I have just finished reading Malcolm Guite’s recent work, Galahad and the Grail. Written in ballad form, Galahad is the first offering in Guite’s attempt to bring these old stories to life for a new generation. It is beautifully published by Rabbit Room Press, and every book should be made with such care. The binding, the paper, the ink and typeface, and the illustrations are all exquisite. Yet they only adorn the exquisite rhyming narrative Guite weaves. His chief aim, I gather, is to help us re-enchant the world through the old stories.

Guite uses a phrase, both in Galahad and elsewhere, for rescuing modern, Enlightenment minds from the immanent frame by opening them to transcendent truth, so that enchantment becomes both the language we speak and the lens through which we see. That phrase is “lifting the veil.” And what can I tell you, except that reading this book helped lift the veil from my own imagination once more?

I delighted in the tales of questing, knights, chivalry, and heroism. But none of it compared to the way virtuous deeds, guided by faith, hope, and love, made barren lands live again. These quest stories do not have human glory or manly power as their end. Instead, they show how a human life given to virtue can make desolate places breathe again with fresh winds and restored vitality. These are places given over to “un-creation” (see Romans 8).

I have been reading this tome aloud to my seven-year-old son, Max. It takes a lot of explaining, but it gives us a chance to luxuriate in the beauty of a poet’s language, and in the process the boundaries of our imaginations are stretched together.

I also listened to it on Audible. Why? Because Guite carries himself like an English hobbit, complete with beard, waistcoat, pipe, and ale. He also has a lovely English accent and a worldly timbre. Hearing him read his own text felt almost liturgical, a kind of leading in worship, even as I drove through rush-hour traffic.

The book closes with several appendices. These are essays on the Arthurian source material, on the imagination of authors such as the Inklings, and on how Guite sees Christianity in and through these Arthurian tales and their history. They alone are worth the price of the book.

Obviously, dear reader, I am recommending this book to you. It is fascinating. If you love the Arthurian legends, enjoy the rhyme and meter of the ballad, and are ready for adventure, this book is for you.

But if you have followed my writing here, you will recall my longing for a kind of communicating, storytelling, and teaching that re-enchants the imaginations of our audiences. I often ask how we can do that, and I often offer tips and ideas for the task. I am happy to report that one way to do it for yourself is to read books like this one. It is not simply that Galahad is a premodern adventure tale. It is also that it comes from someone like Guite. He shares a purpose with Martin Shaw, Norman Wirzba, the Inklings, Paul Kingsnorth, Rachel Carson, Winona LaDuke, and so many others: to introduce you to the something more, the enchantment of the world.

It strikes me as a bit funny how many people set up a dichotomy between imagination, enchantment, and the transcendent on one side and ethics, justice, and social responsibility on the other. The dichotomy is false, and it is destructive.

My own testimony is this: when I read enchanting tales of a world alive, I am drawn toward acts of virtue, courage, and hope. Those are the ingredients of any work of justice. Reading alongside people like Guite and striving for enchantment is not an escape from a world in need of justice. It is how we armor up and make ready for the task!

I have preordered the next installment: The Coming of Arthur, and I anticipate it greatly as my imagination is stretched and my sense of calling deepened. Keep walking my pilgrim friends!

Recently, I have shared a few pieces from a project I am working on with Alan Barnes. It is a “Bestiary of Monsters,” which reflects on famous monsters, why we created them, what they say about us, and perhaps what they say about the sacred. Today I want to share a reflection on Ghosts, because today is All Soul’s Day—thus it is a day when we remember the dead. Remember well, my friends, and enjoy what follows:

Ghosts are pervasive in culture, particularly in the form of stories about the spirits of the dead. Their nature, purpose, and function vary significantly depending on the cultural context. In many Western societies, ghosts are often seen as spirits of the deceased who linger due to unresolved issues or unfinished business. They are commonly depicted in literature and films as haunting specific locations. In cultures such as those in China and Japan, ancestral spirits are revered, and beliefs about ghosts encompass both benevolent and malevolent entities. The concept of “hungry ghosts” in Chinese tradition refers to spirits suffering from insatiable desires resulting from improper burial rites. In some African and Native American cultures, ghosts serve as guardians or guides, playing a crucial role in the community of the living.

Ghost stories are so ubiquitous that the term “ghost story” serves as a major category encompassing numerous spooky tales, whether told around a campfire or during late-night sleepovers. These stories often address existential questions: What happens after we die? Is this life all that there is? Themes of unfinished business, regret, and the inability to move on are prevalent in many ghost narratives. This is why a wealth of ghost stories is traditionally associated with Advent and Christmastime. While this time of year is not typically seen as spooky in the 21st century, it was viewed as such in much of the medieval world, and even in modern times, as exemplified by A Christmas Carol.

During the darker months of the year, people have historically contemplated death, the spiritual world, and the realm of spirits. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the ghost story serves as a lesson from “the other side.” Scrooge is shown what could happen if he does not change his ways; the ghosts haunt him with visions of his past, present, and future—delivering a moral lesson through ghostly benevolence. However, not all ghosts or ghost stories are so well-intended.

Reflection—Why Do We Tell Ghost Stories?

Perhaps the greatest fear elicited by ghosts is the fear surrounding death, the ultimate unknown. The mysteries surrounding life after death and the finality of death create space for storytelling and speculation. This is why an NPR radio show/podcast such as Spooked can be so popular that it airs during hours when children might hear it. (On a side note, my kids listen to Spooked 12 months a year).

One of the greatest ghost stories in the American canon is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It tells the tale of Ichabod Crane, a superstitious itinerant teacher, and his witching hour encounter with the Headless Horseman. While the story suggests that the ghost was merely a prank by Brom Bones, Ichabod’s romantic rival, the encounter still frightens the schoolmaster away from the village, leaving Katrina Van Tassel to Brom Bones himself. Washington Irving’s masterpiece weaves superstition, local lore, and ideas about the supernatural together to create an enduring tale that has been remade countless times.

Aside from the threat of a headless horseman hunting for a head, what is so terrifying about death in this story—or in any ghost story? The questions surrounding death are numerous, filling the void with speculation. Perhaps we struggle to imagine that our lives could simply end, that our selves could become extinct. If we persist, then how will we exist? Will we be doomed to repeat one task forever? Paranormal psychologists refer to this type of haunting as “Residual Hauntings,” where people report seeing a ghost occupying the same place repeatedly, performing the same activity day after day, perhaps like an unconscious Sisyphus. Alternatively, the afterlife could be a mere half-existence, lacking vitality and fulfillment. For some, non-existence might not be troubling, but for others, it is indeed a terrifying idea.

The Headless Horseman, if that old specter is real and not just Brom Bones in disguise, seems to have unfinished business. This illustrates a second reason why ghost stories evoke fear: they conjure feelings of regret. Regret is tied to loss, missed opportunities, and mistakes. The hauntings of Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ tale stir feelings of regret about lost innocence and time poorly spent in self-serving miserliness. The Headless Horseman, once a Hessian soldier, embodies a profound sense of loss. Locals tell his story to warn each other of his ongoing search to find a suitable replacement—he will not miss an opportunity to regain his head.

What can we learn from these ghostly fears? First, the mystery of death is of existential significance for human speculation. By nature, it is a true mystery, often forming the basis of traditional religion as well as folklore. To address the anxieties that arise from such mysteries, we can either seek relief through stories of hope or find a way to psychologically accept death as an inevitable fate, living in spite of it.

Of all the faith traditions significant to Western culture, Christianity offers some of the most robust teachings of hope concerning death and life after death. A popular yet often misunderstood interpretation of the faith suggests that eternal reward (heaven) or punishment (hell) awaits us all on the other side of the grave. Setting aside themes of grace and judgment, is this truly the best possible outcome from a Christian perspective? The archetype of Christianity is Jesus Christ, and how did things go for him after he suffered state-sponsored execution? Christ was resurrected from the grave. If St. Paul is an expert in Christian faith, his correspondence with the Corinthian church suggests that the fate of those found with Christ in life will be the same as Christ’s—resurrected, embodied, restored life. In a world fearful of the grave, which might offer a lesser existence, a disembodied and regretful life, or even worse, no life at all, the Christian hope is for a resurrected life that is restored and glorified to a state untainted by sin or evil. This means lives—and missing heads—restored without the blight of war, the need for mercenaries, or the nasty pranks of romantic rivals.

However, the more nuanced fear that ghosts elicit is associated with regret. The phrase “the ghosts from the past” describes memories, experiences, and emotional vulnerabilities that haunt and loom over a person. This concept comes from our understanding of ghosts as entities trapped in moments of their lives until they can resolve their unfinished business, much like the character Sam Wheat in Ghost, who needs to address the injustices obstructing his deep love for his partner, or the spirit of Samantha Kozac, who requires the house’s inhabitants to find her murdered body in Stir of Echoes. While these cases deal with injustice, sometimes it is the regret of the ghost itself that the story seeks to address. This is the reason Dr. Malcolm Crowe in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is unable to move on. He haunts the world as a spirit on a psychological quest fueled by guilt. His regret over failing a former patient manifests as a need to “fix” the situation by helping another child, a major protagonist in the story.

The fear we face over themes of regret makes ghost stories a form of memento mori. Memento mori is a Latin phrase that translates to “remember that you must die.” It serves as a reminder of the inevitability of death and the transient nature of life. This concept encourages individuals to reflect on their mortality, prompting them to consider the value of their actions and the legacy they leave behind. Memento mori has been a prevalent theme in art, literature, and philosophy throughout history, particularly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It often manifests as a symbolic representation of death, such as skulls, hourglasses, wilting flowers, or decaying objects, which serve as reminders of mortality. As an intentional practice, memento mori has been utilized by ancient and contemporary Stoics, Christians, and even overlaps with Buddhist philosophy and practice. Essentially, by reflecting on ghostly regrets, audiences can confront their choices about living their own lives, ensuring they do not end them in regret or with unfinished business.

This reflection on regret underscores a profound psychological and spiritual need for people to learn to be kind to themselves. Forgiveness is not merely a deep personal task we must extend to those who have wronged us; it is also one we need to learn to offer ourselves. Lives filled with regret are often lives stuck from pursuing what is good, beautiful, and true. Ghost stories, especially modern ones, are adept at illuminating such needs.

As has been widely noted, cultures create or utilize monsters to express their contemporary concerns and anxieties. This applies to ghost stories as well. One animating concern of today’s culture is the ambivalence we feel about embodied existence. It is not uncommon to hear technologists proclaim that we are on the cusp of a transhumanist moment in our species. A fundamental dream of the transhumanist movement is the ability to download our personalities, memories, and interior lives into a digital format that may persist beyond the death of our bodies, allowing us to live indefinitely. The future of humanity is intimately tied to machines of our own making, which reminds us of ghostly figures. In both cases, we encounter disembodied consciousness that persists beyond, and independently of, a physical body bound to its basic needs and tendency toward decay.

Can one have a memory without a body? Does the body help individuals remember? Machines may have navigation uploaded into their systems, but do they understand the feeling of walking east toward the rising sun with a gentle breeze at their backs? Can disembodied algorithms wonder? All these questions mirror those we can ask about disembodied spirits, suggesting that ghost stories might help us navigate the technological shifts our society is experiencing.

Ghosts can terrify us, and when they do, we can recall the old Scottish prayer:

From ghoulies and ghosties,
And long-legged beasties,
And things that go ‘bump’ in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

Perhaps such a prayer will provide divine assistance against all that haunts you. Or perhaps you will be charmed by its arcane language and smile at its whimsy—maybe that will alleviate what haunts you.

However, do not forget that ghosts can terrify us by revealing many things that already trouble and torment our minds. This is how two of the best new ghost stories—both televised series—function: The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. In both series, ghosts and hauntings serve as powerful metaphors for the characters’ unresolved grief and emotional turmoil, illuminating the complex interplay between love and loss. In Hill House, the specters manifest the trauma and pain of past experiences, revealing how deeply ingrained fears and unaddressed emotional wounds can haunt individuals and families long after the initial events have passed. The house itself becomes a character, embodying the weight of loss and the memories that refuse to fade, forcing the characters to confront their collective pain. Conversely, Bly Manor approaches the theme of haunting with a more poignant lens, where ghosts symbolize the enduring nature of love and the sacrifices made for it. The spirits represent unresolved emotions and the burdens of memory, illustrating how love can transcend death while simultaneously highlighting the sorrow that accompanies such connections. Both stories poignantly explore how the presence of ghosts compels characters to face their fears and confront the emotional scars left by loss, ultimately leading to a deeper understanding of their relationships and a path toward healing.

For those seeking healing and freedom from their mistakes, bad deeds, and sins of omission, here is a well-worn prayer for you:

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen.

I have been reading Malcolm Guite’s latest book, Galahad and the Grail, and it has made me notice what his public work has been about lately: re-enchanting the world for people who live under the weight of disenchantment. It is as though modern rationality has drained the magic out of the world, something Max Weber saw coming more than a century ago when he wrote of the “disenchantment of the world.” I have also been following Lee C. Camp’s wonderful podcast No Small Endeavor, where he has done a series of interviews called “The Ache,” all about our longing for enchantment and transcendence, for something more than materialism can offer our deepest desires.

I am glad to find these voices. I wrote my PhD on the ecological crisis and Christian thought, and I often go on about the need to recover the ways Christianity actually enchants the world, despite the accusation that it was a disenchanting force. (Maximus the Confessor is my favorite counterexample.) So I have been asking how I can help others re-enchant their view of the world. My primary public role is preaching, and so the question becomes: what can I do through public speaking to shape and reshape the imaginations of those who listen?

Here are some practical ways you can help enchant the imagination through your teaching, preaching, and other public communication.

1. Get away from your notes. Perform your message with energy and imagination. This lets ordinary things come alive. Use imagery, storytelling, and dynamics rather than PowerPoint or a tightly held script. The act of speaking needs a spark so people can feel the spark that is all around them.

2. Practice your storytelling. Facts and ideas change minds, but stories change lives. We are story-formed creatures who experience and tell stories, and when we tell them well, we place listeners inside worlds. Entering a world is one of the ways people learn to reimagine their own.

3. Find moments of whimsy. Playfulness, humor, and witty connections delight the mind. You can bring whimsy through story and joke, but also through examples drawn from unusual or niche corners of the world. Showing how an extremely particular story still holds universal concerns is a way to slip a little whimsy into a message. Listeners feel delight, see connections, and find the world simply more interesting.

4. Study poetry. We should do this for its imagery and metaphor, but also to become more masterful with language itself. “Enchantment” holds “chant” in its root. There is something spellbinding about language, and it can make the world meaningful in new ways. We must learn to use the gifts of language in the broadest sense, so we can weave a spell of meaning for listeners who are busy, distracted, or not paying close attention.

5. Perform paying attention. Be someone who notices things. The world is what we attend to, and most of us miss so much of it. As leaders, we must practice attentiveness ourselves and then perform it publicly, noticing the small, the overlooked, the unexplained, the mystifying, and, dare I say, all that is magical about the ordinary world.

6. Go deep in a specific area, and talk about it. The more you know about a thing, the more mysterious and wonderful it becomes. While I was on medical leave for liver disease, I fell in love with studying fungi, and as a kingdom of living things they are mind-boggling. I can rattle off facts and figures that will wow you. The same is true of any subject: birds, trees, river avulsions, the size of the Milky Way, canine hearing, the age of sharks. You get the idea. The world is interesting. Be interested, and go deep. It will help you speak to the majesty of the world.

7. Pay attention to world-building. You do not have to study fantasy, but notice the stories where whole worlds are built: film, television, role-playing games, video games. World-building stretches and shifts the imagination, and it can help you show people where they stand in the drama of real life.

8. Avoid AI for content. AI generates language from patterns in what has already been written. To find an original voice, you have to come at things through your own mind and experience. What you share back into the world will then be refracted through your uniqueness, and it will meet other people in theirs.

9. Resist the urge to apply too quickly. Your teaching and preaching should have lessons and “what now?” moments. But let people turn their imagination toward wonder about God, the world, and the self. Let them luxuriate in meaning found in contemplation, not merely application.

10. Let silence have its place. Modern people are not silent enough. In silence we listen, and in listening comes a haunting sense of something more.

Bestiary—mummies

As a boy, I was fascinated by the classic Universal monsters. I loved them, though I was rarely frightened by them. That was especially true of The Mummy.

Years later, I asked my mother what made The Mummy so terrifying when she was a child. She smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we were just easier to scare back then.”

Her smile told me she understood the problem. It’s difficult to fear a corpse wrapped in old bandages, shuffling along at a snail’s pace, in an age when monsters leap from the shadows, wield knives from razor-fingered gloves, or chase their victims with chainsaws.

Yet perhaps that is precisely why the mummy deserves another look. Monsters rarely endure generations unless they continue to express something true about the human condition. Beneath the dusty wrappings lies one of humanity’s oldest fears.

Perhaps The Mummy’s antiquated horror is the reason that the 1932 classic’s remake in 1999 was less a horror film than it was an action-adventure film in the style of a George Lucas or Steven Spielberg summer blockbuster film. But do not let the familiarity or the nostalgia of The Mummy fool you. The creature itself is very much a monster emerging from universal human fear.

Just what is a mummy beyond a bandaged member of the walking dead? In its simplest form, a mummy is a human body intentionally or naturally preserved after death through chemical treatment, freezing temperatures, or other environmental conditions. In other words, mummies are not merely the stuff of horror films—they are historical artifacts. Archaeologists have discovered them in frigid regions where the cold naturally preserved the dead and in ancient cultures that intentionally mummified their deceased as part of their burial practices. Of these, the ancient Egyptians are by far the civilization most closely associated with the mummy.

Unlike other monsters such as vampires, werewolves, or witches, mummies were not monsters in the lore of ancient peoples. Mummies mostly got their promotion into monstrous lore in modernity, especially in the Victorian era.

Several things converged that enshrined this character into the horror pantheon:

• Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt (1798)

• European Egyptomania

• Archaeological discoveries

• Colonial looting of tombs

• Public “mummy unwrapping” parties in Victorian England

The Victorians literally bought mummies, displayed them in museums and private drawing rooms, and even held “mummy unwrapping” parties where ancient corpses were ceremonially opened for the entertainment of curious guests. Such spectacles reflected Victorian culture’s remarkable fascination with death. Cemeteries were often treated as public parks where families gathered to picnic among the graves. Post-mortem photography preserved the likenesses of deceased loved ones, and inventors even designed elaborate “safety coffins” equipped with bells and other mechanisms in the unlikely event that someone was buried alive. Death was not hidden from Victorian life; it was contemplated, ritualized, and, at times, strangely domesticated.

The Victorian death fetish is the primary reason mummies populated the stories of their vaulted-ceiling salons. This all makes sense, because the Victorian age is one where Science is winning sway over premodern superstition, yet one where so much about death seemed unpredictable. Indeed, death lived everywhere and stopping it seemed so pointless with cholera, typhus, diphtheria making death part of everyday life.

Yet by the twentieth century, the mummy had largely fallen out of fashion. Death still came for everyone, of course, but advances in medical science made it more predictable while dramatically reducing the threat of many once-deadly diseases. The mummy no longer seemed to embody the anxieties of the modern world.

Even so, it is worth noting that in 2026 a new Mummy film reimagines the classic monster, and in 2027 Brendan Fraser is set to reprise his role as Rick O’Connell in The Mummy 4. Is there new life in this old monster of decay?

Perhaps the answer is simple nostalgia. Hollywood has long discovered that beloved intellectual property is often a safe investment, and audiences are eager to revisit the films of another generation. But Lee Cronin’s new interpretation invites another possibility. What if the mummy is returning because it once again speaks to the fears of our age? If monsters survive across generations, it is rarely by accident. They endure because they continue to give shape to the anxieties we struggle to name.

Reflection

So, why do mummies scare audiences? How did the creature lumber into our darkest thoughts? Obviously, mummies touch on a pedestrian human fear—death. The mummy is a character that blurs the line between life and death much like the zombie. And we are never comfortable when that line is blurred.

But there is more to The Mummy than our apprehension of death. Ever notice that mummies are creatures of the past who prey on the present? Perhaps the mummy shows us that there are ways in which our past can be as monstrous as our unknown future!

Mummies evoke the fear of the past returning to haunt us. They also awaken another, quieter anxiety: the fear that we ourselves will one day be forgotten. Beyond that, they stir a numinous fascination with civilizations that remain just beyond our grasp. We have fragments of ancient Egypt and other lost cultures, but only glimpses into their worldview, technology, and beliefs. The mystery itself invites speculation.

One need only glance at the “Ancient Aliens” phenomenon to see this impulse at work. Its proponents often employ what might be called an “alien of the gaps” approach, attributing misunderstood monuments and engineering feats—pyramids, temples, and astonishing stonework—to extraterrestrial intervention rather than human ingenuity. I have no interest here in debating the existence of alien life. My point is simply that the ancient world exerts such a powerful hold on the modern imagination that, in the absence of understanding, we are tempted to fill the gaps with increasingly fantastical explanations.

The mummy is born from that mystery. It is the embodiment of a civilization that still speaks to us, even though we can no longer fully understand its voice.

The past can be monstrous, and it wears many disguises. The mummy is one of them. What lies behind us that we hope to forget? And what have we forgotten that we never should have?

Galadriel captures this beautifully when she reflects on the One Ring in Tolkien’s epic:

“Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the Ring passed out of all knowledge.”

The mummy is another kind of MacGuffin—a symbol standing in for the things that should not be forgotten. It reminds us that the past is not merely behind us; it continues to shape us, whether we acknowledge it or not. In that sense, the mummy is a profoundly conservative monster—not in the partisan sense of the word, but in the older sense of conserving memory, wisdom, and inheritance. It warns us that a people who lose their past may also lose themselves.

It makes the most sense that people of modernity would be fascinated with mummies as a way of being haunted by the past, because modernity did its best to cut itself off from the past.

Philosophers and historians have noted how unique it is that the modern period was the first period in human history named by its own inhabitants. Typically, epochs are named by later observers, but not so with moderns. The name modern itself means “right now.” It was as if there was a point when the Western intelligentsia said, “ok, that is it, we are modern. We are ‘right now!” Other asked “what does that mean?” “Well,” said the intelligentsia, “it means that whatever we are, we are not the past. And we are certainly not beholden to old ways of thinking or commitments like: superstition, religion, ethnicity, family, or whatever. We are looking only at our future.” The modern imagination makes an idol out of the future and proposed progress. And it does so at the detriment of past knowledge.

Every now and then, a creature from the past creeps up behind a culture obsessed with the future. Modernity, convinced that progress always lies ahead, rarely notices the slow approach of forgotten wisdom until it is too late. Like the mummy itself, the past moves slowly—but it has a remarkable way of catching us.

A profound moral and spiritual lesson from The Mummy is this: do not neglect the past or do so at your own peril. In the realm of theology, specialists neglected the past. Modern thinkers stopped reading Thomas Aquinas as well as some Church Fathers. They only read “manuals” of their thinking. Think “reader’s digest” versions of the great minds. When a movement of thought in 20^th century theology started focusing on the primary texts again, it brought the fresh realization that the medieval and ancient thinkers were not only brilliant, but they had considered the same issues and problems we are only now considering—and they have much to say that is useful. We ignore them at our peril.

Colonialism has similarly disregarded indigenous learning. The “more modern” and thus “more advanced” society blew in, assumed the indigenous inhabitants to be barbaric and stupid, and lost so much learning that was gained through generations of living with a place, observing its rhythms, and gently operating within its circular patterns of life and death. A great example of this is ecological lessons of controlled burning. For generations, Indigenous peoples in Australia and North America practiced what is now called cultural burning. They intentionally set small, carefully managed fires that cleared away underbrush, encouraged new growth, and reduced the fuel that eventually feeds catastrophic wildfires.

When European settlers arrived, many dismissed these practices as primitive or even dangerous. In many places, governments outlawed them altogether, convinced they knew better.

But they didn’t.

Over time, forests became choked with dead vegetation. What had once been managed through frequent, low-intensity fires became tinderboxes waiting for a spark. Many of the massive wildfires we see today are, in part, the consequence of ignoring the wisdom of those who knew the land best.

Today, ecologists and land managers are rediscovering what Indigenous communities had understood for centuries. Tribes like the Karuk and Yurok in California are once again using cultural burning to restore forests, improve biodiversity, and reduce the risk of devastating fires.

There is a lesson here that extends far beyond forestry. We have a habit of assuming that the newest ideas are the wisest ideas, or that technological sophistication always surpasses ancient wisdom. But sometimes the people we dismiss as “behind the times” are the very ones who have learned to pay the closest attention. Wisdom is not always found in innovation. Sometimes it is found in humble, patient observation of God’s world.

G.K. Chesterton applies a heuristic when thinking of change and progress. It is often called “Chesterton’s Fence.” He wrote about it in his 1929 book The Thing:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Ignorance is not to be confused with progress. Asking “why” of the ugly or misunderstood fence placement is the first and most wise move of any such reformer. His principle is a middle path between a “let’s always keep it this way” attitude and “change is good because its change” one.

A song that might help us think through the dangers of forgetting and future generations is from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. It is called “Teach Your Children,” and it is about handing down knowledge that is the most important of all:

You, who are on the road
Must have a code you try to live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a goodbye

Teach your children well
Their father’s hell did slowly go by
Feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s the one you’ll know by

Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you

And you, of tender years
Can’t know the fears your elders grew by
Help them with your youth
They seek the truth before they can die

Teach your parents well
Their children’s hell will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s the one you’ll know by

Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you

Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you

Ooh, and know they love you
And know they love you, yeah
And know they love you

But what if we are not only afraid of the mummies in our collective past? What if we are afraid of becoming the mummy ourselves?

That is another layer of the monster’s horror. What if one day we find ourselves alone, surrounded by the artifacts of our lives, while we slowly fade from the memories of everyone else? What if we become relics of a life once lived?

Few works capture that fear more poignantly than Johnny Cash’s rendition of the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt. In the accompanying music video, Cash is surrounded by the relics of his youth and fame. Photographs of loved ones, treasured possessions, and a lavish banquet table all testify to a life richly lived—yet he sits alone among them. As he sings of pain, regret, and memory, the imagery takes on an almost Eucharistic quality. Wine is poured out as though his own life were being offered like a drink offering, and the weight of mortality hangs over every frame.

The song asks a haunting question: What have I become?

It is, in many ways, the question of the mummy.

When Trent Reznor first heard Cash’s version, he famously remarked that the song no longer belonged to him—it now belonged to Johnny Cash. That is because Cash transformed a song about addiction and self-destruction into a meditation on aging, memory, regret, and mortality.

Yet even after the music fades, the deeper question remains: What happens when we begin to feel like the mummy—surrounded by the things we spent our lives accumulating, yet increasingly forgotten by the world around us?

The gospel offers a different way.

It reminds us that the measure of a life is not found in what we preserve but in what we give away. We are remembered not because of the possessions we leave behind, but because of the love we have shared, the lives we have touched, and the treasures we have stored where neither moth nor rust can destroy them.

Jesus put it this way:

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19–21)

The mummy spends eternity clinging to what remains of the past. Christ invites us to invest ourselves in a future that death cannot steal. The mummy is wrapped in grave clothes, trying desperately to preserve what is fading away. The risen Christ leaves his grave clothes behind.

That is the final lesson of the mummy. Our hope is not found in preserving ourselves. It is found in resurrection.

Ghosts-Background

Ghosts are pervasive in culture, particularly in the form of stories about the spirits of the dead. Their nature, purpose, and function vary significantly depending on the cultural context. In many Western societies, ghosts are often seen as spirits of the deceased who linger due to unresolved issues or unfinished business. They are commonly depicted in literature and films as haunting specific locations. In cultures such as those in China and Japan, ancestral spirits are revered, and beliefs about ghosts encompass both benevolent and malevolent entities. The concept of “hungry ghosts” in Chinese tradition refers to spirits suffering from insatiable desires resulting from improper burial rites. In some African and Native American cultures, ghosts serve as guardians or guides, playing a crucial role in the community of the living.

Ghost stories are so ubiquitous that the term “ghost story” serves as a major category encompassing numerous spooky tales, whether told around a campfire or during late-night sleepovers. These stories often address existential questions: What happens after we die? Is this life all that there is? Themes of unfinished business, regret, and the inability to move on are prevalent in many ghost narratives. This is why a wealth of ghost stories is traditionally associated with Advent and Christmastime. While this time of year is not typically seen as spooky in the 21st century, it was viewed as such in much of the medieval world, and even in modern times, as exemplified by A Christmas Carol.

During the darker months of the year, people have historically contemplated death, the spiritual world, and the realm of spirits. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the ghost story serves as a lesson from “the other side.” Scrooge is shown what could happen if he does not change his ways; the ghosts haunt him with visions of his past, present, and future—delivering a moral lesson through ghostly benevolence. However, not all ghosts or ghost stories are so well-intended.

Reflecting on Lessons from the Ghost

Perhaps the greatest fear elicited by ghosts is the fear surrounding death, the ultimate unknown. The mysteries surrounding life after death and the finality of death create space for storytelling and speculation. This is why an NPR radio show/podcast such as Spooked can be so popular that it airs during hours when children might hear it.

One of the greatest ghost stories in the American canon is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It tells the tale of Ichabod Crane, a superstitious itinerant teacher, and his witching hour encounter with the Headless Horseman. While the story suggests that the ghost was merely a prank by Brom Bones, Ichabod’s romantic rival, the encounter still frightens the schoolmaster away from the village, leaving Katrina Van Tassel to Brom Bones himself. Washington Irving’s masterpiece weaves superstition, local lore, and ideas about the supernatural together to create an enduring tale that has been remade countless times.

Aside from the threat of a headless horseman hunting for a head, what is so terrifying about death in this story—or in any ghost story? The questions surrounding death are numerous, filling the void with speculation. Perhaps we struggle to imagine that our lives could simply end, that our selves could become extinct. If we persist, then how will we exist? Will we be doomed to repeat one task forever? Paranormal psychologists refer to this type of haunting as “Residual Hauntings,” where people report seeing a ghost occupying the same place repeatedly, performing the same activity day after day. Alternatively, the afterlife could be a mere half-existence, lacking vitality and fulfillment. For some, non-existence might not be troubling, but for others, it is indeed a terrifying idea.

The Headless Horseman, if that old specter is real and not just Brom Bones in disguise, seems to have unfinished business. This illustrates a second reason why ghost stories evoke fear: they conjure feelings of regret. Regret is tied to loss, missed opportunities, and mistakes. The hauntings of Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ tale stir feelings of regret about lost innocence and time poorly spent in self-serving miserliness. The Headless Horseman, once a Hessian soldier, embodies a profound sense of loss. Locals tell his story to warn each other of his ongoing search to find a suitable replacement—he will not miss an opportunity to regain his head.

What can we learn from these ghostly fears? First, the mystery of death is of existential significance for human speculation. By nature, it is a true mystery, often forming the basis of traditional religion as well as folklore. To address the anxieties that arise from such mysteries, we can either seek relief through stories of hope or find a way to psychologically accept death as an inevitable fate, living in spite of it.

Of all the faith traditions significant to Western culture, Christianity offers some of the most robust teachings of hope concerning death and life after death. A popular yet often misunderstood interpretation of the faith suggests that eternal reward (heaven) or punishment (hell) awaits us all on the other side of the grave. Setting aside themes of grace and judgment, is this truly the best possible outcome from a Christian perspective? The archetype of Christianity is Jesus Christ, and how did things go for him after he suffered state-sponsored execution? Christ was resurrected from the grave. If St. Paul is an expert in Christian faith, his correspondence with the Corinthian church suggests that the fate of those found with Christ in life will be the same as Christ’s—resurrected, embodied, restored life. In a world fearful of the grave, which might offer a lesser existence, a disembodied and regretful life, or even worse, no life at all, the Christian hope is for a resurrected life that is restored and glorified to a state untainted by sin or evil. This means lives—and missing heads—restored without the blight of war, the need for mercenaries, or the nasty pranks of romantic rivals.

However, the more nuanced fear that ghosts elicit is associated with regret. The phrase “the ghosts from the past” describes memories, experiences, and emotional vulnerabilities that haunt and loom over a person. This concept comes from our understanding of ghosts as entities trapped in moments of their lives until they can resolve their unfinished business, much like the character Sam Wheat in Ghost, who needs to address the injustices obstructing his deep love for his partner, or the spirit of Samantha Kozac, who requires the house’s inhabitants to find her murdered body in Stir of Echoes. While these cases deal with injustice, sometimes it is the regret of the ghost itself that the story seeks to address. This is the reason Dr. Malcolm Crowe in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is unable to move on. He haunts the world as a spirit on a psychological quest fueled by guilt. His regret over failing a former patient manifests as a need to “fix” the situation by helping another child, a major protagonist in the story.

The fear we face over themes of regret makes ghost stories a form of memento mori. Memento mori is a Latin phrase that translates to “remember that you must die.” It serves as a reminder of the inevitability of death and the transient nature of life. This concept encourages individuals to reflect on their mortality, prompting them to consider the value of their actions and the legacy they leave behind. Memento mori has been a prevalent theme in art, literature, and philosophy throughout history, particularly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It often manifests as a symbolic representation of death, such as skulls, hourglasses, wilting flowers, or decaying objects, which serve as reminders of mortality. As an intentional practice, memento mori has been utilized by ancient and contemporary Stoics, Christians, and even overlaps with Buddhist philosophy and practice. Essentially, by reflecting on ghostly regrets, audiences can confront their choices about living their own lives, ensuring they do not end them in regret or with unfinished business.

This reflection on regret underscores a profound psychological and spiritual need for people to learn to be kind to themselves. Forgiveness is not merely a deep personal task we must extend to those who have wronged us; it is also one we need to learn to offer ourselves. Lives filled with regret are often lives stuck from pursuing what is good, beautiful, and true. Ghost stories, especially modern ones, are adept at illuminating such needs.

As has been widely noted, cultures create or utilize monsters to express their contemporary concerns and anxieties. This applies to ghost stories as well. One animating concern of today’s culture is the ambivalence we feel about embodied existence. It is not uncommon to hear technologists proclaim that we are on the cusp of a transhumanist moment in our species. A fundamental dream of the transhumanist movement is the ability to download our personalities, memories, and interior lives into a digital format that may persist beyond the death of our bodies, allowing us to live indefinitely. The future of humanity is intimately tied to machines of our own making, which reminds us of ghostly figures. In both cases, we encounter disembodied consciousness that persists beyond, and independently of, a physical body bound to its basic needs and tendency toward decay.

Can one have a memory without a body? Does the body help individuals remember? Machines may have navigation uploaded into their systems, but do they understand the feeling of walking east toward the rising sun with a gentle breeze at their backs? Can disembodied algorithms wonder? All these questions mirror those we can ask about disembodied spirits, suggesting that ghost stories might help us navigate the technological shifts our society is experiencing.

Ghosts can terrify us, and when they do, we can recall the old Scottish prayer:

From ghoulies and ghosties,
And long-legged beasties,
And things that go ‘bump’ in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

Perhaps such a prayer will provide divine assistance against all that haunts you. Or perhaps you will be charmed by its arcane language and smile at its whimsy—maybe that will alleviate what haunts you.

However, do not forget that ghosts can terrify us by revealing many things that already trouble and torment our minds. This is how two of the best new ghost stories—both televised series—function: The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. In both series, ghosts and hauntings serve as powerful metaphors for the characters’ unresolved grief and emotional turmoil, illuminating the complex interplay between love and loss. In Hill House, the specters manifest the trauma and pain of past experiences, revealing how deeply ingrained fears and unaddressed emotional wounds can haunt individuals and families long after the initial events have passed. The house itself becomes a character, embodying the weight of loss and the memories that refuse to fade, forcing the characters to confront their collective pain. Conversely, Bly Manor approaches the theme of haunting with a more poignant lens, where ghosts symbolize the enduring nature of love and the sacrifices made for it. The spirits represent unresolved emotions and the burdens of memory, illustrating how love can transcend death while simultaneously highlighting the sorrow that accompanies such connections. Both stories poignantly explore how the presence of ghosts compels characters to face their fears and confront the emotional scars left by loss, ultimately leading to a deeper understanding of their relationships and a path toward healing.

For those seeking healing and freedom from their mistakes, bad deeds, and sins of omission, here is a well-worn prayer for you:

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen.

We have all seen an invisible man story or two. Film devotees will remember Claude Rains in James Whale’s 1933 Universal monster picture The Invisible Man, adapted from H. G. Wells’s 1897 novel of the same name. Others will fondly point to the “monster of the week” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” (1997). In it, a high school student named Marcie Ross begins to disappear, her body following her sense of isolation. She turns to unconscionable acts, until men in 1990s FBI suits arrive to take her to an undisclosed school for assassins.

Marcie’s is not the only story that ties invisibility to moral corruption. Think of the One Ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It makes whoever wears it invisible: Isildur, Gollum, Bilbo, Frodo. (As if anyone could hold power over so corrupting a force.) In the end it makes monsters of its bearers by turning them inward, toward lower and lower forms of existence. Gollum is what remains of a person after nearly five hundred years of hiding. And this is the power of the invisible man trope: it asks what we would do if no one were looking.

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man (2020) boldly reworks Wells’s story. It moves the focus away from the invisible man and onto the person forced to live under his invisible power. Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) escapes her wealthy, brilliant, violently controlling boyfriend, Adrian Griffin. Soon after, she learns that he has apparently taken his own life and left her a fortune. But strange events convince her that Adrian has built an invisibility suit and is stalking her. Because no one else can see him, people dismiss Cecilia as traumatized or unstable. Adrian uses that disbelief as one more weapon, attacking the people around her and finally framing her for her sister’s murder. When Cecilia at last fights back and the man in the suit is unmasked, he turns out to be Adrian’s brother, Tom. Adrian then resurfaces, claiming he was held captive the whole time, and the question becomes whether he was ever really out of the picture. In the final scene, Cecilia puts on a second suit, turns Adrian’s own methods against him, and stages his death as a suicide.

Whannell’s version works so well because it turns Wells’s science fiction into a story about invisible power. Wells asks what a person would do if he could act without being seen. Whannell asks what happens when someone who already has power over you also becomes literally unseen. The horror isn’t simply that Adrian can disappear. It’s that Cecilia cannot prove what is happening to her. Invisibility becomes a metaphor for domestic abuse, coercive control, gaslighting, and the experience of not being believed. Whannell keeps his monster almost entirely off-screen, and the film’s dread comes from the empty corners of the frame where he might be standing. Even Cecilia reaches for the suit in the end, a reminder that the power to go unseen tempts the wronged as well as the wicked. For all its freshness, the film is still working on the old question: what will people do when no one is watching?

That question is far older than Wells. Its most famous form comes from Plato. In the Republic, Glaucon challenges Socrates to prove that justice is worth having for its own sake, not just for its rewards. He tells the story of a shepherd, the ancestor of Gyges of Lydia, who finds a ring that makes him invisible. Before long the shepherd seduces the queen, murders the king, and takes the throne. Anyone given such power, Glaucon argues, would do the same, because no one is just willingly. The thought experiment asks a basic question: are we good because we desire justice, or because we fear getting caught? Plato spends the rest of the Republic answering it. Justice, he argues, is the health of the soul, and so it is good even when unseen. Tolkien’s ring reads like a long, haunting reply to Glaucon.

The Lessons of the Invisible Man

These stories make us ask whether our acts of justice come from real care for the good or only from concern about how others will see us. Is morality a social construction held in place by communal shame, or is it written on the human heart? It is an endlessly fascinating question, and it easily brings God into the conversation, since a believer can always answer that we never escape God’s gaze. But that answer raises questions of its own. Is God a kind of panopticon, like Jeremy Bentham’s prison where inmates behave because they might be watched? Is that kind of watching enough to keep us in moral check, enough to keep us human and save us from the monstrous? Or is it easy to ignore a God who sees us when we cannot see God?

What I find most interesting in the motif comes through most clearly in the Buffy episode, and it is all about personhood. Everyone ignores Marcie Ross, and that neglect becomes her physical invisibility. People treat her as a non-person until she nearly becomes one. This lands because almost all of us have felt invisible somewhere, especially in high school. From there Marcie declines, like Gollum, into a parasitic existence, living in the crawlspaces of other people’s lives, until she loses her personhood altogether.

Notice the difference. Gyges, Griffin, and Adrian seize invisibility. Marcie and Cecilia have it forced on them. The first is the sin of the powerful who hide. The second is the sin of a community that refuses to see. Both end in monsters.

In the Christian tradition, as in others such as African Ubuntu (“I am because we are”), personhood is defined by relationship: with oneself, with God, and with others. Self-disclosure, being known, is what makes a person. Every version of the trope, from Glaucon’s shepherd to Whannell’s Adrian, asks how much of a person we can remain when we withdraw and hide from one another, or when others hide us away.

Being seen is a basic human need. The Doors sang about how strange people seem when you’re a stranger, “people are strange when you’re a stranger, faces look ugly when you’re alone.” Simon & Garfunkel sang of people who talk without speaking and hear without listening, “People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening.” This is why communities matter. And it is why it matters theologically to remember that we are seen in our innermost depths. Hagar, a slave woman whom no one else saw, was the first person in Scripture to give God a name: El Roi, “the God who sees me” (Genesis 16:13). It matters so much that I will end with another song as a benediction:

Psalm 139 KJV:

Psalm 139

1 O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me.

2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.

3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.

4 For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.

5 Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.

7 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

9 If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

10 Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

11 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.

14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

15 My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

17 How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!

18 If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.

19 Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.

20 For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain.

21 Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?

22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:

24 And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

The identity confusion I wrote about is this: we fancy ourselves a “big tent church.” Our movement has been driven by unity since its beginning, so we picture ourselves as a big tent where almost anyone can find shelter. My first critique is simple. If the first thing you can say about yourself is that you are a big tent, then you cannot be much of anything in particular.

From conversation and experience, I gather that fans of the “big tent” idea mostly mean that we have an open communion table where everyone is welcome. That is true, and it matters. Our tradition was unusual in opening the table to Christians of other traditions and denominations. But that practice is no longer as distinctive as it once was. Many churches now have an open table, and you cannot throw a rock without hitting a church that is all about “welcome” and “belonging,” a place where everyone can find their place.

To me, the big tent, or the open table, is at best a wing of our identity, a secondary marker. What comes first is our near-sacramental commitment to baptism and the weekly practice of the Lord’s Supper. Those practices set our tradition apart among non-Catholic churches. Spoken of rightly, they could make us something like an American via media, a middle way between the sacramental churches and the free-church evangelicals. They grow out of the tradition’s commitment to the basics of church life as we understand them through Scripture. Some call this “primitive Christianity,” others “New Testament Christianity,” and still others simply being “an Acts church.” Because our other great impulse was unity, it makes sense that we leaned into the logic of the open table, finding ways to eat together across differences of opinion.

Some may think my dismissal of the “big tent” label goes against the very foundation of our tradition. I would say I simply want language that keeps us from getting lost in ambiguity, and our tradition, especially the Disciples, slides into ambiguity easily. So I want to offer another way of thinking about the big tent and the open table. I learned it years ago from a layperson in my church.

I had just finished all the acrobatics of description and logic it takes to explain who we are. You know:

• We are committed to the New Testament expression of the church.

• We are committed to unity.

• We are sacramental about baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

• And then the big one: In essentials, unity; in opinions, liberty; in all things, charity.

He listened to all of it and said, “Oh, I know. We’re a Mere Christianity church.”

I asked what he meant.

“Mere Christianity,” he said. “You know, like C. S. Lewis wrote about.”

In that famous book, Lewis set out to describe what is “merely” Christian: the faith in its most basic and universal form, the thread that runs through every tradition of the church. Take the atonement. Lewis doesn’t settle the debates over how Christ’s death saves us. He insists only that it does, and he treats the competing theories as secondary. Elsewhere he observes that at the spiritual center of each tradition, among its most faithful people, the communions are closest to one another, closer in spirit even when they remain apart in doctrine.

Isn’t that what we have been reaching for with “big tent,” or “open table,” or “in essentials, unity”? I prefer my parishioner’s phrase because it is clear. We do not accept everything. What we care about is what is merely Christian. We major in the foundations. Beyond them there is plenty of room for opinion, nuance, and disagreement. N. T. Wright updated Lewis’s idea for a new generation as Simply Christian, and that is our stuff: the simply Christian things.

Lewis famously described mere Christianity as a hall with doors opening onto many rooms. The hall, he said, is a place to wait, not to live, and the fires, the chairs and the meals are in the rooms. Fair enough. But if the Stone-Campbell tradition is a room, it is one furnished almost entirely from the hall, with its door propped open, and the meal is on the table every Sunday.

That commitment, I maintain, makes our tradition unique on the American church landscape. It is worth holding on to.

One of the highlights was a talk by Dr. Michael Babich on why medicine and its practitioners need to engage more deeply with the arts and humanities. I smiled as he described them as tools that help doctors treat human beings, because they make doctors more human, too. I delighted in his musing that art can fuel medical creativity. And I agreed when he suggested that we are more than rational heads floating around in machines (my summary, not his words).

Afterward, I told someone, “This is how the world used to work.” Theological studies has known this for centuries. There was a time when fields of thought were not so neatly siloed from one another. (Yes, theology was once called the queen of the sciences, but that’s not my point here.) From a Christian perspective, the whole world is one. We live in a cosmos, after all. If the world is a gift from God, then any intellectual pursuit, any inquiry into any field, is in some sense a search for part of ultimate meaning. Naturally, our pursuits speak to one another, and we must not surrender entirely to siloed specialization.

Yes, yes, yes: we need specialists. We need people who master a topic or a narrow field. But we must also strive to be well-rounded. If our specialized knowledge is too narrow to see how our little piece of the pie connects to another, we have traded knowledge for a new form of ignorance.

The other day I was talking with a handful of Georgia Tech students, and I kidded them that I wish every one of them had to double major in an arts or humanities degree. “If you’re designing and engineering our world, you’d better understand its heart,” I said. They laughed politely. They’re kind. But I wasn’t entirely kidding. What good is engineering without beauty in mind? What help is innovation without a sense of truth? Is it right to build a society without a notion of justice undergirding the work? We speak of “the arts and sciences” as if they belong together, but all too often we act as if they have little to teach each other.

Throughout the rest of the conference, I was struck by how many people said doctors need to know how to speak with people different from themselves. I was encouraged by how many clinicians were working to understand the psychology of trauma. I was moved by appeals to basic human needs, like the delight of taste. Yes, I was at a medical conference, but what I experienced was human beings trying to make sense of their world. I met caregivers and advocates working to humanize systems for their loved ones. I met people telling stories and listening to others’ stories. I watched doctors and researchers cry with gratitude as several of their patients showed improvement. I saw humanity at work in science, helping humanity.

I’m glad there was recognition that the sciences need the humanities. (Those of us in the theological world could have told you that. ;) But it’s right. If you’re reading this, let me encourage you to widen your scope. Grow a little in an area of inquiry that you’re not used to. It’s okay to try, and it’s okay if it’s hard. In the end, you might just become a little more human.

I’m currently at the National Liver Gathering in Pittsburgh, PA, sitting at a table for The Liver Circle, sharing my story and learning about the growing problem of fatty liver disease and other solvable challenges tied to liver disease. As I meet people who have touched or been touched by liver disease, we trade stories of struggle and survival.

In some ways, I’m an oddball. I have a reputation for keeping my native liver in a jar of denatured alcohol on a bookshelf at home. Most people never get the chance (or the desire) to take home an organ that was damaged beyond repair after a transplant. But fate, providence, and a little salesmanship got me my own private memento

.

Last night, someone asked how I feel when I look at my old liver. Floating in its jar, dissected, hardened, and exceedingly non-liver-like, it stirs up many feelings. One I was surprised to share is compassion. I feel bad for how I mistreated it. I also feel gratitude for the work it did for me, over 500 functions, for more than 40 years. And that, in turn, gives me gratitude and appreciation for my new liver.

When I told my new friend this, my right hand found my scar and hovered over my midsection, right where my liver lives. I patted it the way I might pat my son on the head and said, “I am so thankful to this liver. He is my friend.”

I wasn’t being silly. I was serious and sincere.

Back in my room last night, I realized what a gift this whole experience has given me. It has made me more embodied and more aware of the systems of my body. Ultimately, it has helped me make friends with the body I am.

We are somatic creatures, yet so many of us live almost entirely in our heads, as if they were distant from the rest of us. My liver pilgrimage has helped me break free of that illusion. As I befriend my body, I’m growing in integrity and wholeness.

For that, I am deeply grateful. And I ask you, dear reader—have you found ways to befriend your body? Don’t wait until you have a health crisis to make you connect with your body in more meaningful ways.

I just recorded a short interview my producer Alan Barnes did with me on that same talk. It is short. It is far more general in my reactions to his diagnosis of church decline than my previous post I shared here. You can here the new episode here:

Still, I get the feeling that for someone who wants to feel grounded in their faith, thoughts and feelings of doubt can be disorienting. So here is the first thing I want to tell you: doubt is in no way the opposite of faith. I think it is closer to say that certainty is the opposite of faith. Certainty is an insidious desire that most of us yearn for, and as that desire grows, moments of doubt become even harder to navigate.

Second, let me suggest something that the writers of Scripture knew, that the fathers and doctors of the church knew, that most mystics knew (and know), and that even many a saintly mother knows: doubt is a part of faith. It is important to see faith not as a destination of cognitive assent or of a certain feeling. Faith, to be cheesy, is a journey, and part of the journey is advances and setbacks, ups and downs, insights and confusion. Doubt is just part of the road we travel.

Third, I think it best to make doubt your friend. When you make it the enemy of your mind, you give it an outsized space there. You turn it into a possible monster and then give it air to breathe and grow. But if you befriend it, doubt can help you as you walk the pilgrimage of faith.

How can doubt be a friend, you ask? Doubt and moments of uncertainty are invitations to keep seeking. In any spiritual life, there are moments when God appears to disclose Godself more fully than at others. Then there are “dark nights,” seasons of the soul when God appears further away. Those feelings are just that: feelings. And feelings, important as they are, are not equal to reality. They are data points telling us about ourselves. The feeling of God’s distance is an invitation to search for God. (I have written about this before in another post, “Help What to do When God Seems Far Away”)

Doubt is similar. It is an invitation to keep searching for God. God wants a searching heart more than a certain heart. Certainty can lead to pride, and it can stunt growth. A seeker, on the other hand, is open to learning more and open to growth. God loves the seekers, because they resist getting too comfortable; they resist falling asleep in dogmatic slumbers of faith’s decay and stagnation.

So what should you do in moments of doubt?

• Don’t worry.

• Be curious about your feelings of doubt.

• Let the doubts send you down the road of seeking.

• Remain open.

• Continue to walk the path of faith (which is not reducible to thoughts, beliefs, and the like), even when you are not certain where the next turn will lead.

Grace and peace.

Recently, I hosted Dr. Ryan Burge — political scientist and master of “graphs about religion” — for our annual Fred Craddock Preaching Lectures at Peachtree Christian Church. Prior to his lectures on mainline decline, American religiosity, and polarization in the pews, I had Ryan on my podcast, Complex Creatures, to discuss his new book, The Vanishing Church. Before we recorded, he asked me a question I couldn’t shake: “Why is your Disciples of Christ denomination declining the fastest?”

We didn’t have time to dig into it that day, but after his lectures, I kept thinking about it. Here are my top reasons why the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) — as distinct from the non-denominational wing of our broader Stone-Campbell tradition — is declining in membership, attendance, and church closures faster than any of the other Seven Sisters of mainline Protestantism.

1. We’re built on a dying model of association.
The DOC is declining for the same reason most churches are: it’s built on the decaying voluntary-association model of American society. The modern church’s structure, form, and manner isn’t strictly a first-century inheritance — it was forged in early America, in the same kiln as the Elks, the Moose, Rotary, country clubs, benevolence societies, the Lions, the Jaycees. And as Charles Taylor, Ted Smith, and Robert Putnam have all shown, that mode of organizing society has been in sharp decline since the 1960s.

Religiosity and spirituality don’t seem to be waning in America — but adherence to church as institution is. Every denomination faces this same reality: the structures we built are structures we’re socially leaving behind. What’s replacing institutional voluntary associations? Communities organized around common values, interests, and purpose — what I’ll call a “movement culture.” And these movements are not defined by locality, due to our digital mobility. In short: if it feels institutional, it’s probably struggling (think boards, committees, by laws, roberts rules of order). If it feels like a movement (think virality, missional, passionate), it has a real shot at thriving. Non-denominational and community churches — even when they’re functionally just as institutional as a denomination — feel grassroots, like a movement. That’s no small part of their appeal.

2. We chose the wrong way to become an institution.
The broader Stone-Campbell Movement — note that “movement” is in the name, and it’s a word worth reclaiming — was, at its origin, non-denominational. In becoming a denomination, the DOC sought the fruits of ecumenical work and dialogue. But it kept its non-denominational roots by remaining an institution of loose association. The result: we’re part of an institution that struggles to hold itself together. There’s no unifying person, office, or place. Joe Jones, arguably our greatest theologian of the last century, once observed that our denomination is really led by strong-willed pastors with strong congregations. And our direction ebbs and flows with those strong personalities and their large platforms. Add to that our general and regional ministries with their antiquated names have no clean lines demarcating who does what, and the whole structure becomes genuinely hard to navigate.

3. Our whole tradition has a weak ecclesiology.
We built our identity on unity and on looking as much like the New Testament church as possible — ironic, given how deeply we fell for voluntary-association institutionalism. Those commitments made us distinct, but they also made us porous. We tend to blend in with our neighbors. Our tradition produces people who look like adjacent fundamentalists, evangelicals, and even other mainliners — but far fewer people who are solely committed to being Disciples. I know Methodists and Presbyterians for whom that membership is a deep part of personal identity. I know far fewer Disciples like that.

4. We’re too apologetic about Jesus.
Ryan Burge critiqued the mainline for being too apologetic in its approach to Jesus — not apologetics as intellectual defense, but a kind of squeamishness about saying plainly what we believe: that Jesus is the source of life and redemption. I’ve seen this firsthand. We’re quick to broadcast our commitment to being “non-dogmatic,” or our commitment to social justice — slower to affirm the historic, orthodox claims about Jesus.

I’ve sat in ordination interviews for pastors transferring in from other traditions. Asked why they wanted to become Disciples, many said some version of, “Because you’re open to anyone.” Which is really just another way of saying, “You don’t have many standards of belief.” We may not be dogmatically creedal — but we are still disciples of Christ. I’ll note that that the DOC churches that are growing make no apologies about helping people experience the salvation or healing of Jesus. They want people to “know” Jesus, and they are unafraid to help people who are grieving, going through divorce, battling addictions, feeling alone and so on to reframe their life by the gift of Christ and the ongoing companionship of the Holy Spirit.

I’d also add: we don’t do much theology. We have theologians, plenty of good ones — but their work rarely reaches the church. Most of our intellectual energy runs toward social justice, disconnected from theology (reflecting on God, creation, Incarnation, Sin, Redemption, Eschatology, etc.). It’s immanence without transcendence. We’re told what to go and do, with little connection to why.

5. We’ve forgotten our evangelical roots.
Burge notes that evangelicals are the only group that has grown in recent decades. Strip away the political baggage the word now carries, and remember what it originally meant: people serious about spreading the good news of Jesus, doing justice in the name of his kingdom, assimilating newcomers into community, and pursuing mission with real energy. It’s a shame we’ve largely left that behind. Our tradition is part of the Evangelical legacy far before it was co-opted by politics, we should retrieve its earlier spirit for our own age. I’ll also note that in the DOC churches that seem to be growing there is a common theme: the pastors MAY be theologically/politically (different things) progressive, and their churches MAY be too, but their speech and language sound just like the Evangelical’s. They use simple, relational, and redemptive language about coming to know God through Jesus Christ, etc.

6. We haven’t figured out how to grow structurally, or in terms of systems.
Evangelicals have learned how to run ministry and govern churches without getting weighed down by institutional bulk. Too many of our churches are structurally built to stay small — by governance, bylaws, and operating policy. You cannot grow in a community where there is no room for actual leadership and vision. Growth doesn’t just happen; you have to plan for it, organize for it, and build the structure for the next size up before you actually reach it. Too many of our churches operate like little clubs of association—all are doomed to decay.

7. Our liturgy has become a hodgepodge.
I’ve been in settings where the weight of the sacraments gets flattened — treated lightly to avoid any hint of dogmatism, until reverence, mystery, beauty, and significance all drain out. I’ve also been in settings where we overcorrect, bending over backward to make communion feel more “special.” The result often lands somewhere one preacher in our tradition memorably called “arts and crafts worship.” You don’t need much to make the Eucharist meaningful — gather, say the words, lift the bread and cup, and share. My take: we absorbed too much of the American liberal project and not enough of the sacramental project of Disciples thinkers like William Robinson and W. Barnett Blakemore.

8. We’ve settled for good enough.
It’s good that we’re tolerant, loving, and accepting. But is it too much to also strive for excellence — not just in worship, but in preaching; not just in preaching, but in our media, our flyers, our websites? Too often we look stuck a decade behind, and in programming we try to do too much instead of doing less, better. In a high-attention economy, let’s make the most of our time, offer our best, and make it count.

9. We don’t know who we are.
We don’t know our own identity — what makes our charism distinct in the wider church. I hear often that the DOC is “a big tent church.” I’m sorry, but if that’s your defining trait, you don’t have one. You can’t be defined primarily by not being defined. If what you mean is that we have an open table, then say that — but even that isn’t unique anymore. Open tables aren’t rare.

Here’s what actually is unique about us: we’ve always been a movement seeking to restore the basics. We sought to be neither Catholic nor Protestant. And as a non-Catholic community — arriving at our convictions through basic Bible study (we might have benefited in the first generation if we had theologians with knowledge of broader theological term) — we landed, almost by accident, on a deeply sacramental view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. That’s the strangest and most interesting thing about us. Had we known how to talk about it, we could have been a genuine American via media — a middle path between Catholic and Protestant.

At bottom, we are a eucharistic movement. Call us a table movement if you like; I prefer eucharistic movement — a people who gather around altars in the world and practice the social teaching of the communion meal. There, we look one another in the eye and say: our fates are bound together. Your success is mine, and my failure is yours. This is what Jesus does to us — draws us into deep solidarity and community with one another.

That’s who I think we are at our best. But instead, we keep grasping for an identity built on openness alone — wanting to stand up for others while making sure we never hold a conviction that might exclude anyone. That’s not an identity. That’s an absence of one.

Conclusion

Those are my top nine reasons the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is the fastest-declining denomination in the mainline. What should we do about it…? In my opinion, the following might help:

• Reignite our passion for the communion movement.

• Recover some of the spirit and energy of our evangelical roots.

• Build our churches for growth, not just maintenance.

• Lean away from institutionality and toward a movement identity.

• Remember — and proclaim without embarrassment — that we are disciples of Christ, unashamed of holding orthodox, essential convictions.

• Strive for excellence in everything we do.

But those are just a few thoughts.

What does Coach Lasso do? He sits with her. He says nothing.

Internet commentators call this “holding space” for her. That nomenclature bothers me, but essentially, yes — that’s what’s happening (it is not a bad term, I just tend to bristle at the sound of it). Here’s how I’d describe it instead: he sits in the grief with her. He doesn’t fix it, or try to. He doesn’t offer platitudes — and Lasso is great at platitudes. He doesn’t let the awkwardness of the moment control him. He simply sits, and lets her feel his presence, for whenever — and if ever — she’s ready to share more.

And yes, this was a good bit of humanity on TV.

So — what should you do when someone is grieving, suffering, or having a moment in front of you?

Do that.

It reminds me of Job. You remember the story. Job is a man of great faithfulness, and — due to a challenge from Satan — God allows him to be put through the wringer. He loses nearly everything. Then his friends show up.

The typical hot take from Bible readers is that Job’s friends leave him worse off, burying him in sketchy theological advice. And that’s fair — eventually, they do. But what’s often forgotten is how they start. Job 2 tells us his friends sit with him in silence for seven days and nights. They don’t speak. They just sit with him.

This is the root of the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva. Before Job’s friends make the mistake of offering advice, they hold space — silently — for his pain. And when we do praise those friends, it’s precisely for this: for showing up and saying nothing.

So what do you do in the presence of deep pain, raw feeling, someone whose circumstance is beyond the reach of platitude?

Don’t rush to speak. Don’t rush to offer anything but silent presence.

So I’ll weigh in on Ted Lasso like everyone else: good job, Coach, for showing audiences a genuinely emotionally mature way of being with others. Turns out it’s also theologically accurate — and faithful.

But when I sit with someone who is deconstructing from faith, I tend to see something different.

Usually it’s someone raised in a particular tradition — or, more often, within a narrow version of that tradition. After gathering more experience, or encountering other ideas, they find themselves questioning everything, sometimes setting aside the faith of their childhood altogether. Some return to a faith that’s more reconstructed and nuanced. Others leave for good.

Here’s my confession: I’m surprised people talk about this as though it were new.

As far as I can tell, this is simply what happens when a person moves from a faith handed to them by someone else toward a faith they actually own — or when they go back to the drawing board entirely. In short, it’s part of growing up.

Still, people are genuinely troubled by the disorientation that comes with deconstructing — or reconfiguring — their faith. So the question comes: “Help, what do I do if I’m deconstructing?”

The question itself carries a fear underneath it — the fear of losing faith altogether. I understand that fear. Faith, whether religious or scientific, is a powerful thing to feel slipping.

But here’s a simple answer, and I think a profound one: Do. Not. Worry.

Perhaps this is simply a season — of searching, wrestling, and waiting. Why do we assume faith should be easy, or unchallenged? Why do we expect it to hand us certainty? Faith is not the opposite of doubt — it’s the opposite of that tempting certainty in the first place. Real faith asks us both to accept and to question. To scrap what we find unfaithful or false, and start over where we must.

Seen rightly, what we’re calling “deconstruction” might just be faith maturing. So: do not worry. And do not stop worshipping, and do not stop practicing. Carry your struggle with you into it.

Have you ever read the Psalms? Those poets brought their doubts, their accusations, their questionable thoughts about God right into the sanctuary with them.

Why can’t you?

Listen to The Snake Made Us Human: Joe Gordon on Fear, Scripture, and Creation

Yet it is also not uncommon for believers to experience times when God seems remote—distant, hidden—perhaps the feeling is that God is out of reach.

Have you ever felt that way? It can be a troubling experience, especially for those who are attached to the feelings that come from a sense of God’s closeness.

So what do you do when you’re in such a spiritual season?

1.) Do not despair.

The first thing to note is that this is a common experience—even for the most ardent and faithful. See Mother Teresa. Teresa of Ávila. John of the Cross. And other faithful ones and mystics. They often speak of “dark nights of the soul,” or moments of spiritual dryness. You are in good company.

2.) Realize that God is beyond our reach.

God is ineffable—beyond full comprehension, beyond the confines of human reason. God is beyond creation, and in no way limited by creation. It makes sense, then, that God would be beyond our tools of exploration. God is always a mystery.

So it makes sense that God might seem out of reach at times.

3.) Appreciate the moments of God’s felt nearness.

It’s incredible to recognize that a God who is “wholly-other” than the world can nevertheless make himself known. God shows up. That is a profound reality.

4.) Let this experience become an invitation.

This whole experience—God’s nearness and God’s seeming distance—is an invitation. It’s as if God, revealed in creation, invites human minds into a game of hide-and-seek.

When we take away the “play” language and replace it with liturgical and spiritual language, we might say that this is an invitation to seek after God.

Feeling God as distant should not bring you to despair. It should invite you to seek God further. It puts you on the hunt. It gives your life purpose, and it helps you live more intentionally. It won’t let you take your mind, the world, creation itself, or other people for granted—because God might be hiding just around the next corner. Don’t miss the glimpse.

Ultimately, the real issue is attachment.

While it is true that spirituality is the quest for connection with the divine, we are often attached—to the feelings we get when we sense God’s nearness. Those feelings can become an idol. God, in his mercy, disabuses us of that idol and calls us to detachment: we need to live faithfully without needing to feel certain emotions before we can believe we are “okay,” or before we can think we’re spiritually good.

Remember: feelings matter, but they are not everything.

So if you find yourself missing God—if God feels hidden—try thinking this instead of despairing or feeling guilty:

“God is inviting me to a game of hide-and-seek.”

And then be faithful to play.

Get on the hunt.

Translate

Poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, agrarian theorist, and angry Christian. Berry’s thought transformed my own. Through his poetry and prose, I could never again imagine my relationship to the non-human world in quite the same way. He changed how I thought about place, too: about our commitment to a particular psycho-geographical region, to local knowledge, to neighbors, to the land beneath our feet, and to the communities that make a place a home.

One of Berry’s most beloved poems is “The Peace of Wild Things.” My sister gave me a copy when I returned to work after months of medical leave and a near-death experience. It had a grounding effect on me then. Now I have it hanging on my office wall.

It remains there as a reminder of the peace of ordinary life. Real life. Life lived among the natural rhythms of things.

Berry writes of going to “the peace of wild things,” and that simple phrase has stayed with me. There is something deeply Christian about the movement of the poem. When anxiety about the future becomes overwhelming, Berry does not tell us to think harder, work harder, or master our circumstances. He directs our attention outward—to the world that exists beyond the anxious self. To water. To darkness. To the stillness of creatures. To the wildness that continues without our management.

That matters to me.

Berry reminds me that I have more neighbors than just other humans.

This may be one of the great gifts of his work. Berry had a way of settling me by first doing a little unsettling. He shook me out of my habitual ways of seeing. He made the familiar strange again. He asked me to look more deeply and wonder at the glories and enchantments of life as they actually are.

I think this is why his work has mattered so much to my intellectual and spiritual life. Berry did not offer an escape from the world. He offered a deeper inhabitation of it. He taught me to pay attention to the particular: a place, a field, a tree, a meal, a neighbor, a body, a season. He resisted the temptation to treat these things as raw material for our ambitions. Instead, he taught me to receive them.

That is perhaps the word I most associate with Berry now: receive.

I have spent much of my own life learning to think about Christian faith in increasingly abstract terms. Theology asks large questions about God, creation, humanity, redemption, and the future. Berry continually brought those questions back down to earth. Literally.

He reminded me that creation is not merely an idea. It is the world we inhabit. It is the soil under our feet, the food we eat, the creatures with whom we share our lives, and the places that teach us who we are. It is also the particular place to which we belong.

And perhaps that is why “The Peace of Wild Things” has become more than a poem for me. It has become a small liturgy of attention.

I look at it on my office wall and remember that the world does not depend entirely upon my anxiety. There is a peace outside of me. There are rhythms I did not create and cannot control. There are creatures who know how to live without carrying the entire future on their backs.

Berry’s great achievement, I think, was to make such things difficult to ignore.

He unsettled our assumptions about progress, prosperity, technology, community, agriculture, economics, and even what it means to be human. But underneath the anger was a profound tenderness. He wanted us to recover the ability to love what is close at hand before it disappears.

He wanted us to stop rushing past the world.

That is a lesson I hope to keep learning.

Wendell Berry leaves behind an enormous body of work, but his deepest legacy may be the people he taught to see differently: to notice the land, to know their neighbors, to resist the abstractions that make destruction easier, and to find holiness in the ordinary.

I am one of those people.

So when I look at the poem on my office wall, I will think of my sister who gave it to me, of the strange season in which I first needed its wisdom, and of the man who spent his life reminding us that the world is more alive, more mysterious, and more sacred than our anxious imaginations allow us to see.

Thank you, Wendell Berry, for helping me learn to look again.

And for reminding me that sometimes the way back to peace is simply to become attentive to the wild, ordinary, beautiful world that has been here all along.

As Ted Smith asked that question, the thought of theological traditions and liturgical moments flooded my mind. I thought of reading Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World where he explains the sacramental worldview of the Eastern Orthodox tradition revealed in its liturgical services. Schmemann imagines that in a worship service where the Eucharist is lifted it is as though heaven and earth are united, “The Eucharist of Christ and Christ the Eucharist is the ‘breakthrough’ that brings us to the table in the Kingdom, raises us to heaven, and makes us partakers of the divine food.”¹⁶ I also recalled Josef Pieper ‘s theory of festivity, and how it aroused in my mind that for communities of celebration true festivity and transcendence are inseparable.¹⁷ And I recalled hearing the heraldic words of Rev. William Barber call to a congregation, of which I was part, to greater solidarity with the “least of these,” and as his proclamation combined spoken word, sung refrains, stories, and recitation of the “great cloud of witnesses,” I felt caught up into something more than myself; his words were performative of solidarity and I was part of it.

Then, Smith made a direct appeal to some of those realities. He spoke of the African American church tradition beautifully. He reminded us in that tradition worship services there were often longer than in predominantly white churches. The worship was seen as an event—folks often went out for restroom breaks during the sermon, because sermons did more than just communicate a few bits of “how to wisdom,” they framed an identity, called hearers into a story, and performed pronouncements of justice. Smith also noted traditions that were more sacramental in focus like the Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholicism too did more than communicate Bible truths. Indeed, their services were performative. Something occurs in mass—ultimately grace is conferred and shared with the people. To these examples we can add the many charismatic traditions of Christian faith. However, the sermons or lessons are shaped in these churches, the overall purpose is an experience, not simply cognitive input or propositional truth claims.

Latour and Smith are on to something, and the more I observe the religious landscape of my own country, the more I see their assessments borne out. Take, for example, the global ministry Hillsong. As a pastor-theologian, my years-long observation of this phenomenon has led me to believe that much of its numerical growth stemmed from its music publishing arm. This aligns with Latour and Smith’s arguments—compelling music creates an experience, and Hillsong’s worship songs often borrow the lyricism of popular love songs, instrumentalizing the language of lovers for religious ends. My curiosity about the sudden rise and fall of Carl Lentz, the celebrity pastor of Hillsong NYC, revealed additional elements in their religious communication that amplified their brand. His congregation grew rapidly and included celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Vanessa Hudgens, and Kevin Durant. I won’t rehearse the details of his or the church’s decline here, but I will admit to watching more than one documentary about it—largely because I’m fascinated by stories of churches making headlines.¹⁸

The documentaries included clips of Lentz’s sermons and portions of Hillsong’s most famous praise songs—music so influential it’s sung in both mainline and evangelical churches. If attention is a measure of success, Hillsong sat at the top. On screen, thousands of young people sang with arms raised, emoting in unison, gathered in a solidarity not unlike a music festival. Lentz himself is a compelling communicator: his fashion is cutting-edge, his idioms tailor-made for social media, his physique fit and unapologetically displayed. He speaks with confidence, clarity, and contagious enthusiasm. Hearing him riff on a visionary thread is undeniably exciting.

But after listening deeply, I couldn’t quite pinpoint what drew people in. Many preachers speak with confidence and energy. What sets Lentz apart? Watching more sermons online, I was struck by how little he offered in terms of doctrine, illustration, theology, or biblical exposition. Loud, dramatic, rapid-fire declarations about God’s goodness abounded, yet rarely did he say something the audience didn’t already know or believe. Then it clicked: the draw wasn’t primarily in the content—it was in the spectacle. Lentz’s style felt like a Coldplay concert with a dash of Drake, facilitating a shared experience for thousands of young people in a secular city where religious speech was likely absent from their daily lives. For many, being a young, devoted Christian in New York might feel like being a Resident Alien (1 Peter 2:9–12). The atmosphere itself was the message. Listening to Lentz made people feel part of something new—something worth giving their lives to.

Kara Bettis Carvahlo wrote in Christianity Today of her experiences with the ministries of Timothy Keller and Carl Lentz when she was a young adult in NYC. When it came to Lentz and celebrity pastors, she says:

The nefarious truth is that we, too, are often responsible for creating celebrity pastors. In college, was I hungry for Scripture and gospel-centered community? Yes. Was I also willing to be emotionally titillated, spiritually distracted and even entertained, and looking for a place to belong? Also, yes.¹⁹

The key words here are “emotionally titillated,” “entertained,” and “place to belong.” The powerful mix of belonging and entertainment creates a sensation affiliated with religious experience, no doubt. When Taylor Swift went on her over 2 billion dollar grossing Eras Tour many “think pieces” assessing the affair were featured in periodicals like, American Magazine, The Presbyeterian Outlook, Spectrum, and the New Yorker. Their shared reflection that going to her show was like going to mass or some other related church service was a common one. The authors, all with unique backgrounds and church experience, reflect on the welcoming nature of the community of Swifties and how participation matters. Each one, in their own way, comments on the solidarity produced by singing with such a great cloud of witness eliciting a numinous experience. This experience is known to give you “chill bumps” too, a marker that something profound is happening, no doubt!

If the likes of Latour and Smith are right, how ought we to speak the sacred from pulpits, in classrooms, on retreats, or even on YouTube? It is all well and good to say that religious communication ought to create an experience, or that it is the “end” not simply a “means,” but what are some ways to go about it? I know enough to know that intentions matter, but no matter how well your intentions are, you cannot account for how another person will receive your communication. Nor can you account for their emotional and spiritual state on any given moment. There are always factors beyond one’s control or intention. But if pressed, the surest way I know to evoke any sort of experience of depth out of a person is through the arts. Stories, visual art, music, etc., all have a way of drawing people into an experience beyond propositional fact finding. Art is complex to define. Trygve David Johnson, through developing the metaphor of “the Preacher as Liturgical Artist” cites Flannery O’Connor, “The basis of art is truth, both in matter and mode. The person who aims for art in his work aims after truth, in an imaginative sense, no more and no less.”²⁰ And to respond to O’Connor, Johnson applies this to the role of preacher.

The Preacher as Liturgical Artist assumes that the creative powers of the imagination are given by God to be used in preaching not primarily so that preachers might persuade others, taking over the role of the Spirit, but so that they might offer back to the Father their human gifts that are redeemed in Christ. Therefore, the initial difference between The Preacher as Teacher and The Preacher as Liturgical Artist is that the former puts the focus squarely on human agency, while the latter embraces responsible human action as a way of offering back to God what God has provided humanity.²¹

I admire Johnson for remembering that part of being human is being creative—a creativity rooted in our divine givenness and connected to theological concepts such as creation and incarnation. What most interests me is his claim that when a preacher works artfully, they are, in a sense, fulfilling their purpose: engaging with material, tradition, imagination, and an audience. This means the audience’s response is not incidental; it flows from their own purpose as creative creatures made to respond to beauty. Johnson’s contribution is a welcome one in the field of homiletics, offering a theological justification for preaching artfully. If art can move people and grant them an experience of truth, then artful preaching offers a way out of the “preaching as a means to some other end” cul-de-sac that ensnares much contemporary religious speech.

Can artful communication also teach? Of course, but the distinction I wish to make between preaching artfully and preaching only to share information can be understood by the way the material works within the listener. Preaching to convey information, or didactive preaching, is knowledge transfer. Its aim is to clearly share knowledge between a speaker and an audience. At its worst it is transactional. There is merit in clarity and shared knowledge, but if the goal of religious speech is the transformation of persons, it often comes up short. Art on the other hand has a greater ability to move people. Art can move knowledge from the head to the heart—to knowledge it can add wisdom.

Theologically, it seems to me there is no other faithful way to preach than with an eye toward the artistic. In Scripture, God speaks creation into existence, suggesting a deep connection between religious thought and poetry. No wonder then, that just under half of the Bible is written in the poetry genre. And speaking of “speaking creation into existence,” consider the expansive vision St. Maximus the Confessor gives to the claim that Jesus is the Logos, the “Word of God,” through whom all things were made (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17).

In his famous “difficulty” Ambiguum 7, St. Maximus the Confessor argues that the Logos of God—Christ—is the one through whom everything was created. Maximus writes:

If by reason and wisdom a person has come to understand that what exists was brought out of non-being into being by God, if he intelligently directs the soul’s imagination to the infinite differences and variety of things as they exist by nature and turns his questing eye with understanding towards the intelligible model (λόγος) according to which things have been made, would he not know that the one Logos is many logoi?²²

This is Maximus’ well-known formula: one Logos is many logoi—that Jesus “held together in himself the logoi before they came to be, by his gracious will he created all things visible and invisible out of non-being.”²³ In this vision, the meaning and value of every creature is grounded in Christ, who is both its source and its telos. As Maximus says, “This same logos, whose goodness is revealed and multiplied in all things that have their origin in him, with the degree of beauty appropriate to each being, recapitulates all things in himself (Eph 1:10).”²⁴

For Maximus, creation comes into being through the divine reason, and every creature has its own logos (rational principle) within the one Logos of God. These logoi are the “inner meaning” of each thing—God’s purpose and design preexisting in the divine mind. Every creature’s rational principle participates in and relates to Christ, the one Logos. Humanity’s vocation is to contemplate, discern, and draw the scattered logoi of creation back to their source in him. The Logos is truly present in the world, though often hidden—waiting to be discovered through spiritual vision and theoria (contemplation). This is a profoundly priestly calling: to seek the logoi, hidden in plain sight, and unite them to Christ—a cosmic game of hide and seek.

The logoi hide in plain sight. They can be discerned only through intentional, contemplative seeking—in the realms of nature, persons, Scripture, and history. This hidden structure of reality draws us into intimacy with the world, inviting us to join a kind of sacred hide-and-seek, delighting as we uncover the inner meaning of all things and their coherence in Christ. Didactic communication may sometimes convey these inner truths through rigorous study and shared insights. For instance, one might study a strawberry in the laboratory, learning how it propagates, its botanical classification, its cellular structure, and its ecological niche. Such research can yield facts, figures, and data—but it may still fail to persuade someone to taste one.

There are other truths about the strawberry that can only be learned through the art and craft of gardening. By tending it through the seasons—from seed to harvest—observing which insects are drawn to it, and working to protect its fruit from birds and deer, you come to know it in a deeper way. Then there is the art of preparing strawberries for jam or jelly, where trial and error teaches you not only how to coax the best flavor but also how to serve it—perhaps on hot, buttered toast—in a way that might win me over for life. Both forms of knowledge have their place in the Logos/logoi “hide and seek” game, but it is often the artful approach that stirs people to the work of uniting the logoi with the Logos.

Namwali Serpell has recently written an insightful article for The New Yorker called “The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies.” Serpell’s claim is that movies of all genres are falling into this new literalist style.

When I say literalism, I don’t mean realistic or plainly literal. I mean literalist, as when we say something is on the nose or heavy-handed, that it hammers away at us or beats a dead horse. As these phrases imply, to re-state the screamingly obvious does a kind of violence to art. “A point is still a point!”25

I have been suggesting all along something similar about religious communication: it is often far too literal. Whether in sentimental paintings of Jesus with lambs, moralistic films like Fireproof, or “how-to” sermons, so much of it is so on-the-nose that it misses the subtle, transformative work that true art can accomplish.

Art is evocative. It is suggestive. It tutors the soul, leading the learner toward a greater school of understanding. While not perfect, art simulates religious experience well because it works within you—it stirs, rouses, and awakens new connections between the world and meaning. Those who seek to participate in religious speech would do well to take notice.

Because of this, I am inspired to preach in the style of an artist whose work once stirred my soul in a profound way, bringing me to a personal and emotional realization that the simple dictum “don’t judge lest you be judged” only hinted at. The artist is Sufjan Stevens, an indie folk-pop singer-songwriter. On his 2005 album Illinois, he recorded a track titled “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” The song sets the tragic life and horrific crimes of the serial killer to a sweet, almost lullaby-like melody. The juxtaposition is striking—evil deeds rendered in a soundscape that is tender and inviting. Stevens’ subtle, poetic language draws the listener in more gently than a blunt or aggressive telling might.

When I first heard the song, I was disarmed by the autobiographical detail that Gacy’s father was a drinker. That single phrase sparked a fleeting compassion for the killer. Then came the darker revelation—Gacy dressed as a clown “for them”—a haunting image of disguise masking horror. When Stevens rings the notes on the lyric for them, I feel terror and compassion in the same breath. The lullaby nature of the piece lowers my defenses. I might never have chosen to dwell on this man’s life, but here I am—and I am not looking away.

Toward the conclusion of the song, I realize that Stevens has taken me on a macabre journey. When he describes what Gacy has done to his victims he does so quickly, to spare the listener the indecency of dwelling there in the sinister crawlspace of human depravity. And like a firework exploding into its apex and then its sudden, fading decline, Stevens sings falsetto oh my God. “Oh My God,” is right. Did that really happen? And did I just listen to that song? Did I enjoy it too? The final lyrics of the song turn on the audience. The whole song Stevens has been pointing at the past, at Gacy, the Jaycee near Des Plaines, Illinois. But now the turn, Stevens sings somberly, confessionally these lines: And in my best behavior, I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid. It is easy to look at Gacy’s life and stand in the place of moral superiority. It is nothing to reduce his entire being to banal evil, in fact, that is the common way we speak of people like him. It would be easy to turn the song to the next track and skip over the indecency of reflecting on these nightmares. But Stevens takes us there, holds us enthralled by dark images and sweet sounds, he pushes us to compassion, maybe even empathy at times, and then at the end, he turns the tables. Stevens confesses that he is just as capable of evil as Gacy was. Stevens lets us know that he does evil. And if he does, then you, dear reader, do too. We are all complicit in some sort of evil! When I first heard this song, I trembled at the conclusion, because I went with Stevens through the distaste, judgment, compassion, and then I was forced to deal with the fact that I took pleasure in judging someone else while I conveniently ignore my own evil acts. I was moved. I was disturbed. Still am. But I was stirred.

Fred Craddock would argue that I am talking about an indirect method of communicating in the style of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. “There is a way of speaking and writing that demonstrates an imperialism of the mind and that engenders the same in the listeners and readers, as though ‘I agree’ or ‘I disagree’ completed the transaction,”²⁶ writes Craddock. The moral in Stevens’s song, if there are any are: hurt people, hurt people; everyone is capable of evil; we all have secrets, etc. And if I set out to teach that lesson directly in a study or through a book, the reader might check the mental note: agree/disagree, and that would be the end of it. Craddock praises Kierkegaard’s indirect approach, which again is shared by Stevens in this song, “SK, sought another method,” Craddock declares, “one that would break the imperialism, with the listener or reader experiencing in every corner of mind and hear, ’I am undone!’”²⁷ What straightforward teaching does is “information but not realization,”²⁸ But the artful, indirect approach in Stevens’s song brought to my soul was a realization about the complexity of humanity, it humbled me through honesty and took me beneath the floorboards of unexamined living.

I have often called this song a sermon. In fact, I’m known for calling all sorts of songs, films, and television shows “sermons.” What these share with John Wayne Gacy Jr. is their use of imagination, metaphor, symbolism, narrative structure, and other artistic tools to layer meaning—often in ways not immediately apparent, requiring reflection to uncover. I call them “sermons” because they move me toward some greater truth or purpose, doing so subtly enough that I find myself carried along without retreating into cynical distance.

Actual sermons, and other forms of religious speech, can work in the same way. When artfully designed, they take an audience on a journey—one that brings listeners “down the road” before they even realize they’ve been traveling. This not only lowers defenses; it pushes beyond mere knowledge transfer, opening the possibility for genuine transformation.

In the end, artful preaching participates in the very pattern of creation itself. If, as St. Maximus tells us, the one Logos holds together the many logoi, then the preacher’s task is not simply to explain but to help people see—to draw out the hidden meanings of things until their coherence in Christ becomes visible. This is the slow, careful work of contemplation, but it is also the playful work of hide-and-seek, where beauty and truth are uncovered in ways that surprise us. Preaching and all forms of religious speech that leans into artistry joins the divine act of speaking the world into being, shaping words so that they do more than inform—they form, transform, and invite. In such speech, the congregation is not merely told about the Logos; they are drawn toward Him, awakened to the truth that all things—every creature, every story, every note of music—find their source, meaning, and fulfillment in Christ.

Religious speech is hard. Any form of communication is challenging enough on its own, but when you introduce weighty concepts of religion, communication seems impossible. How would you judge an effective bit of religious speech? Another way to put my question is blunt: what is religious communication for? Some religious folk might answer with one or more of the following: conversion, moral formation, social justice reform, church growth, community organizing/building, or giving voice to calamity.

I am convinced that most people, even the devout, do not consciously think about the purpose of a piece of religious speech like a sermon, but they participate in the communication, nonetheless. Innately, we tend to slide into rhythms of behavior that include religious speech. We speak and we listen to messages and filter them through the cultural and political trends of the day (plus many others). For cultural animals native to late modern capitalism, this means that religious messaging is often judged by its ability to persuade others or gain further attention—we are in the “attention economy,”¹ as many have noted. Church sermons often try to convince listeners to join, show up, volunteer, or chip in the donation plate. Prophetic appeals in front of the courthouses are about convincing society or the ruling bodies to expand their understanding of justice. The popular pundit and psychologist Jordan Peterson uses religious speech to convince young men to take responsibility and find purpose in their lives—doing so with as much fervor as a tent revival preacher.² And since convincing is the aim, it seems to me that so much of what counts for religious speech today is dominated by explaining ideas, knowledge transfer, teaching, and the like. To me, this leaves so much of what passes for a sermon or even a piece of religiously motivated art (poetry, music, film) to fall flat and boring. Perhaps the very best of religious speech should be more than simply about convincing people to some sort of action. I do not think so, or at least I hope for more. The purpose of religious speech is not merely about convincing; it must be about the strangest yet most desirable of phenomena: transfiguration of people.

Recently, an important but under-engaged philosopher put a fine point on the confusion and shortcomings of religious speech in a moving meditation called, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech. That philosopher is the late Bruno Latour, a French catholic from a family of winemakers (dating back to the 17^th century). He was a leading thinker in the philosophy of science and technology writing on science communication, politics, ecology, and modernity. Latour’s work has always had the ability to look at concepts that we widely consider without much thought only then to expose the common concept as a bit weirder and harder to hold after an intentional analysis. His work is important because it can make you do the hard work to really understand the things you take for granted. This is helpful for the question that drives me, because Latour can help us get behind what religious speech does and what we should expect from it. To this aim, what is the point of a sermon? According to Latour it is not simply about information but rather transformation is the goal. But before we explore further, let’s consider the “torments” as Latour understands them.

In Rejoicing, Latour writes in a personal, meandering, and meditative style about what causes him shame when thinking about “religious speech.” His style is not propositional, nor is it scientific, and I am certain that the medium is an attempt to demonstrate the message. This is why his is a book beyond description, rather it needs to be experienced. I think it is fair to say that Latour would agree with my feeling that we are living in a dearth of quality preaching and religious communication in our time. Latour’s feelings are complicated. On the one hand he laments what he hears from pulpits each Sunday. There a clergy person presumes that the sermon, or homily, is the moment of information communication, as if religious “facts and figures” or simple explanation of its content may be delivered like scientific and political fact. But, as he points out, religious speech cannot do that, nor should it even try. It cannot because it is a constant act of translation between worlds, texts, terms, and concepts.³ The knowledge it aims to share is only ever approximate, incomplete, and girded by mystery.

Complicating matters is that religious people tend toward preservation. It makes sense, if you came to understand something as “sacred,” you would no doubt want to hold onto it, to safeguard its meaning and value. Religious people tend to cling on to the way religious ideas are understood and expressed in the past because that is where they have found light and life. This leads to a certain conservatism in religious life. There is more than an aversion to change going on here, on behalf of the religious observer—having a spiritual awakening or experience is not a normal event, so when one takes place in you, you cling onto it for dear life. The irony here is that by holding on to these religious relics of meaning and insight, we hold them in place with such a strong grip they begin to lose their ability to shed insight onto todays or tomorrow’s world. They become dusty, antiquated relics of time, eventually appearing more superstitious than truthful. Indeed, the religious act of translation and interpretation never ceases. Humanity has yet to exhaust the meaning of God or the world, let alone our own subjective selves.

On the other hand, Latour is ashamed of the questions he gets about his belief. In Church Life Journal: A Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life, Paul Lynch writes, “he cannot explain his devotion to anyone: friends, colleagues, students, even his children.” Even though Latour struggles through mass because of what he hears in all the religious speech, he continues to go. The experience is best explained by Latour, himself:

and yet the Scriptures have been properly and faithfully handed down. Anyone can hear them. But then the sermon begins – and the overburdened listener feels like running away as fast as his legs will carry him, for what he fears finding is that, in accepting this heritage, he’s made a bad deal....no mountain of debt will make me give up my heritage. I covet the treasure hidden from those on the inside as much as from those on the outside, from the vendors who no longer know the value of what they are offering as much as from buyers who laugh at this old flea-market stuff.⁴

What is Latour’s primary gripe about “religious speech,” which includes but is not limited to acts such as: preaching, prophetic speech, teaching, liturgy, sacred music, art, etc.? For starters, right and proper religious speech is “never ‘about’ religion. Rather,” according to Latour, “religious speech is that which accomplishes the aims of religion: renewal, conversion, relationship. Religious speech does not convey information; it changes the audiences who hear it.”⁵ But for Latour, we tend to create religious speech, as much as we expect from it. What we expect is the communication of information about reality, moral teaching, metaphysical data—in a word we try to speak religion like we try to speak the sciences with a sort of one-to-one correlation between a stated fact about a thing that is studied, etc. But can one ever have such a grasp on something such as God or the soul? Speaking about the desire to speak of religion in the same tenor as the sciences, Latour calls, with exceeding cheekiness, the “perils of ‘double-click’ communication,” which for him functions with all the succor of a “madwoman in the attic.”⁶

Latour argues that actual scientific research is demanding, and so is communicating its findings, but all of that is masked by this “double-click communication,” because by it, “all difficulties vanish, all paths level out: information becomes faithful communication without any transformation whatsoever, through simple obvious likeness between the copy and the original.”⁷ This double-click communication gives people the illusion that by doing a bit of internet-based reading they understand a thing that was rigorously engaged with and studied in a laboratory with the accoutrements of peer review and lab-to-lab repeatability. Double-click knowledge of a thing is like the knowledge a student can have of Moby Dick by simply asking Chat GPT for a summary, themes, and critique of the book without having entered the narrative through reading and contemplating the text’s use of language, character, and plot. To really know a thing like Moby Dick is to require the transformation of the reader through the subjective journey of reading the text. The same could be said of reading a sacred text like the Holy Bible.

To repeat, for Latour, religious speech exists to transform people. And to make this point, Latour examines the role of angels from the biblical narratives. Claiming that religion does a poor job of communicating information, he says of these “messengers,”

It is precisely the utter lack of information conveyed by the panoply of religious expressions that provides a guarantee that we will never be able to use them to proceed to secrets superior to the secrets of sciences, to loftier mysteries, more exalted spiritualities, less indecipherable gnoses. Do a test: compile a list of everything said by angels in the Bible, despite supposedly being tasked with ‘conveying messages,’ and you’ll learn next to nothing about anything.⁸

Neither the great “pomp and circumstance” heraldry of the angles, their choirs and voices which fill listeners with fear, nor even their individual visitations to young, betrothed couples concerned much new information about God that was previously unknown. Latour announces, “this is because angels do not convey messages; they change those they address. What they transfer is not an information content, but a new container. They do not bring maps offering some hold to beings starved of knowledge – they transform their interlocutors. What they convey are not telegrams but persons.”⁹ Therefore, religion is not a life map, because “religion leads nowhere.”¹⁰ The real purpose of a pilgrimage is not the destination after all, but it is what happens to the pilgrim along the way. It is about the transfiguration of the pilgrim’s inner life. It is about existential and spiritual maturation. As Paul Lynch concludes, “religious speech...does not cover distance; it creates intimacy.”¹¹

For Latour, the language of lovers is a better metaphor for understanding religious speech. Is this saccharine or shallow? No, this language is useful, because when lovers speak of their love, what is being offered is much more than mere information. If my wife asks, “do you love me,” she is not really asking me to repeat the same phrases, ideas, or stories that I have said 100 times before. My guess is that she is not even asking for assurance of my love. If I professed my love 100 times before, then I would have already and quite clearly shared the information about my affections. Yet, as we know, the language of lovers is endlessly repetitive. At the sound of the question “do you love me,” I cannot simply offer the same old answer, but as Latour reminds me, I “also cannot not repeat old formulas. ‘There’s nothing more repetitive than the music of lovers, they always annotate the same story—theirs.”¹² Lynch explains, “sometimes those annotations fail, and they appear to lead lovers to the end. But sometimes the lovers manage to retell their story in a way that renews their love, by ‘twisting, hedging, shifting, redressing, reinterpreting the same episodes.”¹³

Reiterations of one’s love story reveals the pilgrimage nature of a long love—only by looking back over it and rehearsing the stories of twists and turns, ups and downs, joys and sorrows, can one look back and pay witness to the deep changes that occurred to the couple as a couple and as they exist as individuals. And so, it is with religious speech— “retelling the old recreates the new.”¹⁴ Indeed, if the etymology of religion is to “bind back to a source,” then it is a natural religious impulse to rehearse one’s stories and the stories of community.

Latour’s ambivalence about the state of religious education is on target. His meditation shares a lot of truth and wisdom I learned from theologian Ted Smith. Many will have familiarity with Smith’s recent addition to the discussion of religion and secularity through book The End of Theological Education. It is a landmark text for anyone curious about America’s religious trends. Although he draws much on the work of Charles Taylor, Smith’s approach shades more sociological. Specifically, he follows church membership and attitudes toward the professionalization of ministry as they relate to the decline of America’s primary social imaginary, “the voluntary association.” His work shows that declining church attendance is not so much to do with irreligion or a lack of spirituality. Rather it has to do with the diminishment of the voluntary association society which is the primary model of social grouping that America has experienced, and it has been the model for the church of the last 200 years. While researching and writing his book, our congregation hosted Ted Smith to lead a leadership workshop on being a cathedral for a secular age. He was working out many of his ideas on secularity, ministry, and the future of theological education in his presentation to our ministry leaders.

Among all the statistics and trends that Smith used to paint a picture of the growing religious landscape our church was facing, he made many comments about why our society is becoming more secular than previous generations. The section that stuck out to me concerned things that the church has done to increase the pull of secularism. And specifically, what trends in preaching have added to secularity. I sat up in my chair, how could the task of preaching about faith, God, and the supernatural amplify something so opposite? Smith suggested that one of the greatest pitfalls of contemporary preaching is that the sermon has become a “means to an end.” Many homiletics courses have been filled with advice to would-be preachers that they needed to make a “practical application clear.” Personally, I remember a time when I was asked to give a talk during an internship. The talk was to a group of lay leaders and the topic was on some assigned biblical passage that I have now forgotten—it does not really matter. At the end of the talk, my onsite supervisor gave me feedback in the form of a “compliment sandwich”: something to commend, a recommendation, and something to commend! I recall that the commendations were small, minor, and rather underwhelming. He was far more vocal in offering his recommendation, which he introduced with a hearty, “so what!?” I looked confused. So, he continued, “good, you told me about the Bible, and you offered some things many in your audience did not know, but so what? What am I supposed to do with it?”

Recently, I convened a group of clergy from my denomination to hold talks on how we can all improve in our attempts at religious speech. One senior member of our group who had a reputation for inspiring church attendance growth addressed the meeting, “most of the sermons I ever preached had the phrase ‘how to’ in the sermon or in the title. People are practical; they want to know how to improve their lives.” Sermons on leadership, overcoming anxiety, living without regrets, and how to deal with disappointment are common in the world of evangelical church growth preaching, indeed. Ted Smith was right. I recognize in my experiences with clergy colleagues, from my days in homiletics, and a cursory survey of the preaching in the largest churches in our country that the point of religious communication is meant to the end of getting listeners to do something, but what?

Sermons could be an appeal for a moral or ethical change in the listeners. Frank A. Thomas in How To Preach A Dangerous Sermon¹⁴ gives expert thought to the notion of preaching with moral leadership toward the end helping form and challenge society’s moral imagination, for example. And his is a necessary message for today’s religious communicators. Also, religious messages may be designed so that the listeners would give more to charitable causes. Religious speech is often used to tell people how to be of service to others, this is indeed the quasi-religious language of the 12-step program. In our age of secularity or at least “church decline” some messages like the “He Gets Us” campaign are designed to make the message of Christ palatable to groups that may have once felt ignored or judged by traditional expressions of Christianity.¹⁵ Religious communication, it seems, is about getting people to do something or to respond to an appeal. This means that it exists for some other end.

At that point in the Smith’s presentation, he got quiet and leaned in toward the audience and said, “most people who come to church already know the things that they are supposed to do.” It is true, general ethical teaching and principles are shared culturally, they can be found on children’s television (Bluey makes me want to be a better father!), and if you want to dig into unique themes, you can always take in a steady stream of Ted Talks. “So why,” he pressed, “would someone want to sit in boredom for 20 minutes in order to be told to do what they already know they should do?” At once I felt the sting of that critique, but I also knew he was right—deep in my core.

What if my preaching were not merely a means of getting people to do or not do something? Ted achieved his aim. Quite dramatically then, he peered out behind his glasses and deeply into our eyes and said, “what if the sermon (and the rest of worship) was not a means to an end, but what if it is the end itself—what if it is the reason?”

PART II….COMING

I train at Alliance Atlanta, and I know so many wonderful people who gather up the courage to step onto the mat and test themselves—to discover what they have learned, what they are capable of, and who they are becoming.

So I decided it might be worthwhile to offer a blessing for those who take the mat, in whatever form that takes.

What follows is offered in grace.

I pray that it is received in grace.

Courage carries you to the mat.

So does your strength, your cultivated skill, your preparation, and all the hours you have spent getting ready for this moment. Your contest is but a moment in time. It will pass.

And remember: the contest cannot take away what you have already gained by showing up.

You come with honor in your heart.
You offer respect to the one who faces you.
You respect the mat—its traditions, its rules, and its judgment.

Never forget the identity of your true opponent: yourself.

Above all else, you are here to overcome yourself—to overcome fear, doubt, impatience, ego, and every part of you that would keep you from becoming who you are called to be.

Notice your breath. Give thanks.

Offer gratitude for the sacred alignment of body and mind—for the strange and beautiful gift of having a body capable of learning, struggling, enduring, and becoming.

May this mat teach you well. May it lead you to the font of wisdom.

May technique and concepts steady your nerves. You know what to do. Play your game.Trust your training.

Be present. Be in the moment. Be alive in your body. And may you emerge from this contest in full health.

Like Jacob, who wrestled through the night with God, may this bout be another step in your journey toward overcoming. May you grapple honestly. May you roll courageously.

And may you discover, as Jacob did, that sometimes we leave the struggle changed—not because we were undefeated, but because we were willing to grapple.

The fact that you have stepped forward, bumped fists, shaken hands, and gone toe-to-toe says all you—or anyone else—needs to know. You are alive. You are here. Never forget and never deny that. You have been given this moment. Give thanks.

Now, Overcome.