by | Sep 5, 2023 | Uncategorized
The sexes are trending in different political directions. Here’s what the church can do about it.
“Does it feel like everyone in your church is getting more liberal?”
Someone posed this question at a recent get-together of evangelical pastors that I attended in the Nashville area. The person raising it had recently discovered that most of the young women in his congregation were not onboard with the church’s complementarian convictions.
Just a few minutes prior, I’d spoken with some of the pastors about a young man with a bad habit of attending services for several weeks, deciding something said or done exposed the church as “liberal,” then moving on to the next congregation. (Mine was one of them.)
“I think many of the women in our churches are getting more liberal,” I said. “But I think the men are getting more conservative.”
An array of empirical data provides evidence of this growing trend. Generations, the new book by San Diego State University professor of psychology Jean Twenge, demonstrates that among high school seniors, 30 percent of young women identify as conservative—down more than 10 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, the number of young men who identify as conservative is more than double: an all-time high of 65 percent.
Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox note in The Atlantic that the share of young single women identifying as liberal nearly doubles that of young single men, and the share of young single men identifying as conservative doubles that of young single women.
We can expect the same trends in the church. Even back in 2014, Pew’s “Religious Landscape Study” revealed that, while Christians were overwhelmingly politically conservative, there was an 18-point percentage gap between liberal Christian women and liberal Christian …
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by | Sep 1, 2023 | Uncategorized
The missionary wife’s “listening prayers” comforted and inspired millions.
Sarah Young, a devotional author who wrote in Jesus’ voice and became one of the most-read evangelicals of the 21st century, has died at 77.
The wife of a Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) missionary to Japanese people, Young suffered from Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses that sometimes forced her to stay in her room for 20 hours a day. In her isolation, she started to practice “listening prayer” and journaling what she felt the Spirit tell her.
“Messages began to flow … and I bought a special notebook to record these words,” Young later wrote. “I have continued to receive personal messages from God as I meditate on Him.”
A few pages from her journal found their way to a women’s prayer group in Nashville in the early 2000s. One of the women shared them with her husband, who was vice president of marketing at Integrity Publishers, and Integrity asked Young if she could write one message from God to the reader for every day of the year. She agreed, and they published Jesus Calling in 2004.
With an additional marketing push after Integrity was absorbed by Thomas Nelson, the book earned a top 10 spot on the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s bestseller list in 2009. It remained atop the list, month after month, for the next 15 years, ultimately selling more than 45 million copies. In August 2023, Jesus Calling outsold T. D. Jakes, Lee Strobel, Rick Warren, Joyce Meyer, Louie Giglio, and Max Lucado.
A children’s version of Jesus Calling has also sold more than a million copies, as have two of Young’s follow-up devotionals, Jesus Always and Jesus Today. Two others, Jesus Lives and Jesus Listens, have sold half a million copies each.
Young’s …
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by | Sep 1, 2023 | Uncategorized
In the second half of the 20th century, each group used the other as a ticket to legitimacy at home and abroad.
On June 3, 1973, Billy Graham preached before 1.1 million people at his largest crusade. This event did not occur in America’s heartland or a major American metropolitan center like Los Angeles or New York. Instead, it took place in the South Korean capital of Seoul.
Next to Graham on the platform, acting as his translator, was Billy Kim, a South Korean evangelist who, like the revivalist, had ties to Bob Jones University. By the end of the message, 73,000 people would walk the aisle and make public decisions for Christ.
Graham’s Seoul crusade was but one point of connection in the postwar era between white American evangelicals and their counterparts in South Korea. Two decades prior in 1950, World Vision—currently a multi-billion-dollar evangelical philanthropic organization—was founded in South Korea. A year later, Campus Crusade for Christ would launch its first international chapter by looking across the Pacific to a country establishing itself as a bastion of evangelical theology.
The relationship between these two groups—white evangelicals in America and South Korean evangelicals—is the focus of Helen Jin Kim’s book Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire. Kim, a religious history professor at Emory University, presents a largely unknown history of how postwar American evangelicals cultivated relationships in South Korea and used them to win acceptance within the religious mainstream back home. For evangelicals, it is also a convicting story that illustrates the corrupting influences of militarism, ethnic identity, and religious ideology.
The ‘transpacific highway’
It is impossible to tell the story of early evangelicalism in …
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by | Sep 1, 2023 | Uncategorized
A young Taiwanese pastor shares about the opportunities and challenges AI offers to those in the ministry.
Since ChatGPT became publicly accessible last year, we’ve heard reports that artificial intelligence (AI) will replace jobs and disrupt other aspects of our lives. Such changes may not currently be apparent to individual local churches in Taiwan. But in recent months, a number of Christian thinkers have been discussing how AI might either aid or possibly replace humans when it comes to pastoral care and preaching.
Several pastors point out that AI lacks physical, emotional, or empathetic abilities, though I personally believe that these limitations may one day be overcome technologically. In addition, they note that AI’s social bias, monopolization, and lack of spirituality when it comes to data labeling. But these are the same dilemmas humans are facing.
Many have cautioned that AI will have an ideological bias, but we can actually use the intelligence of ChatGPT to examine whether our words could unintentionally offend congregants with different political identities and positions.
As a young pastor who is optimistic about what role AI can play in my work, I recently spent six months exploring whether ChatGPT could be beneficial to my own ministry. After using this tool for half a year, I believe AI offers ways for pastors to more efficiently work and balance their many responsibilities.
Working smarter, not harder
For many pastors, there is never enough time for sermon preparation. When I was in seminary, one of my classes required students to draw up a schedule of a typical week in a pastor’s life. The professor critiqued the schedule I submitted as having “too much time for sermon preparation.” Indeed, after researching and writing a sermon and dealing with all the administrative work, leading …
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by | Sep 1, 2023 | Uncategorized
Evangelicals lament the circumstances but say a syncretistic pastor’s faith-driven counterattack was unwise.
Vijonet Déméro had little patience for the Haitian pastor who led his congregation into what proved to be a deadly confrontation with local gangs last week.
“Foolishly foolish action,” said Déméro, a Protestant leader and secretary general at Université INUFOCAD in Port-au-Prince, referencing Jesus’ words about the blind leading the blind. “For me, the pastor forgot his role as pastor. He is not the police.”
The pastor at the center of the controversy is Marcorel Zidor, also known as Pastor Marco, who leads the Evangelical Piscine de Bethesda church, in the northern suburb of Canaan.
On August 26, gang members opened fire, killing at least seven people with machine guns, as Zidor and members of his congregation approached the group, marching in armed protest.
Despite criticism from human rights groups and Christian leaders, and even acknowledging personal injury himself, Zidor has defended his actions.
“Ninety-five percent of my faithful followers were not hurt by bullets even though they were hit by them,” he said in an interview earlier this week. “Those who died are those who ran to take shelter at some houses. If they didn’t lose their faith, and if they had run in the same direction with the main crowd [the faithful ones], they wouldn’t be dead.”
Haiti’s department of foreign affairs and worship has since suspended the church’s license, noting that many of the victims’ relatives had showed up to Evangelical Piscine de Bethesda demanding answers and reparations. (The department also noted its commitment to religious freedom.)
Zidor’s protest comes at a time when churches in Western Haiti have struggled …
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