Category: Christian news

Manifesting isn’t the answer. Consenting to holiness is. Recently, a psychologist at New York University wondered if young adults were not saving money for the future because they felt like they were putting it away for a stranger. So Hal Ersner-Hershfield conducted an experiment, giving some college students a real mirror and others virtual reality goggles where, with the help of special effects like those used in movies, they could see a future version of themselves at age 68 or... Read More

Conservative and progressive Christians favor different approaches, and both have their place. What would the parable of the Good Samaritan look like today? In the United States, the man lying beside the road may well be dying from an overdose of fentanyl. Over the course of the pandemic, social isolation combined with a flood of super-potent synthetic fentanyl pushed overdose deaths in the US to unimaginable levels, from 70,000 in 2019 to 107,000 in 2021. Will we, like the Levite and... Read More

Tearfund and A Rocha see the impact in humanitarian crises now and want to organize churches to help. When Matthew thinks about the drought in Ethiopia—the worst in 50 years—he thinks of the starving animals and malnourished people. When he thinks about the solution, he thinks of the need to address climate change. “It’s not a one-off thing. It’s not a glitch,” the director of Tearfund Canada told CT. The Christian relief organization has provided... Read More

The Spirit is at work, but so are the mechanisms around high-production sets. “Bigger!” said the voice in my in-ear monitor. I was on stage in a dark room, nearly blinded by spotlights. It was my first time leading worship at a big regional conference for college students, and one of the production managers in the sound booth prompted me to raise my hands higher, move more, clap more, jump, be more physically demonstrative. I had always known conference worship sets were... Read More

One formed me. The other entertained me. On a sunny March afternoon in 2014, I found myself jumping on the L train from Manhattan to Williamsburg to interview a young, urban pastor named Carl Lentz in his luxury waterfront apartment. A trendy evangelical magazine wanted me to profile him. With its nightclub venues and award-winning worship music, his Hillsong church was attracting thousands of diverse young people from around New York City. Lentz is now featured in an FX documentary, The... Read More

Experts from around the world explain the consequences of the AI revolution for believers on and off the internet. Hundreds of millions of people have used ChatGPT since its arrival last November to plan vacation itineraries, help them code better, create pop-culture sonnet mashups, and learn the finer details of their beliefs. For years, Christians have Googled their theological questions to find articles written by humans answering questions about God and God's Word. Now, people can... Read More

Interview with scholar of American Salafism finds commonalities—and potential for engagement—between the austere Islamic interpretive movement and the Christian community most wary of them. If one pictures “radical Islam,” chances are the image resembles Osama bin Laden, Boko Haram in Nigeria, or the ISIS fighters of Iraq and Syria. And the connotation is that they are out to kill—or at least to turn the world into an Islamic caliphate. They are known as... Read More

One generation of Soviet refugees is welcoming another. Sergei Karpenko’s Chicago church is now almost entirely made up of refugees from the Russian war against Ukraine. Many of them aren’t from a church background, so the pastor of Bible Church of Ukraine-Chicago spends his mornings eating breakfast with the new arrivals and evenings hosting Bible studies in his apartment. “It happens by the providence of God that I am here, and God sent new people from Ukraine,”... Read More

The late pastor theologian gave strong counsel to me and so many others in ministry. This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here. “Gandalf isn’t supposed to die.” That text appeared on my phone yesterday from a New York City pastor who worked closely with Tim Keller. It made me smile and cry at the same time. So many of us called Tim “Gandalf,” in part as a tribute to his frequent J. R. R. Tolkien references, but also because... Read More

From Beirut to Barcelona, pastors reflect on his influence. “Christians are called to be an alternate city within every earthly city,” Tim Keller wrote for CT in 2006. “We must live in the city to serve all the peoples in it, not just our own tribe. We must lose our power to find our (true) power.” Keller, who died on Friday, May 19, at age 72, launched nonprofit organization Redeemer City to City to train and develop leaders for gospel-led movements in urban... Read More