WASHINGTON (RNS)—As a 7-year-old, Wyatt Reynolds prayed nightly before bed. He went to church faithfully in his south Georgia community but was never convinced that he had truly given his heart to Jesus.

Then, barely a teen, Reynolds began listening on his iPod Nano to a daily radio show run by Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary, and went on to read the works of John Piper, R.C. Sproul and other contemporary Reformed Christian theologians and pastors. Through them, he found and embraced Calvinist doctrines.

“That was super liberating for me as an incredibly angsty middle schooler,” said Reynolds, now a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University in New York.

Young, Restless and Reformed

Reynolds had joined the ranks of the “Young, Restless and Reformed”—a renewal movement born in the early 2000s and fueled by scores of his evangelical Christian peers who had grown up with largely theology-free, self-help-oriented sermons and fundamentalist shibboleths of evangelical churches.

Instead, these young Christians drank deeply of a theology named for the 16th-century French Protestant John Calvin that was brought to America by the Puritans.

At the time Reynolds joined, the Calvinist renewal movement was a juggernaut that generated a seemingly endless stream of conferences, books, videos and social media posts.

As charismatic and intellectual as they were conservative, its leaders touted countercultural ideas such as complementarianism—the belief that, while the sexes are equal, God put men in charge of the church and the home. Reformed renewal became a powerful lifestyle brand that united Christians across denominations and generations.

With that success came spectacular failures. In the 2010s, many of the movement’s leaders fell from grace. Mark Driscoll, founder of the now-shuttered Seattle megachurch Mars Hill, was accused of abusive behavior. Prominent pastor Tullian Tchividjian admitted to sexual misconduct. C.J. Mahaney was accused of covering up abuses in his church network. James MacDonald was terminated for a “substantial pattern of sinful behavior.”

Joshua Harris, whose bestselling 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye was a bible of the purity culture, has left the Christian faith altogether.

This spring, the movement suffered another blow with the death of Tim Keller, a retired New York megachurch pastor, bestselling author and co-founder of The Gospel Coalition, one of the flagship institutions of the Reformed resurgence. Known for his intellectual curiosity and personal kindness, Keller was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020 and died in late May.

While the movement remains influential, the controversies and losses raise questions about its future.

“What happens when you wake one morning and realize that if something’s going to be reformed,” said author and speaker Hannah Anderson, who was heavily influenced by the Reformed resurgence, “you’re the target of the reforming?”

‘Like water to thirsty people’

Anderson said she first encountered Calvinist theology as a college student through Minnesota pastor Piper’s 1986 book Desiring God. She’d come from a fundamentalist background where the overwhelming message was that a person never could be good enough to earn God’s love.

In Calvinism, she found a doctrine of salvation—“soteriology,” as theologians put it—that said it was God whose act of bestowing grace saved people, not human effort.

“Anything that spoke of grace was revelatory,” she said. “The grace part of reformed soteriology felt like water to thirsty people.”

As the movement grew, aspiring pastors began to flock to seminaries that taught the so-called doctrines of grace. Mohler’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.; The Master’s Seminary in Los Angeles; and Piper’s Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis began churning out so many young, zealous pastors that the movement made national headlines.

Author Collin Hansen, whose 2008 book Young, Restless, Reformed chronicled the movement’s early days, explained Calvinism’s appeal to young Christians to Time magazine in 2009, saying, “They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God.”

Author Wendy Alsup, a longtime member of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, said she was drawn to the church’s surprising pairing of intellectual rigor and approachability. This approach translated into a veneer of sophistication.

“At the time, it meant that you could dress more hipster and drink beer, as opposed to a lot of the fundamentalist upbringing I had,” said Alsup.

But most importantly, many of those who encountered Calvinism around this time say their faith suddenly blossomed under its influence. Former Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear said in a recent interview that, growing up, his understanding of God was “too small.” He struggled to give God the kind of devotion the Bible demanded, Greear said, which left him bewildered.

 Things began to change after he read The Religious Affections by the Puritan writer Jonathan Edwards, who described a God big enough to commit his soul to—bigger than the figure who appeared in the seeker-friendly megachurches he’d grown up in.

“There was something about the Reformed presentation of the gospel that rang deeply in our hearts,” he said. “Because this was the God that had been talked about through all of the Bible stories we’d been hearing.”

‘Snack-size theological instruction’

Like the original Reformation of the 1500s, which advanced on the strength of the printing press, the new Reformed Christians were bolstered by a revolution in publishing. The internet allowed web-based apologists such as The Gospel Coalition, whose site draws 10 million viewers a year in the U.S. alone, to issue a constant stream of arguments.

Kristin Du Mez, professor of history at Calvin University and author of the 2022 bestseller Jesus and John Wayne, said the movement made Calvin’s tortuously layered doctrines accessible.

“It was kind of a snack-size theological instruction and very accessible, very popular for that reason,” she said. “But with a sense of being a weightier take.”

The resurgence also benefited from more traditional formats. In 2001, Crossway published the English Standard Version, a new Bible translation that used traditional terms such as “mankind” and “men” to denote human beings and favored a complementarian reading of the Scriptures.

Its success backed a publishing empire, according to Joey Cochran, an American religious historian and editor of the Anxious Bench blog at Patheos.com.

In this, Cochran sees a resemblance to Dispensationalism, an end-times theology based on the work of John Nelson Darby that popularized the concept of the Rapture in the early 1900s. Dispensationalism also had its own Bible—the Scofield Study Bible. It spread through radio broadcasts, the new tech of the time, and low-cost print publishing.

Similar to Dispensationalism, whose Rapture theology is now widely considered a core biblical belief among many evangelicals, new Calvinism used its network to plant ideas such as complementarianism firmly in the evangelical conversation.

Popular conferences created community

But perhaps nothing created the Calvinist phenomenon more than conferences. Thousands of young evangelicals like Greear found each other through events run by organizations such as Together for the Gospel—known as T4G—and The Gospel Coalition.

They forged long-term friendships and cooperation across denominational lines that continued as they gained pulpits across the United States.

That sense of community is typical of evangelical renewal movements, Du Mez said. Baptists, Calvinists and even some charismatic Christians saw Reformed theology as a unifying force, regardless of the theological traditions of their denominations.

Another hallmark of the Reformed resurgence was its development of scores of new congregations and a relentless desire among its adherents to spread the gospel.

Molly Worthen, a religious historian at the University of North Carolina, experienced that relentlessness firsthand while writing last year about the Summit Church, Greear’s North Carolina megachurch.

“There are few things that humans find more exciting than feeling like they are part of an unstoppable movement,” Worthen wrote.

Worthen, who credits Greear and Keller for her unexpected conversion to evangelical Christianity last summer, said the two men’s beliefs that ideas matter—and that Christianity had intellectual rigor—helped open the door to that conversion.

Intellectual gravity

She suspects intellectual curiosity plays a role in the influence of the Reformed resurgence movement and The Gospel Coalition.

“I think there is a fusion there in The Gospel Coalition—which, of course, Keller helped to found—that combines emphasis on mission with this intellectual gravity and this commitment to serious conversation about ideas that I think people in general are hungry for,” she said.

Brad Vermurlen, a research associate in the sociology department of the University of Texas and author of Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism, believes the movement’s influence outpaced its actual numbers.

New Calvinists came to “represent the center of influence and excitement within the American evangelical landscape,” he said, but in recent years, the movement has declined in “prominence, excitement and energy.”

Lack of mentoring young leaders

While the renewal identified charismatic leaders and gave them platforms, it did not do a good job of mentoring those leaders, Reynolds said. While attending The Journey, an influential Reformed church in St. Louis, he saw the church’s pastor, Darrin Patrick, fired in 2016 for misconduct.

“There wasn’t real mentorship of up-and-coming people,” said Reynolds. “There’s a way in which, if someone said they were called, looked good in skinny jeans and could quote someone who was dead, and pop culture, then you could be a leader.”

Anderson said she regrets the movement wasn’t Calvinist enough. She believes the movement focused mainly on salvation but missed a broader emphasis on common grace and the goodness of God’s creation. Those ideas—that God is at work everywhere and not just among an elect few—matter.

‘Pride was the downfall’

For some leaders, she said, that lack of balance led to a certainty of belief that lacked kindness toward anyone who disagreed.

Alsup said pride also became a downfall for some leaders in the Reformed resurgence, who believed their theology was better than the theology of other Christians.

Though Mars Hill members didn’t refer to themselves as “new Calvinists,” according to Alsup, when Mars Hill was at its best, members were comforted by Calvinist doctrines like irresistible grace, God’s sovereignty and the perseverance of the saints, which teach that “once God’s got you, he will keep you,” said Alsup.

But Mars Hill’s foundation began to crack. Driscoll was hit with accusations of plagiarism, profanity, sexual fixation, abuse of power and promoting an aggressive brand of machoism.

While Driscoll’s downfall has been attributed to many factors, Alsup points to an arrogance that she said many church members shared.

“We thought we were doing something new for God,” she said. “And we despised the generation that came before us. And the pride was the downfall.”

In the years since Mars Hill imploded, Alsup has found herself at a small, multicultural church plant in the Presbyterian Church in America.

“I kept the Reformed, but shook off the young and restless,” she quipped.

Keller, Alsup said, represented the best of the new Calvinist movement. He effectively communicated God’s greatness and grace, exuding kindness while probing constantly with his mind.

“It will be interesting to see, does it survive without someone like Tim?” Alsup said. “Have enough folks learned things from Tim to carry on the mantle of making it not threatening, but beautiful?”

WASINGTON (RNS)—At the height of the pandemic, many Americans who attended in-person worship services turned to their computers and their couches instead for virtual viewing.

Now, the Pew Research Center finds a third of Americans regularly attend in-person worship services while a bit more than a quarter regularly watch religious services on TV or online.

Its new survey paints a detailed picture of which, why and how often Americans continue worshipping online or on TV:

Half of those who are regular online watchers of religious services usually do so alone.

More than half (61 percent) of those who virtually attend do not participate in worship activities as they did in person, such as singing, kneeling or praying out loud. But Black (49 percent) and Hispanic (47 percent) online worshippers are more likely to continue these practices virtually.

And while the majority (60 percent) of virtual viewers watch the worship service of one congregation, 32 percent watch those of two or three houses of worship, and 6 percent watch four or more different congregations. One-quarter of regular online worshippers say they exclusively watch services of the congregation they usually attend.

“Regular” attenders were defined as those who said they watched or attended services in the month before the survey or had attended or watched at least monthly.

The online survey of more than 11,000 Americans reports significant levels of satisfaction among those who are worshipping online.

“Broadly speaking, the survey finds that most Americans who watch religious services on screens are happy with them,” states the report on the survey, released June 2. “Two-thirds of U.S. adults who regularly stream religious services online or watch them on TV say they are either ‘extremely satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the services they see.”

A similar share of U.S. adults (68 percent) say they are extremely or very satisfied with the sermons and a bit more than half say they’re also quite satisfied with the music they hear at worship services they view online or on TV.

Still, a larger share of U.S. adults express significant satisfaction with aspects of in-person worship, with 74 percent of those who attend in person saying they are very or extremely satisfied with the sermons and 69 percent saying the same about the music.

Survey explores technology and religion

Researchers delved into the nuances of religion and technology to report on the state of virtual and in-person worship in a survey taken in November, after the pandemic had waned but before the end of the national health emergency.

The top major reason adults say they watch religious services online is because they’re convenient. While 43 percent of regular virtual viewers cite convenience, just a quarter cite safety, specifically a concern about contracting or spreading COVID-19 or other diseases.

But COVID remains a factor for some Americans who say they attend in-person services less often than they did before the pandemic. While 21 percent of less frequent attenders say they found other ways to pursue spiritual interests, an almost equal percentage (20 percent) said, “I am still worried about COVID-19.”

There also is a distinct difference in the feelings of connection depending on whether Americans worship online or in person.

About two-thirds of regular in-person attenders say they feel “quite a bit” or “a great deal” of connection with other attenders, choosing the highest two options on a five-point scale. Just 28 percent of regular virtual viewers report the same sense of connection with in-person attenders while they, the virtual participants, are watching on TV or online.

A somewhat smaller percentage—22 percent—of virtual observers say they feel a strong connection to others watching virtually.

Of the quarter or so Americans who continue to use screens to take part in worship services, three-quarters say they prefer the in-person experience, compared with 11 percent who prefer watching on TV or online and 14 percent who say they don’t have a preference.

Demographic differences noted

Among the people who are most likely to watch church services virtually are members of historically Black Protestant denominations. Nearly 6 in 10 (58 percent) say they watch online at least monthly or did so in the month before the survey, compared with 47 percent of evangelicals, 28 percent of mainline Protestants, 24 percent of Catholics and 19 percent of Jews.

Two in 10 of these Black Protestants solely watch remotely via screens, 37 percent attend virtually and in person and more than 1 in 10 (13 percent) say they are in-person attenders who don’t regularly choose to watch virtual services.

Black Protestant church members also are more likely than viewers of some other faiths to say they feel like active participants in services they’re watching virtually. They also were the group with the largest percentage—25 percent—of people who watch services of another congregation in addition to or other than their own.

Members of historically Black Protestant churches (37 percent), along with evangelical Protestants (28 percent), are the most likely to engage at least weekly in religious technology, including apps for prayer or Scripture or religious study groups. About 12 percent each of Catholics, Jews and mainline Protestants are considered heavy users of religious technology.

Other findings of the survey on religion and technology included:

• 30 percent of U.S. adults say they use online searches to gain religious information.
• 21 percent use websites or apps to help them read the Bible and other Scriptures.
• 15 percent listen to podcasts focused on religion.
• 14 percent use websites or apps as reminders to pray.

More than half of U.S. adults—54 percent—say they never use apps for prayer, Scripture study or religious information, nor do they listen to religious podcasts.

The online survey of 11,377 respondents was conducted between Nov. 16 and 27, 2022, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points. Margin of error for subgroups varied.

Author Greg Garrett explores themes of faith, prejudice, violence, love, forgiveness and healing in his latest novel, Bastille Day, just as he does regularly in his roles as professor, preacher and cultural critic.

For more than three and a half decades, Garrett has served on the faculty of Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture.

Garrett has written more than two dozen books—critically acclaimed novels, spiritual memoirs, scholarly works, and reflections on the intersection of pop culture and faith.

He also serves as Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral in Paris, where he periodically preaches and teaches. The city—and the cathedral itself—provide much of the setting for Bastille Day.

Garrett was in Paris on July 14, 2016, when a terrorist drove a 19-ton cargo truck into crowds of people at the promenade in Nice, France, who gathered to celebrate Bastille Day. The attack left 86 dead and more than 400 people injured.

The tragedy prompted nationwide mourning. People in the largely secular nation who seldom attend church gathered in sanctuaries throughout the country the following Sunday, which happened to be Garrett’s turn to deliver the homily at the American Cathedral.

The event left a deep impression and became the seedbed in which the novel germinated. While Garrett said he is accustomed to writing about “big issues” in his nonfiction work, he wanted to explore terrorism, interfaith struggles and prejudice through a novel.

He chose to probe the deep questions those issues raise through the fictional characters he brought to life in Bastille Day.

Plus, he acknowledged, many of the authors he admires most used Paris as a setting, and he wanted to accept the challenge of following their lead.

“Being a storyteller is an essential part of my life. … And I’m at a stage in my life where I want to be swinging for the fences every time out,” he said.

Through the novel’s characters, Garrett examines the “hateful myths” behind prejudice—a major research topic he has explored through a three-year grant from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation.

Since the novel is set in Paris, it’s also—inevitably—a tragic love story. Garrett’s narrator and protagonist is Calvin Jones, a former war correspondent who returned from Iraq to spend 10 relatively quiet years working on a local news job in Texas.

After a violent event in Dallas brings back nightmares from his time in Fallujah, a friend offers Cal a job in Paris. There he meets Nadia, a beautiful Muslim woman from Saudi Arabia who is days away from entering into an arranged marriage she dreads.

Character inspired by a Baylor student

Garrett loosely based Nadia on a Baylor student by the same name who was from Saudi Arabia and who faced a similar situation.

“She would come in, sit in my office and just weep,” he said. “The choice presented to her—like Nadia’s choice [in the novel]—seemed insoluble.”

He recalled her saying: “If I don’t go home, my family will be ruined. And if I do go home, I will disappear forever.”

In the middle of the semester, the student disappeared from the Baylor campus.

“I don’t know if she fled. She had bought a motor-scooter,” which Garrett characterized as a “radical act of defiance” for a Saudi woman in the 1990s.

“I don’t know if she got on her bad motor-scooter and rode off into the night and is out there somewhere happy and fulfilled. That is my hope. Or if she was grabbed and taken back to Saudi Arabia in the middle of the night,” he said. “Either of those things seems possible to me.

“So, one of the things that drove this book … was that I wanted to write a story about my Nadia that gave her more agency than she ever had in real life. … I wanted there to be choices all around.”

Overcoming fear, moving toward faith

Garrett also deals with a thwarted suicide attempt in the novel—a subject that hits close to home for him. In his book Crossing Myself: A Story of Spiritual Rebirth, he wrote about his own chronic depression that led to a suicide attempt, as well as how he returned to faith through the faithful witness of a historically Black Episcopal church in Austin.

He explores a similar faith journey through the characters in Bastille Day.

“When we are afraid, we make bad decisions,” Garrett said, noting Jesus’ repeated admonition to “fear not.”

Bastille Day debuted as the No. 1 “Christian novel” on Amazon—a distinction Garrett finds ironic, given the books’ mature subject matter and its often-salty dialogue.

“I’m a little ambivalent about that,” he confessed. “I look first at some of my competition. This is not an Amish romance—not to cut people who read or write Amish romances.”

Nevertheless, Bastille Day deals seriously with faith issues and gospel truth.

“The movement away from fear in spiritual terms is one of the big things this book is about,” Garrett said, noting the important impact people of faith can have in the lives of others at critical times.

“Our love and our willingness to be the hands of Christ and to manifest the peace of Christ are the only things that might keep somebody going on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

Another key theme, Garrett noted, is helping people discover how forgiveness allows them to make peace with the past and to move forward toward healing from brokenness.

“It’s not extravagant wisdom to know that if we are carrying around poison from our past, it’s hurting us and nobody else.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Over the past decade, Jemar Tisby’s life has largely been shaped by two forces: the Bible, and the deaths of young Black men, often at the hands of law enforcement.

About a decade ago, Tisby, then a seminary student in Jackson, Miss., helped start a new group called the Reformed African American Network—an offshoot of the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” movement that had spread like wildfire among evangelical Christians in the first decade of the 21st century.

The group hoped to write about racial reconciliation from the viewpoint of Reformed theology, the ideas most closely associated with the ideas of John Calvin and popularized at the time by preachers and authors such as John Piper. But amid this resurgence of Reformed thought, there were few resources to be had on race issues.

Then, in 2012 in Florida, Trayvon Martin, a Black teen, was killed by the neighborhood watch coordinator of a gated community. All of a sudden, people in the movement were listening.

At the time, Tisby said in an interview, he and others raised their hands and said they had something to offer. The mostly white leaders of the Reformed movement, he said, welcomed them.

“I believed them,” he said. “I thought: ‘We are here. They must want us here.’”

Over the next few years, Tisby, a former pastor turned history professor, became a leading voice on race among evangelicals through his writing and as co-host of “Pass the Mic,” a popular podcast.

He wrote op-eds on race and faith for The Washington Post and published the bestselling The Color of Compromise, which details the long history of racism in American Christianity.

How to Fight Racism, a 2021 follow-up, was named Faith and Culture Book of the Year by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.

Conservative concern about ‘wokeness’

But Tisby’s success has since collided with conservative concerns about “wokeness”—a byword that encapsulates liberal critiques of systemic racism, America’s racial history and other social justice themes.

In recent months two college English professors at Christian colleges—one in Florida, the other in Indiana—have been dismissed for allegedly talking too much about race in their classes.

In both cases, critics pointed to the appearance of Tisby’s work on class syllabuses to claim the professors were undermining their students’ Christian faith.

 “I’ve become, for the far right, a symbol of everything that’s wrong with how people who they call the left are approaching race,” Tisby told Religion News Service.

The “woke war” playing out in school boards, on college campuses and in church pews has been driven by activists like Christopher Rufo and by conservative evangelical authors and preachers who warn that wokeness and academic notions such as critical race theory are heresy.

As a result, evangelical pastors who were once outspoken about the need to confront racism have gone silent, or in some cases, been driven from the movement altogether.

Black exodus from evangelical world

Some black Christians—including Tisby and his colleagues at the Witness, as the former Reformed African American Network is now known, have left the evangelical world, sometimes quietly and other times loudly.

Some, like Tisby, have found it harder to leave—finding their ties to the evangelical world difficult to unwind even when they are told they are not wanted. Last year, the board of Grove City College, a Christian school in Pennsylvania, apologized for a 2020 sermon Tisby gave at a campus chapel session after an online petition accused him of promoting critical race theory.

White evangelical institutions have recognized a need in recent years to become more diverse in order to prosper as the country’s demographics change. But their donors often bridle as schools and churches change, causing a backlash that drives away people of color.

Anthea Butler, religious studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of White Evangelical Racism, a 2021 book about the racial divides of the evangelical movement, said evangelicals have a long history of welcoming Christians of color into their movement and then ousting them if they ask too many questions about race.

She said college leaders, like those behind the report at Grove City, or other Christian leaders who have denounced Tisby want to make an example of him as a warning to others.

“They want to punish him,” she said.

Tisby deeply immersed in evangelicalism

A native of Waukegan, Ill., Tisby found Christianity while in high school when a friend invited him to a church youth group meeting. Attending the University of Notre Dame, he began to think about a call to ministry.

In South Bend he also discovered Calvinist theology after a friend sent him a copy of Piper’s 1986 book Desiring God.

After graduating in 2002 and a year working for Notre Dame’s campus ministries, he joined Teach for America and was sent to teach sixth graders in impoverished Phillips County, Ark., in the Mississippi Delta.

The experience changed the direction of his life.

“This is cotton country—the land of slavery and sharecropping,” Tisby said. “You can see it in the landscape. You can see it in the generational poverty.”

The predominantly Black community was marked by a lack of jobs, poor medical care, food deserts and a struggling school system.

“The thing that struck me was that there are churches on every corner,” Tisby said. “Not only were they racially divided, it also didn’t seem like they were having much impact in the community. That’s where I started thinking about the relationship between faith and justice.”

After four years at the school, he took a year off to study at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Fla., before returning, this time as a principal.

 “I just felt God wasn’t done with me in the Delta,” he said.

He finished his divinity degree at a seminary in Jackson, Miss., working part time in the school’s admissions office. He was charged with helping recruit Black students and helped to start an African American leadership initiative.

Pushback both familiar and surprising

Afterward, he enrolled at the University of Mississippi and earned a doctorate in history. He is now a professor at Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically Black school in Louisville.

The recent pushback against his work, he said, seems both familiar and surprising. As a historian, Tisby has traced the ways American Christians have tried to claim that the faith is colorblind. The love of Jesus, they maintain, should break down divides between people of different ethnicities.

But rarely, Tisby said, do Christians manage to overcome racial differences. In The Color of Compromise, Tisby recounts how English settlers in Virginia faced a dilemma. In their homeland, Tisby writes, the custom was to free slaves who converted to Christianity. In 1667, the Virginia General Assembly decided that, no matter what the Christian faith taught, baptism would not make slaves free.

Tisby recounted some of that history in his 2020 chapel sermon at Grove City College. He had first been invited to speak in 2019 but his visit had been delayed by scheduling conflicts and complications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

School leaders later said they had invited him as a Christian writer who could help the school’s students grapple with racial reconciliation. Tisby, who had spent years in white evangelical spaces, felt he had a message the students there could hear.

“What I picked up on was, we’re willing to give you a hearing, but this is not what we typically do,” he said.

A year later a group of alumni and parents from Grove City launched a petition, claiming the school had been overrun by “wokeness” and critical race theory.

The petition cited Tisby’s speech as a sign the school had lost its way, but school leaders claimed it was Tisby who had changed course.

“The Jemar Tisby that we thought we invited in 2019 is not the Jemar Tisby that we heard in 2020 or that we now read about,” they told a board committee.

Early signs of looming division

Tisby traces white evangelicals’ suspicions of their Black counterparts to the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo., that followed the shooting death of Michael Brown. The protests, which brought the Black Lives Matter movement to national attention, drove a wedge between Black and white Christians, he wrote in a 2019 Washington Post op-ed.

The split gained momentum in 2018 with a gathering in Memphis, Tenn., to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Sponsored by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Gospel Coalition, a prominent Reformed evangelical group, the event featured a host of prominent leaders, including Piper, Texas megachurch pastor Matt Chandler, Baptist pastor Charlie Dates, legendary Black pastor and community organizer John Perkins and Russell Moore, then president of ERLC.

These preachers urged attendees to address the scourge of racism that stained the life of the church. Moore told attendees that enduring racism was leading younger Christians to question their faith.

“Why is it the case that we have, in church after church after church, young evangelical Christians who are having a crisis of faith?” said Moore, who has since left the SBC and is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. “It is because they are wondering if we really believe what we preach and teach and sing all the time?”

That same week, an association of Southern Baptists in Georgia kicked a church out for racist actions against another SBC church. The Georgia Baptist Convention followed suit, as did the national Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting.

Opposition to CRT as a rallying cry

But in April of 2018, Tom Ascol, an extremely conservative Southern Baptist pastor from Florida, criticized Thabiti Anyabwile, a well-known pastor in Washington, D.C., for writing about the sin of racism. Ascol, who would later run for SBC president largely on his opposition to critical race theory, produced a documentary about what he called liberal drift in the denomination.

The pushback had begun. By that fall, a group of conservative pastors, many of them Calvinists, signed “The Statement on Social Justice & the Gospel,” which responded to “questionable sociological, psychological, and political theories presently permeating our culture and making inroads into Christ’s church.”

In 2019, a resolution passed by the Southern Baptist Convention called critical race theory a “tool” to understand society and led to calls for the convention to denounce the resolution.

Those Southern Baptist debates over critical race theory long preceded debates in the general public.

Ryan Burge, a political scientist, noted that Google searches for the term critical race theory or CRT were nearly nonexistent when Baptists started debating it. Only later did the debate spill out into the mainstream to be used by politicians, including Donald Trump, to rally supporters. It has since been equated with Marxism and other ideas anathema to conservatives.

Lerone Martin, associate professor of religious studies and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, said that evangelicals have long found it easier to label Black leaders as leftists or Marxists rather than to deal with the reality of racism.

“That way, anything they dislike or oppose can be dismissed wholesale,” he said.

Tisby said he’s not an apologist for CRT or any ideology. He reads the Bible and history and tries to tell the truth, he said in an interview. That is his job as a Christian and as a historian. And he doesn’t think he’s all that special.

“I don’t think there’s anything in particular about my approach that is novel or different than what a lot of people have said for a long time.”

BRENTWOOD, Tenn.—Although most churchgoers say they want to serve in their communities for gospel impact, there is a noticeable gap when it comes to the number who are already volunteering for a charity.

Most Protestant churchgoers say their churches encourage them to serve people not affiliated with their church and that they want to do so. But few have volunteered in the past year, a new study by Lifeway Research reveals.

More than 4 in 5 churchgoers say their churches encourage every adult to serve people outside their church (84 percent) and they want to serve these people in hopes of sharing the gospel (86 percent).

Despite saying they want to serve people who are not a part of their church, few churchgoers are even serving within the context of their own churches. Two in 3 (66 percent) churchgoers say they have not volunteered for a charity (ministry, church or non-ministry) in the previous year. Three in 10 (30 percent) say they have, and 4 percent are not sure.

According to the latest findings of the U.S. Census Bureau, 23 percent of Americans volunteered through an organization between September 2020 and September 2021.

“The easiest way to serve others is when a charity or group organizes the effort,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. “They recognize the need, come up with a plan and often gather needed resources. You just have to show up. Churchgoers say they want to, but less than a third showed up to help a charity in the previous year.”

In another 2022 Lifeway Research study, Protestant pastors said churchgoers were more likely to serve in the church than in the community.

Pastors estimated, on average, 42 percent of their adult churchgoers were involved with regular responsibilities at their churches. And pastors estimated an average of 27 percent of adult churchgoers were involved in serving in the community.

The gap between desire and action

Younger churchgoers—ages 18 to 34 (91 percent) and 35 to 49 (91 percent)—are more likely than those 50 to 64 (84 percent) and older than 65 (79 percent) to say they want to serve people in their community who are not affiliated with their church.

However, the oldest churchgoers (those over the age of 65) are the most likely to say they participated in any type of volunteer work in the previous year (40 percent).

Denominationally, Methodists are the most likely to say their churches encourage them to be involved in ministry that serves community members not affiliated with the church (98 percent) and among the most likely to say they want to do this in hopes of sharing the gospel (95 percent). Still, Methodist churchgoers are the most likely to say they did not participate in any volunteer work in the previous year (88 percent).

“This study did not measure service churchgoers may have done individually for their neighbors. Meeting such needs as they arise is a great form of service,” McConnell said. “But some of the most widespread needs in communities require volunteers working together, something that the majority of churchgoers don’t do over the course of a year.”

A similar gap between desire and action exists for Christians sharing their faith, according to a 2022 Evangelism Explosion study conducted by Lifeway Research. More than 9 in 10 (93 percent) self-identified Christian adults in the U.S. say they are at least somewhat open to having a conversation about faith with a friend. And around 4 in 5 (81 percent) feel similarly about speaking about faith with a stranger.

Yet, in the past six months, 53 percent had a conversation about faith with a loved one. And 40 percent had a conversation about faith with a stranger.

Although many factors may contribute to this gap, pastors identified one in a 2021 Lifeway Research study that may play a role in churchgoers’ hesitation to get involved in both evangelism and community service—comfort. More than 2 in 3 Protestant pastors (67 percent) say comfort is a modern-day idol that has significant influence in U.S. churches.

Cultivating desire that leads to action

Theological beliefs and church attendance frequency contribute to the likelihood a person wants to serve and will have actually volunteered outside of their congregation.

Those who attend a worship service at least four times a month are more likely than those who attend one to three times a month to want to serve people in their communities (88 percent v. 82 percent). The most frequent church attendees are also the most likely to have volunteered in the past year (37 percent).

Additionally, those with evangelical beliefs are more likely than those without to have a desire to serve those in their communities who are unaffiliated with their churches (90 percent v. 83 percent) and to have served in the past year (37 percent v. 25 percent).

“Service is contagious. When you are regularly participating in the life of your church, people you get to know will ask you to serve with them,” McConnell said. “Doing good things with friends is enjoyable and easier to find time to do.”

Lifeway Research conducted the online survey of American Protestant churchgoers Sept. 19-29, 2022, using a national pre-recruited panel. Quotas and slight weights were used to balance gender, age, region, ethnicity, education and religion to reflect the population more accurately. The completed sample is 1,002 surveys, providing 95 percent confidence the sampling error does not exceed plus or minus 3.3 percent. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Tim Keller, an influential Presbyterian Church in America minister who founded a network of evangelical Christian churches in New York City, died. He was 72.

Known for his brainy and winsome approach to evangelism, Keller founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan in 1989 and grew the congregation into a hub for a network of churches across the city.

His 2008 book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, reached The New York Times bestseller list. His books sold more than 3 million copies.

Keller had been under treatment for pancreatic cancer after announcing in June 2020 that he had the disease. On May 18, Keller’s son Michael posted a message that his father had been released from the hospital and would receive hospice care at home.

“It is with a heavy heart that I write today to inform you that Redeemer Presbyterian Church founder and long-time senior pastor, Tim Keller, passed away this morning at age 72, trusting in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection,” Bruce Terrell, a leader of the Redeemer Leadership Network, wrote in an email announcing Keller’s death.

“We are forever grateful for his leadership, heart and dedication to sharing the love of Christ with others. While we will miss his presence here, we know he is rejoicing with his Savior in heaven,” Terrell wrote.

‘The Bible came alive’

Born Sept. 23, 1950, in Allentown, Penn., Timothy James Keller grew up in a Lutheran church and, later, in a congregation of a small denomination known as the Evangelical Congregational Church.

His mother wanted him to be a minister. But like many college students, he lost interest in practicing Christianity while studying at Bucknell University, even though he was a religion major, according to a recent biography.

Keller later recounted having a conversion experience as the result of being involved in an InterVarsity student ministry, where he learned to study the Bible from a ministry leader named Barbara Boyd.

“During college, the Bible came alive in a way that is hard to describe,” he wrote in his book, Jesus is the King.

“The best way I can put it is that, before the change, I pored over the Bible, questioning and analyzing it. But after the change, it was as if the Bible, or maybe Someone through the Bible, began poring over me, questioning and analyzing me.”

While attending Gordon-Conwell Seminary north of Boston, he became friends with Kathy Kristy, whom he had first met when visiting her sister, a classmate of Keller’s. After a rocky start, the two began dating while attending a summer class at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, according to Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation, a recent biography by Collin Hansen. They later married.

After seminary, Keller became pastor of West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, Va., part of the newly formed Presbyterian Church in America, where he spent five years. There, his ministry was shaped by lessons he’d learned at the Ligonier Study Center run by R.C. Sproul, an influential Calvinist author and preacher. In particular, he held regular question-and-answer discussions with the congregation.

He then spent five years teaching at Westminster Theological Seminary before moving to New York to plant Redeemer in Manhattan. That startup church began meeting in space rented from a Seventh-day Adventist congregation.

Redeemer Church flourished in Manhattan

The church grew quickly to a group of 250, according to a history posted on its website. Unlike many urban churches, which drew crowds with rock bands, Redeemer became known for its traditional worship style and for Keller’s sermons, appealing to the mind as well as the heart. Redeemer eventually grew into a congregation of more than 5,000 and became known for planting other congregations in New York and beyond.

Keller told Christianity Today in a 2022 podcast he wanted people to see the Christian gospel as “intellectually credible” and to recognize that “it offers something that they’ve been looking for all their lives.” He said he also wanted newcomers to be “gratified participants.”

“They felt that they were not trespassers, they felt welcomed, they felt that they were expected, and they were not under pressure to immediately bow the knee,” he said.

Author Jonathan Rauch became friends with Keller in recent years. Despite their differences—Keller was a conservative evangelical pastor, Rauch is Jewish, atheistic and openly gay—Rauch said he never doubted his friend’s love.

“Though he was a man of profound learning, he always expressed it with curiosity and humility,” he said. “Though he was devoted to the church and a builder of institutions, he never forgot that individuals come first. Tim’s pastorate was universal, a gift to believers and unbelievers alike. When I hear the term ‘Christlike,’ I’ll think of him.”

“I was blessed to get to know Tim a bit over the past year,” said Karen Swallow Prior, a professor of literature and Religion News Service columnist. “He went out of his way a couple of times to reach out to me and offer personal encouragement and support at specific moments when I needed it. That showed me exactly the kind of person he is, and that’s the kind of person I want to be. Tim’s legacy is deep, wide, and immeasurable.”

Keller also was a leading figure in the Neo-Reformed movement as one of the co-founders of The Gospel Coalition. “We are a fellowship of evangelical churches in the Reformed tradition deeply committed to renewing our faith in the gospel of Christ and to reforming our ministry practices to conform fully to the Scriptures,” the group’s preamble says.

Conservative but not confrontational

Known for his conservative but non-confrontational approach to ministry, Keller came under fire in recent years from critics who said his “winsome” approach to engaging with culture no longer works in such a polarized time.

Keller told Religion News Service in a 2022 interview he found such criticism puzzling. As an evangelical pastor in New York, he said, his views were often in conflict with the broader culture. But that was not going to stop him from acting like a Christian.

 “This was never the neutral territory,” said Keller, who stepped down as pastor of Redeemer in 2017. “We always had opposition.”

John Starke, pastor of Apostles Church Uptown in New York City, said, “While Tim is often known for listening to his critics, I’m glad he listened to Jesus here more.”

Starke said Keller taught him the connection between knowledge and vibrant spirituality, but also how to pray.

“Tim taught many of us pastors who ministered in urban contexts how to have a cultural and theological grid when we thought and talked about the world around us,” Starke said. “But he also taught us how to pray for revival and experience personal spiritual renewal. It was both, and both were important to him.”

Unlike other evangelical pastors, Keller was skeptical of Donald Trump. He was part of a 2017 closed-door gathering of evangelical leaders who met at Wheaton College to try to figure out the movement’s future in the age of Trump.

“As the country has become more polarized, so has the church, and that’s because the church is not different enough from modernity,” Keller reportedly said at the meeting. “There’s now a red evangelicalism and a blue evangelicalism.”

Despite his illness, Keller kept writing. In his 2022 book, Forgive, he described the power of forgiveness, something he said many of his fellow Christians have lost faith in.

“A secret to overcoming evil is to see it as something distinct from the evildoer,” he wrote, “Our true enemy is the evil in the person and we want it defeated in him or her.”

In their update about Keller’s health on Thursday, Keller’s family said that he was grateful for all those who have prayed for him.

“I’m thankful for my family, that loves me. I’m thankful for the time God has given me, but I’m ready to see Jesus,” he prayed, according to the family update. “I can’t wait to see Jesus. Send me home.”

In addition to his wife and son Michael, Keller is survived by sons David and Jonathan, a sister, Sharon Johnson of Sorrento, Fla., his daughters-in-law Jennifer, Sara and Ann-Marie, and seven grandchildren.

PHILADELPHIA (BP)—Christians tend to follow their mother’s religion, but those who have changed their religion since childhood are spiritually healthier, the American Bible Society said.

The answer likely lies in the quest involved in exploring Christianity, the American Bible Society said in its latest release from the 2023 State of the Bible report.

“It didn’t matter which Christian tradition they had come from or moved to, the process of moving itself seemed to boost the vitality of their faith,” the Bible society stated.

More than three-quarters of Christians—77 percent—follow their mother’s religion. But those who have changed their faith while remaining Christian consistently scored higher on several variables related to living faithfully, the Bible society said in the second chapter of the 2023 report.

Those who have changed their faith are slightly more Scripture engaged, have a higher belief in Bible accuracy, hold religious faith as more important and are more curious about Jesus and the Bible.

Of those who have changed faiths, 64 percent believe the Bible is totally accurate in all the principles it presents, compared to 47 percent of those who retained their childhood faith.

Three-quarters of those who have changed their faith since childhood rate their religious faith as very important in their lives, compared to 68 percent of those whose faith remained the same.

Three-quarters of those who have changed religion are curious to know more about Jesus, compared to 64 percent of those who’ve retained the religion of their childhood. And 78 percent of switchers are curious to know more about Scripture, compared to 66 percent who haven’t switched.

The differences are true in each major denominational group including evangelical, mainline and historically Black Protestants, as well as Catholics.

“We explored the personal faith journeys of people since childhood, as well as their commitment to Christ today. When people change their faith, they often wind up with a stronger one,” the Bible society stated.

“Their quest for a truer expression of their relationship with God carries them into deeper engagement. We observed the movement of faith through a continuum that included seeking and claiming and enjoying a relationship with Jesus.”

Strengthened faith after searching

Researchers also linked the phenomenon to the fact that those who search outside their childhood faith tend to develop a deeper connection to newfound faith, a matter of owning their relationship with Christ.

“Internalization of Christian truth is a lifelong process,” researchers said. “As they seek the best expressions and connections for their faith or their growing understanding of the Bible’s teaching, some people will pull up stakes from one religious tradition and move to another. This is not necessarily a loss of faith commitment. It can actually signal spiritual growth.

“Sometimes seekers return to their spiritual roots with a stronger faith.”

The American Bible Society plans to release monthly findings from the report, with upcoming releases focusing on spiritual vitality in America, how the Bible impacts human flourishing, the faith of Generation Z, how the Bible impacts behavior, and technology and the Bible.

Now in its 13th year, the State of the Bible report annually looks at the Bible, faith and the church in America.

The American Bible Society collaborated with the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center in designing the study conducted online and via telephone to the research center’s AmeriSpeak Panel. The 18-minute survey, conducted Jan. 5-30, produced 2,761 responses from a representative sample of adults 18 and older within the 50 states and D.C.

BRENTWOOD, Tenn.—More pastors are encouraging members to adopt and provide foster care at a time when adoptions have declined in the United States.

A Lifeway Research study found more than 2 in 5 U.S. Protestant churchgoers (44 percent) say their congregation and its leaders are involved proactively with adoption and foster care in at least one of seven ways.

A similar percentage (45 percent) say they haven’t seen other churchgoers or leaders provide any of the specific types of care or support, while 11 percent aren’t sure.

“Caring for the fatherless is repeatedly prioritized throughout Scripture,” said Scott McConnell, executive director Lifeway Research. “But the Bible does not pretend caring for another like your own child is convenient or easy.”

More than 1 in 10 churchgoers say someone in their congregation has provided foster care (16 percent), adopted a child from the United States (13 percent) or adopted a child from another country (11 percent) within the last year.

Compared to five years ago, fewer churchgoers say they’ve seen members of their church actively participate in adoption and foster care. In a 2017 Lifeway Research study, 25 percent of U.S. Protestant churchgoers said a church member provided foster care, 17 percent said someone adopted domestically and 15 percent said a member adopted internationally in the past year.

Adoptions and the prevalence of foster care have fallen among all Americans in recent years. The number of U.S. children in foster care dropped from 436,556 with 124,004 waiting to be adopted in 2017 to 391,098 with 113,589 waiting to be adopted in 2021, according to a report from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System. Adoptions, both domestically and internationally, have declined as well.

Need is great and may grow greater

Some experts have speculated, however, that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will result in increased strain on the foster care system and additional children in need of adoption.

In a Lifeway Research study conducted just prior to the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion rights, around 3 in 4 Americans (74 percent) said churches and religious organizations in states that restrict access to abortion have a responsibility to increase support and provide options for women who have unwanted pregnancies.

“It is likely the pandemic limited some families in considering foster care or adoption,” McConnell said. “But the need is still great in the U.S. and could grow larger in states with abortion restrictions.”

Churchgoers in the parenting age range often are more likely to say they’ve seen someone in their church step up in these areas in the past year. Those ages 18 to 34 (19 percent) and 35 to 49 (22 percent) are more likely than those 65 and older (10 percent) to say someone in their congregation has provided foster care.

Churchgoers 35 to 49 (16 percent) are twice as likely as those 50 to 64 (8 percent) and 65 and older (9 percent) to say someone at their church adopted internationally. Those 18 to 34 (19 percent) and 35 to 49 (20 percent) are twice as likely as those 50 to 64 (10 percent) and 65 and older (8 percent) to have seen a domestic adoption in their church within the last year.

Nondenominational churchgoers (22 percent) are among the most likely to have seen foster care in their churches. Methodists are among the most likely to say a fellow church member has adopted either internationally (18 percent) or domestically (31 percent).

Despite the decrease in churchgoers seeing members actively participate, many say within the last year they’ve heard leaders broach the subject and seek to support the issue in other ways.

Around 1 in 6 say their church leaders have raised funds for families who were adopting (18 percent), encouraged families to provide foster care (17 percent) or encouraged families to consider adoption (16 percent).

Additionally, 10 percent say their church leaders have provided training for foster parents in the last year.

Churchgoers are more likely now to say they’ve seen leaders help in these ways compared to 2017. Five years ago, 12 percent of churchgoers said leaders encouraged members to provide foster care, 8 percent saw leaders raise funds for families who were adopting, and 6 percent said leaders provided training for foster parents.

 “While some forms of encouragement have become more common in churches in the last five years, 8 in 10 churchgoers have not seen or heard each of these forms of help or encouragement,” McConnell said.

Again, proximity to parenting age increases the likelihood of someone having seen leaders encourage members in these ways. Churchgoers under 50 are more likely than those 50 and older to say they’ve seen leaders raise funds, encourage providing foster care and encourage adoption. Those 65 and older (4 percent) are least likely to say they’ve seen leaders at their church provide foster care training.

Methodists are among the most active in providing assistance and encouragement. They’re among the most likely to say they’ve seen leaders raise funds for adoption in the past year (42 percent) and the most likely to say their leaders have encouraged churchgoers to consider adoption (48 percent) and provide foster care (41 percent).

 Comparable to 2017, 45 percent of U.S. Protestant churchgoers say their church hasn’t helped in any of these ways in the past year.

“Not every exhortation from pastors and church leaders is heard or understood by laity, but only a minority of churchgoers recognized encouragement for families to adopt or provide foster care this last year,” McConnell said.

 Churchgoers 65 and older (59 percent) are most likely to say they haven’t seen their church provide any of the assistance or support asked about in the study. Females (49 percent) are more likely than males (39 percent) to select “none of these.”

Denominationally, Presbyterian/Reformed (60 percent), Lutheran (55 percent) and Baptist (50 percent) churchgoers are more likely than Restorationist movement (26 percent) and Methodist churchgoers (20 percent) to say their churches haven’t helped in these ways.

Lifeway Research conducted the online survey of American Protestant churchgoers Sept. 19-29, 2022, using a national pre-recruited panel. Quotas and slight weights were used to balance gender, age, region, ethnicity, education and religion to reflect the population more accurately. The completed sample is 1,002 surveys, providing 95 percent confidence the sampling error does not exceed plus or minus 3.3 percent. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Habitat for Humanity was built on a pair of simple yet profound ideas. Everyone deserves a decent place to live. Anyone who wants to help make that happen is welcome to pick up a hammer and get to work.

For nearly five decades, those ideas—which Habitat’s founder referred to as the “theology of the hammer”—have helped Habitat grow from its humble beginnings at a Christian commune in Georgia into a worldwide housing nonprofit that’s helped more than 46 million people around the world find a place to call home.

Among those homes are 30 “Unity Build” houses in Nashville, Tenn., built by an interfaith coalition of congregations over the past three decades. Those congregations believe very different things about God, said Kevin Roberts, a former pastor and director of faith relations and mission integration for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Nashville. But they share a common conviction about helping their neighbors.

Working together in polarized times

That makes a Habitat build site a rare place where people who disagree can work together in polarized times. All they need is a willing pair of hands.

“When you step onto the Habitat build site and someone puts a paintbrush or a hammer or a saw in your hand, no one asks, ‘Who did you vote for?’” said Roberts. “No one asks, ‘Where did you go to church or did you go at all?’”

That inclusive approach has helped Habitat thrive despite the many challenges facing faith-based charities in the United States, including aging supporters in shrinking congregations, a loss of faith in organized religion, and the nation’s growing polarization.

Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, said the nonprofit’s mission is to put God’s love in action by providing housing. To do that, he said, requires bringing a wide range of people together.

Using volunteers to help build a Habitat house is a social change strategy, Reckford said, one that invites people to care about affordable housing and about working with their neighbors. That’s an important task in today’s isolated and polarized times.

“My observation is that when people serve together, they focus on what they have in common,” Reckford said in a phone interview. “They focus on shared values, as opposed to when we sit by ourselves online. Then it’s all about how we are different.”

Reckford hopes to expand that kind of intentional bridge-building in the coming years through a new initiative called Team Up—a partnership of Habitat, Catholic Charities, the YMCA and Interfaith America. The initiative was first announced last fall at a White House summit.

The idea is to address the nation’s divisions by inviting people to build friendships as they serve together to meet community needs. For Habitat, that will likely involve more intentional community building on the worksite and an increased focus on interfaith cooperation.

Deep Christian faith and ‘radically inclusive’

Reckford said Habitat’s core Christian identity and its commitment to interfaith work go hand in hand. Faith in God is at Habitat’s center, but God is “not a border” to keep others out.

That deep faith, he said, allows Habitat to be “radically inclusive” and to welcome anyone who wants to lend a hand.

“We should not have to give up what has made Habitat successful in order to be joyfully welcoming of others,” he said.

Reckford suspects community service will become increasingly important for churches and other faith groups in the future, as people become more skeptical of organized religion.

Habitat, he said, was born in church basements and grew by tapping into the energy and faith of people who were already church members. Now many churches will have to reach out to people who aren’t part of their community to continue their ministry, he said.

“In our increasingly unchurched culture, community service is going to be the front door for more and more faith communities,” he said. “The first invitation might be ‘Come to serve with me’ rather than ‘Come worship with me.’”

Service offers venue for interfaith dialogue

Eboo Patel, president of Interfaith America, said his organization’s work was shaped in part by his experience working on an overseas Habitat for Humanity project in Hyderabad, India, in the early 2000s.

Interfaith America—then known as Interfaith Youth Core—was just getting off the ground, and Patel and others volunteered on a project in a city that had experienced religious violence.

On that project, Hindus, Muslims and Christians worked side by side.

The experience left Patel convinced of the power of service as “a common table for interfaith conversations,” he said.

As he looked further into Habitat’s history, he learned the group’s late founder, an Alabama lawyer named Millard Fuller, began the work in part so his Christian friends could get along.

“Millard Fuller’s original vision was: Hey, my evangelical and mainline friends can’t even talk about Jesus because it just leads to an argument,” Patel said. “But we can serve together.”

That ecumenical approach to working together naturally led to interfaith work, said Patel. The idea of helping your neighbors, he said, is common among many faiths. No matter what they believe about God, each faith has its own version of the theology of the hammer.

There’s something “extra sacred” when people of different faiths work together for the benefit of others, according to Patel.

“Everyone has a story to share,” he said. “You’ve opened up what we called mutually enriching conversations between people of different faiths.”

Recently, Pikes Peak Habitat for Humanity, based in Colorado Springs, dedicated its second interfaith-build house, which brought together Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, along with a Native American group.

“We try to pair two faith congregations together from different traditions so that they have the opportunity while on the construction site for the day to get to know one another,” said Chloe Henry, the Faith in Action program manager for Pikes Peak Habitat.

Pike’s Peat Habitat has also organized an interdenominational Christian house build as well as interfaith dialogue events where people can talk about how their faith inspires them to care about affordable housing. This past year’s interfaith event focused on the topics of increasing Black homeownership and on building a community where everyone belongs.

Nashville Habitat also has held interfaith dialogues, as well as interfaith worship services—involving Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Christian clergy—at Congregation Ohabai Sholom, a Nashville synagogue better known as the Temple.

The Temple first became involved with Habitat when a past president of the synagogue wanted to get congregations involved in a social action project, said Rabbi Shana Mackler, who also serves as a senior scholar. The Unity Build began with three congregations and now involves nearly two dozen.

“We have stayed involved largely because people love direct action projects, and because it gives us the opportunity to connect with other houses of worship and religious communities in doing good, meaningful work,” she said.

For Lauren Brooks-Gregory, the interfaith service at the Temple is one of the most important aspects of the Unity Build. Brooks-Gregory, who is 40, said she first became involved in Habitat as a teenager and learned about the Unity Build through her Calvary United Methodist Church, where she grew up.

The church has long been a supporter of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Nashville, which has helped 1,000 families become homeowners.

She said the interfaith service sets the tone that everyone involved is committed to the same goal—putting a roof over a family’s head.

Brooks-Gregory took over as a volunteer coordinator for the Unity Build in 2022 and said she wants to build on the legacy of those who came before her. In her role, she works alongside the point people in each congregation, who are responsible for raising funds and finding volunteers. She said there’s room for congregations small and large to get involved.

She hopes the interfaith work of Habitat will become even more intentional in the future. A former youth pastor who now does training for an electrical contractor, Brooks-Gregory said strengthening relationships between people of different faiths takes intentional effort and planning—especially in trying times.

“The effort to get along is ever-changing,” she said. “It just looks different right now. But the struggle has always been there.”

Brooks-Gregory said she loves the way Habitat puts people in motion to get something constructive done, while they get to know each. That provides space for understanding, she said.

“Let’s practice interfaith dialogue. But also, hand me that two-by-four.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Despite reports of declining worship attendance and religious affiliation, 6 in 10 Americans say that they pray, a new survey reports.

A higher percentage—85 percent—say they engage in a spiritual practice to connect with a higher power, whether prayer, meditation, mindfulness, reciting affirmations or spiritually based yoga. Prayer is the most common of the five practices, with 39 percent of Americans saying they practiced meditation and 38 percent practicing mindfulness.

Findings of the survey of more than 1,700 Americans were released by the Radiant Foundation on Thursday (May 4), which is the National Day of Prayer.

It showed U.S. adults who pray often do so at dawn or when they awaken (50 percent) or at bedtime (55 percent). More people report that they pray in their car (61 percent) than in a place of worship (46 percent).

“These results make it clear that there is more praying taking place than people expect. People are praying in a variety of ways and in unexpected places throughout the day,” said John Dye, executive director of Skylight, a Radiant Foundation website that offers spiritual content, such as prayer, affirmations and yoga, aimed at young adults.

“They are frequently exploring their spiritual side and using prayer to work through adversity, find meaning, and create connection with a Higher Power.”

A distinct majority of those who pray (87 percent) said they believed they’d received an answer to their prayers in the last 12 months.

The top reasons cited for prayer were for a loved one in crisis (76 percent) or when someone else was sick (71 percent).

Other findings looked at how and with whom people prayed.

Eight in 10 reported regularly praying by themselves. Younger respondents—in particular millennials and Gen Zs—were more likely than younger boomers and Gen Xers to report they prayed regularly with members of their spiritual group or family. Nearly a quarter said they pray routinely around their pets.

More than three-quarters of those who pray use at least one spiritually related object when they do.

The most popular objects, based on a provided list of 20, were books and other texts, used by a quarter of respondents at least a few times a week. Others included burning objects such as candles (19 percent), a journal (18 percent), a pillow or kneeling pad (18 percent), a rosary or prayer beads (18 percent) or iconography (18 percent).

The survey was commissioned by Skylight and conducted by the Boston-area research firm City Square Associates. A total of 1,783 U.S. adults ages 18 to 64 participated in the online survey, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Many of the questions on prayer were asked only of the 1,090 Americans who indicated they pray.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Emerging from the narrow entrance to a cave south of Jerusalem, scholar Joan Taylor found herself saying a blessing for Salome.

Salome is described in the Gospels as following and ministering to Jesus and is named as one of many women present at his death and at his tomb after his resurrection.

Ancient Greek graffiti inside the cave also asks “holy Salome” for mercy, suggesting to Taylor and her travel companion, scholar Helen Bond, that Salome may have been remembered as a healer in the early centuries of the church, just as many of Jesus’ male disciples were.

“These early women disciples of Jesus should be celebrated. They should be restored somehow, as this place should be restored,” Taylor says, sitting outside the cave in the British Channel 4 documentary Jesus’ Female Disciples: The New Evidence.

“They were working alongside the men. They were as important to the early Jesus movement as the men were,” she continues. “They are clearly there in our texts, and to forget that is a shame. If it’s all about men and the band of 12 men around Jesus, we’re forgetting the other half of the story.”

The documentary gained unexpected attention, with the duo writing it receiving more press coverage than any other religious program since the BBC’s Son of God in 2001.

Women’s roles in the Bible ‘have been obscured’

Taylor and Bond—who also wrote the book Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples, which details the scholarship that didn’t fit into their 50-minute film—aren’t the only scholars working to restore the picture of Jesus’ first female followers.

Several new books are taking a fresh look at the roles of women in Jesus’ ministry and in the early church.

“It’s not that we’re making new discoveries about women. It’s not that we’re trying to rewrite history. It’s simply that women have been obscured, and women’s actual roles in the Bible have been obscured,” said Beth Allison Barr, the James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University and author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.

“It’s time when we’ve got to see them for how they really are,” she said.

That time comes as many Christians—particularly white evangelicals—are asking questions about how their faith was formed and what they were taught it meant to be a Christian, Barr said. That includes ideas around women and gender roles.

“People are like, ‘Hey, maybe what I was always taught about this—maybe there’s more to the story.’ And, I mean, it’s such an encouraging moment,” Barr said.

Gupta: ‘I was wrong’ about women in ministry

Nijay Gupta—professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary and author of Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church, released in March with a foreword by Barr—said he was forced to reconsider his belief that the Bible forbid women from leadership in the church when he was in seminary.

Gupta had been warned to stay away from women studying for a Master of Divinity degree because they were being “disobedient,” he said. He ended up marrying one.

And the more women he met in seminary, the more he realized they believed the same things he did about the truth of the Bible.

Two years of research into what the Bible said on the topic started with him writing a paper on why women shouldn’t be in ministry and ended with him writing a paper on why they must.

In the New Testament, Gupta encountered Nympha, who not only hosted a church in her home but is described in the same way church leaders are described elsewhere. When writing about her in Tell Her Story, he was tempted to name the chapter “The Most Important Early Christian You’ve Never Heard Of,” he said.

He also reencountered Mary, the mother of Jesus, whom he always envisioned frozen in time as a teenager in the Christmas story. But, he realized, she was there throughout Jesus’ life, at his death and even afterward among the disciples when the Holy Spirit arrived at Pentecost.

Gupta started teaching and writing about the stories of women found in the New Testament because, he said, “I was wrong, and I was so sure of being right before.”

How we view these women has impacts far beyond biblical interpretation, he said.

“An accumulation of modern life experiences tells us if the Bible is God’s word, if it’s the authority for Christians, we need to take seriously everything in there, and that’s going to affect how we treat women today,” he said.

Focusing on neglected women in Scripture

Other scholars have focused their attention on individual women who receive passing reference in the New Testament.

Phoebe, whose name appears in a list of greetings from the apostle Paul at the end of the Book of Romans, takes center stage in Susan Hylen’s book Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like, published in January. The two verses about Phoebe describe her as “sister,” “deacon” and “benefactor.”

Hylen, professor of New Testament at Emory University, uses those lines as a jumping-off point to investigate some of the “vague clues” the New Testament gives about the lives of the women in its pages.

She offers historical context to help readers reach their own conclusions about the roles women may have played in the early church and beyond, which may look different than they had assumed.

“I sense right now that there are a lot of churches where it hasn’t been conventional for women to have leadership roles, but people are open to it,” she said.

The scholars argue much of what they’re writing isn’t new.

‘An exercise in amplification’

Gupta describes Tell Her Story in its introduction as an “exercise in amplification” of the stories of women in the biblical text.

Taylor, professor of Christian origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College London, points to the work of German theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who pioneered the field of feminist biblical interpretation in the 1980s and 1990s with such works as In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins and But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation. Taylor studied  Schüssler Fiorenza’s methodology at Harvard Divinity School.

Bond said she still was surprised to encounter women as more than “light relief” in the biblical texts.

“This is genuinely part of the story that hasn’t filtered out from academic towers and academic institutions,” said Bond, professor of Christian origins and head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh.

Much of what is being written now about women in the New Testament “is really an evangelical phenomenon,” according to popular author and public scholar Diana Butler Bass.

“I think these questions have been, by and large, explored very thoroughly, and pursued with great success, in Catholic and liberal Protestant circles for more than four generations already, but now evangelicals are just finding them.”

The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge of feminist biblical scholarship as mainline Protestant denominations began to ordain women, Butler Bass said, pointing to the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elizabeth Johnson.

Still, Butler Bass said, she was surprised when a sermon she delivered last summer sharing new scholarship about Mary Magdalene—whom she called “first among the apostles, really, when it comes to women in the New Testament”—went viral.

In the sermon, she pointed to the work of Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, incoming assistant professor of New Testament at Villanova University. Schrader Polczer’s research suggests the oldest text of the Gospel of John was altered to split in two the character of Mary in the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

As a result, today’s Bible translations place sisters Mary and Martha—who are featured in a different story in the Gospel of Luke—in the passage. Schrader Polczer argues instead it should be Mary Magdalene in the passage, making one of the first statements of belief in Jesus as the Messiah.

That would put Mary Magdalene, who is named elsewhere in the Bible as traveling with Jesus and his disciples and as the first witness to Jesus’ resurrection, on par with Peter among Jesus’ disciples, Butler Bass said.

After delivering the sermon to a largely progressive Christian audience of mainliners and exvangelicals last July at the Wild Goose Festival, Butler Bass sent the audio to her Substack subscribers. By the time she arrived home a few hours later, it had been downloaded nearly 100,000 times.

To date, she believes it has been listened to 750,000 times.

But imagine, she said, if the church had been listening to Mary Magdalene and other women named in the New Testament all this time.

“Is there a pathway to finally reimagine the nature of leadership in early Christian communities and the ways in which Jesus understood the callings of men and women?” Butler Bass said.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—It’s been 60 years since Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on scraps of paper, but faith leaders say his response to white clergy critics endures as a “road map” for those working on justice and equal rights.

Recent events and exhibitions tied to its anniversary have revealed the ongoing interest in and relevance of King’s letter, in which the civil rights leader wrote: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice held a virtual event April 26 to mark 60 years since King penned the letter on April 16, 1963, after being jailed for his organization of a nonviolent demonstration on Good Friday that year in the Alabama city. The letter was released publicly the next month and was included in his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait.

Jim Wallis, the center’s director, noted how King wrote that the greatest “stumbling block” for freedom-seeking Black Americans was—rather than a Ku Klux Klan member—the “white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Wallis pointed to the current debate in some school districts over what books children can and can’t read as an example of why the letter continues to be relevant.

“We know that it is impossible to build a truly multiracial democracy if we do not wrestle honestly and directly with its legacy and current manifestations of white supremacy,’’ he said. “At the moment when some are trying to erase our history, especially our racial history, remembering and learning from the past is now more important than ever.”

King’s letter was addressed to eight clergymen, whom he called “my Christian and Jewish brothers,” after they questioned the need for and the urgency of the Birmingham campaign he had led as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the interim president of the National Council of Churches, shared at the event how King’s letter guided her family’s prayers for her older brother’s safety as he traveled that year by bus to the South to aid the movement.

‘A road map’ for positive change

“It was a fearful time, a fearful time when something had to be done,” she said. “The African diaspora is calling you to do it. And King gives us a road map on how to begin that process of change.”

Pastor Otis Moss III of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ called the letter part of the “extracanonical material” his family thought necessary to read beyond the Bible.

“What’s so important about it today is you still have people who have ecclesiastical positions but have no moral authority and who are trying to claim moral authority,” said Moss, who, like McKenzie, was required to read the letter at the historically Black college he attended.

“He was talking to the Christian nationalists of his day and setting them straight and saying, ‘You have no moral authority.’”

The 60th anniversary of the letter has been marked with talks at churches, a parade in Oklahoma City and exhibits of related artwork at the New Jersey State Museum, as well as the display of an early draft at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair.

Faith leaders at the Georgetown event and in interviews commented on King’s stated concerns in his letter, which included that the church could “be dismissed as an irrelevant social club” and that he has daily met “young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”

In an interview, Randal Maurice Jelks, author of the 2022 book Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America, said the letter deeply resonated with a churchgoing public of the 1960s but remains relevant in teaching people of a range of faith perspectives today.

What the letter, which was more than 6,000 words long, “continues to point out is that people do have to take a side in the struggle for justice, whatever those justice struggles are, and you can’t be, as King would say in that letter, lukewarm about that.”

‘The mission didn’t stop with the man’

Melech E.M. Thomas, a millennial pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal Church, said in an interview he thinks King’s “masterful” letter should be heard in U.S. history classes and in seminaries rather than just a mention of his name or his legacy.

“In every pulpit, this year, there should be some type of reading, public reading of excerpts of the letter from the Birmingham jail, just to remind us of why we are the church and what God has called us to do,” said Thomas, pastor of Bethel AME in Selma, N.C.

“The mission didn’t stop with the man. We have an obligation to continue what he called us to do and I hope that myself and my generation, as we are coming into leadership, will continue to do the same.”

In an interview, Sojourners President Adam Russell Taylor said King’s letter offers a theologically and civically grounded challenge to not be silent that still applies to churches today. Taylor noted the fallout from clergy he thinks were not courageous enough to speak amid false statements that the last presidential election was stolen.

Taylor pointed to a recent Brookings Institution and Public Religion Research Institute survey that found that 29 percent of Americans qualify as Christian nationalists but, by a ratio of 2-to-1, Americans reject a Christian nationalist view.

“If the people in the middle were really willing to stand up and speak out more, I think we could reach a tipping point,” Taylor said. “Which way we tip is really up to all of us, but I think it’s that middle that we really need to activate and inspire to be much more outspoken and much more courageous.”

A questioner at the Georgetown event inquired about how predominantly white faith communities can join with racially diverse groups on racial justice issues.

Moss responded by citing an anti-violence event in downtown Chicago the previous Saturday featuring hundreds of men, most of them Black. The gathering represented new efforts by his congregation and others that were supported by a range of houses of worship, from Pentecostal congregations to synagogues. He called it an opportunity to “change the narrative” about how the city’s youth are viewed and affirmed.

“We did a walk downtown, not against our children, but to say that we love them,” he said, adding that his is one of several churches planning to offer some 750 jobs to youth this summer. “They were saying that we’re in this together. This is our city. These are our children.”