by | Jul 17, 2024 | Uncategorized
In these fractured times, we want to focus on Jesus’ call to chase after his will.
Consider this a reintroduction.
In our March issue, I explained that 2024 would be a transformative year for Christianity Today. This magazine is the first deposit on that promise. Everything from the wordmark to the colors, fonts, layout, and structure have been reimagined and remade. We hope you agree that this delivers a more compelling experience. We want each issue to be a jewel, a work of art, a feast of stories and ideas that conveys the richness of living and thinking with Christ and his church.
Over the remainder of the year, I will explain why we are charting this course. For now, I wish to explain the language you will often see alongside the wordmark.
Before I came to Christianity Today, I led a creative agency that helped hundreds of organizations refine their branding and messaging. Yet I have never thought about Christianity Today as a brand. It is an effort to illuminate what it means to follow Jesus faithfully in our time.
We have, however, a fundamental invitation. It’s not a tagline or a slogan but an invitation: Seek the kingdom.
I will say more about our calling to the kingdom of God in subsequent issues. For now, I want to say one simple thing.
The kingdom of God is elusive. Jesus likens it to a seed, a pearl, a treasure, a vineyard, and a banquet. He speaks of the “secrets of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 13:11) and calls us not to chase after the things of the world but to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (6:33).
“Seek ye first” was the first song I remember singing. It was before my baptism, before I knew Jesus, before I knew how beautiful and broken the world and the church could be. But it was, in its simplicity, the invitation that summoned me to …
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by | Jul 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
The Catholic convert brings a fighter persona and outsider’s view to politics.
Donald Trump’s first running mate, Mike Pence, appealed to conservative evangelical voters by offering what Trump lacked: political experience, a pro-life record, a steady demeanor, and outspoken Christian faith.
Two presidential elections later, Trump’s 2024 pick for vice president, J. D. Vance, appeals to conservatives by being like the former president: a fellow political newcomer, a populist, and a fighter unafraid of shaking up the system.
He’s “somebody who can carry on the core of what President Trump did in his first administration for a while to come,” said Aaron Baer, president of Center for Christian Virtue, based in Vance’s home state of Ohio.
Vance rose to national prominence through his 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which drew attention to the lives and faith of working-class rural Americans.
Since then, he’s converted from evangelicalism to Roman Catholicism and from a Never Trump conservative to a faithful “Make America Great Again” Republican, successfully running for US Senate with Trump’s endorsement in 2022.
Political commentators are already talking about how a victory for the Republican ticket in November would put Vance in a strong position to contend for the nomination come 2028—under a national conservative or America First style of politics that comes as a departure from the old guard conservatism that someone like Pence represented.
“He appeals to the kind of younger, religious, political evangelical,” said author Hannah Anderson, who has written about rural life and ministry and reviewed Vance’s book for CT. “There’s a lot of questions …
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by | Jul 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
An excerpt on faith and sight from Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation.
I grew up fearing the power of the eyes. I was supposed to avert my eyes from certain television shows, movies, books, and images. When it came to men, I was afraid of my gaze—and doubly afraid of theirs. Just looking at the sale rack was risky if I wanted to avoid envy and irresponsible spending. Even at 40, I still hide my eyes when I feel afraid.
But I’ve come to realize that for all the time I spent worrying about where not to look, I should have spent a lot more time thinking about what my eyes should be fixed upon. I feared what I saw would corrupt me. It never occurred to me that what I saw could also save me.
Scripture tells us faith begins with a vision. “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John the Baptist declares in John 1:29 (NKJV throughout). See your salvation, he entreats us. Look and be saved. John’s words refer to another story of salvation through sight: the bronze serpent. When the Israelites wander in the wilderness, several of them die from poisonous serpents. Yahweh intervenes and instructs Moses to create a bronze serpent, so that “everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live” (Num. 21:8). Jesus compares himself to the serpent, saying, “As Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14). The serpent of sin has bitten us, and its poison courses through our blood. But if we look at Christ, we will live.
Scripture includes a few suggestions on when to avert our eyes (1 John 2:16; Matt. 18:9), but far more frequently, it invites us to behold, to look, to pay attention. Behold often introduces the unexpected and captivating. It asks us (quite …
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by | Jul 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
In an age of social media celebrity and showy spirituality, we are invited into a holy unawareness.
If a good deed done is not posted on social media, did it really happen? If an act of generosity is not caught on camera and never goes viral, was it a worthwhile gesture? These questions, facetious as they seem, point out something I’ve observed in my own life: a deep desire to display my goodness to others. There’s even a modern term for it: virtue signaling.
According to Jesus, this is an ancient struggle, a primal temptation. We long to be known and seen, but if we aren’t careful, this longing can lead to a kind of performativity that corrodes the soul.
In Matthew 6—the center of the Sermon on the Mount—Jesus flips showy spirituality on its head: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen. … But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (vv. 1, 3). Jesus reveals a key characteristic of his narrow path: hiddenness.
That is an important word for those who, like me, intuitively strive to be noticed. Can you relate? Social media has created (or perhaps revealed) the hunger within us to be seen. As some have aptly said, the current generation of young adults—and emerging ones—can be described as “Generation Notification.”
Each time we get notifications—those coveted red or blue circles with a number in them—dopamine releases in our brains. The cycle is hard to break. Even if a comment is negative, receiving one is still addicting because being seen is better than remaining invisible.
To be known and seen is one of our deepest longings. But left to our own devices (pun intended), we get stuck in a never-ending cycle of performative spirituality, where we seek to get …
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by | Jul 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
Christian organizations are struggling to reach prisoners in a country where 1 in 56 people is in jail.
In just over two years, El Salvador’s government has sent 80,000 people to prison. With over 111,000 people incarcerated, the country has the world’s highest proportion of people behind bars—one inmate for every 56 people.
The current situation stems from a zero-tolerance policy toward the gangs that once proliferated in the country. Salvadoran gangs are considered transnational crime organizations responsible for taking murder rates to levels only seen during the 1979–1992 civil war.
In March 2022, President Nayib Bukele decreed a régimen de excepción (state of exception), which suspends a significant number of civil rights and makes it easier to arrest and prosecute suspected gang members. Though the administration initially promised the decree would last for a month, it has since been renewed 27 times by the Salvadoran congress, lasting nearly two and a half years.
El Salvador has never had a significant prison ministry presence. But for those few that have worked in prisons, the régimen de excepción has both presented an opportunity and revealed a set of problems.
On one hand, leaders say, there’s a real chance for a substantial number of inmates to turn their lives around through the gospel. “Most of them know they need a physical transformation. Evangelism may show them they need a spiritual transformation too,” said Raúl Orellana, a regional ministry leader who has served in El Salvador’s prisons since 2008.
On the other hand, for a variety of reasons, few Christians have shown interest in prison ministry, work that has only become more difficult as the government has increased restrictions on civilian visits in prison.
All of El Salvador’s …
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