Page 3019 – Christianity Today (2024)

A critique of Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and the rest of the new atheists makes the key point that these authors, in attempting to tear down all religious belief as toxic, have failed to distinguish the good from the bad. And they haven’t even come up with any new and particularly compelling arguments. For a movement that provides itself on its supposed intellectual superiority, that’s quite an indictment.

According to reviewer Peter Berkowitz in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“In making his case that reason must regard faith as an enemy to be wiped out, Mr. Hitchens declares Socrates’s teaching that knowledge consists in knowing one’s ignorance to be ‘the definition of an educated person.’ And yet Mr. Hitchens shows no awareness that his atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it colors all his observations and determines his conclusions.

“Mr. Hitchens is by far the most erudite and entertaining of the new new atheists. But his errors and his excesses are shared by the whole lot. And these errors and excesses have pernicious political consequences, amplifying invidious distinctions among fellow citizens and obscuring crucial differences among believers world wide.

“Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today’s bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America’s destruction.”

Memo to the angry atheists (and I know many atheists are calm and reasonable): Not all religion is alike.

Elizabeth Marquardt writes in today’s New York Times, “On April 30, a state Superior Court panel ruled that a child can have three legal parents. The case, Jacob v. Shultz-Jacob, involved two lesbians who were the legal co-parents of two children conceived with sperm donated by a friend. The panel held that the sperm donor and both women were all liable for child support.”

There have been no legal and cultural reactions. So, it seems that having multiple parents will soon become legally accepted practice. “If more children are granted three legal parents,” Marquardt writes, “what is our rationale for denying these families the rights and protections of marriage? America, get ready for the group-marriage debate.”

“If we allow three legal parents,” she says, “why not five?”

I am becoming my grandfather, and that is a good thing. Let me explain.

The more I have gotten involved in the evangelical creation-care movement, the more I have found myself drawn toward practices that my grandparents did—or would have done if they were available. Each time I “reduce-reuse-recycle,” I become more like Grandpa Gushee from Milton, Massachusetts.

I am becoming convinced that creation care and what we evangelicals usually call “stewardship” are basically the same thing. This discovery is slowly changing my family’s lifestyle. The more that lifestyle changes, the more I skip back about 60 years to the values of an earlier generation.

These are values such as hard work, modesty in consumption, consistent giving, frugality in spending, saving for the future, and squeezing every last drop of value out of our possessions. You work hard and earn an honest living, spend your money judiciously after setting aside a generous portion for giving and saving, buy only what you need, and make it last as long as you can.

To be fair, these were values that my parents tried to instill in my sisters and me. But we were children of the 1960s and 1970s. Parental values had a hard time competing with mall values, schoolmate values, and TV commercial values.

I know that I haven’t warmed easily to simple living. I didn’t get everything I wanted as a kid, but I did get as much as I needed and some of what I wanted.

Early married years saw some pretty simple living. As newlyweds, Jeanie and I delivered newspapers for a time while we went to school in Louisville. That was not fun. Date night consisted of cheese bread and water at Pizza Hut. A whole date for $3.00!

But as our income increased, our lifestyle went up with it. Three years living in urban Philadelphia while working for Ron Sider did not win us over to the simplicity gospel. (Sorry, Ron.) As our children came along, we became more acculturated and began living in suburban style. A bit of inherited money helped that process along, and off we went.

Then the creation-care movement came calling. I became involved in various efforts of the Evangelical Environmental Network, helped draft the Evangelical Climate Initiative, and now get to hang out with some of the country’s leading environmental scholars and activists. I began to see that concern for creation is both biblically and empirically mandatory.

I also began to see that, as Al Gore has discovered, you must walk the walk if you are going to talk the talk of creation care. There can be no gap between proclamation and practice on this one. Not just because critics with sharp knives are near at hand, but also because integrity demands it.

Imitating Ron

So theory is now becoming practice in the Gushee household. We are making a gradual transition to compact fluorescent light bulbs, which cost more on the front end but use less energy and last longer. Despite the lack of mandatory recycling or even easily accessible recycling here in Jackson, Tennessee, we are recycling plastics, paper, and newspaper. We are reusing the back side of printed pages in the home office whenever possible. I now imitate my old boss Ron Sider and scribble many of my notes on the back of used paper. Ron is famous for that.

We have set the summer thermostat to 75 and the winter thermostat to 65. I am trying to retrain myself and my family to turn off every light in the house that is not being used. We are seeking to get maximum use out of our old cars; next year, when we train our fifth family driver, I will get a hybrid, and she will get my old Explorer. Jeanie loves to plant trees and is doing so across our property, which is good for the environment and beautiful in itself.

We have a long way to go. Our utility bills are still too high, as are our gasoline costs. We must find a way to cut both. We eat out too much. Probably our house is too big, and we should downsize someday, though I pity the poor fool who tries to drag Jeanie away from the home in which we have now raised our children.

In the end, the lifestyle that Grandma and Grandpa Gushee pursued is at least beginning to come into view over the horizon. They lived through scarcity and the Depression and learned valuable lessons from it. They were good stewards because they had to be. The challenge for 21st-century Americans is that many of us don’t. We must become good stewards simply because we choose to be.

As we do, we might discover that economic and environmental stewardship go together, hand in glove. Perhaps this rediscovery will motivate us to preserve the health of our planet.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Other articles on the environment are available in our special section.

Gushee’s recent columns include:

The Joy of Policy Manuals | There’s more to workplace justice than good intentions. (April 26, 2007)

Jesus and the Sinner’s Prayer | What Jesus says doesn’t match what we usually say. (March 6, 2007)

Dethroned | Jesus puts the all-important self in its place. (January 8, 2007)

Children of a Lesser Hope | What happens when we lose confidence in the church. (November 1, 2006)

How to Create Cynics | Everybody knows when we’re covering up our confusion with God-talk. (September 1, 2006)

What’s Right About Patriotism | The nation is not our highest love, but it still deserves our affection. (July 1, 2006)

Gushee’s webpage has a biography and information on his books and articles.

One of the founding fathers of modern worship music, Brian Doerksen has released his fourth solo album, Holy God (Integrity). While he’s enthusiastic about his Lord, Doerksen isn’t so excited about trends in the worship genre.

You have 25 albums to your credit as a worship leader or producer. So why do few people know your name?When I first felt called to do this more than 20 years ago, I wanted to perform music on big stages. But God quickly called me to be all about worship, which is really, “Notice God, don’t notice me.”

That explains why you’d rather lead at your local church than get your name out there or go on a high-profile tour.It is connected. If I’m going to write worship music, inspiring others and putting songs in the mouths of the local church, if I’m not anchored in the local church and finding my primary identity there, it’s going to feel false. I hear people say, “My goal is to write a song that the whole world will sing.” I look at them sideways and ask, “Why don’t you try and write a song you want to sing in your prayers to God? Or a song that your local church wants to sing, where you’re serving, where you’re known and loved?” Let God worry about the rest of the world.

Why make an album focused exclusively on God’s holiness?Two reasons. The positive reason is, when I went to withdraw and seek God at the beginning of last year to learn what he wanted me to do, I had such a powerful encounter with him and his holiness. The more I meditated, the more it became the only thing I wanted to sing about.

The negative reason would be simply my deep concern about some of what is going on in the modern worship explosion—the shallowness, the man-centeredness, the banality. I wanted to do something that was about God and his core attributes. A song like “Holy God” is a God song, not a song about our feelings toward God. It’s not our response to God. So this was my way of saying, “Think on these things.”

Andree Farias, a regular contributor to Christian Music Today.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

A longer version of this interview is available from Christian Music Today, which also has a review of Holy God.

Doerksen’s official webpage has podcasts about Doerksen’s songs in Holy God, information on Doerksen, and another interview.

Two weeks ago in this space I reviewed Charles Marsh’s new book Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity. Many of you wrote in response; there were also indirect responses, on blogs and so on. Thanks to all who wrote, pro and con. It was nice, of course, to hear from readers who appreciated the review, and not so pleasant to hear from others who said that I epitomized the very pathology Marsh was concerned to draw to our attention. What was disappointing was the relatively small number of responses suggesting the possibility of ongoing conversation between different vantage points. There were some such, but not so many as might be hoped.

In the interest of furthering such conversation—and in the spirit of Alan Jacobs’ column on Cass Sunstein—I want to return briefly to the subject this week. One criticism I received from several writers was that I had simply failed to respond to the “substantive issues” Marsh raises. This kind of response can easily be a conversation–stopper, or merely the cue for a variant of the wonderful Monty Python “argument” skit.

So how to proceed? Maybe just by trying to carry on a conversation anyway. Case in point: a response to my review from D. W. Congdon on the thoughtful blog The Fire and the Rose, which Congdon—a student at Princeton Theological Seminary—maintains with several like–minded souls. Congdon began by saying that I had written “another unnecessarily harsh and unfair review of a book” (he didn’t specify the previous occasions he had in mind). Congdon, I should add, is a regular reader of Books & Culture (more recently he posted a favorable comment on Ric Machuga’s review of Michael Behe’s new book). Whatever our disagreements on Marsh’s book and the larger subject it addresses, we should be able to talk.

Most of Congdon’s post is devoted to the theme that “partisan evangelicalism” does indeed “run rampant” in large segments of our nation—not least in his hometown, Portland, Oregon. He refers to a New York Times piece about evangelical voters’ response to Giuliani, which quotes a voter who says that Giuliani—as a supporter of abortion rights—will never get his vote. Later in the article, however, as Congdon reports, we learn that among the 40 evangelicals interviewed, most would vote for Giuliani if he were to win the Republican nomination, on the grounds that he “would be preferable to any Democrat.”

Here is what Congdon says in response:

There is a lot in this article worth pondering, but at the very least it gives a glimpse into the deep partisanship of conservative evangelicalism. Like many Christians I know from my home town, it is more important to keep a Democrat out of office than to elect the best candidate. For such people, preventing the death of unborn children is infinitely more important than the deaths of born men, women, and children around the world, often at the hands of American soldiers. Personally I would not just call this partisanship; I would call it idolatry.

I’d agree with Congdon that Christian voters, whether Republicans or Democrats—or neither—should vote for the candidate who seems best for the country. (It was in that spirit that Wendy and I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992.) Such judgments, of course, as I suggested in my review of Marsh, should be informed by an acknowledgment of fallibility, a strong appreciation for the law of unintended consequences, and a sense of irony informed by history. (Did I mention the election of 1992?) And it is not unreasonable, never mind idolatrous, to factor in the party affiliation of a candidate for president, since you are not just voting for an individual when you vote for president. What Congdon is describing here sounds (to me, at least) very much like the way we all muddle along as we participate in the messy business of electoral politics.

What really struck me, though, was Congdon’s assessment of those Christians from his hometown. It seems remarkably ungenerous coming from a writer who has begun by complaining about an “unnecessarily harsh and unfair review.” Isn’t it possible that “such people” take the deaths of those “born men, women, and children” very seriously indeed? On what basis is Congdon justified in concluding that “such people” value the life of an aborted child “infinitely more” (and please note the word “infinitely” in particular)? Isn’t it possible that for these Christians, the wrongness of abortion has a moral clarity that is often difficult to achieve in matters of foreign policy, say? And by the way: Are there other Christians—perhaps even in Portland—who believe that the wrongness of the U.S. invasion of Iraq has a stunning moral clarity? And if such Christians would be inclined to use that decision as a way of evaluating any candidate (where does he or she stand on Iraq?), would they too be guilty of idolatry?

These are a few of the things that occurred to me as I was reading Congdon’s response. I hope the conversation will continue.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

Copyright © 2007 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

One of the most intriguing publishing trends of the last decade or so is the fascination with the Amish, most vividly expressed in a thriving subgenre of fiction devoted to Amish life (largely though not exclusively pitched to the evangelical Christian market) but also in journalistic accounts. Alongside this popular line is a parallel trend in the scholarly world, where (especially under the imprimatur of John Hopkins University Press) impressive work is being done.

Karen M. Johnson–Weiner’s Train Up a Child falls in this latter category. Johnson–Weiner’s book can be read on two levels: as an ethnographic study of Old Order Amish and Mennonite schools, and as a stimulus to rethinking parochial schooling across the religious spectrum.

Train Up a Child presents detailed descriptions of schools in nine Old Order communities scattered through New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. Old Order religious ideology defines the church–community as “God’s realm” and demands its separation from the world. The schools covered here represent the wide range in degrees of allowable worldliness within the Old Order. They also vary in size, age, economic base, and the nature of their interaction with other Old Order communities.

Johnson–Weiner analyzes each local community in terms of its relationship to other Old Order settlements and to the general culture. Then, she explores the influence of such relationships on pedagogy, student–teacher interaction, discipline, selection of classroom materials, the physical structure and location of the school in the community, the extent to which students are drawn from one church community or several, the teaching of religion, and parental participation.

Train Up a Child is the most comprehensive survey of Old Order Schools currently available. Johnson–Weiner’s personal contacts within the Old Order community enabled participant observation, interviews, and correspondence that would be impossible for the average researcher. Combining this unique access with her research skills as chair of the Department of Anthropology at SUNY, Potsdam, she presents a readable, credible analysis of Old Order education’s response to modernity.

Despite the popular fascination with the Amish, “the average North American,” as Johnson–Weiner notes, “sees little difference between one Old Order Amish person and another … . In their plain, archaic–looking clothes and horse–drawn buggies, they all seem firmly anchored in the nineteenth century.” Guilty as charged. Most of us don’t know the Swartzentruber Amish from the Wenger Mennonites. Hence at the strictly ethnographic level, Train Up a Child struck me like a National Geographic special—interesting but remote, without impact on my everyday life.

But I also read the book as a parent and as a member of another Christian community, not so readily recognizable and distinctive as the Amish but nonetheless sharing many of the challenges they face. If the Amish are going to survive as a religious and cultural entity in the new millennium, they need to ensure that their children accept a set of values that are clearly different from those of the dominant society. That sounds like me and mine. Clearly personally relevant.

The issues the Amish community leaders considered when creating their schools are profitable for the rest of us to consider as well. Teachers at Swartzentruber Amish schools do not explicitly teach religion or Christian values. On the surface, that seems an odd choice for a parochial school. But Swartzentruber leaders want to be sure their community clearly understands that the responsibility for communicating spiritual truth and fostering spiritual growth belongs to parents, assisted by the church. School will deal with education. Parents must provide religious oversight. Don’t expect a Christian school to meet your responsibility.

In some Old Order schools, teachers are the clear authority inside the classroom but immediately lose that position when they step outside. They play on the playground as part of the children’s group rather than as supervisors. They may be “Teacher” in the classroom but they are always greeted by just their first name in the community. The point here is that education is only one part of life. It isn’t the main drag. The community and its shared values are far higher in priority. In my upper–middle–class suburb maybe we need to rethink this. (How does our tendency to extravagantly honor admission into Ivy League schools square with valuing each child as God’s unique, loved creation? Which parent at my church could calmly report “my son is failing fifth grade, but becoming a kinder person”?)

In some Old Order Amish schools all education is in German. In other schools all classes are conducted in English and German is relegated to a two–hour session each Friday. Some Amish believe that “education prepares our children to live in our Amish community”; others would say that “education prepares our children to make a living in the outside world.” Where is your local Christian school on this spectrum?

Some Old Order Amish schools intentionally choose curriculum like McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer, first published in 1881. Others teach from “modern” texts created in the 1950’s. The college textbook I require is now in it’s 8th edition, each with very minimal changes from its predecessor, apparently a way to make used textbooks obsolete so new ones can be sold and create profit for the publisher. How modern is modern? What qualities do I really want in the books my children use?

Old Order schools are the locus of their children’s introduction to the non–Old Order world. What should my local school, public or private, teach my kids about the world?

Whether as a window into the world of Old Order Amish or as a source of relevant questions about education, this is a good read.

O’Ann Steere is an instructor of psychology at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She has been involved in providing mental health care to missionaries for nearly 20 years.

Copyright © 2007 Books & Culture.Click for reprint information.

A while back I heard Len Sweet say that our society is moving away from the “bell curve” and toward something called the “well curve.” His comment got me doing some research on the topic and thinking about what all of this means for church leaders. Who knew that bells and wells were such important topics for church leaders to consider?

Since high school we’ve known all about the bell curve: that fundamental law of natural science and statistics that defines normal distribution as being massed near the middle while being low on the extremities. Represented on a graph, the distribution looks like a bell-shaped curve. The bell curve implies that most people gravitate toward the middle or average and avoid the extremes. For example, most people are of average height, have moderately sized families, and earn a “C” in statistics; few people are really tall or really short, few have very large or very small families, and few earn A’s or F’s.

But within the turbulent days we live, a new phenomenon is being recognized. The distribution for some of our choices is an inverted bell curve, or a well curve. In these cases, the population gravitates toward the ends or extremes and is lowest in the middle. The well curve describes many economic and social phenomena. For instance, television screens are simultaneously getting both larger (60″ plasma!) and tinier (watch the latest episode of 24 on your iPod!); stores are getting larger (Wal-Mart) and smaller (specialty boutique stores); people are eating more healthful food (organic) and more fast food (McDonald’s).

Perhaps more significant than the rise in the extremes is the decline of the middle: consider the disappearance of the middle-class, the demise of mid-sized companies, the loss of status for anything considered average, and the polarization of politics in America. Our tastes and choices are shifting away from the middle and toward the extremes.

The well curve helps describe a number of interesting church trends going on these days: how the church is moving theologically liberal and conservative, with the disappearance of the moderate; how churchgoers increasingly prefer megachurches and microchurches, but not mid-sized congregations; and how the church is both growing and losing prominence within the larger society.

On the local church level, pastors and other church leaders need to pay attention to the well curve for another important reason: it describes how churchgoers participate in the life of a given congregation.

The New Churchgoers: Very Active or Hardly Active

In a bell curve context, church leaders could expect most members to be moderately involved in the life of the congregation while the fringes were inhabited by the highly involved at one end and the minimally involved at the other end. But in a well curve context, leaders can expect few people to be moderately involved; instead folks will be either highly involved or barely involved.

The question is: How can pastors and other church leaders deal effectively with the well curve involvement of their church members?

As a coach to pastors and congregations, I’ve noticed four trends among churches that are adapting to this new context.

1. Membership. Churches are rethinking membership in seismic ways. Some consider anyone on the mailing list to be a member or they drop membership altogether. Other congregations emphasize membership and heighten the bar of what it takes to join the church.Church leaders who are embracing the well curve reality allow for a sense of belonging at both ends of the spectrum. This often results in leadership strategies that make membership available at two polarities: membership that is quick and available to practically anyone, and a level of membership that signifies considerable choice and high expectation.
2. Money. With the onset of well curve participation patterns, church budgets must be adjusted because there are fewer and fewer “average givers” these days. The two (non-contradictory) messages being sent to the congregation are “don’t feel pressured to give” and “give even more.” Rather than rail against the old 80/20 principle of giving, some church leaders are adapting their stewardship strategies to take advantage of it. They increase overall giving by giving appropriate attention to the ends of the giving continuum.As one pastor told me, “If I ask everyone to give 10 percent, the minimal giver stops giving or leaves the church altogether, while the big giver obliges by giving less than he can. I’m finding it more helpful to talk about starting small or giving big. Those messages tend to hit home.”
3. Movement. When it comes to moving people into deeper spiritual waters, North Point Church near Atlanta provides a great example of maximizing the extremities while giving fittingly minimal attention to the middle. They talk about moving people “from the foyer to the kitchen” which roughly means from large scale worship experiences to small group participation, or from anonymous to intimate. The middle step (I believe they refer to it as “the living room”) is an important one-time meeting that helps people consider and get started in a small group. Contrast this with typical Sunday school, a big middle strategy aimed at getting everyone to attend classes that avoid anonymity while rarely delivering intimacy.
4. Manpower. In a well curve context, who is going to do all the work of the church? After all, there are classes to be taught, ministry to be done and good news to be spread. Some are finding the answer to be a shift in church staffing that emphasizes more volunteer and part-time personnel overseeing armies of workers.Gone are the days of Mrs. Sally teaching the fourth graders 50 weeks each year for two decades. The newer paradigm is for two-thirds of the church to be involved as short-term or rotating workers, while a significant number of high capacity volunteers or part-time staffers bring continuity and oversight.

In this paradigm, there is a shrinking role for the moderately involved volunteer.

What well curve trends have you noticed in your own congregation? And if the well curve trend continues or even increases, how will you respond?

Chad Hall serves as a coach/consultant to church leaders and is the co-author of Coaching for Christian Leaders: A Practical Guide (Chalice Press, 2007).

To respond to this newsletter, join the discussion at our blog, Out Of Ur.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Compass Direct News is corroborating earlier reports from China Aid Association that there is significant crackdown underway right now inside China against Christians and other religious groups.

Compass says:

Christians throughout China fear tough restrictions on their freedom to worship in the coming year following the launch of a government crackdown ahead of August 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Christians across China are reporting a shortage of Bibles, even in cities where Bibles previously were readily available. There are reports of ongoing house church raids and arrests, and an unprecedented number of foreign Christians have been expelled from China in recent months. In addition, research presented at a government meeting in January revealed that the number of Christians in China may have reached 130 million, including 20 million Catholics – much higher than previous government estimates, according to a report from the China Aid Association (CAA).

If there are 130 million Christians within the borders of China, that is a staggering number and it suggests an utter failure of the central government’s grand strategy of managing religion through the Public Security Bureau, the United Front, and the Three Self system.

If there are 130 million Christians within the borders of China, that forms the largest population of Christians in all of Asia’s 3.9 billion people. Japan itself has a population of 127 million.

Who knew the church could grow so persistently?

In my own attempt to deal with poverty in a Christlike way, the most profound lesson I’ve learned is also the most obvious: Poor people are people. Those who live and die in want of basic needs are just as smart, beautiful, creative, motivated, holy, and wise as you and I. They are also just as dumb, ugly, dull, lazy, sinful, and foolish as you and I. Living in Nicaragua, Mexico, and more recently Kenya alongside people in poverty, I’ve seen how our inability to identify with people across the wealth divide can subvert our good intentions in missions, hurting the people we’re trying to love.

Examining our blindness to the humanity and volition of poor people would reveal a deeper issue underlying poverty: broken fellowship. We show our alienation from God by toxic relationships with each other, inequality, and poverty on a local and global scale. Fellowship among believers is at the heart of God’s vision of redemption, alongside his desire for us to have individual relationships with him.

Maintaining healthy relationships across the wealth divide, however, is not easy. Lack of awareness of the enormous power differential between the “servants” and the “served” has led countless well-meaning mission groups to disempower poor communities. People who are treated as helpless come to hold a lesser view of themselves. People who believe they are “blessed to be a blessing” and in no need themselves come to a lesser view of the people they serve. These victim and savior complexes create a co-dependency that perpetuates the problems of poverty and far outweighs any temporary relief such missions provide.

I’ve seen this all over the world; poor people who understand that getting help requires appearing helpless, and rich people who unwittingly advance the helplessness of those they serve by seeing them as objects of charity, not equals.

“Watching the coverage of celebrities visiting Darfur … one would never guess that of the 14,000 aid workers in Darfur, nearly 13,000 are Sudanese,” Zine Magubane wrote last month in the Chicago Tribune. The Boston College sociologist described Vanity Fair‘s first Africa issue—which features American celebrities on its 21 covers—”an extravaganza of generous glitterati and anguished Africans” where “the Africans in question become, essentially, a colorful backdrop; their only function is to look miserable, as the intensity of their suffering bears a direct correlation to their utility in helping a celebrity build his or her brand.” Our brand is Christianity, but it is promoted by love, not disparity.

As poverty becomes a frontline discussion in the American church and evangelicals step up their efforts to care for people living in poverty, we need to consider what role we take in ministries to the poor. Rick Warren in particular is calling thousands of ordinary Americans to respond to Jesus’ concern for the poor in a respectful way. In our broken world, the love of Jesus calls us to mutually transformational missions that are educational to rich learners and empowering to poor teachers.

I’ve seen hints of a healing approach here and there, but never more vividly than in a little Nicaraguan village called Santa Rosa. Two friends of mine who work for an American nonprofit called Bridges to Community—one a young American woman, the other a young Nicaraguan woman—spent several months in Santa Rosa working in the fields, cooking and eating, talking and listening, and generally making friends with the people there. Having built a foundation of friendship and trust, they called a meeting and asked the community, “Would you be interested in working with groups of young Americans, and if so, what would you like to do with them?”

Months of community meetings and conversations ensued, leading to the formation of a local organization called (in translation) “From Here to There.” This organization defined an agenda for the development of their community, and they began hosting groups of Americans a few times a year. The community takes great pride in sharing their culture and way of life with these groups, teaching them how to work the fields and speak the language, and they’ve achieved a number of their development goals.

This project works because villagers in Santa Rosa are defining the terms of engagement, and each of the American groups spends several months beforehand studying and reflecting on Nicaraguan history, politics, economics, religion, land, and culture. These young Americans enter Santa Rosa on vastly more humble footing than most short-term groups; their agenda has been designed by the community, and they know something about their hosts’ rich culture and complex history. Likewise, the community of Santa Rosa is better able to receive Americans than most communities; they have identified their problems and designed appropriate solutions, and they consider themselves teachers and guides.

The results of this mutually transformational approach are manifold. The people of Santa Rosa have all the pride and none of the helplessness of my friends in other communities, and the Americans are more deeply and humbly transformed than most mission trip participants.

I hope to add momentum to the change I see in the American church today to heal our broken world by loving our brothers and sisters, rich and poor alike, across the globe.

Joel Wickre serves on the board of Blood:Water Mission and studies medicine and public health at the University of California Berkeley. He and his wife, Cathy, currently live in a rural village in Kenya, where they’re assisting the community to open a health clinic.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Other Christianity Today articles on missions and ministry are available on our site.

Barak Obama, Don Cheadle, and Oprah are among those are on the covers of Vanity Fair‘s July 2007 Africa issue.

Blood:Water Mission, founded by Jars of Clay, is working with African communities to build 1000 wells.

Evangelicals who visit Rome cannot help but enjoy the stately buildings and stirring sense of history. A few like it so much they never leave. Such is the case with Francis Beckwith, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society. In April, the Baylor University philosopher rejoined the Roman Catholic Church.

Such defections always provoke a little evangelical soul-searching, in this case about the classic doctrine of justification. Beckwith found the Protestant view, which assumes that sanctification follows justification, inadequate.

"As an evangelical, even when I talked about sanctification and wanted to practice it, it seemed as if I didn't have a good enough incentive to do so," Beckwith told Christianity Today. "Now [in Catholicism] there's a kind of theological framework, and it doesn't say my salvation depends on me, but it says my virtue counts for something."

Beckwith, in describing his confusion, has done us a favor, giving us an opportunity to explore a question that frankly many Christians ask: Why be good?

The Virtue of Christ

Justification by faith, which gives us assurance of our standing before God, is not just a pastoral doctrine. It goes to the very core of our theological tradition. Martin Luther described it as the "first and chief article" of Protestantism "on which the church stands or falls." It is no surprise then that recent affirmations of justification have attracted evangelicals as diverse as Tom Oden and R. C. Sproul, Pat Robertson and Ron Sider. Still, don't be surprised to see more debates about justification unfolding. Next month's cover story, by British scholar Simon Gathercole, will look at how some evangelical scholars are reinterpreting Paul's teaching on justification.

So what is the "first and chief article of Protestantism"? Scripturally, it goes like this: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). Alienated from God, hostile in mind, we practice evil behavior (Col. 1:21). Though we offend his perfect holiness, God acquits those who trust in him and in what he has done for us through Christ: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21).

Theologically, we understand it like this: In his perfect life and obedient death, Jesus succeeded where Adam failed and became the head of God's new family. We belong to Christ; we belong to this new humanity. Christ is judged righteous, and we who believe are made alive in him.

The late medieval church framed its understanding of God's grace in terms of merit: personal merit was never enough, and the infinite merits of Christ were available only through the sacramental channels of the church. Luther and the other Reformers used Paul to challenge the church monopoly on merit. They rightly taught that only Jesus' merit counted before God and that only through faith could his merit be ours. God credits Jesus' righteousness to those who trust in him, declaring them just and acquitting them of their sins.

Such a radical idea has caused many to think: This is too good to be true. Surely I must contribute something to the process. But we contribute nothing. We don't even contribute faith. With God's gift of faith, we paradoxically deny the meritorious nature of human action and affirm the work of Another. It is not faith in faith, but faith in Christ.

Thus, Protestants from John Calvin to John Wesley have agreed: We have peace with God by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Flaunted Freedom

Another question that has troubled Christians since the days of Paul is this: "Why bother to be good when it seems to make no difference to our salvation?"

Paul has little patience for such an attitude, partly because it displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens in justification. It is not only about getting rid of personal guilt; it is also about taking on a new corporate identity. "We died to sin," Paul says. "How can we live in it any longer?" (Rom. 6:2). We have been baptized into Christ's death; shouldn't we live with him in resurrection life? As members of his new humanity, shouldn't we live like it? Paul's conclusion: "Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body" (Rom. 6:12).

Simply put, those who are truly justified will lead lives of holiness, knowing with Paul that "we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do" (Eph. 2:10).

Sadly, many in our churches have sold the extraordinary gift of justification for the pottage of therapeutic religion. Rather than finding assurance in Christ, some assure themselves they have done nothing so bad as to deserve condemnation.

Even worse, others flaunt their freedom, abusing the truth that Jesus covers a multitude of sins. As Paul said of people who accused him of teaching that we should sin to bring more grace: "Their condemnation is deserved" (Rom. 3:8).

Such attitudes do not exemplify trust in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who treats holiness with deathly seriousness. They turn the old notions of merit on their heads, treating a priceless gift—Jesus' righteousness—as if it had no value.

The Bible says this type of faith—faith without good works—is as good as no faith at all. It's as dead and meaningless as the selling of indulgences.

So, Professor Beckwith, virtue does count for Protestants—it signals our understanding that Christ's virtue counts for everything, and that any good the Holy Spirit enables us to do is but a grateful response to God's gift of justification.

When the church gets that, it gets our "first and chief" message, a message that still turns people's worlds upside down.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Francis Beckwith spoke with David Neff about his decision to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church and ETS's response.

Collin Hansen commented in CT Liveblog on Beckwith's resignation and the following ETS statement.

Other Christianity Today articles on theology and justification include:

Declaration: Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification

Nothing But the Blood | More and more evangelicals believe Christ's atoning death is merely a grotesque creation of the medieval imagination. Really? (May 1, 2006)

Sticking Points | Despite recent rapprochement, evangelicals and Catholics remain far apart on key issues. (December 2005)

The Gospel of Jesus Christ | An introduction to "The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration."(David Neff, February 1, 2000)

You Can't Keep a Justified Man Down | An interview with N. T. Wright, author of The Resurrection of the Son of God. (April 1, 2003)

CT Classic: Are We Speaking the Same Language? | What Catholics really believe about justification—and why defining our terms makes all the difference. (November 1, 1999)

Reformation Day Celebrations Ain't What They Used to Be | The Lutheran-Catholic Justification Declaration is a good step, but it's only a beginning. (November 1, 1999)

Theology: Does The Gift of Salvation Sell Out the Reformation? | The recent statement from evangelical and Roman Catholic leaders on the Christian doctrine of justification "sells out" the Reformation, according to James Boice, chairman of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (ACE). (April 27, 1998)

Paid in Full | The sacrifice of Calvary was not a part payment; it was a complete and perfect payment. (Charles H. Spurgeon, February 9, 1998)

Should Catholics and Evangelicals Join Ranks? | A recent document entitled Evangelicals and Catholics Together gives a resounding yes to this question. (July 18, 1994)
Also: Why I Signed it, Parts 1 and 2