by | Aug 25, 2023 | Uncategorized
A trendy, perfectly furnished home is not required to be useful for the kingdom.
Our first home was my in-laws’ tiny cottage, where we stayed for free. There were unfinished walls, the floors were painted chipboard, and all our furniture was dated and used. When our first guests came by, I remember looking around, my stomach twisting with anxiety. What must they be thinking of us? I wondered if I could ever host company again—at least, not until we moved.
But our next home, a small fixer-upper with shag carpets, was not much better. Meanwhile, it seemed every other house I walked into—whether my peers’, friends’, or family members’—was HGTV worthy. Mine could never compare. Once we moved into a “real home,” I believed, I would be much more hospitable.
Similarly, Trillia Newbell wrote about experiencing this same fear when she moved into an apartment. “Our new home felt like it was too small to truly be welcoming,” she said. HGTV even has an article listing 35 ways to hide the ugly parts of our homes so guests don’t see them.
Apparently, this feeling is more universal than I realized. A recent article from Insider says shows on HGTV might be contributing to this very sense of insecurity—creating a world where people are fearful of being assessed by the aesthetic state of their home:
Homeowners are “seeing everything that’s wrong with their home and imagining when people come into their home [that] they’re also criticizing and scrutinizing and judging” their living spaces, said Annetta Grant, an assistant professor of markets, innovation, and design at Bucknell University.
The article set out to show how homeowners’ philosophies have changed over time.
“Traditionally, people …
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by | Aug 25, 2023 | Uncategorized
Reclaiming the culture wars requires reclaiming wonder.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Last week I was talking with a new believer in Christ—one who came from a thoroughly secular background—and she mentioned that some family members were really worried about her. “I can’t believe you’ve become an evangelical Christian,” one of them said. “How can you be for guns?”
Guns?
The family member assumed that her becoming an evangelical Christian meant she had joined a political tribe, complete with gun-culture views of assault weapons. But this new Christian happened to have the same political view on this issue as her family. Of all the things that changed in her conversion, her view on guns wasn’t one of them.
My shoulders slumped when I heard this—and it wasn’t because I agreed or didn’t agree with this family’s views on gun policy. My disappointment was because I had heard some version of this many times before—people who, when hearing about evangelical Christianity, think not of the gospel but of some extreme political identity.
It would be easy to blame that on the media portrayal of evangelical Christians in America (“All they pay attention to is the politics!”) or on this woman’s family members (“How religiously illiterate has America become that all these people see are caricatures?”).
There are ways that the outside world does unthinkingly caricature evangelical Christianity. That’s hardly a new development with secularization—note the many jokes about George Whitefield’s preaching in early American newspapers or the writings of H. L. Mencken, who didn’t mean “Bible Belt” as a compliment. …
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by | Aug 24, 2023 | Uncategorized
Some Christian ministries take a break. Others try to reach an increasingly secular population on holiday.
The Église Évangelique de Houlgate is situated in the charming and quiet town of Houlgate, two hours from Paris on the Normandy coast. With its red brick exterior from the 1950s, the Protestant church sits in an ideal location—visible at the entrance to the town and overlooking the beach—for a perfect escape from the fast-paced life of Paris.
Houlgate has 1,711 year-round inhabitants, but the summer season can bring nearly 15 times the amount of people to the small city. This complicates shopping, traffic, and lines in the boulangerie, but it also boosts church attendance. Tourists flock to the coast and some pay a Sunday morning visit to the city’s only Protestant church.
Why the sudden rush of vacationers? The simple answer is that summers in France are taken very seriously. Not only is it acceptable to travel in France during July and August, but it is encouraged by the culture. Protestant churches all over France, like the one in Houlgate, have to adapt to this cultural tradition by changing up their usual rhythm in order to keep people coming through their doors.
With 25 paid vacation days available to most employees, businesses are closed for weeks or months in the summer season, and administrative workers send automated emails declaring their absence until la rentrée in September. Not surprisingly, church attendance fluctuates wildly: Some churches go so far as to shut their doors during the summer while others have an entirely different congregation during the season.
“We see [a 50 percent] growth during the summer season, thanks to tourists,” said Cyril Poly, a longtime member at Église Évangelique de Houlgate.
But not all seaside areas attract tourists. …
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by | Aug 24, 2023 | Uncategorized
The Texas suit reflects a broader evangelical debate over how many strangers are too many to welcome.
Long before he was seated as a federal judge in the southern district of Texas, Drew Tipton starred in a high school musical.
In 1977, when he was just ten, Tipton landed the title role in Angleton High School’s fall play. The show was Oliver!, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Pulling it off required a community-wide effort in the 10,000-person town of Angleton, Texas. The cast drew not only from the high school, but also from the local middle school and three elementary schools.
During rehearsals, when the young Tipton danced and sang among youth nearly twice his size, he put “forth an unusual effort and shows great confidence,” according to a local newspaper, The Brazosport Facts. To that, Tipton simply added: “It makes me feel excited to be doing the lead role.”
Like his father, the pastor of Angleton’s Second Baptist Church, Tipton enjoyed speaking before a crowd. He would later say, as an adult, that it was part of what led him to the law.
“My parents were consistently convinced that great things lay in store for me,” Tipton told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing in February 2020, by then an attorney at a Houston law firm specializing in employment law and trade secrets litigation.
If this were a Dickens novel, then Tipton’s breakout performance as a child—portraying a destitute boy rescued by a distant wealthy relative—would be almost too good a foreshadowing of the drama before him now. In his fourth year as a district judge, Tipton must consider a case that will decide whether thousands of people can escape desperate circumstances with the help of benevolent friends and family.
What is perhaps …
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by | Aug 24, 2023 | Uncategorized
The ‘Great Dechurching’ is an opportunity for our tradition to rediscover a more enduring ecclesiology.
Most people who stopped attending evangelical churches in recent years are not “nones” or exvangelicals.
In fact, many still self-identify as born-again Christians with perfectly orthodox Christian beliefs, according to Jim Davis and Michael Graham’s newly released The Great Dechurching. These Christians believe in the Trinity, the atonement, and the reality of Jesus as their personal Savior.
They just don’t go to church.
It might be easy to imagine that the millions of dechurched individuals are an aberration whose evangelical identities are somehow suspect. Surely, they don’t really understand what the Christian faith is all about, we might think.
But what if evangelicalism itself is partly to blame? What if the problem with dechurched evangelicals is not their faulty understanding of faith, but rather evangelical theology’s own lack of emphasis on the church?
Relative to other forms of Christianity, evangelicals have historically maintained a rather low view of the church, compared to their high view of a believer’s individual relationship with God.
While Catholics for centuries insisted on “no salvation outside the church,” evangelicals have traditionally insisted that a person’s salvation has nothing to do with church affiliation or church sacrament. While some Protestants, such as Lutherans and Anglicans, have reserved a role for the sacrament of baptism in salvation, many evangelicals have eschewed this sacramental theology.
American evangelicalism was born in eighteenth-century outdoor revivals, which denounced unconverted ministers and called people to experience the Holy Spirit and the gift of salvation outside of church walls. The Anglican …
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