Page 861 – Christianity Today (2024)

Churches are sanctuaries.

But what happens when the sanctuary is violated? When violence lights the sanctuary walls on fire? When the safe haven is riddled with the bullets of those broken and guilty who were welcomed within, with opened arms? How should we understand these realities?

For some, churches are “sanctuaries” because in them, the broken, the wounded, or even the guilty come to take refuge. In the medieval period, English common law and church canons held that a debtor or fugitive fleeing from the strong arm of the law could find a haven in the church.

For others, relatedly, “sanctuary” evokes the physicality of the church. In the early commonwealths of this world, the walls of the sanctuary—reverberating with the gospel of God’s forgiveness in the eternal kingdom—provided some respite. To speak of a sanctuary is to speak of the sanctuary: the building with a steeple, a pulpit, some pews, a baptismal font, and the table. Here is where the church gathers: in the sanctuary, a place set apart for the Lord.

In all these common usages, the idea of “sanctuary” conjures up a sense of safety, of set-apartness, of refuge, and of peace.

A Place Set Apart to the Lord

Typically, the term referred to the great Tent of Meeting and its broader precincts that the Lord instructed Moses to build in the desert: “Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them” (Ex. 25:8). The holy, set-apart God saved a kingdom of holy, set-apart people from among the nations to be his own treasured possession (Ex. 19:5-6), and the sanctuary was to be his holy, set-apart dwelling among them:

There I will meet with the people of Israel, and it shall be sanctified by my glory. I will consecrate the tent of meeting and the altar. Aaron also and his sons I will consecrate to serve me as priests. I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God. (Exodus 29:43-45)

In many ways, the desert sanctuary was a return to Eden, which most scholars recognize today as the original sanctuary where the Lord walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day (Gen. 3:8). This is why it needed to be kept set apart and pure.

In that first sanctuary, the Serpent violated the holiness of God’s dwelling with impure, violent, disruptive lies to deceive the man and the woman, drawing them into rebellion, sin, and death. Rendered unholy through sin, they were exiled from the sanctuary of God’s holy presence, kept out through flame and sword (Gen. 3:22-24).

Much of the ceremonial and ritual law introduced in the Torah—even the initially bizarre legislation caught up with issues like bodily fluid, clean clothes, skin sores, and not eating creepy, crawly animals—is concerned with symbolically driving home the reality of sinful flesh, death, and the stunning mercy of the forgiving God who has given them access to himself once more.

Dependent on grace, Israel must learn to once more “be holy as I am holy” (Lev. 11:44-45; 19:2), in both her ritual as well as her moral life, avoiding the idolatrous practices of her neighbors. Indeed, the moral and the ritual are two sides of the same coin.

Here we find the paradox and tension of the sanctuary of God (both as tabernacle and later as temple) in the Torah: it is the set-apart place that emphasizes both God’s nearness and his holy transcendence. It can only be approached and entered with extreme caution; under prescribed conditions; and through purification, atonement, forgiveness of sin, and the mediation of the priesthood God has given them.

To dishonor God’s sanctuary is to court wrath and judgment (Lev. 10:1-3). And yet its approach—drawing near to the God who is other, pure, holy, and perfect—is precisely the sanctuary’s purpose.

For this reason, the sanctuary of God is a delight and a refuge. In Psalm 84—a representative temple psalm—the dwelling place of the LORD, with its courts and glories, is a place of delight: a place where even the birds find rest for themselves and the halls resound with praise because of the presence of the living God. Here God’s people find their rest.

A Place and a People Set Apart

In the New Testament, Jesus restructures the sanctuary. The eternal Son comes in the flesh to tabernacle among the people (John 1:14)—he becomes God with us as the true sanctuary and temple. In him, the holy one dwells with his people. In him, they find refuge and healing.

Even further, united by faith with Jesus, God’s new, holy, set-apart people become the holy, set-apart sanctuary to the living God (1 Pet. 2:4-5). In Christ, they receive their holiness, purity, and forgiveness of sins, rendering them a fit dwelling for the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3).

This is a growing sanctuary—through its gathering, worship, and shared, holy life, it expands its boundaries, inviting in those who are outside. Indeed, Acts 2 depicts something of the transformation, with the nascent sanctuary of the church growing as a seed from within the stump of the old temple courts. Church buildings become “sanctuaries,” then, because they are set-apart places where the sanctuary of God—the church—meets in his name.

What can we say, then, about the violation of God’s sanctuaries?

God Is in His Sanctuary

So often, when we read of an attack, a shooting, or a burning, we’re tempted to ask: where was God? When his house is under assault, why is he not there? And yet the first fact we must be clear on is that God is not indifferent to these attacks on his holy sanctuary.

There are many passages in the New Testament that drive this home, but none more clearly than Acts 9:4, where Jesus confronts Saul with the words, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul is ravaging the church, dragging believers off to jail. We might expect Jesus to say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute my people?” Instead, Jesus makes it abundantly clear here that an assault on the church is an assault on his own person.

John Calvin’s comments on the passage beautifully capture the heart of this verse, suggesting that by this, God “will have us to be assuredly persuaded of this, that he suffereth together with us, as if the enemies of the gospel should wound us through his side.”

Where is God, then, when his sanctuary is under attack? Where else but among and within his people, by the power of his Spirit? Jesus does not hold himself aloof from our sorrows, but he calls them his own and carries them along with us.

God Will Avenge and Protect It

One more truth that ought to be understood is that God will not always allow his sanctuaries to be violated, though he does allow it for a time. This also should not surprise us. If the sanctuary is built on the cornerstone that was rejected, despised, and violently cast aside (1 Pet. 2), then we should expect to suffer, as well.

The sanctuary the Lord offers in this life is not necessarily peace from troubled, outward circ*mstances—there’s a reason Jesus blesses those who will suffer for his name’s sake (Matt. 5:10). He knows suffering is coming.

But God will not allow this to carry on forever. Calvin comments again on Acts 9:4: “that we may hope that he will revenge our miseries, who crieth out of heaven that all that which we suffer is common to him as well as to us.”

Paul, the one who experienced the Lord’s intervention on behalf of his church, warns that “if anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple” (1 Cor. 3:17). He comforts the Thessalonians suffering violent persecution, saying that “God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled” (2 Thess. 1:6-7).

God isn’t vindictive, nor ought his people to be so. But he is just. The cries of his saints—the assaults on his sanctuary—are costly to him.

Thankfully, it is because we know this that we are urged not to pay back evil for evil, not to be overcome by evil. Instead, we can leave vengeance in the hands of the Lord, trusting him in all our sufferings (Rom. 12:17-21).

His Sanctuary Cannot Ultimately Be Overcome

Ultimately, the assaults of God’s enemies cannot overwhelm God’s sanctuary. When the holiness of his sanctuary is lived out, the violence of those who would attack and profane it does not violate that holiness. When God dwells among a people, they remain his set-apart people, no matter who sets upon them. As Jesus said, “The gates of hell shall not overcome it” (Matt. 16:18).

One extraordinary sign of this reality came in the forgiveness offered to the shooter by the families of the victims at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the wake of the kind of violence and hate they experienced, struggling with forgiveness is normal, right, and understandable. It takes time, and none could have faulted those families had they kept quiet.

But what the world saw at that moment in Charleston was something of a miraculous, public sign of a deep, scandalous reality: the reality of the gospel of a holy God who does not have to be gracious, but who nonetheless wills to be so in Christ. This is mercy of the God who comes near to us, who makes a sanctuary for himself out of sinners, and who then offers the sanctuary of the gospel to others.

And so when the forgiveness of sins was offered in Christ, as it was that day, these family members were a special testimony of the Holy Spirit, declaring that the violence of the profane cannot overcome the holiness of God’s sanctuary—God’s holy people.

This is the sort of mercy, holy forgiveness, and grace we see acted out on a smaller scale in sanctuaries across the world every week, as God dwells among his people. In these places, families are reconciled, the poor are fed, mercy is extended to the broken, and the gospel is preached to guilty sinners needing respite from the weight of their sins. It is this same holy life that was on display in the forgiveness offered in Charleston.

What happens when the sanctuary of God is assaulted? God reveals his life in the lives of his sanctuary people, his people who become a refuge: one that even the violence and violation of the world cannot overcome.

donnierayjones / Flickr

It took seven months on a waiting list before my son could be evaluated for autism.

That time was a curse in many ways. Things got worse. He gave himself black eyes and gashes on his forehead because his body craved more input. He slept without clothes because he became too overwhelmed by changing them in the morning. He went on unaware of how to commune with other people, oscillating between entirely ignoring his peers and tackling or laying on them.

But those seven months were a gift, too, because that turned out to be the amount of time I needed to make peace with autism. Despite the fact that Declan could have benefitted from an earlier evaluation—despite the fact that close friends and family encouraged us to seek one—my own fears inhibited me. While we waited, I began to reconcile a disorder I understood little about with the child I’d rocked to sleep for three years. That reconciliation resulted in a drastically different understanding of autism spectrum disorder, one that enabled not just awareness of ASD, but also acceptance of it.

The word autism is derived from the Greek “autos,” which means self—as in “implying a narrowing of relationships to people and the outside world.”

When my son goes to children’s church every Sunday, the routine is mostly the same. He holds my hand as we wait to check in, rocking from one foot to the other. One of his classmates, a vibrant little girl, excitedly approaches to say hello. Declan ignores her. We walk into the room. The teachers say hello. Declan ignores them. Without a word, he sits on the rug; he’s near others, but he’s not. Not really.

I enter the service similarly. I worry about Declan. What if, eventually, his peers grow weary of saying hello to the boy who doesn’t wave back? What if nobody ever knows that he’s funny and bright and kind? Beautiful voices culminate in praise around me; I blindly shake hands with my neighbors whom I do not see. Autism: “implying a narrowing of relationships to people and the outside world.”

When my husband and I finally walked into the neuropsychology evaluation room, a small space outfitted with a smattering of toys, we were asked when our concerns began. I had no idea how to answer. There was the time, when Declan was just 18 months old, that he head butted a brick wall. That was concerning. The fact that he smiled and tried to do it again was even more worrisome. His speech delay, of course, should have been a red flag. He threw big, violent fits. The sound of laughter or popping gum sometimes scared him. He has an obsessive interest in circles. He asks to hug fire hydrants when we pass them.

As I recounted these things to an autism specialist, I felt simultaneous relief and guilt. Relief that we were there, speaking aloud the things we’d silently worried over. I felt shame that these things didn’t compel me to seek an evaluation sooner. In retrospect, the signs were there. I just wasn’t ready to interpret them; I was not ready to have an autistic child.

There is a stigma tethered to autism, inspired by a combination of misinformation and fear. The result is a sort of cultural boogeyman. The idea that my child could be autistic inspired a uniquely paralyzing fear in me. For at least three years, autism was a tragic affliction with no known cure. My son did not seem like someone suffering a tragic affliction; he just seemed like a person—the one I carried and bore; the human being I dignified with a name.

Declan: man of prayer; full of goodness

Autism: a narrowing of relationships to people and the outside world

For a very long time, these two things seemed to war with one another. I perceived autism as something that would detract from my son’s identity, not something that could be central to it. It took seven months, countless fits, and many awkward conversations with friends and family before I could think of my son as an autistic child rather than a child with autism. The difference is subtle but profound. The latter is a person afflicted with something—my dad has diabetes. My grandfather had cancer. The former is something weightier but freeing. It is the culturally absurd notion that autism might be part of someone’s personhood. It is an absurd notion that my own experiences with autism affirm.

When Declan was evaluated, the professionals conducting the exam didn’t scan his blood for a disease or take x-rays in search of something broken. They asked questions about his mannerisms. They observed him play. They knelt on the dusty floor and interacted with him. The question implied by such things is not “What does he have?” but rather “Who is he?”

Once he was declared autistic, it didn’t feel like our relationships were narrowing; it felt like they were expanding—making room for a God-knit little boy who isn’t typically developing. I felt relieved. My heart swelled with joy for who my son is. We felt peace.

That night, we ate cake. We commemorated the end of one journey and the beginning of another. We rejoiced over the fact that doors to much-needed therapy would finally open. We affirmed the personhood of an autistic little boy; we celebrated the face of a boogeyman.

Declan has big brown eyes set into a round face. His smile, when he graces you with it, is angular and cheesy. He spins in circles, around and around like a colorful top. He loves music. His hands flutter like the steady thrum of a heartbeat, clasping and unclasping with rhythmic beauty. The only unprompted observation he has ever made about God was informed by his obsession with circles:

“Look—circle!” he exclaimed from the backseat.

“That circle is called the moon. Did you know that God made the moon?”

“Thank you, God.”

I cannot find the place where Declan stops and his autism begins. I struggle with it at times, as I’m sure he will. But I treasure relics of hope, too. There are the obvious things—patient speech-language pathologists, kind preschool teachers, weighted blankets, and fidget toys. And then there are smaller, stranger pieces of hope. Sometimes it is as miniscule as a gas station clerk who has bothered to remember your son’s name. It is the fact that God dotted his creation both with circles and little boys who love them.

And sometimes hope is a spunky girl at church who still waves to the boy who doesn’t wave back. It is his faint whisper when she walks away—her name, uttered so softly I can barely hear it, but uttered nonetheless.

In my experience, autism isn’t simply the narrowing of relationships to people and the outside world; it is the altering of relationships to people and the outside world. Perhaps that’s something that needs to be accepted, not cured.

Valerie Dunham is a staff writer and sports columnist at Christ and Pop Culture. She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, with her husband, Matt, and son, Declan, where they attend Northstar Church. She enjoys sports, reading, and reminding everyone that she is originally from New England. You can connect with Val on Twitter @ValDoesWords.

Last week, Israel’s Christian schools warned that they were in “immediate danger of collapsing financially.”

The reason: the delayed release of $13 million promised to the struggling schools by the Israeli government.

Now the government has said it will soon distribute the money, fulfilling a deal made back in September 2015 that ended a 27-day strike. But Christian educators believe the struggle for equal treatment for their “unofficial but recognized” schools is far from over.

Ten months ago, students, parents, and staff from 47 Christian schools staged a strike to protest what they called unfair treatment from Israel’s Ministry of Education. The schools provide primary and secondary education to 33,000 students.

At the time of the strike, the Office of Christian Schools (OCS) demanded the reversal of government budget cuts that reduced state funding for primary school students to about $23 million per year, and protested strict limits on the tuition that member schools can charge. It costs $71 million per year to run the Christian schools.

The Ministry of Education offered to provide full funding if the schools joined the public education system. It also offered policy guarantees protecting their Christian identity.

The OCS schools rejected that offer. Christian leaders said that if they joined the public system with its 1.1 million students, their schools would lose too much local control.

The strike was settled when the government agreed to a one-year pledge of an additional $13 million in funding.

When the Ministry of Education failed to meet the final March 31 deadline to release the funds to the Christian schools, an atmosphere of mistrust developed, according to insiders.

“We regret the fact that the Ministry of Education is trying again to force our institutions to join the public system,” the OCS stated on May 23. “The Christian schools in Israel are at risk of collapsing financially. If the government will transfer the promised [$13 million] soon, then this collapse will be delayed for one year.”

Three days later, Michal Cohen, director general of the Ministry of Education, said the government would pay the $13 million to the Christian schools within several weeks. “It should be emphasized and made clear that the Ministry of Education honors the [Sept. 23] agreement and underscores its obligation for its complete fulfillment.”

But this statement left the chief administrator at one Israeli Christian school asking for details. “The statement is very general without a specific timetable. The good intentions have to be proven,” said Botrus Mansour, general director of the nationally recognized Nazareth Baptist School.

“Christian schools have reduced the annual tuition by 25 percent in light of the commitment to transfer the agreed sum,” he said. “The failure to do this has created a severe cash flow problem in all schools. The negotiation committee of the Christian schools is ridiculed now in our community for our belief in the goodwill of the government and its sincerity in the first place.”

Mansour said that primary students in Christian schools currently receive about 35 percent of the state support that public school students receive. Other “unofficial but recognized” schools, such as Montessori and Torani systems, have had state support reduced in recent years. But two networks of schools run by Hasidic groups traditionally receive 100 percent of their funding from the state.

“We call on the political leadership to take the needed action and solve the ongoing crisis,” Mansour said, “thus keeping these historical and excellent schools that have contributed to the Christian presence in the Holy Land.”

[Image courtesy of Pilgrims of Ibillin]

Trinity Broadcasting Network

Jan Crouch, the cotton candy-haired televangelist known to viewers as “Momma Jan,” passed away Tuesday after a massive stroke.

“Laurie and I have just watched the transition of our precious mother from this world to the next; watched her step into the presence of Jesus and into her heavenly reward,” wrote Crouch’s son Matt. “[She] loved many things, but most of all she loved Jesus, and now has seen him face to face and has experienced his grace in fullness.”

Crouch cofounded the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) with her husband Paul in 1973 and spent decades on-air sharing testimonies, offering prayers, and participating in the network’s “praise-a-thons.” TBN broadcasts messages from preachers such as Joel Osteen, T. D. Jakes, and Benny Hinn around the world via 78 satellites and more than 18,000 television and cable affiliates, according to its website.

“Today Jan Crouch enters heaven as @hillsongchannel commences tomorrow. It's only possible because of her legacy,” tweeted Hillsong senior pastor Brian Houston.

In addition to the global television network, Crouch directed the Holy Land Experience, a Bible theme park that opened in Orlando in 2001.

Her husband Paul passed away about two and a half years ago after chronic heart problems.

Their 43-year-old ministry has been plagued with legal trouble.

• In 2013, a Pentecostal minister was sentenced to prison after selling a fake cancer cure—actually made of suntan lotion and beef flavoring—on TBN. Six patients died because they trusted her as a minister, the Wall Street Journal reported.
• In 2012, the Crouches’ granddaughter Brittany Koper accused some of the network's directors of illegally distributing "charitable assets" worth more than $50 million for their personal use. In response, TBN filed half a dozen lawsuits nationwide accusing Koper and her husband of engaging in a smear campaign to divert attention from their own financial sins. The filings prompted a California federal judge to threaten to brand the network a "vexatious litigant" and the Trinity Foundation, a group long critical of TBN, to call for evangelical ministries to withdraw from the network’s airwaves.
• A year earlier, TBN cut ties with a popular End Times broadcaster after he accused Rick Warren and Robert Schuler of uniting Christianity and Islam.
• In 2004, the broadcaster refuted a Los Angeles Times in-depth series alleging that Paul and Jan lived separately, that Paul had a hom*osexual encounter with an employee, and that TBN’s $583 million in assets “have prompted questions about why the network continues to plead for contributions.” Paul pulled in an annual salary of $413,700, while Jan made $361,000, the newspaper reported.
• In 2000, a Christian writer filed a $40 million lawsuit against Paul, Jan, and TBN, claiming that the Crouches’ 1999 apocalyptic movie The Omega Code was originally her story. The Crouches eventually settled.

Evangelicals have struggled with the question of whether to abandon or reform the broadcaster.

“Prosperity theology is a false theology,” Al Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told The New York Times. Between its message and its reputation for high spending, Mohler said, “TBN has been a huge embarrassment to evangelical Christianity for decades.”

Ed Stetzer, executive director of LifeWay Research, appeared on TBN both as a guest and as a host. “I’m glad I did it,” he wrote. “[I] think we made great shows that made much of Jesus.”

With its Pentecostal preachers, TBN draws in a racially and internationally diverse crowd of Christian viewers by the millions. Leaders of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference tweeted their condolences.

”Paul and Jan changed the world,” said Sam Rodriguez, NHCLC president. “Now it's our turn to lift Jesus high.”

[Image courtesy of TBN Facebook]

Brad Flickinger/Flickr

If my memory holds and my body lasts into old age, I’m pretty sure I’ll still be able to sing all the words to Led Zeppelin’s 1971 hit, “Stairway to Heaven.” My kids, on the other hand, may have the lyrics from the CDs of Rebecca St. James and Delirious? tattooed into their long-term recall.

My husband and I both grew up in non-Christian families and wanted to give our three children a different upbringing, so we home-schooled them. We watched Disney movies—which made us too liberal for some of our homeschool peers—but we listened to Christian radio and banned some secular music (like Prince), which made us too conservative for most of the non-churched parents in our neighborhood. We were parenting by the seat of our pants.

How do we protect our kids from toxic stuff while not overprotecting them in a way that’s harmful in the long run?

As our kids moved into early adolescence, we found ourselves debating the sexually charged videos of Britney Spears and the subversive humor of The Simpsons. At times, it felt as if we were trying to staunch a flood of sex and violence with a kitchen sponge. Although the entertainment was different back then, we faced the same perennial problem faced by parents today: How do we protect our kids from toxic stuff while not overprotecting them in a way that’s harmful in the long run?

Plenty of young adults have publically lamented the isolation and social marginalization that often comes with growing up in a cloistered environment. Sarah McCammon wrote a poignant essay for NPR’s Code Switch blog, in which she describes her sheltered evangelical upbringing and how she’s never able to fully enter into key pop culture moments shared by her age peers. The recent death of Prince was one of these moments. She writes,

After a decade-plus of adult life on my own, I've learned to blend in, to laugh off the references I don't get, to shake off the embarrassment about not really knowing much about evolution or falling silent when friends swap prom stories (no dancing at my high school). But [Prince’s death] brought back some of the old feelings of isolation that I first felt in the workplace and around peers from outside my evangelical cocoon — a sense of being out of place and maybe not quite right.

There were times we overreacted to something that might have been beneficial had we elected to watch and discuss it.

As a mother, I read these stories differently and feel sympathetic to the plight of parents who are doing the best they can. During the 1980s and early 2000s when my husband and I were raising our children, we had a relationship with pop culture that was probably similar to that of McCammon’s parents. We heard from a variety of Christian parenting experts that our guiding principle should be Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” The challenge came in sorting out the true, pure, and lovely in each age stage of our parenting journey.

We didn’t do it perfectly by a long shot. There were times we overreacted to offensive song lyrics or changed the channel on a TV show that might have been beneficial had we elected to watch and discuss it with our kids. Sometimes, when it seemed that “Philippians 4:8 goodness” was in short supply in our culture, we felt afraid for our kids and made media decisions that reflected our fear. Though we worked hard to teach our children wise principles for engagement with popular culture, our young adult children are marked by the same experience as McCammon.

Our son Ben, now 31, has a master’s degree in communications, media, and theater and wrote about his childhood in an essay for The Guardian titled “How Did I Stay Normal When I Was Homeschooled? I Watched TV.” He writes:

Though I didn’t have language for it at the time, I knew it wasn’t public school that made the kids on the block normal. Rather, by virtue of being in a populated and social setting, they had easier access to the ordinary, compared to us Midwestern homeschoolers in the ’90s, who, by our outsider nature, were excluded from that conversation. I realized that TV was a shared “ordinary.” I couldn’t be in class eight hours per day with the kids on the block, but as we patrolled the streets on our BMXs, at least we could talk about which Power Ranger was best.

We didn’t say “no” to everything our kids wanted to watch or listen to, nor did we want to. Our hope was that, if we could land somewhere between the extremes—of passive, uncritical consumption, or blocking all pop culture with ironclad filters—our kids would learn to think critically with music and media.

Now, just as then, parents are being presented with music and media choices at a dizzying pace. Though few otherwise-responsible parents would sit their toddler in front of an episode, say, of Game Of Thrones or teach them all the words to whatever this summer’s version of “Blurred Lines” might be, we’re all dealing with the monumental mission of filtering for our young kids and then equipping our older kids to navigate pop culture for themselves.

Thoughtful parents are finding guidance from researchers and reviewers who are committed to equipping parents for the task. In the Christian community, especially, there are many who promise to do all the sorting for us, which is a tempting shortcut. However each family is different and there is no one-size-fits-all set of rules that will simplify the evaluation and discernment process.

As I’ve reflected on our parenting journey, I’ve realized that my husband and I sometimes leaned a little too hard on the dichotomous categories of “sacred” versus “secular.” Some of the things branded “sacred” in the Christian marketplace are woefully short of real truth, wisdom, and beauty. Slapping a Bible verse or two on something shallow and derivative doesn’t infuse it with virtue or give it the power to keep our kids safe from harm. A better posture for parents is the slow, daily (and imperfect) process of differentiating what is true from what is profane. This kind of filtering can defend and sustain families through their children’s growing years.

There is a time to shelter, a time to expose, and it takes supernatural wisdom to know the difference. This wisdom is at the heart of Philippians 4:8 and makes outsiders of each one of us who follows Jesus, whether we know all the words to Purple Rain or not.

“How’s your church doing?” It’s a question all church leaders are asked sooner or later, and if it catches them off-guard, it can be tempting to fall back on Sunday morning censuses and budgetary breakdowns, even when they know that data doesn’t tell the full story.

This week, then, we asked some ministers to tell us how their churches are doing—without relying on the numbers. Here’s what they had to say:

The Community’s TrustThe thing I find myself celebrating most these days is the high level of trust people and organizations outside the faith have in our church. As their trust has grown, so has our ability to share our faith in meaningful ways—and doing that in creative and innovative ways is just fun! — Rachel Currie Triska, Dallas, Texas

Passing More PeaceI can tell how our church is going by our greeting time during service. We are a church of all peoples, so it used to be an awkward 90-second break where everyone would try their best not to be approached by anyone. As we've grown in doing life together, we have had to double the amount of time. I rarely see anyone left out, no matter which culture they are from or how new they are, and it often runs over as our attenders enthusiastically say “hello” to someone different from themselves. — Oneya Okuwobi, Cincinnati, Ohio

Contentment in FaithfulnessMy church is struggling with the problem of relative positioning. If I told you I was an elder in a church where the preaching is excellent, there is plenty of money in the bank, we own our own building, we are sending out and supporting missionaries, and we are doing great internal development, you'd think we were wildly successful. All those things are true, but our numbers are down from where they were before, and we're not quite supporting our monthly budget needs, so everyone is struggling with feeling down and discouraged. Contentment is a funny thing. The most important thing, though, is that I attend a church where faithfulness and Christlikeness are real goals that we are honestly trying to pursue as best we know how. It has been a joy to serve in that environment. — Benjamin Bartlett, Louisville, Kentucky

A Unified Church CultureLately I've been answering this question with things like: "I really like the culture we have here. We are seeing God do some really great things." Or if there are some struggles, we might say, "We're going through some big changes right now and praying for unity.” — Daniel Darling, Nashville, Tennessee

Work Outside the Church DoorI tend to evaluate the health of a congregation by what happens outside the church building. When members gather for fellowship outside prescribed times, when they take initiative to share the gospel with their neighbors, when they volunteer at our community school and library—these are the times I'm most optimistic about where we're heading. When the mission of the kingdom is drawing us outside ourselves and we're moving beyond the safety of our walls, I have hope that the gospel is taking root and producing good fruit. — Hannah Anderson, Roanoke, Virginia

Sharing, Showing, and ShapingWe only know how our church is doing based on how the greater community is doing. What happens on Sunday for us is only a response to how we are living together in our community daily. There are three major ways we diagnose how we're doing, which we sum up with the hashtag #ssslove: are we sharing the love of God? Are we showing the love of God? Are we being shaped by the love of God? If we can say we have been faithful in pursuing these things, then we are doing well. For us, it's not a question of if we have been successful, because God never told us we would be successful—only to trust and be faithful. — Jonathan Brooks, Chicago, Illinois

iStock / serdjophoto

In this regular series, we share innovative practices from the world of stock photo ministry.

One of the most important questions churches have to contend with is how to decorate their worship spaces. Crosses, of course, are the standard ornament—but should they be?

When I first laid eyes on the image above, I confess I was more than a little confused. What was it about this cross bottony that made it so terrifying to our recoiling, mustachioed friend? Had it been used in a Madonna video? Had someone drenched it in Axe body spray? Did he just really prefer Celtic crosses instead? It was impossible to say.

After I thought for a moment, though, it occurred to me that perhaps that look of horror was intended not for the cross, but for something beyond it. Perhaps he was using it to ward off a vampire or some other unholy fiend. (Such, of course, is the peril of interpreting any stock photo—like a Joel Osteen sermon, it gives you no context.)

Whether you’re a vampire or a human, however, the cross actually can be pretty frightening. The Presbyterian church in which I was raised, for instance, took Exodus 20:4’s ban on “graven images” so seriously that it touched off a small controversy when we discussed adding a cross to our sanctuary. (Living in the Christian tradition means you can’t really ever escape the shadow of the Cross, but there are still many of us who try really hard.) We eventually warmed to the idea—but only after agreeing that the cross would be, if nothing else, “tasteful.”

It probably goes without saying, though, that “tasteful” is rarely an appropriate word to apply to a Roman torture instrument. Aesthetics of the Golden Ratio aside, talking about a “tasteful cross” makes about as much sense as talking about a “tasteful guillotine” or a “tasteful iron maiden.” Perhaps our soul-patched, plaid-sporting subject looks horrified, then, because he has only just now thought about what, exactly, his cross means.

I can sympathize. The first time I walked into my current church, I was at least a tiny bit shocked to see a four-foot-high, full-color crucifix hanging at eye level inside the narthex. Unlike the polished, stylized cross from the sanctuary of my youth, it’s not subtle—it demands that you look into the face of a suffering, dying man, count his protruding bones, and watch the blood flow from his hands, his feet, his side. “Tasteful,” it isn’t. What it is, however, is true—unpleasantly so. It’s the sort of thing you want to hold at arm’s length.

But even if Bela Lugosi really is standing on the other side of the camera, I honestly wonder whether he or Captain Goatee is more shaken by the symbol. The rules for the standard horror monsters always seemed so arbitrary to me—why silver bullets for werewolves? why garlic for vampires?—but the vampire’s aversion to the crucifix makes at least a degree of sense. Vampires, after all, find life by taking it from those around them. This is the law of the world. Kill or be killed. Resources are scarce. Take what you can, while you can. The cross, however, demands that they—and the rest of us—gaze into the face of the one who bleeds for us, unreservedly and fearlessly.

Demands on pastors’ time are both heavy and various; while many pastors would love to spend more hours with their people, it can be hard to break away from sermon preparation, meetings, and the tyranny of the inbox long enough to make a hospital visit or a cup of coffee count. When pressure is high and spare time is in such short supply, is the time it takes to be a shepherd still worth it?

Lee Eclov certainly thinks so. As the senior pastor of Village Church of Lincolnshire in the Chicago suburbs and an adjunct professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Eclov’s a busy man. But even with a full plate, he still finds time to focus on his flock. We caught up with him to ask him about how he sees shepherding’s role and future in the local church.

Do pastors still see shepherding as valuable? Are young seminarians still interested in this?

I believe that when God calls someone to be a pastor, he instills in them what we call a “pastor's heart.” In many of the seminary students I teach and mentor, I see a God-given desire to shepherd people individually and personally. But they have so few examples, especially if they've grown up in large churches where they didn't always see the behind-the-scenes shepherding that is often there. Furthermore, personal shepherding seems so inefficient! Still, most people whom God calls don't envision themselves running programs that help large groups. I find students are deeply interested in things like wise counseling, praying with people, visiting the sick, and discipling.

How has pastoral shepherding changed since you began your ministry?

In the 1970s, when I began in the ministry, one rarely heard of a church of over 1,000, and even in those churches it was common for pastors to actually visit homes and hospitals. Ministries were far less diverse and usually much less complex. Church people usually had an expectation of personal pastoral care.The downside of all that was that churches often demanded too much individual attention from pastors, which was why pastorates were often quite short. Even though pastors in those days rarely even heard of sabbaticals, they found ways to take them anyway—by resigning from one church and moving on to another every few years!

Is personal time with the pastor as common now as it was then?

No, but it is deeply treasured by people. Folks are deeply grateful for any kind of personal visit—a lunch, a phone call at a stressful time, a quiet huddling in the foyer on Sunday morning.

Last year during Lent, I set out to pray with every household in my church for a half hour. No chatting or refreshments—simply a half hour of prayer, part of which was silence as I tried to listen to God's voice. In those weeks, I prayed personally with and for 96 households, 195 people. At the end of our times, they were often moved to tears. Several said, "No pastor has ever prayed for me like that before," meaning that no one pastor had given them that much undivided spiritual attention in prayer.

We forget that there is no one else in a Christian's life like their pastor, and every Christian should have a shepherd.

What is one surprising piece of advice you give to young pastors?

Don't think that ministry is all done in multiples. If God has called you to be a pastor, he will give you at least some measure of the heart of Jesus for each one in the flock as well as for the flock together. You will rarely feel your identity as a shepherd so clearly as in personal work.

Habibah Agianda / Flickr

Life as we knew it changed on April 16, 2000.

That’s the night my husband, John, and I sat at a friend’s dinner table surrounded by five girls between the ages of 5 and 15. Some were adopted; others were there through foster care. She told us, “There are orphans right here in Hawaii who need adoptive families. The church really needs to get involved.”

When we prayed about it, we sensed God calling us to become foster parents. Eleven-year-old Angie arrived a few months later, and John and I were nervous but ecstatic. Surely this was going to be a happy-ending story, different from the harrowing tales our friend had told us.

By the end of month, though, we were wading through unprecedented darkness. Faced with her stealing, lying, cursing, and insults, we felt hopelessly unprepared and inadequate for the task at hand. Angie made the choice to leave our home for good, leaving John and I shell-shocked.

Looking back on that experience 15 years later, my own family makeup has shifted and so has the church’s involvement in foster care and adoption. And yet, I would still affirm that adoption and foster care remain unimaginably hard, and God is still calling the church to care for orphans.

A positive trajectory

In churches and ministries across the United States, evangelicals have responded to Scripture’s command to care for displaced children (James 1:27) like never before.

“A decade ago, the concept of the church having a dedicated ministry for orphans and children in foster care was generally rare outside of the occasional mission trip,” said Jason Weber, the director of foster care initiatives at the Christian Alliance for Orphans. “Today, if people don’t have a ministry like this in their own church, they are likely aware of other churches in town that do. It won’t be long before this kind of ministry will be as standard in the church as youth ministry or men’s ministry.”

Barna Group research indicates that practicing Christians are more than twice as likely to adopt than the general population, and 50 percent more likely to foster. Congregations across the country—Overlake Christian Church in Seattle, North Point Community Church in Atlanta, Colorado Community Church in Denver, and countless others of all sizes—are getting involved with formalized programs to support children and potential parents and caretakers.

In Colorado, Focus on the Family, Project 1:27, and other Christian nonprofits worked with the state’s Department of Human Services to lower the number of waiting kids in foster care from 800 to below 300. In Florida, 4Kids has linked dozens of churches to the needs of kids in the foster care system—starting with supporting families to prevent the need for kids to enter the system in the first place

The emerging challenge

In the midst of success stories like these, an urgent need has emerged: post-adoption support for parents who have welcomed children with trauma backgrounds.

Like our experience back in 2000, many adoptive and foster care parents couldn’t have imagined how hard it would be to meet the needs of the children entrusted to their care. How could they? Some of the problems take years to fully materialize. For some, fanciful notions of parental love righting all wrongs have been replaced by gut-wrenching challenges including family devastation, divorce, disruption, lost faith, and heartbreak. Adoptive parents are crying out to the church, “Please help us!” It’s especially important for the church to lend a hand to these families—these kids have been through so much in their lives and desperately need stability. By strengthening and helping adoptive parents, congregations are directly helping the kids, as well.

The body of Christ can answer this cry in tangible ways—with meals, respite, prayer, compassion, and a constancy of presence. Those are the actions that have helped John and I the most and are things we couldn’t have guessed we’d need when we welcomed Angie into our home all those years ago. I often note that there are more churches in the US than there are adoption-eligible kids in foster care. This is a crisis that the church could literally eliminate, but in order for that to happen, we need more than just brave families who feel called to adopt. We need brave congregations willing to come alongside them for the long haul. Adoptive families cannot make the journey alone.

The parable of the Good Samaritan seems so obvious to us today. Who among us would be so callous as to see a beaten man on the street and pass by on the other side, leaving him with nowhere to go? Answering that question may be more uncomfortable than we think.

Many of the more than 400,000 children in foster care have been beaten and abandoned just like the man in the parable. Do we see their need and pass by on the other side, telling ourselves that caring for the broken and abandoned is not our calling? Do we convince ourselves that someone else will surely stop along the way and help?

Unfortunately, there are not enough Good Samaritans to go around, and these precious children continue to suffer. Most can’t presently return safely to their birth parents or to any family, and some never can. For more than 100,000 of the kids in foster care, parental rights have been terminated, and they have no permanent place to call home. Their only legal “parent” is a government agency. And so they wait, living in temporary foster homes, moving frequently from place to place, gripping their meager possessions in trash bags.

Breaking the cycle

The number of modern-day orphans in the US foster care system has remained steady. But each one is made in the image of God. They’ve been wrongfully described as “unadoptable” because they are older, in sibling groups, or have special needs. They’ve endured unthinkable trauma in many cases and have challenging behaviors as a result. These children will become adults who belong nowhere and with no one, and they often, in turn, have children who end up in the system. The cycle continues through generations. In our family, two of our children adopted from foster care are the third generation in their families to be involved in the foster care system, and in talking with other parents who have adopted from foster care, this is a scenario that comes up again and again.

To break it, the church must continue to embrace this ministry as integral to our witness to the love of Christ in our communities.

For some families who have adopted kids from traumatic backgrounds, a saving grace was the church—a caring community that surrounded them and helped them love those whom society deems unlovable. And the thing that will save thousands more image-bearing kids in foster care with challenging behaviors is, yes, the church. Whether that’s through adoptive families who allow their lives to be turned upside down and continually trust God for the strength to carry on, or through the congregations that make long-term commitments to embrace those families with practical support, the church must be ready to exercise what Scripture calls “religion that is pure and faultless.” This National Foster Care Month, may we recommit ourselves, as one body, to the mission of ensuring that every child has a forever family.

Kelly Rosati is the vice president of community outreach at Focus on the Family, serving as the ministry spokesperson on sanctity of human life and adoption and orphan care issues. She and her husband, John, live in Colorado Springs with their four children.

Kelly previously wrote for Her.meneutics about how Adoption Doesn’t ‘Fix’ Kids.

donnierayjones / Flickr

What does justice have to do with God’s heart for the fatherless in the global village? The answer might show us how to imitate God’s heart toward vulnerable children, orphans, and families in distress. We have a front row seat to God’s heart for the fatherless in the last words of Moses; it is an opportunity to gain insight as to the heart of God for children, the poor, and the fatherless. Deuteronomy 24:17-22 records Moses’ last instructions regarding the fatherless, the widow, and the alien. He issues a call to justice, generosity, and redemption.

One of Moses’ key messages was a plea to those entering the promised land to uphold justice, especially for the fatherless, the widow, and the alien. Moses taught that a citizen of the promised land must have a social and humane attitude towards the economically weak.

Moses was concerned for the poor, the disadvantaged, indentured servants, escaped slaves, resident aliens, orphans, widows, and convicted criminals. He was concerned that the alien would not have rights in a court of law, that the fatherless would not have a father to defend them in court, and that the widow’s reputation would be at stake if her outer cloak was not returned by sundown. Moses points back to their slavery in Egypt. He alludes to the story of Joseph and the unjust treatment by his own brothers and Potiphar’s wife. Do you remember the betrayal of Joseph’s brothers, which let him into slavery? Do you remember how he was falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife and unjustly thrown into prison a second time?

Moses wants the children of slaves entering the promised land to remember where they came from in order to be careful not to repeat what was done to them. In other words, he wanted the pain of their past to serve as the passion for their future. Moses says “Don’t forget the injustice, the abuse, the mistreatment, and the pain of your past, so that when you are well off, when you become an owner, when you come into the land of prosperity, you will passionately insist on justice for the alien, the fatherless, and the widow.”

You may have suffered some type of pain, mistreatment, injustice and maybe even an abuse of some sort. You may have suffered both insult and injury. You may have been slighted, ridiculed, and mocked. Moses reminds us that a call to justice means taking the pain of our past to bless others in the future. The truth is that we find our own healing when we forgive those who have hurt us, and prevent the abuse and injustice intended for others.

The global village includes vulnerable children and orphans living in your community, in your county, in your state, across our nation, at our borders, and in other countries. Today, there are more than 150 million orphans in the world. Many are true orphans with both parents deceased, others are single orphans with one parent living who is unable to care for them, and some are social orphans whose parents love them but cannot provide for their needs. In the United States, we refer to these children as vulnerable children, vulnerable to abuse, abandonment, and neglect. CAFO, the Christian Alliance for Orphans (www.cafo.org), led by Jedd Medefind, is an outstanding movement that points our attention to serving vulnerable children and orphans.

Dr. Robert Cooke Buckner was born in Madisonville, Tennessee and answered a call to vocational ministry at the age of 17. He began to pastor his first church that year and eventually moved to Albany, Kentucky to pastor the Albany Baptist Church. By 1859 he moved to Paris, Texas to answer a call to serve the First Baptist Church there in 1861. When he crossed the border into Texas, a man by the name of General Sam Houston was running for governor. Buckner came to Texas at the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. Over the next twenty years, R.C. Buckner would serve this church, start a printing press called the Religious Messenger and write about the plight of children whose fathers went to fight in the Civil War but never returned. In 1877 Dr. Buckner sold the printing press but not before issuing an invitation to deacons and leaders from across Texas to meet for a Deacon’s convention at his home church, First Baptist Church of Paris, Texas. His goal was to cast a vision for caring for orphans across the state.

Buckner was seized by the vision of God’s heart for the fatherless in James 1:27: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” He raised a vision for caring for orphans by asking the gathered deacons, “What if you were dead, brethren, and your child left behind. How would you want others to respond?” Before the gathering in the church, Dr. Buckner met with a few leaders outside under an old oak tree and said “To get this thing started, I am placing one dollar in the hat.” Up to twenty-seven dollars were placed in the hat and carried into the church. They raised $200 dollars that day, then $2000 dollars two years later, and in 1879 the Buckner Orphan’s Home was begun in Dallas, Texas.

Buckner was influenced by the vision recorded by James, the half-brother of Jesus. James was influenced by the life and ministry of Jesus. Jesus drew the vision for his ministry from the Prophet Isaiah as recorded in the first sermon of Jesus in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth (Luke 4:14-30). This first sermon outlines Jesus’ vision for ministry: to preach good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, liberty to the oppressed, freedom for the captives, and to proclaim the year of our Lord’s favor. I wrote about God’s heart for the fatherless in The Jesus Agenda: Becoming an Agent of Redemption. You can learn more about the book at jesusagenda.org.

Over 137 years after that first dollar was placed into the hat, Buckner International continues to provide foster care and adoption, family transition programs, family preservation services, and senior care. You can learn more about what we do at buckner.org. Our mission is to shine hope into the lives of vulnerable children, their families, and seniors. I invite you to join us as we pursue God’s heart for the fatherless in the global village.

Albert L. Reyes is president and CEO of Buckner International, an international social service ministry focused on transforming the lives of vulnerable children, their families, and seniors based in Dallas, Texas.