most powerful and practical handbooks on
pastoral leadership ever written, allowing that some of what he suggested was specific to
his time and not ours. So I read about the Benedict Option with great interest and antic-
ipation. However, I was disappointed in three ways. First, that the rationale introducing
the idea was cast in terms of recent culture wars and seemed to reflect a nostalgia for a
“Christian” America that never existed rather than a vigorous pursuit of Christian disci-
pleship. Second, that it did not include any interaction with how the Anabaptist tradition
has wrestled with these issues nor any of the other voices from intentional Christian com-
munities. And third, that it felt like a withdrawal into an insular fortress rather than chal-
lenging leadership that presents the larger society with attractive alternate ways to live.
Norman Stolpe Milwaukee, WI

I believe Dreher’s thinking is flawed. Jesus prepared his disciples for confrontation and
its consequences, not strategic withdrawal. In the Gospels, Jesus confronted the Jewish
leaders, the powers of darkness, and the sicknesses of the human body, and commanded
his disciples to do the same. In John 13–17, Jesus’ last lecture, he covers the disciples’ rules
of engagement, the consequences of that engagement, and the resources available for that
engagement. The disciples aggressively confronted the world “while God added his tes-
timony through signs, wonders, various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed
according to his will” (Heb. 2:4, ISV).
Paul Lloret Lancaster, SC

A good look at what living in Christian community would practically look like.
ChismYoung

Rod Dreher states that “the sixth-century father of Western monasticism responded to the
collapse of Roman civilization by founding a monastic order.” That is not completely cor-
rect. Benedict’s Rule is a composite of several earlier “rules.” Augustine’s rule was widely

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used at least 120 years before the Rule of Saint Benedict emerged.
Bob Gilbert Kennesaw, Georgia

The heightened polarity of our times is revealing the broken leg on which this strain of
evangelicalism is standing. To suggest that a movement toward monastic-type commu-
nities is a truer reflection of Christ’s church is a far greater danger than a culture that is
hostile to our faith. By example to his disciples, Jesus was continually prompted by com-
passion to move toward those outside the boundaries with grace, mercy, and love.
Eric Branstrom San Clemente, CA

Our First Community

Good word from @TheRichardClark in @CTmagazine on technology, social media, and
local church community.
M_Y_Emerson

I grew up in a caring community of Christ followers but spent most of my life living at
a distance from them. I wanted something more exciting. Yet, as I turn to Scripture, I
realize God uses the normal and not just the exciting. I’ve started going to the Internet
less for community and have found [community] among these imperfect, awkward peo-
ple who have loved me even when they didn’t understand me.
Thank you for this article, CT. May you guys be a voice of peace and faithfulness to the
broken in an age of cynicism and doubt.
Daniel MacLean

Let Bible Studies Be Bible Studies

Amen. While these other books may be helpful, I am seeing more and more resistance to
holding them up to the light of Scripture and keeping Scripture as our ultimate standard.
In fact, I see many who have read helpful Christian books but have not read their Bible.
Lisa Voogd Sikkema

I disagree. Any time you discuss and read Scripture, it’s Bible study. Guides can be help-
ful. Let’s not complicate it.
Jill Cummings

When God Does the Unexpected

I loved the @krishk excerpt in @CTmagazine. Who knew Habakkuk had something to
say to Trump’s America?
just_inpaul

Intentional communal living may mean Christians living more monastic lives. Perfect
piece by @roddreher.
jonminnema

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REPORTING FROM THE CHURCH WORLDWIDE

N E WS

THE M A IN L I NE ’ S SAV I NG GRAC E ?

Even in secular Canada’s declining denominations, conservative theology correlates with
church growth.
BY KATE SHELLNUTT

Amid the decades-long decline in mainline Protestantism in North America, researchers

in Canada recently found an “elusive sample” of congregations whose growth has bucked
the trend.
The key characteristic these exceptional Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and United
churches had in common? Evangelical theology.
With fewer evangelicals and more secular surroundings than their brethren in the
United States, Canada’s mainline denominations collectively lost half of their members
over the past 50 years. Last year, a team of sociologists suggested that conservative theo-
logical beliefs—including emphasis on Scripture as the “actual word of God” and belief in
the power of prayer—may be the saving grace keeping attendance up at 9 of 22 Ontario
churches studied.
“Most people, especially academics, are hesitant to say one type of belief system is better
than another,” said David Millard Haskell, the study’s lead author. “But if we are talking
solely about which belief system is more likely to lead to numerical growth among Protes-
tant churches, the evidence suggests conservative Protestant theology is the clear winner.”
The mainline congregations that kept growing by at least 2 percent a year emphasized
markers typically associated with evangelical beliefs. For example, such churches described
evangelism as the main mission of their church, were more committed to personal spiri-
tual disciplines such as Bible reading, and saw Scripture as a singular authority.
Haskell’s study was one of the most popular papers published in the Review of Religious
Research last year. His findings among Canadian churches echo trends that researchers
in the US have been tracking for decades.
“Clearer theology leads to clearer practice. You know what you’re hanging on to,” said
Jennifer McKinney, a Seattle Pacific University sociologist who studied mainline renewal.
“Conservative churches are the ones that grow, and that’s still happening in the US.”
The new research, conducted by a team out of Wilfrid Laurier University and Redeemer
University College in Ontario, indicated that among growing mainline churches, 93 per-
cent of pastors and 83 percent of attendees agreed that “Jesus rose from the dead with a
real flesh-and-blood body, leaving behind an empty tomb,” compared with only 56 percent
of pastors and 67 percent of attendees in struggling ones.
The thriving congregations were also more likely to affirm that “God performs miracles
in answer to prayers” than were congregations in decline (pastors: 100% vs. 44%; attendees:

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90% vs. 80%). Across survey measures, pastors of churches with declining attendance
were the least conservative.
Rodney Stark, codirector of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, noted
similar findings in the US. His data shows that “there are pastors who are conservative, and
their congregations are growing while their denominations decline,” the sociologist said.
Conservative theology fosters greater commitment, which leads to a greater sense of per-
sonal happiness and stronger bonds between church members, the Canadian researchers
concluded. Christians at Ontario’s thriving mainline churches—on average, significantly
younger than attendees in their denominations as a whole, with two-thirds under age
60—proved to be more evangelical in belief and in practice than fellow mainline attendees.
However, David Roozen argues that given the concentrated sample of 22 congregations,
the researchers’ conclusions do not apply more broadly. Roozen, an expert on national reli-
gious trends and mainline Protestantism at the Hartford Institute of Religious Research,
says other factors such as age and the use of contemporary worship may account in part
for the appeal.
According to Roozen, the study’s analysis predicts the traits of individuals, not churches
themselves. So the data shows that “people who are conservative go to growing congrega-
tions, not that growing congregations are conservative,” he said.
Roozen’s own research through the Faith Communities Today study, which includes
more than 5,000 mainline churches in the US, has found that “theology had no effect.”
Congregations on both theological extremes were more likely to still be growing.
Haskell says liberal and conservative doctrines necessarily produce different outcomes.
“All the growing church clergy in our study, because of their theological outlook, held the
conviction that it was ‘very important to encourage non-Christians to become Christians,’ ”
he said. “Conversely, half the clergy at the declining churches held the opposite conviction,
believing it was not desirable to convert non-Christians. . . . Which do you think is more
likely to generate church growth?”
Like Stark and other fellow researchers tracking denominational decline, Roozen
observed how theological shifts make it harder for mainline churches to assert their value
over non-religious progressive worldviews. “If you’ve got a younger generation that are
asking, ‘What good is religion?’—what do liberal Protestants say to them?” Roozen noted
that without focused teachings on the uniqueness of Jesus or belief in heaven and hell,
for example, mainline congregations find themselves in competition with humanitarian
and secular groups.
“The challenge to liberal Protestantism is not conservative Protestantism,” he said.
“It’s secularity.”
While the Canada study offers a new and rather unexpected source of inspiration for
Christians concerned about declining church attendance, discussion over the counterin-
tuitive appeal of conservative theology in a secularizing culture dates back to at least the
1970s. Dean Kelley’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, and the related research that
ensued, suggested that the “strictness” of conservative religious communities corresponded

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to church growth.
Since then, Kelley’s notion has been challenged by demographic analysis—including
family size among evangelicals—and conflicting trends. Critics have asked: If conserva-
tive theology is such a major draw, what explains the megachurch boom around pastors
like Joel Osteen? Or the recent record decline among Southern Baptists?
Roger Finke, the sociologist who directs the Association of Religion Data Archives, found that
even conservative denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention and Lutheran
Church–Missouri Synod, have had to continue to innovate to maintain their vitality.
“In short, the conservative groups often retain the core teachings that are valued so
highly by the membership. But members want much more than the retention of valued
teachings,” he said. “In areas that are not core teachings, churches must continually search
for innovative ways to reach, activate, and serve members.”
KATE SHELLNUTT is online associate editor for CT.

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 GO FIGURE

That Loving Feeling

In recent years, Americans have developed warmer feelings toward every
religious group—except evangelicals. Even more striking: Only 61 percent of all
Americans (and 55 percent of non-evangelicals) personally know someone who
is evangelical, down 9 percentage points from 2014. It was the biggest decline
of any group. Jews warmed to evangelicals the most, while black Protestants
cooled the most.

HOW HOW
AMERICANS FAITH GROUPS
RATE RATE
FAITH GROUPS EVANGELICALS
(FROM JUNE 2014 (FROM JUNE 2014
TO JANUARY 2017) TO JANUARY 2017)

90⁰ 90⁰

White
80⁰ Evangelicals 80⁰

Black
70⁰ Protestants 70⁰
Mainline
(not asked in 2014)

Non-evangeli-
Jews cal Protestants
Catholics
Evangelicals 60⁰ White Mainline 60⁰

Catholics

Buddhists Non-evangeli-
50⁰ cal Americans 50⁰
Hindus
Mormons
“Nothing
in Particular”
Atheists All Unaffiliated
Muslims 40⁰ 40⁰

Agnostics
Jews

30⁰ 30⁰
Atheists

20⁰ 20⁰

MEAN 0 to 33 degrees = negative

THERMOMETER 34 to 66 degrees = neutral
RATINGS 67 to 100 degrees = positive

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

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N E WS G L E A N I N G S

Southern Baptists’ uncooperative funds

Some churches in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) aren’t happy with recent deci-
sions by denominational leaders and are showing their displeasure by closing their wallets.
After Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) president Russell Moore’s repeated
public criticisms of Donald Trump and his evangelical supporters, Prestonwood Baptist
Church in Texas—led by Trump adviser and former SBC president Jack Graham—decided
to escrow money marked for denominational programs. The church gave $500,000 to the
Cooperative Program in 2015; the program’s annual budget is about $190 million. Another
megachurch in Tennessee is holding back funds over the decision by both the ERLC and
the International Mission Board (IMB) to support a Muslim community’s right to build
a mosque in New Jersey. The IMB apologized and changed its policy to “speak only into
situations that are directly tied to our mission.” The SBC executive committee formed a
task force to “study and recommend redemptive solutions” by September.
CHINA
Korean missionaries kicked out
More than 30 Protestant missionaries from South Korea have been expelled from north-
eastern China, where some had been working for more than a decade. Along with evan-
gelizing, the missionaries had been helping defectors from North Korea. Some linked the
expulsion to China’s objection to South Korea’s agreement to host a US missile defense
system. The radar is meant to help protect the country from North Korea but is capable of
reaching into Chinese territory. China has expressed its displeasure by canceling appear-
ances by South Korean performers and taking measures against some companies. Others
point to China’s increased regulations on Christianity, including 26 new restrictions that
were passed in October.
Free Christian college finally finds a taker
After eight years and several false starts, the Massachusetts campus that once housed
evangelist D. L. Moody’s school for girls will finally be used again. In 2009, the campus
was purchased from the school by the Green family, who own the Hobby Lobby franchise.
They spent $5 million sprucing it up with the aim of donating it to a Christian institution.
But when they offered it to Christian colleges, almost all balked. The campus—40 build-
ings on 200 acres—may be free, but it costs a lot to maintain. The eventual willing recip-
ients: a small Catholic college in California looking for a second campus and the Moody
Center museum. The National Christian Foundation has created a $5 million matching
grant fund to help both with expenses.
Bob Jones regains tax-exempt status
More than three decades ago, the US Supreme Court confirmed the IRS’s decision to strip
Bob Jones University (BJU) of its tax-exempt status due to its policy of denying admission
to those in an interracial marriage or known to support interracial romantic relationships.

STANDARD-VIEW
The university dropped the policy in 2000 and apologized for its racial discrimination in
2008, but didn’t seek tax exemption again until it began to reorganize in 2014. Since the
university moved under the tax-exempt umbrella of its elementary school, it doesn’t need
separate IRS approval to take the exemption. Spokesman Randy Page told The Greenville
News the move allows BJU donors to write off their gifts and makes BJU a more attrac-
tive recipient for grants.

Ex-Muslim can’t sue church over baptism

When a Muslim man converted and was privately baptized by an Oklahoma church in
2012, he says the church promised to keep it quiet. But while he was visiting his home
country of Syria, the church published his baptism on its website. Islamist extremists in
Damascus, aided by a relative, kidnapped and tortured him, according to a lawsuit he filed
against the church. The man had to escape by killing his relative and now can’t return to
Syria, he said. He sued the church for $75,000 for breaking its promise, but the Oklahoma
Supreme Court decided the judicial system doesn’t have jurisdiction because “baptism
is not secular.” However, three of its eight judges disagreed, saying in part that the case
“does not involve a question of discipline, faith, or ecclesiastical rule.”

HOW HISPANIC CHRISTIANS FEEL

IN TRUMP’S AMERICA

WORRIED ABOUT DEPORTATION:

(for themselves, family, or friends)

PROTESTANTS 25% A LOT 47% WORRIED

CATHOLICS 37% A LOT 54% WORRIED

MY PLACE IN AMERICA:
I HAVE SERIOUS CONCERNS
PROTESTANTS 37%

CATHOLICS 50%

I FEEL CONFIDENT
PROTESTANTS 59%

CATHOLICS 46%

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

STANDARD-VIEW
NEWS HEADLINES | CHURCH LIFE

BEARING BURDENS AFTER OBAMACARE

The future of Christian health care sharing.

Enrollment in Christian alternatives to health insurance tripled under the Affordable Care
Act (ACA) enacted by President Barack Obama. The total number of individuals across
health care sharing ministries surpassed 625,000 this year.
Christians who swap health insurance premiums to cover each other’s expenses
instead usually find themselves with lower payments than they’d have for policies pur-
chased through the ACA exchanges. But as President Donald Trump pledges to dismantle
Obamacare—starting with the individual mandate requiring coverage—many health care
sharers are committed to staying put.
“With all the talk of health care reform and ‘What do we do? How do we fix this mess?’
the solution will not come from regulations and mandates,” said Anthony Hopp, spokes-
man for Samaritan Ministries, one of the biggest health care sharing networks. “We’re
going to have to think biblically.”
Groups like Samaritan Ministries (whose enrollment jumped from 65,000 to 224,000
individuals over the past five years) and Medi-Share (up from 46,000 to 222,000 during the
same period) take their cues from the New Testament call to “bear one another’s burdens.”
“We hear from a lot of church organizations and religious nonprofits,” said Michael
Gardner, spokesman for Medi-Share. The booming network, which opened a branch office
in Colorado Springs last year, is considering creating group plans that Christian organi-
zations can offer employees. “We want to meet their needs as well.”
These ministries say their principles go back to the early church: selling property and
possessions to “[distribute] to anyone who had need” (Acts 4:35). Members of organiza-
tions like Samaritan Ministries and Medi-Share match each month’s contributions with
thousands of households that have major medical expenses arise.
In the New Testament, “there are lots of signs about this kind of care and awareness;
where one body has needs, others in the body are supposed to step up,” said Darrell Bock, a
Dallas Theological Seminary professor who has authored commentaries on Luke and Acts.
Compared to contemporary efforts for Christians to pay for each other’s heart surger-
ies, births, broken bones, and cancer treatments, “I think the sentiment and the approach
is actually somewhat parallel,” Bock said. “In Acts, it shows the nature and depth of the
community. But it’s not something that’s commanded.”
Like most acts of generosity described in the Bible, providing for needs within the church
should be done voluntarily, scholars say.
In Acts 2, the same chapter that chronicles Pentecost, Luke describes sharing within the
church body and uses language affiliated with ancient utopias, according to Craig Keener,
a biblical studies professor at Asbury Theological Seminary. “Luke sees it as an ideal,” he
said. “It follows the outpouring of the Spirit, so he sees it as a good thing.”
Daniel Coughlin said joining a health care sharing network taught him to trust the

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Christian community. “Samaritan Ministries is more than an inexpensive way to provide
for my health care,” said Coughlin, who survived cancer at 25 and whose medical history
long prevented him from obtaining insurance. “Health care sharing is being part of a com-
munity and bearing the burdens of the other people.”
People have become more willing to opt for a paradigm-shifting alternative as today’s
“sharing economy”—led by industry disrupters Uber and Airbnb—reintroduces a largely
individualistic culture to the power of the collective.
The Christian health care networks that began as small-scale, relatively unknown oper-
ations in the late ’80s and early ’90s now flourish as Americans rethink their relation-
ship with institutions and each other. Health care sharing organizations do not operate
as insurance and don’t guarantee coverage. Yet it doesn’t seem as strange to count on the
generosity of neighbors now that crowdfunding is on the rise; hundreds of thousands of
Americans have turned to online campaigns on sites like YouCaring and GoFundMe in
order to cover unexpected medical costs.
While the Enlightenment and Reformation brought Protestants a greater sense of indi-
vidualism, “the cultures of the Bible were collectivist—group first, individual second,” said
Ben Witherington III, another New Testament scholar at Asbury. Believing that God was
the owner of all things, the Jerusalem church was “prepared to share as needed,” he said.
For Christians, health care sharing may take the place of insurance in their budget, but
functions differently in their lives because of the motivations at its core. The ministries
send out prayer requests and match members with specific needs in the network, con-
necting them personally to wherever their $350 or $500 payment goes that month. The
plans only cover unexpected medical expenses, so routine and preventative care costs
like mammograms and colonoscopies, long-term prescriptions, mental health, and many
other expenses covered by traditional insurance programs must be covered by the patient.
“People will hear about the low cost, and that may be what gets them to pick up their
phone and call. But it’s really their faith that motivates them,” said Gardner. His Medi-
Share network has covered $1.4 billion in medical bills since it began in 1993.
Many health care sharers sign up to avoid the year-over-year price jumps. Obamacare
premiums rose by about 25 percent for 2017, with certain states adopting hikes that amount
to $1,000 to $2,000 increases for families who don’t qualify for subsidies, according to Time.
Members of health care sharing ministries (provided the organizations have been
functioning since 1999) are exempt from the ACA’s individual mandate, which penalizes
Americans without health insurance. Days after Trump took office in January, adviser
Kellyanne Conway indicated that the President would not be enforcing the mandate any
longer. The eventual end to the individual mandate will do away with the need for a reli-
gious exemption.
“Things are definitely in motion, but we anticipated that with Trump,” said Hopp, follow-
ing Conway’s announcement and the President’s executive order urging agencies to ease
ACA requirements. “Health care sharing ministries existed before the ACA; God-willing,
they thrived during the ACA; and they will survive after.”
KATE SHELLNUTT is online associate editor for CT.

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 18%
WHITE EVANGELICALS WHO
APPROVE OF OBAMACARE

47%
ALL CHRISTIANS WHO
APPROVE OF OBAMACARE

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

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N E W S H E A D L I N E S | C H U R C H I N AC T I O N

TOGETHER FOR THE GOSPELS

Unprecedented unity among Bible translators is transforming Christian giving, too.

This fall, ten Bible translation agencies—from Wycliffe Bible Translators to Pioneer Bible
Translators to the United Bible Societies—will invite givers to visit a single website to see
how Bible translation is progressing around the world and to join in this effort by making
their contributions. Rather than competing against one another for website visitors, the
agencies will allow the collaborative site to connect visitors to the initiatives and organi-
zations that best fit their interests.
That sort of others-centered cooperation is unprecedented in the Bible translation sec-
tor, said Dal Anderson, former chief operating officer of Seed Company and Every Tribe
Every Nation. As of late 2016, this network of ten heavyweight Bible translation agencies
and several resource partners was involved in 90 percent of the translation work done glob-
ally. “Those of us working in the Bible translation world know how big of a miracle this is.”
The dramatic shift toward collaboration has delighted givers, who are looking for proven
leadership, extraordinary vision, and clear momentum, said David Wills, president emer-
itus of the National Christian Foundation, one of the largest privately funded nonprofits
in the United States.
“If you add collaboration to the mix, the attraction and potential for growth becomes
exponential,” he said.
In fact, this time the givers led the way.
“The investors have really challenged us on this,” said Bob Creson, president and CEO
of Wycliffe Bible Translators. In some cases, large givers were being pitched by several
translation agencies for nearly the same work.
“They patiently said, ‘I love what you’re doing. Please get your act together,’ ” he said.
The vision of an opportunity larger than any agency could accomplish alone was first
articulated by Mart Green, who founded Mardel Christian Bookstores and chairs the
Hobby Lobby board. He gathered several big givers and the heads of three Bible transla-
tion agencies, then laid out a vision for a central digital Bible library. That way, all trans-
lations of Scripture would be available to anyone, instead of siloed in separate systems.
While working on the library, the agencies learned to trust each other, and givers were
intrigued, Green said. The library launched in 2010; since then, it has gathered more than
1,100 Scripture portions and versions.
“It [didn’t] take too long for them to figure out, ‘Okay, I’m sure glad we didn’t build 10
digital libraries,’ ” he said.
Meanwhile, Todd Peterson, a former professional football kicker who was Seed Com-
pany’s interim CEO and former board chair, was also communicating a bigger goal.
“I got a clear vision for inviting our most influential, affluent friends to join us for a
weekend and really be challenged with the huge vision of providing for Bible-less people,”
he said. (Of the more than 7,000 languages in the world, just over 3,000 now have some

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Scripture. Just 636 have complete translations, but those languages account for nearly
70 percent of the population.)
At the first weekend gathering, Seed Company financial partners raised a few million
dollars, and the organization repeated the event over the following few years. In 2014,
celebrating the beginning of the 1,000th language project, more than 100 couples gave a
total of $21 million.
“That had never been seen before in the fundraising world for missions,” Peterson said.
Part of the gathering’s success was its focus on those without access to the Bible and on
Jesus’ kingdom instead of the Seed Company’s needs or the fame of its staff, speakers, or
musicians, he said. And that sparked an idea in Peterson.
“That was a paradigm shift. I said, ‘This isn’t about Seed Company.’ ”
Peterson suggested that Seed Company share its weekend gathering format and com-
munity of substantial givers with the larger translation network, banding with them to
cast a unifying vision of working together to translate the gospel into every existing lan-
guage. He called Green to start a dialogue.
“There’s no way Seed Company will go for it,” Green told him. “But you’re the former
chair and acting CEO, so I guess if anybody could get away with it, you could.”
In 2015, Seed Company opened up the event—which is now its best fundraiser—to fellow
translation organizations. At the gathering, donors would be exposed to the global need
for translation and matched with the most appropriate translation agency based on their
passions for particular regions or people groups, even if that agency was not Seed Company.
Building the level of trust to pull off such an event took countless monthly meetings on
the part of a steering committee, consisting of agency CEOs and other influencers, direct-
ing the coalition. A commitment to transparency was key in an environment where adding
an agency to the alliance or even a change in executive leadership could throw off trust.
“Transparency goes out the window, and people are reluctant to talk,” Anderson said.
Trust was also built through a commitment to working together through snags and dis-
agreements that has now trickled down to efforts to cooperate at the implementation level.
Today, the coalition’s magnetism has introduced an unanticipated problem, Anderson
said. Forming a partnership with the coalition can be more attractive to field partners—
the individual missionaries, local churches, and other organizations on the front lines of
Bible translation work—than working with one of the organizations alone. So the group
has had to choose its engagements carefully, he said. For example, consideration of one
prospective partnership continued over a year, with members of the team holding differ-
ent positions.
“At the end of the day, it’s an environment that looks for unity more than plurality,”
Anderson said. The coalition chooses its commitments and endorsements unanimously,
or not at all.
The unity on display at the 2015 joint fundraiser clearly inspired givers. Of those who
attended, roughly 60 couples gave just under $20 million—about half the attendance but
nearly the same amount of money as the 1,000th language celebration the year before.
That means the average gift of $200,000 to one agency in 2014 rose to an average of

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$300,000 toward Bible translation in 2015, Peterson said. “We saw a $75,000 commit-
ment from the 2014 weekend turn into $600,000 in 2015. We saw $300,000 turn into $1.5
million, and $1 million turn into $3 million.”
The rising tide lifted all of the translation agencies involved, Peterson said. “That was a
miracle. God had given us a fresh new vision. He brought unity we had never seen before.
And all of a sudden, the donor community was responding with stunning generosity.”
The collaboration popularized a name—illumiNations, a reference to the foretelling of
nations coming to the light in Isaiah 60:3—and is still picking up steam. The cooperative
agencies are joining their efforts to create a software system to track in real time which
languages are being translated and how much of the work is left to do, which will be added
to the coalition’s website, www.illuminations.bible. They’ll also have a presence at the
Museum of the Bible that will open in Washington, DC, in the fall of 2017.
“We’ve adopted a ‘better quality, faster, cheaper’ mindset,” Peterson said. “Everybody
in the conversation is saying, ‘We’ve got to do this excellently because this is God’s Word.
But we also have to do it as quickly as possible because people are dying every year. And
also inexpensively, because that’s just good stewardship.’ ”
Collaboration, not competition, is the best way to achieve that, he said.
Some ministry sectors have been cooperating for a while, such as the International Sports
Coalition (ISC), founded in 1987, and the Accord Network (formerly the Association of
Evangelical Relief and Development Organizations), founded in 1978. But today collab-
orations are rising in popularity, with networks like illumiNations and the International
Orality Network (founded in 2004) popping up more frequently, Wills said.
“ISC and this Bible translation collaboration are extraordinarily powerful because all
points of the triangle—investors, the people doing the ministry, and those receiving the
ministry—are all engaged in a collaborative effort,” Wills said. “That’s explosive.”
A key ingredient is humility, he said. So is having an abundance mentality. “It means
that you’re trying to make someone else successful.”
In a room full of type-A leaders with strong personalities, “it’s a God thing when it hap-
pens,” Wills said. “You look at it and say, ‘Wow. Our primary responsibility is to not get in
the way of what God is doing.’ ”
The illumiNations template could be applied to other areas like clean water, anti-abor-
tion efforts, or poverty relief, Peterson said. “It’s the Holy Spirit’s prerogative, but there is a
lot of biblical vernacular here—generosity, humility, and integrity leading to greater unity.
“I wonder if we could challenge the church to have more of these experiences,” he said.
“If I was seeing this kind of unity in other ministry areas, I’d be excited, and I’d give more.”
SARAH EEKHOFF ZYLSTRA is a contributing editor for CT.

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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

V I E WS

W H AT TO M A K E OF D ONA L D TR UM P ’S S OUL
And how that might shape our response to his presidency.

BY MARK GALLI

It has been customary to give a new president 100 days before evaluating his administra-
tion. With President Donald Trump, many could not wait even 100 hours—and for good
reason. Trump and his team tripped out of the starting block and fell flat on their collective
faces. The President’s executive order temporarily suspending refugee resettlement and
banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries was an administrative and legal
disaster. His every cabinet pick has faced fierce opposition. And amid reports of a White
House staff in chaos, the President has only amplified his critique of the press.
Before and after the election, CT has also weighed in on our political or moral concerns
about Trump. He has promoted policies and appointed people who work against matters
we have editorialized on—his callousness toward refugees and his seeming indifference to
the environment are two examples. And while evangelicals may disagree about the Presi-
dent’s policies on such matters, few would argue that Trump is a moral exemplar. Both the
Left and the Right have noted vices and ethical problems, from utter self-centeredness to
cruel remarks to blatant conflicts of interest, and more.
One dimension that has been mostly neglected, though, especially among Christians,
is a matter of some consequence. To understand its gravity, we must begin with the most
positive of theological statements: Trump is a man whom God loves. He is a sinner for
whom Christ died. Despite his evident moral failings, Trump nonetheless has been cre-
ated in the image of God. He may be a political and moral enemy for many of our readers,
but that is all the more reason we are called to love him and pray for him (Matt. 5:44).
To love such a man surely includes challenging the policies and moral tenor of his admin-
istration. But this prophetic work too easily slips into “rejoicing in evil” (1 Cor. 13:6). We
note this especially among late-night comedians (and their viewers) who delight in mock-
ing Trump’s every misstep to the reward of soaring television ratings. Humor is a divine
gift designed, in part, to relieve unbearable tension—which today is at a breaking point
politically. So these comedians play an important role in a democracy. Still, a fine line runs
between righteous satire and rejoicing in the foolishness of others, and when it is crossed,
it does not bode well for Christian witness or for the health of the republic.
What might better characterize our reaction is less satire and more lament. Blessed are
those who mourn their sins (Matt. 5:4), and because they see themselves in solidarity with
all sinners, who also mourn the sins of others.
And, more shocking still (given the current climate), instead of being quick to speak
truth to power, we might also, from time to time, speak mercy to the immoral. And if there

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is anyone who needs mercy, it is Trump.
Some believe that Trump is a baby Christian who is making his way in the faith. While
we would never presume to judge another’s heart, we are deeply troubled by what is
observable about Trump’s spiritual health. Aside from his ethical breaches and question-
able character, his attitude toward the sacred has been confused and cavalier. He says he
“reveres” Jesus not for his death and resurrection on our behalf, but mainly for his “brav-
ery and courage.” In Iowa, he spoke of the Lord’s Supper, saying, “I drink my little wine
. . . and have my little cracker.” He is reputed to have said he has no need of forgiveness,
but he qualified that in an interview with Cal Thomas: “I will be asking for forgiveness,
but hopefully I won’t have to be asking for much forgiveness.” He fundamentally sees
himself not as a sinner in need of mercy but as an “honorable man.”
Again, it is for God alone to judge the state of the heart. But the gospel of Jesus Christ
casts the behavior of Trump in a transcendent light, and that light looks to us like dark-
ness (Luke 11:35).
Not all evangelicals will agree with our assessment. But can we agree on this? To continue
to attack or defend his policies depending on our assessment of the common good. And
to do so as men and women who know themselves and Trump as sinners in the hands of
a righteous God, who will brook no evil—and who will never fail to welcome the penitent.

MARK GALLI is editor in chief of Christianity Today.

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V I E WS CO N F E SS I N G G O D | D E R E K R I S H M AWY

THE C H U R C H I S N ’ T CA L L ED TO B E ‘D EC E NT’
We’re called to something more.

When asked why it was important to him to have a cabinet that was 50 percent female,
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau coolly responded, “Because it’s 2015.” In other
words, “It should just be obvious to any decent, thinking person.”
In 2017, this sort of rhetorical flourish is even more common. Online discourse is lit-
tered with listicles like “9 Steps to Becoming a Decent Human Being.” A quick Google
search for the phrase “being a decent person doesn’t cost you anything” yields dozens of
unique memes.
How did the charge to be a “decent human being” become so persuasive?
In his book A Secular Age, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor suggests we are mak-
ing up for the motivation gap in what he calls the “modern moral order.” At its heart is a
sort of “secularized agape,” a universal benevolence and moral burden towards all peo-
ple. This burden is rooted not necessarily in God or the divine but in our shared sense of
dignity. Recognizing the universal dignity of all becomes essential to affirming our own.
The shared acknowledgement of mutual human dignity is an undeniably positive devel-
opment. It has motivated and reinforced international humanitarian efforts, anti-racism
initiatives, and other beneficial movements.
But Taylor questions whether this source of moral energy is really enough to sustain our
universal “benevolence.” After all, Taylor notes, “never before have people been asked to
stretch out so far . . . as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates.” In the long term,
without the fundamental energy of the gospel, what would broadly fuel these measures?
The answer is shame.
One way to gin up moral energy is by thinking of these standards as what it takes to be
a “decent human being.” If you fail to meet these standards, it’s not that you’ve tried to
achieve a great undertaking and stumbled. You’re just someone who doesn’t measure up
to the basics of being a decent person in 2017.
As Taylor notes, with shame as the main motivator of moral behavior, our efforts at jus-
tice are “vulnerable to the shifting fashion of media attention,” because we need to be seen
as decent people above all. Sadly, the church isn’t immune from this tendency.
While well intended, focusing on being decent human beings as a way to effect change
underestimates the difficulty of accomplishing “secularized agape.” It is not a simple
matter to overcome the ingrained prejudices of generations. It involves much more than
simply knowing what year it is and acting accordingly. Enlightenment or not, we have yet
to evolve past the basic narcissism woven into our hearts since the Garden of Eden. Our
failure to understand this ends up transforming prophetic truth-telling into self-satisfied,
self-righteous scorn at the predictable failure of so many to live up to a popularly defined
standard of “decency.”
But this is precisely where the church can speak a word of grace to a world worn down by

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shame. We worship Jesus Christ, who preaches the high call of the Sermon on the Mount,
proclaiming the eschatological moral order of the kingdom of God, but who also invites
the spiritually poor into it (Matt. 5:3). Jesus does not come for the decent—after all, “It is
not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Mark 2:17).
The church has the space to embrace the redemptive tension that leads to real moral
transformation, rather than leaning on the limited resources of shame. We don’t lower
the moral bar for “those sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 1:2). We’re not just saved to be
“holy and blameless before God” (Eph. 1:4). Our salvation inspires lives such that even
the “pagans” who “accuse us of doing wrong” will see our good works and glorify God (1
Pet. 2:12). Christian agape calls us to be not decent, but Christlike.
At the same time, God calls us to confess that none is without sin (1 John 1:8). Along with
being a prophetic community, Jesus calls us to be a priestly one, forgiving each other’s inev-
itable failures “just as in Christ God forgave” us (Eph. 4:32). Because we have his Spirit, we
bear one another’s burdens and restore each other “in a spirit of gentleness” (Gal. 6:1, ESV).
As a community dependent on the gracious, empowering agape of the triune God, we
can offer hope for change beyond mere shame for failure.

DEREK RISHMAWY is a doctoral student in systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

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V I E WS B E G I N N I N G O F W I S D O M | J E N W I L K I N

HOW TO OV E R CO M E SI B LI NG R I VAL RY
Deep friendship in the body of Christ starts at home.

Sibling friendship is a countercultural notion. TV shows, movies, and books rarely por-
tray siblings as allies. Sibling rivalry has been elevated from an occasional challenge to
the cultural norm.
Under this norm, parents function as referees and judges—breaking up fights, assign-
ing blame, and steering siblings to leave each other alone. But the Bible indicates that sib-
linghood (both spiritual and physical) consists of more than simply tolerating each other.
I’ve been pondering Proverbs 18:24: “One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin,
but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” True friendship is a gift of the rar-
est kind. When the writer of Proverbs wants us to conceive of the deepest form of friend-
ship, he says, in essence, “Imagine a depth of friendship that exceeds even that between
siblings.” He points to siblinghood as the gold standard.
I came to parenthood with no vision for my children to be friends. I grew up the only
girl among four brothers, and “adversarial” does not come close to capturing the dynamic
among us. Our fights explored the full range of verbal, physical, and psychological aggres-
sion. We loved each other, but we didn’t really learn to like each other until later in life.
By contrast, my husband has called his sister, Emily, his best friend for his whole life. At
first, I thought he must be lying. But there was evidence—pictures of them holding hands
(holding hands!) on a trip to Disney as teenagers, full-body hugging at a family gathering,
and heading to a dance together her senior year when she didn’t have a date.
I wanted to scoff, to say they were a statistical anomaly. But I also wanted to hope: What
if Jeff and I could raise our four kids to be best friends? Despite the overwhelming consen-
sus that it couldn’t be done, we began crafting a plan to try. We consulted Jeff’s parents.
We quizzed older parents whose kids were friends. We scoured parenting books. And we
assembled a handful of principles to guide us:
No favorites. Sibling rivalry can grow from a perception (right or wrong) that one
child is more favored than another by Mom and Dad. We told the kids they were each our
favorites in unique ways. We did not love them equally, but uniquely with equal intensity.
No teasing. This one was hard for me. I had grown up with sarcasm and teasing, and I
was world class at both. By not allowing them, our home became a place where the kids
felt safe from the verbal aggression that was the norm elsewhere. Instead, we prioritized
affirmation, setting aside times to verbalize what we genuinely liked about each other.
Frequent reminders. When conflict arose, we reminded them, “Your sibling is your
best friend.” When peace reigned, we reminded them, too. We repeated what we wanted
to be true between them until it became what they expected to be true.
Together versus apart. Rather than separate fighters, we pushed them closer, assign-
ing them a shared consequence (like a chore) to do together. It was not our job to “break
it up” but to “bring it together.” If conflict continued, we canceled outside activities. Until

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they could get along with their best friend at home, outside friends could wait.
Quantity time. Because deep friendship takes root in shared experiences, we spent
countless hours of time together as a family. While we recognized the gift of outside friends
and activities, we didn’t let either monopolize our kids’ free time. Their best friend from
soccer would be a distant memory in 30 years, but the best friends they shared a last name
with would be in their lives forever.
Why do we discount the vision of our kids as each others’ dearest friends? Why do we
settle for rivalry? Frankly, as a parent, it’s easier to be a referee than a reconciler. It’s eas-
ier to separate than to shepherd—at least in the short-term.
But as I witness the deep friendship that has grown between my kids, I affirm that the
long-term benefit was worth the effort. A friend who sticks closer than a brother is a rare
gem. A sibling who is a best friend is a treasure for a lifetime. And a Christian family filled
with siblings who are friends bears compelling testimony to the gospel of peace.
JEN WILKIN is a wife, mom, and Bible teacher. She is the author of Women of the Word and None Like Him.

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COV E R STO RY

CA N YO U CO N TR OL YOU R S E L F ?
New research suggests you may have more willpower and self-control than you think.
BY BRADLEY WRIGHT WITH DAVID CARREON

As a Christian, I have often wondered about my failures of self-control. Why is it that I can
know what I want to do, carefully plan to do it, and then do something completely differ-
ent—something unhelpful and often directly opposed to my beliefs? As Paul wrote, “I do
not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Rom.
7:15). To make matters worse, for the longest time I had no idea how to change the situa-
tion other than to try again and hope for the best.
In this context, I discovered social science research on self-control—and it turns out
there’s a lot of it. Studies on self-control have boomed in the past two decades, and self-con-
trol is a really good thing to have. Research has found, for example, that people with more
self-control live longer, are happier, get better grades, are less depressed, are more physi-
cally active, have lower resting heart rates, have less alcohol abuse, have more stable emo-
tions, are more helpful to others, get better jobs, earn more money, have better marriages,
are more faithful in marriage, and sleep better at night. But psychologists, sociologists,
and other scientists aren’t just interested in self-control’s practical benefits. They want
to know what it is, how it works, and why some people seem to be better at it than others.
Let’s start with definitions. Self-control regulates desires and impulses. It involves want-
ing to do one thing but choosing to do another. We substitute responses to a situation, like
wanting to eat a bag of chips but instead picking up an apple. That definition may seem
obvious, but thinking about self-control this way helps us avoid less accurate or more
vague ways of thinking about self-control, like “being a good person.” We use self-control
to regulate what we think, what we do, and even how we express our emotions. Willpower
is the emotional and mental energy used to exert self-control.
Christianity frequently asks us to substitute one response for another. Self-control
was a prominent virtue in the Greco-Roman culture. The Hellenistic world emphasized
the self of self-control and often portrayed ascetic avoidance of pleasure as high holiness.
The biblical writers, by contrast, saw many of the world’s pleasures as God’s good gifts to
be enjoyed and believed that self-control was the fruit of submission to God rather than
autonomy. Nevertheless, the idea that we are to substitute one response for another, reg-
ulating our desires and impulses, lies behind every biblical command to obey when we
are tempted. We want to worry, but we are to pray. We want to curse, but we are to bless.
We want to hate, but we are to love.
How we think self-control works matters. I used to think that self-control worked like
a fire extinguisher—to be used in emergency situations to fight back the flames of temp-
tation. Or maybe it was like a power switch, to be turned on when needed. But research
paints a different picture.

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MO RE A M U SC L E T H A N A B ATTE RY
One key recent discovery is that self-control is an exhaustible but buildable resource.
Psychologist Roy Baumeister demonstrated this with a clever experiment. He had college
students skip a meal, so that they felt hungry, and then sit at a table. The table had freshly
baked chocolate chip cookies, candy, and radishes. The first group of students—the lucky
ones—could eat whatever they wanted. Of course, they only ate the sweets. The second
group had the same food in front of them, but they were told to leave the sweets alone, and
they could only eat the radishes. The third group had no food in front of them at all. (It
was the control group.) After the students sat at their tables for a while, they were given a
complex geometry problem to solve. The trick was that the problem was unsolvable; what
mattered was how long they worked on it before giving up. The students in groups 1 and 3
worked for about 20 minutes. But, the students in group 2 worked only about 8 minutes.
Why such a big difference? The students in group 2 had already used up a lot of self-con-
trol resisting the sweets, so they had less energy left over for working on the geometry
problem. Researchers call this ego depletion (and there’s a lively debate in the research
literature about how much we experience it).
Does this mean that self-control, once it’s used, is gone forever? Not at all. It recharges
with rest. In fact, the more often self-control is used, the stronger it gets. One study demon-
strated this by having right-handed students use only their left hand to open doors. This
required intentional thought and effort—self-control—to override natural inclination.
After subjects had done this for a while, they had more overall self-control.
Self-control is like a muscle. It weakens immediately after use but strengthens with
frequent use.

W H O ’ S BE H I ND TH E W H EE L?
A second key discovery regards the interplay between self-control and habits. Most of our
daily actions are automated. We do them with little thought or energy. Think of driving
your car to work: You back out of the driveway, and before you know it, you are there. Like-
wise, we “automatically” comb our hair, climb stairs, and do the dishes. The basal ganglia,
located deep inside the brain, help to coordinate automated behaviors.
We also engage in controlled behaviors. These behaviors require conscious thought and
effort. Think of driving in a foreign country, where cars are on the “wrong” side of the road.
Or assembling a piece of furniture with confusing instructions, or using a software pro-
gram for the first time. Controlled behaviors are directed by the prefrontal cortex, which
is located right behind the forehead.
Automated and controlled behaviors make a great team. Automated behaviors allow
us to do many activities easily, but they don’t work well with new or difficult actions or
anything that requires long-term planning. In contrast, controlled behaviors enable us to
do new and difficult things, but they require a lot of willpower. If we had only automated
behaviors, we would be like simple robots, mindlessly repeating the same actions every

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time. But, if we had only controlled behaviors, we’d have to intentionally plan and execute
every single thing that we do.
Now imagine an elephant with a rider on its back. It’s a strong animal, weighing six tons
and working tirelessly. It’s also prone to wander off in search of food or whatever else
catches its eye. The rider is smart—he knows what needs to be done and is good at plan-
ning. The rider is also weak, at least compared to the elephant. For a short period of time,
the rider can control the elephant using muscle, but this never lasts long, no matter how
hard the rider works. The rider soon tires, and then the elephant can do what it wants. But
the rider can train the elephant so it does what it should with little effort from the rider.
This general metaphor of an animal with a rider on its back dates back to Plato, and it
has been recently popularized by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The elephant is
automated behavior—strong, powerful, but not good at planning and prone to stray. The
rider is controlled behavior, who knows what needs to be done but struggles to control
the elephant. Willpower is the strength of the rider. The power of this metaphor is that
it gives us insights on how to strategically use self-control. But before we get to that, let’s
look at the relationship between self-control and Christianity.

CU LT IVAT I N G A ND CO U N TI NG FR UI T
The Bible speaks of self-control as a good thing. Self-control is a fruit of the spirit (Gal.
5:23). A person who lacks it is like a city without walls (Prov. 25:28). It’s something that
church elders should have (Titus 1:8). The practice of Christianity requires self-control.
Think of a typical Sunday service—you stand up, sit down, kneel, shake hands, shut your
eyes, open your eyes, listen, talk, and sing—all at the right times. We don’t necessarily think
of these actions as moral decisions, but they use the same self-control resources, the same
combination of automated and controlled behaviors, as self-control as we normally think
about it. And that “normal” sense of self-control kicks in when we leave the sanctuary, when
the hard work of the faith starts. Whatever their theology about the relationship between
law and grace, Christians agree that holy living requires self-control in every area of their
lives. There are sins of omission and sins of commission. The Ten Commandments is the
best known list of self-control challenges in history.
Because Christianity requires self-control, it logically follows that it also builds it, and
thus we can expect active Christians to have relatively high levels of self-control. And we
can test this expectation with data. Several colleagues and I conducted SoulPulse, a large-
scale study of self-control and spirituality funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
This study (which you can learn more about at SoulPulse.org) had participants use their
smartphones to answer survey questions twice a day for two weeks. It measured trait-level
self-control using a standard scale that included questions about resisting temptation,
refusing things that are bad, and acting without thinking.
We compared the self-control levels of Christians with those of people who have no
religious affiliation. Protestants and Catholics both averaged higher levels of self-control
(Fig. 1). Then we looked at how self-control varies among Christians by church attendance

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(Fig. 2). Christians who go to church most often also had the most self-control.
Two caveats: The analyses don’t include people of other religions because of data lim-
itations. I would assume that they too have high self-control because every religion has
its own self-control tasks. (Think of Muslims fasting during Ramadan or Buddhists sitting
in meditation.) Also, while religion can promote self-control, it could also be the case that
self-control promotes religiosity.
So far, we have an interesting (albeit abstract) treatment of self-control. How can we
use this knowledge to live out our faith more fully? We’ve found four general strategies.

LO O K F O R W H AT ’ S N OT T HE R E
The first strategy is simply being aware of our capacity for self-control and willpower
throughout the day. Keep an eye on the gas gauge. It gives us a sense of what is possible.
Knowing our willpower level tells us when it might be a good time to take on new chal-
lenges, or when we should stop and refill. It lets us know when we are most vulnerable to
moral failure.
How do we monitor our willpower? It is most apparent in its absence. That is, we are
most aware of our willpower level when we are low on it. One symptom of low willpower
is difficulty making decisions, even small ones. Last summer, my wife, son, and I spent the
day cleaning, and as a reward, we went out to eat at a new restaurant. When we got there,
it had a 90-minute wait. Choosing a different restaurant should have been an easy deci-
sion for us: There were a dozen restaurants within a few blocks, a couple even in sight.
But we just stood there for a minute with dazed expressions, unable to compare options
to decide where else to go. It just felt too hard.
Another symptom is that things bother us more than they usually do. We use self-control
to regulate our emotions, so negative emotions surface easily when it’s low. We become
irritable, and routine events become provocations. When somebody walks by our house,
our 14-pound miniature poodle barks at them a few times. Usually I don’t even notice this
barking, or I think it’s funny. But when I’m depleted, I end up yelling (the human form of
barking) at her to stop.
A third symptom is that temptation becomes more alluring. Something like this hap-
pened to me yesterday morning before going to church. I walked into the kitchen and saw
a pan of double-chocolate fudge brownies on the counter. They were there the day before,
and I hadn’t given them much attention. But after a fitful night worrying about an upcom-
ing deadline, I was low in self-control. The room got quiet, and the brownies, though all the
way across the room, somehow filled my field of vision. Soon one brownie after another
made its way from the pan to my mouth, and I sat through church with a stomachache.

G ROW P OW E R W H I L E YO U S L E E P
The second strategy is to do things that increase our self-control. Resting our self-con-
trol means just that: A good night’s sleep bolsters self-control the entire next day. Studies
have found that workers who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to act unethically and

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take credit for other people’s work. Likewise, experimental subjects randomly assigned to
less sleep are more likely to cheat on tasks the next day. In the SoulPulse study, we found
that the participants had a lot more willpower after they had slept well than they had on
their usual sleep schedule.
Food also matters. The brain consumes a disproportionate amount of the glucose in our
blood, so when blood sugar is low, we have less mental energy for self-control. The worst
foods for self-control are refined sugars and processed grains. These foods break down
quickly when eaten and spike our blood sugar. This prompts the release of insulin, which
lowers our blood sugar. Low-glycemic foods, those that keep steady blood sugar levels,
are best for self-control. In the SoulPulse data, participants had somewhat less state-level
willpower after they had eaten sweets in the previous two hours.

HAST E DO E S M A K E WASTE
A third strategy for managing self-control is to not waste it. Years ago, my wife and I dis-
covered Dave Ramsey’s financial program, and we tracked all of our expenses. We were
astonished at the many little ways that we were wasting our money. We even had auto-
matic withdrawals for things that we no longer used. Getting rid of these money wasters
gave our finances a quick boost.
Something similar has happened to me with self-control. Once I started paying attention,
I noticed the ways that I exercised it unnecessarily. Getting rid of these willpower wasters
has given me more self-control for the things that matter. Some willpower wasters use up
emotional energy. When I hurry to drive somewhere, I get anxious and have to pay more
attention to what I’m doing. I start scanning the lanes to figure out which is fastest, and
I get upset with red lights and slow drivers. In contrast, when I leave with time to spare,
the drive is relaxing, the passing scenery is interesting, and I arrive ready for what is next.
SoulPulse participants had less willpower when they were rushing at the time of a survey.
Another drain on emotional energy is interpersonal conflict. Conflict is sometimes nec-
essary and healthy, but often it arises out of impatience, carelessness, or our shortcom-
ings. I’m rarely as distracted and upset as when I’ve gone a few rounds squabbling with
a loved one. In this way, being kind and patient with others preserves self-control. The
SoulPulse participants had less willpower when they had argued with a loved one in the
previous 12 hours.
Other willpower wasters squander cognitive energy. Take multitasking, for example.
Multitasking is a myth. Our brains can’t pay close attention to two things at once. Yes,
we can carry on a conversation while we walk, but that’s because walking usually doesn’t
require much attention. We can’t carry on the same conversation while we are also doing
long division in our head, because that also requires attention. When faced with simul-
taneous attention tasks, our brain may appear to be multitasking, but it is in fact quickly
switching back and forth between them. This switching takes energy. Imagine trying to
write two thank-you letters at the same time. You write a couple of words on the first note,
then quickly move your hand to the second note and write a couple of words. You go back

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to the first note, back and forth until it’s done. It would be exhausting. Likewise, SoulPulse
participants had somewhat less willpower when they were multitasking.
Another cognitive energy waster is frequent use of email and social media. Each time
we check an account, we have to decide what to do with the message, post, snap, or tweet
that we just looked at. Do we delete it, store it, respond to it, pass it along? Decisions, even
this small, require willpower. Even if we do nothing with what we’ve read, we might still
think about it for some time afterward. Many people, myself included, need to check email
for work. Maybe we do it more often than needed. I used to check my email 8–10 times a
day, but now I am down to once or twice a day. The SoulPulse participants had slightly less
willpower when, in the previous hour, they had checked their Facebook account.

TRA IN T H E E L E P H A N T
The fourth strategy differs from the first three. Using the metaphor of the elephant with
a rider, the first three focus on keeping the rider strong (i.e., maintaining higher levels of
self-control). This strategy trains the elephant. The elephant is a strong and tireless ani-
mal, so if it can be trained to do our important work without the rider having to push and
pull, good things happen. We can use willpower to make habits out of the thoughts, feel-
ings, and behaviors that we want in our lives. Once they are habits, they become routine
and automatic. This is the single best use of willpower, better than fighting temptation or
making ourselves do things we don’t want to do. Sometimes we have to do these, of course,
but temptation will return, and an unpleasant task today will still be unpleasant tomor-
row. In contrast, habits can make the things that we value happen regularly and easily.
In the first half of my career, I would agonize over writing: when to do it, how much to
do, and so on. Over time, I’ve made it into a habit. Now, on most weekdays, at 7:30 a.m.
sharp, I sit in the comfortable leather recliner in my home office, throw a favorite blanket
over my legs, pick up a blue gel pen and a pad of paper, and write until 11:30 a.m., with a few
breaks interspersed. When done, I feel good about what I’ve accomplished and go on with
my day. Here’s why this habit is important to me: It allows me to write or rewrite about
1,500 words each day with little thought about what I should be doing. It just happens. The
elephant gets a lot done without the rider exerting much effort. A habit has three com-
ponents: a behavior (what is done), a cue (when it is done), and a reward (why it is done).
When we put these components together, and practice them regularly, a habit emerges.
Making a habit out of a small, simple behavior is straightforward—just do the new
behavior, with a cue and a reward, consistently, and it will become routine. This “just do
it” approach, however, doesn’t work as well with big, challenging changes. Common advice
is to just do the challenging behavior for 30 days in a row and it will become a habit. The
problem is that some habits take much longer than 30 days to form. And, frankly, if it’s a
big change, I probably can’t do it for 30 days straight. That requires too much effort and
self-control.
Here’s a better way to make big changes. Start with what behavioral scientist B. J. Fogg
calls a “tiny habit.” Think of the big change you want to make, and then pick one small

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behavior from it. This behavior should be so small that it feels trivial. This ensures that
it’s easy to do. Start doing this small behavior consistently until it becomes routine, and
then, when you feel ready, add another behavior from the big change until it, too, is rou-
tine. Then add another and another until the whole big change has become a habit. This
approach requires patience, but it works surprisingly well.
Recently, I decided to start doing an exercise routine first thing in the morning as a way
of getting myself going. I picked 12 exercises to do for one minute each. The problem is
that I don’t like doing any of them, especially early in the morning. If I had approached
this as I have past exercise resolutions, I would have psyched myself up, called on deter-
mination, and planned to do the whole routine every day. I might have also posted inspi-
rational quotes on the refrigerator and asked my friends to hold me accountable. With
this “just do it” approach, I would get off to a good start because of my high motivation.
But inevitably, I would start to falter after a week or two as other demands in life asserted
themselves, and soon I would be back at square one. This time, however, I started with a
tiny habit. Every morning, after I took my vitamins (the cue), I walked to the sun room,
and did one, single burpee (the behavior). That’s it. One repetition of one exercise. When
I finished, I told myself, out loud, “Good job!” (The reward). My goal in doing one repeti-
tion was not to get good exercise. It was, after all, only one repetition. My goal was to start-
ing building the habit of good exercise. Since I started awhile ago, this habit has steadily
grown, and it won’t be too long before I’m doing all of the exercises every morning with-
out a second thought.
As I integrate these strategies into my life, I manage and use self-control more effectively.
Over several years, I have given myself a habit makeover. I have formed or am forming new
habits with exercise, eating, sleeping, paying attention to my wife, helping my son with
school work, praying, being grateful, photographing nature, cleaning the house, meeting
people at church, learning about my faith, and other things that matter to me.
N. T. Wright describes this process as virtue: “Virtue is what happens when someone has
made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which
is good and right, but which doesn’t come naturally. And then, on the thousand and first
time, when it really matters, they find that they do what’s required automatically. Virtue
is what happens when wise and courageous choices become second nature.” Intentional
habit formation is central to the New Testament’s call to holiness and sanctification.
This process has given me a sense of hope. Having been a Christian for several decades
now, I have had self-control failures in many shapes and sizes. I understand that I’m saved
by grace, and that I don’t have to have good habits to be loved by God. And that’s one of the
big reasons that I want to have good habits—it’s not a matter of fear or duty. But even so,
those self-control failures are aggravating and discouraging. Somewhere along the line, I
concluded that these failures proved that there is something wrong with me. If self-control
is like a power switch, then I wasn’t turning it on, and therefore I was either incompetent
or defective in these areas of my life. If it was only a fruit that I had no role in cultivating,
it wasn’t growing very well.

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 Understanding self-control better has led me to a more encouraging conclusion. Some-
times I fail because I’m simply an exhausted rider. Other times, I’m a rider on an untrained
elephant. This gives me hope for the future. I don’t have to simply accept my regular short-
comings; instead, I have an effective way to work on them. I will face self-control chal-
lenges and sometimes fail. And there is still evil and sin, as well as the Spirit and grace.
But, slowly, I am becoming a strong, skilled rider atop a well-trained elephant.

BRADLEY WRIGHT (brewright.com)is a sociologist at the University of Connecticut. DAVID CARREON is a psychi-
atry resident and neuroscientist at Stanford University.

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 SE LF-CO N T ROL
BY RE LIG IO U S A F F I L I AT I ON
( FIG . 1)

AVERAGE SCORE FOR TRAIT SELF-CONTROL

65

60

55

50

45
PROTESTANTS CATHOLICS UNAFFILIATED

CH RIST IAN S’ S E L F - CON T R OL

BY CH U RCH AT T E N DA N C E
( FIG . 2 )
AVERAGE SCORE FOR TRAIT SELF-CONTROL

65

60

55

50

45
NEVER YEARLY MONTHLY WEEKLY

Participants were surveyed on a wide array of activities, attitudes, behaviors,

and other factors, including self-control traits. They scored on a 100-point scale
based on their answers to such questions as “I am good at resisting temptation”
and “Pleasure and fun sometimes keep me from getting work done.”

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T H E C T I N T E RV I E W

W H Y DO N ’ T T H E G OS P E L W R I TE R S TE L L THE SAM E
STO RY ?
New Testament scholar and apologist Michael Licona’s new book argues that ancient lit-
erary devices are the answer—and that’s a good thing for Christians.

INTERVIEW BY CALEB LINDGREN

Though Michael Licona became a Christian at a young age, he experienced strong doubts
while working on a master’s degree in religious studies at Liberty University. That led him
to explore the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus in his PhD work, and to engage in
public debates with leading skeptics and atheists. Driven by a desire to follow the evidence
wherever it led, Licona understood that journey might lead him away from Christianity.
In 2010, Licona released his book The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical
Approach, which showed that the evidence for the historical resurrection of Jesus is much
stronger than any competing explanations, such as the idea that Jesus’ body was stolen
by his followers or by his enemies, or that the disciples simply experienced hallucinations
of the resurrected Jesus.
Licona, formerly apologetics coordinator at the North American Missions Board, is now
teaching at Houston Baptist University and has founded RisenJesus.com. He recently
released a new book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from
Ancient Biography (Oxford University Press).

What was your upbringing like? Did you grow up as a Christian?

My parents were Catholic and split up when I was five. My mom remarried and we started
attending a Presbyterian church. When I was very young, I was obsessed with getting to
heaven. I was always asking, “How do I get to heaven, Mom?” And she said, “You just have
to do more good than bad.” So, I was constantly thinking, Where am I on that scale?
When I was ten years old, the Presbyterian church had a combined youth group event
and they brought this Christian magician in. He did magic to illustrate the message of
the gospel. He focused on what God had done, not what I was supposed to do. And for the
first time I understood the gospel: It wasn’t what I did; it was what Christ did. They gave
an invitation to come forward and make a profession of faith. I went forward to become
a Christian; it was what I’d been looking for.

How did you become interested in apologetics?

Toward the end of my graduate studies, I started doubting my Christian faith. I believed I
had a relationship with the Lord, that the Bible was true. But what if I was wrong? Don’t
people from other religions say the same thing? How could I know that I’m not a Chris-
tian because that’s what I learned from my parents?
These questions bothered me. I knew it could mean the eternal destiny of my soul if

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I got it wrong. So I was determined to be open-minded and seek truth. That led me into
apologetics, which I had no interest in before. But even that wasn’t enough. I quickly real-
ized that I was just seeking the answers I wanted to find, which led to further doubts and
more investigation. I was studying the Resurrection for my PhD at the time, initially just
wanting to find another way to prove it. But I became interested in approaching the Res-
urrection differently, as a historian. If we subjected the resurrection of Jesus to strictly
controlled scrutiny using the historical method, what would it look like? What would it
yield for us? My goal was to answer these questions.

Is this what led to the public debates you’ve had with prominent skeptics like Bart Ehrman
and Evan Fales?
I intentionally got involved with debates with the leading skeptics out there because I knew
that someone like Bart [Ehrman], who’s more intelligent than me, who’d been doing this a
whole lot longer than me, would be likely to find any weaknesses in my arguments. I had to
cross every t, dot every i, and be very careful not to overstate my conclusions, because he
was going to challenge everything I said. It was all meant to test my ideas, to find the truth.
I prayed before each debate. I did believe God existed. But I prayed, “If Christianity is
false, I want to know. Please show me. Even if you have to humiliate me, show me it’s false
and I’ll follow you wherever it leads me.”
After each debate, I would go back, consider their objections, and see what legitimate
things they had to say. If my case needed adjustment, I adjusted it. If a portion needed to
be abandoned, I would abandon it. If I had concluded that the evidence pointed against
the resurrection of Jesus, I would have left Christianity.

Where did that lead? Were your doubts ever settled?

I had studied the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection enough to know that it’s pretty
good. But I didn’t know at the time how good it really was. I did my best to bracket my
desired outcome while my investigation proceeded, which took deliberate and sustained
effort. I wasn’t surprised that the Resurrection came out on top, but I was surprised at
how much it outdistanced other theories. So, yes, it settled many of my doubts.

Is the evidence as good for the bodily Resurrection as it is for the disciples’ experiences of
the Resurrection?
One thing that virtually all scholars agree on is that Jesus’ disciples had experiences
that they sincerely interpreted as the risen Jesus appearing to them. So, I weighed the
hypothesis that Jesus’ actual resurrection is the explanation for those experiences against
competing explanations, and the resurrection hypothesis came out way ahead. And after
looking into it, I believe the evidence is actually incontrovertible that they claimed Jesus
was raised bodily. Not only is this crystal clear in the Gospels, but we get this even in Paul.

Since Gospel harmonization is not exactly a new field, what makes your new book, Why Are
There Differences in the Gospels?, different?

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If we want to understand the Gospels properly, it’s best to understand the genre in which
they were written. For nearly two decades now, the majority of New Testament scholars
have agreed that the Gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, or at least
they share a lot in common with it.
Most scholars admit that ancient biographers had a flexible way of reporting events. In
my book, I explore some of those flexibilities to see if they can explain the differences in
the gospel accounts. This differs from harmonization efforts, which sometimes subject
the Gospels to a sort of hermeneutical waterboarding until they tell the harmonizer what
he wants to hear.
I think whatever view of the Scriptures we choose to have should be in concert with
what we observe in Scripture. I like the way Mark Strauss describes it, reading Scripture
“from the bottom up.” We read Scripture and we base our view of Scripture on what we
observe. In contrast, a “top down” approach begins with a certain view of Scripture, then
reads Scripture with that assumed view in mind. I take the “bottom up” approach, because
I think if I am truly to have a high view of Scripture, then I must submit to Scripture, love
Scripture, and accept Scripture as God has given it to us rather than forcing it into a mold.
If I fail to do this, I deceive myself, claiming to have a high view of Scripture when in real-
ity I would have a high view of my view of Scripture.
What my book does is look at how one of the most highly regarded biographers of antiq-
uity—Plutarch—reported the same events differently. By looking at those different accounts,
I can identify patterns in those differences, infer compositional devices from those patterns,
and then read the Gospels with those devices in mind. It’s truly amazing to see the Gospel
authors using many of the same compositional devices employed by Plutarch!

Can you give me an example?

Here’s one that I didn’t find mentioned by classicists. I call it literary spotlighting. Imag-
ine you’re viewing a theatrical performance. You’ve got multiple actors on the stage. All of
a sudden the lights go out and a spotlight shines on one of the actors, who starts to give a
monologue. You know other actors are there on stage but you can’t see them because the
spotlight is focused on that one character. Literary spotlighting is when an author men-
tions only one person performing an action, even when he is aware of several characters
who are involved.
In 63 BC there was a Roman senator named Lucius Sergius Catilina who was planning a
rebellion. Letters describing the plot reached a famous general, Crassus. So Crassus, with
two other prominent Roman senators, went to Cicero’s home that night and delivered the
letters. Cicero was the most powerful person in Rome that year, serving as lead consul. The
following morning, Cicero called the senate together and alerted them to the conspiracy.
That is what is reported in Plutarch’s Life of Cicero. But when you read Plutarch’s Life of
Crassus, he shines a spotlight on his main character, Crassus, and there is no mention of
the two senators who accompanied Crassus to the home of Cicero.

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So this same sort of “spotlighting” appears in the Gospels as well?
Yes. Take, for example, the Resurrection narratives. In Matthew and Mark, there is one
angel who is mentioned at the tomb. In Luke and John, you have two. Could it be that Mark,
followed by Matthew, is shining his literary spotlight on the angel who’s announcing that
Jesus has been raised, even though they know of another angel who was present? Some
scholars would say that Luke and John embellished the story by adding a second angel. But
embellishment is certainly not a tendency of Luke. Spotlighting was a common practice
and explains the difference better, in my opinion.
We can see probable literary spotlighting several more times in the Resurrection nar-
ratives, with the number of women who went to the tomb and how many disciples went
to confirm what the women had seen.
Every book and letter of the Bible was written within various genres that were contem-
porary to the authors. We can either think that God departed from the rest of Scripture
and had the Gospels written in a genre unique to Scripture, or we can think that the Gospel
authors were writing biographies of Jesus. If you view the Gospels as biographies, then
understanding the biographical genre of that era becomes important.

Does this affect the historical reliability of the Gospels?

My book doesn’t argue one way or the other about the historical reliability of the Gospels. I
was looking to gain a deeper understanding of the biographical genre of the Gospels, so that
we can read them closer to how their authors intended us to.
That said, those who want to argue against the historical reliability of the Gospels on
account of contradictions in them are going to find that is no longer a legitimate argu-
ment—if it ever was. Most ancient biographers were trying to be accurate. I disagree with
the claim that the Gospel authors did not intend to report historical events accurately.
Although ancient biographers did not have the same commitment of reporting with the
precision we expect in modern biography, most of them were committed to preserving
accurate portraits of their main character.

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S P I R I T UA L I T Y

THE CAL L IN G OF T HE IN FE RTI LE WHO HO PE

Why the church needs the testimony of marriages without offspring.

BY MATTHEW LEE ANDERSON

At the center of the remarkable montage near the opening of Pixar’s Up stands the sor-
row of infertility.
On one side lie the joys of a budding marriage, and on the other the delights of its twi-
light. In the hour of crisis, Carl sees Ellie sitting in the garden facing the sun with a forlorn
look, feeling the devastation of their joint barrenness. Neither character speaks through-
out the montage, but here their silence is particularly apt: the wordlessness of grief weighs
heavily upon them, and upon us. Relief begins when Carl, who is by no means immune to
their sadness, places Ellie’s “adventure book”—which has many more pages in it for them
to fill—in her lap. It is the most beautiful depiction of infertility I know of; it is among the
most tender five minutes of film I have ever seen.
But the adventures Carl and Ellie are given in the latter half of their lives are not the
grand, exotic drama they had wanted. They hoped to someday live on top of a waterfall.
Instead, car tires go flat, the roof needs replacing, and bones are broken. At every turn,
the ordinary challenges of living in this world prevent them from pursuing the dreams of
their youth. Yet if their adventure book is incomplete when Ellie dies, it is not empty; we
glimpse the fullness of their love and feel like it is enough. The sadness at their separa-
tion stems not from their inability to live out their dream, but from the reality that they
are no longer together.
While the montage is widely regarded as one of the most moving parts of the film, it
almost failed make the final cut. Director Pete Docter said the studio was leery of show-
ing their infertility because it was “going too far.” But the filmmakers had no real choice:
Carl and Ellie’s lives lacked emotional depth when their pain was removed. The audience
would not care for them quite as much if it were gone, and the rest of the plot would not
pack as much punch. Carl’s subsequent adventures include making friends with an eight-
year-old who is reminiscent of Carl himself as a young boy, a relationship that would not
be nearly as interesting without knowing their infertility. And so the sweet and sad mon-
tage stayed, infertility and all.

B E YON D S E N SIT IVIT Y

It is easy to cast a pall over our society’s ritual celebrations of family and fertility by offer-
ing cautions that not everyone shares in the fun the same way. Pleas to remember the
pain of the infertile are common these days. Such exhortations for care and concern cer-
tainly have their place, as infertility can be a heavy, unwelcome, and suffocating burden.
It is impossible for those who face it to avoid the pervasive reminders that some of their
deepest desires are frustrated.

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 But such cautions must be more than trigger warnings that one person’s joy might
exacerbate another person’s sorrow. If we offer nothing beyond these admonitions, our
view of both fertility and infertility will be too impoverished, too weak. We will obscure
the gifts such couples have for each other. The infertile offer the church far more than a
shadow over its joy at the gift of life. They ensure through their mourning and laments that
biological children are not reduced from gifts to idols. Their presence helps the church
learn endurance in the face of what feels like the endless rejection of our deepest earthly
desires. Those who are infertile and have allowed hope to grow within their soul orient
marriages toward their true end, the eschatological kingdom of God, in a way that not even
the celibate can. All these are facts, and as the novelist Charles Williams suggested, all facts
are facts of joy. We cannot excuse the fertile from mourning with those who mourn. But
neither can we excuse infertile couples from rejoicing with those who rejoice. Both must
stand or fall together: We need the joy and the sorrow, both, to illuminate and interpret the
other. This is the way the tragic glory of the gospel takes embodied form in our churches.
It is no secret that procreation structures the lives of infertile unions as much as any
couple’s. Such an absence will almost certainly be met with tears, as it should be. Some-
times it is accepted with a quiet resignation. But it may also become a gift for the infertile
couple, and when the hours of sadness and emptiness finally grow thin, may be adopted
as a vocation, a way of bearing witness to goods that the church risks forgetting otherwise.

Q U E ST IO N ASSUM E D A NSW E RS
Couples have sought medical and technical interventions to help them procreate since
at least the time of Rachel, who wanted mandrakes from Leah to help her conceive (Gen.
30:14). Yet there is no doubt that the success of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other treat-
ments has raised the stakes for couples who are infertile, rendering the default path one
of aggressive intervention—hormone injections, the harvesting of eggs, endless semen
samples. Our newfound ability to create babies in the lab generates the expectation that
infertile couples will.
The widespread and uncritical adoption of reproductive technologies among evangel-
icals has thus had the effect of rendering infertility even less visible among our commu-
nities than it would otherwise be. The lovely montage from Up could hardly be set in our
own time and might not make sense to our grandchildren. The film’s plot turns on what
is rapidly becoming a relic of a bygone era. The sorrow that marks infertility is overcome
these days not by taking up an adventure book, but by constant visits to fertility special-
ists, hormonal treatments, surgeries, and (almost literally) whatever else the exhausting
regime of “making” a baby in the modern era demands. Many of those efforts are under-
standable—Rachel sought her mandrakes, remember. But they also can consume the
infertile couple.
Within the church, the pressure to have children is compounded by the rapidly expand-
ing adoption movement. The correlation of infertility and God’s calling to adopt is some-
times left implied, but is more frequently overt and direct. But as writer Kevin White has

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observed, there is more good that needs doing in this world than each of us are commanded
to accomplish. The general exhortation to love one’s neighbor may sometimes require a
couple to adopt, but sometimes it may not; infertility does not on its own make adoption
obligatory. In fact, infertile couples might be uniquely at risk of treating adopted children
as a means of fulfilling their own frustrated desires for a biological child, reducing them to
an instrument of the parents’ happiness. It is tempting to view adoption as a path toward
alleviating our own suffering and emptiness, rather than an expression of charity toward
the child. In its ideal form, the call to adopt expands the horizons of a couple’s imagina-
tions for their lives. Yet in its institutionalized expression, it risks reducing adoption to
an obligation upon the infertile, which would undermine its gratuitous character.
Which is not to say that those who choose medical intervention or adoption are selfish.
By no means! But like any good, they can tempt toward idolatry, transforming human life
and God’s graciousness from a gift to an earned reward for years of hard work and pain.
The church might want to resist the pressure for marriages to have children through any
means possible, and hold on instead to infertility as a unique and irreplaceable witness
within its inner life. It is easy to look at such sadness and think that if we can avoid it, we
are best off doing so. But the church might lose something crucial if there are no childless
marriages in our midst. That we can make children through IVF does not entail that we
should. But widespread acceptance of IVF means that we risk forgetting both the strug-
gles of permanent barrenness and its unique virtues. The special vocation of the infertile
means recalling the church to goods that our technologically sophisticated world has for-
gotten and obscured.

WH AT IN F E R T ILIT Y OFFE RS
What goods might infertile couples bear witness to? In his magisterial work of moral the-
ology, Resurrection and Moral Order, Oliver O’Donovan suggests the early church con-
strued “marriage and singleness as alternative vocations, each a worthy form of life, the
two together [composing] the whole Christian witness to the nature of the affectionate
community.” The one bore witness to the original goodness of creation through sanction-
ing sex and procreation, while the other looks forward to the glory of the eschaton. But
neither captures the distinctive contribution that the barren make to the church’s moral
witness on marriage.
One aspect of the vocation of the infertile is that the frustrated willingness to bear
children reminds the church that our children are gifts from Providence. The glad
assumption of sorrow and lament—a paradoxical, but necessary form of life—by those
who are barren testifies within the church (and beyond) that the power to make new life
comes from God and not from ourselves. Children are not made; they are given. Man
and woman throw themselves upon the grace of fate in trying to bring a child into the
world. The emergence of new human life is a miracle, as the infertile well know.
Infertility also expands the church’s moral imagination, and reminds us that the satis-
faction marriage offers comes ultimately not by childbirth but in the resurrection from

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the dead. The sadness that often marks infertile couples is fertile soil in which a deeper
and more pervasive joy in our resurrection can take root. Those who groan in their infer-
tility, who know only the vanity of striving but never encounter the gladness of birth,
participate in the groaning all creation suffers as it awaits the revelation of the sons of
God (Rom. 8:22). Those who are infertile remind the church that even its songs of tri-
umph must sometimes be sung in a minor key. They bear a cross, that others may know
the source and end of their crown. They remind the church that the joy of resurrection
sits alongside a painful, frustrating “not yet,” pleading patience and endurance and good
cheer in the face of hardship. They thus bear witness to a form of marriage characteristic
to a fallen world, a form of marriage under judgment—and grace.
More practically, though, infertile couples help expand the scope of familial love. Like
adoptive couples, their ongoing hope bears witness to the church that the most basic
character of parenthood is not biological. But unlike adoptive couples, the infertile must
extend their marital and parental love outside the family itself. Maternal and paternal love
are not given only to mothers and fathers, biological or otherwise. They are the mature
form of married love, and thus are available to any couple, fertile or not. The glory of the
union of man and woman can be given to others through non-biological, non-procreative
means—as Carl from Up discovers as he develops a fatherly affection for his young friend.
Infertility does not free a couple from the duty and delight of learning the love mothers
and fathers know so well.
But the infertile also uniquely challenge the church to remain vigilant against a natal-
ism that reduces marriage’s perfection to the presence of biological children. The celi-
bate stand outside marriage, testifying that it is not necessary for the Christian. But the
infertile stand within marriage and announce the eschatological character of the children
who are given to it. As gifts from God, children are to be returned to God. The non-familial
expression of maternal and paternal love thus orients marriage toward its eschatological
perfection, offering both a yes to marriage itself and a no to limiting marriage’s point to
biological children.

THE C H IL D F OR T HE C HILDLESS
Christianity does not merely admit the tragedy of infertility but positively sanctions it. It
knows the tragedy of infertility as well as it knows the tragedy of the Cross. Those whose
marriages are infertile should drink the cup of mourning to its final drop; they have been
authorized by their Savior to do no less.
A child will not answer that tragedy. Only the Christ Child, who comes into the world
through the Virgin Birth and is born again on the third day, can meet our procreative sor-
rows with the satisfaction we demand. The infertile sound such a witness by reminding the
church that the biological children born within it are echoes and foretastes of the power
of the Resurrection—but are only echoes and foretastes, and not the substance itself. By
naming their tragedy, infertile couples deepen the church’s mourning and prepare it for
the joy that comes with the dawn. We can no more tell the story of marriage in the church

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without infertility than the makers of Up could tell Carl and Ellie’s story without it.
Hope is a virtue that is born from pain, sorrow, and loss. It is a virtue that, in this world,
is easily imported on to our young. “The children are our future,” we tell each other in
reverential tones, because in an important sense they are. Among the many reasons we
love infants is that they remind us of the newness of the world, the possibility that we our-
selves might someday again have a clean start. Yet in this they are, as theologian Stanley
Hauerwas has observed, only “symbols of our hope” and not its object. To conflate the two
is to lose the plot of the story of the gospel, which ends in rebirth rather than birth. Hope
rightly takes a secular form in the birth of children. But it takes its fullest shape in its birth
in the soul, when we look beyond children to the new start of the world that Christ prom-
ises us in the Resurrection. Those who are infertile can more easily lift their eyes above
and beyond this world—and therein lies the promise of their lives.
It is therefore not enough for infertility to remain in the shadows of our churches. It
is not enough for writers to exhort pastors to speak in hushed, gentle tones for fear of
reminding others of their pain. The infertile must also be called to unfurl their banner
and to march triumphantly beneath it. Infertility is a gift for the church, and no gift can
be cultivated without sorrow and struggle. Like all vocations, the infertile must learn the
unique contours of their task and discern the specific ways their community needs them.
But they should make no mistake: The church does need them, as much they them-
selves need comfort from the church. Marriages die for confusing the gift of new life with
the joy of the eschaton. We need visions of paternal and maternal love that take their
form beyond the walls of the family and stories of marriages whose porous boundaries
allow for strangers and neighbors to receive gifts they would not know otherwise. There
is so much good in this world to be done; there are so many more adventure books to
fill. The infertile know this all too well. It is their calling to teach this to the rest of the
church, as well.
MATTHEW LEE ANDERSON is a doctoral candidate in Christian ethics at Oxford University and the founder of Mere Orthodoxy.

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DISCIPLESHIP

RA DICA L ISLA M IS N OT T HE NI GERI AN CHURCH’S GREATEST

THR E AT
Why one of Africa’s leading Christian thinkers believes the real danger is among Christians.

BY SUNDAY BOBAI AGANG

A good pickpocket works with a partner who will distract the “mark” while the pickpocket
steals his wallet, camera, or passport. Sometimes the distraction will be an unwanted
conversation, an aggressive sales pitch, or an “accidental” collision in a crowded area—at
which point the pickpocket does his work. Right now, Christians are being swindled.
We hear a lot about the threat of radical fundamentalist Islam. Some believe there is
an “Islamization agenda” at work that is trying to undermine traditional institutions and
replace them with a new Islamic order. To be sure, many horrible acts have been com-
mitted under the banner of radical Islam, and there is a real danger. But the truth is this:
Overblown fears about a supposed “Islamization agenda” may actually be distracting
Christians from the true threat that is stealing away the authentic witness and authority
of Christianity.

THE IS L AM I ZAT ION AGE N DA

Like in many other countries in Africa, the belief in an Islamization agenda is potent, alive,
and well in Nigeria. Since the early 1980s, Nigerian Christians have been deeply concerned
about the possibility of a secret plan to conform the country to the dictates of Islam.
The seed of this idea goes back to the jihad led by Usman dan Fodio in 1804. His goal
was to “dip the Qur’an into the Atlantic Ocean,” meaning that he intended to impose
Islam upon the entire nation of Nigeria. Although he died without realizing his vision,
dan Fodio left a legacy that the Muslim umma (community) in Nigeria has continued to
pursue. Many Nigerian Christians believe that any time a Muslim is president of Nigeria,
the Muslims will use that as a platform to pursue their agenda and intensify their efforts
to impose Islam on the entire country.
The rhetoric around this conspiracy theory is currently at a fever pitch because the cur-
rent president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, is a Muslim. Some Christians have pointed
out that his past statements indicate that he is a radical Muslim. Everywhere one turns,
Christians are talking about a secret plan to supplant Christianity with Islam in Nigeria.
For example, pastor Isaac Valentine Olori writes, “We are apprehensive because [Presi-
dent] Buhari’s agenda is tilted towards Islamization of this country.” Olori contends that
“[a]ny Christian who thinks he is safe from the terror of the sword of Islam is joking.” To
those peddling the conspiracy theories, the recent activities of Fulani herdsmen, the prev-
alence of Boko Haram sects, and the opening of Islamic banks across the nation are seen
as confirmation of Islamization.
Recently, a learned colleague wanted to know my take on this concern. I reflected

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carefully because this was the latest of a growing number of well-respected statesmen and
stateswomen in the country who have expressed concern that the Islamization agenda
might be true. I cautiously responded that I think Christians in Nigeria should be afraid
of something more dangerous than the Islamization agenda: the ethical and moral deca-
dence eroding Christian public life.
It is not that I don’t believe in the possibility of the Muslims planning to Islamize the
world. We Christians are often concerned about our political influence, so why should we
expect any different from Muslims? Rather, I worry more about the serious moral deca-
dence and ethical decline which now characterize Christianity in Nigeria and the African
continent at large.
Today, many Christians are deeply involved in corruption and flaunt decadent and
immoral lifestyles. Our greatest threat is the sin in our own lives. That sin—any sin—is
indeed lethal. We need to put our house in order. History is filled with narratives of great
empires and churches that fell due to self-indulgence and moral excess. So, when faced
with fears of Islamization, we must not forget the greater danger of sin.

S L I DIN G IN TO DECAY
Christians in Nigeria are dancing on the brink of moral and ethical collapse. Many Chris-
tians who hold public office have become corrupt or immoral, betraying their public Chris-
tian testimony. They lack integrity and cannot present a strong moral and ethical witness.
They lack the virtue of honesty in public life.
Nigeria is considered a very religious country. Christianity is not limited to churches and
prayer meetings. Prayer and Bible readings are found in boardrooms and government offices.
Billboards announce upcoming crusades, and exclamations like “to God be the glory” and
“praise the Lord” easily fall from the lips of Nigerian Christians, even in public.
But as the well-known and respected Catholic priest George Ehusani has noted,

Alongside religiosity, corruption in its many shapes and sizes is booming in Nigeria—from the petty brib-
ery taken by the clerk in the office or the policeman at the checkpoint, to the grand corruption by which
huge project contracts are hurriedly awarded, not for the sake of the common good, but because of the
greed of the awarding official, who requires some money via contract “kickbacks.”

He also notes that activities like embezzling and cheating—ranging from school children
to high-profile public figures—often go hand in hand with outward expressions of piety.
Many Nigerians obtain fraudulent medical certificates, as well as fake birth and citizenship
certificates, to be admitted to good schools or to get choice jobs. They evade taxes, over-
and under-invoice customers, perform fake audits, and on and on. He concludes, “All these
practices are so commonplace and so widespread that many young Nigerians are unable
to distinguish between good and evil or between right and wrong.”
Father Ehusani is merely describing what is common knowledge to all Nigerians. These
matters are more lethal to the Christian faith than any Islamization agenda.

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THE COR R UP T ION OF P R OSP ERI TY
In the 20th century, indigenously founded churches sprang up across Africa, particu-
larly in Nigeria. After the Nigerian civil war (1967–70), Christians who saw the conflict
as a sign of the end times embarked on a massive campaign to spread the Good News of
Christ across Nigeria. Student associations and missionary movements sprang up. Nige-
rian Christians were determined to re-enact what happened in the Book of Acts: turning
“the world upside down” (17:6 ESV).
Sadly, today the story has changed. Both mainline and Pentecostal Christianity in Nige-
ria are still committed to reaching out to the unreached, but the undue emphasis on health
and wealth has permanently changed the face of Christianity in Africa and the world at
large. Pastors and church members are now more interested in building beautiful and
massive edifices than in reaching out to the unreached people groups of the world. Many
pastors are obsessed with material possessions, sometimes owning one or more private
jets! The corruption of Christian moral values has now given way to the worship of mate-
rialism and pleasure. Our real god is now mammon (Matt. 6:24). We have become devoted
to what American theologian and social critic Reinhold Niebuhr called self-love, self-in-
terest, and the will to power.
A Nigerian critic of the church spoke the truth when he summarized this problem:

Thieves are offered the front seats in church; recognition is accorded based on the size of one’s tithes
and offerings; pastors now specify the exact amount of offerings they want, and members run over
themselves to be the first to make the payments and “claim” their blessings. . . . Pastors have peddled
the notion, to their own advantage, that prosperity and well-being are determined by how faithfully
members pay their tithes and offerings; the amount of material possessions that one has is now per-
ceived to be an indicator of one’s spiritual well-being.

Even more troubling are accusations of witchcraft that Christians perpetuate against
one another. Investigating this disturbing trend in 2010, CNN interviewed Lucky Inyang,
a project coordinator for Stepping Stones Ministry, dedicated to helping street children,
who said,

Religious leaders capitalize on the ignorance of some parents in the villages just to make some money
off them. They can say your child is a witch and if you bring the child to the church, we can deliver
the child, but eventually they don’t deliver the children. . . . The parents go back to the pastor and say,
“Why is it you have not been able to deliver the child?” and the pastor says, “Oh, this one has gone
past deliverance; they’ve eaten too much flesh so you have to throw the child out.”

The CNN report found that most pastors charge a fee for deliverance—anywhere from
$300 to $2,000.
So, African Christians are treading on costly contradictions when we speak of guarding

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our Christian faith against Islamization while simultaneously wallowing in deep immo-
rality, materialism, and paganism.

THE FUTURE OF AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY

In 2015, the Pew Research Center published a thorough study which projected a massive,
worldwide religious shift by 2050. The study states that “Christianity has been the 800-
pound gorilla on the world stage,” but is now “losing its edge.” The study projects that by
2050 Christianity will be only slightly larger than Islam, and by 2070 Islam will eclipse
Christianity as the number one world religion.
Just because today Africa is the center of gravity for Christianity is no guarantee that it
will continue to be so. Historically, Christianity has always been on the move. Yes, Christi-
anity will increasingly become an African religion. Yes, Africa is already the largest Chris-
tian continent. But, in a 2011 study, the Pew Research Center documented the historical
movement of Christianity from one location to another and predicted that it will continue.
I appreciate our Christian patriotic interest in guarding the Christian faith from being
supplanted by Islam. However, the church should not allow that concern to distract it
from keeping its house in order. God does not call us to compete with Islam. Rather, he
calls us to holy living. “It is written, ‘Be holy, because I am holy’ ” (1 Pet. 1:16). As it is, the
Christian faith in Nigeria is suffering public disgrace and disrepute because of our lack of
self-control, ungodly living, and compromised integrity.
Jesus declared that he is the truth, the way to eternal life (John 14:6). Christians can be
confident in our salvation by faith in our resurrected Lord Jesus Christ; we have nothing
to fear. Our source of power and authority is God, the same power that raised Jesus from
the dead (Eph. 1:18–20). We are given power and authority to combat satanic and demonic
oppression, to destroy the works of the flesh, to heal obsession with material things, and
to create just structures and systems that guarantee human flourishing. By the power and
authority God has vested in us, we have nothing to fear and no excuse for failure. We have
in us what we need to create fertile environments for social and spiritual transformation,
in Nigeria and around the world.
The fear of an Islamization agenda is very real, but it must not be allowed to distract us
from our primary concern: Christlikeness, holy living, hard work, and moral integrity. If
we are concerned about the spread of Islam, let us be equally concerned about the lack of
Christian public integrity and witness in our society. We must not allow fearmongering
or conspiracy theories to prevent us from recognizing the true threat.

SUNDAY BOBAI AGANG is professor of Christian theology, ethics, and public policy at ECWA Theological Seminary
in Kagoro, Kaduna State, Nigeria.

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BOOKS , MOVIES , AND THE ARTS

REVIEWS

W ELCO MIN G T H E STRA NGE R . . .

AN D U P H O L D I NG T H E L AW
How Christians should weigh the many complexities of immigration reform.
BY SAMUEL D. JAMES

Early in his new book, Just Immigration: American Policy in Christian Perspective HHHHH,
Mark Amstutz recounts the story of a young man in California who had completed law
school and was seeking admission to the state bar. But his aspiration was so controversial
that he eventually found himself in front of the California Supreme Court.
The problem? This young man was not an American citizen. His parents had brought
him from Mexico to the United States when he was just a boy, and he was undocumented.
In a surprising decision, the California Supreme Court ruled that even though the man
was not authorized to be in the United States, he nonetheless could be admitted to the
state bar and practice law.
Amstutz, professor of political science at Wheaton College, cites this story as an example
of the incoherence and double-mindedness of US immigration policy. It certainly is that.
But in a way, it’s also symbolic. What could better epitomize our national immigration
debate than the image of a young man, on the threshold of fulfilling his American dream,
facing the reality that he was never an American? On one side, hope for a better life. On
the other, demands of justice and the rule of law. What should we make of this? 
It’s this moral and political knot that Amstutz, who has researched and taught for nearly
30 years on the intersection of Christian ethics and public policy, wants to help untan-
gle. Just Immigration is an admirably thorough, well-researched overview of the United
States’ immigration policy. It’s also an explicitly Christian look at the ethical dimensions
of national immigration laws and practice. Amstutz aims to reshape how American believ-
ers approach these intertwined issues.

MO N ST ROU S LY CO M P L E X 
Just Immigration is really two books in one. First comes a roughly 100-page explainer on
the American immigration system, combined with a brief summary on immigration theory
and ethics. Amstutz does a deep dive into the governmental infrastructure of immigration.
From relevant federal legislation to dozens of agencies and departments to the varied and
intensive processes of migrant admission, he provides a glimpse of a monstrously complex
political mechanism. This complexity is not just incidental, according to Amstutz; it is a
root cause of difficulties and failures of America’s immigration system. 
One example is the inconsistency with which legislators and officials enforce existing
law. Arguably the most obvious problem in American immigration is the high number of

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unauthorized migrants, and the question of the government’s response. Even though offi-
cial directives for responding to illegal immigration exist, they are often ignored by those
most able to enforce them, especially since, as Amstutz writes, “the economic demand
for low-wage workers far exceeds the supply of native workers who are able and willing
to do the work.” In other words, the economic benefits of being able to pay workers low
wages with minimal protections are often more attractive than the prospects of enforc-
ing immigration law.
The conflict between the rule of law and cheap labor doesn’t just reflect an exploitive way
of treating immigrants. It also undermines the state’s moral authority. Amstutz argues that
the inconsistency and opportunism that often characterize the response to illegal immi-
gration are a serious threat to the legal and political integrity of the entire government: 

The rule of law is not an ancillary attribute of representative government; rather, it is the moral
foundation of legitimate governmental rule based on consent. To be sure, legal compliance is
never fully fulfilled. But when a significant portion of a people disregard a law, this failure not only
undermines a specific statute but can also call into question the credibility of the government’s
ability to ensure legal compliance with any law.

This point is crucial, according to Amstutz, because it gets to the heart of why so many
responses to illegal immigration, especially from the Christian community, fall short. Ams-
tutz outlines a “communitarian” political philosophy, which acknowledges the legitimacy
of sovereign nations, borders, and cultural cohesion. Communitarianism stands in con-
trast to “cosmopolitanism,” which emphasizes global citizenship, universal human rights,
and the freedom of migrants to live where they choose. “For the communitarian,” Ams-
tutz explains, “states are the primary institutions for protecting human rights. Advancing
basic rights, including freedom and equality, is only feasible within a strong state, where
the rule of law is institutionalized.”
In other words, meaningful laws that govern immigration—and enforcement of those
laws—are essential to human flourishing.

HUMA N DI G N I TY A ND TH E R UL E OF L AW 
Amstutz’s case for communitarianism is compelling. While it’s common for many today
to speak of being a “citizen of the world,” human beings simply do not live that way. We do
not relate to “the world” in some airy-fairy abstract sense; instead, we live in relationship
with specific people (those around us) and specific places (our homes and communities).
Thus, we are not dealing with “citizens of the world,” but citizens of actual nations—and
the social coherence that comes from belonging to a specific place with a specific social
contract is legitimate and good for human flourishing. 
So what does this mean for the immigration debate? For Amstutz, it means that a truly
just and fair immigration system must take seriously both the human dignity of the migrant
and the rule of law. Since Christians believe both that governmental authority is legiti-
mate (Rom. 13) and that human beings have intrinsic worth and dignity, being made in

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God’s image (Gen. 1:27), they should articulate a political ethic that preserves the human
dignity of the migrant while taking civil authority and justice seriously. 
It’s here, unfortunately, that Amstutz finds fault with his fellow Christians. The “second
book” of Just Immigration is an admirably thorough analysis and critique of major Chris-
tian views on immigration reform. Amstutz devotes nearly 100 pages to evaluating encyc-
licals, denominational statements, and other major documents from Roman Catholics,
evangelicals, and mainline Protestants. Interestingly, Amstutz finds that Catholics, evan-
gelicals, and many other traditions all share a common flaw in their calls for immigration
reform: lack of respect for the rule of law. 
Amstutz’s critique is clear, if only because it appears so frequently. For example, Ams-
tutz writes that “the Catholic Church’s approach to US immigration policy fails to accu-
rately represent the complexity of the moral dilemma involved.” Concerning the National
Association of Evangelicals’ “Immigration 2009” statement, Amstutz likewise remarks
that the document “oversimplifies a complex issue and fails to illuminate the fundamental
tradeoffs among competing values.” He similarly chastises the Southern Baptist Conven-
tion’s 2011 resolution “On Immigration and the Gospel,” calling its request for a pathway
toward legalization “startling” and criticizing SBC leaders for failing to “offer a rationale
for such an initiative on either biblical or moral grounds.” 
Amstutz is right to call for a more robust political ethic. As his book demonstrates, immi-
gration policy is indeed an exhaustingly complex issue, and deserves more than slogans
and simplistic narratives. To the extent that religious leaders talk down the complexity
of the immigration issue, they deserve criticism.
But do they? Are Roman Catholics, evangelicals, and other Christians really as guilty of
one-eye-closed reductionism as Amstutz alleges? While the book criticizes religious lead-
ers for not producing a more theologically and politically mature perspective, it doesn’t
actually tell us what this would look like. The final chapter, “Strengthening the Christian
Witness on Immigration,” doesn’t put forth any explicit policy proposals. Nor does it
articulate a full-orbed political ethic of immigration. Amstutz spends most of the chapter
(again) critiquing the simplistic solutions offered by most Christian traditions, and listing
an assortment of questions that a serious theological approach to immigration must con-
sider. While these questions are helpful, they do not constitute an example of the intel-
lectually serious political ethics that Amstutz accuses most Christian groups of missing.

THE M O RAL L E V E L 
This absence isn’t just disappointing. It undermines many of Amstutz’s criticisms of Chris-
tian immigration statements. For example, in summing up the shortcomings of evangelical
immigration activism, Amstutz chides evangelicals for focusing on “policy advocacy, not
moral education. This is regrettable because the most important contribution churches
can make to policy debates is at the moral level.”
But evangelicals, as well as Roman Catholics and others, have based their calls for immi-
gration reform on Christian moral teaching—Amstutz simply disagrees with their conclu-
sions. Skepticism toward mass deportation, for instance, is not a failure to think morally

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about immigration; it is one of many possible applications of morals to the policy issue.
Amstutz never explicitly advocates mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, but
his dismissive response to calls for a humane and legally coherent path toward legalization
seems to warrant a more explicit treatment of that and other policy questions. Unfortu-
nately, that never happens.
This failure handcuffs a potentially game-changing book on Christians and immigration.
Just Immigration is sober and knowledgeable about the competing values at work in the
immigration debate. It’s also a timely call for Christians to take seriously the intellectual
task of applying our worldview to public policy. What the book lacks is a positive case for
reform that incorporates biblical principles of both human dignity and the legitimacy of
civic law. Just Immigration is enormously helpful, but incomplete.
SAMUEL D. JAMES is a writer and editor who serves in the office of the president at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Reli-
gious Liberty Commission.

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R E V I E WS I N T E RV I E W | J E N P O L LO C K M I C H E L

G O D IS A HOM E M A K E R
How that truth gives hope to a broken, inhospitable world.

INTERVIEW BY A. J. SWOBODA

Home sweet home. Home is where the heart is. Human beings have crafted a multitude of
expressions that testify to an innate desire for rootedness, comfort, and belonging. In Keep-
ing Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home, writer Jen Pollock Michel (also the author
of Teach Us to Want, CT’s 2015 Book of the Year) explores this universal longing through
biblical, theological, and practical lenses. A. J. Swoboda, author of The Dusty Ones: Why
Wandering Deepens Your Faith, spoke with Michel about our “spiritual homelessness”
and the God who prepares a place for us (John 14:3).

Why do you argue that all human beings are spiritually homeless?
It is easy for us to say that those inside the church are spiritually “homed,” while those
outside the church are spiritually homeless. I see us all as spiritually homeless in this
world. The home that God wants us to have is not fully realized. We may gloss over spiri-
tual homelessness by saying that we have God and then moving on. But we are not home
yet. We live in a broken, inhospitable world. I believe the church can do a better job of
sympathizing with the condition of homelessness in our world, particularly among our
neighbors, but we also need to identify it in ourselves.

You write at length about the “spirituality of housekeeping.” I was reminded of Brother Lawrence’s
description of “the God of the pots and pans.” Can we find Jesus while doing the dishes?
It means demolishing the divide between the sacred and the secular. Even just last evening,
around the dinner table, my family and I were talking about Christ’s call to serve in John
13: How do you serve? Whom do you serve? What are the qualities of Christian service?
My daughter asked who I served. I answered, “My readers.” And she said, “Well, that’s
not fair. You get paid to do that.” So we had this conversation about whether it counts as
serving if you get paid. But that represents the kind of secular/sacred divide that shapes
so much of our thinking.
This idea of housekeeping means that there is no secular part of our lives. There is no
place where we are not called to serve. There is no corner of the universe where God’s
presence cannot be found. So, finding God in the pots and pans is a call to embodiment
and being placed. The call to love is often very menial and mundane. Those things that
we do over and over again are so important for our maturity and development in Christ.

The American church likes to praise people who “go, go, go” into the world—what you call the “val-
orization of missionary service.” Certainly Jesus tells us to “go.” But what does that look like for
someone who’s physically limited or for a stay-at-home mom or dad?
When I think of the Great Commission, I think everybody gets a Jerusalem. Everybody

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gets a place that God is reaching. One of the disadvantages of the valorization of “going” is
how it leaves out all those people who can’t realistically go. Can we go and still stay? The
Great Commission says yes: We can be “here” because we are “sent” by God to be here.
Everybody has a neighbor. Everybody has someone to love and serve—and someone who
needs to hear the Good News.
That “going by staying” takes many different forms. One way the church can grow is
in recovering the diversity of what “go” and “serve” and “love” can look like. There is no
one narrative.

In an age of what Eugene Peterson calls “ecclesial pornography,” with people constantly moving
from church to church, how can we become more rooted?
We must remember that the church is an imperfect place. So long as we expect that the
church will meet all of our needs, we will be afoot, always looking for the next best church.
We need to be honest and see that the church has contributed to this crisis. We have become
so busy selling experience, event, and spectacle rather than the slower and quieter disci-
plines, like being formed into the image of Christ and living together as one community.
It’s easy to suggest simple answers to complicated issues. I recently heard Eugene Peter-
son say that we should find the closest church and just stay there. Well, the church that
is four doors down from my home does not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. I
don’t have any interest in going there. But perhaps when you do find a suitable church, do
all that you can to stay. That requires resilience, forgiveness, and ultimately confidence
that Jesus is the head of his church. He said the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
That does not mean that the church has no issues or problems. But it does mean that
Jesus does not give up on his church. I honestly don’t have much patience for people who
only have criticism for the church. Ultimately, we should be optimistic—after all, Christ is.

How do contemporary patterns of church mobility affect our spiritual lives?

It leaves us ever-restless. This could be said for geographical mobility, church mobility,
you name it—any time we think that better is “out there,” it’s always possible we’re just
fooling ourselves. That doesn’t mean we should never plant a new church. But let’s do it
with a realistic mindset. One way or another, we’re still going to feel this sense of spiritual
homelessness.
This is one more reason why we need to acknowledge our common experience of home-
lessness: so we can have the right orientation to the world. So that we have the ability to
say, “The church doesn’t have to give me everything.” And neither does my marriage, my
family, or my job. Being present in the here and now comes packaged with the limitations
of the world we find ourselves in—the chronic brokenness of things.

Why do you insist so pointedly that the God of Scripture “does women’s work”?
I’m encouraged, in Scripture, when I see God doing work that I know intimately. He is
portrayed as preparing food, raising children, and giving birth. This helps me really feel
that God knows me. And it dignifies this work that is so often ignored in the world, and

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even in many churches.
I grew up in traditions that don’t highlight the God who does women’s work. And that
leaves me sometimes feeling left out of the story. If we don’t talk about the God who does
women’s work, who does that leave out? The beauty of the Bible is that everyone gets to
find themselves there. Everyone is part of this story—men and women, rich and poor,
powerful and marginalized.
I was really influenced by Lauren Winner’s book Wearing God, which focuses on many
images we tend to ignore in our reading of Scripture. Let’s talk about the God who pants
in labor for his children. Let’s talk about the God who prepares the feast. Let’s talk about
the God who weans us as children—an image so totally arresting that I might be writing
my next book about it. It has really enriched my view of Scripture to pay closer and bet-
ter attention to the concrete images. And when I do that, I can’t help but see a God who
does women’s work.

NEW & NOTEWORTHY

Compiled by Matt Reynolds

The Most Misused Stories in the Bible

Surprising Ways Popular Bible Stories Are Misunderstood
ERIC J. BARGERHUFF BETHANY HOUSE

Anyone with experience in a small-group Bible study knows the pattern: You read a pas-
sage of Scripture together, go around the room to find out what everyone thinks . . . and end
up with nearly as many interpretations as there are interpreters! This book—a follow-up
to Bargerhuff’s 2012 effort, The Most Misused Verses in the Bible—reviews common mis-
handlings of stories from the Old and New Testaments, such as Cain and Abel, David and
Goliath, and the parable of the “rich fool.”

Torn Asunder
Children, the Myth of the Good Divorce, and the Recovery of Origins
EDITED BY MARGARET HARPER MCCARTHY EERDMANS

When parents divorce, their children often bear emotional scars. Even when the split is
reasonably free of acrimony, there remains a haunting sense of confusion and insecuri-
ty—“a wound,” writes McCarthy in her introduction to this volume, “that affects them at
the very level of their being.” Torn Asunder gathers more than a dozen essays, written by
Protestants and Catholics, examining divorce through the lenses of theology, philosophy,
politics, law, and psychology. The authors survey the damage done to children of divorce
and reflect on what it will take to rebuild a durable culture of marriage.

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Theologies of the American Revivalists
From Whitefield to Finney
ROBERT W. CALDWELL IVP ACADEMIC

The First and Second Great Awakenings were times of incredible spiritual fervor, as thou-
sands flocked to open-air revivals and reported born-again experiences. But they were also
times of intense debate among preachers and theologians over different understandings
of Christian commitment. What does it mean to be saved? How exactly should a conver-
sion experience unfold? How should preachers present the gospel so as to usher hearers
into an authentic encounter with God? Caldwell, who teaches church history at South-
western Baptist Theological Seminary, maps out the theological traditions that emerged
from these debates—traditions that have shaped American Christianity ever since.

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R E V I E WS

D O S MA RT P H O N E S G I V E YOUR S OUL CANC E R ?

A balanced, biblical take on the devices we can’t seem to live without.

BY JEFF HAANEN

I remember the day I got my first smartphone. Upgrading from a “dumb phone,” I was
dazzled. Crisp and clear pictures. Email and calendar in one place. Ready access to Twit-
ter, Facebook, and any search engine I wanted. In the words of the AT&T ad, I could now
“move at the speed of instantly.”
But as the months went on, I realized my smartphone was not a neutral tool that would
leave my life unaffected. My days started to change—sometimes drastically. It began with
email. I started checking it almost obsessively. Wake up, turn over, check email. Get cof-
fee, check email. My daughter would ask a question. “Hold on, honey, I’m just finishing
this email.”
Then came social media. I could now post pictures directly to Facebook. Yet rarely did I
consider whether my 300 “friends” needed to see my weekend family adventures. Twitter
became my news source. Even though I clicked on dozens of articles, I noticed I never read
them through. My thoughts started to fragment into smaller and smaller pieces. Oddly
enough, even though I now held in my hand the key to unparalleled productivity, at the
end of the work day I felt a new level of exhaustion.
Tony Reinke’s new book, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You HHHHH, makes explicit what
many of us feel bubbling under the surface: quietly, subtly, our phones are changing us.
Reinke catalogues the quiet catastrophe he believes our phones are causing. For instance:
We’re distracted. We check our smartphone 85,000 times a year, or once every 4.3
minutes.
We’re a hazard to others. Texting and driving makes us 23 times more likely to get in
a car accident.
We crave approval. Each social media moment is another scene in our “incessant
autobiography.”
We idolize celebrity. Our attention drifts from the eternal toward the latest headlines
and gossip.
We become lonely. “Technology is drawing us apart, by design. We feel the sting of
loneliness in the middle of online connectedness,” Reinke says.
We get lost in the digital noise. The average daily social media and email output is
larger than the Library of Congress.
We lose track of time. The wonder of people, plants, nature, and art—even God him-
self—gets lost in the whirl of “urgent” notifications.
All in all, Reinke makes an admirable attempt at bringing theology to bear on our digi-
tal devices. Snarky remarks on Facebook proliferate, but Scripture calls us to steer clear
of slander and honor others with our words (James 4:11–12; Eph. 4:29). We seek approval

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from social media, but true approval comes from God (Rom. 2:29). We struggle with “fear
of missing out,” or “FOMO,” yet the scope of eternity dramatically reframes our perspec-
tive (Luke 16:19–31).
After reading the book, I felt like I had a digital cancer growing in my pocket. Each chap-
ter builds on what smartphones are allegedly doing to us: creating isolation, distraction,
addiction, idolatry, and a host of other ills. Less-than-inspiring subtitles abound: “FOMO
in the Grave,” “Junk Food for the Soul,” “Technology and Isolation.”
Perspectives on technology generally gravitate toward one of two poles. Instrumentalism
says technology is just a neutral tool, an “instrument.” The popular phrase “Guns don’t kill
people. People kill people” expresses this view. Technological determinism, however, says
that technology is an unstoppable force shaping society—and each of us. The machines are
out of control and must be resisted, lest we end up like the human drones of The Matrix.
We miss the point if we become either pro- or anti-technology. Instead, liberation from
our smartphones (and all our technology) is best summed up by the psalmist: “I will walk
about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts” (119:45). In contrast to the Amer-
ican view of freedom—essentially, lack of restraint on individual choice—the Bible sees
true freedom as a matter of living within proper boundaries.
The redeeming gem of Reinke’s book is found in asking readers to define those bound-
aries. After reading a list of 12 questions under the heading “Should I Ditch My Smart-
phone?,” I asked myself, What do I really need my phone for?
As I began deleting apps and setting new boundaries, I found myself catching an appeal-
ing vision of a better—and slower—life. And my phone once again became just a tool, to be
used like all good things given by God (James 1:17).
JEFF HAANEN is executive director of Denver Institute for Faith & Work and founder of the 5280 Fellowship.

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TOP 5

B O O KS MO R E C H R I ST I A N HI GH S C HOOL E R S S HOUL D B E
E N CO U RAG E D TO R E A D
Matthew Farrelly, teacher and curriculum developer for Christian classical schools, recom-
mends some overlooked classics.

The Apology of Socrates PLATO

Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, invited followers to ask ultimate questions about
wisdom, virtue, and the purpose of life. Plato, his student, records some of Socrates’ final
words as he stands trial unjustly for corrupting the youth of Athens, including his call “not
to care for your body or your wealth” so much as “the best possible state of your soul.” That
Socrates bears strange resemblances to Jesus is a beautiful providence.

The Iliad HOMER

Homer’s setting is predominantly upon the battlefield of Troy (Ilium). Yet, the poet’s deepest
passion lies in revealing the enchanting tension between human love and hate, friendship
and betrayal, passion and glory, free will and divine determination. As Christians, we see
just how radically different our God is from pagan conceptions of Homer’s day (of which he
is a subtle critic, much like the “impious” Socrates).

On the Incarnation ATHANASIUS

This little book ( just 72 pages) is a beautiful contemplation of the event and implications
of Jesus’ incarnation. Eminently readable, epic in scope, and the polar opposite of cold,
academic theology, it is a profound reflection on the very heart of Christian faith. Athana-
sius, the fourth-century Alexandrian bishop, beautifully unveils the nature and purpose of
Christ’s life and work, using rich theological metaphors that remind us of God’s deep love
for the fallen human race.

The Mission of God CHRISTOPHER J. H. WRIGHT

Due to a variety of cultural and educational trends, we’ve seen a sharp drop in the ability of
students to read deeply and synthetically. Biblical literacy is no different. Working knowl-
edge of biblical personalities and chronologies is often shallow, which is the tip of an even
larger iceberg: ignorance of the Bible’s overarching story of salvation. Wright draws from
his biblical and theological expertise, inviting us into a deeper understanding of the biblical
arc of God’s saving mission.

East of Eden JOHN STEINBECK

Published in 1952, East of Eden is what Steinbeck considered “the only book [he had] ever
written,” believing “there is only one book to a man.” It retells of the story of Genesis 1–4
through the diverse and often surreal characters of the Trask and Hamilton families, who
inhabit Steinbeck’s own Salinas Valley, in California. The novel probes the depths of human
nature in a way that is both haunting and hopeful in its ability to deeply transform the reader.

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S P E C I A L H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N S E C T I O N / S P O N S O R E D B Y S E M I N A R Y G R A D S C H O O L . C O M

AT-H O ME S E M I NA RY
Why More and More Students Are Leaning Toward Distance Learning

BY AMANDA CLEARY EASTEP

Balancing the demands of leadership roles with family and other responsibilities is a chal-
lenge for anyone in ministry. Now add the time, energy, and cost of pursuing a seminary
or graduate degree. For many seminary students, this goal would be much farther out of
reach without the increasing availability of distance learning programs.
“The online trend has continued to climb year after year. What once was a casual inquiry
is now a default expectation,” says Tommy Lister, Fuller Seminary’s director of distributed
learning. “Our students are often serving in ministry, working to provide for their fami-
lies, and pursuing their academic goals all at once.” In an attempt to reach these students
who are firmly planted in their lives but are still seeking educational opportunities, col-
leges and universities are striving to provide more and better distance learning options.
Some institutions offer fully online programs that enroll students from nearly any-
where in the world. Other schools offer hybrid programs with both online and on-campus
components. These degrees may require students to take a certain number of classes on
campus or to come to campus for a few days of in-person study or planned activities that
enable students to connect more personally with classmates and professors.
Whatever the format, seminary students note a primary benefit of distance learning is
the flexibility it offers. By pursuing their degrees through distance learning, participants
can continue their ministry involvement and accommodate families, careers, geograph-
ical constraints, and life changes.

A P RO GRAM TH AT L E TS YOU D O I T AL L
“Being a distance learning student has enriched my vocational and personal life by giving
me the freedom to pursue both,” says Josh Friend, an associate pastor in Alberta, Canada,
who is pursuing a master of divinity from Calvin Theological Seminary.
Friend preaches monthly, plans and organizes worship, helps with the children’s pro-
gram, and leads a weekly worship service for those with special needs. Because his role
changes from week to week, the flexibility of his hybrid program is key. “I was worried it
would be impossible to manage working full time and being in school full time. Two of our
children were born while I studied as well,” Friend says. “Yet, here we are with the end in
sight, and we have managed.”
As Friend’s story implies, the ability to continue nurturing both a ministry and a family
is one of the main reasons students choose distance learning.
Cari Fydirchuk, who is also working on a master of divinity at Calvin, echoes Friend’s
thoughts: “Seminary is not an individual journey—it has been a family journey.” Fydirchuk
continues, “My full-time job is as a wife and mother. We’ve had to learn how to work as a

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team in order to balance family life, work life, and study.”
Fydirchuk serves on the leadership team of her church in Alberta. She enrolled in Calvin’s
distance learning program to prepare for a vocation as pastor. In addition to the flexibility
of the program, she has appreciated the opportunity to integrate what she’s learning into
her ministry. “This is what sets distance learning apart from other seminary programs,”
says Fydirchuk. “You’re able to live into your studies as a pastor, and you don’t have to
wait until you’re finished to engage in a ministry setting.”
Friend has experienced similar benefits. “All of the study and preparation was like having
the right tool on my hip at the right time,” he says. “This has been true not just in preach-
ing or teaching but also in leading premarital courses, counseling others, and establishing
my own personal disciplines.”
In addition to needing help from family and friends, both students emphasize the impor-
tance of receiving encouragement from their respective distance learning communities.
As she nears the completion of her program, Fydirchuk says what stands out is the
“amazing support” of professors and colleagues: “Although this is a distance program,
you don’t feel alone. There’s a great community of support to plug into. I will leave with
lifelong friendships and great mentors.”
Jill Hatcher is a student at Fuller Seminary pursuing a master of arts in theology and
ministry through the online hybrid program. She and her husband, Kirk, have been mar-
ried for 22 years and have 3 sons. Working as a part-time grant writer and consultant while
attending seminary has been an adjustment—and a source of family bonding:

My college-aged son and I bemoan lengthy papers and late nights while confessing
our latest Netflix binges. My high school son and I trade random facts that cross over
from church history into world history. My middle school son and I sneak off to lunch
at least once a week. And my husband appreciates my ‘you gotta see this’ from the bril-
liant professors and seminarians who now make up my daily community.

As Hatcher’s experience reflects, the ability to continue nurturing both a ministry and a
family is one of the main reasons students choose distance learning.

B EN EF ITS OF A G LO B A L C L ASS R OOM

Although Dominique J. Pettway lives near Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS), she appre-
ciates the flexibility of distance learning, which allows her to work, serve her community,
and visit campus as needed. Pettway is pursuing a master of arts in biblical counseling. The
hybrid program’s counseling classes are held on campus with Bible and theology classes
offered primarily online.
“I find it a huge advantage to be able to watch lectures at 11 p.m. when I’m off from work,”
she says. “This gives me the freedom to make sure my heart is ready to receive whatever
I’m about to hear in a lecture, rather than going into a lecture at a scheduled time with a
million other things on my mind.”
Pettway is involved in a number of multiethnic small groups, and she serves in a ministry

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that offers free support groups to families affected by divorce. “Because my DTS courses
help me think through deep theological issues and formulate reasons for the beliefs I
hold, I’m able to apply that in the groups I’m involved with,” she says. “Talking to people
is literally what I’m earning my degree in, so having the theology to back up a basic under-
standing of human functioning is essential to any ministry.”
In addition to staying engaged with her home church and community, Pettway has also
taken advantage of the proximity of the DTS campus. While taking an online course, Pett-
way decided she would benefit from more one-on-one discussion with the professor: “Since
I live in Dallas, we were able to meet and have a wonderful conversation that spurred me
on to dig even deeper.”
No matter the physical location of either the institution or the student, distance learning
creates a global classroom.

MO RE T H A N J U ST A ST U D E NT
John Dyer, executive director of communications and educational technology at DTS,
says that upon completion of their undergraduate work, many distance learners imme-
diately begin training for pastorates or counseling. But other students are part of an older
demographic who are already serving in ministry and want to further their education or
add to their credentials.
Friend also sees this trend in his program at Calvin and says this demographic benefits
everyone. “Many of us are older, some even grandparents returning to school to pursue
a new vocation, and many of us are pastors in churches,” says Friend. “The confluence
of in-the-church experience and seminary education make it a more profitable learning
experience.”
Although he hadn’t been in school for more than 20 years, Glen Hammons says the tran-
sition into the master of arts in theological studies hybrid program at Assemblies of God
Theological Seminary (AGTS) was easier than he anticipated.
“Students are initially discouraged about the logistics,” says Hammons. “They think,
What if I have a question? What if I get lost in the material? Then they contemplate the
costs and think, What if I blow this? But classes progress one day at a time, and AGTS takes
care of you.”
This care, Hammons notes, is built into the program structure. Students glean from a facil-
itator and message board, class questions and discourse, and the availability of professors,
either by phone or over lunchtime conversations during the on-campus classes.
In his sixth year as a lead pastor, Hammons enrolled specifically for the purpose of
enhancing his effectiveness in a new program he and his team started three years ago. The
program provides local and overseas college students the opportunity to shadow minis-
try leaders and attend classes at his church for an entire semester. “As I was leading this
ministry, I found that to best facilitate it, I had to be a step ahead,” says Hammons. “I’m
not looking for a master’s degree to advance me but to benefit the church.”
Not only has Hammons’s online education supported his work with his church’s pro-
gram, his studies have also affected his pastoral ministry. Last semester, Hammons took

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a missiology course that spurred him to refocus the church’s emphasis on missions: “The
class caused me to repent of the limited vision I had of missio dei.”
When Beth Wolff started the master of arts in theology program at Fuller, she was work-
ing as a pastor of the birth-through-college ministries and overseeing a staff of seven. “I
was being pulled in the direction to teach, and I felt I needed to build a stronger founda-
tion and understanding of where my faith was coming from,” she says.
She would come to appreciate even more the flexibility of the program when she was
offered a new full-time position as the campus and teaching pastor in a different state.
“Distance learning helped with that transition,” Wolff says. “I was concerned about fin-
ishing my degree, but the new position couldn’t wait.”
Due to the program’s hybrid format, however, Wolff was able to continue taking classes
online and could attend the on-campus classes at Fuller’s Phoenix campus. In addition to the
flexibility of the program aiding in her transition, Wolff says the courses themselves became
a “guide rail through the chaos” of moving to a new job and state: “After the move, I experi-
enced a huge identity crisis as I went from a large church to a small one and from confidence
in the way I facilitate ministry to an environment in which the way I did things didn’t work
the same.”
As a testament to the real-life support of her program’s virtual community, Wolff received
wise counsel from her assigned group leader, who advised her to take a quarter off school
to rebuild her foundation and put newly learned spiritual practices into place during her
season of transition. “This leader cared more about who I am as a person than who I was
as a Fuller student.”

PASTO RA L CA R E B E YOND THE C L ASS R OOM

As most distance learners will attest, the depth of care and support they experience is not
dependent on daily face-to-face interaction.
Chris Gilmore, who recently graduated from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
(SBTS) with a master of divinity, had been enrolled for a year when his wife died unex-
pectedly and he needed to take time off of school to mourn and focus his attention on his
infant son. He says the SBTS community surrounded him with support.
Later, when Gilmore eventually remarried and moved to Ohio, he re-enrolled in SBTS’s
hybrid program. During that time, he and his wife were leading a couple’s class and a small
group addressing the topic of grief. He also began to search for a full-time pastorate posi-
tion. “The huge benefit of Southern Baptist’s program is its mature believers and faculty,”
Gilmore says. “Classes are taught not only by professors but by pastors.”
For Gilmore, the online format was its own challenge: “As much as I love online course-
work and technology, I’m a face-to-face kind of person. It’s difficult to not be in the class-
room.” However, he says interpersonal connections were still made possible with the
seminary’s online communities, video lectures, and recorded classroom lessons.
Initially, Wolff had the opposite reaction to the in-person sessions in her hybrid pro-
gram. “When I first started at Fuller, I was frustrated with the on-campus requirement,
but later I found those portions so enriching,” she says. “For me, the sessions transformed

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each username into a real person. There was now a touchpoint that created a better con-
versation once we were all back in our online forums.”
Friend’s experience at Calvin encompasses the benefits of distance learning in the pro-
verbial nutshell: “I find a close bond with people hundreds of miles away, including mentors
who care for me and pray for me. My children have studied alongside me as they under-
stand that Daddy is also in school. The things I bring home, both in experiences and new
information from Calvin, have shaped how my wife and I have talked and thought about
ministry,” he says. “Most of all, it has been affirming to know that there’s much to learn
and experience when one is called to a life of ministry.”

AMANDA CLEARY EASTEP is a freelance marketing writer focusing on higher education and business. Her essays
have been published by Think Christian and Topology magazines. She blogs about faith and the midlife adven-
ture at amandaclearyeastep.wordpress.com.

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May 2017

T E ST I M O N Y

A F O RMER SH O P L I FT E R TAKE S STOC K

How a young tech entrepreneur repented of his teenage hedonism.

BY EDEN CHEN

Growing up, I was something of a nomad. I spent the first years of my life in the Mary-
land suburbs of Washington, DC. Then, at age six, I moved to Hong Kong, where I would
remain until the third grade before moving back to Maryland. I grew up speaking Chinese
at home but learned to master English at school. At a young age, I became adept at adapt-
ing to different environments. 
My ambitions were as quirky and unorthodox as my upbringing. Since I loved watching
movies and morphing into different personas, I thought I might like to become an actor
someday.
My dad was a musician, and my mom was a journalist. They raised my brother and
me in the church, but they gave us a long leash to explore. By the time we returned from
Hong Kong, both of us had stopped going. In any event, my priorities lay elsewhere. I was
obsessed with four things in particular: video games, sports, acquiring material things, and
chasing women (at one point, I found myself trying to see three different girls at once).
On the court, I loved playing basketball and tennis. But I really excelled with the video
game controller in my hand. I hung around with a community of hackers and pro gamers,
and at one point, I was one of the top 10 Warcraft 3 players in the United States.
But my grades were suffering. And meanwhile, I had begun regularly shoplifting at the
mall. On a weekly basis, my friends and I would compete to see who could walk out of the
mall with the highest dollar value of stolen goods. Thankfully, God wouldn’t let me drift
too far down this dangerous road.

APP ET IT E FO R G OD
At age 16, I began attending church again, hoping to find another source for friends and
fun. Instead, I found myself slowly developing an appetite for God. I had always believed
that God existed. From my perspective, it seemed likelier that nature and human cre-
ativity resulted from creation, rather than random chance. Everything had to come from
something, so who started it all?
Still, for all my curiosity, I wasn’t eager to hear the answer. I knew well enough that dis-
covering a righteous God could interrupt my preferred lifestyle of pursuing pleasure and
doing as I pleased.
After attending church for a while, my youth pastor invited me on a mission trip to a
rougher part of Nashville, Tennessee, and I went because I thought it might be fun. During
that trip, I met a missionary couple from Germany and a missionary from Florida who

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helped reignite my search for God. These missionaries had lived in the inner-city projects
for extended periods, and materially speaking they had next to nothing, but they were the
most joyful people I had ever met. I had always assumed that more riches and possessions
led to greater joy, but these missionaries were debunking that theory. How could people
who were living in a place with so little have so much joy?
After returning home, I embarked on an all-encompassing search for God. I studied the
major world religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. I figured
that if God was real, then he would probably make himself known. I read C. S. Lewis’s Mere
Christianity, the most logical expression of faith that I had encountered. All of a sudden,
it struck me that running away from Christianity would require more faith than running
toward it. I felt that the gospel offered the most compelling answers to life’s most important
questions: Where does all of the good in the world come from? Where does all the evil in
the world come from? How do I deal with personal guilt over the way I have lived my life?
Other factors were decisive in my embrace of Christian faith. The first was my dissat-
isfaction with the idea of karma and many similar concepts found in Eastern religions.
Getting the sort of life you deserve sounded too good to be true, and it didn’t line up with
my experiences. In real life, the wicked often escape punishment, and the righteous often
live with pain and suffering. The Bible presents a more realistic view of the wicked when
the psalmist says they are “always free of care, they go on amassing wealth” (Ps. 73:12).
This got me to thinking: If a concept like karma is not true, how do we explain suffering
and the problem of injustice? The gospel presents a fascinating solution. In the instant
someone accepts that they are a sinner and that Jesus is Lord, they are made righteous
not because of what they have, but because of what Jesus did on the Cross. That was the
most simple and complete solution to the problem of how God can punish sin without
crippling sinners—that is, all of us—with guilt and condemnation.
Finally, the character of Jesus fascinated me. Jesus grew up in a remote village in the
Middle East, and he became the most influential person in human history. His Word has
shaped everything, from literature to art to politics—down to the curiosities of how we
name our kids and our cities. Jesus has transformed billions of people over the last 2,000
years, even though he spent most of his time on earth serving the poor and downtrodden
with a group of 12 people who would have been regarded, in their day, as losers and out-
casts. It seemed utterly improbable that someone with such a lowly social profile could
have altered the course of history so radically.
But as Lewis remarked in Mere Christianity, “Reality, in fact, is usually something you
could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you
could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I
should feel we were making it up.” Gradually, it dawned on me that Jesus couldn’t have just
been crazy and lucky. He had to be exactly who he claimed to be—God’s only begotten Son.

STAYIN G G R O U N D E D
There wasn’t one specific moment that led me to become a Christian. It was God’s pursuit,

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month after month, that slowly broke through to my skeptical soul. Of course, I’ve had peri-
ods of growth and periods of failure. Like the actor of my childhood dreams, I’ve bounced
around between different career “roles,” uncertain which one I wanted to embrace. First,
I pursued youth ministry in college. Then I detoured into a career in finance, working as
an investment banker and then as a hedge fund manager.
I realized that God had given me an ability to provide wise counsel to others in busi-
ness—and hence a platform to share and reflect the love of Christ. But on many occasions,
I found myself putting this “ministry” ahead of my actual faith. The business world was
influencing me more than I was influencing it.
To stay grounded, I kept pursuing missions opportunities in low-income environ-
ments. I ministered in the projects of Washington, DC; Philadelphia’s West Kensington
neighborhood; and in South Central Los Angeles. A little over two years ago, my wife and
I moved to a home in South Central because we felt that God was present in the diversity
and humbleness of its people.
Today, I head up a creative agency called Fishermen Labs. We make virtual- and aug-
mented-reality experiences, apps, websites, and emerging technology for startups and
Fortune 100 companies. We hope to emulate the 12 fishermen that Jesus called to follow
him—the most influential band of misfits in the history of the world.

EDEN CHEN is the co-founder of Fishermen Labs. He and his wife live in Los Angeles.

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