Page 959 – Christianity Today (2024)

I’d been looking for someone to write an article to complement Daniel Leonard’s poem about whale falls, but I didn’t mention the subject when I pitched Dorothy Boorse an article about mosquitoes. In her reply, she mentioned in passing—in all caps with two exclamation marks—how excited she was that that she’d recently seen a dead whale. As a middle-class white dude with a great job, I get self-conscious about loudly proclaiming, “Jehovah Jireh! The Lord will provide!” But Jehovah really does jireh, as this issue repeatedly attests.

A dead whale is one of those mysterious ways that God provides. But it usually looks to me like a corpse, a sad end. I need biologists like Boorse, poets like Leonard, and a magazine like The Behemoth to show me that it’s much, much more than that. As Mark Galli’s essay in this issue also demonstrates, creation is so much bigger and so much better than I imagine. And God is greater still. “He gives food to every creature. His love endures forever,” the psalmist writes in Psalm 136:25. And, in slightly different words, in Psalm 145:15–16. And Psalm 104:27. I need even more reminders than these.

Like right now. Today we’re saying goodbye to Andie Roeder Moody, who has been The Behemoth’s assistant editor since its planning stages. I’ll forego the ill-considered whale fall analogies I tried in earlier drafts of this editor’s note and just get to the point: Andie is awesome and her new employer, North Park University, is about to be very blessed. We’re lamenting her departure. But this issue has already helped me remember God’s continued provision for her, for us, for this magazine, and for others. I hope you experience something similar as you read on.

Ted Olsen is editor of The Behemoth and tweets @tedolsen.

On a field trip on a September day, my students and I stood on a rocky ocean shore, mesmerized by an object in the water. Bouncing with the waves between a rock outcropping and the rocks of the shore lay an 18-foot dead body. Its sleek form was black with shades of gray and purple. It was a dead whale, lying on its back. The tail and flippers were discernable, but the shape became less recognizable as our eyes scanned forward. The throat, pleated in life, had expanded. A massive spherical bubble eclipsed the familiar shape where we expected its head to be.

Was this a stomach extruded and filled with gases from decomposition? I was not sure what exactly we were seeing. But I did know this: I was on a field trip on a beautiful fall day, it was a dead whale, and it was both disturbing and mesmerizing! Many parts of the natural world have that combination of concurrent attraction and repulsion, but this was bigger and rarer. We stood and marveled.

For weeks afterward, when anyone asked me how the semester was going, I replied, “My semester is great. My students and I saw a dead whale in Gloucester. It was so gross and so fabulous.”

Leaving the shore, I knew the scene would become even more macabre as fish, birds, and crabs consumed the whale carcass in ripped-off chunks large and small. For those scavengers, it must have felt like a grand feast. But the creatures around Gloucester didn’t know how lucky they were.

Imagine living in the dark and cold of the abyssal plain, that vast land deep under the ocean’s surface and far from a continental shelf. These ocean bottoms are some of the most remote, unstudied, and inaccessible parts of the globe. Light does not penetrate; no photosynthesis occurs with which to drive a food web. Tiny food particles drift slowly down from the surface, sometimes miles above. Creatures that live here survive in the cold and dark, with little food, growing slowly.

Until, a mile or two above them, a whale dies. A giant cornucopia falls to the floor, providing the kind of carbon and other resources that would normally take up to two thousand years to drift over their home.

The riches of a whale carcass, sometimes as large as 160 tons, provide food for decades—a vast bounty in a world of scarcity. The swimming scavengers arrive first: Eel-like hagfish, which cover themselves in slimy mucus. Rattail fish, skinny and fearsome. Sleeper sharks, with their ragged teeth. They all swim in to grab bites. Crabs and their crustacean cousins, the ocean isopods with their many feet, scramble by to pinch off bits. The banquet can last months. Or years.

Then come the oddities in a second stage. The first scavengers leave once most of the soft tissue of the whale fall is eaten. Then the bones and the sediments beneath the carcass, which are full of fats and other edibles, provide housing and nutrients to a thick carpet of worms and small crustaceans. Mussels and snails join the community. Sometimes as many as 40,000 creatures crowd into a square meter, about the size of a card table.

The worms are weirdly spectacular. Some worms in the genus Osedax float through the ocean, blind and mouthless, hoping to land on a whale carcass. Once there, they grow what look like roots into the whale bones, and absorb nutrients. They grow feathery appendages out the other end, to absorb oxygen. They look like little mosses, only red. Even without a gut, they digest the bones, using acids released from their skin to absorb the remains. Even more fantastically, these worms contain bacteria that live within them. The bacteria pour into the bones as well, possibly helping to dissolve the structures. These “Bone-eating” or “zombie” worms had an even bigger surprise in store for people who studied them: at first it appeared that there are no males. It took years for scientists to discover that the males are microscopic and live inside the bodies of females, providing sperm as needed.

After this alien stage of creatures has had its fill, the whale fall enters its final, “sulfur-loving” stage, which can last decades. As the complex fats in the whalebone break down in a process without oxygen, they release sulfur compounds. Some bacteria can use the energy from these compounds instead of sunlight in order to produce sugars, and they form the base of a complex food web comprising almost 200 species.

These anaerobic bacteria and the organisms that depend on them are remarkably similar to the creatures in deep sea hydrothermal vents and in “seeps,” where hydrocarbons such as crude oil or methane ooze out of the ocean crust. At least 30 of the 400 or so species that live on whale falls also live near hydrothermal vents or cold seeps.

So this is the great story: Deep in the darkest part of the oceans, where food is scarce and light does not exist, every once in a while, a great feast arrives from the surface. The giant’s death supports an elaborate succession of creatures dependent on such a bonanza. Creatures here are unfathomable—wild and tangled, able to survive cold and pressures that would kill us, able to live on the dead body of an animal itself long-lived, gigantic, and majestic. There is no waste here, no sorrow over a death which offered life for others for so many years in this otherwise desert. There is only a secret showcase of provision and flourishing, a hidden model of fruitfulness in the face of the pressures of these depths.

Whale falls are extremely difficult to study. Human ability to descend into the ocean is only now taking us to places where we can see them. Everything we have seen with our remote vehicles or manned submarines is only the tiniest glimpse of the mystery of the distant ocean bottom. When I stood with my students on the shore, looking at the bloated carcass of a smallish dead whale, we were tapping into the inscrutable marine world far away that we will never see.

Neither I, nor the students with me on our field trip, had ever before seen a dead whale outside of a nature film. Decay is not naturally attractive to many people. It was gross. And fabulous. But to the myriad creatures designed to clean the world of dead things— the scavengers, the worms, and the bacteria whose bodies allow them to use resources we cannot—the purple-black and gray of that corpse represented not life’s end, but its provision. Not a loss, but the beginning of a community that would last for generations.

Dorothy Boorse is professor of biology at Gordon College.

In conjunction with our most recent print issue of Leadership Journal, an exploration of the State of the Pastorate, we asked a series of pastors a simple question: what is the current state of your pastorate? The full collection of essays will be updated throughout the week.

What’s the state of your pastorate? Let us know online through tweets, blogs, drawings, or smoke signals. Include the hashtag #mypastorate, and we’ll feature our favorites in a post next week.

In the fall of 2012, I joined the pastoral leadership team at Saddleback Church as the lead campus pastor in Irvine. Coming from a church planting background, I was a fish out of water in a church structure so vast, fluid, and rich with historic influence. At the same time, my wife and I were both confident that the missional values flowing from senior pastor Rick Warren deeply aligned with the passion God placed in our hearts.

Three years have passed, and I’ve learned faith-stretching and painful lessons in growing our local body. We’ve done things that may appear counter-cultural in expanding God’s kingdom: we (1) launched an extension worship site on the other side of town, (2) relocated our campus to a building nine miles away, (3) replanted a remnant core team of 300 at our old worship site, and (4) sent out two of our associate pastors to help lead these new congregations.

I would never suggest going from one congregation to three within a couple years as the blueprint of growing a church while maintaining a healthy blood pressure level.

Whew … take a deep breath. I would never suggest going from one congregation to three within a couple years as the blueprint of growing a church while maintaining a healthy blood pressure level.

The cost of kingdom growth

The price of growth often requires us to release some of our best leaders to the mission field. That’s what pastors must face when we invest energy and emotion and literally feed our ministry leaders, only to realize it’s time to send them off.

A secular study claimed that a new employee’s value equates to at least a two-year investment of training and wages. Keeping your talent is the most logical and effective way of building up the organization. However, Scripture tells us otherwise through the life of Jesus and Paul as seen in their experiences in kingdom growth and leadership development. Despite the growth pains, there are joys that come in reloading a ministry for another season so God can allow us to advance once more.

Growing pains

In the early 1980s, Saddleback Church wanted to help plant churches in nearby cities. One of the first target cities was Irvine (15 minutes north of Saddleback’s Lake Forest location). But nothing took hold until Easter 2008. The multisite church strategy fostered new vision for Saddleback Church to launch an Irvine campus. This time, within three years, Irvine blossomed into the largest regional campus.

God’s favor blessed the church with a vibrant congregation filled with passion and many strong leaders. Three services in Northwood High School’s 650-seat auditorium wasn’t enough to hold everyone. We created an outdoor overflow area with a tarp-shade and portable TV screen to create enough space to seat everyone. Things had to change quickly.

The first solution was to start an extension site across town in another high school. We hoped this would provide space and also allow others to grow into leadership roles. And we looked for a permanent home for relocating the congregation. At this point, the sweaty weight room was not cutting it for the youth ministry of almost 200 students. The facilities limited our ability to grow beyond our current size.

In 2014, God blessed us with a new church facility nine miles away and the relocation happened! Yet, there was a price to growth. We were forced to reexamine our leadership pipeline with pastoral staff and lay leaders.

Rebuilding the walls

One of the main reasons the Northwood High School location was growing so fast was due to the multitudes of new homes being built in the area. Everyone in church planting knows that new homes mean new families looking for community, and new churches can provide that.

We realized that we still needed to reach these neighborhoods. So even though we’d moved, we needed to maintain a presence in the ripe harvest fields surrounding Northwood. It also meant that we needed to rethink our leadership base to do ministry well at both locations.

For the next few months (January-March 2015), I had to intentionally ask people to “leave” our church and help serve the Northwood High School campus. Yes, I encouraged people to leave their seats of “comfort” and follow their ministry “calling” to the community where God could use them to reach others for Christ. For the last six years, these people had seen God bless their church and finally land a permanent home. Now I was asking them to go back to the days of set-up and teardown at the crack of dawn. I am not sure who felt crazier–the people hearing me say it, or me hearing me say it.

Then, in March 2015, we sent out one of our best associate pastors. He had been one of the key members who helped birth the Irvine campus in 2008. We made it official. Irvine North was born, and it had a new pastor. The people had to see that our pastoral team affirmed this mission. We wouldn’t ask people to go if we weren’t willing to let one of our key pastors go as well. Selfishly, I had so many mixed emotions. I told myself that I’d recruited this guy, hired and developed this guy, but I was so WRONG! God had found this guy, and God had used people like me to shape him for a future purpose that we never really considered until recently. While I had a short-sighted view of growing my organization, God was busy preparing this man and others to lead our newest Saddleback campus.

Such leadership redeployments don’t stop. The cost of growth means other ministry teams are looking at your best talent. One month later, another associate pastor was selected to help bring new vision to another Saddleback campus in another city. (Really God, you can take my left arm, but please, can I keep my right arm?) Again, we can be slow and near-sighted in recognizing the whole grand scheme of God’s plans. In those moments, that pain of losing your best pastors and a chunk of your congregation reminds you that this is NOT your bride that he died for. While losing colleagues and team members may sting, but you cling to the hope that God knows what he’s doing.

The Aftermath

So what happened to our church after the relocation and the relaunch? Approximately 70-75 percent of our congregation made the move to Irvine South, and 25-30 percent of the members stay backed to help re-launch the Irvine North campus, with some being key members of the original campus.

Next, I was faced with who would now lead the new fledging campus. It would require a lead pastor and a worship leader. Fortunately, we’ve been developing both positions in our extension site, and they were willing to take on the new challenge.

While in some ways, the division felt like loss, the narrative didn’t stop there. Before the North/South “split,” our congregation averaged about 1,800 in attendance. We had outgrown the high school facilities and needed to find a new home. Eight months later, the two campuses in the same town are now averaging about 2,300 in attendance. That net gain of 500 new faces experiencing the Lord’s love is a miracle of God’s grace.

Any church planter would give his right and left arm to see that type of growth. Sending our best people also stretched our members’ faith by asking them to fill in various leadership positions. Attendance grew, service increased, and the peoples’ spiritual faith stretched. What more could any pastor ask for?

While it’s crazy to think that dividing human resources, financial investments, and leadership personnel would help build the body of Christ, God asks that we trust him. “Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this” (Ps. 37:5). God’s way can seem uncomfortable and unconventional, but I hope you experience the same joy I have in releasing your best for God’s mission.

Kevin Nguyen is lead campus pastor at Saddleback’s Irvine South campus in California.

If you wanted to see a romantic comedy this year, you were in luck—especially if you wanted to see the old formula flipped on its head. A new wave of “feminist” romantic comedies attempted to empower women within the traditional meet-cute to happily-ever-after relationship story arc.

Trainwreck, starring comedian Amy Schumer, is perhaps the most talked-about example, but others include 50 Shades of Grey—lauded by some for its female-centric portrayal of sex, though not for its gender dynamics—and the Alison Brie-led Sleeping With Other People, about a woman who can only develop a healthy, balanced relationship with a man once the pair agrees to not have sex.

Those who argue that these films are empowering say something like this: The women in these movies are fully in touch with their own sexuality and unabashed about asking for what they want. They are not princesses waiting to be rescued nor incomplete without a man. These women are fully capable of walking away, no matter the man’s charm or wealth or persuasive ways.

You could dismiss these movies as superficial illustrations that "modern women like sex and that's okay," but they actually illustrate something that frustrates a lot of women—both Christian and not—about relationships: it seems like there’s no middle ground. You can choose sex without emotional involvement, or you can choose emotional involvement without sex.

But I’d argue that these movies do not empower women. Instead, they obfuscate the reality: sexual liberty doesn't reduce emotional vulnerability.

Sexual empowerment is not the same thing as power in a relationship—something many Christians readily acknowledge. But when we also deny that we even have a human appetite for sex (a much more common attitude within the church), or suggest it’s an entirely negative desire, we fail to provide a practical approach to real relationships, with all the uncertainty, negotiation of wants and needs, and vulnerability they involve. Neither stance addresses the reality that relational vulnerability is hell when it’s lopsided.

In the traditional rom-com formula, the woman usually takes the first step of vulnerability by acknowledging her feelings for the other person. Then eventually, the man must make up for lagging behind through some grand public gesture. In this scenario, success for the woman is to become the object of desire, but at least this (arguably) elevates her value.

Trainwreck flips the gender roles by making love interest Aaron (Bill Hader) the emotional one and Amy (Schumer) the one who makes the grand romantic gesture in the end. The lesson of Trainwreck is that the modern, sexually liberated woman doesn’t need emotional support from a man—until he makes the first emotional move, and then it’s okay to lean in.

In Sleeping With Other People, Lainey is so emotionally incompetent she constantly seeks out sex that leaves her feeling used in the aftermath. She repeats this cycle over and over until a man, Jake (Jason Sudeikis), becomes a safe emotional attachment figure by agreeing to a no-sex rule. In this case, while both Lainey and Jake embrace the freedom of sexual activity and had sex earlier in their relationship, not having sex seems to be the real equalizer. (It’s so old-fashioned it’s dysfunctional.)

When we see these women as examples of female empowerment, though, we preach that denying our vulnerability is a form of safety. Amy and Lainey “protect” their hearts with a barrier carefully built of narcissistic confidence and the idea that it’s ok to sleep around, without regard for or fear of potential emotional complications.

This mask has been around since at least the Rock Hudson/Doris Day sex comedies of the late 1950s; back then, it was the "unreformed bachelor” stereotype. In order to project the visage of an aloof “single and loving it” character, one must have a rampant and well documented sex drive, fear of commitment and repressed emotional life. Assigning these characteristics to the female protagonist, as in Trainwreck, does nothing to reform the rom-com formula or empower women, since the male love interest in these examples still swoops in to rescue or reform by allowing the female to admit how she feels.

While this new wave of rom-coms puts the emphasis on the female sex drive—the female leads are very proactive in the sexual aspect of their relationship—the women in these examples are still waiting for the man to lead emotionally. He has control over her ability to accept what she feels and the safety to express it—and in my opinion, that’s a step back for women. This is a passive role, not an empowered one.

I would never hold 50 Shades up as a good example of a functional relationship, but Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) is actually the most honest of these three examples regarding her vulnerability in relationship with Christian (Jamie Dornan). She submits to his sexual wishes despite reservations, but draws a line at denying her heart or accepting his dismissal of her feelings. Equality it’s not—using sex as a power play is never healthy and the relationship portrayed is full of red flags for abuse—but in owning her vulnerability, Ana is actually more courageous than the supposed empowered examples elsewhere. She walks away at the end of the movie not because she’s denying her feelings, but because she’s owning them.

Many storytellers concede that healthy, happy relationships are too peaceful to provide great stories: feelings are acknowledged and resolution happens quickly. This is called the Moonlighting effect, because of a wildly successful 1980s show that quickly went downhill once the two leads got together.

My go-to cinematic example of a working romantic relationship is Coach and Tami Taylor in Friday Night Lights. But their marriage is already well established during both movie and TV show, and the audience never sees the negotiations involved in beginning to build their mutually supportive relationship.

Fortunately for storytellers, many people haven’t experienced mutual consideration and healthy resolution in their relationships—particularly in the early days. Many of us have never experienced a relationship healthy enough to eclipse the messy ones. In poor combinations, two mostly mature and well-adjusted people can bring out the worst in each other.

This unavoidable drama can make women long for the wild mutual desire that, in rom-coms, is the only necessary ingredient for a “happily ever after” (especially the kind of wild desire that makes one run through the airport or chase a cab). Many of us rail against the formula and welcome stories that have some fun with it, but still look for the signs of happiness we’re taught on screen.

The essence of the romantic narrative is a journey from unequal power dynamics (the uncertainty of dating and the early stages of testing your fit with another person) to equality motivated by love. But in real life, romance still plays a role—that improbable, grand, mysterious ingredient—but so does intentional alignment with the other person’s needs. Love interwoven with a desire to know and serve the other is also God's kind of love. "This is because I want faithful love, not sacrifice/I want people to know God, not to bring burnt offerings," reads Hosea 6:6.

Where is the alternative model for the woman who doesn’t want to wait around to be the object of some man’s quest but also cannot accept the sexual without compromising the emotional? Not in pop culture. But also, unfortunately, not in the church. Christians’ relationship solutions often involve denying the messiness of emotional negotiation and human interaction. Plenty of youth groups (some influenced heavily by Joshua Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye) push the message that romantic relationships are dangerous, perhaps unintentionally promoting the idea that the confusion of feeling something about another person should be hidden or denied. Messy relationships are unavoidable. Navigating them requires grace for people and faith in something better.

Ultimately, a healthy relationship is not about power, because power assumes that one is greater than the other. Power, when looked at in a relationship, comes from both acknowledging vulnerability and granting that power to the other out of trust. To gain power, you've got to lose it, in other words—a lesson the church ought to be able to teach.

But until we come up with better examples, women will keep looking to rom-coms and learning through painful trial and error.

Alicia Cohn is a regular contributor to Christianity Today's Her.meneuticsand freelance writer based in Denver. She tweets @aliciacohn.

Of all the adjectives people might use to describe documentary films–important, artsy, difficult–one that does not spring immediately to mind is fun. But the new documentary Finders Keepers challenges this preconception of nonfiction films as hard work, offering a wild tale full of severed limbs, courtroom drama, and plenty of salty humor.

In the midst of the many belly laughs the film offers, though, it also poses a key question for sensitive viewers of documentaries: when is it okay to laugh at the people onscreen?

The story revolves around a legal dispute between two men over a preserved, amputated leg. When irrepressible showboat Shannon Whisnant finds the leg in a grill he purchases at auction, he sets out to do the American thing and make some money off the spectacle. John Wood, the leg’s original owner, demands its return. Whisnant refuses to budge. The two men trade words and eventually take each other to court. Filmmakers Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel keep their focus tight on the two characters, and Whisnant especially fills up the screen with his charisma and homebrewed witticisms.

As funny as the film is, I found myself a little unsettled at certain points laughing at its contents. At The Dissolve, Scott Tobias pinpointed one source of my unease when he described the film as “borderline hicksploitation.” Finders Keepers takes place mostly in one small North Carolina town, and both Whisnant and Wood represent an oft-mocked sort of Southern whiteness. So as Whisnant rattled off one down-home proverb after another, I found it hard to determine why exactly I found myself laughing. Was it because Whisnant said something genuinely funny and provocative, or because he said it in a rustic, unsophisticated way, with a twang in his voice?

The divide between laughing with and laughing at the characters in a film has never been clear in documentaries, and it must be navigated with caution. As opposed to a fictional comedy, the stakes in a documentary have real-world meaning: documentary subjects have inner lives that actually exist, and real dignity that can be assaulted.

The director has a responsibility, of course, to present the characters of a film in ways that do not distort their personalities exploitatively. Yet even the most sensitive directors must rely on the audience to complete the picture accurately. When Errol Morris' first film, Gates of Heaven, was released, some people accused the director of mocking the subjects of his film—pet owners who wanted their deceased to have loving, often extravagant, burials. In my view, Morris presents the pet owners with remarkable sympathy–their quirks emerge as part of the larger picture of their humanity–but it takes a sensitive eye to suss out the fine line between tragedy and comedy.

Are we as audiences sensitive enough to the glorious contradictions of our fellow humans—the dignity mixed with foolishness—to see documentaries like these and respond appropriately? Sometimes it seems highly unlikely. At the same film festival where I saw Finders Keepers, I also caught Nick Broomfield's chilling documentary Tales of the Grim Sleeper, about a serial killer who, through police negligence, carried on his gruesome murders of African-American women for thirty years in Los Angeles. In his films, Broomfield appears as a character, investigating events while putting himself in the story. Over the course of his sleuthing, Broomfield strikes up a friendship with Pam, a prostitute who knew many of the murdered women.Like Shannon Whisnant, Pam fills every scene with her verve and charisma. Like Shannon, she often rattles off humorous turns of phrase. Given Tales of the Grim Sleepers' higher narrative stakes, however, the question of when to laugh becomes even knottier. Unfortunately a good chunk of the audience I saw the film with gave little consideration to these subtleties, and roared with laughter nearly every time Pam opened her mouth—including during several emotionally charged moments during which Pam described lost friends. In this context, the audience clearly crossed a line, laughing not at what Pam said, but at Pam herself, for her lack of formal eloquence, her propensity to liberally salt her language with swear words—at all the markers that distinguished her from them.

Documentary audiences have hardly cornered the market on insensitive viewing—at the recent screening I attended of the tense but fictional drug war film Sicario, many people whooped and hollered through the film's deliberately troubling portrayal of violence. But the imperative to watch with empathy and discernment strikes me as all the more important in a form where the subjects onscreen are not actors, but real people. When the people we mock and feel superior to have real lives, real struggles and pains and joys, it makes our desire to dominate them through ridicule that much more twisted, a slap in the face of the imago dei.

Can we do better? Can we laugh without laughing at others? Is the time honored command to laugh with people, and not at them, possible in the slippery world of documentaries?

I think the answer lies, in part at least, in laughing less, and laughing better.

Tamping down the urge to laugh does not come easily, especially since laughter often strikes us out of the blue, for unexpected reasons. Adults no less than children tend to resort to laughter as a defense mechanism, when confronted by something new and troubling. Controlling these urges takes practice and self-awareness, a guarding of the self.

The point here is not, of course, to rob ourselves of the joy of laughing at funny things. And we certainly should not cut down on laughter in order to view characters such as Pam with a feeling like unadulterated pity, an emotion no less condescending than mocking laughter.

Instead, our goal should be to cultivate a desire to see beyond the surface and witness people in the depth of their complexity. If you find yourself watching a documentary and reflexively laughing every time a particular character comes on screen, you can safely assume you have swapped out the reality of that person for a caricature. When you find a giggle rising in your throat, catch yourself before it escapes. Hold it a minute, and ask yourself why you want to laugh in this moment. Then release it or beat it back down as necessary.

As Christians, we should excel others in sensitive viewing. When we watch people talk about themselves and their lives onscreen, we should listen attentively and empathetically. If we laugh at Shannon Whisnant, it should not be because he's some dumb hick who makes us feel better about ourselves, but because he has a rich, complex personality that bursts at the seams with enthusiasm and energy. Laughter at its best gives us a potent way to appreciate the tangled beauty of creation, even as it comes to us through the story of a nonfiction film—so long as we laugh from joy, and not derision.

Asher Gelzer-Govatos is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he lives with his family. The film critic for the Columbia Daily Tribune newspaper, his work has appeared in outlets such as Paste, The Week, and Books & Culture.

Since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last year, discussions of race in this country have been tense. His death, and the subsequent killings of unarmed black men and women at the hands of the police, have lifted the conversation on race out of black households and onto the national stage.

As the 2016 election cycle gears up, the longstanding issues of inequality, racial justice, and police brutality take on a new urgency. Just as the civil rights movement fought for legal recognition of African Americans’ fundamental human and civil rights, the Black Lives Matter movement looks to political leaders to respond to this injustice.

I have been watching to see what the presidential candidates say—and what they say they will do—about Black Lives Matter.

Politicians are strategically poised to address the inequalities in America’s social and economic systems. The activists within the Black Lives Matter movement and Campaign Zero are teaming up with both major political parties to coordinate a town hall-style forum for candidates to discuss race and criminal justice during the campaign. The issue did not come up at all during the last GOP debate (I’ll be watching to see if it does tonight).

The Democratic candidates responded to a question on Black Lives Matter during their debate earlier this month: “Do black lives matter or do all lives matter?” Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner whom pundits deemed the winner that night, answered, “We’ve got to do more about the lives of these children. We need a new New Deal for communities of color.” Her response evaded the question and was nebulous at best—given the fact that she never explained what this “new New Deal” entails. In another question, she mentioned employing police body cameras and addressing mass incarceration.

But the Black Lives Matter movement is looking for more than vague responses. It’s easy for any candidate to pay lip service and voice their support without tangibly engaging the issues the movement seeks to address. In response to police brutality and systemic racism, Black Lives Matter is specifically calling for better accountability and training for law enforcement; independent investigations into police killings; and community involvement in overseeing officer misconduct.

As Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck says, “In a state, a people and its government are always most intimately bound up with each other.” Although Bavinck is noting the necessity of church-led government, he is also drawing on the example of earthly governments to argue for a positive link between politicians and those whom they serve.

Ideally, given Bavinck’s observation, we would see the oppressed lifted up as politicians act for their wellbeing. Presidential candidates would show concern for those who are disproportionately affected by police brutality and systemic inequalities. Doing so demonstrates that at the very least they acknowledge our common humanity. However, these sentiments are inadequate if they do not translate into political action.

One of these candidates will be elected as the next President of the United States of America. He or she will sign or veto laws that address systemic inequities at the federal level. In other words: he or she will have the ability to “let justice roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24), so that it might drench those who have endured the scorching heat of injustice for far too long.

In view of their platforms, policies, and strategies, regardless of our political leanings, we can and should look for candidates who demonstrate sincere concern over oppression, disparity, and injustice. These are not “niche interests.” Nor are they merely a way to appeal to African American voters. Instead, these are areas where the government can hear the concerns of its people and create better systems to sustain the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” held by all.

Nevertheless, the call to shoulder the burdens of the oppressed is not left to the political candidates alone. As Christians, we affirm the inherent image of God in every man and woman (Gen. 1:26-27). After sin and injustice entered the world, our God defined a true fast as, “letting the oppressed go free, breaking every yoke, and not hiding from our own flesh,” in addition to cultivating a contrite heart of humble submission to the Lord (Isa. 58).

Christians can be among the loudest voices to declare unequivocally that black lives do indeed matter. Such a statement does not detract from the inherent value of all lives; it simply provides public value and affirmation to lives that have been historically devalued and denigrated in the long record of our nation’s history. Brittany Cooper, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University, made this point succinctly saying, “Contained within the statement is an unspoken but implied ‘too,’ as in ‘black lives matter, too,’ which suggests that the statement is one of inclusion rather than exclusion.”

As an African American myself, I am particularly grieved by the killings of unarmed black men and women. When I read reports from experts that say that the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice was “reasonable,” my soul cries out in sorrow. How can it not, my fellow Christians? After all, God calls us to “mourn with those who mourn” (Rom. 12:15).

I have a personal stake in this movement, and so do my fellow African American brothers and sisters in this country. We cannot continue living our lives looking at the flashing lights in the rear-view mirror wondering if we will live through a police encounter. That is survival—not life. As citizens of America, we want to ensure that little black boys like Tamir Rice are not gunned down while playing in city parks and little black girls like Aiyana Stanley-Jones are not killed in their sleep. The Black Lives Matter movement urges for better police training and oversight to ensure these kinds of mistakes don't happen.

What would it look like for communities like Ferguson to have more officers love the people in the neighborhoods they police by seeking the welfare of those whom they have sworn to serve and protect? We long to share in the sense of security and safety our white brothers and sisters experience in the presence of a police officer rather than the pulsating sense of anxiety and trepidation.

I know that ultimately my hope is in Christ, not in any system, government, or leader. Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection secured the coming kingdom of God. Because of that gospel reality, I have hope for tangible change in this present age, not just in the age to come. Therefore, to the candidates, I present a call to mete out justice on behalf of the oppressed. And to my fellow Christians, I present a plea to truly love your neighbor by demonstrating the same compassion as the Samaritan did to the man left for dead— for African Americans today are that man.

Ekemini Uwan is a Master of Divinity candidate at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She will graduate in May 2016 and is the winner of the 2014 Greene Prize in Apologetics for her essay entitled "Van Til, African Traditional Religion and The Prison of Unbelief." Ekemini writes intermittently for various Christian websites and often tweets, speaks, and opines about racism, theology, and the intersection of the gospel.

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This June, CT drew attention to veterans' experience in the cover story "Formed by War." To continue the discourse sparked by that story, alongside the Centurions Guild, CT will host an online series on Christian soldiers. The following essay is from Centurions Guild founder Logan Isaac and introduces the series, called Ponder Christian Soldiers. The second installment can be read here.

What does it mean to be a Christian soldier?

Some consider Christian and soldier to be nearly synonymous. Insofar as both the church and the military are engaged in bringing good news, justice, and democracy to the farthest reaches of the globe, the distinction between the two is permeable.

To others, “Christian soldier” is an oxymoron. To be one is to violate the requirements of the other. To be a good Christian, I must cease being a soldier; to become a soldier is to betray my Christian faith.

I came across both of these views repeatedly over several months in 2005, when, as a soldier on active duty, I prepared for my baptism. Those who identify as patriots told me that, since Israel was commanded to commit violence against her enemies, God clearly condones the use of violence to carry out his will today. Meanwhile, pacifists claimed that Jesus warned that those who lived by the sword would die by the sword; therefore soldiers like the Centurion of Great Faith (Matthew 8, Luke 7) are scriptural anomalies and not models for Christian behavior.

It seemed that to choose pacifism would be to abandon military service. To choose military service would be the betray all that Jesus stood for. In my memoir, I describe being subjected to such polarizing tales about Christian faith and military service, and how, as a result, the Christian story of God seemed fragmented and at odds with itself.

War Is Irreducibly Personal

In the 10 years since my baptism, I’ve been searching for a perspective that makes sense, for one that reflects God’s story of Christian soldiers. And despite the implicit message I received—that the balance between faith and service is a zero-sum game—I believe that written in the pages of the Bible and across church history is indeed a story about Christian soldiers that transcends our polarized traditions.

While researching my second book, I found that both camps ignore significant aspects of the history of Christian soldiers. Pacifists, one the one hand, deny or downplay the impact that military service had on King David, Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, and John Perkins. Patriots, on the other hand, often overlook the concrete lessons about the church’s relationship with state power offered by military martyrs like Saint George, Franz Jagerstatter, the Hofer Brothers, and Tom Fox. Both ends of this theological spectrum have a selective interpretation of the faith that can leave Christian soldiers alienated from worship and from participating in the local church. Holding too closely to the ideas we have about war creates a stranglehold around the people for whom war is irreducibly personal.

The world God made is full of color; thus, our black-and-white thinking about Christian soldiers will fail to appreciate the complexity of military experience. Progressives are concerned that to value military service is to condone violence. But in reality, only a small portion of today’s force is directly responsible for committing martial violence. Meanwhile, conservatives worry that to reject violence per se is to reject the virtues and values made visible by the martial fraternity, such as courage, sacrifice, and conscientious obedience. Each side of the spectrum relies on caricatures, shorthand, and clichés instead of examining actual lives and experience.

This is why narrative is crucial to making theological sense of war. When we give proper attention to detail within embodied experiences, the moral complexity of organized violence comes into sharper detail. Caricatures rely on what Pope Francis called “simplistic reductionism” and they lose their power when we commit to listening to the complex story that Christian soldiers have to share.

Because the story of Christian soldiers has its place in the story of salvation history, it has a narrative unity over time. To recover this unity, the church needs to shake the dust off those stories, reexamining them so that the tension between God and country can be instructive. Adapting to tension is how we grow and mature.

After three years in formal theological training, I have not read or heard an account of Christian soldiers that reflects my six years of active duty. We forfeit the opportunity to learn when we reduce Christian soldiers to either/or equations to solve, or when we issue definite statements about “the troops.”

The story of Christian soldiers has been present in salvation history from the beginning, from King David and Cornelius in Scripture to Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola. Yet most theologies of war have mostly been formulated by those who have no direct personal military experience. We need to think and talk about war beginning not only from abstract speculation, but also from the lived experience of military service. That's why contemporary soldier saints are invaluable resources.

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We want to invite conversation about the experiences of veterans. If you have a story to share, or a question to ask, direct those to Centurions Guild founder Logan Isaac at logan[at]centurionsguild.org.

In what feels like another lifetime, before my babies, I pored over early American immigrant letters in a dusty library in Edinburgh, Scotland. For my PhD dissertation, I was hoping to find the immigrants writing self-aware reflections on changing identity from British to American. I thought I might read stories of transformation; instead, a typical letter advised how much pork to pack for the journey. These farmer immigrants had neither the time nor the inclination to ponder the meaning of their experience.

And yet, even though my immigrants didn't wax poetic, their matter-of-fact letters and emigration guides were testimonies to their immigrant existence—evidence that their lives meant something. Today, in Alcoholics Anonymous, in adolescent youth groups, in church accountability groups, people circle together to enact the ancient rite of "bearing witness." They tell the truth about God and themselves in front of others.

In Christianity, the art of testifying is as old as scriptural injunctions to remember: for ancient Jews to bind the Law on their foreheads, for God's people to construct physical reminders—ebenezers—of God's great acts, to pass these on to their children, and above all, to record the stories. First-person narratives became the form that testimony took, and Augustine's Confessions set the standard for written testimony: a scrupulous yet passionate narrative telling how his faith grew by fits and starts, how he found his story in the story of God.

As the act of testifying flourished and took news forms in Protestant American settings, it eventually found a particular New World expression where emigration was likened to a conversion experience. The movements of emigration took on spiritual language, where the Atlantic crossing was "crossing over" from death to life, from Old World to New. Thus American experience more generally became wedded to a narrative of transformation, whether couched in a "by your own bootstraps" rationalism or a Christian rhetoric of conversion.

The form of confessional narrative, then and now, hinges on personal change. Since doubting Thomas' words, "I believe, help my unbelief," Christians have been fascinated with the divided self, but with one caveat: the narrative must arrive at wholeness. Even if we are a "culture ravenous for first-person testimony," as Slate writer Laura Miller suggests, we want more than mere salaciousness. This, I think, comes from a Christian belief that history has a purpose, a telos, something that all our individual stories are moving toward.

Evangelical confessions and testimonies must fit into a larger scriptural narrative. Christian testimony, then, is like communal prayer; it is both vertical and horizontal. It is meant not only to communicate with God but also to reveal the self, both to the testifier and to the listening—and reading—community. So when we tell our stories together, we become something bigger than our personal histories. We become the church.

The "I once was lost, now I'm found" storyline is central to the evangelical church, and places the self firmly in a wider geographic (all places) and temporal community (all time). Bearing witness publicly seems to be as old as the church, but today we're seeing a particular vogue for first-person writing by Christians. Hannah Mudge in Christian Today has perceptively noted the "Christian storytelling boom," which privileges vulnerability as its cardinal virtue.

This "boom" is the context for Seth Haines's debut book, a confessional narrative titled Coming Clean: A Story of Faith. It's the familiar conversion narrative with a twist, deeply rooted in American evangelical forms of expression but unmistakably speaking to this moment. Coming Clean is Haines' story of conversion away from alcohol addiction and towards a renewed faith in an abiding God.

Coming Clean starts in loss. Haines' one-year-old son is losing weight, and the doctors can't seem to find any answers. In the midst of the very real possibility of losing his youngest son, Haines turns to a Nalgene bottle of gin poured over hospital ice to numb the pain. So begins his addiction and the "exposition of [his] process of stripping off the falsities, of coming clean."

Coming Clean is a journal of his first 90 days sober; as such, it feels rough and raw. At the outset, the writing can feel a bit put-on at times, where Haines wrestles not only with God, but with the confessional memoir form as well. He addresses the reader's own cynicism toward personal testimony, our distrust that vulnerability can be used as a trump card to opt out of debate. Haines goes back and forth between simply telling his addiction story and directly addressing the reader by anticipating her concerns. What seems at times like hedging, though, also establishes Haines as a writer who is mindful of the church's long tradition of oral conversion narratives: he is a testifier who bears witness in print form rather than in front of a congregation. Without the nodding heads of a congregation to affirm the nature of his testimony, Haines' self-proclaimed "inability to put firm language on" his coming clean is a way of establishing a shared heritage of sin and rebirth. In fact, this failure of language to describe a conversion experience often leads to a profusion of it, as Haines acknowledges. Conversion, like writing, is unwieldy. He writes: "If pain took an organized, nameable, tangible, physical shape, it'd be an easy thing to put to death." The daily journaling format of Coming Clean gets as close as we can to the voice of oral testimony.

The power of testimony is that it taps into something we already know. It provides the hearer (or reader) with little aha moments when the convert's story intersects with the hearer's. Evangelical testimonies re-tell the gospel story in events that are particular to each convert and yet universal, too. What is common is a shared heritage of goodness tainted by sin. So when Haines comments that "we're all drunk on something," and that "the addiction is not the thing. The pain is the thing," he widens the story to allow the reader to substitute her own addictions and pain.

At the center of the Christian narrative is the insistence that we need saving from sin—we're powerless to break free on our own. In a recent talk, I heard Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft make the connection between sin and addiction explicit: "If you take secondary things and make them first things, then you're an addict." Or, as Augustine would put it, sin is when our loves are disordered. Haines is a modern-day storyteller who puts his own addictions on display so that his readers can find healing.

But testimony also moves toward something. Even without the promise of a neat narrative trajectory, Coming Clean moves toward resolution. It is a book that traces Haines' story within a wider narrative of God's faithfulness and provision; it is a return to faith in a present God, whose voice could be heard among the Texan mesquite trees of Haines' childhood and who is beside him on his painful journey toward properly ordered loves. And, like all good testimonies, it's messy. Or, as Haines' writes: "This is not a clean story. This is a story of coming clean."

Ashley Hales holds a PhD in English from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. But she spends most of her time chasing around her four children and helping her husband plant a church. She writes at www.circlingthestory.com and loves to make friends on Twitter.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The dating apocalypse is upon us! At least that’s what a recent Vanity Fair article, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’,” claims. Is it true? Are we really in a “dating apocalypse”—or worse, a “marriage apocalypse”? Is that why, at 26-that-basically-rounds-up-to-30, I can be hopelessly alone on a Friday, despite being willing to split the check, carry the conversation, and even indulge an anecdote about your pet rat? Surely, there’s a better way.

As Nancy Jo Sales bleakly describes the dating scene and the effects of hookup culture, I can’t help but see a correlation with a seemingly opposite phenomenon in the church: courtship. It seems that the impetus behind hookup culture and the desires that drive courtship may not be all that different.

The Holier Version of Hooking Up

In the world that Sales details, men and women sit side by side at a bar, and instead of exchanging wry glances and shy smiles, they’re sending emojis and propositions to ten different Tinder profiles, all without having to pay for a stranger’s drink. I’ve spent more time and money ordering a pizza than some of these people have arranging their dalliances for the week.

But how does this kind of love-‘em-and-leave-‘em lifestyle compare to the church? It all comes back to a little book by Joshua Harris. At least, that’s what I like to think when I’m alone, again, on a Saturday night while some very single, wonderful, handsome men from my church are also alone on a Saturday night.

In 1997, a 21-year-old Joshua Harris kissed dating goodbye, and many in the church followed suit. Conservative Christianity raced to embrace a courtship culture, one that places pretty strict limitations on time spent alone with the opposite sex and encourages parental involvement throughout the process. While some of the more stringent observations have faded away, the essence of courtship still permeates the church: The purpose of dating is to find someone to marry, so date with resolution and intentionality.

Coffee dates have become interviews for the altar, and to say yes to a first date is to commit yourself for all of eternity—or so it feels.

One of my friends was recently asked out on a date by a man with whom she had very little history. As she nervously nibbled on a Panera salad, her date began to compare her to the Proverbs 31 woman and his own mother. Clearly, he was already sold.

However, while I love her very much, I can attest that my friend is not the Proverbs 31 woman. In fact, she’s just a normal woman, one who snoozes her alarm on accident and tells little lies about why she’s late. She’s human, and what’s going to happen once her date realizes this unfortunate truth? Does her worth diminish—or does her boyfriend grow dissatisfied—once her very “humanness” begins to show?

Now it seems people are only as valuable as they are marriageable. Every interaction between singles is tinged with commodification: What can you do for me? How much can you provide? How well can you love and serve me? And truly, the only relationship with the opposite sex worth cultivating is one that leads straight to “I do’s.” Some days it feels like once a guy knows I’m not wife material, he decides I’m not worth knowing at all.

But this strategy hasn’t done much to increase our marrying odds. As hookup culture hurtles alongside the church’s courtship culture, the results aren’t very pretty. Marriage rates for the entire 20somethings group are the lowest they’ve been in six decades. Only 26 percent of Millennials are married, compared to the 36 percent and 48 percent of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers who were married by age 29.

The Reality of Picking and Choosing People

While they seem like an unlikely pair, the hookup culture that’s deteriorating our dating scene and the courtship culture left haunting the church may indeed be growing out of the same circ*mstances.

As a product of a broken home, I can speak to an obvious cause: No one wants to get divorced. Many of us have seen our parents divorce. In fact, we’re the largest generation to be raised by single or divorced parents. After wading through irreconcilable differences, confusing custody battles, and hectic bicoastal parenting, it’s no wonder that we, as a whole, are a little hesitant to pull the trigger (what an unseemly analogy), lest we repeat the cycle.

Many Millennials also struggle with the immense burden we feel to find the right person. This decision can affect your happiness, family, earning potential, and even career path. Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and author of Lean In, once said that the “most important career choice you'll make is who you marry.”

Courtship culture has also perpetuated this idea. According to one article, “Every suitor is a potential husband, and every woman is a possible wife . . . Who you choose to marry is the most important decision of your life. More than anything else, it will dictate your future happiness and success.”

That feels like a pretty heavy weight to carry on a first date, but we do it. Over and over again, I hear my friends (and, okay, myself) analyzing a dating or Facebook profile and discussing it in terms of “husband potential.” “He’s got three part-time jobs. I mean, I’m glad that he’s working, but where’s the stability in that?” “He spends a lot of time with his family. I love that. Being family oriented is really important.” “We couldn’t fit a car seat in the back of a Camaro!” You get the picture.

All of this commentary, however, only highlights the fact that none of us know what we're doing. Tim Urban describes our inability to fully comprehend this idea of “The One,” writing, “Thinking about how overwhelmingly important it is to pick the right life partner is like thinking about how huge the universe really is or how terrifying death really is—it’s too intense to internalize the reality of it, so we just don’t think about it that hard and remain in slight denial about the magnitude of the situation.”

But pressure and denial manifest themselves in different ways. Some of us embrace the courtship mentality and think that through overanalyzing, praying, and marriage-centered dating we can actually take control of the situation. However, this method is self-defeating. In seeking the perfect relationship, we will eschew genuine, intimate relationships that develop as a result of grace, patience, and love being required and extended.

Others, like those in Sales’s article, give up that hope entirely. Finding the perfect partner, or even an acceptable lifelong partner, is too hard. So we should all just enjoyably bide our time with meaningless, fruitless hookups until the perfect person comes moseying past our booth at the Waffle House, right?

The Wandering Eye and Greener Pastures

Perhaps the advent of the Internet, and consequently dating sites and apps, has acted as a catalyst for one of our deepest fears: There’s always someone better out there.

For years we’ve joked about and openly owned our FOMO (“fear of missing out”), but maybe FOBO (“fear of better options”) is actually dictating our dating. Am I picking the right person? What if I’m settling and then “The One” shows up in a year? Will this person be worth the sacrifice of my freedom? For women, these fears are only heightened by a race against the clock, an arbitrary expiration date that all good, Christian women should be wed by or else lose the possibility of starting a family altogether.

Because we can browse dozens of profiles while wasting time on a Monday night, we see exactly how many people are out there. Instead of only being exposed to the three eligible bachelors in our small church, we have access to handsome, eligible bachelors from around the world! But, this isn’t necessarily a good thing.

We now find ourselves standing at the largest buffet known to man, and with that empty plate in hand, we’re wading between rows and rows of options. Do we want the egg roll or the cheeseburger? The brunette who can play guitar or the skinny youth pastor in Daytona? And just as we reach to grab a pair of tongs, something tastier, better, catches our eye.

We’re paralyzed by options. And we’re scared to death of choosing the wrong one.

(Re)Introducing Intimacy

In hookup culture, the stakes are low—really low. There’s very little risk of rejection as you never know who may have passed on your profile, there’s an abundance of superficial affirmation, and there’s little investment. It’s as easy as downloading a free app and eating up the data on your cell plan.

Even in our courtship culture, we still model this risk-averse behavior. It’s not worth the risk of dating someone who probably, maybe, won’t be my spouse, and it’s not worth establishing relationships that will potentially only end in heartbreak instead of a honeymoon. And all of this makes me wonder if it’s actually our fear of intimacy that has us trudging through this dating quagmire.

Andrew Reiner claims that our generation is unable to love because of our lack of intimacy with each other. He writes that hookup culture “flouts the golden rule of what makes marriages and love work: emotional vulnerability.” And I would argue this same idea applies to those engaging in courtship culture. Remaining aloof until someone pledges undying love may be wise, but it’s also a little cowardly.

Being so guarded also removes any need for self-reflection. I’ve recently thrown myself deep into the dating waters. While I’ve been on nine consecutive first dates without even an offer of a second date, I know that I wouldn’t have met a handful of those guys for breakfast again, no matter how delicious the pancakes were. But for a few of the others, it does cause me to pause, to ask tough questions about myself, my communication style, and my expectations. Though I haven’t come to any strong conclusions, the process of questioning has been very beneficial for me. If I had continued to only embrace courtship, I never would have been forced into such uncomfortable, but ultimately profitable, self-examination. Because sometimes it’s not them—it’s me.

Reiner goes on to say that “dodging vulnerability cheats us of the chance to not just create intimacy but also to make relationships work.” This idea, more so than the others, resounds through the churches whose pews I’ve warmed. When we are only choosing to engage in a relationship with people who are sure-things, with people who fit easily into our lives, with people who don’t require work, we’re losing something. There is much to be gained in loving people who aren’t the easiest to love.

Making a List, Checking It Twice

Over and over I’ve been told to guard my heart (with good reason, as I am quite likely to hand it away to strangers, vagabonds, and not-nice-men), but I wonder if this too has contributed to the problem. I’m only just now learning the difference between using discernment and remaining distant.

In a bid to guard my heart, I’ve constructed a rather ridiculous mirage of man, complete with deal-breakers and marriage-makers, and I’ve called this wisdom. Unfortunately, I’m not alone. I don’t know a single girl who doesn’t have at least a few basic necessities jotted down on a mental spreadsheet, ready to analyze and itemize the next guy to come along. But too often these lists of ideals become unrealistic, more closely resembling a spiritual superhero than a God-fearing man.

As much as I can pray for a guy with financial stability, spiritual thirst, confidence, and a desire to adopt, I can only hope there’s a man praying for a girl from a broken home with a bum knee and mild social anxiety because at times those seem like my selling points. At the end of the day, I have to question whether my list helps me find a husband or is actually keeping me from one.

Yes, we’re stuck in a broken system, but a broken system can’t fix itself. It’s when we invest more in the process of dating than in the person we’re dating that we find ourselves in unfulfilling or abusive relationships, confused because we did it all right on paper. Perhaps we need more open dialogue regarding the problems that plague our singles, or maybe we need more singles who are willing to revamp the system, or maybe we just need more people encouraging us with affirmations. A friend recently closed an email with a few words on dating that I jotted down and hung above my desk. So with my own mixed feelings of hope for more and resigned acceptance of today, maybe here’s what you need to know too: “You’re fine. The world is just busted.”

So let’s figure out how to fix it.

In conjunction with our most recent print issue of Leadership Journal, an exploration of the State of the Pastorate, we asked a series of pastors a simple question: what is the current state of your pastorate? The full collection of essays will be updated throughout the week.

What’s the state of your pastorate? Let us know online through tweets, blogs, drawings, or smoke signals. Include the hashtag #mypastorate, and we’ll feature our favorites in a post next week.

The church I serve as lead pastor is the church I helped to found in 2007 with a core group of committed Christian families. Eight years later, I could reflect on achievements, mistakes, growth, challenges, joys, or disappointments. But most of the time this is what’s on my heart: the weight of ministry and the wait of ministry.

The weight of ministry

In all my time in the pastorate, the weight of pastoral ministry never lightens. I’ve trained up leaders and learned to delegate responsibilities. But the high stakes and sober responsibility of ministry are a constant pressure that leaves me in need of God’s grace.

Though I have been preaching for over 20 years and have grown in my love of and ability to preach, it remains one of the most sobering tasks God has given me.

Though I have been preaching for over 20 years and have grown in my love of and ability to preach, it remains one of the most sobering tasks God has given me. Public speaking can be scary, but preaching the Word of God is a stewardship of divine truth. It demands that the preacher to be careful and precise, while also being creative and passionate. There is always a risk of minimizing or marring the truth through my misplaced enthusiasm, agenda, or ignorance.

Because we are handling both the word of God and the people of God, James reminds us that “we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). The responsibility is to rightly interpret and apply every passage so that those who hear are exhorted to believe who the Lord is and to heed his words. While the real work of heart change and transformation belongs to the Holy Spirit, the communication of the word is ours. It is a weight I cannot bear in my own strength, but one I must bear with the strength provided by God (Col. 1:28, 29).

And on top of that, I’m called to shepherd people. My job is not just to make decisions for the church, but to lead, serve, and disciple those under my care. I share this responsibility with our elders, since it requires that we know the people, remain accessible to them, and actively pursue their spiritual good.

It’s easy to overextend ourselves in service or neglect those in need by busying ourselves in other areas. The real weight of this is not so much the threat of busyness, but the welfare of people’s souls.

The wait of ministry

At every point along the way, I thought I’d be farther along: that more would be converted, that God would have done more. But I am called to wait.

For me, waiting is hard, especially when eternity hangs in the balance. Finances and conflict may overwhelm me, but waiting for God to act and for things to “happen” can be maddening. But waiting is necessary.

God doesn’t operate on our timeline or schedule his work according to our calendar. People take time to change. Growth of individuals and churches is generally slow. Church leaders with large platforms may tell inspiring stories of rapid growth and mass conversions, but they are the outliers. Their talks should come with a disclaimer: “Results not typical. Results may vary.”

A lesson hard learned

The weight of ministry is easily recognized, but the wait of ministry is a lesson hard learned. I can dream big, drawing up five-year plans, and still find my ministry way behind schedule—my schedule in particular.

I take great pains to teach our church planters the importance of patience in ministry. We can dream, plan, strategize, pray, labor, but we simply do not have the power to make things happen.

I am still learning. Waiting is a major aspect of my pastorate. We need more laborers and a new worship space. We preach the gospel and invest in people. We plant and water, but it is God who gives the growth.

My pastorate is characterized by joy, hard work, and a lot of fun, and the supernatural work of God. But it’s the weight and wait of ministry that I am compelled to share in the hope of encouraging others who, like me, find themselves with a calling that demands more of me than I am capable of in myself. The ministry is all I want to do, and my courage to continue is found in the God who not only calls, but also empowers, and more importantly also accomplishes what only he can do.

Joe Thorn is lead pastor of Redeemer Fellowship in St. Charles, Illinois.