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IS WATER THICKER THAN BLOOD?

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WHO IS JESUS? SESSIONS & SPEAKERS

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Jesus According to Pop Culture DAVID ZAHL

False Jesuses KIM RIDDLEBARGER

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Jesus’ Person and Work ROD ROSENBLADT

Jesus and the History Channel MICHAEL HORTON Lamb of God: Old Testament Prophetic Texts NANCY GUTHRIE

What Does the Early Church Say About Jesus?

W. ROBERT GODFREY Good News! You’re Not Jesus MICHAEL HORTON

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features VOL.24 | NO.3 | MAY-JUNE 2015

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The First Family: Outside the Home

BY DAVI D VA ND RUN EN

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Becoming a Contrast-Society: A Reflection on the Nature of Christian Community

BY C. CHRI STO PHER SMITH

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Growing a Healthy Heart

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Who Should the Church Look Like?

A Study on Diversity

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Grounded in the Resurrection: The Church as a Community of Kinship

BY JA ME S K . A . SMITH

BY PI OT R J. MAĹ YS Z

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departments 04 05 10 14 16 57 63 64

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

BY E RI C LA NDRY

INTERVIEW ›› The State of

the Evangelical Church Q&A WI T H E D ST ETZ E R

CHRIST & CULTURE ›› Looking at Buildings

and Listening to the Gospel

BY N. S. CO LE MA N

THEOLOGY ››

Father’s Day: A Day for the Fatherless

BY LE O N M. BROWN

My Child, My Neighbor, and the Church

BY A NNA I LO NA MUSSMA NN

BOOK REVIEWS BILLINGS, PIKETTY, AND WITMER

GEEK SQUAD ›› Beyond Culture Wars…Again

BY MI CHA E L S. HO RTO N

BACK PAGE ›› Diversity in

the American Church

BY BRO O K E VE NT URA

Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Associate Editor Brooke Ventura Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Design Director José Reyes for Metaleap Creative, metaleapcreative.com Review Editor Ryan Glomsrud Designers Tiffany Forrester, Ashley Shugart, Harold Velarde Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith Modern Reformation © 2015 All rights reserved. ISSN-1076-7169 Modern Reformation (Subscription Department) P.O. Box 460565 Escondido, CA 92046 (855) 492-1674 info@modernreformation.org www.modernreformation.org Subscription Information US 1 YR $32. 2 YR $58.

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LETTER from the EDITOR

ERIC LANDRY executive editor

Who were your most formative influences in life?

What experiences have made you into the person you are today? Our families—in both their healthy and dysfunctional forms—continue to shape and reshape all of us well into our old age. Sometimes we feel as if we’ll never be free from their unhealthy influence on us; sometimes we long for the warmth and embrace of those we were born to love. When the Bible uses the term “family” to refer to our relationships in the church, it brings to bear all the good and bad connotations of that word to the fellowship of the saints.

It’s not hard to imagine that families in the first century had many of the same underlying problems that families have today. Sibling rivalry, absentee fathers, smothering mothers—the stereotypes ring true because they’re part of human nature. Still, “family” is the term the Bible uses to describe God’s people. So, by using such an earthly word, God is telling us that even this new relationship born out of belief will be touched by many of the same joys and struggles that our biological families share.

Yet when Christians are brought into the family of God, their belonging isn’t a matter of DNA: “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother,” says Jesus (Matt. 12:50). Ideally, then,

the “whoever-ness” of this new family makes it broader and more representative of all the tongues, tribes, and nations of earth than your own natural family. The sad reality, however, is that our church families look too much like our natural families—mere extensions of the stratified community into which each of our families is carefully placed.

Is there a way to overcome the natural and all too common barriers to belonging to the people of God? Can the waters of baptism trump our genetic and social predispositions to people who look like we do, vote like we do, educate their kids like we do, laugh at the same jokes, and shop at the same stores? In this issue, we marshal the best theological, exegetical, and sociological resources to help us rediscover our new identity in Christ.

First up is Presbyterian pastor and theologian David VanDrunen, who helps us understand what the Bible says about the church and our new family relationships in the church. Christopher Smith, coauthor of Slow Church, follows this biblical-theological review with some practical advice for nurturing the faith-formed relationships in the local church. Reformed philosopher James K. A. Smith compares the competing liturgies of church and culture, asking how our natural families are formed (or deformed) by these rhythms of faith and life. Lutheran theologian Piotr Małysz returns to our pages with a discussion of the togetherness of Christian worship and the ways that God’s ongoing work in the church creates a new community of faith.

Our hope with this issue is that it will increase our understanding and appreciation of the church and benefit not only you and your natural family as you all worship God, but also your new family in Christ—prepared together for that great day when we dine with him at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

“ ‘FAMILY’ IS THE TERM THE BIBLE USES TO DESCRIBE GOD’S PEOPLE.”

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INTERVIEW

Q & A with ED STETZER

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INTERVIEW

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d Stetzer is executive director of LifeWay Research and a well-known conference and seminar leader. Holding two master’s degrees and two doctorates, Stetzer has planted, revitalized, and pastored churches, trained pastors and church planters on six continents, and has written dozens of articles and books. We posed a series of questions about the state of evangelicalism: where people go to church, the diversity of church, worship trends, and church growth theories.

Q In 1970, Donald McGavran, a missiologist and founding dean and professor of Mission, Church Growth, and South Asian Studies at the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, published a seminal book on missions titled Understanding Church Growth. How have church growth theories changed since Donald McGavran popularized the concept of a homogenous unit?

a. McGavran contributed much more than

the Homogenous Unit Principle (HUP), though that is probably what he will be remembered for. What he did was seek to apply some of the social sciences to missions. But yes, church growth theories changed from what McGavran said to what his disciples said, and it has continued to change.

Over the years, a lot of this headed into “methodological mania.” Basically, some people turned missiological analysis into methodological strategies: “If you do these four things, then these nine things will happen.”

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So the Church Growth Movement (note the capitals) ended up missing some key things.

For example, I’d say the movement focused more on growth than on genuine conversions, more on fruitfulness at the expense of faithfulness, and ultimately more on enlarging a church rather than on what a church actually is. However, it would be a mistake to not learn how best to engage our culture so that we can proclaim the gospel most clearly. That’s what McGavran was originally about, and he sought to apply that to the HUP. The HUP basically said that people were more likely to come to Christ without crossing racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic boundaries.

At the time, that was surprising and new to consider. Today, most consider that to be common sense—a poor, Gujarati church in Sindh, Pakistan, is more likely to reach the ethnic minority of Gujarati in Sindh.

An issue arose when people began applying those principles in ways that separated rather than brought people together, which can be tricky. For example, the Presbyterian Church in America has an African-American ministries department led by my friend Wy Plummer.

Should it? Furthermore, doing research on how African-American church plants can be more effective would be the kind of research that McGavran would say is the correct application of his HUP. Wy and the leadership of the PCA became the lead sponsor of a LifeWay Research project that examined 290 AfricanAmerican church planters. In their study they found that among the churches that closed, lack of financial support was the most common contributing factor. The survey identified three characteristics that had the most positive impact on worship attendance. Those characteristics were present in more than two-thirds of the churches: delegation of leadership roles to volunteers, leadership training for new church members, and a plan of personal spiritual formation for the church planter. The study also found that worship style impacts attendance. The most common worship style used

by African-American church plants was blended, cited by 45 percent, followed by contemporary gospel, contemporary, and urban contemporary, ranging from 12 to 14 percent. However, church plants with a more distinctive style, urban contemporary for instance, had higher attendance than churches using a blended style. That’s the best of Donald McGavran applied today.

In the past, megachurches have catered to specific musical tastes or worship environments by hosting

multiple worship venues on one campus. Church plants have targeted specific populations in neighborhoods of large urban areas. Is niche marketing dead? Are those sorts of trends changing?

a.

It’s maybe not dead, but it’s definitely changed. Years ago, particularly during the 1980s and ’90s, there was a swarm of new or transitioned churches that moved into contemporary approaches. Today, most large churches are led like Saddleback and worship like Calvary Chapel.

In other words, niche marketing may seem less MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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INTERVIEW

common, but as most churches look alike now, that’s not really a niche.

Now, of course, I know there are major exceptions—and many churches of the readers of this magazine would be among them. However, the fact is that what those niche churches did in 1987 was not what a normal large church looked like, whether Presbyterian, Baptist, or nondenominational. So you did not need a niche when there was a worship war and the niche churches won. Most churches are just generically contemporary with variants of that approach.

Are evangelical churches becoming more or less diverse in their congregations?

“SIMPLY PUT, EVERYONE LOVES THE IDEA OF DIVERSITY; THEY JUST DON’T WANT TO DO CHURCH WITH PEOPLE WHO ARE DIFFERENT FROM THEM.”

a.

They are more diverse but probably not as much as in the general population.

Interestingly, in a recent LifeWay Research survey, 85 percent of serious Protestant pastors say every church should strive for racial diversity. Yet about the same percentage say their church is predominantly one racial or ethnic group. The most recent National Congregations Survey from Duke University summarized that American congregations have become more ethnically diverse since 1998. A key point is that, although the population of congregations has itself become somewhat more diverse—for example, 7.7 percent of churchgoers attended predominantly Hispanic congregations in 2012 compared to only 1.4 percent in 1986—there also is meaningful change within congregations. That is, congregations, especially predominantly white congregations, have become more internally diverse since 1998. The percentage of people attending congregations in which no ethnic group constitutes at least 80 percent of the regular attendees increased from 15.3 percent in 1998 to 19.7 percent in 2012. So we have made progress, but we have a long way to go. Simply put, everyone loves the idea of diversity; they just don’t want to do church with people who are different from them.

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How do the percentages break down of people worshipping in churches? Are more people in fewer large churches? How does the research speak about church size? What is the segmentation from small church to megachurch or beyond?

a.

The largest trend is toward large, nondenominational churches. The language differs, though, on how to describe this. For example, there is no real definition of a “small church.”

This probably seems odd, but the issue is that the “small” church is the “normal-sized” church.

The National Congregations Study puts the median church size around 75. Although most people would say that’s a small church, it’s really a normal church. So the small church is the normal church. Yet most Americans don’t go to small churches, even though most American churches are small. Let me explain: Just about everyone would consider a church with 1,000 people in weekly attendance to be a large church. More people attend churches with over 1,000 people than attend churches with fewer than 100—even though almost 60 percent of churches consist of less than 100 people. Fifty percent of church attendees actually attend the largest 10 percent of churches.

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C H R I S T & C U LT U R E

LOOKING AT BUILDINGS

AND LISTENING TO THE GOSPEL

by N. S. COLEMAN

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PHOTO BY SCOTT PAGE

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s a triangle inherently any more moral than a rectangle? Let that seemingly odd question sink in for a few moments. Now, how about a cube and a pyramid? Or

perhaps a stone villa or glass-and-steel house? This distinction is what architects call “form”—that is, the physical shape, size, and material quality of the structures we build or do not build.

While it has been said that form follows function, it can never equal function. The outward form of our buildings and cities cannot be equated with the social life and vitality that inhabit them.

Contrary to what a recent set of Modern Reformation articles seems to suggest (“How to Listen to a Building,” September/October 2013, and “The Church Meets the Humpty Dumpty Zoning Ordinance,” January/February 2014), I would like to offer that the forms of our buildings and cities have absolutely nothing to do with the most moral of all questions: reconciling sinners to a holy God. We might agree that the particular shape, cut, and style of our shoes, suits, and dresses do nothing to express the inward longing of each of our persons.

My pajamas can tell you nothing of my hopes or my aspirations—not to mention the utter depths of my sinful depravity. Why do we expect our buildings to operate differently? Are we really comfortable

saying that our desire for a tree-lined sidewalk is intrinsically more moral than our choice to wear loafers instead of tennis shoes?

Never mind that our preferences change as often as the evening sun sets. Just look at how many women wear sweaters with shoulder pads these days, or the number of men in bell-bottoms you might see swinging around. We would be ignorant to assume that our preferences for our buildings’ aesthetics are not as fashionable as our choice in clothing. Obviously, the time and money that we devote to our buildings greatly increases their longevity vis-à-vis our preferences. It is no wonder that the psalmist talks of the heavens wearing out “like a garment” rather than a stone column. But even the MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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C H R I S T & C U LT U R E

ancient Greeks knew that stone columns do “wear out.” The Ionic order followed the Doric, just as slim-fit suits followed baggie pants. One style of stone column became unfashionable and was exchanged for a more elegant “cut.” It would be terribly presumptuous to assume that any one of these fledgling aesthetics is more intrinsically fitting to the gospel than another, that an architect’s preference for glass and steel is more (or less) holy than stone and wood. What greater authority should our own changing fashions have upon the shape of our children’s churches than our fathers had on ours? Will we set our children’s “teeth on

edge” with a weak attempt at Classical form, just to assuage the assault done to us by a rampant, uncritical Modernism?

Let me be clear: I adore beautiful buildings.

They are, quite literally, my life and profession.

And I say that as unequivocally as I can, being a

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fan of both Modern and Classical aesthetics. But to put the word gospel anywhere close to either of those preferences is to forego the only good news we truly have. To assume that whatever design our culture prefers is somehow equal to its own moral and religious vacuity, and thus claim it to be inherently anathema to our gospel message, is shortsighted and ignorant of the very hope declared in that proclamation. As much as I love a beautifully detailed Classical building, I must never hold it up against an equally well-designed contemporary masterpiece—at least not in the name of morality. Our proclamation of hope to this fallen world is not to be found in pedestrian-friendly streets or quaint villages over and against megalomaniacal cities and suburbs. Midtown Manhattan shouldn’t give way to The Truman Show aesthetic of Seaside, Florida—not in the name of Christ.

Indeed, we really should take much more time and consideration in the design of our buildings than our culture (and greedy developers) prefer. We need to take all the time we can afford to make certain that our cities, homes, and churches are as functional, beautiful, and long-lasting as possible. But to propose that one particular style of building speaks any more willingly on behalf of the gospel is to ignore history.

If buildings speak, it is only of ourselves—their creators—and the vain sinful desires that reek and fester within us. If the pediment on the front of a New England church could speak, it would tell of the horrors of ancient Greece and Rome, where it was first used on idolatrous temples and solemnly presided over licentious debauchery and murder. If the pointed Gothic arch inside a medieval cathedral could speak, it would moan over the feudal labor that hewed it into shape in a Europe presided over by a self-aggrandizing and doctrinally erroneous Holy See. Are we really prepared to uphold the architectural forms of the ancient

heathen or the medieval hypocrite as a paragon of Christian “community” and its expression? Against those who would deny the justification of sinners, is aesthetics really the battle we are willing to fight?

We must remember that architecture and urban design have no ability to create community. That power rests in the glorious message of the gospel alone. Only the living word of Christ speaks, calling sinners from darkness to light. Against the accusations of our sin, the refractions of sunlight in a particular window or the shadow line from a classical cornice remain silent. While physical light and darkness are powerful metaphors for the spiritual realities of our struggle with sin (regardless of their apostolic use), to assume that they can become more than mere metaphor is to lose the forest for the trees. Metaphors always lead us to something more; signs always give way to the thing signified. And we have signs, signs that our Lord himself gave us: bread, wine, and water—not buildings. These alone are the visible gospel, completely independent of our churches’ shape, size, or color.

One particular heap of bricks can no more speak the words of the eternal Word than a pile of rotting drywall. And both remain impotent to encourage sinful men to love one another. Contrary to centuries of architects’ failed attempts, utopia does not begin at the drafting board.

But man has always tried, even long before Modernism. Take the New England city of New Haven, Connecticut, as a quick example. This independent colony was founded as an attempt to presage the heavenly Jerusalem, with its streets laid out according to Ezekiel’s temple vision (or at least a Renaissance approximation thereof ), centered on a single church set in a generous park, a renewed Eden. But the search for an earthly paradise aborted any longing for their heavenly home. Even a city with a tall white steeple at its very center could not keep men from pushing Christ out of the center of their hearts. And without the Word-made-flesh, there is no shape or size of a city or building that can unite people. Architecture cannot make “community.”

Our hope cannot be in the form of our built environment, no matter how harmonious its shape and proportion, nor the promise of earthly bliss it may offer. We may imagine a city with numerous treelined streets, beautifully landscaped parks, and a stout stone-and-timber church at its center where

“CONTRARY TO CENTURIES OF ARCHITECTS’ FAILED ATTEMPTS, UTOPIA DOES NOT BEGIN AT THE DRAFTING BOARD. BUT MAN HAS ALWAYS TRIED.” the message of Christ’s atoning blood is absent, and find nothing short of Sodom.

Our only hope for fellowship and empathy on this momentary pilgrimage will be found in the shed blood and risen body of our Lord, and only there.

And with regard to him and his saving work, our buildings will always remain silent. But not our pulpits. When Christ is preached boldly, we can turn and see our own sprawling suburban wastelands, our tacky developer McMansions, and our shoddy, run-down churches ringed with acres of asphalt, and behold Zion. And more than any beautiful building or ingeniously planned suburb of our own design, may each of us long for that great city to come, begun so humbly in the faithful preaching of the word and administration of the sacraments.

And there may we pilgrims finally behold the glory of our heavenly home, to which no earthly structure can ever compare, one “whose builder and architect is the Lord.”

N. S. Coleman holds degrees in architecture from the University of Southern California and Yale University. He currently practices in Los Angeles and is a member of Christ Reformed Church (URCNA) in Anaheim, California.

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THEOLOGY

Father’s Day: A Day for the Fatherless

by LEON M. BROWN

I

t’s Father’s Day, and Hallmark and other retail stores greatly benefit during this holiday.

Revenue is increased as children, quite possibly along with a parent, flock to these venues to purchase cards and other gifts that express gratitude.

Children desire to ensure their father knows how much they care about him. It’s common, therefore, to see Father’s Day gifts with the words “You’re the Best!” or “World’s Best Dad” etched on them. T-shirts and cards abound with these statements, whether true or not. In all the rejoicing that occurs on this day, what about the other—the fatherless? How do they celebrate this national holiday? Has this become a second Mother’s Day for the fatherless?

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“WHILE FATHER’S DAY IS A GREAT TIME TO CELEBRATE ONE’S DAD, IT IS ALSO A TIME TO CONSIDER THE OTHER. JAMES WRITES, ‘PURE RELIGION AND UNDEFILED BEFORE GOD AND THE FATHER IS THIS, TO VISIT THE FATHERLESS…’” During holidays like this, we don’t often think about the other. Our minds are often so consumed by our own family ethos, we not only neglect considering the other but we also forsake how we might be a blessing to the other. There is no shortage of the fatherless. According to some statistics, single parent households are as high as 60 percent in some major cities in the United States. Additionally, there are thousands of children awaiting adoption or foster parents. Hence, while Father’s Day is a great time to celebrate one’s dad, it is also a time to consider the other. James writes, “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless…” (James 1:27, King James Version).

The fatherless are a high priority to God (Exod.

22:22; Deut. 10:18; 24:19; Ps. 10:18; 68:5; 82:3). The Lord desires to ensure that justice is not perverted toward the fatherless, that they are well taken care of, and that he, God, is Father to the fatherless. More subjectively, however, many children have never known the warm embrace of a loving and caring father. The fatherless hear stories about how someone’s dad is there to clean his son’s first wound, teach him how to ride a bicycle, or throw the football on Saturday afternoon. The fatherless live vicariously through those who share narratives about when their father taught them how to drive a car and when he was present to congratulate them at high school graduation. The fatherless can’t purchase gifts on Father’s Day that say, “You’re the Best!” or “World’s Best Dad.” There’s a void in their hearts, whether they admit it or not, where they wish their family were normal and Dad present.

Such reality should cause us to mourn with those who mourn. It should bid us to help in whatever manner we are able (that is, visiting the fatherless and the orphans). There are, however, redemption stories. While the ultimate story of redemption is captured in the gospel, there are lesser versions of redemption and reconciliation that should make our hearts glad.

In February 2013, just after the birth of my daughter, I met my father, who had been absent from my life since I was four. I found his contact information on an Internet website that only charged $2.95 for a telephone number and address.

With great anticipation, I called the telephone number, and after a brief interaction with the man on the other line, he revealed that he was my father.

Then he said some of the most encouraging words I could have ever heard from him: “I was looking for you.”

In the sea of fatherless and orphans, my story is abnormal. Not everyone will have the privilege of meeting their father after over thirty years of absence. Despite such a narrative, however, you can be a blessing to the fatherless and the orphans.

There are plenty of children to whom we can reach out on this national holiday. Please consider being an encouragement to the fatherless and orphan on this day—a day when they cannot celebrate the joys of having a godly father in the home.

Leon M. Brown is pastor of Crown and Joy Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Richmond, Virginia.

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THEOLOGY

My Child, My Neighbor, and the Church

by ANNA ILONA MUSSMANN

E

ven before he was born, my son interfered with my participation at church. The exhaustion of pregnancy sent me to bed at the same time as evening services began, and when I signed up to provide soup for the Lenten suppers, I had to send the food via my husband so that I could lie down. Since then, my little guy has steadily devoured ever more of my time and resources.

Not only am I prevented from volunteering for numerous roles that I might otherwise be well fitted for, but on the average Sunday morning I don’t even hear the whole sermon, because a small person is jumping up and down on my lap or bursting into tears when he is not allowed to bite the hymnal.

Yet motherhood has given me an opportunity to serve my neighbor, in and out of church, in new ways. The more obvious benefit is the instant connection to other mothers. I am able to go on playdates, chit-chat, form friendships, and offer an example of Christian living to women with whom I might not otherwise have as much in common. The shining, fresh, obvious humanity of babies breaks down barriers of race,

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socioeconomic status, and culture, and people are eager to interact with my smiling child. Babies are awesome that way.

Another way in which my son enables me to serve others is much more complex. In today’s culture, we sometimes think of children as a hobby or a lifestyle choice, as if trying to achieve the picture-perfect family was analogous to a love of golf or trying to become an artist. This makes child-rearing sound a bit selfish, especially if it absorbs the time that could otherwise be devoted to serving people outside of one’s own home. Children, however, are not extensions of ourselves and our desires. They are not cute little accessories that we pick up exactly three-and-ahalf years into marriage.

Lately, I have been noticing a slew of online articles that say roughly, “Why didn’t anyone warn me that motherhood is a miserable job?” or arguing that society needs to acknowledge that motherhood is not for everyone, instead of “pressuring” women to hide the fact that they hate being moms. I think that these writers reflect the shock experienced by some parents when they realize that parenthood is at odds with our dominant cultural values. TV reality shows tell us to follow our dreams, but our insatiable children absorb the energy that would make those dreams possible. Disney tells us to trust our hearts, but our children’s needs and problems teach us that our hearts don’t always have the answers (and don’t always feel very loving). Culture everywhere says to pursue our own happiness, but child-rearing requires that we sacrifice our happiness for the good of others. Even the church sometimes seems to suggest that true spirituality lies in outreach programs that clash with the bedtimes of our kiddos.

These disadvantages of family life are actually good things. Children are not an overly absorbing hobby. They are people. They are the church. They are our neighbors. They are among those whose God-given role is to give us opportunities to serve the weak and the poor, the ugly and the tired, the temper-tantrum-throwing, poopy-diapered little fiends who take and take without a word of thanks.

In doing so, we are brought face-to-face with own weakness, poverty, ugliness, and weary inadequacy.

There we fall to our knees, again and again, and are shown the incredible mercy of our God. Like many other members of the church, it is the vocation of children to provide us an opportunity to teach and serve. They fill this role in a special way.

When we adults are allowed to choose our own ministry opportunities and match our perceived talents to the correct committee, we are sometimes able to maintain illusions about our own worthiness, intelligence, dedication, and shiny-haloed righteousness.

Kids destroy that. We don’t pick them and their personalities; God does. That is part of the beauty of family. In his book Heretics (Hendrickson, 2007), G. K. Chesterton says that when we select our own companions, we live a more narrow life because we will inevitably pick out people like ourselves. When instead we must coexist with whoever happens to belong to our small town, our clan, or our family, we are forced into a broadening experience that reflects

“CHILDREN ARE NOT AN OVERLY ABSORBING HOBBY. THEY ARE PEOPLE. THEY ARE THE CHURCH. THEY ARE OUR NEIGHBORS.” true reality. This teaches us, as Chesterton writes, “the fact that life, if it be a truly stimulating and fascinating life, is a thing which, of its nature, exists in spite of ourselves.”

My son is a baptized member of the church, and I have the opportunity to serve him both by caring for his physical needs and by ensuring that he hears the word of God. When I wipe down his grimy highchair for the one-millionth time in a single day (my kid has a ravenous appetite), I am doing as spiritual a work as if I were leading the choir, because it is an act that comes from the faith that God gives me. When I teach him to fold his hands for bedtime prayer, this too is service to a member of the church. When I gently (but firmly) correct his effort to pull my hair during prayer times, this is yet another opportunity to care for the body of Christ.

Of course, motherhood is not given to everyone, and it is not our job to compare various roles within the church and to declare that one or another is more “useful” or more holy. Instead, it is our task to receive the vocations we have been given, whatever they might be, and rejoice in the opportunity to be the masks through which God works. In this act we follow a long line of biblical figures. Despite their excuses and resistance, their kicking and screaming and other weaknesses, God used them. I pray that in his mercy he will work also through me.

Anna Ilona Mussmann is a wife and mother living in Pittsburgh. After graduating from Concordia University Wisconsin, she taught elementary school for several years. She edits the blog Sister, Daughter, Mother, Wife and loves dark chocolate, Dorothy Sayers, and the Oxford comma.

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features 30 BECOMING A CONTRAST-SOCIETY: A REFLECTION ON THE NATURE OF CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

38 GROWING A HEALTHY HEART

22

THE FIRST FAMILY: OUTSIDE THE HOME

44 WHO SHOULD THE CHURCH LOOK LIKE?

50 GROUNDED IN THE RESURRECTION: THE CHURCH AS A COMMUNITY OF KINSHIP 21

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THE FIRST FAMILY: OUTSIDE THE HOME

by DAVID VANDRUNEN illustration by ADAM QUEST

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Almost every Christian will readily agree that the family is important.

Family is the one truly natural institution, and of all the many institutions that influence us through our youth, our families—for better or worse—usually end up shaping us the most. Recent decades have witnessed rather profound changes in cultural attitudes and practices regarding family: the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, reproductive technologies, declining birthrates, and now the extension of marriage to homosexual couples. We look around us and it seems that “family” is increasingly becoming whatever a person or group of consenting people want it to be, rather than a fixed idea—an institution established

by God as part of the natural order. In light of the vital significance of family relations for children’s moral development and the stability of civil society, we are rightly concerned about these many far-reaching changes in family affairs over the past several decades.

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So we all agree that family is important. But just how important is it exactly? A certain pattern has played out many times through history: an established idea or institution comes under assault, and well-meaning people respond by doubling down on their efforts to defend and support it; but they end up overreacting and hence emphasizing it so much that they lose proper perspective and neglect other ideas or institutions that may be just as or even more important. Is there any danger of well-meaning Christians today following this same pattern with respect to the family?

That danger certainly does exist, and the institution probably most likely to suffer from an overreaction to the contemporary assault on the family is the church. Although this may be uncomfortable for some Christians to hear, the Bible indicates that while the family is important, the church is even more important. This article explores these themes, first by noting how Scripture describes the family as a wonderful blessing, and then by considering the evidence for the superiority of the church in God’s redemptive plan. Christians’ concern about the family is well placed, I conclude, but it would be tragic if zeal for this divine gift clouded our appreciation for the centrality of the church in our Christian lives.

THE FA M I LY: R E A L LY IM P O RTANT If we just stop to think about the great blessing a loving, supportive, and virtue-instilling family is for those raised in such a family—or about the deep damage a broken, neglectful, or abusive family does to those who grow up in this context—it doesn’t take much imagination to conclude that family relationships are extraordinarily important. Scripture confirms and reinforces these impressions in all sorts of ways.

Already in Genesis 1, Scripture unpacks the purpose and importance of the family by giving humanity this initial commission: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28). Genesis 2 goes on to explain that this fruitful procreation is to take place within marriage: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). Thus we sometimes refer to marriage as a “creation ordinance”:

from the beginning God established the family, centered in marriage and child-rearing, as a natural and foundational institution for the human race to carry out its God-given labors in this world. Later, God reaffirmed this institution twice, in the covenant with Noah and the whole human race after the great flood (Gen. 9:1, 7). Despite our fall into sin and God’s curse upon the world, God still upholds the family by his common grace and gives it a continuing central role in carrying out his purposes in human history.

The Westminster Confession of Faith (24.2) helpfully lists four purposes of marriage identified in Scripture. First, marriage is for the mutual help of husband and wife, an idea captured in Genesis 2:18 where God says that it’s not good for the man to be alone and thus makes “a helper fit for him.”

Second, marriage is “for the increase of mankind with legitimate issue.” In other words, a marital relationship isn’t necessary to procreate, but it’s the proper context for bringing children into existence and raising and training them. This purpose of marriage isn’t limited to Christians, as the reference to “mankind” indicates. God’s call to be fruitful and multiply extends to the human race generally (Gen. 1:28; 9:1, 7). Third, marriage is for the increase “of the church with an holy seed.” God is pleased to build his church for the next generation in part through Christians nurturing their children in the faith (see Mal. 2:15). Fourth, God ordained marriage for the “preventing of uncleanness,” providing the proper forum for sexual activity. Although the Westminster Confession (alluding to 1 Corinthians 7:1–5) puts it negatively—that is, a marital sexual relationship helps to keep us from extramarital sex—Scripture also speaks of sex within marriage as a positive good, most explicitly in the Song of Songs.

Scripture speaks of the family’s importance in so many ways. We might think of how serious Abraham and Isaac were about finding the right kind of wives for their sons, the celebration of children as “a heritage from the Lord” (Ps. 127:3), and the corresponding grief of many Old Testament saints who struggled with barrenness, or Paul’s advice to younger widows to “marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander” (1 Tim. 5:14). But this scratches only the surface. The family indeed must be of high importance for Christians. But is it the most important thing?

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“A certain pattern has played out many times through history: an established idea or institution comes under assault, and well-meaning people respond by doubling down on their efforts to defend and support it; but they end up overreacting and hence emphasizing it so much that they lose proper perspective and neglect other ideas or institutions that may be just as or even more important.�

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FAMILY A N D THE C H U RC H Family is clearly not the most important thing in Scripture. Our relationships to and within the church are ultimately more important than our family relationships. In this section, I’ll highlight several considerations explaining why.

First, and perhaps most obviously, family relationships are not the most important thing, insofar as our allegiance to God must always trump family loyalty if they’re in conflict. This point, of course, extends beyond family loyalty to every human loyalty. We must always “obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Whether it is a government official, an employer, or a friend, we must refuse anybody who demands allegiance above our allegiance to God. Family, however, can often provide the strongest and most plausible temptations to cheat our highest allegiance. It’s certainly difficult to give up a good job because it compromises our devotion to Christ, but it’s painful to be forsaken by one’s family for becoming a Christian.

Is Christianity really so important that it justifies letting these deep bonds be broken? Scripture is clear that it is indeed. Jesus said unambiguously, “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” (Matt.

10:35–38; cf. Luke 9:59–62; 14:26) So here is one respect in which the church is even more important than the family. Those who believe with their hearts must confess with their lips (e.g., Rom. 10:9–10) and thus be “added to the number” of Christ’s church (see Acts 2:47). Hence, Christians should unite with the body of believers and be faithful in their responsibilities to it, even if their families are staunchly opposed.

This brings us to another reason why the church is ultimately more important than the family. While family relationships are temporal, relationships in

“WHEN WE TREAT OUR CHURCH FAMILY AS OF EVEN HIGHER IMPORTANCE THAN OUR NATURAL FAMILIES, WE TESTIFY TO THE GRACE OF THE GOSPEL AND OUR HOPE OF EVERLASTING LIFE IN THE MOST INTIMATE BOND WITH ALL OF OUR FELLOW BELIEVERS.” the church are permanent. To put it another way, family relationships are natural and belong to this present age, while relationships in the church are eschatological and extend into the age to come.

Consider the family first. When God established marriage at creation, he commanded couples to be fruitful and fill the earth (Gen. 1:28). He repeated this mandate in the Noahic covenant (Gen. 9:1, 7), whose purpose was to preserve the natural order “while the earth remains” (Gen. 8:22). Thus God designed child-rearing as a task for this present world, a world not destined to last forever. Scripture also indicates that marriage itself only lasts for the duration of earthly life. At weddings, couples vow to be faithful “for as long as we both shall live” because the marriage bond ends when one spouse dies: “A married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage” (Rom. 7:2; cf. 1 Cor. 7:39). Every Christian will enter heaven single. And the glorified saints will remain single, for they will “neither marry nor [be] given in marriage” (Luke 20:35).

Now consider our relationships in and to the church. When the “keys of the kingdom” bring us MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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into the church, we truly enter the kingdom; whatever is bound “on earth shall be bound in heaven” (Matt. 16:18–19). Joining the church of Jesus Christ (provided we do so sincerely) creates a permanent, everlasting relationship with Christ that will continue and be consummated in the new creation. Christ died for his church so that she might be “holy and blameless,” “without spot or wrinkle” (Eph. 5:27), which will be realized only in the age to come. This permanency of relationship applies not only to the church in general, but also to other individual members of the church.

The New Testament says a lot about our union with other Christians, whom it calls our brothers and sisters, and who will remain our brothers and sisters in the new creation. Paul captures this point when he encourages Philemon to receive and liberate Onesimus, his slave who converted to Christ while away from him. Philemon now can “have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother” (Phil. 15–16). Thus here is another reason why the church is of greater importance than the family. Our family relationships are temporal and earthly, while our relationships in and to the church will endure permanently into the age to come. Family relationships are of penultimate importance, but church relationships are of ultimate importance.

The idea that fellow Christians are “brothers and sisters” raises a final consideration. Instead of saying that family is not the most important institution or kind of relationship, it might be more accurate to say that our natural family is ultimately not as important as our church family. There will be family in heaven, but not millions of discrete families, each with a husband and wife. There will be only one family in heaven, made up of millions of brothers and sisters—with Jesus as our husband (Eph. 5:25–32) and brother (Heb. 2:11–12). But God grants a little foretaste of that experience here and now in the church. When Jesus was told that his (natural) mother and brothers were looking for him, he responded, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:21). This helps to explain why Jesus told his disciples, “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life” (Matt. 19:29).

Those who give up natural families here and now for Christ actually receive family blessings

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a hundred times over. Christians gain Jesus’ own “mother and brothers”—fellow believers—as an even dearer family. Similarly, Paul explains that we’ve been adopted as the sons of God, and because we’re his sons we’re also his heirs—heirs of everlasting life (Rom. 8:14–17; Gal. 4:4–7). Remarkably, we are “fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:14), who is “the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29).

He earned the everlasting inheritance by his perfect work, and we share the inheritance through union with him. Thus Paul also calls the church the “household of God” (Eph. 2:19; 1 Tim. 3:15). When we treat our church family as of even higher importance than our natural families, we testify to the grace of the gospel and our hope of everlasting life in the most intimate bond with all of our fellow believers.

T HE CHU RCH, T HE FA MI LY, AN D T HE CHRI ST I A N LI FE These considerations don’t make natural family relationships unimportant. Married Christians must be diligent to foster right relations with their spouses (e.g., Eph. 5:25–33; Col. 3:18–19) and zealous to train their children in the fear of the Lord (e.g., Eph. 6:4; Col. 3:21), while children should obey their parents (Eph. 6:1–3; Col. 3:20). Keeping family in proper biblical perspective hardly justifies neglecting familial responsibilities. In fact, Christians who do not care for members of their household are worse than unbelievers (1 Tim. 5:8). These biblical admonitions need to be emphasized.

But Christians also need to be on guard against overreaction to contemporary attacks on the family.

We should never make the family a substitute for the church, for example. A home “church” is not the same as the church Christ established, which gathers together Christians from many families under the authority of ministers, elders, and deacons.

Family worship is wonderful, but it can’t take the place of the church’s corporate worship.

Other temptations are subtler. Some churches advertise themselves as “family friendly,” but in so doing they make the church unfriendly to those without spouse or children. This can happen in all sorts of ways. Church programs and fellowship (formally or informally) sometimes segregate members who are married-with-children from those who aren’t, as if the latter are odd or have a completely

“Our family relationships are temporal and earthly, while our relationships in and to the church will endure permanently into the age to come.”

different set of needs. Or when these groups mix, the former sometimes make their stories about childrearing the center of attention, effectively excluding the latter from relevance. Family-friendly churches can send all sorts of messages to the unmarried that they really haven’t begun to live until they marry.

Although most Christians will and ought to marry at some point in life (see 1 Tim. 5:14), Paul explains that not marrying can be better for some Christians (1 Cor. 7:6–8, 25–26, 32–35). And while barrenness was experienced as a terrible curse under the Old Testament, the New Testament never once treats it as such for new covenant believers. If a church turns family-friendly into unmarried- (or childless-) unfriendly, it’s done a disservice to those without spouse or children.

Christians with big and/or active families also need to be on guard against getting so enveloped by family activities that they unwittingly neglect to give as much attention as they should to the church and its needs. Investing time in spouse,

children, and grandchildren is valuable, but what about in the lonely person who sits across the pew on Sunday? Investing financial resources to educate one’s offspring and give them a head start in life is a noble goal, but what about the needy fellow church member who has no natural family member to help?

Exactly how particular Christians honor both their natural family and (even more) their church family is a matter of wise judgment that cannot be specified once and for all in advance. But all Christians ought to strive to give testimony here and now to their hope of everlasting life through zealous love—as the Apostles’ Creed puts it—for the “communion of the saints.”

David VanDrunen is the Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido. He is author of Law and Custom: The Thought of Thomas Aquinas and the Future of the Common Law (Lang, 2003).

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BECOMING A

A REFLECTION ON THE NATURE OF CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

C O N T R A S TSOCIETY

by C. CHRISTOPHER SMITH

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O

ver the last decade, community has been a rising buzzword among Christians in North America. From the emergence of new monastic and missional communities to the publi-

cation of books with titles such as From Couch to Community and Lean on Me: Finding Intentional, Vulnerable and Consistent Community, there is a deep hunger in our age to talk about and to live in Christian community. Certainly the powers of the modern age—technology, consumerism, unbridled sexuality and, above all, individualism—conspire to tear asunder the basic communities that gave shape and meaning to life in earlier generations, particularly family and neighborhood.

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We are indeed living in what British journalist George Monbiot recently referred to as “the age of loneliness.” But does all our longing for, dreaming of and talking about community necessarily cultivate the sort of Christian community to which we are called in Christ? Near the beginning of his classic book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer issues the stern warning that we should be wary of preferring our dreams of community to actually living in community. “The person who loves their dream of community,” he says, “will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”

Almost two decades ago, my wife and I helped start a church comprised almost completely of young adults. Most of us in that church were weary of the minimalist consumer church we had grown up with: show up on Sunday morning, do a few religious activities, and then go your own way for the remainder of the week. In that new church, we found deeper ways to share life: eating together several times a week, serving together in our neighborhoods, and often doing social activities together. This new church community felt good and certainly went deeper than the ways of being church that most of us were familiar with. And yet, I suspect that we were not a very mature expression of Christian community, rooted more in our dreams of community with like-minded friends than in the self-sacrificing and reconciling love of Christ.

With Bonhoeffer’s words at the front of our minds, let’s explore the nature of the community to which we have been called in Christ, and reflect briefly on a few possible hallmarks of healthy Christian community in our age. To begin, let’s turn to the biblical narrative. A careful reading of Scripture, from beginning to end, emphasizes that community is not optional for those who are called to follow Jesus. Indeed, the gathered people of God are at the very heart of what God is doing in the world. The Old Testament is predominantly about the Israelite people—the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—who were set apart as God’s holy people.

Although God was the creator of all humanity, God had a special relationship with Israel, rooted in the promise to bless the descendants of Abraham and through them to bless and restore all creation.

God gave the law to the Israelites to teach them how to share life together in ways that embodied

“‘ THE PERSON WHO LOVES THEIR DREAM OF COMMUNITY,’ [BONHOEFFER] SAYS, ‘WILL DESTROY COMMUNITY, BUT THE PERSON WHO LOVES THOSE AROUND THEM WILL CREATE COMMUNITY.’” the love, truth, justice, and compassion of God. The Old Testament story depicts that in spite of God’s guiding presence and the thorough instructions of the law, Israel was not particularly faithful to God, often preferring to follow the ways of their pagan neighbors. God, however, was not ready to abandon Israel and sent prophet after prophet to call them back to the way of God. Jesus, who was raised up within the Israelite people and whose work focused almost exclusively on Israel, began his ministry by gathering a community of disciples around himself. These disciples traveled with Jesus and shared life with him on a daily basis. Spanning the range from Simon the Zealot to Matthew the tax collector, this community was about as diverse as one could have imagined within first-century Israel. These disciples followed Jesus at great cost, giving up their previous professions and leaving their families. There was, however, a deep sense in which the community of Jesus’ disciples became a new family for both Jesus and the disciples.

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After Pentecost, the wall of ethnicity that separated the Israelites from the rest of humanity was torn down. As the Apostle Paul notes in Romans 11:17–24, Gentiles were grafted into the tree of Israel and adopted into God’s family. This adoption is the legacy of our churches today; we are part of God’s people, adopted through the reconciling work of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Israel, the ancient people of God, was not abolished in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Rather, it expanded to be defined no longer solely by ethnicity, but by faith in the reconciling work of God. Even in our highly individualistic age, there are all sorts of communities to which we belong: people of a certain national or ethnic heritage, people who do similar kinds of work (for example, unions or professional associations), fans of a particular sports team, neighborhood groups, or people who share similar hobbies or interests. How are we as communities of Christ’s followers to be distinguished from all other sorts of communities? The answer to this question is found in Israel’s call—and our call, as ones grafted into Israel—to be a holy, set-apart people (see, for instance, Deut. 7:6–8). Holiness, though, is not an end in itself, but rather a means by which we bear witness to the reconciling love of God. Contemporary German theologian Gerhard Lohfink refers to the people of God as a “contrastsociety,” a people whose life is structured in a way different from all other communities. In Jesus and Community (Fortress Press, 1984), Lohfink writes: [There are] two grounds for Israel being a holy people. First, there is the electing love of God, who chose Israel from all nations to be his own people. But, in the second place, Israel’s holiness also depends on whether it really lives in accordance with the social order which God has given it, a social order which stands in sharp contrast with those of all other nations. (123) Our aim is not simply to be different, or to be a counterculture that rigidly opposes the dominant culture at every turn. Rather, we are called to be attentive not only to what we do, but also to how we do it. We may do things that look very much like the things our neighbors do, but we do them for different reasons. We may work in jobs or own businesses as our neighbors do, but that work is always secondary

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to the work that God is doing in the world, to which we bear witness in our church communities.

Cutting against the grain of the prevailing culture is always difficult, but what specifically are the impediments to our living as a contrast-society in our church communities? The primary opposition— as the Apostle Paul emphasizes in Ephesians 6—is not flesh and blood, but rather powers of darkness.

These powers are perhaps most oppressive in the ways that they shape our imaginations. Many of us, for example, cannot imagine going without health insurance or life insurance, a car, smartphone, or 401K. A little more than a century ago, however, none of these things existed, and yet few of us now can imagine life without them.

Sometimes these powers shape our imaginations through the institutions we work for or through the built environment. If my employer expects me to work forty, fifty, or sixty hours per week, it is going to be difficult to imagine a shorter work week with more time for church and family, especially if I find the work energizing. I might find it difficult to bike to work because the roads between my home and workplace were built primarily for cars and with little thought for bikers. The powers thus narrate for us what we should desire, and how we should live in the world. Advertising is an aggressive power that works on our desires to compel us to buy stuff we don’t need with money we often don’t have. The power of individualism teaches us that we need to have our own house, our own car, our own pool, our own retirement plan, and so forth.

As an exercise in imagining what it might look like for our church communities to be contrastsocieties in their particular places, let’s look at a few specific powers at work in the dominant culture of North America, and how shared practices of the church can help us start to bear witness to a different way of living and being. Let’s begin with the most basic and most fragmenting power in Western culture: individualism.

Our life together stands in contrast to the individualism of the broader culture because, above all, we are rooted in the biblical narrative, at the heart of which is God’s work of gathering a people. Although we are unique persons created in the image of God, our primary identity is located not in our own personal stories, but in the story of God’s gathering and reconciling work. We also demonstrate an alternative to individualism

“ O U R L I F E T O G E T H E R S TA N D S I N C O N T R A S T T O T H E I N D I V I D U A L I S M O F T H E B R O A D E R C U LT U R E BECAUSE… WE ARE ROOTED IN THE BIBLICAL N A R R AT I V E … . O U R P R I M A R Y I D E N T I T Y I S LO C AT E D N O T I N O U R O W N P E R S O N A L S T O R I E S , B U T I N T H E S T O R Y O F G O D ’ S G AT H E R I N G A N D RECONCILING WORK.”

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“ A S F O L LO W E R S O F J E S U S , O U R A I M I S N O T A M A S S I N G O U R O W N P R I VAT E E M P I R E S , B U T R AT H E R S E E I N G T H E KINGDOM OF GOD BEING REALIZED ON E A R T H , A S I T I S I N H E AV E N . ”

through the practice of koinonia, or sharing our resources. Koinonia is the New Testament Greek word often translated as “fellowship,” but this religious gloss often obscures a deeper reality. The early Christians in Jerusalem embodied koinonia in having “all things in common” (Acts 2:44). The later story of Ananias and Sapphira illustrates that this practice was not a sort of collective in which a central organization owned and managed all the resources. Instead, individuals and families had resources that they did not consider as their own private possessions (see Acts 4:32), but rather as resources for the good of the whole community to be shared generously. This sort of koinonia economy offers a sharp contrast to the individualism of our age, in which people are solely responsible for taking care of themselves. Finding ways to share resources such as homes, cars, meals, lawnmowers, and so on, frees us to share even more abundantly with our brothers, sisters, and neighbors.

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In a similar fashion, the practice of generosity forms us into a community that offers an alternative to consumerism. Our consumer society, fueled by advertising that stirs up desires in us, compels us to buy and own more stuff. Consumerism, of course, goes hand in hand with individualism. When we exist largely in isolation, we have little imagination for sharing our resources, and we also are significantly more vulnerable to the manipulation of advertising. In contrast, God shares abundantly with humanity, providing abundant resources for the health and flourishing of the world. As we follow God in the way of Jesus, we learn to share generously the abundance that God has provided for us. Generosity does not always come in the form of charitably giving money away. In fact, the most intimate form of generosity is perhaps hospitality, sharing our homes, church buildings, and lives with others. As followers of Jesus, our aim is not amassing our own private empires, but rather seeing the

kingdom of God being realized on earth, as it is in heaven. This calling frees us from the bonds of consumerism; we are freed to be able to share the resources God has given us with our sisters, brothers, and neighbors.

Our church communities also bear witness as an alternative to the narcissism, or self-absorption, of the broader culture. We should not be surprised that a culture in which individualism reigns supreme is also profoundly narcissistic. In contrast to the narcissism of the world, we have been called in Christ to “give preference to one another” (Rom. 12:10) and to “look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others” (Phil. 2:4). Many of our attempts to foster Christian community, like the story I shared at the beginning of this article, are fundamentally narcissistic because the community is made up of people who are largely like us: of a similar ethnicity, income, age, and so forth.

One of the greatest flaws of the church-growth movement is a similar sort of narcissism, often referred to as the Homogeneous Unit Principle: that is, churches grow best when comprised primarily of a single, particular demographic group.

The advocates of church-growth ideology were not wrong. Churches can grow large when focused on a particular audience; but that sort of homogeneous community is not the sort of Christian community into which we have been called, one in which God is engaged in the messy work of reconciling diverse peoples—Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female (Gal. 3:28).

I have described here some of the virtues that define the church as a contrast-society, but I’ve said very little about the practicalities of what a church that embodies these virtues might look like. I’m hesitant to say too much about practicalities, because I believe local churches should discern how they will embody Christ together, and these communities will inevitably look quite different in differing places. I do want to mention briefly two practical considerations that are pertinent to our capacity to be a contrast-society: engagement and proximity.

In order to cultivate the sort of contrast-community I have described here, we need engagement with one another deeper than simply a Sunday gathering and possibly a midweek gathering. We need to find ways for our lives to be intermeshed with one another on a near-daily basis. I don’t recommend

“WE NEED TO FIND WAYS FOR OUR LIVES TO BE INTERMESHED WITH ONE ANOTHER ON A NEAR-DAILY BASIS.” lots of new programs, but rather finding ways to engage with our brothers and sisters in things we are going to do anyway: for instance, living in a neighborhood, working a job, the schools and activities of our children, and our entertainment.

Thinking about intermeshing our lives leads us to the second consideration: proximity. It is hard to be deeply engaged and share resources in diverse and meaningful ways if we have to travel long distances to do so. Yes, some communities will be more dispersed (especially in rural areas, where life is simply more spread out), but it is hard to cohere as a community that bears witness to anything—let alone a different way of life—when we spend large chunks of time commuting. There are many ways in which we can be mindful of proximity—from relocation to smaller groups of people within the church who live close to and share life with each other—but regardless, our churches cannot continue to be oblivious to place and proximity.

It is good and timely that many Christians are longing for community today, but as we seek to fulfill that yearning, let us be vigilant to discern a sort of contrast-community rooted in the good news of Jesus Christ, rather than in our idyllic dreams of community!

C. Christopher Smith is editor of The Englewood Review of Books (EnglewoodReview.org) and coauthor with John Pattison of Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus (IVP Books, 2014). He is currently writing a book titled Reading for the Common Good.

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GROWING A HEALTHY

by JAMES K. A. SMITH

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T

he image of the “nuclear” family has always been an ambiguous one for me. Of course, it’s meant to convey a picture of a centered family, anchored by a mom and a dad, with children orbiting around them as satellites, together comprising one of the basic units of society—an “atomic unit,” if you will. (Part of the sad state of our age is that such a picture is now taken to be quaint and antiquated.) But having been raised during the denouement of the Cold War and shaped by movies like Red Dawn, for me the notion of a “nuclear” family also carried the connotations of a bomb shelter or concrete bunker, a fortress to protect us from the threats of a menacing world.

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The metaphor is stark but not entirely off base.

Granted, there are extreme versions of this that are insular and fearful (what we might call the “doomsday preppers” of Christian parenting). But we rightly have a sense of caution when it comes to the influence of the world on our families, especially on our children. Indeed, it’s a biblical admonition: we are both incubators and defenders of our children’s hearts and minds, stewards of their imaginations, responsible for their instruction. And thus it is only natural that we should be their defenders, on guard like sentinels watching in the distance for oncoming threats. When the father of Proverbs 4 admonishes his son to “guard his heart” (Prov. 4:23), the father’s instruction is itself part of that defense.

But what if we’re missing the real threats? What if we are constructing defenses against the intellectual blasts of “ideas” and “messages” from the world, but not insulating against the sort of toxic radiation that can seep through our intellectual defenses?

This happens when we parent our children as if they were “thinking things.” Every parenting strategy—like every pedagogy—implicitly assumes something about the nature of human beings (insofar as children are human beings—and trust me, I remember the days when that was hard to believe).

Having drunk from Cartesian wells, modern Christians have tended to assume that human beings are basically and primarily thinking things. We effectively assume that “you are what you think”—a phrase I once saw emblazoned across a man’s forehead in an advertisement for a Bible memory verse program. As a result, we tend to treat our children as intellectual receptacles, veritable brains-on-a-stick.

And we parent and protect them accordingly: we try to foster their faith by providing them with biblical knowledge, catechizing them to give us the right answers, and then gradually equipping them to also discern the false teachings the world will throw at them. If we are basically thinking things, both our defenses and our instruction should be primarily intellectual.

But what if we aren’t fundamentally or only thinking things? What if our children aren’t brainson-a-stick? What if as being human means we are creatures who are oriented and animated by desire?

What if you are what you love?

Then that changes things. First and foremost, we need to take seriously how our loves and ultimate

“WHAT IF AS BEING HUMAN MEANS WE ARE CREATURES WHO ARE ORIENTED AND ANIMATED BY DESIRE? WHAT IF YOU ARE WHAT YOU LOVE?” longings are shaped and formed. As Paul suggests in Colossians 3:12–16, love is actually a habit, one of the moral habits we call the “virtues.” If love is a virtue, a good habit, then we need to be attentive to how such habits are formed. The tradition from Aristotle to Aquinas has always emphasized that we acquire virtue in two ways.

First, we learn virtue by imitating exemplars, following the example of those who model virtue.

This should give us new appreciation for the New Testament emphasize on imitation: “Be imitators of God, as beloved children,” Paul admonishes (Eph. 5:1). Far from being some inauthentic mimicking, imitation is how we learn to “put on” Christ.

This, of course, is also one of the most daunting aspects of parenting.

Second, acquiring virtue takes practice. We learn how to love by being immersed in rhythms, routines, and rituals that enfold us into a story that articulates what counts as “the good life.” But these practices also form our habits and dispositions, shaping our character so that we become a certain kind of person. It’s one of the reasons Aristotle said habits were “second nature”: they become so woven into our character that we do them without thinking about it. Compassion, love, and forgiveness become part of our character. But that doesn’t happen by acquiring information; it happens through practices of formation.

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If children are human beings, and if humans are first and foremost lovers, then Christian formation isn’t primarily or only an intellectual endeavor. That means cultivating a Christian home isn’t like curating a theological salon. Christian parenting won’t only be didactic. A Christian home also needs to be a space where rhythms and routines function as liturgies of rightly ordered love, pedagogies of desire that train us—parents and children alike—to desire God and what God loves.

That’s why our households need to be caught up in the wider household of God: the liturgies of our homes should grow out of, and amplify, the formative liturgy of word and table. (On this score, there is a lot of wisdom to be gained by returning to the Westminster Divines’ “Directory for Family Worship,” a supplement to their “Directory for the Publick Worship of God.”) As Michael Horton so winsomely captures it in his book on worship, A Better Way, historic Reformed worship draws us into the drama of Christ-centered redemption. That liturgical formation, you might say, character-izes us: it weaves us into the story of God in Christ and thus shapes our character. The formative liturgies of a Christian home depend on the ecclesial capital of the church’s worship.

Family worship will be formative only to the extent that it taps into our imagination, not just our intellect. To do so, such worship needs to traffic in the aesthetic currency of the imagination—story, poetry, music, symbols, and images. Such worship will be tactile, tangible, incarnate. (Think of all the prophet Jeremiah’s object lessons as a biblical model here.) Children are ritual animals who absorb the gospel in practices that speak to their imaginations.

This is an important reason to make music an aspect of family worship. As Augustine said, “He who sings prays twice.” There is something at work in the lilt of a melody and the poetry of a hymn that make the biblical story seep into us indelibly.

This is also a reason to invite your family into the rhythms of the liturgical calendar or the “Christian year.” The rhythms of Advent and Christmas, Epiphany and Pentecost, Lent and Easter are a unique way to live into the life of Jesus. The colors of these seasons can become part of the spiritual wallpaper of your home, shaping the ethos of a family. The royal purples of the king, the bright white of Christmastide, and the fire red of Pentecost all

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create a kind of symbolic universe that invites us into a different story.

These seasons also come with their own tactile rituals. For example, families can enjoy creating an Advent wreath together each year. Children can tangibly participate in lighting the candles of hope, love, joy, and peace—also sometimes known as the Prophet’s candle, the Bethlehem candle, the Shepherd’s candle, and the Love candle. During Lent, families can observe a form of fasting together in which the growling of hungry bellies is a visceral way to learn about hungering and thirsting after righteousness.

There is physicality to such worship that encourages us to understand the gospel anew in ways that endure in our imagination. Mark Twain once quipped, “He who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” What he meant was that no explanation of what it’s like to carry a cat by the tail can compare with the tangible experience of trying to carry a cat by the tail (don’t try this at home!). Liturgies are the tangible way we come to understand the gospel with our imagination.

However, there is a flipside to this picture: if we are what we love, and our longings are shaped by love-shaping liturgies, then we need to recognize that not all liturgies are rightly ordered to God and his kingdom. In short, we need to recognize that our culture is rife with liturgies that are anything but directed to God. Indeed, all kinds of cultural practices are after nothing less than our hearts.

These are not just things we do; they do something to us. The rival liturgies of late modern culture are legion: from the consumerist liturgies of the mall, to the egocentric liturgies of our smartphones, to the hedonistic liturgies of the modern university (for a harrowing account, read Tom Wolfe’s novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons).

The mall, for example, is not just a neutral space of consumer exchange. It is a temple, a religious site devoted to the god of consumption. This isn’t because the mall has some “doctrine” it is foisting upon our teenagers. No one meets them at the door of the Galleria trying to sell them on what the mall “believes.” The last thing the mall cares about is belief. The mall isn’t worried about something so intellectual. It’s after our hearts, our loves, our wants.

And so the mall invites us into its own liturgical experience: into its labyrinth lined with veritable

“AS AUGUSTINE SAID, ‘HE WHO SINGS PRAYS TWICE.’ THERE IS SOMETHING AT WORK IN THE LILT OF A MELODY AND THE POETRY OF A HYMN THAT MAKE THE BIBLICAL STORY SEEP INTO US INDELIBLY.” “icons” of the so-called good life—the mannequins adorned in the latest offerings from the Gap and Forever 21 that function as the stained-glass windows of the consumerist “church.” The ubiquitous tentacles of marketing constitute the evangelism of this mammonistic religion, beckoning us to a better life in ways that bypass our intellect and appeal to our imagination. Such cultural practices are not disseminating “messages” that try to change our mind; they entice us into practices that aim to train our loves. Pedagogies of desire are everywhere.

If we assume our children are basically brainson-a-stick, then we won’t even see the liturgical power of cultural practices. As a result, we mistake some things as benign that are actually toxic—not because they are loaded with false teachings and bad ideas, but because they are teaching us to love false gods and desire rival kingdoms. So, for example, we end up thinking that all things Disney are safe, wholesome, and benign because the “content” seems innocuous, when the imaginative worlds of so many Disney stories are bent on turning our children into prodigious consumers, as if stuff will save our souls.

And the specifically intellectual defenses we give our children are often insufficient to contend with such cultural liturgies. While Victoria’s Secret is stoking a fire in their bellies, we in our thinkingthing-ism are trucking waters to their heads. The

waters of our defense never touch the fire. What we need are countermeasures; we need to fight deformative fire with reformative fire. If cultural liturgies shape our loves by capturing our imaginations, then the formation of a Christian imagination requires immersion in intentionally formative liturgical practices centered on Christ and indexed to the kingdom of God. We are thereby taught to inhabit the world as God’s creation, longing for the kingdom come, focused on the things above. In short, we will learn how to live as citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20) who desire what God desires for his world. We will learn how to be neighbors, how to love our enemies, how to be a people who desire shalom.

This means one of the most significant decisions we can make for our homes is to commit ourselves to congregations whose worship is not just informing our intellects but also capturing our imaginations.

Such worship then sends us into our homes where we can extend those liturgical rhythms, practicing the faith in the liturgical habits of home.

James K. A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin College where he holds the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. His books include Letters to a Young Calvinist (Brazos, 2010) and Desiring the Kingdom (Baker Academic, 2009).

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WHO SHOULD THE CHURCH LOOK LIKE? A STUDY ON DIVERSITY

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C

ole Brown says he was surprised by all of the discouraging advice he received as he was preparing to start a multiethnic church in inner-city Portland, Oregon.

In 2006, the now 33-year-old pastor was planting what he described as a charismatic Reformed church, connected to the Acts 29 Network. Dozens of people told him it was “absolutely impossible” to plant an ethnically diverse church, and they advised against it. Instead, he was told to “pick a target group; aim for them. That’s how you’ll build the kingdom.” But he says, “I just couldn’t, in good conscience, do that.”

Almost nine years later, Brown continues to pastor Emmaus Church, which is now a congregation of 120 people. Half the church is African American, 40 percent are Caucasian, 8 percent Latino, and 2 percent Asian. Brown says his discouraging advisors have been proven wrong. But he acknowledges it’s been a tough road: “Very difficult.

Very slow growth. Very magnificent.”

Emmaus Church is part of a national trend.

According to recent research, the number of evangelical churches considered ethnically diverse has grown by 250 percent in the past fourteen years.

One of the nation’s leading religious demographers, Michael Emerson, called this “a pretty astounding change,” given that in 1998 evangelicals were the

“BROWN, WHO IS CAUCASIAN, SAYS HIS MARRIAGE TO AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN HELPED HIM SEE THE DESPERATE NEED FOR EVANGELICAL CHURCHES TO BECOME DIVERSE.”

least likely to be racially integrated among the religious groups examined.

In 2012, Duke University’s National Congregations Study found that 13 percent of evangelical congregations were considered diverse—dramatically up from just 5 percent in 1998. Sociologists consider a church diverse if at least 20 percent of the congregation is of a different ethnic background than the majority of the congregation. Emerson explained: “That’s the tipping point where [racial groups] go from being tokens to actually having a collective voice that can change the organization.”

The change in evangelical churches is particularly impressive when compared to mainline Protestant churches measured during the same period. In 1998, about 5 percent of both evangelical and mainline congregations were diverse. By 2012, unlike evangelical churches, mainline churches remained unchanged. Though mainline denominations have put a lot of emphasis on diversity and tolerance, this doesn’t seem to have translated into racially mixed churches. Emerson says that’s because “‘high church worship style does not seem to attract great diversity.” In addition, he observed that “the most straightforward way to have interracial congregations is to begin new churches that are diverse from the start”—and, he pointed out, the mainline is generally not planting churches.

Brown, who is Caucasian, says his marriage to an African-American woman helped him see the desperate need for evangelical churches to become diverse. Early in their marriage, they attended an all-black church and an all-white church for a few years each, and they were frustrated by both. “From the church leadership on down,” Brown recalled, “what both churches unintentionally communicated was: ‘We want you here, but you need to become like us to fit in.’” He says this was especially problematic when they wanted to invite others to church.

Brown recalled one embarrassing incident when he invited some African-American friends to his predominantly white church. The pastor was preaching on Acts 17, “and somehow he made the whole sermon into a political sermon and referred to Democrats throughout the sermon, with all seriousness, as ‘demon crap.’ Our friends were just appalled and couldn’t believe it, because in their community most of the Christians are Democrats.”

But it was just as awkward when they invited their white friends to an African-American church, as the

“THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO REALLY BELIEVE THAT THE CHURCH HAS MISSED THE BOAT. AND ONCE CHRISTIANS STARTED TO BELIEVE THAT DISCRIMINATION AND PREJUDICE COULD BE AT THE ROOT OF THEIR CONGREGATIONS, THEY BEGAN TO REALLY PANIC.” lengthy and active worship services threw off some of his friends. “Instead of a ninety-minute church service, you have literally a four- or five-hour church service. And instead of sitting and listening to a sermon, you’re seeing people literally run around in circles and people jumping up and jumping down and people shouting.” And yet there was no attempt to explain what was going on or to make outsiders feel welcome. “There were all sorts of people in these neighborhoods who just weren’t represented in the churches we were attending, and the churches seemed to be okay with that. We were not.”

Emerson says that not long ago, most evangelicals were satisfied with churches dominated by a single ethnicity. In seminary, pastors were taught to focus on growing homogeneous churches targeting specific people groups, or niches. This was, in essence, planting churches by capitalizing on the natural human desire to be around your own kind.

He says that denominations were buying into this concept at the highest levels, and church planting pastors were questioned about which people group they were targeting: “One pastor said, ‘I put down “human,” and they said then you cannot start a congregation because you have to know what people group you are trying to reach.’” For Emerson, however, this thinking has “essentially gone away” in recent years. Increasingly, across evangelicalism, it’s now in vogue to seek racial diversity.

In a 2013 survey, Lifeway Research found that 91 percent of pastors and 73 percent of Americans agreed that churches should reflect the racial diversity of their community. Emerson says that the most recent research shows that this desire is slowly being realized in a growing number of churches.

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and community: “We wanted to see our friends able to worship under the same roof, and we wanted to see our neighbors able to worship in the same body.”

This is not merely a personal preference. He believes that ethnically diverse churches can be a powerful, visual demonstration of the gospel. “Something’s going on here. There are people who are not like each other who are voluntarily sharing their life together.

I think that glorifies Jesus and fulfills his prayer in John 17 that we would be united.”

In the 1990s, a growing number of churches and parachurch organizations started to become ashamed by the homogeneous makeup of so many congregations, according to sociologist Gerardo Marti of Davidson College in North Carolina. They became convinced that the Christian faith held out ethnic diversity, reaching people from every tribe tongue and nation, as the standard: “There are people who really believe that the church has missed the boat. And once Christians started to believe that discrimination and prejudice could be at the root of their congregations, they began to really panic.” He says that to the credit of many churches, they attempted to become diverse voluntarily, while many workplaces and social institutions were required by law to pursue affirmative action.

Marti says that churches and other voluntary organizations don’t naturally become diverse. “All research generally reveals a radical level of homogeneity in our voluntary networks. We tend to marry people like us. We tend to have friends who are like us.” Breaking out of that framework requires a tremendous amount of work, which can seem counterintuitive to many evangelicals. “Churches want to say that if we preach the gospel and we love all people we’ll become diverse,” but he says research doesn’t seem to bear that out.

Brown and his congregation have had to be very intentional in their efforts to build a multiethnic church: “We can’t just preach the gospel and assume racial reconciliation will happen.” He believes the gospel “does have the power to accomplish it [racial reconciliation] and that is one of the

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implications of it. But we [pastors] have the responsibility to draw that out.”

Diversity can be risky and difficult. In fact, Mark Mulder, a sociologist at Calvin College, says there’s a cost to pursuing racial diversity in churches: “A lot of times churches want to do this but they don’t want to pay the cost.” There’s a genuine risk that if churches pursue diversity, then the “people who’ve been there for a long time don’t go anymore. If we change the way we’re doing something, somebody’s going to lose something in the process. If a smaller church does it, and it doesn’t go well, the whole thing could fold.” Congregations need to examine what they do and why they do it, and they may have to root out cultural practices and traditions that form unnecessary barriers for others. “That is the key question. How do you tease out what is essential; what is the stuff that we can’t let go of ? That is crucial. And what is just part of the Dutch ethnicity or part of the culture that we can just let go of ? And I think that’s the key conversation.”

Brown and his church are well aware of the risks, challenges, and costs of becoming ethnically diverse.

Everyone has to be willing to make compromises.

“The style of music isn’t what you would have chosen and the style of preaching isn’t what you would have chosen,” and for that reason it can be tempting to go elsewhere.

Brown has found that being in community with people from various different backgrounds can be risky and painful. He says that Caucasian members of his church have worried about being perceived as racist or accidentally offending someone. They say, “I don’t normally have to get this intimate contact with people who are not like me. How is this going to go? Is it going to come back to hurt me?” Likewise, African-American or Latino people in Brown’s congregation may entertain doubts and questions of their own: “Do these white people really love me? Do they want what’s best for me? Are they going to actually listen to my voice, or are they going to push their voice on me like so many have in the past?” Brown says it hasn’t always been easy to persuade others that these challenges are worth facing, “because it

is a big cost that most churches don’t require you to pay. But it is well worth the cost.”

Emerson spent a decade studying diverse congregations, looking for what they had in common, which may have contributed to their success. He says that in most cases the drive for diversity had to come from the top, from the leadership of the congregation. It must be “a leader who truly believes this is what the congregation should be, that this is part of our mission as Christians.”

Brown goes even further. He believes that churches should make every effort to have ethnic diversity in the leadership of the church: “To have an all-white leadership team and say ‘We want to have a multiethnic church’ is disingenuous, because you’re just asking people of color to continue submitting to white men leading the white way.” In his research, Emerson came to a similar conclusion. He found that churches with ethnic diversity in their leadership were more likely to sustain diversity over the long term. In addition, he discovered that churches that had become diverse had adopted mission statements defining the church, in part, as multiracial or multiethnic. His research showed that it was even more effective if that message was incorporated into the weekly bulletin: “Unbelievably, just putting it on your bulletin, you start diversifying right then and there.”

Small acts seem to send powerful messages to visitors: “‘Wow. They’re saying I belong here.’… And with some people that’s enough for them to stay.”

Emerson also found that churches with ethnic diversity in their leadership were more likely to sustain diversity over the long term.

Marti cautions that in the rush to have churches reflect the racial character of their neighborhoods, there’s a danger of “tokenism.” He says some churches “attempt to maneuver bodies for the sake of color and do it in ways that violate people, because obviously they’re being treated for their value to esthetically create an ambiance of diversity, rather than actually being valued for who they are.” An excessive focus on race can result in the congregation focusing on difference rather than the many things they have in common. He says that churches that are successful and building long-term racially integrated churches have members who have built relationships with others around common interests, such as their careers or the arts.

“CHURCHES CAN’T BECOME DIVERSE REALLY UNTIL INDIVIDUALS IN THE CHURCH HAVE THEIR OWN DIVERSE RELATIONSHIPS.” Marti’s research has shown that success in ethnic diversity begins outside of the church: “Churches can’t become diverse really until individuals in the church have their own diverse relationships. It’s really about the relational connections that people have, not so much the racially mixed community that you build at church.”

Mulder is reluctant to suggest specific steps that churches can take toward diversity: “I think there are a lot of pastors out there who would love to have a ten-step formula for doing it, and it just doesn’t exist because it is so context specific. What works in Los Angeles isn’t going to work in Grand Rapids necessarily.” He says the number of variables is mind-boggling—from the size and ethnic makeup of a neighborhood, to the theological and cultural traditions in a church and denomination. “It’s a messy process and you have to be willing to lose things, and you have to be willing to start the process with a good dose of humility, trying to figure it out as you go.”

For Brown, pastoring a multiracial church has clearly shown him his own limitations and how much he has to learn. “No matter how much I want to pastor a diverse church, no matter how badly I want to reach the Black, Latino, Asian population in my neighborhood, I’m a white man and that affects how I see the world and it affects how I do church.”

After almost nine years of living and working in a multiracial church, Brown says he’s more convinced than ever that this is how the church should look.

He says his experience has allowed him to know God in a way that he might not have: “You’re seeing aspects of God’s image that you would not otherwise see on display.”

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GROUNDED in the RESURRECTION: The CHURCH as a COMMUNITY of KINSHIP

by PIOTR J. MAŁYSZ illustration by ARTHUR SINGER

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ate modernity (that is, our day and age) has proved to be surprisingly communal in its ethos. We seek our identity in the groups we affiliate with on Facebook, in the beards and hipster clothing we wear, football teams we religiously root for, professional conferences we attend, dieting strategies we swear by, organic food stores where we shop, and not least, congregations and community groups we have joined. Our desire, in short, is to belong: to find ourselves under the protective umbrella of a community.

Nonconformism is decidedly passé unless it means group contestation of some other group’s outlook. This may come as a surprise when one considers that modernity, as such, is characterized by individualism and the idolization of subjective perception, intuition, and choice. “Dare to think for yourself” was how the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summarized the outlook of the Enlightenment;1 whereas

on American soil Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled self-reliance and being one’s own man.2

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This communal backdrop must not be ignored when we evaluate the turn to the tradition, both liturgical and theological, among today’s Christians. For it, too, at bottom represents a quest for community. The church is in! The example of Roman Catholicism is particularly instructive. Rome has, of course, always boasted an uncompromisingly corporate view of the Christian life. Yet it has also experienced a notable shift of emphasis from the priest at the altar to the table fellowship of the faithful, only to find many of the faithful now actually opting for the more priest-centered liturgy of the Latin Mass! The late modern communal ethos, when it finds itself in the church context, is not satisfied with the community at hand but seeks to give it roots in the remote past.

The cloud of witnesses, made up of generations of participants and devotees, has a verifying function.

It helps identify the truer and more authentic, the genuinely catholic and thus universal. Perhaps more importantly, it minimizes the risk of wrong commitment and guarantees stability. Among Protestants, a case in point is the rise of the New Calvinism as an unambiguous alignment with the tradition, not to

mention the popularity of high-church Anglicanism or even Eastern Orthodoxy. This traditionalism has a liturgical dimension: liturgical worship makes the community visible and continuous. And it has a theological dimension: retrieval of the theologies of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin endows our communal endeavors with an abiding significance.

The body of worshippers in a particular time and place finds itself connected through liturgy and theological pedigree to the believers who have gone before. All this goes against the grain of subjectivist and individualistic piety, bestowing on today’s believers a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, larger than the individual, and larger than life.

There is certainly much that is encouraging in the current liturgical and theological recovery of the Christian faith’s corporate dimension. Christians are not Gnostics whose identity boils down to an individualistic experience of inner enlightenment. There are no armchair Christians, as if being a Christian involved nothing but believing in one’s faith. Nor is sanctification one’s personal self-improvement project. It is determined, first of all, by the needs of one’s brothers and sisters in Christ. But if I am indeed correct in seeing the current ecclesiological turn, with its liturgical and theological emphases, as part of the late modern search for a communal shelter, then we must also consider the phenomenon from a more critical angle. What we learn from Augustine’s dismissal of pagan virtues as splendid vices, and from Luther’s insistence that even the best of works can be mortal sins, is that one can do the right thing for the decidedly wrong reason.

At stake here is the church’s self-understanding and the way it communicates this to the world. The late-modern idealization of the communal ethos is, from the perspective of the church, a deeply ambiguous phenomenon. We should laud its intellectual, psychological, and sociological assault on naive modernist individualism and self-reliance. But it should not put us in a celebratory mood. The fundamental problem is that the vast majority of today’s communities are, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term, “imagined communities.” Each is constituted by a founding act of choice on the part of its members. “The choice,” writes sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, “is restated daily and ever new actions are taken to confirm it”3—if only through maintained

“ALL THIS GOES AGAINST THE GRAIN OF SUBJECTIVIST AND INDIVIDUALISTIC PIETY, BESTOWING ON TODAY’S BELIEVERS A SENSE OF BELONGING TO SOMETHING LARGER THAN THEMSELVES, LARGER THAN THE INDIVIDUAL, AND LARGER THAN LIFE.”

awareness that there always are other options. What characterizes late modern communities, Bauman continues, is that they are held together by bonds of affinity. Affinity, to be sure, boasts “the intention to make the bond like that of kinship.” But even as it works assiduously to cement it, affinity can never quite shrink from keeping some options open.

If this is an accurate picture of our society, then the church must be careful how it articulates the irreducibly corporate dimension of Christian existence. Liturgy, especially the way it builds up to the Lord’s Supper, is not simply an appealing embodiment of the worshipper’s desire to belong. Theological traditions are not just ideological safe havens that cloak our individual lives with meaning. Fundamentally, the church is not a community hanging “on the thin thread of conversation,”4 whose goal is to talk over, and distract people from, the precariousness and even meaninglessness of existence. If it is, then Christianity is another communal vision that offers an arguably stronger, more genuine, and more satisfying sense of togetherness. The church is then a purveyor MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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of yet another community in the marketplace of meaning, either appealing or off-putting to all those who are in search of an intellectually and affectively compatible home.

What Bauman helps clarify is the need for the church to understand itself in distinction from communities based on affinity and thus, fundamentally, in distinction from communities whose center is a human enactment of togetherness—however traditionalist, liturgical, or theological in its appeal.

How is the church to do this? How is the church to embody a unique community of kinship? I submit that Christianity, insofar as it aspires to be God’s church, must build its self-understanding not on how it realizes a communal ethos, but on a sense of the gospel as God’s ongoing action.

The New Testament points to God’s ongoing action when it speaks of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and, with it, the resurrection of all flesh. What this connection emphasizes is that Jesus’ resurrection is no mere announcement of what the future will bring, what awaits when God at long last wraps all history up. It is, in other words, not a foretaste of what will come nor even a declaration of what God will one day bring to pass in all of his creation. It declares what already is the case!

The choice between the future tense “will” and the present (perfect) may seem a trivial one, a matter of

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mere rhetoric. But no less than the nature of God’s action in history, and with it biblical ecclesiology, is at stake.

Jesus’ resurrection is evidence of what God has already begun to do with all of his creation. The new creation (2 Cor. 5:17) is none other than the present reality of Jesus’ resurrection. Consider, first, the alternative: If the import of the resurrection is merely a hope in the future, then the church emerges as a fundamentally human reality, a community of the interim. Confined to an anthropological plane, the church is only a negative community, set against the world by its own story, which means simply the refusal of other available stories. With this founding story the church comforts itself in words spoken and symbolized through practice. The church may even be tempted to engage in explicit competition and seek to make a case for the superiority of its story.

By contrast, an altogether different reality comes into focus if the import of the resurrection is that, beginning with the risen man Jesus, the new creation is already underway. So understood, the resurrection certainly does not obviate the need for human speech and practice, yet it fundamentally reorients them. For now the gospel is not a mere message but, above all, it bears tangible witness to God’s present action. Here we must be even more specific: the gospel attests to God’s redemptive-creative work. It is, in fact, God’s own self-attestation. This takes place not merely in the hidden and treacherous recesses of the believer’s heart, but also in the midst of creation, breaking into history’s flow and showing in the here and now the futility of death’s grip, the absurdity of sin, and the obsolescence of the demonic.

How does all this take place? It is already in the present that we truly are buried into Christ’s death and raised with him to newness of life (Rom. 6) in an act where Christ himself, in the words of Luther, “is present at baptism and in baptism, in fact is himself the baptizer.”5 And it is already in the present that grain and grapes yield not only bread and wine, but also a heavenly feast, as Irenaeus states so eloquently!6 God at work in the here and now is our comfort and our hope. This is the gospel, the good news of the new creation already being called into being. Through and around this gospel, we too are being gathered as a people made by God unto himself. God’s unceasing work on behalf of his creation transforms us from our former nothingness, rescues

“THE CHURCH IS NOT ANOTHER CLUB. WHAT JUSTIFIES THE CHURCH IS THE ONGOING WORK OF GOD THROUGH WHICH HE GIVES BIRTH TO HIS OWN PEOPLE. GOD’S WORK ALONE FORMS THE CHURCH, AND SO FORMS IT INTO A COMMUNITY OF KINSHIP, OR IN THE WORDS OF CALVIN, ‘THE MOTHER OF BELIEVERS.’” us from our empty ways, and renews us in our minds; it is our new birth, which will find its completion in no less than bodily resurrection and incorruption.

What sets the church apart from the world, in distinction from both modernist individualism and its late-modern communitarian avatar, is not simply the church’s communal character. For the church does not represent yet another community. Rather, through the church, in creation’s very midst, God publicly displays his faithfulness and carries out his promise. With Christ as its head, the church is thus the reality of the resurrection (God bringing it about) between the resurrection of the One and the assured rising of all. Even with a story to tell, the church is no mere rhetoric, or even worse, a language game to satisfy our desire to belong. Rather, the church is God’s own people in the vivifying, recreating, sacramental presence of their risen and now ascended Lord. The church is God’s people who, raised with Christ to newness of life, repeatedly find their sustenance in his body and blood and, precisely in doing so, “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26).

In summary, the late-modern turn to a communal ethos, exemplified in the recovery of liturgical and theological continuity, is a mixed blessing. For what justifies the church is not that it does community

well, or that its sense of community transcends time and place, but that it has something more ancient to offer. The church is not another club.

What justifies the church is the ongoing work of God through which he gives birth to his own people.

God’s work alone forms the church, and so forms it into a community of kinship, or in the words of Calvin, “the mother of believers.”7 If the church’s liturgy embodies this truth and its theology testifies to it, then the church will find no excuse to proclaim or market itself. For the church lives by the gospel alone: the gift of God himself. And it has nothing but this to offer.

Piotr J. Małysz is assistant professor of divinity, history, and doctrine at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. He is also an ordained Lutheran pastor.

1 Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784).

Various editions available.

2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841).

3 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003), 29.

4 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 17.

5 Martin Luther, “Concerning Rebaptism” (1528) in Luther’s Works, vol. 40 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1958), 242.

6 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, bk. V, ch. 2.

7 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.I.iv.

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STOP STALKING THE MAILBOX

On the White Horse Inn blog, Out of the Horse’s Mouth, you’ll

find links to recent and archived episodes and related articles,

plus additional discussions and comments, where you can join the conversation on today’s most relevant theological topics.

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book reviews

58 “When the pain hit, all I could do was focus my mind in a certain direction.

‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me…’”

62 60

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BOOK REVIEWS

The Reviews section is usually reserved for critical engagement with important books of interest to our readers. We’re changing gears slightly in this issue by featuring an excerpt of our friend J. Todd Billing’s new book Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Brazos Press, 2015), which tackles the tough issues of grief and suffering. We often turn to Dr. Billings for his wise and winsome insight, and for those reasons we commend this excerpt of his new book to you.

A N E XC E R P T F R O M REJOICING IN LAMENT

O

by J. TODD BILLINGS

n the morning after hearing the news that a precancerous malady was likely, with cancer possible, I was downstairs, shedding tears of pain and anxiety. Rachel came downstairs with our seventeen-month-old son, Nathaniel, while our daughter continued to sleep upstairs. At the breakfast table, I told Rachel that after researching online, I found that a precancerous malady would be very likely to eventually move into cancer—whether after five years or ten years. This is not what we wanted for our family. This is not what we wanted for our lives. The fear, the uncertainty, was palpable.

As we wept together, Nathaniel started bawling in his high chair as well. He didn’t know why Mom and Dad were crying, but he knew that this was not the normal breakfast routine. Rachel and I dried our tears and attempted to console Nathaniel. But his crying continued, big tears rolling down his face.

Several weeks later we received news that rather than a benign yet ominous precancerous malady, my illness was already cancer. Not only that, but the cancer had already been eroding my bones. After receiving this news, my doctor and I could see a likely explanation as to why I had been sick so many times in the last few years: pneumonia, bronchitis, a constant cold, and several other infections. My immune system had been compromised—a common symptom of my cancer.

But within a week of this diagnosis, I was to start

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chemotherapy, which made my previous list of symptoms seem miniscule.

Chemotherapy is poison. Good chemotherapy is poison that is focused quite specifically on a particular cancer rather than a more “general” poison for the body. But many of the medications that I started that week were to counter the side effects of the chemotherapy itself. Overnight, the number of pills I took each day multiplied, and my schedule quickly filled up with visits to the cancer office to receive an IV and chemo shots.

I was usually the youngest patient at the cancer office by decades.

There is nothing introspective about physical pain. I recall one procedure, a bone marrow biopsy, where I was lying on my stomach on a paper sheet on top of a treatment table. A large needle was placed into one of the bones in my

back. Even though there was a local anesthetic, the pain shot throughout my body’s bones like an electric shock. When I sat up, there was blood on the table and on the floor. My friend, who had given me a ride to the cancer center, gave me a forced smile as I stood up. The paper sheet was wet with sweat.

When the pain hit, all I could do was focus my mind in a certain direction. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me . . . through Christ who strengthens me, through Christ . . .”

Paul’s words to the Philippians came to mind (Phil.

4:13) and became my mind’s focus point during the pain. It wasn’t a meaningless mantra. I needed to be confessing a truth that made such endurance of pain both possible and purposeful—going before God’s presence in the raw pain.

At other times during chemo, I struggled with the effects of steroids, which would make my mind race like . . . it was on steroids! For some myeloma patients, the effect was not just an undesired mental alertness but a burst of physical energy: the wife of one patient told me with a smile that she would wake up the morning after her husband had been on steroids, finding that he had been up all night cleaning the house! For me, the steroids caused a flood of mental activity for a few days and then a steep slide into deep fatigue on other days. My dosage varied, but on some days it was ten times the dosage ordinarily prescribed for steroids. The steroids helped to make the chemotherapy more effective without adding further toxins. It was required, not optional.

On many evenings, when I was trying to settle my energetic mind, I lay down on the living room floor and repeated the following words from the opening of Psalm 27.

The Lord is my light and my salvation— whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the stronghold of my life— of whom shall I be afraid?

When the wicked advance against me to devour me, it is my enemies and my foes who will stumble and fall.

Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then I will be confident.

One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple. (vv. 1–4 NIV) This prayer was hard work. I had to repeat these words many times for them to become my prayer.

Gradually, my mind would focus, tense muscles would release, and I was brought into a place that was not just the story of my cancer, my steroids, my chemo.

By the Spirit, I was led into God’s presence with my fear, with my anger, and with my hope being recentered on life with God, to “dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to see him in his temple.” The fight with cancer was not repressed or left behind: “though an army besiege me . . . though war break out against me.” But in praying the Psalms—in soaking in its words—I was moved toward trust, and even hope. “My heart will not fear . . . even then I will be confident.” In the busyness of day-to-day life, I was not always in touch with my fear, anger, and need for hope during this time on chemo. But praying this psalm both put me in touch with these realities of my life and helped those realities to be reframed as I moved to trust in the Lord and his promises.

J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament. Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group. © 2015. Used by permission. http://www .bakerpublishinggroup.com.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

BY THOMAS PIKETTY Belknap Press, 2014 696 pages (hardcover), $39.95

E

ven more than Stephen Hawking ’s A Brief History of Time, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a most unexpected best-seller, especially given the fact that, unlike Hawking ’s most famous work, this one contains no pictures. It is also probable that the two works have something else in common: many more people own the book and perhaps have it on prominent display on their shelves than will actually have read very much of it. It is a heavy, technical tome, though written with style and clarity (given the opacity of the topic). One can certainly say it is easier to follow than Marx’s great work of the same name, but that is not a particularly high compliment.

Piketty’s thesis is relatively straightforward: The world economy exhibits much greater returns on capital than actual economic growth. While this thesis is argued at great length and with economic data for over twenty countries over a long period of time, the implication is really rather simple: The gap between rich and poor is growing wider and wider, and more and more money is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. In terms of Western electoral politics, it means that the rhetoric about the squeezing of the middle classes is (according to Piketty) a reality that can be seen in terms of the ownership of capital. It is a somber argument in terms of its implications for the future.

Economics is not my field, and so I must leave critiques and assessments of Piketty’s argument

60

and supporting evidence to the experts. But even as a layman, it is obvious that one problem with the book is its prophetic aspirations. The future is unpredictable for many reasons, natural disasters not being the least of them. The problem is rendered complicated by further factors. A world where oil prices are a key part of any developed country’s economy is a world where the whole idea of national economies with even relative independence as understood, say, one hundred years ago, is an anachronism. When one is analyzing economic behavior on a global scale, the capacity for error would seem quite great.

Oil is vital for the simple reason that the automob i l e wa s i nve nte d a nd has become an essential part of life. The IT revolution of the past forty years has also transformed the world economy. Movies and television have created and transformed markets.

Game theory has changed how economists and businesspeople think. None of these things could have been predicted at the end of the nineteenth century, and yet all of them have profoundly shaped national and world economies. Confident predictions of blessing or disaster by economists on the scale that Piketty chooses to make them are clearly illfounded. Maybe he will prove to be correct, but there is absolutely no way of knowing that. As I say, I am no economist, but I do know something about the history of economics, and history indicates that its predictive power is extremely limited, being subject to so many variables.

The real significance of the book, though, lies less in the details of its argument than in the fact that it is a phenomenon. To have a footnoted 650-page economics tome as a best-seller is astounding. And, given the fact it is unlikely to

be read by many of those who have bought it, and that it lacks either a sexy title or a glossy cover to attract buyers, one has to ask why this is.

There are a couple of factors involved. First, I suspect it speaks to the cultural moment. Picketty’s thesis is essentially a pessimistic one, whereby the future (for most us) is going to contain much less in terms of opportunities for increasing material comfort and upward social mobility than the past.

Many in the Western middle classes are intuitively aware that in their lifetime they have not seen the growth in the standard of living that their parents enjoyed in the post-war boom and then again in the 1980s. Piketty offers an account of why this is so and along the way finds people we can blame: the international capitalists.

Second, the book represents something of a return to the traditional concerns of the Left. The manifold failures of Marxism should have finished the Left, but we all know that did not happen.

Instead, the Left of the 1950s and ’60s reinvented itself via the work of the Frankfurt School and numerous trendy French thinkers such as Louis Althusser. The New Left is a complicated movement, but it bequeathed to subsequent generations two obvious things: one, a barbaric prose style of Gnostic opacity that cloaked its arguments in shrouds of impenetrable linguistic bombast; and two, a psychologized, rather than an economic, concept of oppression. That is why the major concerns on the Left today are often only tangentially connected to economics: abortion, LGBTQ rights, and so on, are the order of the day.

In this context, the success of Piketty’s book seems to reflect the fact that many people still (rightly!) regard economic issues as fundamental to the human experience of freedom and oppression. The book may well be an example of “Old Left” thinking, but that in itself is to be welcomed, as it represents a return to a debate in which the terms are not simply defined by whatever the latest sexual lobby group decides them to be. I can argue with the Old Left because I can agree with them that, to borrow a phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Third, and following from the last point, I suspect much of Piketty’s success is due to the book being a conscience-salving purchase. Like the Harvard professors who devised and campaigned for the Affordable Care Act, most of us want to imagine

“WHEN ONE IS ANALYZING ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR ON A GLOBAL SCALE, THE CAPACITY FOR ERROR WOULD SEEM QUITE GREAT.” ourselves as committed to helping those suffering economic hardship. But also like said professors, we generally prefer to think that other people are the problem and do not appreciate it when the proposed solution is applied to ourselves. To read Piketty, or perhaps more likely, to own Piketty, is to place oneself on the right (i.e., the Left) side of the current debates about poverty without actually having to do anything about it—partly, of course, because if Piketty is right, there is nothing we can do about it.

So, is there a Christian “take” on Picketty? I would suggest it is this: The book simply confirms what the Bible says about the infatuation people have with mammon. People are fascinated with money, its power, who has it, and who does not.

That Piketty’s book is a best-seller is prima facie evidence of this. That makes sense: money gives us god-like powers. Money can also allow us to distract ourselves from our own mortality. People thus like books about money and about why others seem to have it and they do not. I suspect Piketty appeals to people for these two reasons: he talks about what we love most, and he allows us all to feel like victims. Greed and lack of responsibility, after sex and violence, are two of the easiest things to sell in today’s marketplace.

Carl R. Trueman is professor of church history and vice president for academic affairs at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia).

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BOOK REVIEWS

Mindscape: What to Think About Instead of Worrying

BY TIMOTHY Z. WITMER New Growth Press, 2014 144 pages (paperback), $17.99

T

here are quite a few things in the world today that cause Christians to worry.

For example, anxiety levels grow when we think about problems concerning health, finances, political issues, and family hardships.

In Mindscape, Timothy Witmer tackles the issue of worry with practical and comforting truths from Scripture. Witmer explains and applies core truths of Scripture like the sovereignty, truth, grace, and love of God, the beauty of the gospel, and the help of the Holy Spirit in sanctification. One of his main points is that Christians need to think about how they think about life issues. In other words, we should consider our “mindscape,” that is, the thoughts that occupy our minds. By God’s grace, and as the Spirit works in us, we should experience a new mindscape, “a gradual progression and transformation in the way we think. … [And] when there is a change in the way we think, there will be a definite change in our words and actions as well” (11–12). This is not the power of positive thinking, but the power of God in sanctification.

Using Paul’s exhortation in Philippians 4:8 to think about such things, Witmer gives biblical guidance on our thought patterns. After two introductory chapters, chapters 3 through 10 discuss Paul’s list of whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy—that we should think about such things.

The structure of each chapter is similar: first, he explains the meaning of each word/concept in

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Philippians 4:8; second, Witmer gives other biblical examples of each word/concept; and third, he frequently applies these truths positively (think this way) and negatively (don’t think this way) to the topic of worry.

There aren’t many weaknesses to point out in this book; it is solid biblically and practically.

However, a few times I couldn’t see how Witmer’s discussion directly tied into the topic of worry. For example, his chapter on “Whatever Is Admirable” doesn’t fully explain how thinking about something admirable would kill worry. There were also times when I thought the book could be a bit more organized; in several places I lost the flow of the theme since the discussion moves away from the topic of worry (for example, his explanation of purity). These aren’t major critiques, but they did come to mind as I was reflecting on this book.

Mindscape is a resource that will be a blessing for Christians who struggle with worry and anxiety. It is easy to read and applicable; it also constantly reminds the reader of God’s grace and the gospel. I recommend this book for personal reading.

Come to think of it, it’s probably a book you’ll read more than once, since it has some good details that a second read would help reinforce. I also recommend this book for a group study, since there are a few application questions at the end of each chapter. As Jesus said, we should love God with our minds (Matt. 22:37). This book will help the Christian do just that—to the glory of God!

Shane Lems is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Hammond, Wisconsin. He has served as a church planter and pastor in the United Reformed Church of America, and he blogs at www.reformedreader.wordpress.com.

GEEK S QUAD

B E YO N D C U LT U R E WA R S … AG A I N

by MICHAEL S. HORTON

I get it. I’m trying to be the spiritual leader in a home with six sinners who trust in Christ, repent of their sins, and look for something beyond this present age as our hope. God calls me and my wife to do our parts. I am all ears when brothers (yes, usually brothers) encourage me and tell me how to pull that off. But, frankly, a lot of it is, well, unhelpful.

It is simply antinomian (“against law”) to shrug off the responsibilities of obedience in leading our families. But there is also a tendency in some circles to confuse cultural traditionalism with the faith.

There are the denim skirts, hard patriarchy, girls brought up to eschew college and simply to focus on marriage, and so forth.

In fact, it’s girls who have the toughest time in our circles. They’re expected—even by “Type A” Christian parents—to excel at everything. They have to prove themselves, especially to our pagan friends who think that “patriarchy” is the great disease bequeathed by Christendom. But they also have to be “Proverbs 31” women-in-the-making, the disciple of the Virgin Mary who will necessarily be the amazing Christian princess and eventual soccer mom.

We have to admit it. There are simply areas where our “go-all-out” hype has made the actual living of the Christian life a tyrannical and oppressive vision for folks, especially young ladies. There are aspects of “traditional culture” that are not really Christian, but twisted and distorted assumptions of an unbaptized patriarchy. Fathers don’t have to die and be reborn, but daughters do. Sons also are expected to be mirror images of the beard-wearing dad who aspires to the role of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (though hopefully not to the actual moral character of these men).

We desperately need wisdom on this issue.

Christianity affirms the primacy of the Father, but in ways that defy the “patriarchalism” of groups that look and act like they belong on a fundamentalist Mormon compound. On the patriarchal side, I’ve seen examples that differ considerably from “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” who “so loved the world that he gave…” I’ve seen versions of Ephesians 5 that underscored submission of wives to husbands, but made little of “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). Subdued, sullen, and appearing as if they had surrendered their personhood to their husbands, many such women evidence little of the joy of their salvation—and of the communion of saints.

Ironically, so do their husbands, the little patriarchs who fancy themselves heads of Israel. Everything is kept in order, tightly controlled, like goslings behind the lord of the manor. These men also miss out. They miss the wonderful surprises of a woman who has some sense of who she is, apart from her husband.

The two become “one flesh,” not one person.

We must move beyond the “Left”/“Right” politics that often determine more of our family and church life than we even realize. The culture is bankrupt. Abortion, same-sex unions, and the increasing encroachment of the state on the life of the family, the church, and the schools are evidence of Leviathan. Nevertheless, the church has to say more than the denim-clad mom and youngsters behind their great high priest. It has to show how following Christ, the true High Priest, makes us all, male or female, “one in Christ” (Gal. 3:28).

Michael S. Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

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B A C K PA G E

DIVERSITY IN THE AMERICAN CHURCH

by BROOKE VENTURA

50%

of all churchgoers in America go to the largest 10% of American churches

I N 1 9 9 8 , O N LY 5 % O F E VA N G E L I C A L C H U R C H E S W E R E CONSIDERED DIVERSE

5%

13%

I N 2 0 1 2 , A S T U DY C O N D U C T E D B Y D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y S H O W E D T H AT P E R C E N TA G E INCREASED TO 13%

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%

OF CHURCHES IN AMERICA

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85% of Protestant pastors believe that churches should strive for racial diversity

85 …and 85% of Protestant pastors say that their congregations are mostly comprised of a single ethnic group

100 HAVE LESS THAN

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Do we all worship the same God?

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WHAT IS THE BIBLE REALLY ABOUT?

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