But not all those records have come from the same theology. 

That’s because Flame, once a Reformed Baptist, is now part of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, a shift he made apparent in 2020 with his album Extra Nos (Latin for “outside of ourselves”).

Since then, he’s put out Christ for You on the Lord’s Supper and Word and Water on baptism, both riffing on the Lutheran understanding of those sacraments. Flame also collaborated with other Lutheran artists on the album Freedom Lessons, explaining Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. His 2024 album is called Neo Ethos.

Lutheran Brethren writer Gretchen Ronnevik interviewed Flame about his denominational change and the impact it’s had on his music. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length, and song lyrics have been inserted by the editor throughout.

You recently moved from Reformed theology to Lutheran theology. What was that process like?

I went to Concordia Seminary in St. Louis in 2016. After I graduated in 2018, I took a year off to work through everything, trying to see if the ideas would hold outside of an academic environment. I thought, I’ve seen the best answers and the brightest minds—let me see how this works out in the wild, talk to a lot of people outside of the Lutheran space, ask questions. That’s really when it became clear that I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen.

What was the tipping point for you?

Two things: sacraments and the universal atonement.

[Interviewer’s note: Calvinists believe that Jesus died only for the elect. Lutherans believe that Jesus died for the whole world (universal atonement) and yet only the elect will believe and be saved. This is different from universalism, which proclaims salvation for all people regardless of belief.]

The tipping point was going back through the Scriptures, seeing that Jesus did die for everyone. That was a big deal for me. To be sure, it was the sacraments too. I mean, it was a little bit like a pseudo crisis—it wasn’t dramatic. It was just a disappointment. Why didn’t anybody expose me to the church fathers on these matters?

You’re simply not going to find not one church father that made the confession
That what baptism really is—
An outward sign of an inward expression.
It’s not in the Bible, and Scripture don’t teach it.
American pulpits,
Most people preach it.
Wanna know what baptism really is?
First Peter 3 verse 20, 21,
Go read it.
Baptism saves, remission of sins,
A means of grace to get you cleansed. Faith receives it. Based on Jesus’ work, The ancient church believed it.

—“The Patristics,” Word and Water

How did this theological shift change your career?

I’ve been doing music as a full-time artist since 2004. My entire career has been built around the Reformed Baptist audience. I may have been a little naive; kind of like Luther, I thought everybody was gonna be excited. Everybody loved to talk about Scripture and doctrine and theology. I thought they’d say “This is great! What books are you reading?”

It was the opposite of that. At first, it was stunned silence. In 2020, I put out a project titled Extra Nos. There was no response from my friends, no “We like the project,” “We dislike the project.” Just silence. Pastors, influencers, friends. I’m like, “Man, is this not good? You know, you can tell me that too. I can take that.” It was just silence.

Then the questions start to roll in: “Are you Roman Catholic?” “Have you left Christianity?” People thought the stuff I was saying was an invented Christian sect—a spinoff, like I’d found some weird insights. They were concerned. Maybe an act of love, just trying to be patient, figuring out how to approach me? But I did notice a pulling away. That was stressful—a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear.

But they see the Grammy nomination and the compensation hitting stages with the gang.
But when you push ancient Christianity through Word and sacrament, then you see people change.
Dang!
I really thought they would hallelujah.
The closest to ya will cock-and-shoot ya.
Standing too close to Dr. Luther.

—“Another Man’s Shoes,” Neo Ethos

I still didn’t get a sense of the cost, though. I didn’t think it would be dramatic, that churches would stop bringing me out. Over time I started to see a little of that—people pulled out financially or wouldn’t invite me to their events. Now, they’re like, “We don’t know what Flame is going to say”—which I respect [their desire to watch over what their church is teaching].

Did it shift the purpose of your art when you shifted theology?

I was one of the guys at the helm of the Young, Restless, Reformed movement. The Cross Movement hip-hop group, the Acts 29 church-planting network—we all just sort of met each other at the same time. We brought John Calvin back from the grave, I like to say.

I thought this would be more of the same. People would hear theology and Scripture being discussed in the music and say, “Man, let’s consider this.” My goal has always been to connect the dots between Scripture, theology, and everyday experience. I felt like Lutheran thought was perfect for that. I’m like, “Man, these are answers we sought.”

I see scattered tulips.
Come with me; I’ll show you what I found.
I be diggin’ in the text. Funny what you find when you low to the ground.

—“Scattered Tulips,” Extra Nos

We had huge divides within the Christian rap genre: “Are you a Christian rapper or a rapper who’s Christian?” Christian rappers are the more “holy” expression. Rappers who are Christian are just positive and less bold about their faith. I’m thinking, “Man, guys. Luther, the doctrine of vocation—we can validate both of these!” I thought this insight would provide a path to think about what we do. But my new theology was the wall that I put up between myself and everybody else. That’s what I came to realize.

Is there anything you miss from Reformed spaces?

Yes. What the Reformed folks have done exceptionally well is create an appetite in the layperson for Scripture and theology. They love to talk Scripture. They love to talk theology. We would stay up late for hours in a restaurant, just talking. None of these people are ordained. They’re just churchgoers. They had the John MacArthur Study Bible, or Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, or Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, or the Puritans. I miss that.

I think a lot of the people I meet now maybe take our theology for granted. Some may not even reference our confessional books—that kind of thing. That’s a noticeable difference.

And there’s a different kind of energy. In Reformed circles, everybody’s always talking about being “on fire for the Lord.” It’s this passion to make sure everyone hears about Jesus and the gospel. I like that. I think that’s a healthy human reaction to something you’re excited about, especially the gospel, you know?

You just put out a new album, Neo Ethos. What does that mean?

Neo is “new” and ethos is “the spirit of the day.”

The mindset behind the title was comparing these two moods or spirits, if you will. One was this ancient church expression of creeds and confessions in the Word of God and sacraments and tying things back to the patristics and apostolic fathers, this appreciation of church history. That’s the old way, which is good and healthy and rich.

The new way would be more consistent with what you get from the Anabaptists, the Zwinglians, and certain versions of the Calvinist movement—they all made their way to the Americas, and they overthrew so much of that stuff: “You don’t need the church calendar, candles, liturgy, infant baptism, or crosses with Jesus on them.”

Now, here we are, with this expression of Christianity that does have that fire and that freedom and that passion to get the Word out there. But with this new ethos, this new spirit, we’ve also left behind good things, good truth, good teaching and doctrine, that should undergird that passion and energy. I want to compare these two expressions of Christianity.

Gretchen Ronnevik is the author of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted and cohost of the Freely Given podcast.

The post Flame Raps the Sacraments appeared first on Christianity Today.

It might not be formal apologetics, though that’s what comes to mind for me: debates, arguments, refuting other people’s beliefs point by point. That kind of apologetics can be helpful for people legitimately wrestling with faith and Scripture. For teenagers especially, it can be a wonderful tool—evidence that Christianity is not illogical, that there are answers to their questions.

But as my own children become adults, I’m also realizing apologetics has its limits. Some doctrines, like the Trinity, are beyond our capacity for total logical understanding. Some apologists work without humility, and that is an ugly thing. And not all challenges in the life of faith involve apologetics’ target, the intellect, for faith is a gift from God that pierces the heart.

More than these limitations, though, I find myself reconsidering the assumption that our proper task as parents is to teach young adults to “defend their faith.”

It’s an interesting turn of phrase—“defend the faith” or “defend your faith”—and not one found in the Bible. (Jude 1:3-4 speaking of “contend[ing] for the faith,” but the interest there is preserving orthodoxy within the church.) The closely related term “defender of the faith” doesn’t come from Jesus or Paul but Reformation history. It’s a title Pope Leo X gave Britain’s king Henry VIII for his writing against the Reformer Martin Luther (and it remains a title of British monarchs today). In that twisted and bloody time, the phrase very much meant defense in a legal and military sense. Henry would wield swords alongside arguments.

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Unclench Your Fist

Kristen Deede Johnson

Instead of defending our faith, the Bible speaks of defending our hope. This comes from 1 Peter 3:13–17 (CSV):

 Who then will harm you if you are devoted to what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness, you are blessed. Do not fear them or be intimidated, but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. Yet do this with gentleness and reverence, keeping a clear conscience, so that when you are accused, those who disparage your good conduct in Christ will be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil.

The word translated here as “give a defense” (or, in other translations, “an answer”) is apologia in Greek, and it’s where we get our word apologetics. But the passage presents a rather different scenario than the one we tend to teach young people as we train and encourage them to defend their faith.

Peter teaches that Christians don’t need to be afraid, nor do we need to go looking for arguments. On the contrary, he envisions other people noticing our hope and asking us about it, then us giving an explanation in gentleness and reverence. The best apologia to teach young Christians, in other words, is to give them a solid hope in Christ the Lord.

To do this, we must first address our own fears and lack of hope. After launching two of our six kids into adulthood, I’ve been astounded at the things other adult Christians have said to my children as they left our house to pursue the vocations God had prepared for them.  There’s a consistent theme of fear and discouragement: If you go to that college or move to this place or aren’t super careful, you’ll lose your faith.

These statements come from a place of genuine and justified concern. Many young Christians go to college and never return to church. We’ve all heard of a young person who’s moved out of the house, begun dating an unbeliever, and rejected their faith to live a different life. We know the data. We know the stories. And we are filled with fear. So we impress that fear on our children, urging them to draw their apologetic swords.

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An Anxious Generation—of Parents

Carrie McKean

But however good the intent, these warnings communicated something more to my kids: Have fear, not hope. Your faith is delicate. It’s fragile. It’s glass. At any moment, it could shatter forever.

Talking with my kids, I found I had to push back on that implicit teaching—because it pushed them toward a false and lesser understanding of God, his mission for each of them, and his role in preserving their faith. “God will never leave you or forsake you,” I told them (Deut. 31:6). “There’s nothing you could ever do that would make God stop loving you” (Psalm 139; Rom. 8:35–39). 

And my husband and I talked about our continued role in discipling our children, even in adulthood. “No matter what happens or what you’ve done, you can always come home,” we said. “Going through dark seasons and enduring suffering in various ways is normal. Remember you are never alone. Pray. And reach out to us, and we’ll pray. We’ve all been there.”

If my children develop a passion for apologetics, wonderful. But what the Bible calls all Christians to do is to defend our hope. I tell my kids they don’t have to enter every argument they encounter. Not all questions are asked in good faith, and some of us don’t think on our feet as well as others. But when people ask us about our hope in Christ, that is the surest thing we know, and we can be ready with an answer. We can be ready to explain our hope—our confidence that Jesus will never leave us or forsake us, our trust that we can’t be separated from his love.

I don’t ignore the data about loss of faith in young adulthood, but instead of speaking fear and doubt to our kids as they leave home, we equip them by speaking hope and assurance over them. I want to speak that same hope and assurance to other parents and Christians in youth ministries too.

Don’t be afraid. Your children’s salvation does not rest in their own hands; it rests in the hands of Jesus. It always has, and it always will. Their hope—and ours—is not in having the most articulate answer or the government leaders we want, getting into the right school, having our professors’ or bosses’ approval, or leading a suffering-free, easy life. 

Our hope comes from Christ, and Christ alone. Our hope is not in the strength of our faith but the object of our faith. There is nothing more certain we can give our kids.

Gretchen Ronnevik is the author of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted and cohost of the Freely Given podcast.

The post Emptying the Nest in Hope, not Fear appeared first on Christianity Today.

Of course, none of us parent perfectly. But watching a child go through deep spiritual struggles can be disorienting when we’ve done everything in our power to prevent it—often with a fervor fueled by our own humbling spiritual history. We’ve learned painful lessons with God, and we want to keep our children from having to learn them too.

Except that’s not how it works. We can’t keep our children from struggling—and if we try, we risk instead keeping them from the full truth and beauty of the gospel.

I grew up in what’s often dubbed a “broken home”—though I would also call it happy. My mom worked hard, and my grandparents lived with us for some of those years. Still, with that background, when my husband and I first started having kids, we set out to do it perfectly, as many new parents do.

With a confidence on the scale of first-year seminary students, we proof-texted all the verses in the Bible about parenting, order, and discipline, and we plugged it into an equation for perfect parenting. Our kids were going to be awesome because we were going to be awesome parents. We were parenting by the Book.

There’s No One Equation for Educating Christian Kids

Gretchen Ronnevik

There’s nothing like the arrogance of the young and inexperienced—though, in hindsight, our problem was more than youth and pride. We had taken a prosperity gospel view of family life, moving principles of “health and wealth” into the process of parenting. More than money or physical wellness, family was where we most deeply desired success, so that’s where the false “gospel of success” took root in our lives.

At the time, we wouldn’t have called this legalistic or prosperity gospel teaching. We would have called it “biblical.” We thought if we could just do this Christian life well, we wouldn’t have to depend on God’s grace all that much. Grace would just be our backup for unusual days—for the curveballs.

We didn’t realize then that when we take principles from the Bible and strip them of Christ and his redemption and forgiveness, they become something else entirely. We took the posture of Adam and Eve holding the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, thinking that if we could just know what to do and not do, then we wouldn’t be quite so reliant on God’s grace.

This was especially evident in how we approached the Book of Proverbs. “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it” (Prov. 22:6). We treated verses like this as fortune-cookie guarantees rather than descriptions of the good that God wants for us. We looked for salvation through our own hands—as we humans are apt to do.

And that made sense, because the Proverbs are good. But we were too apt to judge goodness by whether something got us the results we wanted in the timeframe we preferred.

God judges what is good differently. Old Testament scholar Chad Bird says that using the Proverbs as guarantees is acting like Job’s friends, examining someone who is suffering and trying to figure out which Proverb he didn’t follow quite correctly: If we just do all the right things, we should be fine! Let’s problem-solve your failures. Perhaps there’s a nugget of wisdom in here that can fix your situation.

Job was a righteous man, and yet the Proverbs didn’t “work” for him. He did everything right, but God still allowed suffering, seemingly with no explanation, and showed up in the final chapters of the book to tell Job and his friends how incorrectly they’d judged the situation.

Let the Children Play: Their Lives Depend on It

Russell Moore

We often don’t want to acknowledge that Jesus not only said suffering could happen to us but promised it would (John 16:33). That is what the prosperity gospel ignores, and understandably: It feels so much more positive and productive to focus on the parts of the Bible that give us a feeling of control.

We don’t want to take heart that Christ has overcome the world. We want to take heart that, well, at least we did everything we could. We don’t want redemption so much as redemption on our own terms, by our own hands.

As our culture moves on from helicopter parenting to lawnmower parenting (where parents go beyond hovering to mowing down all obstacles for their kids), the temptation of prosperity gospel parenting only becomes stronger.

It feels like we’ve somehow failed if our kids are dealing with hard things. It feels like failure if they are struggling with their faith or wrestling with God. We start to think it’s our job to mow down all that struggle, forgetting it’s actually our task to be with and pray for our children in struggle and joy alike.

And parents are not the only ones with this sense of failure. I was speaking with a young adult not long ago who said she felt pressure to be happy all the time. Her parents kept saying that they just wanted their kids to be happy, so when she wasn’t happy, she felt like she was failing them.

“I just want it to be okay to have a day where I’m sad,” she told me. She wanted the freedom to feel the whole range of human emotions without disappointing her parents—without making them feel like they didn’t do everything right.

Of course, a central tenet of the gospel is that we can’t do everything right, and this is why we so deeply need God’s redemption. I remember once pouring my heart out to God when one of my kids was struggling. I cried out because I could not fix that pain. But God showed me then that if I had the capacity to remove all of my children’s struggles, they would never need him. They would never have reason to cry out to him for themselves.

My limitations help my children seek and see God. His power is displayed in my weakness (2 Cor. 12:9), not in mechanistic promises of family prosperity, and this is a power my kids must come to know for themselves. Learning to rely on salvation by Christ alone is often a daily battle. Our kids must wrestle through it—and past all their versions of self-justification—just as we did.

The longer I parent, the more I realize that God is more willing for my kids to struggle than I am. I always want to skip the struggle, ignore the struggle, fast forward to overcoming the struggle. I am often impatient and unwilling to walk through the pain.

But if we can let go of prosperity gospel parenting, we can embrace the true gospel of a God who is with us and for us.

Want Your Kids to Stay Christian? Double Down on Home Discipleship

Lyman Stone

We can introduce this God to our children—not a God who is counting up our parenting failures or demanding constant happiness, but a compassionate God who meets us in our struggle. Who allows us to wrestle with him. Who doesn’t ask us to pretend things are fine when they’re not fine. Who permits us, as Martin Luther put it, to “[call] the thing what it actually is,” even if it is uncomfortable or unhappy.

As much as we hate the fact that in this world we will have struggles—and our kids will have struggles—we can take comfort in God’s honesty, patience, and love. And we can show our children that this is what God is like, so much better than the prosperity gospel’s petty and often inept idol could ever be.

What if starting children off on the way they should go isn’t just teaching them right and wrong and making sure they go to Sunday School? What if it’s teaching them to fall on God’s grace, every single day?

Gretchen Ronnevik is the author of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted and co-host of the Freely Given podcast.

Kate Bowler: I Reject the Prosperity Gospel but I Still Crave What It Promises

Andrea Palpant Dilley

The post I’ve Been a Prosperity Gospel Parent appeared first on Christianity Today.

We decided to try homeschooling—just her and just for a year. But as we prepped our second child for kindergarten, some red flags flew up around his health and learning needs, and we decided that it might be easier to homeschool both that school year. After that, the rhythm of homeschooling just fit with our family. My husband ’s job has seasons of intense hours as well as seasons of more time at home, and we were able to customize our family life around that fluctuation.

People often asked us if we would always homeschool. I’d say we were going “kid by kid, year by year.” Homeschooling felt like a big curve ball God threw our way. I didn’t dare presume I knew what God had for us next.

That’s not to say I came easily to a posture of trust and humility around schooling decisions. I went through my arrogant phase, my exasperated phase, and a phase where I hit my stride. But in education discussions with fellow parents and others in our community, I found that it was often Christians—sometimes even myself—who showed little grace, no matter which side they were defending. I was an arrogant public-school mom, turned an arrogant homeschool mom, turned a humbled let-the-Lord-lead mom. That final phase was hard won, and it’s one I hope to help other parents reach more quickly than I did.

Public Schools Aren’t Godless. Ask the Christians Who Feel Called to Stay.

Ericka Andersen

I don’t regret the years I spent homeschooling my kids. I treasure them. But the inability to commit to homeschooling forever caused tension in some of our relationships. When I signed up to tutor in our local homeschool group, I was asked to sign a contract committing to homeschool all my children through high school graduation and declaring my belief that homeschooling was the best educational choice for all families. That seemed presumptuous for me to claim for myself or others. I always amended the contracts in the margins, adding phrases like “God willing.”

Now, 14 years later, our homeschooling journey has ended. Our reasons for stopping were multifaceted. Bit by bit, God prepared our hearts for a change. Our kids are getting older, and we talked to each of them about this shift. We made different choices for different children based on their different needs and wants. The oldest of our six kids is now a sophomore in college. Another is nearing adulthood and enrolled in online school. Two are in public school, and two more attend a private Christian school. Will they stay where they are this year until they graduate? God willing.

One of the things my experience has taught me is that homeschooling is a poor insurance policy for a child’s faith. I’ve witnessed many homeschooled kids who graduate wanting nothing to do with God. “It’s just too hard,” one of them said to me. “God wants me to be perfect all the time, and it’s not that I can’t try to please him anymore; it’s that I no longer care.”

I’ve seen spiritual burnout on the faces of teenagers whose parents want to use God’s law to make superchildren with superfaith but foster a Christless Christianity instead. God is the starting point, but functionally, we try to determine what our children will do and think. We transform Proverbs 22:6—“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it”—from prudent guidance into mechanistic guarantee.

Are Christian Schools Training Christians or Americans?

Bonnie Kristian

We subconsciously start to believe that if we parent perfectly, we’ll have perfect children—and homeschooling offers a level of control that other education options can’t match. But this is a formula devoid of the doctrine of sin and redemption. At its root, it’s a sort of salvation through works. It’s devastating—and not only for the children who lose their faith.

I’ve been heartbroken sitting next to a friend who spent years of her life training up her children, only to see a child reject the faith she taught them. In her mind, she did everything right. She kept the standard high. She disciplined well. But the equation didn’t work.

Of course, all parents have their own equations. It’s not exclusive to homeschoolers. My pastor sent his kids to Christian elementary school for a good foundation, then switched to public middle and high schools to expose his children to the world while they could still each night bring doubts and questions to Mom and Dad. Some families find their kids do better in public school, where it’s easier to decipher who’s a Christian and who isn’t and where there may be more opportunities to put faith in action. Others start their kids in public school, then switch to Christian school after realizing their children are tenderhearted and need a more protective environment. Still others have kids with special needs that can’t be properly addressed by small Christian institutions.

Some equations work, and some do not. But the constant in educational success stories, in my observation, isn’t any one equation. It’s that God will be faithful to our children, and we can trust him no matter what comes.

Of course, even having educational choices—being able to decide which equation seems best—is a privilege, and privilege is never required for faith. Quite the opposite: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” Jesus taught. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort” (Luke 6:20, 24). And anyway, discipleship isn’t restricted to school hours.

Our ability to raise our children in the faith isn’t dependent on our location, our income, and other material advantages. Great saints have been raised in places where Christianity is illegal. Many deeply faithful Christians never spent a day in school. God is not bound by our educational choices.

In Defense of the Christian Private School Bubble

Andrea Palpant Dilley, guest writer

Conversely, as a mother who has used all the most common schooling options in America today, I can say without hesitation: No matter what educational path you choose, sin will be there. Even homeschools have bullies. Children fight. Teachers are tired. Discipline is difficult. Even there, Christ is the only Savior, and no schooling choice you can make will let you skip grieving with your child over the brokenness of our world. No level or model of education can bypass our desperate need for a Savior, every hour, every day.

Homeschooling was a rewarding part of our family’s story. But had we not been able to homeschool, sin would still be real, and God would still be faithful.

I’m a Lutheran, and in our tradition’s doctrine of vocation, we don’t look for a one-size-fits-all plan for our lives. Knowing that we are saved on account of the work of Christ and Christ alone, we are free to love and serve our neighbors in many different ways. What that looks like will vary from person to person, family to family, and community to community. This is true of education too. In our vocation as parents, it’s reasonable to look at the education choices in front of us, at our children’s needs, at our own needs as parents, and then pick the best fit.

I’ve learned there are upsides and downsides in every type of education, and that’s okay. My faith isn’t in any educational equation. Equations fail. Nor is my faith in my ability to be the perfect mother. I am not my children’s savior. My faith is in Christ and Christ alone.

Gretchen Ronnevik is the author of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted and co-host of the Freely Given podcast.

Taking Kids to Church Matters More Than the ‘Right’ School, Study Suggests

Stefani McDade

The post There’s No One Equation for Educating Christian Kids appeared first on Christianity Today.

Por supuesto, ninguno de nosotros es un padre perfecto. Pero ver a un hijo atravesar profundas luchas espirituales puede resultar desorientador, sobre todo cuando hemos hecho todo lo que ha estado a nuestro alcance para evitarlo, a menudo con un fervor alimentado por nuestra propia y humilde historia espiritual. Hemos aprendido lecciones dolorosas con Dios y queremos evitar que nuestros hijos tengan que aprenderlas también.

Pero no funciona así. No podemos evitar que nuestros hijos tengan dificultades y, si lo intentamos, corremos el riesgo de impedirles que experimenten la plena verdad y belleza del evangelio.

Crecí en lo que algunos llamarían un «contexto familiar desestructurado». No obstante, yo también lo llamaría feliz. Mi mamá trabajó duro y mis abuelos vivieron con nosotros durante algunos de esos años. Aun así, con esos antecedentes, cuando mi esposo y yo empezamos a tener hijos, nos propusimos criarlos perfectamente, al igual que muchos padres primerizos.

Con una confianza comparable a la de los estudiantes de primer año de seminario, revisamos todos los versículos de la Biblia sobre la paternidad, el orden y la disciplina, y creamos con ellos una ecuación que pensamos daría como resultado una crianza perfecta. Nuestros hijos iban a ser asombrosos porque nosotros íbamos a ser padres asombrosos. Estábamos siguiendo el Libro a la perfección.

No hay nada como la arrogancia de los jóvenes inexpertos, aunque, en retrospectiva, nuestro problema iba más allá de la juventud y el orgullo. Habíamos adoptado una visión del evangelio de la prosperidad y la habíamos aplicado a la vida familiar, incorporando principios de «salud y riqueza» al proceso de crianza. Más que en el área del dinero o el bienestar físico, el área donde deseábamos el éxito más profundamente era en nuestra familia, y ahí es donde el falso «evangelio del éxito» se arraigó en nuestras vidas.

En ese momento, no lo habríamos identificado como una enseñanza legalista o del evangelio de la prosperidad. Lo habríamos llamado «bíblico». Pensábamos que si conseguíamos hacer bien esto de la «vida cristiana», no tendríamos que depender tanto de la gracia de Dios. La gracia sería simplemente nuestro respaldo en días inusuales, para los obstáculos imprevistos.

En ese momento no nos dimos cuenta de que cuando tomamos principios de la Biblia y los despojamos de Cristo y su redención y perdón, se convierten en algo completamente distinto. Adoptamos la postura de Adán y Eva sosteniendo el fruto del conocimiento del bien y del mal, pensando que, si pudiéramos saber qué hacer y qué no hacer, entonces no dependeríamos tanto de la gracia de Dios.

Esto fue especialmente evidente en la forma en que abordamos el Libro de Proverbios. «Instruye al niño en el camino correcto y aun en su vejez no lo abandonará» (Proverbios 22:6). Tratamos versículos como este como garantías y no como descripciones del bien que Dios quiere para nosotros. Buscamos construir la salvación con nuestras propias manos, tal como solemos hacer los humanos.

Y eso tenía sentido, porque los Proverbios son buenos. Pero éramos demasiado propensos a juzgar algo como «bueno» en función de si nos daba los resultados que queríamos en el plazo esperado.

Lecturas devocionales de Adviento 2023 de Christianity Today

Dios juzga lo que es bueno de manera diferente. Chad Bird, erudito del Antiguo Testamento, dice que usar los Proverbios como garantía es actuar como los amigos de Job, examinando a alguien que está sufriendo y tratando de descubrir qué proverbio no siguió del todo correctamente: Si hacemos todo lo correcto, ¡deberíamos estar bien! Encontremos la solución a tus fracasos. Quizás haya una pizca de sabiduría aquí que pueda solucionar la situación.

Job era un hombre justo y, sin embargo, los Proverbios no «funcionaron» para él. Hizo todo bien, pero aun así Dios permitió el sufrimiento, aparentemente sin explicación, y en los capítulos finales del libro Él mismo habla para decirles a Job y sus amigos cuán incorrectamente habían juzgado la situación.

A menudo, nos cuesta reconocer que Jesús no solo dijo que tal vez encontraríamos sufrimiento, sino que aseguró que sucedería (Juan 16:33). Eso es lo que el evangelio de la prosperidad ignora, y es comprensible: parece mucho más positivo y productivo centrarse en las partes de la Biblia que nos dan una sensación de control.

No queremos confiar en que Cristo ya venció al mundo. Queremos alegrarnos de que, bueno, al menos hicimos todo lo que pudimos. No queremos tanto la redención como la redención en nuestros propios términos, obtenida por nuestras propias manos.

A medida que nuestra cultura pasa de la crianza tipo helicóptero (sobreprotectora) a la crianza tipo cortadora de césped (donde los padres van más allá de la sobreprotección y buscan derribar todos los obstáculos para sus hijos), la tentación de aplicar el evangelio de la prosperidad a la crianza solo se vuelve más fuerte.

Sentimos como si hubiéramos fracasado de alguna manera si nuestros hijos enfrentan cosas difíciles. Sentimos como si hubiéramos fracasado si están luchando con su fe o con Dios. Empezamos a pensar que es nuestro trabajo desaparecer toda esa lucha, y olvidamos que en realidad nuestra tarea es estar con nuestros hijos y orar por ellos tanto en la lucha como en la alegría.

Y los padres no son los únicos que tienen esta sensación de fracaso. Recientemente hablé con una joven que dijo que se sentía presionada a ser feliz todo el tiempo. Sus padres seguían diciendo que solo querían que sus hijos fueran felices, así que cuando ella no era feliz, sentía que les estaba fallando.

«Solo quiero que esté bien tener un día en el que me sienta triste», me dijo. Esta chica quería tener la libertad de sentir toda la gama de emociones humanas sin decepcionar a sus padres, sin hacerles sentir que no habían hecho todo bien.

Por supuesto, un principio central del evangelio es precisamente que no podemos hacer todo bien, y es por eso por lo que necesitamos tan profundamente la redención de Dios. Recuerdo que una vez le abrí mi corazón a Dios cuando uno de mis hijos estaba pasando por un tiempo difícil. Lloré porque no podía hacer nada para arreglar ese dolor. Pero Dios me mostró entonces que, si tuviera la capacidad de eliminar todas las luchas de mis hijos, ellos nunca lo necesitarían a Él. Nunca tendrían motivos para clamar a Él por sí mismos.

Mis limitaciones ayudan a mis hijos a buscar y ver a Dios. Su poder se muestra en mi debilidad (2 Corintios 12:9), no en promesas mecánicas de prosperidad familiar, y este es un poder que mis hijos deben llegar a conocer por sí mismos. Aprender a confiar únicamente en la salvación de Cristo es a menudo una batalla diaria. Nuestros hijos deben luchar con esto por sí mismos y superar todas sus versiones de autojustificación, tal como lo hicimos nosotros.

Cuanto más tiempo soy madre, más me doy cuenta de que Dios está más dispuesto que yo a que mis hijos pasen dificultades. Siempre quiero saltarme la lucha, ignorarla y avanzar rápidamente para superarla. A menudo soy impaciente y no estoy dispuesta a caminar en medio del dolor.

Pero si podemos dejar de aplicar el evangelio de la prosperidad a la crianza, podremos abrazar el verdadero evangelio de un Dios que está con nosotros y a nuestro favor.

Un amor implacable

Alexandra Hoover

Podemos presentar este Dios a nuestros hijos, no un Dios que cuenta nuestros fracasos como padres o exige felicidad constante, sino un Dios compasivo que nos encuentra en nuestra lucha; que nos permite luchar con Él; que no nos pide que finjamos que las cosas están bien cuando no lo están; que nos permite, como dijo Martín Lutero, «[llamar] las cosas como lo que son realmente», incluso si se trata de algo incómodo o infeliz.

Por mucho que odiemos el hecho de que en este mundo tendremos aflicciones (y que nuestros hijos tendrán aflicciones también), podemos consolarnos con la honestidad, la paciencia y el amor de Dios. Y podemos mostrarles a nuestros hijos que así es Dios, mucho mejor de lo que jamás podría ser el ídolo mezquino y a menudo inepto del evangelio de la prosperidad.

¿Qué pasaría si instruir a los niños en el camino correcto no fuera simplemente enseñarles la diferencia entre el bien y el mal, y asegurarse de que asistan a la Escuela Dominical? ¿Qué pasaría si más bien consiste en enseñarles a confiar en la gracia de Dios, todos los días?

Gretchen Ronnevik es autora de Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted y copresentadora del pódcast Freely Given.

Padres cristianos: no es necesario que protejan a sus hijos de las opiniones divergentes

Rebecca McLaughlin

The post ‘En este mundo afrontarán aflicciones’. ¿Aceptaremos que esto incluye también a nuestros hijos? appeared first on Christianity Today en español | Cristianismo hoy.

Jonathan was in his first job out of college as a family ministries director at a church in Pennsylvania. His father, Jim Dennis, was visiting him, and he came with a gift: a journal from his own father, James Dennis, written while on a five-church preaching tour in Toronto one year before he died.

Jonathan had never met his grandfather. He’d died of a heart attack at age 51 while diving in Hawaii, leaving earth the way he lived—fully, and full of secrets. Jonathan knew his grandfather was a pastor. He knew he was a gravitational center of faith around which his family orbited until his sudden death sent everyone into a spiritual tailspin. But he didn’t know much else about his grandfather’s faith until he sat in his office and slowly read that journal over a couple of days.

In one entry, his grandfather wrote about how much he missed his wife while traveling. In another, he wrote about how God had changed the lives of the people he met, his words brimming with an enthusiasm that put a smile on Jonathan’s face.

But they also left Jonathan with questions: How did his grandfather, who showed clear signs of posttraumatic stress disorder from his service in World War II, respond when he first heard the gospel? Why did he feel called to be a pastor so soon after conversion? What did he learn in ministry? What were his struggles? What did he overcome?

So many untold and unfinished stories. Yet reading his grandfather’s words was also like remembering a stranger who felt, in some ways, strangely familiar. He recognized his father and himself in his grandfather’s passion for introducing people to Christ, and his all-consuming work of sermon preparation.

Wow, this is really cool, Jonathan remembers thinking. This is legitimately an unbroken line of three men in my family joining the ministry, despite all our trauma. This is a direct lineage of spiritual legacy.

Even now, as he shares that moment, he tears up. It was an awesome reminder that, no matter the pain and brokenness in a family, God remains faithful from generation to generation. “And if this is true for me in three generations,” he adds, “how much more of this truth and legacy do we have access to as Christians, if we really go looking for it?”

There is something about the third generation that has long inspired myths. In the business world, conventional wisdom has held that most family businesses do not survive beyond three generations. First-generation entrepreneurs pioneer their way from rags to riches, the thinking goes, and leaders of the second generation faithfully steward their parents’ enterprise. But the grandchildren, far removed from the vision and example of the founders, reliably squander their hard-earned inheritance.

There’s not much evidence that this curse of the third generation is a real thing. The Harvard Business Review has tried to debunk it. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the large majority of businesses do not last past a decade—that is, few businesses even make it out of the first generation, let alone into the third.

Still, the notion that things fall apart in the third generation persists among pundits and business advisers. And it has been applied to other family phenomena, such as inherited wealth.

In churches, many sermons have mapped the third-generation curse to faith. A Google search for “third-generation Christian” will yield the general idea: New converts burn with fire and zeal; they give and sacrifice everything to God. The second generation grows up in that faith-saturated culture and might continue to attend church, but their passion for God dims. The thirds? They drift away completely.

Pastors have found biblical examples. They point to Moses and Joshua as the first generation that led the Israelites to Canaan, but by the period of the judges, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25, ESV). They point to David, a great leader and “a man after God’s own heart,” but whose grandson, Rehoboam, steered the nation into moral and spiritual decay. Third-generation Christians are warned about their predisposition to decline.

As in the business realm, the case for a spiritual third-generation curse is shaky. It ignores, for instance, that David himself set the family curse in motion through his predation of Bathsheba (2 Sam. 12).

Even if these myths fail to hold up as a rule, however, they may contain some truth about the multigenerational nature of discipleship. Western evangelicals tend to individualize their faith, often expressing it as a personal experience and relationship with God. They may speak of gratitude toward devout parents who raised them in a “Christian home,” but far less emphasis is given to the testimonies of forefathers. Evangelicalism has always been a breakaway movement, prizing independence over remembrance.

But the Bible is full of references to the importance of identifying our spiritual heritage and roots. “Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past,” exhorts Deuteronomy 32:7. When God calls Moses from the burning bush, he introduces himself as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob”—more than 400 years after all three patriarchs died (Ex. 3:6). The apostle Paul writes in 2 Timothy 1, “I thank God, whom I serve, as my ancestors did, with a clear conscience,” then reminds Timothy to consider the legacy of his grandmother Lois and mother Eunice (vv. 3–5).

That is exactly what Jonathan Dennis did the day he opened his grandfather’s journal. It was the missing piece in a saga of three generations of pastors, each from a different denomination, each displaying different parenting styles, and each with its own pain and trauma.

It is a story about not just the faithfulness of men, but the faithfulness of God.

In his 51 years on earth, James Henley Dennis lived many lives. He was an active-duty service member during WWII, a pastor, and a prison and hospital chaplain. He was a father of five. People remember him as a beloved and gifted preacher who made the gospel come alive.

He was also complicated.

Jim, 68, and his brother Mike, 73, have both lived longer than their father. But James’s presence still casts a long shadow over them. They loved him as fiercely as boys in awe of their father could. But their dad was an enigma, a puzzle with odd missing pieces.

Mike, the oldest, remembers a fun, boyish man who flew stick-and-paper airplanes with him. But he also remembers an angry drunk who would whoosh out his belt at the slightest mistake or mischief. He remembers his father’s liquor-laced breath huffing and heaving until his rage switched off as swiftly as it had clicked on, leaving a man standing in a daze of confusion and shame. Mike called it “The Demon.” Looking back, he now sees clear signs of PTSD.

Jim, the third child, remembers a man radically saved. This dad opened the door one afternoon to a new Baptist pastor in town and, that very day, knelt to give his life to Christ. Within a year, he’d finished seminary and uprooted his family from Portland, Oregon, to pastor a small Baptist church in Haines, a rural city in the eastern part of the state with a population of 300. Later he pastored a Conservative Baptist church in Dayton, Washington, and then another in Walla Walla. The Demon reared its head every now and then, but it eventually retreated into hibernation.

Jim and Mike often marvel at the different versions of their father they experienced, and at how little they still know about him.

As gregarious and charismatic as their father was in the community, James was a quiet, private man at home, cradling his memories behind his breastbone. They knew he served in WWII and spoke fluent German, but he refused to share war stories.

Mike spent a decade researching his father’s past. “I wasn’t just interested. I was obsessed,” he said. After multiple thwarted attempts to procure his father’s service records, Mike said the Department of Defense informed him the records are sealed until 2045. The family believes James helped hunt down Nazis after the war. As a youth, Mike remembers seeing terror on the faces of German-speaking immigrants when they met James at restaurants or grocery stores. The family also believes James survived two assassination attempts. He never explained how he got some crater-like scars on his back.

There’s also a sweet picture of James holding up a one-year-old Mike by his armpits. Mike does know the story behind it. They’re picnicking by Lake Whatcom in western Washington, smiling and squinting into the sun. As Mike’s mother snapped that picture, James gestured at his firstborn and said, “I don’t know what to do with this.”

But does anyone know? When it came to parenting, James kept things simple with three rules: Be on time for dinner, don’t come home with the cops, and whatever you did, don’t tell Mom. That freestyle upbringing carried over to their religious education. Dad didn’t preach to his kids. There were no family devotions, no recitations of Scripture or catechisms. They rarely dined together as a family—dinner was a “blow in, blow out” affair, Mike recalled.

If there was any intentional religious teaching, James relied on osmosis, letting his kids observe the way he lived out the gospel. As a pastor of a rural church in the early 1960s, James barely earned $300 a month. The family lived in a poorly insulated parsonage where, in the winters, their bedrooms sometimes felt chillier than the tundra outside.

But Dad was rich in relationships, so his family felt rich. People he counseled invited them to fish in their private lakes, pick whole cows from their ranches, fill their pantry with root vegetables from their farms. Such social wealth followed them wherever they moved. In every new town, within a month Dad would have knocked on dozens of doors and counseled dozens of souls.

There was “an implied education,” Jim noted, that “how you treat people is more important than what you believe in, because it reflects what you actually believe.” James wasn’t just pastor of a Baptist church, Jim said; he was pastor to all, from the high and mighty in elite social circles to the sodden and downtrodden at the local taverns and rodeos.

Maybe that’s just nostalgia talking. But similar refrains echoed through conversations with several other families of third- and fourth-generation missionaries and ministry leaders interviewed for this story.

“Grandpa never stopped being a pastor. It was just who he was,” said Gretchen Ronnevik, a writer and ministry leader whose grandparents were missionaries to Japan.

“I didn’t see one person in church and another person at home. My father was the same everywhere,” said Pavlo Tokarchuk, a fourth-generation Baptist pastor in Ukraine.

“I have a doctorate and two master’s degrees…and what guides me more is my grandmother’s example of a lived-out faith,” said Rob Hoskins, the president of a global Christian ministry, whose family tree includes pastors and missionaries spanning four generations.

Studies suggest that authentic practice of faith inside the home increases the odds of intergenerational religious transmission. The father who prays and writes sermons in his room every morning. The grandfather who prays blessings over his children and grandchildren whenever they visit. The missionary-kid grandmother who tells childhood stories from Africa and still evangelizes to the servers at Denny’s.

Data also shows that parents who directly and explicitly talk about faith with their children—what they believe, what that means, why it matters, how it relates to other areas in life—are much more likely to cultivate spiritual longevity in their children’s lives. So too are parents who are warm, affectionate, and affirming while setting clear standards and consequences.

Parents who are too permissive, authoritarian, or distracted are much less successful in passing down their faith. The late sociologist Vern Bengtson argued that emotional closeness with fathers, in particular, has a greater impact on religious transmission than emotional closeness with mothers.

But salvation is no guaranteed birthright, even in ministry dynasties. In a 2013 Barna survey, 40 percent of pastors said their children went through a period of significant faith crisis. About a third said their children were no longer active in the church. And 7 percent said their children no longer consider themselves Christians.

In many ways, James Dennis was the Abraham in his family—the first believer and the first to be called to ministry. When he responded, his family walked with him into a new land, through no choice of their own.

But when he died, his wife and all five of his children drifted away.

By the time he lost his father, Jim had already been wandering from his childhood faith. He saw people who sang piously on Sunday act very differently on Monday, and he wanted nothing to do with them. His dad’s premature departure was just one more reason to turn away from God.

Jim was 27 then, living in Denver and making big bucks doing telemetry intelligence analysis—basically, collecting information on foreign missiles—for Lockheed Corporation, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors. He had a colleague who reminded him of his father, a man all his coworkers despised simply because he was openly Christian and refused to drink with them. Jim watched this man show kindness even to those who mistreated him and thought, Dad lived his life like that.

It was a “reality check,” he said, that “there are people who take their faith seriously.” He befriended that colleague, and one day, after hearing the gospel once again at that man’s coffee table, professed faith in Christ. He began attending a Southern Baptist church and joined the choir.

Two years later, while volunteering at a Christian education conference in Detroit, he met Cheri Hartman, a children’s pastor from Ohio with a childlike faith who came from a devout line of Assemblies of God ministers. Jim asked her to lunch. Not realizing it was a date, she showed up with three girlfriends. He paid for lunch. She was impressed. He wrote her; she wrote back. Six months later, they were married.

A few days after he proposed to Cheri, on his flight back to Denver from Ohio, Jim imagined life as a husband and father. He didn’t want to drag his future family into his career, which involved a lot of secrecy and covert operations. At the time, he was volunteering in the music and children’s ministries at a Nazarene church. He loved studying and talking about Scripture. By the time his plane landed in Denver, his mind was clear. The next day, he quit his high-paying job and soon became a pastor.

“I never dreamed I’d be a pastor,” Jim told me. But the change didn’t feel strange or shocking. It just felt right.

Every church where Jim and Cheri subsequently served became their second home. On Sunday, their family was often the first to arrive and the last to leave. So when they were kicked out of one church, they didn’t lose just their job and income—they lost their community.

Jim was an assistant pastor at an Assemblies of God church in Cleveland, Ohio, when he began to computerize the church’s handwritten ledgers. While going through the financial records, he discovered that the church owned a nine-hole golf course and had been diverting earnings into the church’s mission fund for years without paying income tax—accruing, by Jim’s calculations, roughly $5.5 million in unpaid taxes and penalties. Jim brought his discovery to the church board.

The next Sunday, the senior pastor announced from the pulpit that Jim and Cheri would be leaving the church to accept “ministry opportunities elsewhere.” At the time, Cheri was upstairs managing Sunday school while Jim stood at the back of the sanctuary. Heads turned toward him in the pews. He looked as stunned as they did.

There was no “ministry opportunity elsewhere.” For the next three years, neither Jim nor Cheri could find a stable job. They exhausted their savings and relied on food stamps to feed their two children. To make ends meet, Cheri cleaned houses, Jim accepted odd jobs, and 13-year-old Jonathan worked part time at a deli. Meanwhile, they watched the church they had served for four years crumble like stale wafers as more people left it.

In the midst of their struggles, Cheri was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. One doctor told them, “I’ve never seen a tumor that big. You better get ready.”

Each Dennis talks about that period differently. Jonathan calls it “church trauma.” Jim just remembers trying to survive day by day.

For Cheri, the memory of her own father’s faith served as a lamp through the dark valley of what she says was a season of growth.

When her mother died of a brain aneurysm when Cheri was 17, Cheri’s father, with tears in his eyes, uttered, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be his name.” Cheri never forgot that moment. She held on to it during chemotherapy and when she had to cut her children’s jeans into shorts because the family couldn’t afford summer clothes. “I just really had peace from the Lord that everything was going to work out,” she said.

What Jim remembers most is the fear of losing his wife and becoming a single dad. He still remembers the rage, shock, and pain of betrayal from people he once called brothers and friends.

After a stint as interim pastor for another church, Jim stopped seeking church jobs, though his wife still works as a children’s pastor and he never stopped doing ministry. Until health issues forced an early retirement, Jim worked as a hospital chaplain for seven years, where he was the happiest ministering to people who didn’t hide their sickness. Today he works with the youth at his church in Arizona and occasionally teaches Bible studies.

If James, the Dennis family’s first-generation believer, was like Abraham, Jim is like Jacob—he wrestled with God and survived, albeit with a limp.

“He’s never fully recovered from that experience,” Jonathan said of his father. “I think he really got hurt by being forced out of the church for doing the right thing, and I think it really hurt him that he was not able to put food on the table.”

Still, his parents tried to protect their children’s faith. “This isn’t God’s fault,” they explained. “This is man.” Cheri consistently pointed out evidence of God’s goodness and faithfulness to her children. “That was God,” she said about how she had signed up for a public health insurance program just before receiving her cancer diagnosis. “Look, God provided that,” she told her daughter, Christina, when a church helped pay for summer camp. She praises God that she has been cancer free for almost 20 years now.

But there were unspoken things that Jonathan sensed as a youth. Perhaps because his parents never once doubted God’s existence, he didn’t question it either, “but I very much wondered if God cared about me.” At times he wondered if, maybe, his father was angry at God. And what would that mean for him, a pastor’s kid who formed his first image of God through his parents’ eyes?

“I’ll never be a pastor,” Jonathan declared. Cheri tried to appear neutral on that topic. Though she and Jim were always careful not to pressure their kids to go into ministry, her personal opinion was “What’s the point of working a regular job if you can work for Jesus?”

“I’ll never be a pastor,” Jonathan would repeat—during dinner, on the drive to church, in his bedroom, whenever the occasion called for another emphasis on how much the life of a pastor’s kid sucked.

“Okay, whatever you want to do,” Cheri would reply. “That’s between you and God.”

Jonathan’s upbringing was very different from his father’s. Jim and Cheri loved hanging out with their children and homeschooled both kids. They did everything together—no blow-in, blow-out dinners at their table. Having a children’s pastor for a mother meant their childhood was stuffed like a piñata with fun Bible stories and artwork, a new devotional book every year, and intentional teachings on doctrines and values. Jim taught the children apologetics, guiding them through questions to logical answers about faith (Jim’s favorite book is Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict).

By the time he was a tween, Jonathan knew about God the way he knew his grandfather: He had never met him, but he had sure heard a lot about him. Then, in one day, when his father was fired from their church for uncovering financial mismanagement, Jonathan lost all the regular rhythms of faith that his parents had carefully woven around the church: “Everything that I identified with faith just disappeared—the place disappeared, the programs disappeared, the connections to it just all went poof.”

Jonathan was then almost 13, old enough to know something was wrong without fully understanding what. Looking back, he says he sees in himself signs of clinical depression. The transition to teenhood is hard enough without isolation, financial hardship, and sickness. He had lots of needs without knowing how to express them, which caused him to withdraw. His father, meanwhile, seemed distant and distracted to the point that, for years, father and son barely talked to one another.

His parents had trained him up in the way he should go, but it took help beyond their family to keep him on that path. A high school friend challenged Jonathan to question whether his faith genuinely belonged to him rather than to his parents. A youth pastor took special interest in him, encouraging him to consider pastoral ministry as a vocation.

Jonathan resisted the call to ministry. Hard. But every reason he employed to argue why he shouldn’t be a pastor—he hated public speaking, he wasn’t leadership material, he didn’t want to raise his own children as pastor’s kids—eventually fell away like chaff. He calls it his “Moses moment.” When God calls you from a burning bush, you can protest all you want, but in the end, your only response is “Here I am.”

He hadn’t even graduated from high school when Jonathan told his parents he felt called to be a pastor. Cheri, with what she hoped was a neutral face, told her son, “Okay, if that’s what God’s calling you to do.” (Jonathan could tell she was uber-pleased.) She then turned to her husband and warned, “Don’t you say, ‘I told you so.’”

But that wasn’t what Jim was thinking. At first, he was flabbergasted. After everything they had gone through? After all that his son had seen happen to him? Then he thought, Oh my God. This has to be God. That’s the only way it could be.

Jonathan is today, at age 33, the senior pastor of Hope Presbyterian Church, an Evangelical Presbyterian congregation in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and a father of four. Like his father, he questioned the theology he was raised in—and eventually, with only the slightest controversy, he left his parents’ denomination for Reformed theology and Presbyterian polity.

His younger sister, Christina, moved to the opposite coast—Huntington Beach, California—and chose a different spiritual path. She grew up in the same household, with the same parents and the same spiritual heritage. She always scored higher in Bible quizzes and was highly empathetic, choosing counseling as a career. Yet while one pastor’s kid became a pastor, the other hasn’t set foot in a church for years.

It’s a sensitive topic for the Dennises. Conversations about faith can get tense—and painful. “It’s the worst thing I can ever think of,” Cheri said. She is a bright-faced woman who smiles and chuckles a lot, but when mentioning her daughter’s faith, her mouth droops and her eyes glaze. It grieves her that she’s unable to talk with her own daughter about what matters most to her. She worries whether she’ll meet her daughter in heaven. But then she gives it to the Lord, because that’s all she can do. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be his name.

When James Dennis died in 1977, his wife’s faith seemed to die with him. “It was like Mom had no reason whatsoever to go to church or have any conversations about God,” Jim said.

As the lone prodigal son who came back to Christianity, Jim is now the one remnant praying for the family.

Not long before his mother’s death, Jim visited her in Sequim, Washington. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s and her memories were moth-eaten. Jim and his mother were sitting together, flipping through family photo albums, when she pointed to a picture of her and her late husband smiling under a sunset at the beach. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, James Dennis. Oh, he loved God so much.” And then she said, “I love God so much too.”

Jim was startled. It was the first time he’d heard his mother mention God in 15 years. He wanted to talk more, but her mind had already moved on. It was a brief, unexpected moment that blesses Jim to this day. “With her mind as affected by dementia as it was, there was still a place for God in there.”

The next day, before Jim left to catch his flight, he stood in the driveway and had a premonition that it might be the last time he would see his mother alive. “Can I pray for you?” he asked. Then like a pastor, and like a son, he blessed her.

The next time he saw his mother was at her funeral. Soon after, his stepfather called. “You have no idea the impact your prayer had on your mom and me,” he told Jim. “There was a change in your mom. A peace came over her.” His stepfather, raised a nominal Lutheran, began attending church again.

For Jim, his mother is one fruit of his father’s legacy that somehow held onto the vine. And who knows? Perhaps there are buds forming on that vine yet.

Like Jim, Mike walked away from faith out of disgust with “organized religion.” Mike remembers overhearing his father talk about a deacon who owned the local telephone company and went to visit an older homebound woman who couldn’t pay her phone bills. The deacon munched on her cookies, drank her tea, and—just before he left—unplugged her only connection to the outside world.

“I just thought he was the most evil man I ever met,” Mike recalled. If a deacon could act like that, what was the point of Christianity?

But Mike liked his father’s Christianity. His father’s faith seemed to have the power to tame The Demon. His seemed consistent, authentic, loving. “He was right there with people, working with blood and guts to do real stuff,” Mike said. Mike didn’t believe, but he could tell when someone genuinely did.

Mike is in Jim’s prayers. In September of 2022, when Mike, a train enthusiast, mentioned he was speaking at a railroad convention, Jim dropped everything and hopped on a train from Arizona to Washington to join him. As always when they got together, the two brothers sat and talked for hours.

One time, Mike commented, “Jimmy, after everything you’ve gone through in ministry, why keep doing it?”

“Well, Mike, I’m not working for man,” Jim said. “I’m working for God. And wherever he puts me, I’m content.”

Mike said, “That’s an answer I would expect to hear from Dad. That’s the way he lived.”

Later, on an Amtrak returning home, Jim felt certain: “God’s got ahold of Mike.” There was a smile in his voice as he reflected on their conversations. “Oh yes, oh yes. No doubt about it.”

Sophia Lee is global staff writer for Christianity Today.

Come Ye Pastors, Heavy Laden

Steve Cuss

The post How One Family’s Faith Survived Three Generations in the Pulpit appeared first on Christianity Today.