Every generation eventually turns to look at the church and finds something to be disappointed about. The ancient Romans thought it subversive. The medieval critics thought it corrupt. The Enlightenment intellectuals thought it irrational. And today, particularly within African American communities, a new version of the old complaint has taken hold, one…

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The Dangerous Trajectory, the Implications, and the Way Forward

In Part One, we examined the controversies that erupted in early 2026 at Morehouse College’s Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. The portrait of Joseph Smith Jr. unveiled on the first day of Black History Month, the s…

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A Portrait Is Worth a Thousand Arguments

There is an old understanding in the life of institutions, churches, colleges, and the sacred spaces that sit at their intersection, that what you put on your walls tells…

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"Where are all the young people?"

It is a catch-all expression used by an older, retired generation of congregants for a generation of adults that span 25–49. They ask it quietly, over coffee and casserole dishes in fellowship halls that once echoed with children's laughter. They ask it in trustee meetings where the budget barely balances. They ask it as…

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There is a moment in the prophet Elijah's ministry when he sits beneath a broom tree and asks God to take his life. He has just called fire from heaven. He has just outrun a chariot in the power of the Spirit. And now, alone and exhausted in the wilderness, he is done. What strikes me about that scene, one of the most human moments in all of Scripture, is not the despair. It is the diagnosis. 'I alone am left,' Elijah says, 'and they seek my life' (1 Kings 19:10). He is wrong on both counts. God will tell him so. But his error is instructive: a man who has watched God move in extraordinary power can still become convinced, in the silence that follows, that the cause is lost. I think the American church is sitting under that broom tree right now.

We are exhausted by our own divisions. Hollowed out by the scandals of leaders we trusted. Compromised by a political captivity that has traded our prophetic voice for access to the powerful. And we have begun to whisper what Elijah said aloud: it is over. We are the last ones. There is nothing left to do but manage the decline. That whisper is a lie, the same lie God corrected in the wilderness, and the antidote to it is the same one God prescribed then: not a strategy, not a summit, not a new coalition. Fire.

A FRACTURED HOUSE

The American church has sorted itself into warring camps with the efficiency it has absorbed from the broader culture. On one side, congregations have collapsed the gospel into a social program, emptying it of its supernatural claim. On the other, congregations have fused the faith with a nationalism so thoroughgoing that the cross and the flag have become nearly interchangeable symbols. Neither camp is listening to Scripture. What we have built are not so much churches as political tribes with steeples, and in the process, the actual gospel gets lost somewhere between the opinion columns and the culture war skirmishes.

The church's critics are right to be suspicious when Christian leaders invoke the language of spiritual awakening while pursuing what is essentially a partisan program. Revival is not a strategy for winning culture wars. But political captivity has a cost that runs deeper than bad optics. When the church begins to see political power as the primary mechanism of its mission, it trades the birthright of prophetic independence for the pottage of access. 'Do not put your trust in princes,' the psalmist warned, not because politics is irrelevant, but because when your ultimate hope is in princes, you will inevitably compromise your witness to accommodate them (Psalm 146:3).

THE SHEPHERD'S WOUND

And then there are the scandals. We built celebrity cultures around individual leaders, insulated them from accountability, surrounded them with yes-men, and trained congregations to confuse charisma with character. The word 'pastor' means shepherd. The shepherd's calling is to be present, accountable, and cruciform. 'Not many of you should become teachers,' James warns, 'for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness' (James 3:1). When shepherds wound the sheep, the sheep scatter, and scattered sheep are not simply a church problem. They are a civilization problem.

WHAT REVIVAL ACTUALLY IS

Revival, properly understood, is the sovereign work of God in which He restores spiritual life to a dormant church and, through that church, to the wider society. It is not a technique. It is not a conference. It is the movement of the Holy Spirit through a humbled, praying, repentant people, producing consequences no human program could engineer. The biblical vocabulary is instructive: the psalmist cries, 'Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?' (Psalm 85:6). The presupposition is that spiritual life can diminish, and that restoration comes only from above.

The biblical record is full of these moments. Josiah's reformation began when the Book of the Law was found in a temple so neglected it had simply been lost (2 Kings 22). Nehemiah's rebuilding of Jerusalem began not with a construction plan but with corporate confession: 'I and my father's house have sinned' (Nehemiah 1:6). At Ephesus, revival was confirmed when new believers burned their magic books, fifty thousand pieces of silver's worth, in public. 'So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily' (Acts 19:20). Repentance is always the door through which revival enters.

"If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land." (2 Chronicles 7:14)

HOW FIRE FALLS, AND WHAT IT DOES

Every great revival in the historical record begins the same way: not in the largest churches or with the most celebrated ministers, but in obscurity, in prayer, through broken and desperate people. The Welsh Revival of 1904 began with a twenty-six-year-old who had prayed for eleven years. The Hebrides Revival of 1949 was preceded by two elderly sisters who prayed through the night, week after week, in their cottage. The First Great Awakening began in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Jonathan Edwards preached through Romans and watched his congregation undone. The antecedents are always the same: prayer, humility, and a willingness to wait on God rather than manufacture results.

And the fruit is always social as well as spiritual. Wilberforce's campaign against the slave trade was a revival-born movement. The Second Great Awakening fueled abolition, prison reform, and the education of women. Genuine revival reaches where policy cannot, because it operates at the level of the human heart. Policy can constrain behavior. It cannot change desire. Only the Spirit of God can do that, and when He does it at scale, the effects on a society are incalculable.

A CALL TO THE KNEES

So here is what I want to say to pastors: you have been given a stewardship unlike any other, the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the care of souls made in God's image. Some of you have discharged it faithfully, week after week, in obscurity, without the platform the celebrity culture has taught us to treat as significance. But some of you have drifted. You have let prayer become a ritual box to check before the real work begins. You have neglected the interior life and tried to compensate with activity and strategy. The prophet Joel was direct: 'Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and say, "Spare your people, O Lord"' (Joel 2:17). Repentance does not begin in the pews. It begins in the pulpit or before the pulpit, in the quiet place where the pastor meets God before he meets anyone else.

And to the people: you are not consumers of religious goods. You are, if you belong to Christ, members of the body through which God has chosen to make His appeal to the world. Pray for revival, not as one item in a balanced spiritual portfolio, but as the primary labor. The great revivals were born in prayer meetings that most of us would find inconveniently long and uncomfortably earnest. They were attended by people so desperate for God that they were willing to stay until He came.

"And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily." -Luke 18:7–8

God told Elijah that seven thousand in Israel had not bowed to Baal. The cause was not lost. It never was. The fire we need is not a fire we can start, but it is a fire we can prepare for, by clearing the altar, stacking the wood, and calling out to the God who has never, in all the centuries since Carmel, grown reluctant to answer. Pray for revival. Pray as if the church depends on it. Pray as if the country depends on it. It does.

Scripture citations from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted.

What if Jesus were an MC?
Not a metaphor. Not a thought experiment for seminary students. A genuine imaginative reckoning: What if the man from Nazareth, the one who turned the world’s value systems upside down, who ate with the despised, who spoke in parables designed to unsettle the comfortable and comfort the unsettled, had been born not in first-century Judea but in twenty-first-century Houston's Fifth Ward, Atlanta's Westside, Chicago’s South Side, or Fort Worth's Stop Six? How would he have proclaimed his message? Through what medium would he have reached the overlooked, the incarcerated, the addicted, the grieving, the young man standing on the corner at midnight with nowhere else to go?
I suspect he would have been an MC.

This is not as irreverent as it sounds. The Sermon on the Mount was not a lecture, it was a provocation, delivered not in the temple courts to the credentialed but on a hillside to the crowd, reminiscent of Public Enemy. Jesus did not write treatises. He told stories. He used the vernacular of his people, the imagery of farming and fishing and debt and wedding feasts, because he understood that truth travels best when it arrives in the native tongue of the listener’s life. The Spirit of the Lord was upon him precisely for this kind of mission.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.” -Luke 4:18

Hip-hop, at its most serious, does exactly the same thing. It is a vernacular art form, born in the Bronx in the early 1970s among communities who had been systematically ignored by mainstream culture, and it has always carried within it a prophetic register that the church, frankly, has been too slow to recognize.

We are at a peculiar and remarkable moment in American cultural life. Religious curiosity is spiking, particularly among young people. And simultaneously, the economics and infrastructure of the music industry have shifted so dramatically that an independent Christian artist can now reach a global audience without the permission of a label, a radio station, or a gatekeeping executive. These two trends have converged into an opening, an opportunity not just for Christian hip-hop as a genre but for the Gospel itself. The question is whether the artist has the fearless imagination to walk through it.

The Unexpected Return of the Sacred

Somewhere between the mid-2000s rise of the New Atheism, which felt, for a season, like the final triumph of secular rationalism, and now, the cultural script flipped. The data are by this point well-documented. Surveys from Pew, Gallup, and a range of sociological researchers have shown that Gen Z, far from being the most thoroughly secular generation in American history, is in fact deeply and restlessly spiritual. They may not be piling into mainline Protestant churches on Sunday mornings. But they are searching. They are asking the ancient questions, about meaning, about suffering, about whether there is anything that holds the universe together, with an urgency that would not have surprised Augustine or Pascal.

What has changed is the platform where those questions are being asked. The town square of spiritual inquiry for this generation is not the sanctuary. It is the comment section of a late-night podcast, the thread beneath a viral video, the DMs exchanged after a song drops. And in that environment, the artists who can hold complexity, who can name suffering without sentimentality, who can speak of transcendence without kitsch, have an extraordinary amount of cultural authority. Hip-hop artists, in particular, have always known how to do this.

Think of the genre’s history. From its earliest days, hip-hop has engaged with theodicy, the problem of evil, the silence of God, the injustice of systems, with more unflinching honesty than most Sunday sermons. The Psalms, it is worth noting, modeled this posture long before there was a genre to describe it. David was a poet who had been to the bottom, who knew what it was to cry out to a God who seemed absent, and who insisted on voicing that experience with full force. There is a reason those poems have survived three millennia.

“I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears. My eyes grow weak with sorrow; they fail because of all my foes.” -Psalm 6:6–7

The opening has been there for a long time. What is new is who can now walk through it, and the tools they have been given to do so.

The Great Disintermediation

For most of the twentieth century, Christian artists who wanted to reach a mainstream audience faced a structural problem that had little to do with talent or message. The music industry was a gated system. Getting your music heard required the approval of label executives who answered to shareholders, radio programmers who answered to advertisers, and a distribution infrastructure that had no particular interest in theological disruption. Christian hip-hop, in that environment, was niche by ddefinition, confined to Christian bookstores and church conferences, speaking almost entirely to people who already believed.

That architecture is gone. Not weakened, gone. Streaming platforms have made distribution essentially free and universal. Social media algorithms reward content that provokes emotional response, which Gospel music, at its best, does with unmatched consistency. TikTok can turn a thirty-second clip of an unknown artist into a cultural moment overnight. YouTube has created a generation of listeners who discovered entire catalogs through a single algorithm-recommended video at two in the morning. The economics no longer require institutional permission.

This is the great disintermediation of culture, and it has been more democratizing than almost anything since Gutenberg. An independent Christian rapper recording in a home studio in Memphis can now put a track on Spotify on a Tuesday and have it heard in Lagos, London, and Los Angeles by Thursday. The middlemen who once decided what was commercially viable, and who rarely erred on the side of theological depth, have been substantially bypassed. The artist now speaks directly to the listener. The gatekeepers are gone. The artist now speaks directly to the listener. For those with something genuinely true to say, this is a gift of enormous consequence.

For those with something genuinely true to say, this is a gift of enormous consequence. The Apostle Paul was himself a tireless user of every available communication infrastructure, the Roman road network, the synagogue circuit, the network of house churches, the epistle as a broadcast medium. He understood that the message and the medium are inseparable. He made himself all things to all people, not out of spinelessness, but out of missionary conviction.

“I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.” -1 Corinthians 9:22–23

He used what was available. Christian artists in 2026 have available to them a communications infrastructure of staggering reach. The question is whether they will use it with the same intentionality.

The Theology of the Cypher

What makes hip-hop uniquely suited to carrying the Gospel to this particular cultural moment is not just its reach. It is its form. Hip-hop is, at its structural core, a confessional art. The MC speaks in the first person. She narrates her own formation, the neighborhood, the losses, the temptations, the moments of grace. He catalogs his failures with an honesty that would make most pastoral memoirs look carefully managed. This confessional posture is not a stylistic accident. It is the genre’s original epistemological commitment: truth is earned through testimony, not assertion.

This happens to be exactly what the Christian tradition has always said about how genuine faith is communicated. You do not argue people into the kingdom. You witness. You tell what you have seen. The earliest Christian proclamation was not a philosophical proof, it was a report: we saw him, we touched him, we heard him. First John opens with almost breathless insistence on the sensory reality of testimony.

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” -1 John 1:1

Augustine’s Confessions is, in its structure, a very long rap verse, one man’s unflinching account of his own wretchedness and the surprising grace that met him there. What hip-hop does in three minutes and forty-five seconds, Augustine did in thirteen books. The form is different. The fundamental move is the same.

Christian artists who understand this are not making compromises with secular culture. They are recovering something the church has always done when it is at its best: meeting people in the form of speech they already trust, and speaking into that form with truthfulness and depth. The error is to assume that faithfulness requires cultural irrelevance. It does not. Jesus never made that assumption. Neither did Paul. Neither should the Christian artist who has been given, by remarkable historical accident, one of the most powerful communication platforms in human history.

The Danger of Sanitization

There is, of course, a failure mode. It is the one Christian hip-hop has too often fallen into, and it must be named honestly if the moment is going to be seized rather than squandered.

The failure mode is sanitization, the tendency to smooth off every jagged edge, to resolve every tension before it has been fully felt, to produce music that is, at bottom, a consumer product for people who are already inside the church rather than a genuine artistic and spiritual reckoning that might reach anyone else. Sanitized Christian hip-hop makes the Gospel sound manageable. It makes grace sound easy. It makes doubt sound like something that can be fixed with the right chorus.

And in doing so, it inadvertently communicates the opposite of what the Gospel actually claims, that reality is harder and darker and more complex than we thought, and that the love that meets us there is therefore more astonishing, not less. Paul did not promise his readers comfort. He promised them something more disorienting and more durable: that nothing in all of creation could ultimately separate them from the love of God. That claim only lands with full force if you have first been honest about the depth of the darkness.

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” -Romans 8:38–39

The young man who is not in church, who is listening at midnight, the one I keep returning to, does not need to be told that everything is going to be fine. He has heard that. He does not believe it, and he has good reasons not to. What might reach him is something different: an MC who knows what it is to be broken, who is not pretending that faith dissolves suffering, who is honest about the distance between what he believes and what he can see, and who keeps believing anyway. That is a witness. That is art.

The young man listening at midnight does not need to be told everything will be fine. He needs to hear from someone who has stood in the same darkness, and kept believing anyway. The opportunity before Christian artists right now is to be the version of themselves that is fully honest, fully skilled, and fully rooted in something that actually holds. Not to produce ecclesiastical content delivery systems. To make art. The Gospel does not need to be protected from the truth. It can handle it. In fact, it requires it.

A Generation That Is Listening

Let me end where I began, with the question of what Jesus would do. It is, I admit, a question that can be deployed cheaply, printed on rubber bracelets, deployed as a conversation-stopper, used to baptize whatever we already wanted to do. But taken seriously, it is one of the most radically disruptive questions anyone can ask. Because Jesus consistently went to the people who had been told, explicitly or implicitly, that the sacred was not for them. The lepers. The Samaritans. The women the culture had discarded. The tax collectors whom respectable society had excommunicated.

The incarnation itself is the original act of cultural contextualization. The Word did not send a memo from a safe distance. It became flesh, embedded itself in a particular language, a particular neighborhood, a particular set of social relationships, because proximity is how love actually works.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” -John 1:14

There is a generation that has been told, with remarkable consistency, that organized religion is not for them, that it is for people who are naïve, or hypocritical, or afraid of science, or politically captured. And yet they are hungry. The curiosity is there. The questions are there. What is largely absent is a credible voice speaking to them in a language they already trust, from a posture that does not require them to become someone else before they can be heard.

Christian hip-hop, at its best, can be that voice. The technology has removed the structural barriers. The cultural moment has created the hunger. What remains is the artists themselves, whether they will have the courage to be fully honest, fully skilled, and fully alive to the tradition they carry. Whether they will trust the Gospel enough to let it speak without protective sanitizing. Whether they will pick up the microphone and say what they actually know.

The commission has not changed. Only the medium has. And in every generation, God seems to find people stubborn enough and gifted enough to carry the old message through the new form.

“How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’” -Romans 10:14–15

It would not, I think, be unlike what was said on a hillside outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, to a crowd that had come not from the synagogues but from the margins, looking for something they could not quite name. The form is different. The audience is different. The infrastructure is dramatically different.

But the message travels.

There are some paths we choose. There are some paths that seem to choose us. It is a moment, buried somewhere in the biography of nearly every great minister, that defies the tidy categories of career development. It is not the moment they graduated seminary, preached their first sermon, or accepted their first call to a congregation. It is an earlier moment, quieter, stranger, more unsettling, when something happened to them that they did not initiate and could not entirely explain. Some heard it as a voice. Others felt it as a weight that would not lift. However they describe it, the meaning is similar: I was called.

We are not, as a culture, well-equipped to take this seriously. We have built an entire civilization around the sovereign self, its preferences, ambitions, and freedom to construct a life of its own choosing. Universities teach self-actualization. Career coaches promise purpose through strategy and self-discovery. Even spiritual life often follows this pattern, as people shop for communities that fit their preferences and curate practices that promise personal growth. The self remains the architect of its own story. The lives that seem to matter most are often those shaped by this reality, people claimed by a purpose they did not invent but could not escape.

What follows is not my analysis. What I intend to offer here is something we desperately need: a serious, searching account of what it means to be called, and why the answer to that question matters not just for ministers, but for all of us trying to understand what we are here to do.

I. What Is a Call?

To speak of a divine call is to make a claim that cuts against the grain of our therapeutic and market-driven age. It is to say that the deepest vocations of human life are not self-generated but received, not manufactured in the workshop of personal ambition but disclosed by a voice that stands over and above our own desires, even while it addresses those desires at their deepest point.

The Hebrew Bible uses several words for this phenomenon. The verb qara, to call, to summon, to name, appears at the most decisive junctures of Israel's story. God calls Abraham from Ur (Genesis 12:1). God calls Moses from the burning bush (Exodus 3:4). God calls Samuel in the night watches of the sanctuary (1 Samuel 3:4). The pattern is consistent: the divine initiative precedes and provokes the human response. It is not that the called person has first sought God with sufficient intensity and thereby earned a hearing. Rather, God speaks, and the world changes.

In the New Testament, the Greek word kaleo carries the same freight. When Jesus walks beside the Sea of Galilee and says to Simon and Andrew, 'Follow me' (Matthew 4:19), the simplicity of the verb conceals a world-altering summons. When Paul reflects on his own vocation, he traces it not to his own religious striving but to divine appointment: 'God, who set me apart from my mother's womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me' (Galatians 1:15-16). The call precedes, penetrates, and persists.

We should be clear about what a call is and what it is not. A call is not merely a strong desire to serve, though such desire may accompany it. It is not the accumulated opinion of friends who admire one's gifts, though such affirmation may confirm it. It is not the path of least resistance nor the path of greatest reward. A call is, at its core, a divine address, a word spoken by the living God to a specific person for a specific purpose within the larger purposes of God's redeeming work in the world. And because it is divine in origin, it carries a weight that mere human aspiration cannot sustain under pressure, nor can human ambition fully explain.

II. The Call of Moses: Reluctance and Commission (Exodus 3)

No account of the divine call in scripture is richer in its texture, more honest about its complexity, or more theologically instructive than the call of Moses at the burning bush. Moses is not, at this point in the narrative, a hero awaiting his moment. He is a fugitive, a man who once wielded the power of Pharaoh's court and brought it down with violent, impulsive force, and who has since spent forty years tending sheep in the wilderness of Midian. He is eighty years old. He has, as it were, missed his window.

And yet the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob speaks from a fire that does not consume, but calls:

"Moses! Moses!" And Moses said, "Here I am." (Exodus 3:4)

The call begins with the repetition of the name, a feature we will observe in Samuel's story as well, and one that signals not merely identification but intimate address. God knows this man. God is not summoning an office-holder but a person. And then God discloses the vocation: 'I am sending you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt' (Exodus 3:10).

What follows is a masterclass in authentic calling. Moses does not leap at the opportunity. He raises five distinct objections each one a version of the question that every genuinely called person must eventually face: Who am I? What shall I say? What if they don't believe me? I am not eloquent. Please send someone else. God answers each objection not by removing the difficulty but by promising presence: 'I will be with you' (Exodus 3:12). The call is not a guarantee of comfort or competence. It is a guarantee of accompaniment.

Here we encounter the first universal characteristic of a divine call: it is almost always received with some measure of reluctance. The called person does not typically rush forward with confident self-promotion. The call confronts, it disrupts, it addresses a person in their inadequacy and sends them into territory they would not have chosen for themselves. This very reluctance, far from disqualifying the called one, often authenticates the call, for who would voluntarily bear such a burden unless compelled by something greater than personal ambition?

III. The Call of Samuel: Recognizing the Voice (1 Samuel 3)

The boy Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli the priest. The narrative of 1 Samuel 3 opens with a haunting note: 'The word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision' (1 Samuel 3:1). Israel is in a season of spiritual famine. Eli's sons are corrupt. The priesthood has collapsed under its own moral weight. Into this darkness, God speaks — and he speaks to a child.

"Samuel! Samuel!" And Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant hears." (1 Samuel 3:10)

What is striking about this account is not merely that God calls Samuel but how Samuel learns to hear. Three times the voice comes, and three times Samuel mistakes it for the voice of Eli and runs to the priest. Only when Eli himself discerns what is happening does Samuel learn the proper posture: 'Speak, LORD, for your servant hears.' The call requires not only the voice of God but the formation of a hearing heart, and often that formation is mediated through the community of faith, through older guides who help the younger discern what they are experiencing.

This yields a second universal characteristic of the call: it is rarely self-interpreting. The called one typically needs a community of discernment, a mentor, a Eli, to help them understand that what they are experiencing is not mere ambition, psychological projection, or wishful thinking, but genuine divine address. The call is personal but never merely private. It is confirmed and clarified in relationship.

IV. The Call of Isaiah: Holiness and Commission (Isaiah 6)

If the call of Moses is marked by reluctance and the call of Samuel by gradual recognition, the call of Isaiah is marked by overwhelming encounter with divine holiness. Isaiah 6 is one of the most theologically dense passages in all of scripture. The prophet is granted a vision of the Lord 'sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,' attended by seraphim who cry out:

"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." (Isaiah 6:3)

The response of Isaiah is not enthusiasm but devastation: 'Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!' (Isaiah 6:5). The call to ministry begins not with a strategy session but with a shattering encounter with the holiness of God. The called one must first be undone before they can be remade and sent.

The sequence of Isaiah 6 reveals the structure that undergirds every genuine call: Vision →undoing → cleansing → commissioning → response. Isaiah sees the Lord. He is undone by what he sees. A seraph touches his lips with a burning coal. He is cleansed and forgiven. Then, and only then, does the call go forth:

'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' And Isaiah, newly cleansed and reconstituted, responds: 'Here I am! Send me' (Isaiah 6:8).

The third universal characteristic emerges here: the call always involves a moral and spiritual reckoning. No one can stand before the holy God and remain unchanged. Ministry that has not passed through the fires of divine encounter will eventually collapse into mere performance, religious technique in service of personal ego. True calling begins with the recognition that the called one is not sufficient in themselves and must be made sufficient by divine grace.

V. The Call of Jeremiah: Before You Were Born (Jeremiah 1)

The call of Jeremiah introduces a breathtaking dimension of the theology of calling that has profound implications for every minister and every believer: the call precedes the person.

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." (Jeremiah 1:5)

Here the divine call reaches backward beyond birth, beyond the construction of personal identity, beyond anything the called one has done or chosen. Jeremiah's vocation was not contingent on his performance, his spiritual resumé, or his willingness to volunteer. It was embedded in the eternal purposes of God before a single breath had been drawn. This is not fatalism, Jeremiah retains genuine agency, as his subsequent anguished prayers make clear, but it is a declaration that the deepest callings in human life arise from a source that transcends the merely human.

Jeremiah, like Moses, protests his inadequacy: 'Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth' (Jeremiah 1:6). And God responds, as he responded to Moses, not with a denial of the difficulty but with a promise of divine accompaniment: 'Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you' (Jeremiah 1:8). The pattern holds. The call is prior. The commission is certain. The presence is guaranteed.

A fourth characteristic of the call thus emerges: the call has an eternal dimension that relativizes the accidents of biography. The called one does not stumble into ministry by virtue of circumstance or personality. They are known, loved, and appointed by a God who operates in the register of eternity even while addressing persons in the particularity of time.

VI. Jesus and the Calling of the Twelve (Mark 1, Luke 6)

When we arrive at the Gospels, we discover that the calling of the disciples by Jesus recapitulates and intensifies all the patterns we have traced in the Hebrew prophets. The rabbi Jesus does not wait for students to apply. He goes out and summons them, an inversion of the normal Jewish practice of the first century, where students sought out teachers. This reversal is itself theologically significant. The disciples did not choose Jesus; Jesus chose them.

"You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit." (John 15:16)

The accounts in the Synoptics are striking for their economy of description. Jesus passes by, he speaks, 'Follow me', and 'immediately they left their nets and followed him' (Mark 1:18). There is no extended negotiation, no doctrinal examination, no trial period. The call of Jesus carries an authority that demands an immediate response. This is not because discipleship is unreflective but because the One who calls is himself the fulfillment of everything Israel's prophets had anticipated. To hear Jesus call your name is to hear the voice of Israel's God in human flesh.

And yet Jesus does not call twelve identical personalities to identical roles. He calls fishermen and a tax collector, zealots and doubters, those who will lead and those who will betray. The call is personal precisely because the God who calls is personal, not fitting human beings into a generic mold but addressing each one in their particularity and shaping them toward a common purpose.

VII. The Call of Paul: From Persecutor to Apostle (Acts 9)

Of all the calls recorded in the New Testament, none is more dramatic, none more theologically charged, and none more relevant to our understanding of divine initiative, than the call of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus.

Saul was no passive bystander awaiting enlightenment. He was, by his own account, 'a Hebrew of Hebrews,' 'as to zeal, a persecutor of the church,' advancing in Judaism beyond many of his contemporaries (Philippians 3:5-6). He was a man of violent religious conviction, traveling to Damascus with official letters authorizing him to arrest followers of Jesus. And then:

"Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?'" (Acts 9:3-4)

The parallels with the call of Moses are striking and surely intentional. Moses hears his name called twice from a manifestation of divine presence in fire (Exodus 3:4). Saul hears his name called twice from a manifestation of divine glory in blinding light (Acts 9:4). Moses is sent to confront Pharaoh and liberate Israel. Saul is sent to the Gentiles to open their eyes, 'to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God' (Acts 26:18). Moses's call came when he had abandoned any hope of his former vocation. Paul's call came when he was most vigorously pursuing a vocation that was, unknown to him, catastrophically wrong.

Both Moses and Paul resist immediately. Moses offers five objections at the burning bush. Paul, blinded and prostrate, can only ask, 'What shall I do, Lord?' (Acts 22:10). Both are given a specific mission that will define their lives. Both are given companions and mediators, Aaron for Moses, Ananias for Paul. Both suffer immensely for their calling, and both understand that suffering not as evidence of failure but as the very form their faithfulness takes in a broken world.

Paul's understanding of his own call, as it develops in his letters, becomes one of the most theologically sophisticated treatments of calling in all of scripture. He speaks of being 'set apart' before birth, as Jeremiah was (Galatians 1:15). He speaks of receiving his gospel 'not from any human source... but through a revelation of Jesus Christ' (Galatians 1:11-12). He insists that his apostolic authority is not derivative of the Jerusalem church but direct from the risen Lord. And yet he remains in deep solidarity with the wider community of apostles, submitting his gospel to their scrutiny (Galatians 2:2). The call is direct, but it is not self-certifying in isolation.

VIII. The Validation of the Call

At this point a serious pastoral and theological question arises: How do we know whether a call is genuine? The history of the church is littered with the wreckage of self-appointed prophets and charismatic charlatans who confused their own intense desires with divine summons. The question of validation is not peripheral to a theology of calling, it is central to it.

Scripture itself offers a coherent account of how the divine call is authenticated. We may trace it through three great patterns: the validation of Moses, the validation of Elijah, and the validation of Jesus himself.

Moses's call was validated by signs. When he protested that the Israelites would not believe him, God did not merely reassure him, God gave him tools of verification: the staff that became a serpent, the hand that became leprous and was restored, the water that became blood (Exodus 4:1-9). These signs were not magic tricks performed for entertainment. They were divine testimony to the divine commission. They said, in effect: the God who can turn a staff into a serpent is the same God who is turning a shepherd into a deliverer.

Elijah's call was validated in one of the most arresting public spectacles in the whole of the Old Testament. On Mount Carmel, surrounded by 450 prophets of Baal, Elijah called on the God of Israel to vindicate his ministry, and the fire fell (1 Kings 18:38). But the sequence that is often overlooked is the preceding chapter: it is in 1 Kings 17 that the validation begins. Elijah commands that rain will cease, and it does. He is fed by ravens at the brook Cherith. He raises the widow of Zarephath's son from the dead. The pattern is clear: before the great public confrontation of Carmel, there was a series of quieter confirmations, provision, miracle, resurrection, that authenticated the prophet's standing before God and man.

The validation of Jesus as the promised Messiah follows the most comprehensive pattern of all. The Hebrew scriptures are dense with anticipation: the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), preceded by a herald crying in the wilderness (Isaiah 40:3), entering Jerusalem on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9), betrayed for thirty pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12-13), his hands and feet pierced (Psalm 22:16), and rising from the dead (Psalm 16:10). The ministry of Jesus was accompanied by miracles of such quality and character that even his enemies could not deny them, they could only dispute their source (John 11:47-48). And the resurrection, which is the hinge of everything, is the definitive validation: 'declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead' (Romans 1:4).

Paul's call was validated along similar lines. The Damascus road experience was not merely subjective, Ananias was separately commissioned to confirm it (Acts 9:10-17). The early churches received Paul's ministry and observed its fruits. His letters bear the marks of extraordinary theological insight. His apostleship was confirmed by the Jerusalem apostles, who 'gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship' (Galatians 2:9). He performed 'signs and wonders and mighty works' (2 Corinthians 12:12). And perhaps most powerfully, he endured a catalog of suffering that no sane person would volunteer for without genuine conviction of divine calling: 'Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked' (2 Corinthians 11:24-25).

From this survey, we may identify several consistent marks by which a genuine call is validated: the fruit of transformed lives; the confirmation of the wider community of faith; the alignment of the call with the trajectory of scripture; the willingness to suffer for the call without abandoning it; and, in certain seasons of God's economy, extraordinary signs and wonders that testify to divine appointment. No single one of these is sufficient alone. Together, they form a weight of evidence that reasonable faith can rest upon.

IX. Universal Characteristics of the Call

As we draw these threads together, the biblical theology of calling reveals a consistent pattern across the centuries. These are not cultural accidents or biographical quirks. They are the fingerprints of the God who calls.

First, the call is always an expression of divine initiative. God speaks before the human responds. There is no account in scripture of a person successfully manufacturing their own call through sufficient spiritual intensity. Moses was not meditating on his vocation when the bush burned. Samuel was asleep. Isaiah was in the temple worshipping. Paul was on his way to commit violence. The God who calls is the God who acts first.

Second, the call always involves an element of confrontation with human inadequacy. The called one is not typically the most gifted, the most prepared, or the most willing. Moses stammered. Jeremiah was young. Isaiah was unclean. Paul was a murderer. This pattern is not incidental, it is the point. 'God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God' (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). The inadequacy of the called one is the space in which divine sufficiency is displayed.

Third, the call is always accompanied by a promise of divine presence. The commission and the companionship are inseparable. 'I will be with you' is the refrain that runs from Exodus to Matthew 28:20: 'And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.' The called one is not sent alone. They are sent in the company of the One who sends.

Fourth, the call is always costly. There is no account in scripture of a genuine divine call that led to a comfortable, uncontested life. Moses died outside the land. Samuel was surrounded by faithless kings. Isaiah was (according to tradition) sawn in two. Jeremiah was lowered into a cistern and left to die. Paul was beheaded. Jesus was crucified. The cross is not an interruption to the pattern of faithful calling — it is its highest expression. The call to ministry is a call to share in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of the world he loves.

Fifth, the call is always oriented outward. The called one is not called for their own benefit or spiritual development alone, they are called for others. Moses is called for Israel. Jeremiah is called for the nations. The twelve are called to make disciples of all nations. Paul is called specifically as apostle to the Gentiles. The call to ministry is always a call into service, into the costly, joyful, self-emptying work of bearing God's presence to those who have not yet encountered it.

X. Why the Call Matters

In an age of professional ministry, where seminaries train competent practitioners and churches hire experienced managers, the question of divine calling can seem almost quaint. Surely what matters is skill, character, and commitment. Does the source of the vocation really matter so much? It matters immensely, and for reasons that go to the heart of the gospel.

It matters because ministry is not primarily a service industry but a divine embassy. The minister stands in the place where heaven and earth intersect, proclaiming good news, administering sacraments, binding and loosing, declaring forgiveness, shepherding the flock of God. This is not work that any competent person can do simply by virtue of competence. It requires a sending, an authorization from the One whose embassy this is. 'How are they to preach unless they are sent?' (Romans 10:15). The call is what makes the ministry apostolic in the deepest sense, rooted in the sending purposes of the triune God.

It matters because ministry is inevitably costly, and mere human motivation will not sustain the cost. The minister who enters the vocation for love of influence, love of platform, love of the idea of serving, that minister will find, sooner or later, that the actual work is nothing like the idea. Congregations are complicated. Suffering is relentless. Critics are vocal. Successes are rare and often ambiguous. What sustains a minister through decades of faithful, unspectacular service is not enthusiasm, enthusiasm fades, but conviction: I have been sent. I did not choose this. I cannot un-choose it. Paul put it memorably: 'Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!' (1 Corinthians 9:16). The call is the ballast in the storm.

It matters, too, because the stakes of ministry are eternal. The minister handles the Word of God, the bread of life, the cup of salvation. Flippancy about authorization in this realm would be catastrophic. The biblical tradition is not nervous about distinguishing genuine prophets from false ones, genuine apostles from self-appointed pretenders. The question 'Has God truly called this person?' is not an institutional bureaucratic question, it is a question about the integrity of the gospel itself.

And finally, the call matters because it locates the minister's identity not in their success or failure but in their relationship with the One who called them. The called minister is not primarily a professional whose worth is measured by outcomes. They are a person addressed by name, 'Moses! Moses!', 'Samuel! Samuel!', 'Saul, Saul!', by a God who knows them intimately and loves them unconditionally and sends them precisely because he trusts them with a portion of his own redemptive work in the world.

Conclusion

The call to ministry is one of the most ancient, most contested, and most life-shaping realities in the biblical narrative. From the burning bush to the Damascus road, the pattern holds: God speaks, the human is addressed, inadequacy is confronted, presence is promised, mission is given, validation follows, and the called one goes, imperfectly, courageously, in the company of the One who sent them.

The church in every generation must recover this understanding. Not because institution-building is unimportant, or because spiritual gifts and theological training are to be despised, they are gifts of the same God who calls, but because without the undergirding reality of divine vocation, ministry becomes merely a career, and the church becomes merely an organization.

The gospel deserves better. The world needs more. And the God who called Moses from the backside of the desert, who called a boy named Samuel in the midnight watches, who called Isaiah from the debris of his self-understanding, who called Paul from the road to violence into the road to Rome, that God is still calling. The burning bush still burns. The voice still speaks. The question is whether we have ears to hear it. "Here I am. Send me." (Isaiah 6:8)

What if the most consequential spiritual event in human history is not approaching, but already underway, and most of us are too distracted, or too comfortable, or too thoroughly shaped by the age itself, to notice?

I've been thinking about this question with increasing urgency, not from the margins of some fevered prophecy conference, but from the center of ordinary civic and cultural life. Every week I sit across from people, educated, thoughtful, well-intentioned people, who have quietly and without fanfare abandoned the faith that once organized their inner world. They haven't become atheists, exactly. They've become something more elusive: they've become people for whom the transcendent simply no longer registers. The heavens are not telling the glory of God for them. They are just the sky.

The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Thessalonica roughly two decades after the resurrection, warned of a specific and dramatic event he called the apostasia, the great departure, the falling away.

"Let no one deceive you by any means," he wrote, "for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first" (2 Thessalonians 2:3).

The Greek word apostasia does not merely suggest theological disagreement or denominational shuffling. It implies a deliberate, sweeping, and catastrophic defection from the faith, a mass turning away that would precede and perhaps precipitate the final crisis of history.

"For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God." — 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4

Now, I want to be careful here, as I think any honest observer must be. Every generation of Christians has been tempted to believe it was the terminal generation, the one living through the last act. That temptation itself is a kind of spiritual vanity, and it has been wrong every time before. I hold that humility close.

And yet, when I read Paul's letters to Timothy, those final, urgent, almost desperate dispatches from an old man who knew his execution was near, I am struck not by their distance from our moment but by their precision. Paul describes a society in the last days with the specificity of a diagnostician who has seen the culture's bloodwork and does not like what he sees.

"But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power." — 2 Timothy 3:1-5

Read that list again slowly. Lovers of self. Lovers of money. Proud, arrogant, abusive. Ungrateful, unholy, without self-control. Lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. This is not a caricature of modern culture. This is, in many respects, the aspirational self that modern culture actively manufactures and markets. The wellness industrial complex packages self-absorption as healing. The financial media glorifies wealth accumulation as virtue. Social media has invented an entirely new architecture for pride, arrogance, and the performance of the self.

And then there is that most chilling phrase: "having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power." This is not describing outright paganism. This is describing something far more sophisticated, a religiosity emptied of the holy, a spirituality that has filed off the uncomfortable edges of actual encounter with the living God. We have become, in many quarters, a nation of people who speak with the vocabulary of faith while having quietly evacuated its claims. We do not deny God at the podium. We simply arrange our lives so that he is unnecessary.

The sociologist Christian Smith famously described the dominant theology of American teenagers, and, he came to the conclusions that they viewed their parents faith, as "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." God exists, according to this faith, to help us feel good about ourselves and to reward nice behavior. He is a divine therapist, on call but not sovereign. He does not demand. He does not judge. He certainly does not make the kind of absolute claims that would interrupt a Saturday morning or require genuine sacrifice.

This is precisely what Paul warned Timothy about. "For the time is coming," he wrote with that quiet urgency of the condemned, "when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths" (2 Timothy 4:3-4).

"For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths." — 2 Timothy 4:3-4

Itching ears. I cannot think of a more precise description of the contemporary multi-media and spiritual marketplace. We have built entire streaming platforms, podcast networks, and social media algorithms specifically designed to find us the content that confirms what we already believe, strokes what we already feel, and never interrupts us with the hard thing. The prophets of this age do not cry out from the wilderness. They have YouTube, ring lights, and curated tiktoks. And they tell us, masterfully, beautifully, exactly what our itching ears have been longing to hear.

The great falling away, if that is what this is, would not look like a dramatic public apostasy. It would not look like the burning of Bibles or the razing of cathedrals. It would look like this: a slow, comfortable, fully rationalized drift away from the claims of God, conducted by people who still consider themselves spiritual, who still feel warmly about Jesus in the abstract, but who have in practice made themselves the final authority over their own lives. It would look like empty pews in aging mainline churches and megachurches that have traded the sermon on the mount for the sermon on personal optimization. It would look like a generation of young people who are, statistically, the least religiously affiliated in American history, not atheists, mostly, just nones, people for whom the whole question has become irrelevant.

Paul's description in 2 Thessalonians also introduces what he calls "the mystery of lawlessness," already at work in his day, and being restrained by some force he references with intriguing vagueness (2 Thessalonians 2:7). When that restraint is removed, he suggests, the full chaos of a world that has rejected God's ordering will be unleashed. What strikes me is the word he uses for the coming deceiver's method: signs and wonders performed in the service of falsehood, received eagerly by people who "refused to love the truth" (2 Thessalonians 2:10).

"The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved." — 2 Thessalonians 2:9-10

Refused to love the truth. Not were unable to find it. Not lacked sufficient evidence. Refused. This is a volitional act, a moral choice, dressed up in the clothing of intellectual sophistication. I think of the ways in which our culture has made truth itself a contested category, not as an achievement of hard epistemology but as a lifestyle choice, a political affiliation, a matter of which team you're on. When truth becomes tribal, the capacity to be deceived on a massive scale becomes not just possible but inevitable.

I am not, let me be clear, making a simple partisan argument. The crisis Paul describes cuts across political lines with ruthless indifference. The prosperity gospel that has infected large swaths of conservative Christianity, the idea that God's favor manifests primarily in health, wealth, and national dominance, is as much a refusal to love the truth as any progressive theological revision. Both represent the same fundamental move: the reshaping of God in our own image, the subordination of the divine to the merely human.

Here is what I keep returning to, as someone who has spent time trying to understand what holds societies together and what pulls them apart: the health of a civilization is downstream from the health of its spiritual life. Augustine understood this. Tocqueville understood it watching America in the 1830s. The habits of the heart that make democratic self-governance possible, the capacity for self-restraint, for genuine concern for the other, for deferred gratification, for the acknowledgment of a moral order that transcends personal preference, these habits were, historically, cultivated in religious community. When that community erodes, something must fill the gap, and what has rushed in is not the neutral, secular pluralism its advocates imagined. What has rushed in is a fierce, quasi-religious politics of identity, grievance, and will-to-power.

Paul told Timothy, in the middle of that same urgent letter: "I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching" (2 Timothy 4:1-2). Out of season. That phrase lands with particular force. The faithful proclamation of the word was going to feel, Paul knew, chronically out of season — awkward, unwelcome, culturally maladroit. That is not a bug in his instruction. It is the feature. Faithfulness, in certain seasons of history, is precisely the refusal to accommodate the spirit of the age.

"I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus... preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching." — 2 Timothy 4:1-3

So are we living through the great falling away? I don't know with certainty, and anyone who tells you they do with confidence is selling something. The New Testament itself counsels epistemic humility about eschatological timing, even the Son of Man, Jesus said, did not know the day or the hour (Matthew 24:36). What I do know is that the conditions Paul described are not hypothetical. They are present. The apostasia, the drifting away, the love of self over God, the itching ears, the accumulation of teachers who flatter rather than challenge, these are not coming. They are here, measurable, documented, statistically robust.

What does that call us to? Not panic, certainly. Not the paranoid withdrawal from culture that leaves the world to its own worst impulses. Paul's instruction to Timothy, written from a Roman prison with execution pending, was not to retreat but to endure, to preach, to do the work of an evangelist, to "fulfill your ministry" (2 Timothy 4:5). The church in Thessalonica was told, after all the apocalyptic warning, to "stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught" (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

"So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter." — 2 Thessalonians 2:15

There is something irreducibly hopeful in that instruction. Amid whatever era of falling away, the call is not to catastrophize but to anchor, to the ancient words, to the community of practice, to the strange and counter-cultural conviction that truth is not a construct, that love requires sacrifice, that a life of genuine faithfulness is more interesting, more difficult, and more real than the frictionless, self-curated life the age keeps promising us.

Perhaps that is the most subversive thing one can say in this particular cultural moment: that the falling away is real, that it has consequences, and that the antidote is not a smarter argument or a better political coalition, but a return to something very old, very demanding, and very true. Paul put it simply, at the end, as he always did when things were most serious:

"But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it." — 2 Timothy 3:14

Continue. In a season of departure, continuation is the act of courage. In an age of apostasia, faithfulness is the revolution.

We talk about leadership constantly. We never stop talking about it. Walk into any Christian bookstore, if you can still find one, and you will discover entire walls devoted to the subject. There are leadership conferences that fill arenas. There are executive coaches who charge the price of a semester's tuition for a weeken…

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The Prescription

In Part One, we examined the forces quietly dismantling Black church life in America, the collapse of the rural pastoral pipeline, the institutional stubbornness of established urban congregations, and the steady migration of gifted young Black believers to predominantly white megachurches. Today, we turn to what must come next, with rec…

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The Diagnosis

What does it sound like when a church is dying? Not the dramatic collapse of scandal or schism, but the slow, dignified fade of an institution that simply cannot find a way forward? It sounds like this: fifteen voices singing "Blessed Assurance" in a sanctuary built for three hundred. It sounds like t…

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There's a hollowness at the center of American life right now, a vacuum where leadership ought to be. Recent polling reveals a dispiriting truth: 77% of Americans don't see any public leaders they admire or would want to emulate.¹ Across public service, business, healthcare, and education, we've entered what experts are calling a "leadership crisis," a moment when 85% of citizens believe their leaders care more about power than people, when trust has eroded to its foundations, when the very idea of leadership itself seems corrupted beyond repair.²

This isn't mere partisan disaffection or cyclical dissatisfaction. It represents something deeper; a moral and spiritual crisis that touches the most fundamental questions of how we organize ourselves, how we choose who speaks for us, and what we expect from those entrusted with authority. As Proverbs 29:2 reminds us, "When the righteous thrive, the people rejoice; when the wicked rule, the people groan." And America, across every sector and community, is groaning.

But within this broader American crisis lies a particular tragedy that deserves our attention: the leadership deficit in the African-American community. This is not a problem of talent or potential, Black America has never lacked for gifted individuals. Rather, it's a crisis of structure, coherence, and institutional capacity. Where once there stood clear voices entrusted to speak both to and for the community's greater good, today there is fragmentation, celebrity, and a silence where moral authority once rang out.

The Long Tradition of Distinguished Leadership

To understand what's been lost, we must remember what once was. From the earliest days of emancipation through the civil rights movement, the African-American community maintained a remarkable tradition of clear, distinguished leadership. These weren't perfect people, history's great leaders never are, but they were people whose authority was recognized, whose counsel was sought, and whose vision helped shape not just a community but a nation.

Frederick Douglass was born in slavery in 1818 and emerged to become the 19th century's most potent civil rights voice. Through his autobiographies and thunderous oratory, he didn't just expose slavery's brutality, he demonstrated to a skeptical nation that African-Americans possessed the full measure of human intellect and dignity. His leadership extended beyond abolition; he spent decades after emancipation advocating for voting rights, educational opportunity, and political power. As Scripture teaches, "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light" (Isaiah 9:2), and Douglass was among those who carried that light.

The mantle passed to Booker T. Washington, born into slavery in 1856 and freed as the Civil War ended. Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute and became the foremost advocate for Black economic self-sufficiency through education and vocational training. Though his accommodationist approach to segregation would later draw sharp criticism, his impact was undeniable. He raised millions from white philanthropists to fund Black colleges and created pathways to prosperity that had previously been unimaginable.

W.E.B. Du Bois, born free in Massachusetts in 1868, took a different path. A brilliant scholar and sociologist, Du Bois demanded immediate recognition of civil and political rights. He co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and served as editor of The Crisis magazine for 24 years, transforming it into the intellectual heart of the civil rights movement.³ His concept of the "Talented Tenth," the idea that the educated elite had a responsibility to help lift the entire race, shaped generations of Black thought.

These early leaders partnered with institutions that amplified their voices and coordinated their efforts. The NAACP, founded through an interracial coalition including Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, became the nation's premier civil rights organization. Its legal strategy, developed by brilliant minds like Thurgood Marshall, culminated in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

The mid-20th century brought new leaders and new organizations, all working in concert. Martin Luther King Jr. founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The National Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) formed what was known as the "Big Five" civil rights organizations.

The power of these organizations wasn't just in their individual strength but in their ability to coordinate. Consider the 1963 March on Washington, a masterpiece of collaborative leadership. The NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, the National Urban League, CORE, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters came together to organize a march that brought 250,000 people to the nation's capital and created the political momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

This is what good leadership looks like: people with different approaches and sometimes conflicting philosophies nonetheless finding common ground to pursue shared goals. As Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 teaches, "Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up." These leaders understood partnership not as weakness but as strength.

The Unified Voice of Black Media

Undergirding this leadership structure was something equally important: a unified Black media ecosystem that served as both information source and identity-shaper for African Americans across all walks of life. For decades, the African-American community looked to and trusted a constellation of news and media outlets that spoke directly to their experiences and concerns. These outlets were our social media before social media.

John H. Johnson's vision truly democratized Black media. In 1945, he founded Ebony magazine, modeled after Life but focused entirely on African-American achievement and culture. "We like to look at the zesty side of life," Johnson wrote. "‘Ebony’ will try to mirror the happier side of Negro life, the positive, everyday achievements from Harlem to Hollywood."⁴ The magazine's first issue sold out its 25,000 print run completely. Six years later, Johnson launched ‘Jet’, a pocket-sized weekly news digest that comedian Redd Foxx called "the Negro Bible."⁵

Available in barbershops, beauty parlors, corner stores, and homes across Black America, Jet reached an average circulation of 900,000 readers. When Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, Jet published the graphic photos of his brutalized body, images that shocked the nation's conscience and helped catalyze the civil rights movement.

The Crisis, founded by Du Bois in 1910 as the NAACP's official publication, combined rigorous reporting with literary excellence and political advocacy. The Amsterdam News, established in New York in 1909, became one of the nation's most influential Black newspapers, chronicling Harlem Renaissance culture while documenting civil rights struggles. The Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, these weren't niche publications but essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Black America.

These outlets served both the doctor and the janitor. They shaped African-American identity while galvanizing thought and perspective. They provided a common frame of reference, a shared conversation about what mattered and why. When Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech or when a new segregation ordinance passed, Black Americans across the country learned about it from the same sources, processed it through the same editorial lens, and discussed it in a common language.

By the 1980s, Ebony was reaching 40% of African-American adults according to Google, a level of market penetration unmatched by any other general publication. This wasn't just impressive from a business standpoint; it represented genuine cultural unity. The Black community had media it trusted, media that understood its concerns, media that elevated its achievements and didn't shy away from its struggles.

The Great Unraveling

But something changed. The decline wasn't sudden, these things never are, but its effects have been devastating. Between 2013 and 2014, four of the five largest audited Black newspapers saw circulation declines. Jet ceased print publication in 2014 after 63 years, moving to a digital-only format. Ebony was sold to a private equity firm in 2016, filed for bankruptcy in 2019, and essentially disappeared before being relaunched as a modest digital publication in 2021.

The numbers tell a story of institutional collapse. Weekly Black newspapers, which once numbered in the hundreds with clear influence and authority, now struggle to maintain any audited circulation at all. The digital revolution, which promised to democratize media, instead fragmented it into a thousand competing voices, none with the authority or reach of the old guard.

What filled the vacuum? Social media influencers, each with their own narrow audience. Cable news shouting matches where complexity is sacrificed for conflict. A proliferation of blogs and websites, many excellent but none capable of creating the kind of unified conversation that Ebony or The Crisis* once facilitated. The doctor and the janitor no longer read the same publications, don't share the same frames of reference, and increasingly don't even speak the same political language.

This media fragmentation both reflected and accelerated the leadership crisis. Without trusted media institutions to amplify and legitimize leaders, anyone with a Twitter following could claim to speak for Black America. Without editorial gatekeepers and institutional accountability, demagoguery flourished. Without a common information ecosystem, the very possibility of consensus leadership became questionable.

Several other factors contributed to the decline. The civil rights movement's legal victories created new opportunities but also dispersed potential leaders into corporate America, academia, and politics, where they pursued individual success rather than collective advocacy. The rise of Black elected officials created the appearance of representation without necessarily delivering substantive power. The emergence of "Black Power" movements in the late 1960s fractured the coalition that had achieved such remarkable success.

Perhaps most damagingly, leadership selection increasingly came to depend on external validation rather than community trust. As political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. observed, Black leaders increasingly rose through "white acclamation," selected not by African Americans themselves but by white media, white philanthropists, and white political establishments looking for acceptable spokespeople. The result was leaders skilled at appealing to white audiences but often disconnected from the Black communities they purported to represent.

What Scripture Teaches About Leadership

In this moment of leadership vacuum, it's worth returning to timeless wisdom about what leadership actually requires. The Bible offers a model that stands in stark contrast to our contemporary confusion, a model not of celebrity or charisma but of character and service.

Consider Titus 1:7-9, which outlines the qualifications for spiritual leaders: "An overseer must be blameless, not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain. Rather, he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it."

Notice what's emphasized: not eloquence or charisma, not credentials or connections, but moral character and commitment to truth. The biblical model of leadership is fundamentally about trustworthiness, self-control, and dedication to something larger than oneself.

This is reinforced throughout Scripture. Matthew 20:26-28 records Jesus's revolutionary teaching: "Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." True leadership, in this model, is fundamentally about service rather than status, about sacrifice rather than self-promotion.

Psalm 78:72 describes David's leadership: "With upright heart he shepherded them and guided them with his skillful hand." Here we see the combination every good leader needs: moral integrity ("upright heart") and practical competence ("skillful hand"). Character without capability is ineffective; capability without character is dangerous.

The Bible also emphasizes humility. Proverbs 11:2 warns, "When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom." And Philippians 2:3 instructs, "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves."

Perhaps most importantly, Scripture teaches that leaders are accountable, not ultimately to polls or popularity but to a higher standard. Hebrews 13:17 reminds us that leaders "keep watch over you as those who must give an account." This is a sobering responsibility, and one that should chasten anyone seeking leadership for its own sake.

The biblical model also emphasizes partnership and collective wisdom. Proverbs 15:22 teaches, "Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed." Ecclesiastes 4:12 observes, "Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken." The great leaders of the civil rights movement understood this. They didn't try to do everything alone; they built coalitions, created institutions, and recognized that enduring change requires collective effort.

Why Leadership Matters

Some might argue that we've moved beyond the need for leaders, that in our democratic, individualistic age, we should be suspicious of anyone claiming to speak for an entire community. There's something to this skepticism, history is littered with leaders who betrayed the trust placed in them.

But the alternative, leadership by algorithm, by social media mob, by whoever can shout loudest or craft the most viral tweet, has proven worse. Without trusted leaders, communities cannot organize effectively. Without institutional structures, achievements cannot be sustained. Without voices of moral authority, it becomes impossible to distinguish wisdom from demagoguery.

As Proverbs 29:18 warns, "Where there is no vision, the people perish" (KJV). This isn't about charismatic personalities or cult of personality, it's about the need for people who can articulate shared values, coordinate collective action, and hold institutions accountable. It's about the difference between a community and a collection of individuals.

The African-American community faces challenges today that require exactly the kind of coordinated, principled leadership that once addressed Jim Crow and segregation. The wealth gap, educational disparities, criminal justice reform, political representation, these issues won't solve themselves. They require organization, strategy, and sustained effort. They require leaders. Because, in the case of King Solomon solving a dispute, good leaders save lives.

But they also require the media infrastructure that made leaders possible and the institutional frameworks that made their leadership effective. They require communities willing to trust, institutions worth trusting, and leaders deserving of trust. As 1 Corinthians 4:2 reminds us, "Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful."

A Path Forward

There are no easy solutions to a crisis decades in the making. But there are principles worth recovering.

First, we must rebuild institutions worthy of trust, and the church must be at the forefront of this rebranding. This means media outlets that prioritize truth over clicks, organizations that prioritize mission over self-preservation, and leaders who prioritize service over celebrity.

Second, we must recover the art of partnership. The most effective moments in African-American history came when different organizations with different approaches nonetheless found common cause. That spirit of coalition-building has been lost in an age of ideological purity tests and social media call-out culture. As Romans 12:4-5 teaches, "For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others."

Third, we must distinguish between leadership and celebrity. The qualifications for leadership outlined in Scripture—integrity, humility, self-control, commitment to truth—stand in stark contrast to what often passes for leadership today. We need less charisma and more character, fewer soundbites and more substance.

Fourth, we must invest in the long game. The great leaders of the civil rights movement didn't achieve their victories overnight. They built organizations, developed strategies, and sustained efforts over years and decades. They understood what Galatians 6:9 teaches: "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up."

Finally, we must remember that leadership isn't about individual achievement but collective liberation. As 1 Peter 4:10 instructs, "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms." The purpose of leadership isn't to elevate the leader but to elevate the community.

America's leadership crisis won't be solved quickly, and the African-American community's particular challenges won't disappear without intentional effort. But history shows us what's possible when people of integrity, guided by principle rather than poll numbers, commit themselves to service rather than status. The question is whether we still have the moral imagination to demand it, and the moral courage to build it.

As we face the future, we would do well to remember the words of 2 Timothy 1:7: "For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control." These are the qualities we need in our leaders, and these are the qualities we must cultivate in ourselves. The great leader deficit isn't just about finding better leaders, it's about becoming a better people, worthy of the leadership we claim to want. Because, in Jesus Christ, we have the ultimate leader, and he not only saves lives, he changes them.

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Sources

¹ The U.S. is in a Leadership Crisis, New Survey Reveals | Press Room | U.S. News https://share.google/iMlp5ei0D0L1cjkGh

² Ibid.

³ A brief general summarization based on David Levering Lewis's book, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993.

⁴ Johnson, John H., with Lerone Bennett Jr. Succeeding Against the Odds. New York: Warner Books, 1989, p. 167.

⁵ Burns, Ben. Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996, p. 142. The characterization of Jet as "the Negro Bible" became widespread in popular culture and was frequently attributed to Foxx among other entertainers.

There is a phenomenon that exists in the streets, barbershops, inner city neighborhoods, and social media feeds of Black America. Young men and women who grew up in Sunday school, and those who never attended, have discovered another table at which to sit. They are becoming Hebrew Israelites and Moorish Americans, followers of the Nation of Islam, devot…

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There is a passage in the eighth chapter of Nehemiah that ought to haunt us. The people of Israel, newly returned from exile, gathered in the public square. Ezra the scribe brought out the Torah and read it aloud from morning until midday. The people stood and listened. They wept. They confessed. They celebrated. They were, in the truest sense, reconstituted by the encounter with the Word of God.

I think about that scene a great deal these days, because something like the inverse of it is occurring across much of modern American Christianity. We have the Book. We simply do not read it anymore.

The statistics, by now, are familiar to anyone paying attention, and yet they retain their capacity to shock. Surveys consistently find that fewer than half of Americans who identify as Christians read their Bible with any regularity. A majority cannot name the four Gospels. Substantial numbers are unable to identify the most basic contours of biblical narrative, the Exodus, the Sermon on the Mount, the resurrection appearances. Among young adults who were raised in the faith, the rates are even more dismal.

We have constructed a Christianity of feeling and belonging, of social connection and therapeutic comfort, that floats free of its textual foundation. We have kept the emotional register of the faith while slowly evacuating its content. And we are only beginning to understand what we have lost.

What the Scriptures Say About Themselves

This would be merely a sociological concern if the Bible did not speak so insistently about its own necessity. But it does, and with an urgency that should arrest us.

"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." -Psalm 119:105

The psalmist is describing something we have largely lost: a sense of Scripture as navigational. The ancient Hebrews did not read the Torah as a cultural artifact to be appreciated or a historical document to be analyzed. They read it, memorized it, chanted it, built their calendars and rhythms around it, because they believed it told them where they were and where they were going.

The Apostle Paul, writing to his young protégé Timothy, makes a sweeping claim about the nature of scriptural text that the early church took with absolute seriousness:

"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." - 2 Timothy 3:16–17

Note the comprehensiveness of the claim. Not some Scripture. Not Scripture when supplemented by the right cultural commentary or the right feelings on a Sunday morning. All Scripture. And note the purpose: not emotional edification, though that may follow, but equipping. The image is almost military, the thoroughly equipped soldier, prepared for the full range of what might be asked of her.

The author of Hebrews reaches even further, offering a description of the living Word that should stop any casual reader in their tracks:

"For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." - Hebrews 4:12

This is not a description of an inert document. It is a description of something that acts upon the reader, something that cuts through the layers of self-deception and social performance that accumulate around the modern self like sediment. When we abandon the regular reading of Scripture, we abandon the primary instrument by which that sediment gets cleared.

The Warnings We Have Ignored

What happens to a people when they lose their sacred text? The biblical writers had an answer, and it was not optimistic.

The prophet Hosea, speaking to a Northern Kingdom that had grown prosperous and spiritually complacent, delivered a diagnosis that reads with uncomfortable contemporaneity:

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you as my priests; because you have ignored the law of your God, I also will ignore your children." - Hosea 4:6

The destruction Hosea names is not primarily material. It is moral and spiritual, a people who, having abandoned the formation that comes from wrestling with divine law, find themselves incapable of navigating the deeper questions of how to live, what to value, and who they are.

Amos describes it even more starkly as a famine, which is to say, as the most primal kind of suffering:

"'The days are coming,' declares the Sovereign Lord, 'when I will send a famine through the land — not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.' " - Amos 8:11–12

There is something almost unbearably sad about that image: people staggering, searching, unable to find the very thing that was always available to them. One thinks of a person who has misplaced their glasses and cannot find them because they need their glasses to look. The Word is there, but the capacity to receive it, having been long neglected, has atrophied.

Jesus himself, in the great temptation narratives, reaches for the Hebrew Scriptures three times to ground his resistance to the devil. But what is most revealing is the first thing he says, drawn from Deuteronomy:

"It is written: 'Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" - Matthew 4:4

He is not simply quoting a proof text. He is articulating an anthropology, a view of what human beings fundamentally are and what they fundamentally need. To be human, Jesus is saying, is to be a creature of the Word. Deprive a person of bread and they will die in weeks. Deprive them of the Word and something essential in them will die, too, only more slowly and less visibly.

Why It Matters Beyond the Pews

I want to insist on something that may seem counterintuitive to secular readers: biblical illiteracy is not merely a problem for the church. It is a problem for the civilization that was, in part, shaped by the biblical tradition.

Much of what we take for granted in our moral vocabulary, the infinite dignity of the individual, the obligation to care for the stranger and the poor, the notion that history is going somewhere rather than merely repeating, the idea that those in power are accountable to something higher than their own power, has deep roots in the biblical narrative. When a society loses its familiarity with that narrative, it does not simply lose a religious resource. It loses the underground aquifer that has been quietly feeding its moral imagination.

When people do not know the story of the Exodus, they have a harder time understanding why liberation matters. When they have not sat with Job, they are less equipped to face suffering without cynicism or despair. When they have not read the Sermon on the Mount, they miss the revolutionary inversion at the heart of the Christian ethical tradition, the suggestion that the meek, the mourning, and the pure in heart are not losers in the human drama but inheritors of its deepest goods.

The current crisis of meaning, loneliness, and moral fragmentation that afflicts so many Americans is not unrelated to this loss. We are trying to navigate profound questions, about identity, about purpose, about how to live with one another across difference, with instruments that have been stripped of their most powerful guidance system.

James, in his letter to the early church, offered an image that strikes me as both beautiful and convicting: the person who hears the Word but does not act on it is like someone who looks at their face in a mirror and immediately forgets what they look like. But the person who looks intently into the Word and continues to do so is like someone who has finally discovered what their face actually is.

"But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it, not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it, they will be blessed in what they do." - James 1:25

We have, as a culture, stepped away from the mirror. And we are struggling, with increasing desperation, to remember what we look like.

What the Church Must Do

The church is, of course, the primary institution responsible for this crisis, and it is also the primary institution capable of addressing it. But doing so will require something more than adding another Bible study to the church calendar. It will require a fundamental rethinking of what formation means and what the local congregation is for.

The first and most urgent step is for pastors to take preaching seriously again as an act of scriptural exposition. There is a mode of contemporary preaching that uses the biblical text as a launching pad, a brief citation before pivoting to psychological insights, cultural commentary, and motivational content. It is often engaging. It is almost always insufficient. The congregation leaves having heard about the Bible without having heard the Bible. Pastors must return to the ancient practice of reading and explaining the text itself, in its historical context and canonical shape, allowing the strangeness and the difficulty as well as the comfort to come through.

The second step is to recover liturgical reading of Scripture as a congregational act. Many traditions have lost the lectionary, the ancient practice of reading systematically through the biblical text across the church year. Its restoration would mean that congregants, even those who struggle with private reading, would hear large swaths of Scripture read aloud in community over time. The ancient wisdom of the church assumed that formation happened through repeated exposure to the full range of the biblical narrative, not through a curated selection of favorite passages.

Third, churches must rebuild the infrastructure of formation that once existed in small-group settings, Sunday school classes, and catechetical instruction. The Sunday morning service is too brief and too passive to carry alone the weight of biblical formation. People need small, accountable communities where they can read slowly, ask hard questions, and be challenged by those who know them. They need a context in which not knowing is acceptable and wrestling is encouraged.

Fourth, churches must be willing to raise the cost of membership. For much of recent American Christianity, the implicit deal has been: we ask very little of you, and in exchange we hope you will return. The result has been communities of low commitment and low formation. The historic church understood that the catechumenate — the structured process of learning the faith before full membership — was essential to producing people who actually knew what they believed and why. Some version of that rigor is worth recovering.

Finally, parents must be re-enlisted as the primary teachers of the faith in the home. Deuteronomy 6:6–7 commands the Israelites to speak of God's words when they sit at home and when they walk along the road, when they lie down and when they get up. The sacred text was meant to permeate the rhythms of daily life, not be confined to the religious hour. Churches can help by equipping parents with the resources and the permission to do this — by signaling clearly that the dinner table, the bedtime conversation, and the long car ride are sacred instructional spaces.

The people who gathered to hear Ezra read the Torah did not understand it at first. So the Levites moved among the crowd, explaining the text, making the meaning plain, helping people understand what they heard. That is still the task. It always was. The Book is still here. The question is whether we have the humility to return to it, the patience to read it carefully, and the courage to let it read us in return.

There are moments in the life of a nation when the contrast between barbarism and grace becomes so stark that it illuminates something essential about the human condition. Last week provided such a moment. On February 5, 2026, during Black History Month, President Donald Trump's Truth Social account shared a video depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama with their faces superimposed on the bodies of apes—a racist trope with roots stretching back to the darkest chapters of American history, when such dehumanization was used to justify slavery and Jim Crow.

The backlash was swift and bipartisan. Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, called it "the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House."¹ Representative Mike Lawler termed it "incredibly offensive."² Even as the White House initially defended the post as an "internet meme," the weight of public condemnation—from Democrats and Republicans alike—eventually forced its removal. Yet Trump himself declined to apologize, saying only, "No, I didn't make a mistake."³

Such a depiction coming from the highest office in the land represents more than a lapse in judgment; it is a degradation of the office itself, a disgrace to the presidency of the free world. As Proverbs 11:9 reminds us, "With their mouths the godless destroy their neighbors, but through knowledge the righteous escape." Words and images have power. They have the power to build up or tear down, to unite or divide, to honor the image of God in others or to desecrate it.

What strikes me most profoundly about this incident is not the offense itself, we have, sadly, become accustomed to such provocations, but rather the response, or more precisely, the non-response, of the Obamas themselves. While lawmakers from both parties issued statements, while civil rights leaders condemned the imagery, while the nation engaged in yet another exhausting debate about racism and presidential conduct, the Obamas remained conspicuously silent. Barack Obama's only public statement in the days following came in a post about the Winter Olympics: "To all the athletes representing TeamUSA: I'm so proud of you."⁴

This silence is not weakness. It is the embodiment of a principle Michelle Obama articulated nearly a decade ago, one that has become a proverb in its own right: "When they go low, we go high." In a recent interview, Mrs. Obama clarified that this philosophy is not about passivity but strategic intentionality. "Going high is about being strategic," she explained. "That doesn't mean you don't feel it emotionally. That doesn't mean you don't get angry, but our response needs to have a goal beyond just being angry. I don't want to waste my anger."⁵

In their measured silence, in their refusal to respond to the searing white hot sin of hate, or every godless and unregenerate insult, the Obamas model something increasingly rare in our public discourse: a pure Christian deportment. I do not claim to know the state of their worship, that is between them and God. But I can recognize the outward manifestation of their walk. We should know Christian principles when we see them lived out. And what we see in the Obamas' response is precisely what scripture calls believers to model.

The Biblical Template for Dignity Under Fire

Jesus himself taught this counterintuitive ethic. In Luke 6:35, he instructs his followers: "But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked." This is a confusing and hard teaching, one that runs contrary to every instinct of self-defense and retaliation that courses through our veins.

Yet Jesus doubles down on this teaching in Matthew 5:11: "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me." Notice that Jesus does not say "if" people insult you, but "when." He assumes that his followers will face contempt, that the world will hurl its worst at those who bear his name. The blessing comes not from avoiding such treatment but from responding to it with a grace that transcends human understanding.

Peter, who himself experienced brutal persecution, offers further guidance in his first epistle. In 1 Peter 3:16, he writes: "keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander." The Greek word translated as "conscience" here is syneidēsis, which literally means "co-knowledge", a consciousness that we are being observed not just by other people but by God himself. It refers to that inner witness that testifies to the alignment between our professed values and our actual conduct.

What does this look like in practice? It looks like maintaining dignity when dignity is denied. It looks like refusing to descend into the mud even when others fling it at you. It looks like understanding that our character is shaped not by what happens to us but by how we respond to what happens to us. Peter's logic is profound: when we maintain good conduct in the face of slander, we eventually shame those who attack us. Not by matching their vitriol, but by maintaining a composure that exposes the emptiness of their accusations.

This principle matters immensely to our witness to the world. The watching world, skeptical, cynical, often hostile, judges Christianity not by our doctrinal statements but by our lived example. When Christians respond to hatred with more hatred, to insult with insult, to barbarism with barbarism, we confirm the world's worst suspicions about our faith. We demonstrate that our gospel is merely tribal loyalty dressed in theological garb. But when we respond to evil with good, to curse with blessing, to contempt with dignity, we point to something transcendent, a power not our own that transforms human nature from the inside out.

The Witness of Restraint

The Obamas serve as an unlikely but illuminating case study in this Christian ethic. They have endured years of attacks that would break most people: the birther conspiracy that questioned Barack Obama's very legitimacy as an American; the countless racist caricatures; the relentless questioning of Michelle Obama's femininity and dignity; and now this latest indignity, during Black History Month no less, depicting them as subhuman.

Through it all, they have largely refused to engage. Not because they lack the means to fight back, Barack Obama commands global platforms and Michelle Obama's voice could rally millions, but because they understand something profound about power: that true strength lies in self-control, not self-assertion. They seem to grasp what the ancient Stoics knew and what Christianity perfected: that we cannot control what others do to us, but we can control how we respond.

This restraint is not natural. It is cultivated. It requires what the old saints called "mortification", the deliberate putting to death of our worst impulses. In our age of instant social media responses, of clapbacks and dunks and viral takedowns, the discipline of silence is revolutionary. It says: I will not let your hatred set the terms of my life. I will not let your contempt determine my conduct. I will not give you the satisfaction of dragging me down to your level.

This is what makes the Obamas' example particularly instructive for Christians in our current moment. We live in a time when the loudest voices in Christian public life often seem the angriest, when partisan fury frequently trumps spiritual fruit, when the line between Christian witness and political combat has become perilously blurred. The Obamas, whatever their personal faith commitmentsdemonstrate through their public conduct what Christian deportment is supposed to look like: measured, dignified, oriented toward long-term moral credibility rather than short-term emotional satisfaction.

Growing Toward Christ-Like Deportment

So how do we grow toward this kind of character? How do we learn to embody the biblical principles we profess? Here are several practices worth cultivating:

First, we must practice the discipline of delayed response.

In the age of social media, the pressure to react immediately is immense. But wisdom requires reflection. Before responding to an attack or insult, we should ask ourselves: What am I trying to accomplish? Will this response build or destroy? Am I acting from strength or from woundedness? The discipline of waiting, even just 24 hours, can transform our interactions.

Second, we must remember that we are always on display.

This is not paranoia but biblical realism. Our lives are "letters from Christ...known and read by everyone" (2 Corinthians 3:2-3). The world watches how Christians handle adversity, disappointment, and malice. Our witness is most powerful not when we're preaching from a position of strength but when we're suffering from a position of weakness—and still maintaining grace.

Third, we must cultivate what the Bible calls "long-suffering" or patience.

This is not a passive resignation but an active choice to endure difficulty without becoming bitter. It requires us to take the long view, to understand that vindication often comes slowly, that character is built through repeated choices over years, not through single dramatic moments.

Fourth, we must learn to distinguish between justice and vengeance.

The Bible commands us to pursue justice, to speak up for the oppressed, to confront wickedness, to stand against evil. But it also commands us to leave vengeance to God. This is a crucial distinction. We can work for justice while refusing to nurse grudges. We can confront wrong while maintaining personal dignity. We can pursue accountability while extending grace.

Finally, we must recognize that our ultimate audience is God, not people.

When we understand that we will give an account to God for how we've lived, for how we've loved our neighbors and our enemies, it changes everything. We stop performing for human approval and start living with an audience of One. This is the meaning of syneidēsis, that co-knowledge with God that Peter speaks of. When we know that God sees everything, that nothing is hidden from his sight, we become less concerned with winning arguments and more concerned with maintaining integrity.

What This Means for the Lost and the Nation

The stakes of our conduct are higher than we often realize. For the lost, those outside the faith, our behavior is often the only Bible they will read. When they see Christians responding to hatred with more hatred, matching insult with insult, they conclude that Christianity offers nothing transformative, nothing that couldn't be found in any political ideology or tribal allegiance. But when they see Christians maintaining dignity under fire, extending grace to enemies, refusing to be diminished by those who attack them, they encounter something genuinely countercultural. They glimpse the kingdom of God breaking into this broken world.

For the nation, the witness of Christian character offers something desperately needed: a vision of citizenship that transcends partisan warfare. Our country is tearing itself apart precisely because we have lost the ability to disagree without dehumanizing, to oppose without demonizing, to fight for our convictions while maintaining our humanity and recognizing the humanity of our opponents. Christians should be leading the way in modeling a better path, not because we're better people, but because we serve a Lord who commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

The tragedy of last week's incident is not just that a racist video was shared from the presidential account—though that is tragic enough. The deeper tragedy is that such incidents have become routine, that we have normalized the abnormal, that cruelty and contempt now pass without serious consequence. In such a moment, the example of those who refuse to participate in the degradation becomes all the more vital.

The Obamas are not perfect, no one is. They are not called to be our moral exemplars in every respect. But in this particular dimension of public life, in their refusal to answer every attack, in their commitment to maintaining dignity when dignity is denied, they offer a template worth studying and, dare I say, emulating. I'm preaching to myself now.

This is what it means to go high when others go low. Not to be silent in the face of injustice, but to respond to injustice in ways that heal rather than harm, that build rather than destroy, that witness to a kingdom not of this world. It means remembering that our ultimate calling is not to win arguments but to bear witness—to lives transformed by grace, to souls that have learned to love enemies, to consciences kept clear before God and man.

In the end, this is the only kind of witness that endures. Political victories are temporary; partisan triumphs are fleeting. But the testimony of a life well-lived, of grace extended in the face of hatred, of dignity maintained when dignity is denied, this echoes into eternity. This is the calling of every Christian, in every age, in every circumstance: to be people of the high road, even when the low road beckons, even when the cost is great.

The Obamas remind us, through their silence and their measured responses over the years, that there is a better way. Not an easier way, nothing about this path is easy. But a better way. A way that honors the image of God in all people, including those who attack us. A way that keeps our conscience clear and our witness credible. A way that, in the fullness of time, shames injustice not through retaliation but through righteousness.

This is the way of Christ. This is the call to go higher. May we have the grace to follow it.

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Footnotes:

1. Gomez, Justin et al. "Trump says he didn't see full racist video before it was posted, says he won't apologize." ABC News, February 6, 2026. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-shares-video-includes-racist-depiction-obamas-sparking/story?id=129918626

2. Gomez, Justin et al. "Trump says he didn't see full racist video before it was posted, says he won't apologize." ABC News, February 6, 2026.

3. Colarossi, Natalie and Contreras, Russell. "Trump says 'I didn't make a mistake' after racist video of Obamas removed." Axios, February 6, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/trump-racist-video-barack-michelle-obama-truth-social

4. "Obama Breaks Silence After Trump's Racist Video." Creebhills, February 8, 2026. https://creebhills.com/2026/02/obama-breaks-silence

5. "Michelle Obama Updates Her Iconic 'When They Go Low, We Go High' Philosophy: 'Be Strategic, Not Just Mad.'" Shine My Crown, August 15, 2025. https://shinemycrown.com/michelle-obama-updates-her-iconic-when-they-go-low-we-go-high-philosophy-be-strategic-not-just-mad/

The story of American Christianity cannot be told without placing the African-American church at its very center. This isn't merely a matter of historical accuracy or cultural appreciation, though both are essential. It's about recognizing that the B…

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There's a moment in every honest historian's journey when everything they thought they knew suddenly changes, and a new light reveals what was always there but never quite seen. For me, that moment came while reading about the Aksumite Empire's adoption of Christianity in the fourth …

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Opening Prayer

Dear God, thank You for the gift of prayer. Thank You that I can talk to You about anything. Today, teach me to pray in ways that matter. Help me understand what You want for my life. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

Scripture Reading - Colossians 1:9-10

“For this r…

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There's a scene in the opening chapter of Exodus that we tend to rush past on our way to the burning bush and the dramatic showdown at the Red Sea. But it deserves our lingering attention, especially now, especially here. Two women, Shiphrah and Puah, receive a direct order from the most powerful man in their world: kill the Hebrew boys as they're being born. The text tells us simply, "But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had commanded them, but let the boys live" (Exodus 1:17).

This is not a story about heroic resistance to distant tyranny. This is a story about ordinary people facing an impossible choice between the law of the land and the law of heaven, and choosing to let the latter trump the former, knowing full well the consequences could be fatal.

The parallels to our current American moment are neither perfect nor neat, but they are present. We live in an age of competing authorities, where citizens are increasingly asked to navigate between governmental demands and deeply held moral convictions. The tensions manifest differently than in ancient Egypt, we're not talking about state-sanctioned infanticide, but the underlying architecture of the dilemma remains: What do you do when the powers that be command what your faith forbids?

Consider three contemporary expressions of this ancient tension. First, there's the healthcare worker asked to participate in procedures they believe constitute the taking of innocent life. Second, there's the small business owner told to facilitate celebrations of unions their faith teaches them not to recognize. Third, there's the parent commanded to affirm ideologies about human identity that contradict what they understand Scripture to teach about how God made us. In each case, ordinary people find themselves at the intersection of Caesar's decree and God's design, forced to choose.

The biblical pattern established by Shiphrah and Puah echoes throughout Scripture. When King Nebuchadnezzar commanded Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to bow before his golden image, they replied with respectful clarity: "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire...But even if He does not...we are not going to serve your gods" (Daniel 3:17-18). When the Persian empire forbade prayer to anyone but King Darius, Daniel simply "continued kneeling on his knees three times a day, praying and giving thanks before his God, as he had been doing previously" (Daniel 6:10). When the apostles were commanded to stop preaching about Jesus, Peter answered, "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). The pattern is consistent: respectful acknowledgment of authority, clear explanation of the conflict, and then quiet, dignified defiance.

History records secular echoes of this principle. The Haitian rebellion wasn't merely about political independence; it was partly fueled by enslaved people who understood, in their deepest souls, that no human decree could make chattel slavery morally legitimate. The Boston Tea Party emerged from colonists who believed certain impositions violated natural law and divine right. Harriet Tubman and the vast network of the Underground Railroad operated in explicit violation of federal law, the Fugitive Slave Act is one example, because they recognized a higher law that declared human beings were not property to be returned to their "rightful owners." These examples demonstrate that sometimes the most patriotic act is principled resistance to unjust law.

But here we encounter the theological cord that has tied Christians in intellectual knots for two millennia: What about Romans 13? "Every person is to be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God" (Romans 13:1). Paul couldn't be clearer. In a 1998 interview on "Larry King Live," Al Mohler, noted Calvinist and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued that the Bible commanded slaves to obey their masters, and when pressed about runaway slaves like Harriet Tubman, he stated there was "no loophole" in the text for disobeying that mandate. And yet, when we look through out scripture, beyond the narrow subjective arguments of men like Mohler, how do we square this with the midwives' defiance?

The answer requires holding multiple truths in tension, something our age of ideological purity finds nearly impossible. Yes, Christians are called to submit to governing authorities as God's servants "for good" (Romans 13:4). Yes, "when the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when a wicked person rules, people groan" (Proverbs 29:2), acknowledging that not all rule is equally just. Yes, prophets like Nathan confronted even beloved King David with God's judgment: "You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword...you have despised Me" (2 Samuel 12:9). Yes, Elijah condemned King Ahab: "Have you found me, my enemy?" Ahab asked. "I have found you," Elijah replied, "because you have given yourself over to do evil in the sight of the LORD" (1 Kings 21:20).

The synthesis emerges when we understand that Romans 13 describes the normative pattern of Christian citizenship, not an absolute command that nullifies all other moral obligations. Paul himself violated unjust orders throughout his ministry. The governing authorities are established by God for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right (Romans 13:3-4). When authorities invert this purpose, when they punish good and reward evil, they step outside their God-ordained role and lose their moral claim to absolute obedience.

This is where Galatians 6:9-10 becomes essential: "Let's not become discouraged in doing good, for in due time we will reap, if we do not become weary. So then, while we have opportunity, let's do good to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith." The call to "do good" supersedes convenience, personal safety, and even legal compliance when the law demands evil.

The lesson for Christians is this: We are to be the most law-abiding citizens in society, right up until the moment we're asked to sin. Then we become the most courageously disobedient. This requires extraordinary wisdom. Not every policy disagreement rises to the level of the midwives' crisis. Not every political frustration justifies rebellion. Christians must distinguish between laws that inconvenience us and laws that compel us to violate God's explicit commands. We must ask: Is this Caesar demanding what belongs to God?

Living under wicked rule requires spiritual maturity. We must pray for those in authority, even, especially when, we believe them wicked (1 Timothy 2:1-2). We must engage in legitimate political processes to advocate for justice. This is being involved in the candidate vetting process and voting matters. We must clearly articulate why we cannot comply when compliance would mean sin, doing so with gentleness and respect. We must be willing to accept the legal consequences of our faithfulness, as the midwives surely understood they might.

And critically, we must remember what motivated Shiphrah and Puah. The text doesn't say they feared Pharaoh's wrath or loved the Hebrew people, though both were surely true. It says they "feared God." This is the heart of the matter. The fear of God must produce the obedience of God. When those align against human authority, we choose God. We do this not out of political ideology, not out of cultural preference, but out of reverent awe before the One who will judge both kings and subjects.

The closing verses of Exodus 1 are instructive: "So God was good to the midwives...and because the midwives feared God, He established households for them" (Exodus 1:20-21). Their faithfulness cost them nothing in the end; it gained them everything. They traded temporary safety under Pharaoh's favor for eternal security under God's blessing.

That's the calculus of faithful defiance. Not reckless, not eager, not triumphalist, but resolute. When the king's decree demands what God forbids, the fear of God compels us to respectfully, clearly, courageously say: I cannot. I will not. And I will trust God with the consequences.

In an age of polarization, this is neither a conservative nor liberal position. It's a Christian position, rooted in the orthodox conviction that God's authority supersedes all others, and that sometimes the most faithful act is the most illegal one. The midwives understood this. Daniel understood this. Peter understood this. And we, if we're serious about following Jesus in a world where kingdoms rise and fall but God's kingdom endures forever, must understand it too.

There's a passage in Jeremiah that has haunted me lately: "They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. 'Peace, peace,' they say, when there is no peace" (Jeremiah 6:14). I think about this verse when I consider what historians will someday call the Trump evangelical moment—a period when a significant portion of American Christianity…

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