Page 596 – Christianity Today (2024)

I remember the first time I touched a dead body. It was at my grandfather’s funeral. You know the scene: attendants in boxy black suits, the cloying scent of flowers, tissue boxes, breath mints, dusty funeral parlor furniture. As the sad murmur of relatives droned all around, I stepped up to the coffin and quickly reached in to touch his embalmed hands, folded nicely on his belly. They felt like cold, soft leather.

That was when death was still an anomaly to me, an outlier. Now it has become familiar, a recurring pattern in recent weeks and months. For the past several years, I’ve served as a pastor in a suburban parish, an evangelical who made his home in a mainline church. I don’t run the show, since I’m a lay pastor, but I’ve been there for most of the funerals. In the past few years we’ve had almost 40 in our parish. Those are a lot of faces I won’t get to see any more on Sunday mornings. Death is no longer a stranger to me; it is a regular part of my life.

This has been one of the more difficult parts of being a pastor, seeing people who faithfully served our Lord over decades take ill and start a steep decline. These deaths don’t have the shock of tragedy, of teenagers hit by cars or babies born without breath. Still, the dull ache of sorrow is there.

It wasn’t always this way for me. I grew up in a thriving megachurch (by Canadian standards, anyways), and I took it for granted that slowly and surely our congregation would continue to expand. And it did, all through my teen years. As I looked out over the congregation on Sunday mornings, I could see a diverse group of people from ages 15 to 60. But children were most often annexed to their age-appropriate ministries, seniors were few and far between, and funerals were not a constant. The bulk of our congregants were in the prime of life.

Later, when I began my pastoral ministry in a congregation that skewed to those over 65, I became frustrated as our church struggled to thrive. Growth no longer just seemed to happen. And though we saw many young families drawn deeper into the life of Christ, we also lost many veteran saints. I learned to care for the very young as our nursery filled up, and I learned to walk with the aging as they lost the strength to sit in our pews.

By embracing death in our churches, we allow our creator to give meaning to our human weakness.

Though I looked longingly at congregations that seemed to expand effortlessly, I learned to love the slow work of pastoring a struggling congregation. I took in the beauty of a woman in her 80s dancing with toddlers and singing worship songs. And I remember the 70th wedding anniversary of a couple that faithfully attended worship for just as many years. These quiet miracles don’t have the same luster as other “vibrant” ministries I’ve been a part of, but nonetheless, they witness to the patience and love of God. I came to appreciate the church as the body of Christ formed of the whole people of God, from young to old—even those heading to their graves.

Pastoring an Aging Congregation

Death does not fall outside the life of Christ’s Body; it is a threshold through which we all must walk. Recognizing death as part of our common Christian life allows for a more expansive vision of God’s redemption, which begins the day we are conceived and carries us into our dying.

I’ve come to appreciate my close experiences with death. When I look at large, booming churches or hip, thriving church plants, I wonder if their pastors experience the regular privilege of burying octogenarians. I’m glad for these growing churches, insofar as people are having encounters with Christ and his Word. I wish so many of the churches in my denomination would thrive like that. Yet I’m learning to appreciate aging congregations like my own in which the whole community of faith mourns with the death of each faithful servant.

I recently read Kate Bowler’s book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. Bowler was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer at age 35. She was enjoying a vibrant career, academic success, and a wonderful home with her husband and toddler. The news of her cancer seemed to crush all of that. Life had to be put on hold for chemo, rest, and preparation for dying.

She writes in her memoir about churches in which blessings come as the direct result of fierce faith. She writes, “The prosperity gospel is a theodicy, an explanation for the problem of evil. It is an answer to the questions that take our lives apart. … The prosperity gospel looks at the world as it is and promises a solution. It guarantees that faith will always make a way.” Bowler writes that she tacitly held to a tamer form of prosperity gospel logic. She expected that, if she followed Jesus, things would go pretty well because God loves her and wants her to have a good life.

I often find myself believing the same thing about my church: if we worship Jesus and do his will, he will bless us with new members and increased vitality. Stagnant membership and death in the congregation feel like punishments for lack of faith.

But God throws wrenches in the wheels of our theological systems. We get fired. We get divorced. We get sick. We die.

Our local congregations lose their liveliness. They suffer from conflicts. They struggle to raise funds. They shrink.

Christians believe that “death is swallowed up in victory” (Isa. 25:8, 1 Cor. 15:54). Our faith is built upon the fact that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. But our experience of death is not always so straightforward. Our sojourn still leads to our bodies being cremated or placed in a coffin.

Helping People Reckon with Death

In many churches I’ve attended, death was pushed to the margins. It was treated like an interruption to God’s work in the world, not as an instrument by which God draws people more fully into his own life. I’m not saying we should love death—after all, it’s still “the last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26). But part of living as disciples is learning to die well.

Ephraim Radner, professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College, writes,

“To die well” is to locate what is good somewhere outside our control—in the God who gives and receives our lives. It is also to allow that alien goodness, the goodness of God's transcendent superintendence over life and its temporal duration, to inform the very meaning of our vulnerability to illness, suffering, and death.

In other words, by embracing death in our churches, we allow our creator to give meaning to our human weakness.

Stanley Hauerwas notes in God, Medicine, and Suffering that Western culture shifted from preparing Christians to die well in the medieval period to franticly attempting to cure us from death in contemporary society. He writes, “We have no communal sense of a good death, and as a result death threatens us, since it represents our absolute loneliness.” According to Hauerwas, we need to learn once again how to grapple with our mortality.

Stories like Bowler’s, then, make me wonder about the kind of church we ought to be. What might it mean to be a church where people regularly come face to face with death? How can we present the gospel in a way that changes hearts, but also ministers to people whose earthly lives will never return to “normal?”

One way in which pastors can deal with death is by talking about it openly in sermons and in conversation. I remember talking with a friend who has since passed away from cancer. He told me that many of the Christians he encountered didn’t want him to talk about the possibility of death. They wanted him to stay positive, focusing on things he could do to get better. He knew that he wouldn’t, but he felt the pressure to stay positive for the sake of others. When I talked frankly with him about the possibility of death, he seemed to breathe easier. In naming death, he allowed the grace of God to come to him even there.

We talk about illness and aging as “battles”; to die is to lose these battles. But staying alive is a battle we all lose eventually—some quickly, some slowly—so we might as well invite God’s presence into our dying. In the cross we understand our living and our dying. What better place to learn this than the church? Who better to initiate these conversations than pastors? Sure, I want my church to be dynamic, vibrant, growing; I pray to God for this. But I also want to cultivate a church where people can reckon with death, worshiping a savior who won his victory hanging from nails pinned to a wooden cross.

Cole Hartin is the assistant curate at St. Luke’s Anglican Church in Saint John, New Brunswick.

Women: Prixel / Lightstock • Pelican: Courtesy of The Pelican Project

Two years ago, Karen Swallow Prior started fielding phone calls from women who all expressed the same desire: to find community among women united in their orthodox belief. “I kept hearing the same kinds of things from women—whether egalitarian or complementarian or otherwise—who wanted a space that was theologically rooted and rigorous but that was also robustly pro-female,” says Prior, “a space where they could be honest about what they believed, where women of different ethnicities and denominations could come together around common beliefs and commitments.”

A few months later, about 20 women from across the country met together to talk and pray about how to practice orthodoxy in the public square and how to equip the church to better disciple women in their midst. The group launched publicly this week as The Pelican Project.

Along with Kristen Anyabwile and Tish Harrison Warren, Prior spoke recently with CT about the formation of their group and why it matters to the cultural moment.

Does the church need yet another collective, group, guild, or parachurch ministry?

Prior: That really is an important question, isn’t it? A couple of years ago, when this idea began to germinate, I wouldn’t have thought so. But then I got an email from a stranger, a conservative pastor leading a conservative congregation. He reached out to me because he sensed that the women in his congregation were withering because of a lack of robust theological training and engagement. He recognized that in his conservative circles (which are mine, as well) the de-emphasis or watering down of women’s discipleship isn’t the result of our theology but rather the failure to properly apply it in whole. Our conversation pointed to a need for more unity around the essentials of the faith. And then I kept hearing from more pastors and leaders expressing similar concerns.

Warren: The world needs a lot of things and, ultimately, I don’t think another guild is at the top of the list. (I have no delusions of grandeur here.) But modest good is still good, and I think all any of us can do is work in small, meaningful, and institutional ways to try to build something that might serve the church and the world beautifully.

Before the group started, many of us were getting inquiries from other women and men; they were asking for resources or struggling to find female voices to read or to listen to. Often, they didn’t know what particular female leaders believed or stood for. They felt that the version of Christianity marketed to women (by both the Right and the Left) tended to be anti-doctrinal and shallow.

There are some great and needed writers’ guilds in the world. Some of us in The Pelican Project are part of them. But, as far as I know, there isn’t one that has an overt, public belief statement with specific ethical and ecclesial commitments. The Pelican Project is not a guild particularly focused on writing or speaking as a craft; instead, we gather around the craft, if you will, of truth and faith, orthodoxy and orthopraxis.

How would you describe the mission and vision of the Pelican Project?

Anyabwile: We’re a guild of Christian women who seek to advance a shared commitment to orthodox belief and practice across cultural, denominational, and racial lines. We want to foster commitment to the common life of the church. We also want to offer biblically faithful resources—and other forms of support—to women, as well as to the pastors and leaders who disciple women.

Is the Pelican Project just for writers?

Prior: Many of our members are writers, but not all. This is not a group focused primarily on publishing or platform. It’s a group that seeks to be a resource for the church, particularly women. We want to strengthen women within their local church communities and also out in the world, where Christians are becoming increasingly combative and polarized. Whether we are writers or speakers or educators or ministry leaders in the church, we want to model a different way, a way of “hospitable orthodoxy” that is uncompromising but also compassionate and kind.

Tell us more about your ministerial goals. How, exactly, do you hope to equip local churches and believers?

Warren: We are all working and active in our local churches. That’s one of the stated commitments of the group. Part of our work is to put good resources and books by women into the hands of local pastors and leaders. Part of our work is to help women have a biblical and robust ecclesiology, so they can be rooted in their local church and tradition, and understand why that matters. Evangelicalism can be so focused on individual discipleship and prone to celebrity worship. We’ve lost a really rich understanding of the church as the primary place for our formation and discipleship.

But there are women whose local church has no female leaders or voices, so we hope to serve as a kind of lifeline for women in those spaces—and for men who want to amplify female voices that are orthodox and have a robust ecclesiology. My hope is that in 30 years, we wouldn’t need anything like the Pelican Project, because local churches would be full to the brim with theologically rooted, theologically trained, institutionally credentialed, orthodox women leaders.

I hope that my own two girls (who are five and eight) will simply have an expectation that their church has dynamic and mature, orthodox, generous, female Christian leaders in it, because that will be so very common. But we’re not there now, so I hope The Pelican Project can help the church in that direction.

What ideological differences define the group? What do you disagree about?

Anyabwile: One of the things I love about the group is that our ideological differences don’t define us. They do matter, but we work hard to understand each other’s perspectives and to either find common ground or disagree charitably.

Warren: I’m a female priest and (obviously) strongly for women’s ordination. Others in the group think women’s ordination is unbiblical. We have different views of the sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, and differences in ecclesiology.Then, there are some of us who are more conservative, theologically and politically, and some not so much. Some vote Republican and some have never voted Republican. We inhabit somewhat different theological, ecclesiological, and, at times, ideological worlds. But rather than ignoring those differences, we find that, as each of us brings them to the table honestly, we’re enriched and challenged, even as we disagree.

As a group, we’re trying to be, in the words of one of the members of our advisory council, “not quite as theologically conservative as our most conservative member, but not quite as theologically progressive as our most progressive member.” But we aren’t trying to be some kind of monolith of “moderates.” We want to embody an actual alternative, a group where politics isn’t our ultimate value; where we can disagree about the Scriptures or tradition but still all come around the Bible and believe, deeply and completely, that it’s true and right; where we can debate, charitably but rigorously. We want to be as honest about our disagreements as our agreements.

On the flip side, what do you agree about?

Anyabwile: We’ve found that, in spite of our real (and important!) differences, we also share similar beliefs and desires. We want rigorous theological debate, but we also want more civility and kindness online. We want women to know Christian doctrine and know why it matters, and we want to obliterate any false dichotomy between Christian orthodoxy and justice. We want female leaders to be more overt about their beliefs, traditions, and structures of accountability.

We’re following the apostle Paul’s appeal to the Philippians to complete his joy “by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” (Phil. 2:2). He’s not urging them to a blind uniformity but toward the kind of unity that agrees, in the words of John Calvin, to “accommodate themselves to each other.” Paul goes on to point out that their humility and sacrificial love for one another is Christlike. Jesus, too, tells us clearly the world will know that we are his disciples by our love for one another (John 13:35). Love is not convenient. It’s messy, beautiful, difficult, and slow, but worth it.

Can other women get involved?

Anyabwile: Yes! If you’re looking for good resources for discipling others (especially women) in your local context, you may want to check out our website. If you’re a woman seeking orthodox discipleship, you can affirm our faith statement and commitments, and you want to engage in civil conversations, even in the midst of disagreement, then you may want to join our Facebook group. As others come alongside and share the vision, we’ll develop new projects in line with our mission and commitments and then invite project leaders to join us.

In terms of discipleship, what’s currently on offer to women?

Prior: Many of us are uncomfortable with the place that consumerism, branding, platform, and marketing have taken within evangelicalism. Sometimes leaders prey on women’s feelings of loneliness and inadequacy—very often in forms that appear to offer spiritual nourishment but instead offer the snake oil of self-fulfillment. Booksellers and bloggers vie for our attention, hawking the idea that we’re all beautiful and brave and messy and unique and “enough,” except not quite enough, which is why we need to buy a book or pay for a conference that will offer us endless assurances that we can, in fact, “reach our goals,” “be enough,” and “make all our dreams come true.”

Anyabwile: There are some wonderful discipleship resources available to women, but they’re often hidden in the back recesses of the bookstores and not promoted broadly, because big names seem to sell better than big, robust theology.

How are you pushing back against this commodified discipleship? What do you offer that’s new?

Warren: In some sense, we don’t think we’re offering anything new—that’s part of the point. Orthodoxy, in the words of C. S. Lewis, is “the same old thing.” But we believe that this old (even ancient) “thing” is the truth of the universe, the reality on which we all stand, and the place in which women flourish. These old-yet-always-new truths can be lost, diluted, or twisted by the shenanigans and sin of both the church and the broader culture.

Anyabwile: What we’re offering is not commodified discipleship but embodied discipleship. We hope to provide resources that help women in the church to center their discipleship more deeply in accountability with one another, more deeply in the Word of God—our source of comfort and hope in a troubling social and political climate—and more deeply in the gospel and all that the gospel requires of us as we worship and serve together.

If your goal is to serve the church, what specific, felt needs are you meeting?

Prior: We want to be a resource for these churches as well as living examples of the idea that women can and should have robust spiritual lives—ones nourished in and by their local churches.

Warren: Esau McCaulley, a New Testament professor and one of our advisors, told us that he “can’t think of a better thing for the church right now than a multi-ethnic gathering of women committed to the local church and a generous but clear orthodoxy.” I agree with him. And there are a few specific conversations that come to mind when I think about how important his observation is.

I had a friend, a professor at a Christian college, call me and say, “I am actively trying to have more female Christian speakers and leaders address our students, but I want to know what these women believe and will teach. I want them to be thoughtful and rooted in the ‘Great Tradition’ of the church. And I want to make sure they are not going to deny a core part of orthodoxy or biblical teaching the week after I bring them in to speak.” I understood his desires but didn’t have any one place to point him. I’ve also had women leaders and pastors ask me, “Is there any place where diverse women who care about doctrine and practice are coming together?”

Anyabwile: I’m often asked by women of color for resources that are theologically sound and written from a minority cultural viewpoint. Many of my white friends want to learn from women of color and often ask where they might find doctrinally compatible, diverse resources, as well. The Pelican Project is a great place that I can point them to.

What about the needs of women in the African American church? How are they different, and how does the group hope to meet those distinct needs?

Anyabwile: Let’s face it. For many Christians, the current cultural environment feels like a spiritual famine. For women, spiritual famine comes in unique forms. Sometimes it looks like the marginalization and devaluing of women due to sexism. For African American women, in particular, spiritual famine comes in the form of both racism and sexism that makes us among the most spiritually alienated people in the church. We are the least preferred and least protected. Both our strengths and weaknesses are often used against us.

For some of us, the famine is something we’ve endured over centuries of slavery, oppression, and indignities at the hands of those who claim kinship in Christ. For others, the famine is a slow drip of microaggressions, misunderstandings, and fears. African American women need the church to see us as true co-laborers whose strengths are celebrated and encouraged. I think The Pelican Project provides a safe space for African American women (and other women of color) to be real and raw about our vulnerabilities, to be seen and sought after for godly wisdom, to be built up in the faith, to build others up in faith, and to have our arms held up in our weakness, so that we might continue the fight for visibility and voice in Christian spaces.

Tell us about the name. Where did it come from?

Warren: According to ancient legend, during times of famine, a mother pelican would pierce her breast with her own beak in order to feed her young with her blood. Early Christians adopted the pelican as a symbol of Christ’s sacrificial love for the church. You can see references to this symbol in Christian literature as early as the second century. It’s in a 13th-century hymn written by Thomas Aquinas. In The Divine Comedy, Dante refers to Christ as “our Pelican.” You’ll find images of the pelican on the stained glass and woodwork of churches across the world.

Anyabwile: The image is both Christological and feminine. It captures the imaginations of those who want to encourage others toward biblical orthodoxy in the local church. We affirm that our sustenance and strength is in Christ alone. And we affirm that the church is the place where that strength and sustenance is served.

In June Benjamin Kwashi, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in Jos, Nigeria, was elected as general secretary of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). Only a few days later, his home in Jos was attacked by Fulani raiders, resulting in the death of his neighbor Adamu Dung. “He was shot through the head because he flashed his light when he heard footsteps of cattle being rustled,” Kwashi wrote on Facebook. “The cows were mine.” This is far from the first time Kwashi has been targeted for religiously motivated violence resulting in tragedy. He and his flock have been under attack for nearly two decades.

Yet external persecution is not the only pressure Kwashi feels against his evangelistic ministry. Timidity is more endemic when it comes to sharing the gospel across the globe. “There was never a time when the apostles handed over anything but a hot potato gospel, one that was sizzling with excitement and power,” he said two days after the raid on his compound. “Woe unto us if we ever become lethargic.” Alex Wilgus, pastor of Logan Square Anglican Church, spoke with Kwashi about these two immanent threats to evangelism: intense persecution and casual indifference.

What is evangelism like while shepherding the church through intense persecution?

It may surprise you to hear this, but the effects of persecution are both good and bad. Positively, it shakes the institutionalism of the church and proves to us that there is no lasting home in this world. But it also destabilizes individual human beings and raises a lot of questions in the hearts of sufferers.

The first questions we encounter with people is this: “Is it because of our sins that God is punishing us?” That tends to be the most common interpretation of what we’re going through. But the truth is that churches impacting society by exposing sin are going to make those powers that are being exposed unhappy. When the church is a light in the world’s darkness, it will suffer from the darkness.

The other question we encounter is from people who cannot make meaning out of their difficulties. A young girl came back from boarding school and arrived to find her father, mother, and sisters, everybody at home, dead. And she wanted to know “why?” We don’t have answers to that except to continue to encourage such a person to trust God. Even though we don’t know why now, we will know it in eternity.

Yet persecution has increased the love, the sharing, and the caring of people for each other. We don’t love the persecution itself. But it has caused in our churches a practical demonstration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Strong churches move in to help people and take them in.

For example, my wife, Gloria, has a habit of taking in orphans. When I was in Jerusalem this past June for GAFCON, the mother of a seven-month-old baby was shot back in Nigeria. The killers thought they had killed both of them, but later on in the day, people went searching for the corpse of this woman, and they found the baby sitting there crying with his dead mother. They immediately knew to bring him to Mama Gloria, to our house.

Showing the love of God by caring for orphans and widows is a top priority, and it is a great witness to our neighbors who are not Christians. It is a great testimony of the gospel.

How is the baby doing now?

The baby is growing fine. He is chubby, chubby—that boy eats! Everybody knows that Gloria will take in any child. There are now 51 in our house. I joke with her that, because there are so many, I am now an orphan. So she will have to take me in as well!

“The power of the gospel” is a big theme in your book Evangelism and Mission. That seems distinct from teaching the gospel message. What do you mean by that phrase?

It is true that teaching and preaching the Word of God is the gospel. But we cannot cause that message to break into hearts, to devastate evil and Satan, and to institute the rule of God in the hearts of people and in society. Only God can do that. We see that again and again. Without even telling people about the power of God, we see people bring out their charms, amulets, and the idols they have trusted and throw them away. We see people who were extensively addicted to drugs and alcohol restored miraculously. We see people who are sexually perverse suddenly change.

The power of the gospel transforms lives, and we have seen it. We do not scream and shout like television preachers. But because we ask God to demonstrate the power of the gospel we preach—the same gospel you preach in the West—he does.

You also write that the institutional structures churches create in the name of evangelism can actually become barriers to evangelism. How so?

The moment you make evangelism the business of a board or committee, the rest of the congregation feels exonerated from mission. The danger is for mission to be specialized, like pediatrics or dentistry. Congregants think, Our mission board must be doing a great job so nothing more is needed. So if you are going to have a mission board or committee, its job should be to recruit and train every member, every family, every student, every child to be enthusiastic and zealous about the mission of God.

That’s a big task. Where should pastors start if they want to see this kind of complete transformation in their churches?

I started by insisting that the church ushers be trained. They are in a position to either welcome people to the kingdom or send people away. If they do not know someone, their face can drive that person away. If they are segregated in their minds, then they will welcome the sorts of people whom they know and like, and make others feel out of place or unwelcome. So the first training I conducted in evangelism was for those who wished to be ushers in the church. I told them that they hold the keys, not me. I am all the way inside by the altar! I do not know what is happening outside the door. People need to know Christ in order to stand at the door and welcome others into the church.

That may seem like a simple step, but let me tell you, it was civil war! I dissolved the Cathedral routine and started a new one. That process was locally divisive. But after it was all done, everybody was waiting to see how it would be carried out.

Practically speaking, how do you carry out evangelism?

In my leadership as bishop, I never forced anybody to join me on mission. I would say, “I am going out on an outreach. Would anyone else want to join me?” At first the clergy would not come, but some people did. And those who did come with me would come back telling stories and testimonies. And that enthused the younger generation. They wanted to come out and see.

Typically I take a few small groups of people to a region. We spend the first night praying all night in a central place. Then we provide transport for each of the groups to go off to various surrounding villages and preach the gospel for the next four or five nights. We all rendezvous again at that central place to take reports. Immediately we start sending missionaries to relocate to those places.

When I look for a place to go, I ask myself, How can the Lord meet the people’s needs? What is the Lord going to give these people to help them start in the faith? So we are not only leading people to Christ, we are also introducing a new way of life. In some places, we discover that basic hygiene is absent. Sometimes there are no schools. Because missionaries are Bible teachers, they naturally become head teachers of any schools that we set up. And sometimes these missionaries get basic health training—and their wives will sometimes do so too—so that they can treat simple things like Malaria, children’s wounds, and nutritional problems. When we outfit our missionaries with these things, their churches grow.

Unfortunately we don’t always get as many missionaries as we need, so we give a missionary responsibility over two or three stations, and we visit them to make sure they are nurtured, the provisions we send to the people actually reach them, and the church in that place is growing. In some places we check on a school we set up or a new clinic. In some places there are neither, but the pure gospel is preached and the people are enthusiastic enough about their salvation that it naturally leads them to live better lives. They keep their homes clean, and their farms yield more food.

Most of the missionaries we send have to build their own homes, raise their own funds, and grow their own crops.

You wrote in your book, “It seems today that … there is a growing, calculated, definite inoculation against boldness when it comes to the gospel.” Why do you think that is the case?

I believe any political or cultural reasons for this situation are all symptoms of failing to make the mission of God primary. God wants to solve the problems of humanity, and the only way he will solve them is through mission—not just talking about it, but actually living it.

After a hundred years of Western nations sending out missionaries to Africa and elsewhere in the world, it got to a point where, if you were talking about mission, you were only talking about going to help people “out there.” That was a mistake. The church in Western and non-Western nations must pursue God’s mission to the world, not just from one part of the world to another. We will put our energies together and see to it with prayers, with biblical foundations, with the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no part of the world that is impervious to the gospel.

Do you think there is an opportunity for a new kind of mission movement, one going from East to West?

That is necessary. It is the need of the hour. We must get Latin Americans, African Americans, Africans, Europeans, we must get all people to agree that we have a calling to do the mission of God. And wherever there is a need, we will go there as a team. If Africans cannot provide the money but Europeans can, then they should provide the money. If Africans can provide some money, and Europeans can provide some money, then together we should go somewhere else in need. It will be a movement of God’s people convinced about God’s mission for the world.

Alex Wilgus is pastor of Logan Square Anglican Church in Chicago, Illinois, and host of the Word & Table podcast.

Last week’s national conference of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) was entitled “Rooted,” but it left some attendees feeling the opposite—confused, torn, and disconnected—amid allegations of hostile conduct surrounding the urban ministry’s top leadership.

The concerns, which centered on CCDA president Noel Castellanos, were referenced by speakers on stage, on unsanctioned flyers distributed during the sessions, and in a statement of repentance posted on the CCDA website.

Then, on Tuesday morning, CCDA announced that Castellanos had resigned prior to the 30th annual gathering, but the ministry’s board decided to wait until afterwards to announce his departure in a “sincere effort to keep the focus on this tremendous milestone as well as honor the life and commitment of our founder, Dr. John Perkins.”

Castellanos, who led the Christian justice ministry for more than a decade, spent the past two years engaged in a reconciliation process with former coworkers, according to CCDA.

“While my resignation was offered in part due to our inability to resolve the conflict with former staff, it was also a decision that I have been contemplating for the last year to allow me to pursue other passions and opportunities,” he wrote in his resignation letter.

“My heart is full of gratitude for the immeasurable number of friends I have made along this journey and hope to continue in the future.”

The CCDA board privately accepted Castellanos’s resignation at a regularly scheduled meeting on October 31. The next day, the beginning of the three-day annual conference in Chicago, corresponded with the launch of a public campaign from six former staff members calling for him to be removed from leadership.

Several women described an “abusive” work environment at CCDA’s national office on a website called 3 Rs Revisited, #RememberRepentReconcile. The name and tagline are a play on the three Rs at the center of CCDA’s justice work: reconciliation, relocation, and redistribution.

The “CCDA community has not always been aware of the toxic environment staff endure,” the former CCDA employees wrote, going on to list alleged issues including “unpredictable emotional explosions, mismanagement of finances, manipulation and intimidation of staff, urging staff to do unethical things, and Noel being found unfit for large portions of his role, and continued support from CCDA’s board of directors.”

The women claim their concerns span a dozen years, and that the ministry failed to adequately investigate or respond to their allegations, despite repeated efforts to report misconduct.

The 3 Rs Revisited authors told CT that as of this year, the CCDA’s reconciliation efforts were in early stages and focused on listening to concerns rather than engaging in the reconciliation process between the parties. Of the handful of former staff who were invited to “listening sessions” with the CCDA board’s reconciliation task force, not all chose to participate, they said.

Ahead of the Rooted conference, their campaign garnered the support of dozens of CCDA partners. Two former board members tweeted to confirm that the board did not do enough to check CCDA leadership in the wake of the allegations.

“As a former board member who left the org due to its (mis)handling of staff complaints, I stand with the courageous former staff who are calling @iamccda to #RememberRepentReconcile,” said Chanequa Walker-Brown, an author and pastoral care professor at Mercer University.

“CCDA Chair @mayranolan committed to do better on past hurts not handled well. I was asked to support past staff. Looking forward to reconciliation and I stand with former CCDA staff calling board to action over workplace injustice within organization. #3RsRevisited #rootedccda,” tweeted former board chair Leroy Barber, who also apologized during his plenary talk at the conference in Chicago.

“I did respond but did a poor job. @mayranolan is handling it much better.”

The ministry’s statement of repentance references its ongoing efforts to acknowledge mistakes in the past and to build a better environment for its staff going forward. In the statement, CCDA apologizes for how “organizational dysfunction” has hurt former staff members and reiterates its commitment to women in leadership.

“There have been times when our leaders have failed in the stewardship of their power and this has led to painful experiences for some in our family,” the statement reads. “We grieve that this is also a part of our history and would like to extend an apology to those for whom pain has resulted.”

Tuesday’s email from the CCDA board said, “It is with a mix of sadness, grief, and lament that we bid farewell to Noel and thank him for his many contributions to CCDA.”

Castellanos became CEO and president of the organization in 2007, but last year the board created a separate CEO position, now filled by Ava Steaffens.

“We have great faith and confidence in her and the very talented and dedicated staff team that she will continue to lead,” CCDA board chair Mayra Macedo-Nolan stated. The website lists a dozen staff members, and all but one are women.

The ministry said in its announcement that the reconcilation process with Castellanos will continue.

“For over two years the board has been diligently working to address personnel and organizational issues. A future communication will outline the steps we have taken thus far and the work that we have yet to do,” said Macedo-Nolan. “Our board will continue to create accountability systems and structures that ensures CCDA moves towards becoming a healthier organization.”

Castellanos joined CCDA in 2004 with the launch of the CCDA Institute, an initiative to provide deeper theological training around the gospel core of its community development work. With a background in Latino urban ministry, he served on President Obama’s Council for Faith and Neighborhood Partnerships and wrote books including A Heart for the Community: New Models for Urban and Suburban Ministry and Where the Cross Meets the Street: What Happens to the Neighborhood When God Is at the Center, which Castellanos discussed in a 2015 interview with CT.

“File this, Francie, and make copies of this letter, would you,” I said to my secretary without looking up from my desk. “And,” I sighed, “would you please pull out the sofa bed one more time?”

“Are you serious? Again?”

“Again,” I said.For the fourth time that day, I needed to be lifted out of my wheelchair and laid down. Then I had to undress to readjust my corset. Shallow breathing, sweating, and a skyrocketing blood pressure signaled that something was pinching or bruising my paralyzed body. As my secretary tissued away my tears and unfolded my office sofa bed, I stared vacantly at the ceiling. “I want to quit this,” I mumbled.

Francie shook her head and grinned. As she gathered the pile of letters off my desk and got ready to leave, she paused and leaned against the door. “I bet you can’t wait for heaven. You know, like Paul said, ‘We groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling’” (2 Cor. 5:2).

My eyes dampened again, but this time they were tears of relief. “Yeah, it’ll be great.”

In that moment, I sat and dreamed what I’ve dreamed of a thousand times: the hope of heaven. I recited 1 Corinthians 15 (“The perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable”), mentally rehearsed a flood of other promises, and fixed the eyes of my heart on future divine fulfillments. That was all I needed. I opened my eyes and said out loud, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”

This experience often occurs two or three times a week. Physical affliction and emotional pain are, frankly, part of my daily routine. But these hardships are God’s way of helping me to get my mind on the hereafter. And I don’t mean the hereafter as a death wish, psychological crutch, or escape from reality—I mean it as the true reality.

Looking down on my problems from heaven’s perspective, trials looked extraordinarily different. When viewed from below, my paralysis seems like a huge, impassable wall, but when viewed from above, the wall appears as a thin line, something that can be overcome. It is, I’ve discovered with delight, the bird’s-eye view found in Isaiah 40:31: “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

Eagles overcome the lower law of gravity by the higher law of flight, and what is true for birds is true for the soul. If you want to see heaven’s horizons, all you need to do is stretch your wings. (Yes, you have wings, and you don’t need larger, better ones; you possess all that you need to gain a heavenly perspective on your trials.) Like the wall that becomes a thin line, you’re able to see the other side.

That’s what happened to me that day in my office. I was able to look beyond my “wall” to see where Jesus was taking me on my spiritual journey.

Scripture presents us with this eternal perspective. I like to call it the “end-of-time view.” This view separates what is transitory from what is lasting. What is transitory, such as physical pain, will not endure, but what is lasting, such as the eternal weight of glory accrued from that pain, will remain forever.

As the apostle Paul writes, “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:17). The apostle Peter, too, writes to Christian friends being flogged and beaten, “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials” (1 Pet. 1:6).

Rejoice? When you’re being thrown to lions?

This kind of nonchalance about gut-wrenching suffering used to drive me crazy. Stuck in a wheelchair and staring out the window at the fields of our farm, I wondered, Lord, how in the world can you consider my troubles “light and momentary”? I will never walk or run again. I’ve got a leaky leg bag. I smell like urine. My back aches. I’m trapped in front of this window.

Years later, however, the light dawned: The Spirit-inspired writers of the Bible simply had a different perspective, an end-of-time view. Tim Stafford writes, “This is why Scripture can seem at times so blithely and irritatingly out of touch with reality, brushing past huge philosophical problems and personal agony. That is just how life is when you are looking from the end. Perspective changes everything. What seemed so important at the time has no significance at all.”

Mind you, I’m not saying that my paralysis is light in and of itself; it only becomes light in contrast to the far greater weight on the other side of the scale. And although I wouldn’t normally call three decades in a wheelchair “momentary,” it is when you realize that “you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14).

Nothing more radically altered the way I looked at my suffering than leapfrogging to this end-of-time vantage point. When God sent a broken neck my way, he blew out the lamps in my life that lit up the “here and now” and made it so captivating. The dark despair of total and permanent paralysis that followed wasn’t much fun, but it sure made heaven come alive. And one day, when our Bridegroom comes back—probably when I’m right in the middle of lying down on my office sofa for the umpteenth time—God is going to throw open heaven’s shutters. There’s not a doubt in my mind that I’ll be fantastically more excited and ready for it than if I were on my feet.

In the meantime, suffering hurries my heart homeward.

Joni Eareckson Tada is the author of over 50 books, including her best-selling autobiography, Joni. She and her husband, Ken, reside in California.

This essay was adapted from Heaven by Joni Eareckson Tada. Copyright © 2018 by Joni Eareckson Tada. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com.

On the day the moving truck pulled away, I was the last to leave. The walls were empty except for the black and white stripes we’d painted, and that little spot of white on the turquoise kitchen wall we covered up with a frame (thinking one day we’d get around to fixing it). There was no bump-bump of children running up and down stairs, no circles of noisemaking.

I stepped on the floorboard that always creaks—to hear it one last time. What was once something to fix was now dear.

I ran my fingers along the living room walls. “Thank you,” I said as I touched the walls that had seen so much life and laughter, so many tantrums and tears. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

I walked around the room, blessing this house and caressing it like the lips of a lover. I prayed the house would be a sieve where our crazy would get caught and our love would pour out to the next owners, another pastor’s family.

This move from an urban neighborhood in Salt Lake City back home to the suburbs of Southern California was clearly where God was calling us next, but that didn’t prevent the leave-taking from feeling like a kind of death. This was the home we’d known the longest as husband and wife. We brought home half our children to this spot of earth. This was the house with the 15-year renovation dreams attached to it. This was the house with the bookshelves my husband, Bryce, built for me to hold the weight of my years of study.

We were leaving the creaking, 100-year-old floorboards Bryce had refinished to follow God’s call to plant a church in the land of plenty and cookie-cutter tract homes. Roots, when exposed to the light, quiver a little.

Markers of Belonging

At first, I scoffed at the idea of a suburban church plant. I thought I was too good for the suburbs, too good to move back home. If you gave me a life in the city or the country, I could idealize it to death, cover it in metaphors, and figure out what the kingdom of God looked like with art galleries and public transportation or endless space for my children to run.

This move, however, pulled me up short. My self-narrative for the past two decades had revolved around movement and moving place. As a married couple, we had moved eight times and birthed more children than we planned. Now, instead of living a life overseas or in the heart of a bustling city center, we found ourselves moving home—to the suburbs. We would be two miles from the hospital where my husband was born.

Some people crave the rootedness and security of staying put. I have measured my homes away from home as markers of belonging. Each one—Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Los Angeles (again), San Diego, Salt Lake City—was evidence that we were doing significant things for God. From there it was a quick jump to seeing our address as the measure of our worth. For a woman who craved the cultural hub of a city or the idyllic freedom of a rural life, I bristled about a move to the suburbs. I was happy in Salt Lake City. The city was booming: Ski resorts were a short drive away, diversity was increasing as more immigrants moved in, and restaurants with award-winning international cuisines were popping up downtown.

Moving home held out its charms: I was excited about proximity to family, how a newer house meant fewer things falling apart, and how we wouldn’t have to learn a new place. But, I wondered, how would I find belonging in the suburbs where everyone—even their houses—seemed to look the same?

I craved sustainability, depth, meaning, nuance—the things you find in a city, I reasoned, or at least in the type of rural life championed by Wendell Berry. How did this move fit; how could I fit? Underneath my feelings of superiority was a deep fear that I couldn’t cut it: I wasn’t pretty enough or successful enough. Could I find belonging in the suburbs, or would I be a misfit?

I’m comforted by the biblical precedent of God’s people laughing at his plans—backing into corners and running off in the opposite direction. I feel kin to Jonah, thinking he was too good for a place; to Sarah, laughing at the idea that God could do the impossible; to Moses, thinking he didn’t have the right skill set to serve God’s people; to Joshua, who was afraid; to David, who followed his feelings, which led to adultery and murder; to Peter, who said he’d always come through and then ran away; to Paul, who desperately wanted to do everything right. The list goes on. In each story, God leads these wayward souls to repentance and restores them to fellowship. So I took a deep breath, said goodbye, and closed the door to our life in Salt Lake City. This was it—we were moving to the suburbs.

Stories of the Good Life

In what they center and in what they hide, all places tell stories through their geography, architecture, and overall design. After World War II, suburbs popped up across America. They were places upwardly mobile middle-class residents would retreat to for their version of a country manor house placed at a reasonable distance away from the city, where (usually) men worked.

Houses became status markers. Cars and commuting became more prevalent. Women increasingly stayed home, removed from the bustle of city life. As suburbs grew, they became whiter and richer. Their racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity wasn’t just lowered; according to Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, editors of The Suburb Reader, the suburbs “built inequality to last.”

Today, each suburb is different: Some are receiving previous urban dwellers who can’t afford city life when they have a family; others are the result of “white flight”; still others are more affluent and cost-prohibitive than the cities they orbit. Many are growing in their racial, political, and socioeconomic diversity.

But each suburb, in its own way, evangelizes for the good life: a life of safety, beauty, comfort, and ease. In their layout, their laws, and their cultural contours, suburbs—like all places—reflect both our good, God-given desires to create home and the beauty and brokenness of a place.

Thankfully, the good news of the gospel is never defined by a ZIP code. The gospel story helps us see the idols of our suburbs and brings hope for an abundant life not contingent on our circumstances.

Our places are good gifts; home is how we begin to know who we are. Yet when we use the gifts of our places—when we use the suburbs—as “ultimate things,” like pastor Tim Keller is fond of saying, we worship them.

The call upon all of us in the suburbs is to find belonging not in what we buy or how we present ourselves, but in loving God and neighbor. If God is our host who prepares a table for us and the bread of life we feast on, then he is intimately concerned with our hungers. He’s concerned about meeting our physical and existential rumblings.

The thing about hungers is that they are all best met in God alone. The story of God’s kingdom is not about a bigger house, more resources (even to give away), security, safety, or the next promotion. No, the story of the Bible is that we have a Father God who meets us in our lostness, in whatever form that takes.

Our souls can suffer when we sleep on featherbeds, eat rich food, and always have the financial means to fill our needs. As people on the Way, we must practice the discipline of being curious about our small hunger pains. Not until we feel our hunger can we be propelled toward repentance, vulnerability, welcome, and belonging.

Feeling our hunger is the first step toward remembering who we are. We need a story to find home in the suburbs. Indeed, as Albert Hsu writes in The Suburban Christian, “God needs suburban Christians who are willing to take a sharp look at their environment, recognize the challenges of the suburban setting, and then stay here to do something about it.”

Finding Our Place

It’s been three years since the moving truck pulled away. There are things still out of place, and we still ache to belong—to have answers to all the niggling questions about what it looks like to plant new roots into the soil of the suburbs. We take comfort in our smallness.

So we also start small; we move our bodies. My husband is downstairs building cabinets in the laundry room so we have somewhere to put our laundry detergent. We walk our children to the local elementary school. I still walk the hills around my suburban tract home, to ground myself and learn to love the particularities of my place. Now, life has settled into some sort of suburban rhythm. I know faces and names, and I’m welcomed into the holy spaces of burden-bearing for neighbors and church members: where we gather and eat, where we worship, where we walk, where we practice being good neighbors.

I still scroll through Instagram to see pictures of what we left, and I still wonder how to make a home here—one that is robust, imaginative, and meaningful. I want to welcome my children and neighborhood into a spaciousness of soul that’s not contingent on a number from a bathroom scale or a test or a bank statement. I’m convinced we don’t need acres of farmland or the cultural cachet of a city to get there. All places can be holy ground when we choose to pay close attention to the ways God is already at work.

So we open our hands, we get moving on our walking paths, we make room, and we welcome people into the feast of belovedness. As individuals, families, and churches commit to love and sacrifice for our neighborhoods and subdivisions, we will find our place. God has made us hungry people, and our hungers are best met through him.

Ashley Hales is a writer living in Southern California. This article is adapted from her book, Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much (InterVarsity Press). Copyright (c) 2018 by Ashley Hales. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com

From the first moment of the pilot episode of Kim’s Convenience—a Canadian network comedy created by Ins Choi, now available on Netflix—I was squirming in my seat. But it took me some time to figure out why.

Kim’s Convenience plunges the viewer into a modern variation on the family sitcom, where both the urban, diverse setting and the main character’s heavy accent take center stage. That accent seems to signify everything that’s out of place about Mr. Kim, the protagonist and patriarch of the show. He interacts with various groups of customers in his convenience store in a busy urban neighborhood in ways that are alternatingly charming and cringe-inducing.

From his attempts to capitalize on a gay-pride parade happening in his neighborhood to his overbearing ways with his daughter, Janet, Mr. Kim is the flashpoint for the viewer. Do you love him or not? Do you find him smart and gregarious or ridiculous and out-of-touch? Kim’s Convenience, for all of its charm and goodwill, has something that will no doubt offend—or at least make uncomfortable—nearly everyone on the scale from conservative to progressive. But paying attention to what makes us squirm illuminates the importance of the show. Kim’s Convenience is one in a slew of pop culture artifacts bringing accents, culture, and stereotypes—and faith—into the mainstream in ways that ask us to face squarely our discomfort with them.

Accents and Archetypes

There is a troubled history to the public reception of various Asian accents, from Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles and beyond. My sister, who watched the movie Downsizing in the theaters in Oregon, told me that the mostly white audience laughed every time actress Hong Chau spoke in her Vietnamese accent—and not because she was saying something humorous. Her accent has inspired pushback, with some actually insisting it is racist and a caricature. When asked by journalists about her portrayal of Ngoc, Chau asked them: What exactly is it about my accent that bothers you? When they couldn’t respond, Chau wondered aloud whether the accent only became a problem because she had a starring role, instead of being a background player.

Similarly, in interviews, Kim’s Convenience star Paul Sun-Hyung Lee talks about the decision to speak with an accent—how he himself chose to channel the voice of his father. “The accent isn’t the joke. It’s part of who [the character] is, but it isn’t the joke.” For him, Mr. Kim is an archetype of a Korean immigrant making his way in Canada, instead of a stereotype being mined for laughs.

His show and others like it are trying to show an accent not as a symbol of status or worth or intelligence or superiority but a lived reality for many. To represent in real and complex and intentionally hilarious ways the experiences and realities of Asian communities, which can and will shift dominant culture perspectives.

Caught between Cultures

Kim’s Convenience aims to unsettle the norm in other ways as well. Instead of an affluent suburb, this is a family-centered show set in a poorer urban context. The Kims sell lotto tickets and cigarettes to their neighbors, as well as diapers and gallons of milk. Mr. and Mrs. Kim’s children do not match up to the “model minority” myth in many ways: Janet (Andrea Bang) is an art student, and Jung (Simu Liu) is a high-school dropout who works at a car dealership. Indeed, one of the more poignant and complicated parts of the show is the relational fracture that runs throughout both seasons—the estrangement of Mr. Kim from his son, who was seen as a troublemaker and kicked out of the family home above the store several years prior.

Mr. Kim is magnetic and eminently watchable. Yet his pride has damaged his relationship with his son and made both his wife and daughter suffer in their own ways. Recognizing that I do not understand all of the layers of culture when it comes to familial relationships, I wrestled with the larger questions this plot arc brought up for me. How do different people categorize success for their children? How do we learn to grapple with a legacy that focuses on remembering history while parenting children in a modern and complex world? How do we stay true to our roots while adapting to our actual, complicated, diverse neighborhoods?

In an interview, show creator Ins Choi said that the rift between father and son is no accident: Kim’s Convenience is based on the parable of the prodigal son. In fact, the central role of the Christian faith in the lives of the characters is inescapable. Choi—who originally wrote Kim’s Convenience as a play that received critical acclaim in 2011—grew up in a family that was deeply devout. Many of his relatives were pastors, and Choi himself went to seminary, where he performed monologues on passages from the Old Testament instead of writing papers.

So Choi is uniquely placed to examine not just the disparity between traditional Korean and modern Canadian culture, but also the specific ways in which Christianity shapes an individual, a family, and a group. Just as the titular convenience store is a place of commerce and connection for the neighborhood, the church Mrs. Kim is actively involved in provides both a social core and a place to celebrate Korean culture. For me this was a revelation: The mostly Korean-immigrant church depicted in Kim’s Convenience is one of the few places we hear the Korean language in the show (in a touching song performed by members of the Kim family). It is also a place where Korean food is elevated and central to potlucks and communal gatherings.

It is both their faith and their Korean heritage, working in tandem, that shape the Kims and make them into the unique, compelling family that they are. These things are embodied in them in ways that are not always predictable or easy to swallow, even for viewers who are also Christians. Their ethnicity makes them part of the diversity of their culture; their faith makes them react to that culture in ways that may offend advocates of diversity.

The Discomfort of Diversity

In an interview, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee pointed out the advantages of setting the show in Canada, a place where diversity is celebrated as a strength. And indeed, as I watched, I imagined that some of the rough edges surrounding certain characters and situations would have been sanded off by the machine that is American network television. After all, the classic American “melting pot” metaphor is based on everyone assimilating into one shapeless dominant (white, middle-class) culture. As many have pointed out, this is a great flaw in neoliberal thinking—that we can and will all get along, as long as all everyone agrees to act the same.

The truth is, diversity can be uncomfortable. There will be a divergence of opinions. People will speak with accents that are thick or unfamiliar or not elevated in the same way others are (consider that a British or French accent is considered sophisticated by many Americans, while a variety of Asian or African accents are not). They will have priorities and values we don’t always understand. And we will have to think about what we do when faced with difference. Do we ignore it? Do we fear it? Do we feel threatened by it? Or can we acknowledge our reality and the complexity of emotions that come with trying to love our neighbors who come from a different background than us? Do we have the strength to interrogate our own cultural assumptions, to listen and watch and learn from people who are underrepresented in media?

These are important questions, involving far more than just our entertainment choices. Heaven, like the Canadian neighborhood in Kim’s Convenience, is going to be filled with people from all places and walks of life. How comfortable we are with that might just correlate to how comfortable we were in celebrating, and elevating, true diversity here on earth.

D. L. Mayfield is a frequent CT contributor and the author of Assimilate or Go Home. Learn more at DLMayfield.com.

Earlier this week, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions was interrupted by a Methodist minister in a clerical collar who shouted verses from Matthew 25 during a religious liberty event in Boston.

“Brother Jeff, as a fellow United Methodist, I call upon you to repent, to care for those in need, to remember that when you do not care for others, you are wounding the body of Christ,” said Will Green, pastor of of Ballard Vale United Church in Massachusetts.

Green’s remarks, followed by another outcry from a Baptist pastor, led both clergy to be escorted from the event. The Trump cabinet member briefly responded, “Thank you for those remarks and attack, but I would just tell you we do our best every day to fulfill my responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States.”

In a news clip gone viral, Green said to Sessions’s face what some members of the nation’s second-largest Protestant body have articulated in statements, tweets, and casual conversation: They’re unsettled to see a fellow member of the United Methodist Church (UMC) enforcing policies their tradition opposes, specifically, the White House directive to apprehend and separate families crossing the US border.

United Methodist leaders have adopted resolutions in favor of comprehensive immigration reform and declared Sessions’s own zero-tolerance stance as “unnecessarily cruel.” More than 600 clergy and laypeople filed an official complaint against him with the UMC, though it was ultimately dismissed by his district this summer.

“I don't believe there's anything in the Scripture or anything in my theology that says a secular nation state cannot have lawful laws to control immigration,” said the attorney general, the highest-ranking Methodist politician.

The denominational groundswell against Sessions—an Alabama Republican and a member of Ashland Place United Methodist Church in Mobile— continues to raise questions over when and how the church should discipline one of its own.

“We deeply hope for a reconciling process that will help this long-time member of our connection [Sessions] step back from his harmful actions and work to repair the damage he is currently causing to immigrants, particularly children and families,” read a letter from UMC leaders filed July 18.

The complaint, which cited “chargeable offenses” of child abuse, immorality, racial discrimination, and “dissemination of doctrines contrary to the standards of doctrine of the United Methodist Church,” was quashed over the summer by the district superintendent of the Alabama-West Florida UMC Conference, which oversees Sessions’s home church. The justification for dismissing the complaint? Duty-bound politics is not personal.

Backlash upon Backlash

“A political action is not personal conduct when the political officer is carrying out official policy,” read the dismissal, offered in a statement from Bishop David W. Graves, resident bishop of the Alabama-West Florida Conference, who concurred with the decision.

According to the dismissal notice, Sessions simply carried out the official program of the president and the Department of Justice, so his behavior didn’t constitute an “individual act” and therefore was not covered under the UMC’s Book of Discipline.

His Methodist critics have not been so willing to separate the two, going on to push back against Sessions’s appeal to the Bible—the oft-cited, oft-ignored opening of Romans 13—to defend the policy.

“While I could fully understand the informal complaints about Sessions, and though I didn’t expect much success for the formal complaint…I don’t understand the rationale for the dismissal of the complaint,” said Will Willimon, a Methodist theologian, UMC bishop, and Duke Divinity School professor, in a response to CT.

“‘Political actions are not personal conduct’? What’s that supposed to mean? What’s the basis in Scripture for that statement? I know nothing in our Book of Discipline that bifurcates personal behavior from public, politically motivated behavior. Whatever happened to, ‘We must obey God rather than human beings (Acts 5:29)?”

William B. Lawrence, a former president of the UMC’s judicial council, called the reasoning behind the dismissal “problematic.” “I do not follow the logic that grants someone, even the president of the United States, the right to ‘superior orders’ with regard to church law,” he stated to the Religion News Service.

Still, such complaints are rare, and laity usually meet with their pastor or district superintendent to resolve, he said in a United Methodist News Service article.

Essentially, there is no precedent for the denomination disciplining lay members in a situation like Sessions’s, and perhaps no need.

“No Methodist to my knowledge in history has been ecclesially punished for political views or actions,” Mark Tooley, a Methodist and the president of the Institute of Religion and Democracy, told CT. “Church members were sometimes disciplined for owning slaves, which Methodism opposed. But Methodist laity weren’t punished for politically supporting slavery or, if in government, for upholding it.”

“Should they have been? Should members of any church be punished and potentially excommunicated for participating in political or state acts violating church teaching? What church does so?” said Tooley, who supported the dismissal, but disagreed with the rationale. “Some Catholics argue the Eucharist should be withheld from pro-abortion rights Catholic lawmakers, but it almost never happens.”

Tooley pointed out that, though a historically liberal denomination, United Methodism maintains conservative stances against same-sex marriage and abortion in certain cases, and members of his denomination have not been proactive in filing charges against liberal politicians whose positions oppose those.

Methodists are the second most popular Protestant denomination in Congress, with 17 Democrats (7%) and 27 Republicans (9.2%), and politicians Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush are both Methodists.

What Place for Discipline?

The majority of Protestant senior pastors in the United States (55%) were not aware of members in their churches ever being formally disciplined, according to an April survey from LifeWay Research. Only 16 percent said their church had disciplined a member within the past year.

Of all denominations surveyed, Methodists were the least likely to say a church member had been disciplined in the previous year (4%). By contrast, 29 percent of Pentecostal pastors, 19 percent of Baptist pastors, and 9 percent of Reformed/Presbyterian pastors said the same.

When asked about the responsibility to administer church discipline, responses varied as to who should take the lead. Few said the responsibility belongs solely to the church elders (14%), the pastor (9%), trustees or board members (4%), or deacons (1%).

Just over half (51%) said two or more of these groups must come to an agreement for discipline to be enacted, and 18 percent said there was no formal discipline process at their churches. Mainline pastors (24%) were more likely to say there was no formal discipline policy than their evangelical counterparts (15%).

Methodists like Sessions are, according to LifeWay’s findings, the least likely to see church leaders administer discipline to its members. Regarding their own churches, 85 percent of Methodist senior pastors agreed with the statement, “A member has not been formally disciplined since I came as pastor nor prior as far as I know.” Methodist pastors are also the most likely to say they have no official policies in place for disciplining church members (37%).

The denomination does, however, have its Book of Discipline, which explicitly permits church trials and even the expulsion of members, though “pastoral steps” like a conversation between the charged member and the member’s pastor and district superintendent would be the first step.

“I hope [Sessions’] pastor can have a good conversation with him and come to a good resolution that helps him reclaim his values that many of us feel he’s violated as a Methodist,” regional conference elder David Wright told UM News, adding, “I would look upon his being taken out of the denomination or leaving as a tragedy. That’s not what I would want from this.”

Over the summer, a Justice Department spokesperson said Sessions would not comment on the matter, and representatives of the Alabama-West Florida Conference also declined to comment.

“It’s not immoral, not indecent, and not unkind to state what your laws are and then set about to enforce them, in my view,” Sessions said on Monday. “I feel like that’s my responsibility and that’s what I intend to do.”

Recently, Google hit the pause button on a military artificial intelligence project amidst thorny ethical questions raised by its own employees. Increasingly in new drone and surveillance systems, human knowledge and actions are augmented and soon might be sidelined altogether. Should we shirk our responsibility and pass authority onto these machines? For Christians, the complex conversation about how AI should be developed as weapons centers on a biblical understanding of human dignity and responsibility.

For Google employees, protest began in April 2018 over involvement in a program to continue work on an AI-based image recognition program for the Department of Defense arguing that Google should not be in the business of war since the company’s historic slogan has been “Do no evil.”

The program, simply referred to as “Project Maven,” is designed to be used in identifying enemy targets on the battlefield. The research would improve an AI system, which processes a massive amount of video data captured every day by US military drones and reports back to military and civilian analysts with potential targets for future military engagement. The New York Times reported that the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars in recent years to develop these systems and often partners with leading technology firms.

Yet, thousands of Google’s employees, including many senior engineers, signed a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai in protest of the firm’s involvement in Project Maven. In June, Google announced that it would not renew the government contract for Project Maven. Employees rejoiced at this decision, but Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and others have criticized the move arguing that dropping the research will increase the likelihood of war and civilian deaths.

Even with more precise computer-aided targeting, the United States Pentagon said earlier this year that “no one will ever know” how many innocent lives have been lost during the fight against the Islamic State and Syria. These tools are not 100 percent accurate and do fail, but they are more accurate than previous weapons systems. Even as specific numbers vary on the number of innocent lives lost, many argue the number of human casualties is less than it would be without the drones because ground troops are not needed as much and the systems are more accurate than previous target systems driven in large part by fallible humans.

But in July, 2,400 AI researchers signed a pledge to block the development of fully autonomous weapon systems because of the massive moral and ethical implications of the technology.

Many people, including Christians, will understandably disagree on the best means and tools to be used in warfare. However, real human lives are at stake. So how might we go about navigating these issues as a society and apply wisdom to the implementation of artificial intelligence on the battlefield?

The dignity of all people

Christians believe that all people are created in the image of God and that our dignity is based solely on that reality (Gen. 1:26–27). This dignity extends even to our enemies because they too are created in the image of God. Because of our sin and rebellion against God, we ushered in the age of destruction, death, sickness, and brokenness, and the natural order of things is turned upside down. God’s creation also turned on each other, committing murder and devising war.

Google’s employees protested their company’s involvement in Project Maven because many did not want to be involved in the killing of other human beings. Soon after Google pulled out of the project, they released a set of AI principles to guide them in artificial intelligence work. It commits to not designing AI as “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.”

Even though the company does not use the Christian understanding of human dignity, they were reflecting the God-given dignity and worth in which all people are created. This is common grace.

While the Scriptures teach that killing of other humans is not the way that God designed our world to work, we are called to seek justice for wrongs committed because the taking of the life of another image-bearer is such a serious matter. We don’t seek to engage in war or bloodshed, but we are to seek justice for those oppressed and downtrodden (Isa. 1:17).

This approach to a just war was first promoted by Augustine of Hippo based on his understanding of Romans 13:4. Just war theory explains that the only just cause for war is the protection of peace and the punishment of the wicked.

So, artificial intelligence can be used in ways that magnify our dignity but can also be used in ways that minimize our dignity in the name of efficiency, profits, and even military victory. AI is neither good nor bad, but a God-given tool to use with wisdom.

In line with just war theory, AI can strengthen targeting systems so that they are more accurate when used in long-range missiles and drones preventing accidental killings of the innocent.

Human in the loop

But just war theory also prohibits the use of “indiscriminate force” in war, meaning that weapons should be not used that cannot be controlled or contained. A nuclear bomb is an example of this type of weapon because we cannot precisely target enemies, and the bomb’s blast will affect anyone present including innocent men, women, and children.

We pursue justice, which can include war, because our God is a just God, but the human role in the use of these AI weapons raises valid questions about who is responsible and in control of them.

The role that humans play in decision making for these weapon systems was operationalized by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd in a loop called OODA. This loop has four stages: (1) observe, (2) orient, (3) decide, and (4) act. As decision making for identifying and engaging potential targets is increasingly automated and augmented, humans will naturally become less and less involved in the decision-making loop because of the speed at which life-altering decisions will have to be made.

At least for the time being, US military engagement will have a human in the decision-making loop per a directive from the Department of Defense in 2017, which aims to “minimize the probability and consequences of failures that could lead to unintended engagements or to loss of control of the system.” But that directive may not last if other countries and groups start to use more autonomous weapons because we may not be able to adequately defend against them based upon the speed and accuracy that the AI will achieve.

By shirking our responsibility to enact justice for wrongs committed and passing it to these automated systems, our true motivations are often revealed that show less of a concern for the human beings affected by our decisions and more of our desire for a quick ending to combat.

Our Brother’s Keeper

Humans are uniquely positioned by God to be morally responsible for those who are facing injustice. But humans also have the grave responsibility to care for and love even our enemies.

A major and often overlooked danger of AI-empowered weapons is a tendency to dehumanize our enemies. Soldiers may not come even close to them in combat, which can lead them to not think of these men and women as humans with families, livelihoods, hope, and dreams. Our enemies become mere pieces of data on the virtual battlefield. They become blips on a screen rather than flesh and blood human beings. AI can desensitize us to the realities of war where real human lives are lost.

So how should we think about the use of automated weapon systems in today’s military? While dangerous and potentially dehumanizing, the development of these AI tools should be pursued if we have any hope of defending the oppressed. We must seek to use these tools for good and not evil, to protect the innocent, and to fight for what is righteous. We should champion the dignity and worth of all people, including our enemies. But we must do so with eyes wide open, recognizing their limitations and the responsibility that we hold for how that justice is enacted.

Jason Thacker serves as the creative director and associate research fellow at The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is the author of a forthcoming book with Zondervan on artificial intelligence and human dignity. He is married to Dorie and they have two sons.

What could possibly possess a Bible church to file a lawsuit against three outspoken critics of their ministry?

Harvest Bible Chapel has not strayed from its 30-year commitment to the unapologetic preaching of God’s Word, nor have we forgotten the explicit teaching of 1 Corinthians 6:1-9. We’d like to share our biblical rationale for reluctantly deciding to take our critics to court.

A Deeper Understanding of Scripture

Throughout church history, cultural happenings have forced a more carefully nuanced consideration of biblical application. In the first centuries, major areas of Christology were refined to combat error. In recent decades, the charismatic movement brought a more nuanced study of the scriptural teaching on spiritual gifts and the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Many of us remember the near unanimous evangelical stance on divorce prior to the 1970s, when most churches held strictly to “no divorce, no remarriage.” Then with the rise in divorce rates and a few high visibility Christian leaders getting divorced, all were pushed back into the Scripture for a view that considered all biblical teaching on the subject.

In just a few years, the prevailing view changed to include “exception language” from the teaching of Jesus (Matt. 19:9) and Paul (1 Cor. 7:15). The Scriptures had not changed, but cultural trends had again caused a more careful study of all biblical passages on divorce, versus the more simplistic “the Lord God … hates divorce” (Mal. 2:16).

The perfection of God’s holy Word is best seen in the way all relevant passages work together to form a consistent unity. Reductionism is the logical fallacy of “making the main thing the only thing.” As Christians we can make this error by forcing one passage to speak with finality on a more broadly covered biblical subject.

In a culture that is far too litigious, Christ followers should be loath to go into civil court for any reason. 1 Corinthians 6:1-9 pleads for caution: “Can we not judge ourselves?” “This before unbelievers,” “Law suits among you means that you have been completely defeated,” “Why not rather be wronged?” and “This is shame to you.” It’s such a clear teaching—but not the totality of biblical teaching that some try to make it.

What if allowing “yourself to be wronged” is a greater wrong because of the many others that would be wronged? What if that matter is not a “trivial case,” as in 1 Corinthians 6? What if the brothers are from different churches, one of which refuses to bring significant detrimental behavior into line? What if the matter is demonstrably illegal and would bring immense suffering to your family?

1 Corinthians 6 deals with two brothers in a single church dealing with a trivial matter that should just be “let go.” That size teaching does not fit all situations, and it is somewhat reductionistic to try to make it so.

When The Elephant’s Debt began posting their criticism, we dug deeply into personal and organizational reflection. We have repeatedly tried to meet with them, and if the bloggers let their “reasonableness be known to all men” (Phil. 4:5) and simply sat down with us, they would learn of the positive changes that initially came from their critical approach. Ongoing appeals have yielded no fruit, though we remain open to meeting in person and ending the legal case.

In the meantime, by assuming the right to influence our church while refusing to listen to the authority of our church leaders, they forfeit the protection given to brothers in 1 Corinthians 6. According to Matthew 18:17 their refusing to “hear the church” requires that they be related to as non-believers, as “gentiles and tax collectors.”

Protecting the Church

Still some ask, “Wasn’t Jesus lied about and spat upon? Aren’t we called to the same?” Yes, on a personal level we are to turn the other cheek when offended, and Christ in his passion, “when they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate” (1 Pet. 2:23).

A conversation with Wayne Grudem, the widely respected theologian and my seminary professor, helped me understand that we should model our response to criticism after Christ’s ministry (John 8:49) not his road to the cross, when his total silence was a unique fulfillment of prophecy.

I accept criticism as part of my calling; some of it is deserved, most of it well intentioned, and all of it used by the Lord to sanctify myself and our church’s leaders. However, a real turning point for our church leadership was the realization that our first responsibility was to protect the church when that criticism went on to impact them.

In the wake of what was being published online, innocent people didn’t just leave our church, but too often left the church. We saw the effects not just in Chicago, but worldwide, wherever our broadcasts and church plants had spread. Friends lost their sons to the faith. New believers who struggled to trust Christ and any authority too often jumped to “fears confirmed” and retreated into unbelief.

People who were saved through our ministry and feeling first time joy in Christ were devastated to read the vitriol. Treasured staff who supported us fully, resigned saying, “We love you, we believe in this ministry, but we must find a place of peace.”

So much damage to so many innocent people – that is what, after six years, prompted us to study the Scriptures afresh regarding established authority, ordained by God to punish wrongdoers (Rom. 13:1-6).

In America, free speech is not universal. You can’t yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater because negligently causing a dangerous stampede of people is not protected speech, but a breach of the law with serious consequences. We have called on authorities, in this case, the court in Cook County, to look carefully at the actions of these bloggers and rule on whether their publications against our church for six years have broken multiple civil laws.

We are not trying to do God’s job; we are asking the authorities God’s established to do theirs. We are not seeking vengeance or retribution. We have not filed this suit because we fear something big will be uncovered or to gain any damages. (The cost of our lawsuit is covered by two of our elders, not from church family offerings.)

We love the body of Christ, and stand ready to give grace and forgive, for in many ways God used the bloggers in the beginning but there is no righteous role remaining for them. We want them to move on and leave the governance of our church to our biblical eldership and congregation.

We pray for the bloggers’ peace and for a new season of freedom from outside interference for the people of Harvest Bible Chapel. Over and over we have asked God to protect our church—and we now believe he has, through the government authorities he ordained (Rom. 13:1-6).

James MacDonald is founding and senior pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel.

Speaking Out is Christianity Today’s guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the magazine.