October 2, 2024

‘It’s Okay to Say We’re Born Again’

Nowhere on its website or in its founding documents does the new Global Methodist Church call itself evangelical.  Perhaps the term is too controversial, too divisive and political.  Or perhaps…

The Bible Contains Discrepancies. That Doesn’t Make It Untrustworthy.

In 1983, biblical scholar Robert Gundry was ousted from the Evangelical Theological Society. Gundry, in his lengthy commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, had suggested that Matthew tailored stories about…

Gen Z Evangelicals Want to Be Famous for Their Hobbies and Talents

Gen Z evangelicals don’t want to be known for their faith. Instead, they want their talents, interests, hobbies, and education levels to be the ways they make a name for…

The Gettys’ Modern Hymn Movement Has Theological Pull

The success of “In Christ Alone” established Keith Getty as one of the leading songwriters in what he refers to as the modern hymn movement. The popular breakout song—which has…

The post CT Daily Briefing – 10-03-2024 appeared first on Christianity Today.

My miscarriage happened at the end of October, a few weeks before Thanksgiving. We celebrated the holiday with friends and family as usual, but that day felt dark in my eyes, too. The vivid decorations, the rich food, even the warmth of being surrounded by loved ones all felt like it was happening in another dimension, one that had nothing to do with my actual life.

Maybe that is how the impending holiday celebration feels to you this year, in the aftermath of another strife-ridden election season, as war continues to rage around the world and talk of mass deportations increases from a chatter to a roar. Amid so much uncertainty and suffering, sitting around a lavish table clinking glasses and thanking God for your blessings can seem ignorant at best and callous at worst.

Or perhaps the chaos and suffering are taking place in your own home, whether because of sickness, loss, or fractured family relationships—in which case celebrating Thanksgiving might feel out of touch in a different way, an exercise in going through the motions.

In recent years, I’ve watched more and more friends on social media declare their refusal to celebrate Thanksgiving. It is a colonizer’s holiday, they say, a gluttonous, jingoistic ritual steeped in oppression that we would all do well to avoid.

In the past, I might have dismissed these critiques as cranky and self-flagellating. Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, with its focus on gathering and gratitude, and it’s less in the way of materialistic distraction than Christmas. True to my Chinese American heritage, I also have a profound attachment to food—to the love and care it symbolizes as well as its life-giving deliciousness.

Part of me still feels like dismissing these critiques, so reluctant am I to let anything mar my enjoyment of a day I hold dear. But although the dark veil of those first few months of miscarriage grief has dissipated, the memory of it is still with me. My heart feels more porous to the pain of others; the families in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Sudan, and beyond being displaced and watching their loved ones die do not feel so far away. The knowledge that in some cases my own nation is supplying so much of the weaponry being used against them—and that soon, we may also begin displacing millions of vulnerable people from within our own borders—feels more difficult than ever to square with any type of celebration, much less such an American one.

This isn’t the first moment in recent memory that Thanksgiving has been politically fraught. In 1970, some Native American activists instituted a National Day of Mourning as a protest against the way the holiday’s origin myth downplays the painful history of Native people. And in the years since Donald Trump’s first election, many an article has been written about family members so disturbed by each other’s political views that they no longer celebrate Thanksgiving together.

Yet there has also been tension at the heart of the holiday for centuries—almost since its inception. Thanksgiving as we know it today originated not with the 1621 harvest feast between the Pilgrims and Wampanoags but with public days of fasting, meditation, and prayer in colonial New England, during which the Puritans repented for their sins while giving thanks for the ending of a natural disaster, like an epidemic or drought.

Later, when US presidents and Congress began declaring national days of thanksgiving, they characterized them as “solemn” days, urging people to “express the grateful feelings of their hearts” while “join[ing] the penitent confession of their sins.”

And in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in the middle of the Civil War, he urged Americans to offer up “Thanksgiving and Praise” along with “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend[ing] to [God’s] tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged.”

It seems that, historically, Thanksgiving was not meant to be a purely celebratory day, a time to luxuriate in self-satisfaction, but rather a day to hold gratitude in tension with sorrow, suffering, and sin—to acknowledge the brightness and darkness that always exist simultaneously in the world.

I experienced many emotions in the aftermath of my miscarriage: excruciating pain (both physical and emotional), rage at everyone who’d never had a miscarriage, despair at the thought that I might never get pregnant again, regret at telling so many people about the baby—for my parents, we’d ordered a cake that said “Congrats, Grandma and Grandpa” and videotaped them jumping for joy. Most of all, I felt a deep sense of meaninglessness.

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When I was pregnant, I made sure to exercise, eat healthy food, take my prenatal vitamins, and examine every label on every product that came into contact with my body. After the miscarriage, all of that seemed pointless. So did prayer. When I announced the pregnancy to our friends, many of them said to us—some with tears in their eyes—that they had just been praying for us to have a baby. If all those people had prayed and the baby had still died, what was the point of praying at all?

I thought I’d never stop feeling the stabbing pain of the loss. But as the weeks and months wore on, the pain became less of an open wound and more of an ache, until eventually, I only thought about it sometimes. Then came the one-year anniversary of the miscarriage.

I hadn’t been tracking the date consciously, but as soon as the weather changed and the leaves began turning orange, my body seemed to know what time it was. By then, I was pregnant again. But in the days leading up to the one-year mark, I began to feel a heaviness in my stomach that had nothing to do with the baby growing inside of me.

It was like being dragged backward in time. The sun began to look dark again, and the meaninglessness began to suffuse the air around me once more. I knew things were bad when I found myself unmotivated to take my prenatal vitamins or even eat lunch—as if my current pregnancy did not matter, did not exist.

When I told my husband, he insisted that we pray. It was morning, and fresh sunlight was streaming through the windows into the kitchen where we sat. I stared at the light dully as he took my hand and asked God to grant us comfort, hope, and vision. When it was my turn to pray, I sat in silence for a long time, unsure of what to say. Then, remembering how my pastor begins every prayer meeting with a time of thanksgiving, I started to thank God. “Thank you for a new day. Thank you for the sunlight. Thank you for our friends.”

The words felt strange and clunky coming out of my mouth. I didn’t feel particularly grateful, but I pressed on. “Thank you for another baby. Thank you for our families, thank you for our community.” As I continued, my thanks became more detailed and specific. I still felt heavy and detached—yet I had the sense that the words were already working to call me back to myself.

That night, I reached out to my friends and family, asking for prayer and letting them know that I was struggling. Their support carried me through the week until eventually I began to feel like myself again. My healing process had begun with thanksgiving.

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It occurs to me now that perhaps the darkness I began to see in the world after my miscarriage was not so much a product of my grief as it was a grief-induced revelation of the darkness that had been there all along. My loss made me more sensitive to the pain and suffering that exists continually in the world, such that for a while, it was difficult—almost impossible—to see any goodness at all. 

Giving thanks in the midst of my grief did not dispel or deny my pain, but it did allow me to remember that joy and beauty still exist, and furthermore, that I need to acknowledge them in order to keep living well in this world. In naming what is good and giving credit to God for those things, we remind ourselves that God is at work in our lives and in our world—not just in spite of suffering and chaos, but right there in the midst of it. Giving thanks expands our imaginations so that we can do more than dread the future—we can also hope.

We celebrate Thanksgiving at the end of the fall, a time of bright darkness if there ever was one. In autumn, the colors and the light become so intense they are almost blinding, while the days grow shorter. It is as if light is performing its swan song while darkness crouches in the corner, ready to fling itself over everything. We can think of Thanksgiving as a celebration in defiance of darkness, or we can embrace the true roots of the holiday and treat it as a time to acknowledge the darkness and light together and to present them both to God.

Christina Gonzalez Ho is the author of the audio series The Last Two Years and the cofounder of Estuaries.

The post I Give Thanks in the Bright Darkness appeared first on Christianity Today.

“Did he say Lecrae?” We kept listening. A few minutes later, Kendrick said the name again. My mouth dropped open. When the song ended, we played it from the top, this time listening carefully.

The untitled track, released on Instagram on September 11, expresses the acclaimed rapper’s weariness and disgust with the contemporary hip-hop world and the music industry at large. In the song, Kendrick feels jaded by the machinations of the very system in which he has found exceptional success. He has received 17 Grammys, 29 BET Hip Hop Awards, and a 2018 Pulitzer Prize. His Drake diss track “Not Like Us” broke multiple streaming records, becoming so popular that, earlier this year at a sold-out Los Angeles arena, he performed the song to roaring applause five times in a row. Kendrick was recently announced as the headliner for the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show.

But instead of celebrating any of these successes, Kendrick spends all five minutes and six seconds of his new song venting his contempt for an industry full of people who “parade in gluttony” and “glorify scamming.” He describes a “culture bred with carnivores,” rife with liars, mercenaries, and cowards whose money emboldens them to make “nasty decisions.” His lyrics are equal parts searching and vengeful. In a repeated refrain, Kendrick pleads for God to give him life, peace, and forgiveness—to “draw the line” between himself and the peers whose wickedness he despises.

Elsewhere, his words turn violent, calling for the “village” to burn down, for heads to crack, for “agony, assault, and battery.” “I think it’s time to watch the party die,” Kendrick repeats again and again. Things are so irredeemably corrupt that he suggests the only solution is destruction, Great Flood style.

The rapper doesn’t waver from his verdict until the final verse, where he asks the question that made me sit up and stare: “Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do.”

Lecrae, of course, is the Christian rapper Lecrae Devaughn Moore, whose career began in the early 2000s and whose frequent collaborators have included Andy Mineo, Trip Lee, Sho Baraka, and Jackie Hill Perry. Most of Lecrae’s early work is explicitly theological, with songs like “Don’t Waste Your Life” (“We’re created for him / Outta the dust he made us for him / Elects us and he saves us for him”) and “Tell the World” (“You hung there bleedin’/ And ya’ died for my lies and my cheatin’ / My lust and my greed, and / What is a man that you mindful of him?”) garnering him widespread acclaim in the evangelical world and ins with the likes of John Piper, Tim Keller, Tony Evans, and Judah Smith.

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Later, with albums like Gravity (2012) and Anomaly (2014), Lecrae moved away from overtly theological lyrics, instead weaving his faith into songs about identity, relationships, race, and class. In more recent years, he’s written extensively about experiences with corruption, hypocrisy, and racism within the church that resulted in a severe crisis of both faith and mental health.

Still, the core of Lecrae’s music remains his relationship with God and the church. Although a highly successful artist in his own right—with BET Awards, Grammys, and several No. 1 Billboard hits—his audience has always been, perhaps always will be, much smaller than someone like Kendrick Lamar’s.

And yet—his influence matters. Lecrae and Kendrick struck up a friendship early in their careers after the latter released his theodicy-themed track, “Faith.” Kendrick has long been vocal about his relationship with Jesus, and though some have questioned his orthodoxy, his faith remains a central theme in his music.

“Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do / F— these n— up or show ’em just what prayer do?” Kendrick wonders. Faced with the same seemingly irredeemable industry, would Lecrae pursue some form of vigilante justice—visceral, instant, immediately satisfying—or the slow, patient route of prayer? Moments later, after a fresh round of denunciations, Kendrick repeats the question: “I mean—[I] wonder what Lecrae would do.”

Perhaps Kendrick has read Lecrae’s memoir, released in 2020, detailing the rapper’s struggles with childhood trauma, depression, and a crisis of faith after the evangelical church’s cold response to a string of police killings of unarmed Black men.

Or perhaps he’s listened to Lecrae’s 2022 track “Deconstruction,” in which the rapper describes hitting rock bottom until a midnight encounter with God broke through the fog of despair.

In both works, Lecrae details a process of healing marked by weakness and surrender, a slow, steady journey entirely dependent on the love of God and others. It’s a stark departure from the brute force and willpower Kendrick finds so attractive. And it’s clear that both Lecrae’s art and his life have been compelling enough to make Kendrick take notice.

As a writer whose work revolves around my Christian faith, I often find myself discouraged, imagining I am destined to obscurity. When peers publish bestsellers or have their books adapted into movies, I find myself wishing my work was more like theirs, addressing Zeitgeisty themes like race, sexuality, or climate anxiety from a primarily agnostic worldview.

Instead, I find myself compulsively writing about spirituality—specifically, the conundrum of being a rational person whose life trajectory has been shaped by supernatural experiences. Sometimes I even feel resentful at my religion, as though it’s a restriction on my art, relegating me to a lifetime of limited reach at best, and irrelevance at worst.

So to hear one of the most talented and decorated rappers alive name-check an artist whose work has revolved around Jesus was deeply heartening. What moves me is not the idea that someday my own work might be noticed by someone more famous. It’s the thought that a sincere, intelligent, and profound artist like Kendrick Lamar, someone who’s seen no end of good ideas and interesting art, might find something in straightforwardly Christian music that gives him pause, that makes him reconsider.

Art that gains this sort of traction must do more than present accurate theological facts or insist on the supremacy of a “Christian worldview.” It must be prophetic.

Prophetic art is art that reveals truths heretofore unrecognized, unseen, or inaccessible. To be recognized as prophetic is one of the highest forms of praise an artist can receive. It’s a word that’s been used to describe Kendrick Lamar, who cunningly folded a lament about toxic drinking culture into his “club-banger” track “Swimming Pools” and spares no one in his excoriating analysis of anti-Blackness in “The Blacker the Berry” (“You hate me, don’t you? / I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself” and “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang-banging make me kill a n— blacker than me? / Hypocrite!”)

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I would argue that “prophetic” is a fitting description for Lecrae’s work as well. Throughout his career, Lecrae has used his music not only to preach the gospel but also to engage his audience with uncomfortable truths about everything from religious hypocrisy (“Bookstore pimpin’ them hope books / Like God don’t know how broke looks / And telling me that I’m gon’ reap a mil’ / If I sow into these low crooks”) to the entrenched racial biases that mar white America’s practice of Christianity (“Right before the fall of 2015, I was all off / It involved killing Michael Brown, had me feeling down / Tweeted ’bout it, Christians call me clown … spoke about my pain, I was met with blame / ‘Shame on you, ’Crae, stop crying, get back to Jesus’ name’”).

Prophetic work is more than just eloquent or insightful, and it doesn’t always find commercial success. It is born of an abiding connection to the Spirit of God—the type of connection that empowers us to create honestly and courageously, even at risk to our comfort and reputation. To make prophetic work is decidedly not to change ourselves to fit the Zeitgeist but to maintain fidelity to the unique questions, ideas, perspectives, and modes of expression God has placed within us—and to make our work unto the Lord, the source of all wisdom and prophecy.

Only then can we contribute something to culture that doesn’t already exist—something capable of causing the Kendrick Lamars of our own disciplines to wonder what we would do.

Christina Gonzalez Ho is the author of the audio series The Last Two Years and the cofounder of Estuaries. 

The post What Would Lecrae Do? appeared first on Christianity Today.