Page 641 – Christianity Today (2025)

Theology

Tina Osterhouse

Christ’s kingdom work involved detours. Can we follow his model?

Page 641 – Christianity Today (1)

Christianity TodaySeptember 18, 2018

Neirfy / Getty

For many parents, the advent of the school year brings with it a familiar and difficult dynamic: cycles of interruptions. As mothers, in particular, we learn to be flexible with our plans and structure our days to bend to our kids’ needs. Nonetheless, as Michelle Radford notes in her recent CT interview, the unique challenge of parenting often precipitates a crisis of identity for many women.

When my two kids—born 14 months apart—were young, I felt as if I’d never get ahead in my career because I was too busy changing diapers, waking up in the middle of the night to feed my children, or running to the store for a bottle of baby Motrin. I struggled with the incessant interruptions and spent much of my time relinquishing well-made plans.

Now, however, as my children move into their teens, I’m beginning to recognize that, in those early years, God was teaching me to be openhanded with my hopes in order to serve others. What I thought hindered me from real ministry was, in fact, God’s tool instructing me to be present to the immediate needs around me, and what felt like falling behind in my career was just the character formation that Christ had been looking for. In sum, those early days of parenthood were teaching me to listen to the voice of Jesus.

All of us—mothers, fathers, pastors, teachers, and everyone else—are part of God’s ministry of interrupted plans, his kingdom of “on-the-way.” We see this in Scripture.

Much of the Jesus’ ministry happened on the way to something else. In Mark 6, Jesus finds out that his cousin, John the Baptist, has been beheaded. The apostles gather around to pass on the terrible news. Jesus then tells them that they need to come away and rest a while. However, the crowds catch wind of where they’re going and follow them. When Jesus sees them, he hits the pause button on his plan and takes a detour. The crowds are like sheep without a shepherd, and he cares too much to ignore them. Five loaves and a few fish later, everyone has their fill, and Jesus continues on with his original plan. He goes up to the mountain to pray.

Luke, too, tells a story of interruption. While Jesus is on his way to the home of a synagogue leader, Jairus, to help his dying daughter, a woman in the crowd reaches out in faith to touch him. Jesus feels the power go out from him and stops. “Who touched me?” he asks (Luke 8:45). The woman emerges from the crowd, trembling, and tells him her story. She has been bleeding for 12 years and no one can help her. Jesus listens, names her faith, and blesses her with peace as she goes on her way.

Meanwhile, Jairus’s daughter dies. They send messengers to tell Jesus not to bother coming after all. It’s too late. It seems that, had Jesus not stopped to meet that woman, Jairus’s daughter might have lived. However, as Luke records the story, Jesus continues on to Jairus’s house and raises the child from the dead. “He took her by the hand and said, ‘My child, get up!’ Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up” (Luke 8:54).

Story after story in the gospels demonstrates that Jesus was willing to change his plans to meet the needs of the moment—to feed the hungry, to heal the sick and the blind, and to befriend the lonely.

As a believer, I’m still learning to emulate Christ’s example. Sometimes I fail to hear the Spirit’s call to interruption, and sometimes I pay heed.

Back in June before school got out for the summer, I was driving home from work—determined to get a few things done at the house before my kids got off the bus—when I noticed a young woman in flannel pajamas on the side of the road. She clung to a tall metal light post and held a cardboard sign requesting help in big red ink. The girl, not more than 20 years old, shook with uncontrollable sobs of a kind I rarely see. As I glanced in my rearview mirror while passing her, I saw the agonizing look on her face and decided to throw my to-do list to the wind.

After I pulled over in a nearby parking lot, I persuaded her to sit down on some restaurant steps to catch her breath while I ducked into the café for napkins. After I sat beside her, she shared her story: She was having an unexpected panic attack. She lived in a tent nearby and was scared. I told her about some of the panic attacks I’ve had. I told her about my life, what I’d done that day, and how I was planting a garden. While I talked, her breathing calmed down. She wiped the dusty tearstains off her glasses and bit her bottom lip.

When I saw first saw her on the side of the road, my mother’s heart demanded that I stop. It was the same mother’s heart that used to wake at night to feed my babies, the heart that had to cancel plans with friends because of a sick child, the heart that used to wonder if I’d ever get to do “real” ministry again. But in that moment of coming alongside the homeless girl, I was reminded again that ministry happens in the small, quotidian moments and that God’s kingdom occurs “on-the-way.”

“We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy,” writes Kathleen Norris in The Quotidian Mysteries, “but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely places, out of Galilee, as it were, and not in spectacular events, such as the coming of a comet.”

As we learn to “start where we are,” as Norris says, the more we notice and heed the quiet promptings of God’s Spirit. We serve the One who was always willing to stop and take a detour for the one person who needed help.

Tina Osterhouse lives with her husband and two children on Lake Joy in Carnation, Washington. She writes on faith, culture, and hope at tinaosterhouse.com. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter at @TinaOsterhouse.

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Theology

Nathan Betts

In an age when most are rushing to have their say, Christians can love by giving others a hearing.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (2)

Christianity TodaySeptember 17, 2018

CurvaBezier / Getty

I remember having a discussion around faith matters years ago with an intelligent person. I met him at an event I was attending with a few friends. On one particular evening, we all decided to have dinner together. Just from the incidental conversations we had before this meal, I knew that he and I did not see eye to eye on many issues.

After the meal finished, the three others got up to use the restroom while he and I sat talking across the table. We entered into a contentious theological issue, and it soon felt as though someone had turned up the temperature in the room. His face became red, and I am sure mine was too.

Eventually he looked at me and said, “Oh I understand now. You are a foundationalist!” If I weren’t so caught up in the emotion of the conversation at the time, I would have asked him what a foundationalist is.

He quickly moved on to his next accusation, clothed in the form of a question: “Tell me, where did you study?” When I mentioned the two universities at which I had done post-graduate education, he dropped his case against me. In hindsight, I am convinced that he was looking to categorize me, but he couldn’t do it because the universities I mentioned simply would not fit the anticipated boxes to be ticked.

As I think back to that intense conversation, I wonder how I could have navigated that situation better and how the Christian faith might inform my frame of mind.

Many of us have been in conversations like this in which we stop listening to the person with whom we are speaking. Lyell Asher, English professor at Lewis and Clark College, proposes a meaningful antidote to this challenge in his American Scholar article. He makes the point that instead of listening for what others might say, we need to recover the art of listening to others. If you have ever been on the receiving end of the listening for conversation, you know what this feels like.

When we simply listen for what another person is saying, we reduce that person down to a stereotype that we already have in our mind. This kind of listening is not really listening. It is merely argument formulation masquerading as listening.

When we listen to others, it is as if the posture and disposition of the conversation becomes open-handed. Listening to another person implicitly says, “I want to learn from you even if I don’t agree with you.” As Christians who are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, this strikes me as exactly the sort of thing we are called to do.

Recovering the Art of Critical Thinking

After watching a certain protest in the news recently, I could not help but think that this listening dynamic or lack thereof is contributing profoundly to the great disconnect and anger in many of the cultural conversations today. Just think of the many protests we hear of on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

More on Listening:

Why We Argue Best with Our Mouths Shut

Quick to Listen: Talking Is Not Going to Change the World

Regardless of who is right and who is wrong in each particular case, much of the disillusionment and confusion stems from our inability to understand each other. In politics, higher education, and increasingly in sport, the “us versus them” mentality haunts us. Issues that might have once been talked about are simply no-go areas in classrooms, locker rooms, and restaurants. The issues are complex, no doubt, but I wonder if one step in the right direction through this volatile terrain might be recovering the art of critical thinking?

In the foreword for Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, there are two portraits of the future painted for the reader. One comes from George Orwell’s 1984 and the other is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The author outlines Orwell’s and Huxley’s views of the future and how they both shared concerns with how the truth would be handled.

As he looked into the future, Orwell feared that truth would be concealed from us. Huxley’s concern was that the truth would be “drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” Postman’s book, penned in 1985, sides with Huxley’s view of the future, and as I read it, I could not help but feel that we have arrived in the moment foretold by Huxley.

Day after day in our 24/7, always-on news cycle, we are bombarded with images, stories, and statements that show the outworking of what Huxley feared. Truth, it seems, is drowning in a sea of irrelevance. Huxley believed truth would be lost in a sea of irrelevance through the deluge of information we would be inundated with. The important would get buried in a sea of irrelevant news.

Indeed, this is a real challenge for us today. But I wonder if the problem lies more in our disposition to simply not listen and learn from others. Yes, truth is being lost in a sea of irrelevance, like Huxley predicted, but the bombardment of information is not the only culprit for this trend. I think a greater problem is that we do not really want to think and listen to others.

Social critic Os Guinness tells the story of a person who studied under Francis Schaeffer. On one particular evening in a French bar room, the student was having a drink with a skeptic. The skeptic asked this Schaeffer protégé many questions about faith. To every question came a response that was nearly word for word from Francis Schaeffer. Finally there came a point in the conversation in which the skeptic, who had actually read much of Schaeffer’s writing, looked at the Christian and said, “Excuse me, but do you write with a Schaeffer pen too?”

The skeptic’s point was that while he was asking genuine questions he was receiving stock answers being trotted out mechanically. Each question was greeted by a ready-made response. They might have been good answers in another context, but they did not seem to grapple with the questions being asked by that particular questioner. True and genuine thinking was not taking place

I confess I am guilty of the same categorization that my friend placed upon me in that heated exchange I wrote about earlier. I have been in conversations with others and have tried to figure out where to place the other person. The problem with this approach (aside from being disrespectful and ignoring a person’s dignity) is that listening for fails to acknowledge the real complexity of what makes up a person’s opinion and line of argument.

More importantly, simply listening for what a person is going to say models an extremely reductionistic view of the human person. It is as if we are saying that our conversational partner can be reduced to a mere set of lists, categories, and sound bites. But are we as human beings not more complex and more sophisticated than that? Is it not the art and discipline of listening—truly listening—that gives our conversations dignity, worth, and civility?

Listening Is Hard Work

Perhaps one of the reasons many of us find it difficult to listen in conversations is because genuine listening takes more work and critical thought. Worryingly, I am convinced that we have become skilled in learning what to think, but not as strong in learning how to think. We are good at clinging to content and conversations that substantiate what we believe and what works within our view of the world. But as soon as we encounter a contradictory opinion to ours, no matter how intelligent it is, we have difficulty engaging it. The tendency is to move away or to tune it out.

Instead of listening to the other person who is sharing an opposing thought to ours, our default setting is to place them into a category that we can comprehend—a category that will keep our own views and convictions intact.

When we find it hard to understand opposing views and we enter into a mode of thought that seeks to place the opposing opinion in a category, are we not implying that we do not desire the truth? Yes, our views and convictions might survive the conversation, but the end result is that the truth, at least our desire for it, has drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Recently I was speaking to a group of senior high students who were about to head off to college. During the question and answer time of my session, one particular student expressly disagreed with a point I made in my talk. The room slowly became quiet. Many students turned their heads to the ground. As it became my turn to respond, there was pin-drop silence. The roaming microphone was then taken away from the questioner and I began my response.

I thanked the questioner for his question and comments. I then asked if we could bring back the roaming microphone so that he and I could continue the conversation. I expanded on the points I made in my talk that he called into question, and we had a meaningful dialogue. After the session ended, one colleague came to me and said, “I missed some of your talk, but I loved the way in which you gave the microphone to the person who asked the most controversial question.”

Truthfully, I would not have made that observation on my own. But in hearing my colleague’s feedback, it reminded me that one of the most significant ways we can navigate tough conversations is to ensure that each person in the conversation is heard.

Christianity Speaks to the Challenge

So what might Christianity have to say to these challenges? As I look at the way the Lord Jesus Christ and the apostle Paul interacted with others, I find two practical ways their interaction with others can shape how we think about conversations.

1. Be open and willing to engage with those with whom we do not agree.

There are many stories of Jesus in which we see him embodying this attitude. Even when others come to trick him, he still listens to and interacts with them. When the Pharisees and Herodians come to trap Jesus in Matthew 22:15–22, they ask him whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not. Jesus responds by asking for a coin, and he then asks them whose image is on that coin. They acknowledge that Caesar’s image is on the coin. Jesus famously says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (ESV).

Matthew’s gospel continues: “When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.” We are not sure if these exact people ever engaged with Jesus again. But just by his willingness and courage to engage with those with whom he disagreed, a meaningful conversation was had.

Commentators often make special note of the question that Jesus asked this politically charged and theologically fierce group. He asked them a question about image. In the ancient world, images denoted authority and accountability. An inscription or a sculpture of a ruler often signified their ruling over a particular area.

When Jesus asks this question to the Pharisees and Herodians, they immediately know the answer because they understand the power linked to Caesar’s image. Yet, as significant as that question was, what is even more striking is that Jesus was willing to have a conversation with people who had opposing views to his.

There is so much to be gleaned from Jesus’ conversational care and thought, but we would do exceedingly well to simply practice and live out his generous willingness to engage with others who did not share in his teaching.

2. Read and understand what others are reading.

In Acts 17:22–34 we read of Paul’s interaction with the Athenians. Paul is explaining and defending the Christian God to a mixed group that included Stoics and Epicureans. Just by doing a bit of study of this story, we soon realize that Paul refers to and cites poetry that had powerfully shaped the religious belief of his audience. His method of evangelism reflects a disposition that wanted to understand the people to whom he was ministering. He was interested in how they thought. He had much to say, but he wanted to show them that he understood them.

There are so many points to draw from this one rich passage of Scripture, but we should not miss the fact that Paul’s citing of poets tells us that he had read the poet’s! He had read what his conversation partners had read. In our moment in which we have become severely groupish in what we read, what we listen to, and who we spend time with, we would do well to take notes from Paul’s speech in Acts 17.

This does not mean we should immerse ourselves in literature contrary to the Christian faith. It simply means that our reading and learning should indicate a desire to learn from others outside our faith conviction. Paul’s method of evangelism at the Areopagus can provide a guiding light to us on this front.

These are only two points, but if we are serious about wanting to listen and learn from others in our radically misunderstanding time, the Christian faith shows us that a meaningful start begins with a willingness to enter into the hard conversations. No one did this more beautifully than Christ. Paul shows us that reading and engaging what our friends have been shaped by could provide real and practical help to our understanding them, not to mention making our witness of Christ more appealing.

We live in a time in which listening, learning, and understanding each other seems beyond our reach. Yet, Christianity brings encouraging news to us here. May God give us the courage, the care, and the clarity to rise above the challenge of misunderstanding others and do so in his name.

Nathan Betts is an apologist with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). He speaks frequently across the US and Canada. His focus areas include the interface of faith and culture, digital technology and belief, and youth apologetics. Follow him on Twitter @NathanGBetts.

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Books

Review

Christie Purifoy

Poet Christian Wiman helps us tune our ears to silence, so God’s voice won’t be lost in the noise.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (3)

Christianity TodaySeptember 17, 2018

Rain: MirageC / Getty Wiman: Macmillan

If I could, I would give this review a flashing, neon title. I would aim on it a bright and roving spotlight. I would print it up like a recruitment poster, pointing finger and all, because I WANT YOU, yes you, to read this book.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (4)

He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art

Christian Wiman (Author)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

128 pages

$11.59

You’re not that interested in art? Poetry isn’t really your thing? Your stack of books to read is already too high? Make those apologies, and I will only press my point harder. It is precisely because there are too many voices calling for our attention—too many books on our bedside tables, too many apps fired up on our screens—that we, as people of faith, should tune our ears to silence. Poets, in particular, help us do exactly that. Only when the “pandemonium of blab—ceases,” Christian Wiman writes, can we “hear—and what some of us hear … is a still, small voice.”

Poetry depends on silence. It depends on the word not written, the pause of line break or comma, the white space on the page. If you are intrigued by the silence that poems can open up in and around words when those words are placed with artful precision and concision, you could dive right in to the quiet rhythms of T. S. Eliot’s quartets, Seamus Heaney’s metaphors, or Mary Oliver’s epiphanies. I suggest beginning with He Held Radical Light, the latest offering from Wiman, a poet, editor, and, most recently, divinity school professor.

Pressing into the Silence

He Held Radical Light is a book-length essay woven of spiritual memoir, literary criticism, and lyric poetry. It demonstrates with intelligence, honesty, and humor how vital poetry can be for any exploration of faith, an argument the subtitle (“The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art”) makes succinctly, as if it, too, were a kind of poem. This is not a book about art and faith, as if one or the other could be peeled away and considered singly. Instead, this book suggests that the field of imagination is one of the most significant places where the divine and the mortal can meet. If that is true, who among us would refuse to travel there merely because we have always found poetry “difficult” or life has become “too busy” for the poetry we once loved?

Wiman is worth listening to because he is himself an accomplished poet and, thanks in part to a decade at the helm of Poetry magazine, he is intimately acquainted with the lives and the works of so many of the best poets of the last century. With Wiman as our guide, we witness his highly personal, sometimes surprising encounters with poets—among them Heaney and Oliver—and what those encounters reveal about the relationship between the life (and faith) of the artist and the art itself. We are also shown how Wiman reads poems, thus becoming more perceptive readers ourselves without any heavy-handed lessons in “how to read a poem.”

But Wiman is also worth listening to because he is a dying poet and a dying man. He is dying in the sense that we are, each of us, dying, but his dying has more urgency and more pain: In 2005, on his 39th birthday, Wiman was diagnosed with an incurable form of blood cancer. Since then, as he has recounted in his earlier memoir, My Bright Abyss, he has undergone hospitalizations, chemotherapies, and even a bone marrow transplant. While neither of his unconventional memoirs offers much medical detail, they offer enough to understand that a poet who can feel his own cells wreaking havoc is a poet for whom the reality of death is more real than it is for most of us.

Why does this matter? It matters because, as Wiman writes, “Resurrection is a fiction and a distraction to anyone who refuses to face the reality of death.” I claimed this book could tune our ears to silence, but I might have said it could tune our ears to what Wiman calls the “final silence” of death. I’m sure you understand why I buried this analogy beneath five full paragraphs. Who among us is eager to confront the prospect of our own demise? The answer to this question goes far in explaining our collective addiction to the “pandemonium of blab.”

But for the faithful seeker willing to press into the silence, or for the one who has had silence pressed upon his or her self by diagnosis or despair, Wiman is a relatable artist-guide. The memoir elements of this book, peppered with honest self-deprecation and confession, insure that Wiman is no poet on a pedestal. He is too human for that, too mortal as well, and he has accepted the painful truth that even his poems are mortal. He recounts the “galactic chill” he felt in his soul when, at the age of 38, he heard his friend and our 14th poet laureate, Donald Hall, casually mention, “I was thirty-eight when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last.” This book asks us to consider that not only will our bodies die but so will much (perhaps all?) of the work of our hands. If poets go on writing, if we go on working and creating, then it must be for some other reason than securing some portion of immortality.

An epigraph from Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez introduces the notion of the poet as spiritual guide on page one: “The world does not need to come from a god. For better or worse, the world is here. But it does need to go to one (where is he?), and that is why the poet exists.” In our day, religion and science both seem fixated on origins. Wiman’s book implies that this fixation is a distraction from a much more pertinent and personal question: Where am I headed? Wiman claims, “One either lives toward God or not.” He gives that simple statement the power of poetic refrain by repeating it twice in one prose paragraph.

Poetry Is Not Enough

Some readers might find Wiman’s definition of faith too simplistic. Those for whom faith has more content might bristle when Wiman, referring to speculation about the poet Wallace Stevens and a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, writes, “I yawn just pondering it.” For Wiman, the “creative faith” of a poem like “The Planet on the Table” is “enough,” though he is careful to add that the poem is enough “because it enacts and acknowledges its own insufficiency.” For Wiman, the weakness or failure of poetry can become a “lens” with the potential to reveal an ultimate spiritual truth and a final spiritual reality that the poem can only ever suggest in glimmering moments that collude with eternity but never encompass, explain, or define it.

Though Wiman does not often invoke the names Jesus or Christ, and then only to push against the highly familiar ways most American Christians use those names, he is absolutely concerned with the content of faith. Too many of the poets he reads, admires, and shares with us in this book have a faith in the art itself that Wiman finds completely inadequate. “Art is not enough,” he writes, and again, “poetry is not enough” because “at some point you need a universally redemptive activity. You need grace that has nothing to do with your own efforts.” Poetry matters, not because it saves, but because it can help us perceive the ultimate reality of a saving grace that lies not above, beneath, or even beyond the experience of death, but somehow within it.

If we as Christian believers already feel ourselves well acquainted with this amazing grace, does the art of poetry have less to offer us? On this question, Wiman speaks persuasively not only as a dying man but as a living one. Since his diagnosis, he has married, become a father, found faith, written more poems, and grieved the deaths of poets, young and old, whom he admired and whom he called friend. He has known the “tangle of pain and praise.” He has experienced the dying that leads to life.

A poem by A. R. Ammons suggests that life is found in God but God is found in death, and Wiman hears in it echoes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”), and in Bonhoeffer he hears echoes of Jesus himself (“Whoever would save his life will lose it …”). You and I have read Christ’s words in our Bibles countless times, we have heard them spoken in our churches Sunday after Sunday, yet in their familiarity they risk becoming only one more sound in the general noise of our distracted lives. Heaney, as Wiman reminds us, once claimed that poetry “set[s] the darkness echoing.” The paradox of poetry becomes the paradox of Christianity: In death, we receive the Word of life. Having read He Held Radical Light, my ears are freshly tuned to hear and to respond to Christ’s liberating, devastating invitation.

Christie Purifoy lives with her husband and four children in a farmhouse in Southeastern Pennsylvania. She is the author of Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons (Revell) and the forthcoming Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace (Zondervan).

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Theology

Michael Egnor

As a Christian and a neuroscientist, I keep learning that to be human is to have a soul.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (5)

Christianity TodaySeptember 14, 2018

Source: Tushchakorn / Getty

I watched the CAT scan images appear on the screen, one by one. The baby’s head was mostly empty. There were only thin slivers of brain—a bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around the edges. The rest was water.

Her parents had feared this. We had seen it on the prenatal ultrasound; the CAT scan, hours after birth, was much more accurate. Katie looked like a normal newborn, but she had little chance at a normal life. She had a fraternal-twin sister in the incubator next to her. But Katie only had a third of the brain that her sister had. I explained all of this to her family, trying to keep alive a flicker of hope for their daughter.

I cared for Katie as she grew up. At every stage of Katie’s life so far, she has excelled. She sat and talked and walked earlier than her sister. She’s made the honor roll. She will soon graduate high school.

I’ve had other patients whose brains fell far short of their minds. Maria had only two-thirds of a brain. She needed a couple of operations to drain fluid, but she thrives. She just finished her master’s degree in English literature, and is a published musician. Jesse was born with a head shaped like a football and half-full of water – doctors told his mother to let him die at birth. She disobeyed. He is a normal happy middle-schooler, loves sports, and wears his hair long.

Some people with deficient brains are profoundly handicapped. But not all are. I’ve treated and cared for scores of kids who grow up with brains that are deficient but minds that thrive. How is this possible? Neuroscience, and Thomas Aquinas, point to the answer.

Is the Mind Mechanical?

As a medical student, I fell in love with the brain. It’s a daunting organ: an ensemble of cells and axons and nuclei and lobes tucked and folded in exotic shapes. I had to learn what it looks like when it’s sliced through by CAT scans, and then what it looks like when I slice through it. My fascination with neuroanatomy was metaphysical: this was where our thoughts and decisions came from, this was a roadmap of the human self, and I was learning to read it as I read a book. It was the truth about us, I thought.

But I was wrong. Katie made me face my misunderstanding. She was a whole person. The child in my office was not mapped in any meaningful way to the scan of her brain or the diagram in my neuroanatomy textbook. The roadmap got it wrong.

How does the mind relate to the brain? This question is central to my professional life. I thought I had it answered. Yet a century of research and 30 years of my own neurosurgical practice have challenged everything I thought I knew.

The view assumed by those who taught me is that the mind is wholly a product of the brain, which is itself understood as something like a machine. Francis Crick, a neuroscientist and the Nobel laureate who was the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, wrote that “a person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.”

This mechanical philosophy is the result of two steps. It began with Rene Descartes, who argued that the mind and the brain were separate substances, immaterial and material. Somehow (how, neither Descartes nor anyone else can say) the mind is linked to the brain— it’s the ghost in the machine.

But as Francis Bacon’s approach to understanding the world gained ascendency during the scientific Enlightenment, it became fashionable to limit inquiry about the world to physical substances: to study the machine and ignore the ghost. Matter was tractable, and we studied it to obsession. The ghost was ignored, and then denied. This was what the logic of materialism demanded.

The materialist insists that we are slaves of our neurons, without genuine free will. Materialism comes in different flavors, each having passed into and then out of favor over the past century, as their insufficiency became apparent. Behaviorists asserted that the mind, if it exists at all, is irrelevant. All that matters is what is observable—input and output. Yet behaviorism is in eclipse, because it’s difficult to deny the relevance of the mind to neuroscience.

Identity theory, replacing behaviorism, held that the mind just is the brain. Thoughts and sensations are exactly the same thing as brain tissue and neurotransmitters, understood differently. The pain you feel in your finger is identical to the nerve impulses in your arm and in your brain. But, of course, that’s not really true. Pain hurts and nerve impulses are electrical and chemical. They’re not even similar. Identity theorists struggled with uncooperative reality for a generation, then gave up.

Computer functionalism came next: the brain is hardware and mind is software. But this too has problems. Nineteenth-century German philosopher Franz Brentano pointed out that the one thing that absolutely distinguishes thoughts from matter is that thoughts are always about something, and matter is never about anything. This aboutness is the hallmark of the mind. Every thought has a meaning. No material thing has meaning.

Computation is the mapping of an input to an output according to an algorithm, irrespective of meaning. Computation has no aboutness; it is the antithesis of thought.

Neuroscience and Metaphysics

Remarkably, neuroscience tells us three things about the mind: the mind is metaphysically simple, the intellect and will are immaterial, and free will is real.

In the middle of the twentieth century, neurosurgeons discovered that they could treat a certain kind of epilepsy by severing a large bundle of brain fibers, called the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Following these operations, each hemisphere worked independently. But what happened to the mind of a person with his or her brain split in half?

The neuroscientist Roger Sperry studied scores of split-brain patients. He found, surprisingly, that in ordinary life the patients showed little effect. Each patient was still one person. The intellect and will—the capacity to have abstract thought and to choose—remained unified. Only by meticulous testing could Sperry find any differences: their perceptions were altered by the surgery. Sensations—elicited by touch or vision—could be presented to one hemisphere of the brain, and not be experienced in the other hemisphere. Speech production is associated with the left hemisphere of the brain; patients could not name an object presented to the right hemisphere (via the left visual field). Yet they could point to the object with their left hand (which is controlled by the right hemisphere). The most remarkable result of Sperry’s Nobel Prize­–winning work was that the person’s intellect and will—what we might call the soul—remained undivided.

The brain can be cut in half, but the intellect and will cannot. The intellect and will are metaphysically simple.

One of the neurosurgeons who pioneered the corpus callosotomy for epilepsy patients was Wilder Penfield, who worked in Montreal in the middle of the twentieth century. Penfield studied the brains and minds of epileptic patients in a remarkably direct way, in the course of treating them. He operated on people who were awake. The brain itself feels no pain, and local anesthetics numb the scalp and skull enough to permit painless brain surgery. Penfield asked them to do and think things while he was observing and temporarily stimulating or impairing regions of their brains. Two things astonished him.

First, he noticed something about seizures. He could cause seizures by stimulating the brain. A patient would jerk his arm, or feel tingling, or see flashes of light, or even have memories. But what he could never do was cause an intellectual seizure: the patient would never reason when his brain was stimulated. The patient never contemplated mercy or bemoaned injustice or calculated second derivatives in response to brain stimulation. If the brain wholly gives rise to the mind, why are there no intellectual seizures?

Second, Penfield noted that patients always knew that the movement or sensation elicited by brain stimulation was done to them, but not bythem. When Penfield stimulated the arm area of the brain, patients always said, “You made my arm move” and never said, “I moved my arm.” Patients always retained a correct awareness of agency. There was a part of the patient—the will—that Penfield could not reach with his electrode.

Penfield began his career as a materialist. He finished his career as an emphatic dualist. He insisted that there is an aspect of the self—the intellect and the will—that is not the brain, and that cannot be elicited by stimulation of the brain.

Some of the most fascinating research on consciousness was done by Penfield’s contemporary Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco. Libet asked: What happens in the brain when we think? How are electrical signals in the brain related to our thoughts? He was particularly interested in the timing of brain waves and thoughts. Did a brain wave happen at the same moment as the thought, or before, or after?

It was a difficult question to answer. It wasn’t hard to measure electrical changes in the brain: that could be done routinely by electrodes on the scalp, and Libet enlisted neurosurgeons to allow him to record signals deep in the brain while patients were awake. The challenge Libet faced was to accurately measure the time interval between the signals and the thoughts. But the signals last only a few milliseconds, and how can you time a thought with that kind of accuracy?

Libet began by choosing a very simple thought: the decision to press a button. He modified an oscilloscope so that a dot circled the screen once each second, and when the subject decided to push the button, he or she noted the location of the dot at the time of the decision. Libet measured the timing of the decision and the timing of the brain waves of many volunteers with accuracy in the tens of milliseconds. Consistently he found that the conscious decision to push the button was preceded by about half a second by a brain wave, which he called the readiness potential. Then a half-second later the subject became aware of his decision. It appeared at first that the subjects were not free; their brains made the decision to move and they followed it.

But Libet looked deeper. He asked his subjects to veto their decision immediately after they made it—to not push the button. Again, the readiness potential appeared a half-second before conscious awareness of the decision to push the button, but Libet found that the veto—he called it “free won’t”—had no brain wave corresponding to it.

The brain, then, has activity that corresponds to a pre-conscious urge to do something. But we are free to veto or accept this urge. The motives are material. The veto, and implicitly the acceptance, is an immaterial act of the will.

Libet noted the correspondence between his experiments and the traditional religious understanding of human beings. We are, he said, beset by a sea of inclinations, corresponding to material activity in our brains, which we have the free choice to reject or accept. It is hard not to read this in more familiar terms: we are tempted by sin, yet we are free to choose.

The approach to understanding the world and ourselves that was replaced by materialism was that of classical metaphysics. This tradition’s most notable investigator and teacher was Saint Thomas Aquinas. Following Aristotle, Aquinas wrote that the human soul has distinct kinds of abilities. Vegetative powers, shared by plants and animals, serve growth, nourishment, and metabolism. Sensitive powers, shared with animals, include perception, passions, and locomotion. The vegetative and sensitive powers are material abilities of the brain.

Yet human beings have two powers of the soul that are not material—intellect and will. These transcend matter. They are the means by which we reason, and by which we choose based on reason. We are composites of matter and spirit. We have spiritual souls.

Aquinas would not be surprised by the results of these researchers’ investigations.

What’s at Stake

Philosopher Roger Scruton has written that contemporary neuroscience is “a vast collection of answers with no memory of the questions.” Materialism has limited the kinds of questions that we’re allowed to ask, but neuroscience, pursued without a materialist bias, points towards the reality that we are chimeras: material beings with immaterial souls.

How would our lives or our society be different if we found that our mind was merely the product of our material brain and that our every decision was determined, with no free will?

The cornerstone of totalitarianism, according to Hannah Arendt, is the denial of free will. Under the visions of Communism and Nazism, we are mere instruments of historical forces, not individual free agents who can choose good or evil.

Without free will, we cannot be guilty in an individual sense. But we also cannot be innocent. Neither the Jews under Hitler nor Kulak farmers under Stalin were killed because they were individually at fault. Their guilt was assigned to them according to their type, and accordingly they were exterminated to hasten a natural process, whether the purification of the race or the dictatorship of the proletariat.

By contrast, the classical understanding of human nature is that we are free beings not subject to determinism. This understanding is the indispensable basis for human liberty and dignity. It is indispensable, too, for simply making sense of the world around us: among other things, for making sense of Katie.

I see her in my office each year. She is thriving: headstrong and bright. Her mother is exasperated, and, after seventeen years, still surprised. So am I.

There is much about the brain and the mind that I don’t understand. But neuroscience tells a consistent story. There is a part of Katie’s mind that is not her brain. She is more than that. She can reason and she can choose. There is a part of her that is immaterial—the part that Sperry couldn’t split, that Penfield couldn’t reach, and that Libet couldn’t find with his electrodes. There is a part of Katie that didn’t show up on those CAT scans when she was born.

Katie, like you and me, has a soul.

Michael Egnor, MD, is a neurosurgeon and professor of neurological surgery and pediatrics at Stony Brook University.

From Plough Quarterly No. 17: The Soul of Medicine (Summer 2018) Copyright © 2018 by Plough Publishing House. Reposted with permission.

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Erin Straza

A new history of the ubiquitous personality test sheds light on what it can and can’t deliver.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (6)

Christianity TodaySeptember 14, 2018

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Know thyself. This phrase is inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, which was built in the 4th century B.C. It’s most commonly attributed to Socrates (470–399 B.C.), who often referred to this Delphic aphorism in his teachings. Suffice it to say, this phrase has a long history.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (7)

Without knowing its origins, however, one might mistake it for the anthem of our own day. Our society is infused with self: self-discovery, self-help, selfies. Knowing thyself seems to be the root of our daily existence. Yet, for all our self-reflection, few of us would claim success in knowing the depths of our own hearts and souls. If anything, the quest has made us aware of all we don’t know, thereby intensifying our desire to unlock the mysteries within.

The desire to know ourselves is what prompts us, for example, to take those online pop-culture quizzes. We long to know which movie or TV character we most resemble or which Mamma Mia! character would be our BFF. Do you know which Hogwarts house you would be sorted into? Or which iconic ’90s music video you are? We click through the questions, despite doubting the scientific accuracy of the results—perhaps this is the missing knowledge that will finally give us a defining sense of self.

The Quest for the Perfect Personality

Interest in personality testing actually began long before these quizzes. There’s a history here too—not as far back as Socrates, of course, but one full of mystery nonetheless. One test in particular, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), is the subject of a new book by Merve Emre, an associate professor of English at Oxford University. Titled The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, the book traces the development of the Myers-Briggs test, assessing its impact on our culture and examining both the praise and criticism it has garnered.

Why all the fuss about a single personality quiz? As Emre explains, the Myers-Briggs is a lucrative $500 million industry and an influential field of study spanning “twenty-six countries and more than two dozen languages.” The reach of this particular test is unlike any other. Despite its prominent place in personality-profile history—or, perhaps, because of it—the Myers-Briggs receives plenty of scorn for how it was created and developed. And revealing that backstory is where Emre’s book shines.

The Personality Brokers takes us to the beginning, before Myers-Briggs was an assessment tool, and introduces us to its creators: Katherine Cook Briggs (1875–1968) and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers (1897–1980). Development began when Katherine sought to “conduct daily trials in living that would shape the outer and inner worlds of the people she loved best” by making “her home into a laboratory of personality research.” Katherine was a home scientist; her family, the experimental subjects. Over the course of Isabel’s childhood, Katherine took notes and tested theories in her quest to mold Isabel into the picture-perfect child. The results were positive and obvious to all.

Eventually, Katherine opened her home to neighbors and acquaintances who wanted to learn these successful parenting techniques for rearing their own children. Key to parenting success, according to Katherine, was understanding the child’s personality type; the questionnaire she developed was the precursor to the personality test now used by countless corporations, government entities, and universities.

Much transpired between that first home survey and today’s Myers-Briggs. The details unfold novel-like from one chapter to the next in The Personality Brokers. Besides the creators, we meet various influencers (Carl Jung, Edward Hay, Donald MacKinnon, Mary McCaulley, and others) and early adopters (like the US government, Educational Testing Service, and the University of California, Berkeley).

Emre takes readers along for the wild ride as the Myers-Briggs evolves from infancy to youth to maturity—no easy road. From the start, the test had as many fierce critics as champions. The main critique lodged against it was that the questions and results were pieced together over several decades by two people with no formal training in psychoanalysis. In addition, results were often inconsistent for test subjects over time. All things considered, it’s truly a marvel the Myers-Briggs survived its pilgrimage to become such a commonplace assessment tool.

A Diagnosis, not a Cure

The first time I took the Myers-Briggs, I was in my early 20s, and I was completely unaware of the history or the controversy. I approached the “test” with enthusiasm, carefully marking my answer sheet as I processed my responses to questions about my preferences for social situations, hobbies, work environment, and the like. The questions are “forced-choice,” so respondents select one of two answers—which means you are sometimes choosing an answer that is close enough but not exactly right. This bothered me, as I feared settling for an answer would skew the results. This too is a common critique of Myers-Briggs, one that Isabel Myers justified using the Jungian theory of “enantiodromia,” what Erme describes as “a ‘going over to the opposite’ in which one of the preferences a person did not express [in the first test] ascended to a ‘much more honored place’ in the psyche” by the second test. Myers believed the test assisted its subjects in self-discovery, revealing deeper truths with every pass.

The test provides subjects with a type (one of 16) based on results from four key categories:

Are you outwardly or inwardly focused? (Extraversion or Introversion)

How do you prefer to take in information? (Sensing or Intuition)

How do you prefer to make decisions? (Thinking or Feeling)

How do you prefer to live your outer life? (Judging or Perceiving)

My first results were more affirmation than surprise. While I was not shocked with my INFP type, what was surprising was how meaningful it was to read about my type and how INFPs function in the world. For example, I didn’t realize that making decisions in the moment was something common to Perceiving types but utterly stressful to Judging types. And it now made sense why my dreamy, overly detailed way of speaking (Intuitive type) didn’t click well with some people (Sensing types).

Socrates was right—understanding myself was key to better living. Being aware of specific ways people are wired has helped me show grace for others (and sometimes even for myself). It’s hard to love your neighbor as yourself when your neighbor acts in very different, often confusing or downright annoying ways. The 16 Myers-Briggs personality types have given us a place to start in relating well to others. In this sense, Emre is correct to observe that the Myers-Briggs has given us “a shared ethos of self-contemplation, an inward gaze that many people once looked to religious institutions and religious authorities to provide.”

It may be this shift that raises suspicions among so many people of faith. Should God’s people rely on tools developed outside of the faith to speak to our human condition? Is it possible for a tool designed by flawed humans to speak truth? Like all man-made constructs, there are flaws and blind spots in the Myers-Briggs. Some Christians believe personality profiling to be nearly evil and call true believers to shun such things. Others call for a tempered approach: Take what’s good, discard the rest, and beware how much power you give your type.

Such is the caution Alistair Roberts issues in an article at Mere Orthodoxy:

We are tempted to treat our personality type as justification and explanation for our behaviour, rather than discerning appropriate forms of behaviour and desire from their relation to fitting objective ends. We should observe the measure of circularity that can be present here: in using our personality types as justification for our patterns of behaviour we can forget that our personality typing was derived in large measure from those same patterns.

Learning our type, in essence, is equivalent to gazing into a mirror for the soul. The Myers-Briggs highlights patterns and tendencies, but it doesn’t have the power to help us correct the weak parts of who we are. It hands us a diagnosis, not a cure. Knowing yourself—knowing your type—isn’t enough, because the knowledge isn’t enough to set us free. We are still a people in need of a Savior, no matter which four letters the Myers-Briggs test assigns us.

Erin Straza is managing editor of Christ and Pop Culture and host of the Persuasion podcast. She is the author of Comfort Detox: Finding Freedom from Habits That Bind You (InterVarsity Press).

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Ideas

Mark Galli

Columnist; Contributor

How critics can help us keep such social ministries vibrant.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (8)

Christianity TodaySeptember 13, 2018

I find myself scratching my head as to why so many evangelical Christians committed to social justice are reacting so strongly to the recent statement on social justice.

In part it may be due to matters of style and tone; the statement, for example, is a list of bold affirmations and denials. This is not in tune with our times. While we are wont to make definitive and sweeping pronouncements on social or political matters, we’re hesitant to talk like this with when it comes to things transcendent (more on this below).

As in any statement, there is much I would want to change or tweak, but statements like this do raise fundamental concerns that deserve careful thought.

The Temptations of Social Justice

For example, I think this statement grasps some of the principal temptations of those who are called into the social justice arena. Every ministry of emphasis has its peculiar temptations (e.g., journalists are subject to cynicism among other sins), and we are wise to be aware of them—if for no other reason than to ensure that our social justice ministries remain vibrant.

One social justice temptation, for example, is to let the world determine our social justice agenda and rationale. This is how the statement, now signed by almost 7,000 people, puts it:

WE AFFIRM that God’s law, as summarized in the ten commandments, more succinctly summarized in the two great commandments, and manifested in Jesus Christ, is the only standard of unchanging righteousness. Violation of that law is what constitutes sin.

WE DENY that any obligation that does not arise from God’s commandments can be legitimately imposed on Christians as a prescription for righteous living. We further deny the legitimacy of any charge of sin or call to repentance that does not arise from a violation of God’s commandments.

Of course, evangelicals have different interpretations about how far to extend those Ten Commandments, but I would think we’d all agree that the Jim Crow era violated both the commandments against bearing false witness as well as murder.

But sometimes enthusiasts for social justice push too far. The statement puts it like this:

WE DENY that true justice can be culturally defined or that standards of justice that are merely socially constructed can be imposed with the same authority as those that are derived from Scripture. We further deny that Christians can live justly in the world under any principles other than the biblical standard of righteousness. Relativism, socially-constructed standards of truth or morality, and notions of virtue and vice that are constantly in flux cannot result in authentic justice.

On a more mundane level, this temptation looks like this: You don’t have to go to many social justice gatherings to conclude that if you are not actively involved in this justice issue or that, you are contributing to the injustice: “He who is not fighting racism is implicitly supporting racist policies” and so forth. It’s dramatic rhetoric, to be sure, but in fact, there is no way any of us can be deeply involved in every social justice effort; we are finite beings, and it is not a sin to be finite. We have to pick our causes, and follow the calling of God on our lives.

The devil’s final temptation of Christ was to offer him political power.

The temptations abound, like they do in every ministry: There are some Christians (white, black, Asian, and Hispanic) who are more anxious about their racial or ethnic identity than they are their identity in Christ. There are some Christians who have let feminism or Marxism or deconstructionism or race theory shape their ideas more than the Bible. There are some Christians whose anger at injustice has little righteousness in it, instead driven by hate of a political leader or group. There are some Christians (left and right) who are so anxious about gaining political power to enact their social agenda that they compromise some important Christian values.

Any devout Christian who is deeply committed to social justice knows these temptations firsthand, and the honest among them acknowledge that they have not always resisted these temptations, especially the last. They never forget that the devil’s final temptation of Christ was to offer him political power.

Learning from History

Another critic, pastor John MacArthur, has expressed similar concerns, especially about evangelical engagement in justice issues. I often disagree with MacArthur, but I think his pastoral instincts should be taken into account when he said (in a blog from August):

Evangelicalism’s newfound obsession with the notion of “social justice” is a significant shift—and I’m convinced it’s a shift that is moving many people (including some key evangelical leaders) off message, and onto a trajectory that many other movements and denominations have taken before, always with spiritually disastrous results.

He’s not the first to note this trajectory. We witnessed this in the last century in mainline Protestant Christianity, whose social justice concern in the 1950s and 1960s was admirable in so many ways. But slowly the mainline become nothing more than the Democratic Party at prayer. Typical were the millennium goals established by the Episcopal Church in 2007. The goals were:

Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger Achieve universal primary education Promote gender equality and empower women Reduce child mortality Improve maternal health Combat HIV and AIDS, malaria and other diseases Ensure environmental sustainability, and Create global partnership for development with a focus on debt, aid, and trade.

Nothing wrong with the goals as such, but they were the exact same Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations in 2000. It speaks volumes that a Christian church could not imagine how to talk or prioritize its social justice agenda without simply copying those of a secular institution. One would have thought Matthew 28—taking the gospel to the four corners of the world—might have played some part in its goals for the millennium.

In this regard, evangelicals have a long history of following the culture. When hunger became an international issue in the late 20th century, that’s when evangelicals began talking about it. We didn’t focus much on race until after Ferguson and the rise of Black Lives Matter. We didn’t spend much energy on sexual abuse in church until the #metoo movement. To be clear, these are all worthy causes. But it does give one pause to realize that our gospel doesn’t seem to help us fashion a social justice agenda that is unique to our faith.

We evangelical Christians would be naïve to deny that we are not subject to the same forces that have so compromised the Christian integrity of the mainline. This does not mean that evangelical social justice will inevitably abandon the gospel. Hardly. There are many examples of social justice advocates who remain deeply committed to Christ and the gospel—I think of many leaders in the black church in particular. But social activists more than most are wise to note how the transcendent dimension of social justice can get marginalized.

The Immanent Frame

Anyone involved in social justice ministries is subject to the loss of the transcendent. As Charles Taylor so effectively argued in A Secular Age, we live today in a time that is defined by what he calls “the immanent frame.” At the risk of oversimplifying, this means living as if this world is all there is. This world is reality; the world beyond it is a matter of personal opinion or speculation. In other ages, the world beyond this—the supernatural, the spiritual, the transcendent—was simply assumed and was clearly believed to be the most real.

This is one reason many Christians are more confident making definitive pronouncements about social concerns (the “immanent") and hesitate to speak boldly about theological concerns (the transcendent). We live in an era dominated by the immanent framing of things, and it takes concerted effort to remember that, as important and vital as our world is, it is but a shadow of the reality beyond us and the reality we will enjoy in the kingdom of heaven.

Evangelism is the greatest work of social justice.

Social justice activism by its very nature lives day to day within the immanent frame. It is concerned about the horizontal: how states and institutions treat people and how people treat one another. The Christian might be initially motivated by uniquely Christian ideals to engage in social justice efforts, as well she should, but as history shows, it doesn’t take much before the immanent frame starts to frame everything.

So what exactly is the transcendent dimension of social justice for the evangelical Christian? This is something we’ve been arguing about as a movement for some decades. But I would put it this way: The ultimate goal of social justice is the same as the ultimate goal of all our activity for Jesus—whether that be encouraging Bible reading and prayer, loving our next door neighbor, practicing business as mission, or a hundred other things—that all might come to know and love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. If our social justice doesn’t have this end in view, I believe we will soon become nothing but the Democratic or Republican parties at prayer.

It is right and good, for example, that we seek to alleviate extreme poverty. As an act of neighbor love, we want to do what we can—from simple charity to social reform—to help the poor. If we help the poor rise out of poverty and into the middle class, we have done a wonderful thing. But if that’s all we do, we will be guilty of committing the greatest injustice of all.

For reasons we cannot fathom, God has shown us the mystery of faith: that Christ had died for the forgiveness of sins, that we might become reconciled to God and enjoy him forever with others in a kingdom of love and joy. There is no greater blessing than to know and love God, who is the Desire of all desires, who is the Ultimate Fulfillment of all we long for. We have heard that message and have believed.

Now we constitute, if you will, a privileged spiritual class. It’s not something we take credit for. In being born again, we have been born into a special, elect people—a spiritual aristocracy, who enjoy unimaginable spiritual riches.

Like the materially wealthy, we are called to help those who are spiritually impoverished so they might believe and then enjoy these spiritual riches. And the way we do that is not complicated:

“How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’ ” (Rom. 10:14–15).

To put it starkly: If we fail to share the greatest riches we enjoy, if we keep this great news to ourselves, we are no better than the materially privileged who refuse to share their goods and work to alleviate poverty. We are, in short, practicing a type of injustice.

To not put too fine a point on it: Evangelism is our greatest work of social justice.

Be Quick to Listen

As noted above, we’ve been debating the exact relationship between the gospel and politics, between evangelism and social efforts, for many decades now. The fact that we continue to debate suggests that there are no easy solutions for how to integrate them. Every solution is fraught with temptation, to be sure.

But precisely because this issue is complex, we are wise to listen to brothers and sisters who come at things differently, even when their criticisms are pointed—especially if they ground their arguments in Scripture and the evangelical tradition of interpreting Scripture. If we want evangelical social justice ministries to remain effective and vibrant for decades to come, we are wise to be alert to issues that can inadvertently undermine our love for others in the public square.

Mark Galli is editor in chief of Christianity Today.

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Keith Mannes

What living next to a doomsday prepper taught me about loving my neighbor.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (9)

CT PastorsSeptember 13, 2018

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You could see the vent-stacks from the road, their turret-like, rounded-metal covers just visible above a massive mound of dirt and grass behind the house. In front of those turrets, planted on the top of the mound and painted white, was a 15-foot-tall wooden cross. Strange.

The house itself was strange, too. The three-stall garage was on the left, parallel to the road. Then there was a section that looked like a normal front entrance to any home. Perpendicular to that section, however, and jutting out straight toward the road, was something that looked like one of those small strip motels you see sometimes in rural towns. The only thing missing was a neon “vacancy” sign. And there they were, behind the little strip-motel wing of the house: those turrets. On top and in front of it all stood that cross, bolted to the ground with heavy metal cables.

Guy had built this complex with his own hands, just an eighth-of-a-mile from the church, one year before I moved into the parsonage. Though this all happened nearly 20 years ago, Guy and his particular view of Christian life have often crossed my mind. Especially lately.

Because most striking of all is that underneath those turrets and that cross, buried in the mound, Guy had built a bomb shelter. The door into it was on the house side of the mound.

Guy and his wife did not attend our church. Well, he did try it a few times, but I will admit, he found me lacking as a preacher. In his view, I didn’t have enough grit. I didn’t display enough serious displeasure with the moral slack of America. (True enough, I suppose). Guy was blessed with wealth, and I could tell—from his own words, and sometimes from his deeds—he was a committed tither.

I don’t remember how or why, but there came a day when Guy came over and sat down on the front porch of the parsonage with a sheaf of papers. He skittered off the rubber bands and unrolled maps of the continental US. He pointed to the cities he believed were major nuclear targets, and then he showed me the wavy, dotted lines that depicted the projected fallout patterns from mushroom clouds. Then his finger landed on our region of the world, and sure enough, according to Guy’s projections, our country road would get way less nuclear fallout raining down upon it than almost anywhere else. And that was one of the reasons Guy had decided to build his complex and its bomb shelter right there in our neighborhood.

I guess it made sense. Our neighborhood was rural. The half-mile stretch from the corner of our church to the corner where Guy’s houses were built contained a total of five homes and the township graveyard. Our road was asphalt, but the intersecting roads were all gravel. Nobody would waste a bomb on us.

When Guy suggested that I too should build a shelter, I have to admit, the idea found some receptivity in my increasingly discomforted heart.

More skittering, and Guy rolled open another sheaf of maps, these displaying another array of concentric, wavy lines. These were sea-level maps, and sure enough, the three-mile radius where we lived was the very highest elevation in our whole state. Who knew? So, Guy said, when the world’s ice melted and the flood waters came, they would not reach us. This too is why he built his shelter here. Guy’s survival was meticulously planned.

I’m not sure what storm was threatening in the early 1990s, but I guess it was pretty bad because other people, too, had survival-defense on their minds. Another Christian man I knew quietly revealed to me that he had dug holes on his property and shrink-wrapped and buried major weaponry and ammo so that “When all hell comes down, we’ll be ready.” Guy, however, had taken that approach to a new level when he dug a very big hole and hired cement trucks to pour the walls of a shelter into it.

Guy told me all about those walls—their thicknesses and the overall dimensions of the shelter—on another summer day as he once again he sat on my front porch steps. He un-banded a third set of papers: the blueprint-layout of the shelter. With his finger he stabbed the page from room to room—the one that contained the treadmill for generating electricity, the food-storage room, and the little bedroom. He told me what the door was made of and what its hinges were like and what kind of the force the door could withstand.

A Bolted Door

That blueprint deeply affected me, as did Guy’s view of life. Whatever may have been going on in the world at the time, I was struggling with my own sense of foreboding and fear. My kids were little, and it seemed like deep things in the world were unraveling. When Guy suggested that I too should build a shelter and that he would consult with me on how to do it, well, I have to admit, the idea found some receptivity in my increasingly discomforted heart.

Some form of biblical interpretation was the basis for Guy’s vision. That extension of the house—the one that looked like a motel—had six little rooms in it. According to Guy, when the glaciers melted and the waters rose, he could house family members there. (In the meantime, Guy told me, if ever I encountered someone destitute and in need, he would work out a financial arrangement with the deacons of our church so we could pay for those people to stay in that wing of the house—a generous thought.) Between the house-motel and the bomb shelter, Guy’s compound was a 20th-century Noah’s Ark. It all felt somewhat Old Testament, kind of like Israel withstanding the nations.

In the end, three things kept me from building a bomb shelter of my own. The first was money, because the amount required to do such a thing was prohibitive. The second was that the house I lived in was owned by the church, and I was pretty sure the board would not be thrilled with those little turrets sticking up behind the youth basketball courts. The third reason was my wife, Alicia, who said, “If the world gets that bad—I mean, if that’s what we have to be—I don’t want to live that way.”

She said this in response to my report of Guy’s accounting of how bad this would get. “The worst part,” he said, “will be when people start pouring hot tar down your vent pipes to try to smoke you out … you know, to try to force you to open the door so they can get in.”

I want my life to be a safe place for any panicked sinners who confront me.

That door, bolted shut, was a pretty good image of Guy’s approach to other people. For example, in a community where, in the winter, everybody’s fields were wide open for avid snowmobilers, Guy instead erected large stones as boundary markers to make his property lines clear. Trespassers were not allowed. One night, some idiot snowmobiled through there anyway, and he claims Guy shot bullets over his head. It was just a rumor, but everybody believed it because, honestly, it fit what we knew of Guy.

It fit him also that one day, when our church was gathering food for a local pantry, Guy came in with boxes of canned vegetables and beans. Like I told you, he was generous. So I thanked him for his gifts. He just shrugged and said, “Yep—well, anyway, I had to rotate my stock.” Even Guy’s gifts to the poor flowed from his concept of self-preservation.

For or Against My Neighbors?

That philosophy of life is tempting to me. I still wonder, especially these days, about burying my guns and amassing a stash of ammo—you know, to be ready for evil powers overrunning us or crazed people breaking in. I remember seeing a film clip of a white supremacist after Charlottesville, with his guns displayed on his bed and a smile on his face, saying, “A lot more people are gonna die before this is done.” And I thought, That dude wants to start another civil war. So maybe I should keep a cache of some sort. As the Rolling Stones wrote, hell on earth does sometimes seem “just a shot away.”

With mad bulls galloping through the nations, and through our own, self-preservation is all the rage. But Guy’s vision—if I drink it in and absorb it—doesn’t have anything to do with our armed forces or police or the Second Amendment. No, at its base, Guy’s vision pits me and my cross against my neighbors. When comes destruction, I dig up my hidden guns, beat my panicked neighbors back, and fend for myself. Then I make a mad dash into the fortress I built, slam the door, and listen to my neighbors bang on it while my family and I hunker down with our spoons, hunched over peeled-open cans of beans with our blood-shot eyes nervously darting from side to side. Me and my cross against my neighbor. Even if it kills them.

It’s tough for me to find Jesus in that worldview.

I find myself hoping and praying that my life can be different. More than ever, I want to be truly for my neighbors and with them. In a day of trouble, or maybe just on any given day, I want to be a door that opens to people instead of closing against them. Like the wild disciple in Gethsemane, chastened by the Lord for brandishing a weapon, I feel chastened too. I want to preach the cross and to somehow live out its calling as that which puts hostility to death. I want my life to be a safe place for any panicked sinners who confront me. Even if they kill me.

This is, of course, easy to say as I sit here ever-so-peacefully tapping on my computer. Still, I am prayerfully aiming my heart that way.

Eventually, Guy moved to another town. I walked over to say goodbye as he drove away. He waved dismissively and hit the gas. I have no idea if, for the placement of his new home, he had researched flood-plain levels. A year later, I moved to a new place, too. I live in a bigger town which, if not an actual target, is surely more susceptible to fallout patterns.

If you drive through my old neighborhood, you will notice that the new owner took down the cross. But you can still see the mound and those little turrets—a stark reminder of our need for shelter and the conflicting views of representing Christ in a world of fear and danger.

Keith Mannes is pastor of East Saugatuck Christian Reformed Church of Holland, Michigan.

To hear the perspective of a Christian prepper, read this article from Andrea Palpant Dilley.

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Books

Alex Wainer

The hype declared Batman an atheist. There’s more to it than that.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (10)

Christianity TodaySeptember 13, 2018

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A young boy kneels by his bed, lit by a single candle. His hands clasped in a prayerful posture, he pronounces a vow that will shape the rest of his life: “And I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.”

In the original telling of Batman’s origin, the traumatized young Bruce Wayne, days after witnessing the brutal murders of his parents, has committed himself to a path that will become a double life, torn between light and darkness. When he eventually takes on the likeness of a night creature to terrify criminals and to ensure no one else will suffer his losses, he will succeed so well that the being he created leads to an identity crisis of faith—one that might resonate in our own hearts.

Weeks ago, the news circulated that in Batman #53, Batman would be declared an atheist. There was little surprise, since Batman is the most self-made superhero in the comic book pantheon, and the one least likely to feel dependent on a supernatural God. But fans were intrigued to hear that writer Tom King was going beyond the implications that Bruce Wayne acknowledges no Higher Power, and exploring the dynamics of how this rejection of faith came to be and its consequences.

Yet in a tweet, King himself questioned whether Batman is actually a practicing atheist: “That’s not how I read that comic.” Indeed, the issue ends with a hint that Bruce Wayne is at a crossroads of faith in God versus faith in himself.

Jury Room Debate

The three-part story, “Cold Days” (in Batman, issues #51-53)—written by King and beautifully illustrated by veteran artist Lee Weeks, an outspoken Christian—picks up after Bruce has been left at the altar by Selina Kyle, a.k.a. Catwoman, who had decided that marriage would hinder Batman’s mission. Standing on the edge of a skyscraper in his groom’s apparel, abandoned, Bruce quickly reverts to his other identity, leaving any chance of mourning and recovery behind. Investigating the deaths of three young women, he finds evidence pointing to his old enemy, Mr. Freeze. He finds Freeze and viciously attacks him, leading quickly to Freeze’s confession and trial.

But then, a twist: Bruce Wayne is called to serve on the jury. He becomes the one “not guilty” vote and questions whether there might be another explanation for the murders. “If we follow the actual facts, take out Batman’s … I don’t know … the presumption of supercompetence. His infallibility,” Bruce argues, maybe they can avoid rushing to judgment based on the Dark Knight’s reputation for always seeing what others miss. It’s obvious that Bruce fears his hasty conclusions may lead to a miscarriage of that which obsesses him, justice, and that Batman’s excessive force had terrified Freeze into confessing to the police. Bruce is at war with his alter ego.

But the jury needs more than Bruce’s theory, and so the millionaire explains how his father, a Christian, took him to church. “He held hallow the immortal soul, heaven, the Father and the Son, giving your will to the Lord, trusting him with that will. He wanted me to believe too. But he wanted me to come to it on my own. We went to church. He told me all the stories. Talked a lot about what we can control, what we can’t.” After the loss of father and mother, “I was upset. I … put aside believing in … a deity. Or believing in anything my father thought had saved him. I couldn’t really see that anything had saved him. … After my parents died, I sought transcendence. I found Batman.”

What the jury hears as Bruce’s source of relief from the fear that had stalked him since childhood, the readers see as Bruce’s tortured confession of his search for an alternate savior, who became himself. When a juror asks if Bruce thinks Batman is God, he responds: “If you define God as the infallible, the responsible, the one who determines life and death, then yes. That’s my argument. I thought he was God.” He asserts that the jury’s confidence in Batman is tantamount to that owed to deity. “God is above us. And he wears a cape.”

Who Am I? What Have I Become?

Despite the comic book trappings of “Cold Days,” Bruce Wayne’s journey toward realization of his idolatry of Batman has real-world parallels. It’s painful when we, in our search for peace and fulfillment, discover instead that we are ourselves the source of our anxieties, fears, and conflicts.

Like all the little fires we build to light our way, which ultimately cause us to lie down in torment (Isa. 50:11), the light emanating from the Bat-signal, intended as a means of healing, has become a dangerous idol. Even if the people of Gotham didn’t actually worship Batman, Bruce has discovered that he does.

Similarly, what keeps me awake at night, or in distress through the day, might be a signal that I have my own dueling identities—the diurnal right-believing identity that finds in myself a nocturnal creature whose desires and emotions diverge from my beliefs. Anger, conflict, and frustration undermine my striving to do right.

Bruce Wayne’s drive to realize his commitment to justice by transforming his body and mind into the perfect avatar of justice made him more a Nietzschean ubermensch than a servant of righteousness. Now, in his brokenness, he sees how he’s fallen short. Sometimes, in our own dark night of the soul, we finally see how we have made a little god out of a good thing—a calling, gift, or even family and church—and held it, burning, close to the heart, until God shouts in our pain and our eyes are opened.

“He tries … and he fails, and he tries again. But he can’t,” Bruce is finally forced to admit of Batman. “He does not provide solace from pain. He cannot give you hope for the eternal. He cannot comfort you for the love you lost. God blesses your soul with grace. Batman punches people in the face.”

If his suffering finally brought about his abandonment of Batman as a substitute god, is Bruce ready to also return to faith in his father’s God? He confesses to Alfred, his butler, that he’s “lost” and needs to remember who he is. The caption at the bottom of the last page depicting Bruce, now back in his original suit, quotes Job 1:20–21: “Then Job arose and rent his mantle, and shaved his head. He fell down upon the ground and worshipped. He said: Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Emphasis in original)

Who is Bruce Wayne? Bruce Wayne is us.

Alex Wainer is professor of communication and media studies at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author of Soul of the Dark Knight: Batman as Mythic Figure in Comics and Film.

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Theology

Rosaria Butterfield

When Christians live communally, outsiders find intimacy within the family of God.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (11)

Christianity TodaySeptember 13, 2018

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Some believe that we live in the midst of a moral revolution, with “liquid modernism” flooding into the bulwarks and mainstays of post-Christian cultures. Others call this sort of talk “alarmist” and believe that we live in the days of happy progress, where we can finally realize a true melting pot of human potential. No one feels this tension more than Christian parents whose children are, for a season—perhaps for a very long season—lost to the LGBT community and its values. It can feel shameful to admit to others in your church that you are torn between your faith and your child and that you fear losing one for the other.

For others, perhaps you feel the weight of those in your church who struggle with same-sex attraction and are faithful members of your church, forsaking sin and living in chastity, but still feeling torn between the culture of the church and the culture of the world. Or perhaps you are someone who also struggles with same-sex attraction. You are silent, though, and the hateful things people in your church say make you more silent every day. If you are someone struggling with same-sex attraction in God’s way—forsaking sin, drinking deeply of the means of grace—then you are a hero of the faith. Nothing less.

For all of these burdens—parental, communal, or personal—the Bible has the answer for it: the practice of daily, ordinary, radical hospitality. I believe that if Christians lived communally, then people who struggle with same-sex attraction would not be driven away from the church for intimacy but instead would find real intimacy within the family of God.

Where should you start? As a church community, designate a house where members live and where people can gather daily. And then start gathering daily. And not by invitation only. Make it a place where the day closes with a meal for all, and with Bible reading and prayer, and where unbelievers are invited to hear the words of grace and salvation, where children of all ages are welcome, and where unbelievers and believers break bread and share ideas shoulder to shoulder. This is the best way that I know of to evangelize your LGBT neighbors—and everyone else.

I first saw the gospel lived and loved in a house like this.

As I’ve noted before, coming to faith in Jesus Christ in 1999 caused a cavernous identity crisis for me. When I came to Christ, I broke up with my partner because I knew that obedience to Christ was commanded. But my heart was not in it. Not at all. And conversion to Christ did not initially change my sexual attraction to women. What conversion did change was my heart and mind. My mind was on fire for the Bible, and I could not read enough of it or enough about it.

And my heart was comforted and encouraged by my time—almost daily—in the home of Ken and Floy Smith. The Smiths took me in. But—I was not converted out of homosexuality. I was converted out of unbelief. Daily Bible reading and daily Christian community made me understand something: Union with Christ was emerging as a central component to my identity, one that competed with my sexual identity. Ken and Floy Smith discipled me in what it means to bear the image of God. From the minute they met me—as a gay-rights activist—they treated me like an image bearer of a holy God, with a soul that will last forever.

The way to evangelize your LGBT neighbors is the same way the Smiths evangelized me: by reminding them that only the love of Christ is seamless. Not so for our spouses or partners. Only Christ loves us best. He took on all our sin, died in our place bearing God’s wrath, and rose victorious from the dead. And yes, Christ calls us to be citizens of a new world, under his lordship, under his protection, under his law.

Original sin explains why some struggle with same-sex attraction and have from the day they remember being attracted to anyone. We know that we were all born in original sin and that this imprints our deepest desires. As we grow in Christ, we gain victory over acting on our sin, but our sinful desires do not go away until glory. And we stand in the risen Christ alone, in his righteousness, not in our own. But we are called—by the God who loves us enough to die for us and live for us—to carry a cross, repent of sin, and follow him. Christians know that crosses are not curses, not for the believer.

And Christ puts the lonely in families (Ps. 68:6)—and he calls us to live in a new family of choice: God’s family. So we evangelize the LGBT family by living differently than others, by living without selfishness or guile. We tell each other the promise found in Mark 10:28–30—the hundredfold promise—and we bear out its truth in our homes: Peter began to say to Jesus, “See, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (ESV).

Receive a hundredfold.

The gospel promises that our neighbors who leave the LGBT community for Christ will receive a hundredfold blessing of new family in Christ. From where will this hundredfold come? Will it drop from the sky? No. It comes not only through the presence of Christ in us but also from individual Christian families and from the body of Christ as found in the local church. This means that while there is solitude, there is no chronic loneliness. This means that birthdays and holidays are spent with your family of God.

This means that you are known and you know. This means that you live a life filled with godly intimacy. If the church is not ready to deliver on this hundredfold promise, to what are we calling our friends?

In a culture of biblical hospitality, we develop real friendships. We talk about our differences as people who can see each other’s point of view even if we don’t share it.

When we meet a neighbor who identifies within the spectrum of LGBT life and identity, we commit ourselves to listening and to treating each person we meet as an individual. We understand that sins of identity run deep and hard.

If we really believed that the blood of Christ is thicker than the blood of biology or that partaking of the Lord’s Supper together is the highest bond of intimacy people can have, we would see and deal with each other differently. We would stop regarding singles as people who need to be fixed or fixed up. We would understand that biblical marriage points to the marriage of Christ and the church. We would appreciate that while marriage is by God’s design, he did not design every person for biblical marriage. At the same time, all Christians are married to Christ, have union with Christ, and will be fulfilled only in the New Jerusalem.

This is the question that we who wish to evangelize the LGBT community must answer: To what are we calling people? If we know what we are calling people from but do not have anything to call people to, we are only sharing half of the gospel.

Rosaria Butterfield (PhD, Ohio State University) is an author, speaker, pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and former tenured professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University. She is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert and The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World.

This essay was adapted from Joyfully Spreading the Word: Sharing the Good News of Jesus edited by Kathleen Nielson and Gloria Furman, ©2018. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.

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Pastors

Derek Hiebert

I work for a seminary, but my advice for aspiring ministers doesn’t start there.

Page 641 – Christianity Today (12)

CT PastorsSeptember 12, 2018

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“What should I do to become a pastor?”

Recently a young man asked me this question via text message. I imagine you have been asked the same question by someone in your congregation—an eager person looking to take the next step in their spiritual growth. You probably have a safe guess as to what my answer was, especially since I am the director of the Western Seminary Seattle Teaching Site. We all know the assumed logic in America for landing a career:

1. Decide what to do with your life.

2. Go to school to learn the skillset.

3. Graduate from said school.

4. Get hired for a job using that skillset.

Now substitute “school” with “seminary,” and voilà! You have a career in pastoring … right?

You might be surprised to learn that this isn’t the answer I texted back to the aspiring pastor, and it isn’t the answer I hope pastors give congregants who ask the same question. In the Bible, those God called to shepherd his people didn’t look at their ministry work as a career—at least not in the way we understand the concept. Their learning came first from development in the context of a local church, with an eye for Christ-centered conviction, character formation, and the ability to make and multiply disciples. Formal training, if they received it, came after the core development they received within the local church.

That is not to say I am anti-seminary. As I wrote above, my full-time job is with a seminary. Academic training is an important resource for those entering full-time ministry. My aim here is not to discourage pastors from recommending seminary, but to provide an intentional order of steps they can offer aspiring pastors that starts long before formal, academic training. This model comes in part from my personal experience of being mentored in the local church prior to attending seminary and in part from my current work counseling people toward theological training.

How, then, did I respond to the young man who asked me what he needed to do to become a pastor? Below you’ll find the strategic, six-step process I recommended. This list is not exhaustive, nor must each step be followed strictly in sequence, one right after the other—they can overlap.

Step 1: Commit to a local church and begin serving.

This may seem basic, but it’s too important to skip, and it isn’t a given. A friend of mine recalls meeting several people during his seminary education who had not committed to a local congregation in years. Some were indecisive. Others were jaded. Many couldn’t imagine joining a congregation that didn’t fit their ideal vision of church—one they hoped to implement right after graduation.

If a pastor’s primary task is to shepherd a local church, the sooner aspiring pastors commit to life in the local church—in all its imperfection and beauty—the better prepared they will be for future pastoral ministry. It is primarily in the context of the local church where on-the-job ministry training begins.

Behind-the-scenes roles help to form a pastor’s character around the gospel, shaping them with humility and gentleness.

A major component of organic training in a local church includes experiencing what it is like to serve in that context. This can be in a variety of capacities, but it should start with small, behind-the-scenes responsibilities.

Before I began any formal leadership role in the local church, I immersed myself in volunteer ministry by serving with middle school students in the youth program. There, I began to learn what it means to be a servant: committing to show up for weekly youth events, helping with setup and cleanup, making space in my schedule to spend one-on-one time with kids, and enduring all-nighters and weekend retreats. I was not paid to serve in this way, nor was I given an “upfront” role. I was merely one of a team of servants giving of my time, energy, and gifts to serve the church.

This experience built into my leadership DNA three values. First, the core motivation for ministry comes from the gospel. We get to serve the church because we have been so graciously served by our savior. Second, I learned the art of modeling what I taught. Pastors cannot lead people to serve wholeheartedly if they have never done the same. Third, behind-the-scenes roles help to form a pastor’s character around the gospel, shaping them with humility and gentleness. In other words, one of the best ways to prepare someone for full-time pastoral ministry is to seat them behind a soundboard, ask them to set up chairs before an event, or invite them to mentor a student as a volunteer.

Step 2: Read the whole Bible at least once.

I worry that the process of reading the entire Bible is becoming a lost art. That’s unfortunate for any Christian, but for potential pastors, it is devastating. Admittedly, this is a step I didn’t experience early in my faith and church experience. I was encouraged to read portions of Scripture—key narratives and memorable passages—before I began leading in ministry, but reading the whole Bible was not part of my regular practice until later.

Obviously, the Bible is a massive tome. The thought of reading the whole book cover to cover can seem a daunting task. But over the years, as I learned the importance of reading through the entire Bible, I discovered advantages for potential pastors. First, they will begin to learn the importance of context when interpreting Scripture. Second, they will begin to grasp the story-formed worldview of the gospel—difficult to discern from disembodied verses—which is a necessary component of Christian theology. Third, it will help them develop a life-long love and appreciation for Scripture, which will be their lifeblood throughout the rigors of ministry. Fourth, even before they serve as a pastor, they will take the lead in curbing the increasing problem of biblical illiteracy in the church.

Step 3: Learn how to make disciples and shepherd people.

The Great Commission undergirds all pastoral ministry. There is no pastoring without disciple-making. It is absolutely imperative that aspiring pastors learn what the Great Commission ought to look like in the local church and everyday life.

During my early development, I learned that making disciples happens not just through weekly, large-group teaching, but through one-on-one and small-group environments. In one situation, I had built a relationship with a middle school boy who was deficient in his reading ability. Part of my discipleship strategy with him was reading Scripture, as well as books from the Chronicles of Narnia. This was immensely fruitful for both of us. He learned to read, and I learned how to do life-on-life discipleship.

I should point out that each of these first three steps aren’t limited to those working toward full-time ministry. They are things every committed follower of Christ should aspire to achieve—which makes it even more distressing when I encounter seminary students who haven’t done any of them. Pastors often say things like, “Seminary didn’t teach me how discouraging it would be to toil in obscurity,” or, “Seminary didn’t train me to shepherd distracted people and naysayers.” Those things should be discovered in the discipleship process of any committed Christian, and I encourage you to push aspiring pastors in those areas before discerning a particular call to pastoral ministry.

Step 4: Pray and listen for God’s direction toward ministry.

Aspiring pastors cannot answer the question “How do I become a pastor?” until they have first answered the question, “What is God telling me to do?” Whatever your view of “calling” into ministry, the potential pastors you’re guiding won’t get very far without committed time in prayer and listening to God. I encourage this step after someone has spent time serving and making disciples because it is during those experiences when people typically begin to get a specific sense of God’s leading.

Seminary is not the end-all means of ministry training, nor should it be the first step in the training regimen for future pastors—and I trust many seminaries would agree.

God often speaks in the context of church community. Early on, as I continued to serve in various capacities with opportunities to teach and lead worship at Sunday gatherings, church members began to encourage me and affirm my gifts (though not without constructive feedback, especially on my preaching). I did not hear God speak audibly to me, but I sensed his will and vocational plan for my life through his church by way of collective affirmation. As you encourage prospective pastors to express their gifts and passions in various ministry environments, help them listen carefully for feedback from other members of the congregation. The church community can provide many sets of eyes to observe and assess their readiness for pastoral ministry.

This process of prayer and listening has another benefit: aspiring pastors will grow in maturity by developing a healthy self-awareness and gratitude for how God has created them. Pastors sometimes leave the ministry because they were a poor fit for a particular role; because their gifts were under-utilized, resulting in vocational strain; or because they tried to express a gift they simply didn’t have. This growth in self-awareness will serve future pastors well for years of effective ministry.

Step 5: If God is leading toward pastoral ministry, begin to look at seminary.

I insert this step near the end as a way to define the nature and purpose of seminary. Unlike the typical role of education in the modern American model of career building, seminary is not the end-all means of ministry training, nor should it be the first step in the training regimen for future pastors—and I trust many seminaries would agree. They offer a unique context for honing theology and ministry theory, but they are not the kind of environment where potential pastors can learn the crucial skillsets of shepherding and making disciples. This context can only be found within the local church.

I have seen this step play out well in the life of a student at my institution, Western Seminary. He spent much of his high school, college, and young professional years serving in a variety of unpaid roles with his local church, where he has been a committed member for more than 10 years. He learned some basic theology while serving there, but it wasn’t until he attended seminary that he achieved greater confidence and clarity in his theology. He found this to be true, for example, with the doctrine of the New Covenant—a concept he had heard about in Sunday liturgy and of which he understood the basic gist. However, since his time in seminary, he has added depth and nuance to his understanding of this crucial aspect of theology: how it compares and contrasts with the Old Covenant and its place in God’s redemption plan and the grand narrative of Scripture.

This student is experiencing the rightful purpose of seminary. It exists to augment hands-on training in the church with accurate theology and ministry theory. It is an academic context where pastors and leaders are trained in tandem with experiential learning in the local church.

Once you are confident God is leading a person toward a vocation in pastoral ministry, you should begin helping them look at which seminary will best prepare them for pastoring. Choosing a seminary to attend for four-or-more years is a big decision, and every seminary is different. Aspiring pastors will likely look to you for guidance and recommendations.

Step 6: Begin reading theology.

This step could actually come right after Step 2, but I place it at the end because the previous steps add so much important context to the study of theology. When aspiring pastors have real-life experience serving and making disciples in a local church, they will realize the need for help in responding to tough questions, from others and in their own minds.

Even veteran pastors struggle with doubts and wrestle with biblical texts and doctrines. Aspiring pastors should expect the same. They may even find they have a personal passion to study theology more deeply. They could attempt this undertaking on their own, but seminary training will equip them with tools and research methods to make their theological study more fruitful. In-depth reading of theology is an addendum to the foundational biblical story and truths of the gospel attained through Bible reading and experiential learning in the local church and everyday life.

If you know people who want to pursue full-time ministry, it is paramount that you help them approach their training in a holistic way, prioritizing hands-on ministry skills supplemented with theological education in the classroom. They do not need help pursuing merely a vocational path to ministry; they need preparation to equip people for living in the powerful reality of the kingdom of God amidst a dark and broken world. The gravity of that situation requires an equally weighty and intentional approach to pastoral development.

Derek Hiebert is the director of the Seattle Teaching Site of Western Seminary.

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