Page 1286 – Christianity Today (2024)

"Don't do it!"

"They are going to hate you!"

I'm grateful for honest friends. I shared what I thought God had called me to and my buddy hit me upside the head with the above warnings. Truthfully, I thought he might be right! But I went ahead anyway.

Let me rewind. I spent most of my pastoral ministry pioneering church plants in liberal U.S. cities. From age 25 to 35, I started faith communities in urban New Jersey, San Francisco, and Marin County. I loved church planting. But God was doing a work in my heart, calling me to walk once again by faith, to do something different than I had ever done.

God was calling me to walk by faith, to do something different than I had ever done before.

Bill Ritchie founded Crossroads Community Church, one of the first generation of mega-churches in the Northwest. Crossroads is located in Vancouver, Washington, on the northern banks of the Columbia River across from Portland, Oregon. By the time I got to know Bill, he was an elder statesman: buttoned up and regal, a consummate pastor. His regional radio ministry was 30 years old, and he communicated flawlessly. When we saw each other at conferences, we would talk and laugh. But when we met up in 2011, things were different. Bill shared his desire to transition Crossroads to a younger pastor so he could focus on keeping retiring Boomers on mission with Jesus. Before we knew it, we were talking about the possibility of my succeeding him.

A Crazy Choice

Bill and I share a love for God, his Word, and people. We are both strong communicators, but that's where the similarities end. If Bill is an elder statesman, I am that statesman's crazy nephew. Bill is buttoned up, while I prefer a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Bill is neatly groomed, while I have dreadlocks and a beard. Bill is quietly refined, and I'm 100-percent Italian from New Jersey. Bill preaches like a classical composer with everything in its perfect place. I preach like a jazz musician with structured improvisation.

On top of these differences, there's a yawning generational gap: Bill is approaching 70, and I'm younger than his children.

Bill said his pastoral legacy was tied to the success of our transition, and he delivered.

When the search process concluded, the church board offered me the lead pastor position. I came on staff in January of 2012, and we designed a transition plan. Given our radically different styles, the transition was a success. Not only did the church not tank, we actually grew by about 10 percent during the transition and continued to grow after I became lead pastor. Whether it's people jumping into groups or volunteering, giving or coming to Jesus for the first time, we are thriving. This is only by God's grace.

Let me share what I've learned along the way.

Planning, Communication, Execution

Long before I was in the picture, Bill and the leadership team had researched leadership transitions. When I arrived, we spent time seeking God and strategizing how we would transition, seeking to avoid potential pitfalls. We decided that the transition had to be finished in two years. We laid out our preaching schedule and decided how we would navigate whenever we disagreed on anything.

We communicated our transition to the congregation in multiple ways. We created a new section of our website dedicated to the next chapter. We distributed brochures. As we preached, we referred back to what we were doing and why. We regularly talked about who we were as a church, the transition, and where we were going. This clear, consistent communication alleviated many of the concerns people had.

Could we execute the transition plan? In many ways, this was the biggest question. Much of our success was because of Bill. When a senior pastor is successful for many years, it's common for that pastor to struggle to "let go." But at Crossroads, Bill said his pastoral legacy was tied to the success of our transition, and he delivered what he promised.

Bill helped me get "buy-in" with the congregation and gave me every opportunity to succeed. We were not only transitioning the leadership, we were expanding how we did ministry. By God's grace, what needed to be finished in 24 months was completed in 14. One of my most profound memories of our "Legacy Sunday" (our formal hand-off date) was bumping into Bill in our speaker's room. He gave me a hug, handed me his resignation letter and said, "We did it! Now let's keep going!" What a model of class and honor!

Guarding the Relationship

The enemy loves to divide and conquer, and pastoral transitions create countless opportunities for him to do just that. We are both visionary leaders, and it was inevitable we would disagree along the way. But from the beginning, Bill and I promised each other that we'd guard our relationship. We agreed we would be unified before the congregation and disagree in private. While Bill was the senior pastor, I deferred to his leadership and we discussed disagreements privately. Since the transition, Bill has deferred to my leadership and we have discussed things privately.

We decided that Bill would remain at Crossroads in a founding pastor role. His new position began immediately after he transitioned from being the senior pastor. Looking back, I think it would have been healthier to give Bill a one-year sabbatical to rest, refocus, and adjust to life after more than 37 years of being a senior pastor. Although Bill has done well, I can only imagine how challenging it must be for him to watch things change.

Facing Tensions

One of my greatest fears about the transition process what dealing with what I call "cross currents." A cross current occurs when you have two conflicting areas of momentum. As you can imagine, with two Type-A leaders in the room, there were many cross currents. Pastor Bill's leadership had one trajectory; my leadership had another. Also, because of our age gap, our approaches to leadership and "best practices" were vastly different.

Part of me wanted the founding pastor to love every idea I have and everything I do. But that is not reality.

How do you navigate between the past and the future? How do you reconcile two unique visions? As you might imagine, there was some choppy water. When we talked about everything—from staffing to what we were preparing for as a church body—there were often divergent ideas. Bill with his dignified packaging preferred classy sermon series ideas. I leaned more toward the edgy and contemporary.

Throughout the transition, I continually reminded myself that Bill was the senior pastor. He was responsible to God for the leadership of Crossroads. When that was the structure, I deferred to his decisions. I had to decide what I wanted to fight for and why, and how to approach conflicts. I had to determine where I needed to exercise patience and simply wait. In the same way, when Bill was the senior pastor, he would often defer to me on a decision that had longer-term consequences. For instance, he knew in the end that new hires or the shifting of staff positions would impact me as a leader far more than it would him. We both, I believe, tried our best to honor each other in the calling that God had on our lives.

Different Ideas

I had some ideas that Bill was just never going to like. The reality is I will do things that he would never have done. This is a challenge for any successor, especially in a situation like ours where the founding pastor is still an integral part of the church.

There is a part of me that wants the founding pastor to love every idea I have and everything I do. But that is not reality. After becoming the lead pastor of Crossroads, I immediately hired a few key executive positions. These were people that Bill would probably never have hired because he looked for different things in those positions. But as the lead pastor, I had to build my team, designed around the structure and future I believed God was asking me to help bring to fruition. I was not building Bill's team. I was building the team I needed to serve the church.

There were other things that were an adjustment for him. I changed the look and feel of the senior pastor's office. Throughout the process of transition, and especially afterwards, I needed to learn to be okay with making decisions that Bill would never have made. I'd been called to lead the church into the future. To do that, I needed to make adjustments to our structure, culture, look, and feel.

Looking Forward

God blessed the transition at Crossroads in amazing ways. Everyone was committed to the process and committed to let God lead, no matter what. We continue to grow and reach out in fresh ways, while standing on the shoulders of a blessed legacy. Despite all the fears out there about senior pastor transitions, we are a living example of God's grace as we continue to take huge steps of faith. As more churches transition from their long-term senior pastors, it's my prayer that there will be many transitions that are as healthy and exciting as ours. God's church is that important. He and his people deserve nothing less.

Daniel Fusco is pastor of Crossroads Community Church in Vancouver, Washington.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Jason Meyer never aspired to fill the pulpit previously occupied by John Piper.

In fact, Meyer had many reasons it was a bad idea for him to succeed Piper, one of America's most famous pastors, in the pulpit of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minnesota. Meyer made sure that God knew a few of those reasons: I'm scared. I don't want this. I don't want the pressure. I don't want the comparison.

Yet, here was Piper in Meyer's office, where Meyer was perfectly content serving as a New Testament professor at Bethlehem College and Seminary, posing the question Meyer had dreaded, but sensed was coming:

"We want to see Bethlehem become a relationally charged place … where God meets us not just in the sermons, but in every area of our life together."

"Your name has come up as a candidate, a strong candidate, to succeed me," Piper said. "We just want to know before we go any further, are you interested?"

"Nothing scares me more than that," Meyer said.

"Well, that's not a no," Piper replied.

Meyer, then 36, had struggled with a gnawing sense that God was calling him to lead Bethlehem. The South Dakota native had followed God's direction to Piper's church and Bible Institute through a series of unmistakable, life-changing promptings; over the years doors opened, and his personal and professional life had untangled in the most unexpected ways.

One of his first life-changing turns came shortly after he started college. He felt God move his heart from pursuing a high-income career as an anesthesiologist to seeking a profession that allowed him to serve others more directly.

"I had begun this process in my heart of wanting to be a servant, wanting to minister to people" Meyer said. "And so, I thought, Man, it is hard to minister to somebody when you put them to sleep."

His career choice switched to occupational therapy, but it would not be long before his direction became even more specific: ministry … and succeeding Piper at Bethlehem Baptist.

God's Timing

The call took Jason and his wife Cara by surprise. After several emotional trials and major moves, their life together finally seemed more settled than it had been in years. He was comfortable in his teaching position, loved eager students and digging into the Bible, and called his Bethlehem College and Seminary position his "dream job."

But for weeks he felt those same promptings that brought him to Bethlehem—internal, gut-wrenching feelings he described as "firecracker" explosions—pushing him in an unexpected direction.

And now, John Piper was sitting in his office. As Piper inquired about his candidacy for succession, Meyer confessed his worries about taking on leadership of the ministry but admitted he felt God drawing him in that direction. He questioned how he could follow the well-known pastor and best-selling author's 33-year ministry while minimizing transitional conflicts that accompany any leadership change.

The Church's Internal Issues

There were also some internal challenges to be addressed, issues that rose after Bethlehem, with a growing membership that is now more than 3,000, became a multi-campus church. Overflowing attendance downtown had spurred the 2002 opening of a north campus that began meeting at a college. That fledgling—yet still connected—campus opened a permanent north site in 2005. The following year a third campus opened south of Minneapolis. Each campus is distinct, with unique challenges. Downtown is thoroughly urban; north campus is struggling to house its growing children's ministry, and the south campus, still meeting in a school, is embarking upon a building campaign.

Managing the growing church's diverse needs was increasingly difficult as Piper, who had been candid about his reasons for wanting to step down, shared in a 2012 Q&A regarding his plans.

"I am less competent at leading Bethlehem structurally and organizationally than I used to be," Piper said. "For about 30 years I was usually able to see through the complexities, and formulate feasible and exciting plans—always with the help of incredibly devoted and gifted partners in ministry. This is no longer the case. For two reasons: One is that Bethlehem is more complex than it used to be; and the other is that my energies and abilities for this kind of organizational and structural planning are diminished."

"Jesus is on this road, and it's scary, but it's scarier to be without him."

Bethlehem's growth and the changes it spurred necessitated that the church leadership's focus had to broaden. Over time, small differences had grown to the point that clear resolution was needed. Strengthening leadership and healing some broken relationships were part of the responsibilities Meyer knew would require much of the next pastor's initial focus, and although it made him uncomfortable, God's calling became increasingly obvious.

Meyer's gifts and love of God's Word were gaining the attention of others in the church, especially as he taught a class at the north campus. Many were asking him if he would be interested in leading Bethlehem. Friends playfully bantered with him about it, unaware of the deep conviction that God had placed on his heart.

The Call

Meyer's hesitance was also based on painful losses he experienced since he was a sophom*ore in college and started becoming serious about his relationship with Christ.

"Everything preceding my call to ministry was a process of God taking things out of my heart that had been idols and forcefully ripping them out of my life," Meyer said.

As a child, Meyer found refuge in sports after his parents' painful but amicable divorce, and many had praised his natural athletic abilities, particularly in basketball. Meyer dreamed of being awarded a college basketball scholarship, but he instead went on a music scholarship, and the sport that had been such a huge part of his life was suddenly gone.

By his sophom*ore year, the relationship with the girl he always thought he would marry evaporated, leaving him heartbroken. Yet, it was through those losses that Meyer realized he had been putting other pursuits before God, and he repented. "I finally understood all I have is God. And I began to grow by leaps and bounds. My relationship with God became consuming."

His grandpa, a strong Christian, saw the change and told him he thought God was calling him into ministry. Meyer was stunned. "My first impulse was to say that was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. But because it was my grandpa, I said I'll pray about it." Meyer figured he and God would agree it was an outlandish idea, but it quickly grew into a spiritual burden.

"That was the most miserable time in my life. Any peace I had with God went away. I felt like it was a tug of war. A battle, like a weight on my shoulders I couldn't get off."

The Candidate

Meyer carried the weight into the next Sunday service, where for the first time he could recall, his pastor preached on the disciples' calling.

"I was so tense I had my fingers on the pew in front of me in a vice grip. I remember at that point saying 'I surrender,' and I took my hands off and put them under my legs. I said, 'If this is what you want from me, then I don't understand, but I trust you.'"

I finally understood all I have is God … my relationship with God became consuming."

Meyer calls that a watershed moment "because I started seeing miracles happen after that. Fountains of compassion coming out of nowhere. I began to devour the Bible." Everything else fell away, including his studies that had been leading him toward an occupational therapy degree.

"I couldn't even open my books anymore," he said. "I'd have the best time waking up in the morning and sitting in the Scriptures all day." A boldness to preach manifested "out of nowhere;" and he pursued God's calling toward ministry, directed unmistakably by the "firecrackers" in his spirit.

Over the years, he pursued ministry, earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees, and met and married his wife, Cara. The couple endured a heart-wrenching adoption path that started with one set of brothers from Ethiopia but ended with another. "God showed us we had to be put on the broken road first, so we could really know how to love these boys … so we could be the parents they needed."

Until the call to Bethlehem's pulpit, Meyer believed that God's will for his ministry was as a professor, but that confidence was shaken during Piper's 2011 "Antioch Moment" sermon announcing his retirement. Meyer said he had the same succession questions everyone had, but during the sermon he experienced a jarring call toward leadership: "It was a sense so clear, so forceful: 'That's what you're going to do.' I just thought, Now I'm scared, because this has happened three times before (when I felt called into ministry, to attend class, and then teach at Bethlehem) and it's always ended up being right, and now this is what I don't want."

Months later, exhausted and raw from trying to run, to desperately convince himself the calling wasn't from God, Meyer found himself at home, collapsing in anguish before God, begging to know why he wanted him leading Bethlehem. Meyer felt a clear answer from God: "What if, in doing this, you'll have more of me?"

"God showed us we had to be put on the broken road first, so we could really know how to love these boys."

"At that point, I felt like it was checkmate," Meyer said. "I really believe with all my heart, there's nothing more I want than that, and if that's what this is, then I guess I do want it. After that, my whole heart changed." His wife Cara said God led her through a similar journey … to the same conclusion. "Jesus is on this road, and it's scary, but it's scarier to be without him," she said.

Meyer, one of two finalists to succeed Piper, was described as "very, very strong" by search committee chair Sam Crabtree. Piper was initially involved, but stepped off after the first search committee meeting to avoid any perception of directing the process. Meyer went through an intensive, detailed, and grueling interview series that included competency meetings with questioning from multiple groups from the campuses, each focused on a particular ministry.

God's calling was affirmed when Meyer received a unanimous recommendation from the elder board for his candidacy, a confidence that was echoed by the congregational vote of 784-8. It was a vote Piper called "simply stunning" and proof of God's hand in the transition. "I started feeling like we're supposed to store each one of these (affirmations) up so when it gets hard, we can say that was hard but this was clear," he said.

The Difficulties

The most difficult part of the first year was leading Bethlehem staff through the relational problems they were experiencing. Crabtree said Meyer handled the challenges well, noting they "came front and center" during the transition but were not caused by it. "He moved toward it and met with all the parties. He didn't exclude himself and say, 'Hey, I didn't cause these problems,'" Crabtree said.

Meyer brought in Peacemaker Ministries, a Christian organization that offers mediation services that helped him guide the process until the issues were resolved. Meyer has also focused on building relationships among leadership to reestablish unity, relying on prayer and God's strength to direct the way.

Crabtree said the leadership is now focused on moving forward together. "Jason never wavered," Crabtree said. "He never said, 'Boy, I don't know what I've gotten myself into here.' He's been 'Let's go and roll up our sleeves.' It just seemed the fingerprints of God were on this transition."

Crabtree said Meyer has a gift of building relationships, encouraging open communication, and taking time to meet with every staff member individually to listen, share, and pray together.

Meyer said he sees God's purpose through the challenges they have faced and he and the elder board are unified in their focus on the future of Bethlehem. "We just saw this as the providence of God in that this is the way he chose to establish my leadership," Meyer said.

Going forward, Meyer said he is committed to humbly seeking God for Bethlehem's every step and strengthening the relationships within the body. One of the ways Meyer is strengthening these relationships is through his preaching. Meyer preaches every Saturday night at Bethlehem's downtown campus, which is taped. He then will preach at one of the three campuses live on Sunday and the other two will show the video of the taped sermon. Meyer is living out his desire to do life together as a whole church.

Meyer says, "There's a lot of excitement. We want to see Bethlehem become a relationally charged place, with all of our members … in the sense that we're not just here to hear sermons, we're really here to do life together, to see it lived out, to feel this is my family, this is my support, this is where God meets us, not just in the sermons, but in every area of our life together."

Laura Adelmann is an award-winning reporter living in Northfield, Minnesota.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

In recent days, the Crimean peninsula has been at the heart of what some have described as the greatest international crisis of the 21st century. But this is not the first time the region has been so critical to international affairs. Many educated people have at least heard of the great struggle known as the Crimean War (1853-56), although its causes and events remain mysterious to most non-specialists.

If the conflict is remembered today, it resonates through the heroic charitable efforts of Florence Nightingale and the foundation of modern nursing. Actually, that earlier war deserves to be far better known as a pivotal moment in European religious affairs. Without knowing that religious element, moreover—without a sense of its Christian background—we will miss major themes in modern global affairs, in the Middle East and beyond.

Given its date, that religious emphasis may seem wildly anachronistic. This was, after all, a highly modern struggle between the Great Powers of the day: Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire against Tsarist Russia. The war was fought with highly modern technology, including railroads and telegraphs, not to mention deadly artillery. Some 800,000 died, almost half from disease—at least as many fatalities as in the American Civil War of the next decade.

Yet the war's causes seem to belong to a strictly pre-modern era, and Orlando Figes' excellent recent history calls this The Last Crusade. As in medieval times, the war grew out of the situation of Christians under Muslim rule in the Middle East, and specifically the control of Jerusalem's holy places.

From the 15th century, the dominant Muslim power was the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which ruled over millions of Christians—Armenians, Greeks, Slavs, and others. As Ottoman power crumbled, European Christian nations pressed hard on its shrinking borders, annexing its territory. From the 1770s, the main predator was Orthodox Russia, which soon established its control of the Black Sea region and pushed into the Caucasus. The Russians also demanded and won the right to protect the holy places, which were to be under Orthodox supervision.

Given time, the Russians would undoubtedly have snapped up the whole Ottoman realm if other powers, especially Britain, had not dreaded the creation of a Russian superpower stretching from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. In effect, Britain became the protector and guarantor of the corrupt and failing Ottoman regime. This international balance of terror allowed the Ottoman Empire to drag on its existence into the 20th century.

That status quo was destabilized in 1852 with the accession of a new French regime under Napoleon III, who had initially seized power in a coup d'état. Facing deep divisions at home, and desperate to prove his legitimacy, he sought to increase his prestige by provoking an international crisis. He did so by exploiting Orthodox–Catholic battles in Jerusalem, gruesome and grossly undignified street-fights led by clergy on both sides, which sometimes erupted into full-scale riots.

In 1846, one such clerical rumble left 40 dead. In 1853, Napoleon demanded that the Ottomans place the holy places under the power of the Roman Catholic Church, and backed up his demands by a naval expedition. We need not go too deeply into the tortuous diplomacy that followed, except to say that war broke out in October 1853. But yes, indeed, even in the age of steam power and the industrial revolution, half of Europe really did go to war over religious grievances.

Looking back at European history, it's all too easy to assume that the religious role in politics and warfare died out much earlier than it really did. We might, for instance, assume that Europe's religious wars ended in 1648, with the closure of the Thirty Years War. But most of the continent's states were avowedly Christian right up to the First World War and beyond, and most practiced some form of church establishment. When wars did erupt, governments and churches framed their nation's cause in religious and even apocalyptic terms, depicting their (usually Christian) enemies as the spawn of Satan. In England, the Crimean War was the last for which the government formally proclaimed national days of prayer, fasting, and humiliation.

The great exception to this general picture of church establishment was France, where Republican secularist traditions were so strong. Yet it was Napoleon III's France that assumed the role of Catholic crusader, at the cost of soaking the continent in blood. Long after the Enlightenment, we neglect the Christian role in European politics and statecraft at our peril.

This was nowhere more true than in Tsarist Russia, where—right up to 1917—politics never lost their apocalyptic and messianic character. When the Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks in 1453, Muscovite Russia took up that mantle. Two Romes had fallen, proclaimed the Tsars, a third stands, and a fourth will never be. As the Third Rome, Moscow was heir to the hopes that surrounded the glorious Byzantine name, including the dreams and visions presented in such texts as the Apocalypse of Daniel. In this apocryphal tradition, a future Constantine would liberate the Orthodox Christian world from the Sons of Hagar, who were increasingly identified as the Muslim Ottomans. At the height of the Turkish wars in the 1770s, Catherine the Great christened one of her grandsons Constantine.

Through the 19th century, even seemingly rational and cynical Russian statesmen maintained this concept of the messianic nation, destined to defend Orthodoxy against Muslims and Catholics alike. Nothing would prevent that empire from freeing Christians in the Balkans and then extending its power over Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine. The words of Pseudo-Daniel still guided Russian actions in 1914.

Obviously, Russian policies reflected both religious and secular motives, and both forces combined inextricably to drive this Russian version of manifest destiny. When the Russians annexed the Crimea in 1783, they did so because of the enormous opportunity to project their power into the Black Sea region, and also because they could now build warm-water naval bases. Nineteenth-century Odessa became a boom city, a Russian counterpart to San Francisco, and Sevastopol was a mighty naval fortress. But Russians also knew that extending their power on what had been those Muslim lands proved the truth of their fundamental religious/national vision. And in the 1850s, they perceived the deadly political and religious threat when foreign forces invaded the Crimea, that now-reconquered holy territory.

Tsarist power is long gone, and the Soviet regime that succeeded it had no time for mystical visions. Yet, as that Soviet idea perished in its turn, Russians have turned once more to the religious roots of national ideology. Post-Soviet regimes have worked intimately with the Orthodox Church, which has been happy to support strong government and to consecrate national occasions. In return, the state has helped the church rebuild Orthodox cathedrals and monasteries aplenty. For 20 years now, both state and church have even labored to reconstruct the once potent Russian presence in the holy places themselves, now of course under Israeli political control.

Why are we surprised to see this new holy Russia extend its protecting arm over the Christian-backed Ba'athist regime in Syria? Russian regimes have been staking a claim to guard that region's Christians for 250 years.

It would be pleasant to think that the U.S. and Europe are taking these religious factors into full account as they calculate their response to the present crisis in Crimea and Ukraine. Pleasant, but unlikely.

Philip Jenkins is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University.

Could Paul have known?

Could Saul of Tarsus, blind about God for decades, blinded by God for three days, really see the invisible? Once those scales fell from his eyes, could he see the unseen?

He wrote that "since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse" (Romans 1:20).

We read that verse and think of the grand, the majestic, the literally awesome. How can one look at the Himalayas or the rain forest or the cosmos and not see a Creator?

But could Paul have been talking about something substantially smaller?

Could Paul have possibly known about . . . particle physics?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, Nah. No way. They didn't even know about germs yet, much less molecules, atoms, and the less-than-microscopic matter that makes it all up. So Paul's off the hook.

But what about today's physicists, especially those who have observed such things, acknowledged their complexity, and marveled at their intricate design? What about those scientists who have truly found the matter that matters most? Are they "without excuse"?

What about those who have actually seen the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle"? If you've seen the "God particle," have you seen God?

Such questions aren't asked overtly in the fascinating new documentary Particle Fever, but they certainly linger, appropriately enough, just beyond sight. The film follows a handful of world-renowned physicists as they aim to prove the existence of the Higgs boson by smashing zillions of protons into one another at faster than light speed.

The Higgs boson ("boson" is another word for "particle") has theoretically been around for a half a century. Literally theoretically. A British physicist named Peter Higgs proposed its existence in 1964, suggesting that such a thing was necessary for, in essence, holding things together. That is, holding all things together. In physics speak, which I don't pretend to understand, the Higgs boson explains "why some fundamental particles have mass when the symmetries controlling their interactions should require them to be massless, and why the weak force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force." (If that excites you, then read the Wikipedia entry from which I stole that quote.)

Fast forward to the 21st century, when physicists from round the world congregate, like so many random particles, in Geneva, Switzerland, at CERN, the world's largest physics lab. CERN hosts a massive accelerator, where they smash those protons together so they'll break up into little bits . . . including, theoretically, the Higgs boson.

That's mainly what Particle Fever is about — following that process, telling the story through the eyes of six physicists who are so geeky giddy about the whole thing that you can't help but smile. (A couple of them even seem normal enough to have a conversation with; mind you, just a couple. But the others' nerdiness is part of the film's charm.)

And so tiny bits of matter collide, yielding other, way tinier bits of matter. And we, the viewers, can't see any of it. But what we can see is data, and it apparently adds up to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which they announce to the world on July 4, 2012. The global media gush about the discovery of the "God particle."

Which brings us back to the original questions: If one proves the existence of the "God particle"—the invisible stuff that holds everything together, that makes the universe work, that keeps you and me and the solar system from either imploding or exploding—does one also prove the existence of God?

None of the six physicists featured prominently in the film would say as much, though a couple came close. Sort of. The most interesting of them is Nima Arkani-Hamed, an Iranian refugee and Princeton prof who is so excited about theoretical physics—and the great experiment documented in this film—that he can hardly contain himself.

He explains that for decades, "we've had an amazing successful theory of nature called the Standard Model of particle physics." But it isn't perfect; Arkani-Hamed says the mystery at the heart of the model yields questions "so patently absurd that we think we're missing something very very big." That "something," he surmises, is the Higgs boson—what another physicist calls "the linchpin that holds everything together."

Physicist David Kaplan says that in the process of smashing protons together, "We are reproducing the physics that occurred just after the Big Bang, when all there was, was particles. They carry the information about how our universe started, and how it got to be the way it is." The Higgs boson, he says, "is responsible for the creation of atoms, molecules, planets, and people. Without the Higgs, life as we know it wouldn't exist."

(Did you notice that he mentioned the creation of these things? Yeah, me too.)

But Arkani-Hamed takes Kaplan's thinking even further—but not quite to what would seem a reasonable, logical conclusion, at least to a viewer of faith. Marveling at the mathematical complexity and symmetry that holds our universe together, Arkani-Hamed says, "On the face of it, you'd look at the situation and say someone really cared a lot to put this parameter at just the right value so we get to be here, and it's a pleasant universe. This is the sort of thing that keeps you up at night. It really makes you wonder . . ."

The camera cuts away, and we see him pacing the floor, apparently wondering. I think he's probably still pacing and wondering.

Once they've proven the existence of the Higgs, the physicists are surprised at its mass. Many thought it would be lighter in weight, which would support longstanding theories about the Big Bang, the universe's rate of expansion, and the complex math that holds everything together. But when it turns out to be heavier than predicted, some of the scientists say that likely means that ours is only one of infinite universes—but that we're lucky enough to be in the only one that happens to be stable. Sweet, that random luck!

The thoughts and implications are mind-boggling.

So, in the end, while they've all but bottled the Higgs boson, Greek physicist Savas Dimopoulos admits that there's still much to learn—possibly very soon, when the CERN accelerator smashes protons together at an even higher speed, resulting in, well, God knows what.

"Maybe in a few more years," says Dimopoulos, "we will know the truth. And that's the most important thing."

And maybe then they, and we, will more fully understand. Because maybe then, "God's invisible qualities" will be even more "clearly seen, being understood from what has been made."

Because matter matters.

Particle Fever is showing in limited release. Click here for a list of theaters.

Caveat Spectator

The field of particle physics is incredibly complex and difficult to understand, but the filmmakers do an admirable job of "dumbing it down" for a lay audience while also communicating challenging ideas. It finds a nice balance, and makes for not only an entertaining 99 minutes, but quite educational and thought-provoking as well. Faith-based audiences will especially appreciate wrestling with spiritual questions about the origins of the universe while getting a glimpse into the science behind it all. Young children would be bored with this, but for teens and up, especially those interested in the intersection between faith and science, it's a fascinating film. There's little to no objectionable content, though a scientist does use the f-bomb twice. The film is not rated.

Mark Moring, a former film and music editor at CT, is a writer at Grizzard Communications in Atlanta.

How do you follow a larger-than-life predecessor? In 2007 Jonathan Falwell became the senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, after the sudden death of his father, Jerry Falwell, who had founded the Thomas Road church in 1956, and founded Liberty University in 1971 and the Moral Majority in 1979. For seven years, Jonathan has ably led the Thomas Road church. Warren Bird of Leadership Network interviewed Jonathan about his experience of following someone as influential as Jerry Falwell.

Before that terrible day of your father's collapse, how much discussion was there about a successor to your father at the church?

There wasn't a lot of discussion. My dad's plan was to be here until he was about 115 years old, and he had every intention of continuing to serve. He didn't believe in retirement. I differ with him on that. I do believe in retirement; the older I get, the more I believe in it! (Laughter.) But Dad always said he wanted to die with his boots on.

In the last year of his life, Dad said, "I'm trusting God to do more in the next five years than he's done in the previous fifty." Lots of us couldn't get our brains around how God could do that.

In fact, two weeks before he died, he preached a sermon and said, "God's man is indestructible until he has finished the work that God has called him to do."

But he never really talked about what the future looked like after him. In fact, in the last year of his life, he said more than once that "I'm trusting God to do more in the next five years than he's done in the previous fifty." And for him, having seen Thomas Road go from 35 founding members to thousands in 2006, that was a pretty big statement. It was hard for a lot of us to get our brains around how God could do more in the next five years than he'd done in the previous 50.

Then, when Dad passed away, that statement became even more difficult to understand

Was there an envelope with a name in it for insurance purposes? Any forecast of what should happen if his plane went down?

Not at all. I wish there'd been some instructions. I would love to have had a document where he laid out what was on his heart. That would have helped us get from point A to point B in those early days. But there wasn't anything like that.

In hindsight, I'd love to have had his guidance, but in another way I'm thankful that there wasn't because it drove me and it drove the rest of our church to do the most important thing that we could do at a time like that, and that's to get on our knees and say, "God, what do you want us to do?"

And that's exactly what we did. That first Sunday after my dad passed away, we gathered at the altar of the church and knelt. We cried out to God: "Okay, God, what's next? Where do you want us to go?" And we continue to do that even now, six years later.

So you became the senior pastor, and the church is grieving the loss of a much-loved, incredible leader, and you are grieving—this is your dad. And yet you are leading the church into a new future. How did you balance the honoring, the grieving—personally and congregationally—along with dreaming the new dream for what God has next?

I remember that Saturday night after my dad passed away, knowing the next morning it was my responsibility to preach and say something of value to encourage and comfort the congregation. To be honest with you, I had nothing to say.

I was sitting at my kitchen table on Saturday night with our worship pastor, Charles Billingsley, and my wife Sheri. And I had no clue what to say and what to do.

In the midst of that conversation, a phrase came up, "Not I but Christ." Four simple words that come out of Galatians 2:20. That took my mind to 2 Corinthians 3 where we're told that our sufficiency is not in ourselves but in Christ and he is all that we need.

I realized, You know what, it's really not up to me. It's not my ability, not my talent, not my words that I have to offer. It has everything to do with the fact that Christ is still alive, he's still on the throne, and so all that I have to do is to seek his face on what he would want me to say to the church about what the church is to do now.

I felt God leading me to preach a series out of the book of Joshua. I started that first Sunday after my dad passed away with Joshua chapter 1—God speaking to Joshua—"Moses my servant is dead. Now you, Joshua, rise up and cross over into the land that I promised you. And everywhere the soles of your feet will tread, I will give to you. As I promised Moses, I promise to you, and no one will be able to stand against you."

I preached that passage, and the call that day is that "We are all Joshua." That wasn't written for me, it wasn't written for anyone in my family, it wasn't written for anyone on our staff. It was written for all of us as a church, that we have a duty and a responsibility as the church of Jesus Christ to march forward, to keep moving.

So that's what I became passionate about, preaching that message. In fact, on the back wall of our church right now—it's been there for six years—is those four words, "Not I but Christ." I want to remind myself each and every week, it's not about me, it's all about Christ, and we've got to keep moving.

What was hardest for you that first year?

Grief. I mean, that was something that even to this day is a difficult thing to handle. I mean, my dad was young and vibrant and hadn't slowed down a bit and was a huge personality. A great leader. He was my dad, my pastor, my mentor, my role model. And so just the fact that there wasn't that person I could call.

He was always my backstop. Serving here at the church as executive pastor, there were lots of things that I made decisions on, made changes, made transitions. But when it came right down to it, I knew that if I blew it and made a mistake, I had somebody I could call who would cover it, who would fix things because he was able to do that. Now that person was gone. "The buck stops here" now, and that changes everything when it all rests on your shoulders.

That was a difficult thing for me to kind of get my head around.

I want to remind myself each and every week, it's not about me, it's all about Christ, and we've go to keep moving.

Then, of course, Dad had always been the shepherd. Now I realized I had thousands of people now that I've got to minister to and that I've got to make a difference in their lives. So I made sure to tell people, "Yeah, we're a large church, but I'm your pastor, and I want to be there for you." So hospital visitation, weddings, funerals, meeting with anybody in the church that wants to meet with me, phone calls, staying after the service down in the front of the sanctuary to talk to anybody who wants to talk for as long as they want to talk—I made sure their pastor was accessible to them. Those were all things that I had to figure out how to do.

What was the biggest surprise that first year?

Pressure. No question about it. When you're now the key leader and the senior pastor, that pressure level goes up quite a bit. The decisions you have to make—no longer do you have the luxury of someone over you who's going to make sure you don't make a really bad decision.

It struck me that now, when the day comes to a close, the decisions I make are the ones that are going to stick. So I've got to make sure that I put in a lot of prayer, a lot of time into the direction and the vision that God gives me for this church to make sure that I'm going where God wants me to go, not where I want to go or where somebody else is encouraging me to go.

Since Jerry Falwell's homegoing in 2007, others in similar situations have come to you. What do you say to those who are accepting the mantel of following a great leader?

That first Sunday morning after my dad passed away, our pastors gathered backstage for a time of prayer, and any time you get a group of pastors together in a prayer meeting, the prayers kind of sequentially get bigger and grander. You have these wonderful prayers and great statements.

It came to me to pray last before I walked out on the stage to preach for that very first time. And I'd heard some great prayers, calling down the fire of heaven and the glory of heaven. When it came to me, I'll be honest, I didn't have the words in me and I didn't have the energy to try to find them. So I just said, "God, I can't do it, but you can, so God, do it today."

I pray that prayer now every time I preach, whether it's here at Thomas Road or in another setting.

So when people ask my advice, I've always said what I remind myself every day, that God has called you to be you. God didn't call me to be Jerry Falwell, God called me to be Jonathan Falwell. He gave me unique abilities and a unique gifting just like he does for every one of us, and we have to make sure that we are using those to the best of our ability.

God didn't call me to be Jerry Falwell. God called me to be Jonathan Falwell.

I encourage people to just trust God. If God has called you to a ministry, if God has called you to be a pastor, if God has called you to do his work wherever it is, then trust God that he's put you there for a reason, and don't second-guess yourself, don't question whether you've got it or not.

Believe in God, walk in the power of God, and be a person who prays to God often, seeking God's direction, seeking God's face, allowing him to lead you. And just believe this, that "my God can do all things" and with him—Philippians 4—you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. Believe it, walk in it, and let God show you his power and his grace.

©2013 Leadership Network. www.leadnet.org. Used with permission and taken from Succession: A Leadership Network Online Event, a video conference on pastoral succession. The entire video is available for purchase at www.churchleadersuccession.com

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

You don't have to spend much time around the evangelical blogosphere to know that something's afoot. Whether you frequent "mommy" blogs or theology blogs, whether you are progressive or conservative, you won't get very far before you hear a common theme. Women of this generation are restless to embrace the fight for justice and find our place in the Kingdom. Books like Sarah Bessey's Jesus Feminist and Trillia Newbell's United along with movements like the recent IF: Gathering, inspire us to take on the world. We are ready to stand for the rights of the poor, marginalized, and defenseless.

But even as we do, we need to take a moment to listen. We need to hear the stories of our mothers and grandmothers who fought these same battles—sometimes hundreds of years before us. We need to know our history.

I grew up in a family that understood the power of stories. I can remember lying in my grandmother's bed, snuggled against her under the crocheted afghan, listening as she told me about the time she overturned the butter churn as a girl and spilled the family's cream for the week. She had grown up in Appalachia, the middle of ten children, and churns and chores were an essential part of who she was. I also remember the stories of my maternal grandmother—how her widowed mother raised her and her four siblings in a paper mill town in New Jersey, how she left home at sixteen, traveling over 700 miles to become the first in her family to attend college.

But our home was also filled with another kind of story; our home was filled with history. Hardly a day passed when my mother didn't teach us some new (and often obscure) fact about the past and why it was relevant to today.

When we drove past the dilapidated towns and ethnic churches in our former coal mining community, she taught us about America's complicated history of poverty and immigration. She, not Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, first inspired me to fight for the rights of women and children with stories of 19th-century missionaries Mary Slessor and Amy Carmichael. And it was when my mother was reading George Elliot's 1859 novel, Adam Bede, (and giving us a play-by-play commentary) that I got my first lessons in women, calling, and the church. Turns out the evangelical gender debate pre-dates the 1960s.

For many, history can seem less personal, less accessible, and somehow less relevant than the family stories we pass through generations. But when my mother told us about history, it became the story of our lives. It became how we made sense of ourselves and explained why the world was the way it was, why we were the way we were.

If history can be understood as "The Story," learning about the women who have come before us will help us understand where we belong in it. We'll learn which act and scene we've walked into; and with these prompts and cues, we'll be better able to play our own parts well.

Over the course of the next several weeks, Her.meneutics will run a brief series for Women's History Month that highlights "women of character, courage, and commitment." Each post will focus on a specific woman and draw connection to our own time. These may not be women you've ever heard of, but they are women who, in their own way and in their own time and place, changed history. And if we let them, their stories might change us today.

What if you learned that in the midst of the Reformation, God used a woman to translated theological texts and write the first sonnet sequence in the English language? How would hearing the story of a noblewoman who helped abolish slavery in the British Empire inspire you to keep fighting to end it today? And what might happen if you discovered that a homemaker in Canada successfully lobbied for the rights of immigrants and workers on the basis of imago dei?

C. S. Lewis once said that "we read to know that we are not alone." In many ways, we tell the stories of history for the same reason. By learning the stories of the women who have come before us—during Women's History Month or at any time of year—we learn we are not alone. We gain context for what we are currently experiencing and, perhaps, discover that our challenges are not so unique.

Most of all, we gain hope—the hope that the God who used our mothers and grandmothers to change the world yesterday might just be able to use us to do the same thing today.

Hannah Anderson is a freelance writer, blogger, and author of the upcoming book, Made for More: An Invitation to Live Imago Dei (Moody, April 2014). She lives with her husband and three children in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. You can connect with her at her blog sometimesalight.com on Twitter @sometimesalight.

Each installment of the link list takes on a different flavor, and this one is no exception. No, that's not right, it is an exception, that's what makes it different. (Maybe I should have gone with the "no two snowflakes are the same" intro.)

• Okay, hands up everybody: who knows where the Bible verse numbers came from?
• Here's another Bible translation teaser: If you haven't heard of the Modern Evangelical Version or the Hebrew Roots Bible, then you might want to follow The Bible Hunter.
• OverviewBible.com is an infographic project typified by this one, listing every dream in the Bible.
• Your mileage may vary: Not everyone will agree with all twelve points in this list of things preachers can learn from TEDx Talk presenters.
• According to this writer, the ideal Christian radio station would include portions of intentionally dead air.
• Christianity Today talks to Brian Brodersen, successor to Calvary Chapel's Chuck Smith. (They didn't always agree.)
• Ready to quit the ministry? This writer speaks from the experience of crossing over to the dark side, with a knowledge of what happens after you submit the resignation.
• The Catholic Church is bolstering their ranks of trained exorcists.
• Sermon of the Week: From early last month, Gary W. Burge talks the Willow Creekers through the familiar ground of Psalm 23.
• J. D. Greear explains why planting additional campus locations might make more sense than planting new churches.
• Megachurch pastor Perry Noble goes public on taking anti-depressants for anxiety issues.
• A few weeks ago we looked at U2charist, but that was before we had heard of having a Hank Williams mass.
• Seven-time author Becky Garrison suggests that Mark Driscoll has been altering the history of his church, rendering it more of a one-man accomplishment.
• "You never think you're in a cult when you're in a cult." A reminiscence of growing up under Bill Gothard's teaching.
• Emmy award-winning Actress Patricia Heaton from ABC-TV's The Middle on Christians in Hollywood.
• The latest abuse-of-children allegations are being pointed at Chicago's Jesus People USA. The community birthed the Cornerstone Festival and Resurrection Band. The complaints against JPUSA form part of a 90-minute documentary.
• The lead singer of the band As I Lay Dying pleaded guilty last week to hiring a hit man to kill his wife.
• On my own blog this week, creating an online social media index for your church family; and a book review of Is Sunday School Destroying Our Kids, a short indie book that grew on me the more I read it.
• From the vault, one year ago, eight issues that don't make or break Christianity.
• This one is worth consideration: A short essay on the proper and virtuous application of hate.
• I never thought about God as "the beginning and the end" as being less like a line and more like a circle. Another wrestling through "If God made everything who made God?"
• Many leadership blogs encourage aspiring authors to start building an online platform, but that goal is fraught with spiritual dangers.
• Tech stuff: This article is about the pursuit of excellence in our weekend services, but I especially love the title: Leading Worship from the Booth.
• With both the Olympics and Superbowl in the rear view mirror, David Platt laments our idolatry of sports.
• Does the church need to have a distinct ministry to its youth subculture?
• Yes, the Pope did say a bad word in Sunday's sermon. (Confusing two similar Italian words is easy if it's not your first language.)
• Writing from a country where we don't have flags in our churches, it's tough to grasp the religious significance of this type of story.
• Randy Alcorn on how we dress up, or dress down for church.
• The Son of God movie is going to have its detractors in the Christian blogosphere, of which this one is representative …
• … the same type of sentiment that resulted in the Noah movie adding a disclaimer …
• … while in other Noah news, Ken Ham is going ahead with plans to build an ark, at a cost of $73 million.
• Biomedical Ethics: The UK is moving toward a fertilization method that would result in three-parent babies.
• Finally, remember when the pastor told you to take John 3:16 and write your name in it? ("For God so loved Bill …") Well, now you can have your name inserted in over 7,000 places.

When not building lists like this one, Paul Wilkinson blogs at Thinking Out Loud and shares his devotional time with readers at Christianity 201.

Sometimes life surprises you.

A tear fell down my face as I entered a restaurant recently with my daughter. We had decided to go out for soup and salad, and to talk. We love to joke and laugh and sometimes dive into deep discussions. So why the tear?

I realized at that moment that I had hit another anniversary. Exactly 14 years ago to the day, a doctor gave me a cancer diagnosis. His words: “You need to press pause on everything you have going on now so you can fight for your life.”

My daughter was 3 years old then. Today she’s 17. As we raised our water glasses to toast the special day, she asked, “What’s that thing you say about learning from cancer?”

“When you believe your days are numbered, you commit to making them count.”

Those words apply to anyone. The challenge lies in approaching days differently—maybe a little differently for some people, for others much more. They certainly apply to leaders—whether in a church or other faith organization. What leader doesn’t want to make his or her days count?

I have enjoyed the privilege of experiencing results from strong leaders I deeply respect and attempt to emulate in my role as the president of a faith-based organization. Sometimes I get it right, many times I need more tries. But the commitment is there.

As a leader, you will make a day count when you …

1. Light someone up in your organization, in a good way. Become generous with specific encouragement and in sharing opportunities for an individual to do more than he believes he can—all because you believe in him. This takes deliberate effort.The place to start is to notice, recall, and mention details about a person’s efforts. The fire this sparks in someone burns bright and long.When appropriate, take this further and cast a positive vision for someone to live into, and then let them chase it. Whenever I found myself the recipient of encouragement and challenge by the senior pastor of the church where I worked, I grew. I changed. And years later I still remember when it happened. “You have what it takes to [fill in the blank]” are amazing words to hear. Why? Because a leader’s voice carries a tone of believability. Many people walk through day after day wishing someone would notice them—and what they’re capable of becoming.It’s easy to go through a day occupied solely by your cares. What would happen if, at least once every day, you committed to encourage or share an opportunity?
2. Appreciate someone who doesn’t expect it. Every day, our paths intersect with people outside of our organization. Share with one of them a few brief words of appreciation. Dan serves as the CEO of another organization in our area, and we meet for coffee or lunch once or twice a year. Every time, he says a genuine thank-you to me for our organization’s work. He doesn’t have to, and it doesn’t come out forced. But it’s memorable and makes me want to appreciate people more.Consider how easy it would be to talk with, not at, someone who serves you. Whenever I travel and turn in a rental car, I’m asked the same question: “How did the car drive?” Rather than join the masses and say “fine,” I reply with: “It shimmies a little when you get it up over 105. How’s your day going?”One hundred percent of the time the attendant smiles and engages in a few moments of chatter that ends with a thank you for the job he does. Do this with people who don’t expect it, and doing it with people in your church or organization becomes even easier.What would happen if at least one person ended their day feeling appreciated by you?
3. Release the hard stuff for a moment, and enjoy life. At least once a day, remind yourself that you really do believe that God has everything you face under his control. For an extended moment, relax and smile because God is bigger than it—whatever it is.At the start of my cancer battle, my oncologist shared these instructions: “Ruthlessly remove stress and anxiety from your life. Your attitude will be your most effective weapon to win this fight.”Is this possible? Yes—through a myriad of little ways that will make tremendous differences. Here are some favorites: Set a realistic to-do list, then get it done and stop working for the day. Leave a little early so traffic doesn’t ruin you. Read more, exercise as regular as possible, and get enough sleep. Focus on your family at night; stop working. Always kiss your kids good night, and always say I love you at bed time (and dozens of times before). Step out of any meeting to take calls from your family. Those goofy breathing techniques for relaxation? They work; do them often. Yes, nutrition matters. But food can also bring great joy, like dark chocolate, good coffee, crispy bacon, chips and salsa, and anything with mustard.
4. Become real with God. Fourteen years ago my prayers shifted in tone. Instead of lifelessly talking at God, I began to pray in a more personal manner—as if talking with a friend. That’s because I seriously thought the day might come soon that I would meet the One to whom I prayed. Whenever I catch myself using unusual formality while talking with God, I chuckle and say, “Okay, this is what I really want to say or think or feel … ” It’s not always reverent—faking a happy face, contentment, or strong character seems wrong, and God sees through the charade. Honesty is a must for any deep relationship.I try to replace “no” with “yes” whenever I can: full, real availability. That’s how I moved through ministry. That’s how I landed in my current role. And that’s how I want to respond every day.Here’s to many more.

David Staal, senior editor for Building Church Leaders and a mentor to a first grader, serves as the president of Kids Hope USA, a national non-profit organization that partners local churches with elementary schools to provide mentors for at-risk students. David is the author of Lessons Kids Need to Learn (Zondervan, 2012) and Words Kids Need to Hear (Zondervan, 2008). He lives in Grand Haven, MI, with his wife Becky, son Scott, and daughter Erin.

At the heart of Lee Oser's new novel, The Oracles Fell Silent, is a mystery. How did 1960s British rocker Johnny Donovan die? Ted Pop, his rival, friend, and bandmate in the rock sensation The Planets, was the only witness, and he has not spoken of it in the intervening decades. Whether Pop was responsible for Donovan's death has hung over the now-aged star ever since. The narrator, a low-level employee at a publishing company named Richard Bellman, is engaged in an on-again, off-again relationship with Pop's daughter Lexie. Through her intercession, he is invited to meet her father (born Theodore Pappas, Jr., to an immigrant to the United Kingdom) and eventually becomes a hanger-on and memoirist over a summer in Southampton.

Oser's book comes at a turbulent time for the "Catholic novel," whose fate is again in the news. The current debate started about a year ago when Paul Elie wrote a cover story in the New York Times Book Review about the fate of the "Catholic" (and, by extension, religious) novel and its place in a larger culture hostile to faith. Elie found that "Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time as something between a dead language and a hangover." This argument is not exactly new; Richard Gilman had made a similar argument, also in the New York Times, thirty years ago, stating "that the religious spiritual novel is in some sense only a memory." As possibly the strongest exponent of mainstream secularism, one might almost think the Times has a vested interest in declaring the end of religiously inflected fiction.

There were energetic responses from Gregory Wolfe, the editor of Image, a journal that covers faith and the arts, among others. Wolfe argued that the religious literary imagination was still there, and in force, if one only knew where to look. Catholic writers may no longer be shouting, or writing in the wrenching language of a Flannery O'Connor, but they remain a "a still, small voice" writing about God and the world. The respected poet and writer Dana Gioia joined the argument in a long article in First Things, mostly taking Elie's side. He too lamented the decline of the Catholic literary imagination in America, which he traced to a combination of circ*mstances in the middle of the last century. "Stated simply," he writes, "the paradox is that, although Roman Catholicism constitutes the largest religious and cultural group in the United States, Catholicism currently enjoys almost no positive presence in the American fine arts—not in literature, music, sculpture, or painting."

At one level, these arguments miss a larger cultural point. For surely part of the reason for the decline of the religious novel in a secular culture has to do with the decline of the novel in a non-reading culture. People do not read or care about novels in 2014 the way they may have in 1960 or 1950 (though how popular some of even the great Catholic novelists were is not self-evident; as J. F. Powers' recently published correspondence indicates, the sales of Morte D'Urban were tiny even after it won the National Book Award.). Literature's moment – in the sense of large-scale novels that form the basis of as common conversation about things that matter and are considered part of an educated person's self-culture – is almost completely past. The most influential religious artists today are not novelists. One can look to a Terrence Malick for an example of a religious-inspired artist, with a close (but very different) second in Mel Gibson, whose Passion of the Christ was a very personal encounter with the Christian mystery. And as writers like Mark Judge have noted, the larger popular culture is awash in confused notions of grace, redemption, and forgiveness. Elie, Wolfe, and Gioia focus primarily on literature, and mostly non-genre "literary" fiction at that. But although understandable, this necessarily is an incomplete picture. A creative young person with a literary bent these days is much more likely to write screenplays, create video games, or develop "apps" than write novels or go work in the publishing industry. Better perhaps to ask who is the contemporary Malcolm Muggeridge, the "man on the telly" who evangelized in the most common medium and was well-known outside religious audiences.

So, the audience for a religious novel, let alone one from a Catholic perspective, is diminished, and the culture is conflicted about religion and how it should be represented in art. Ironic knowingness seems to be acceptable, sincerity (even sincere doubting), not so much. The question facing those authors, however, is the same as it was for Walker Percy or O'Connor. Include too much religion in a novel and the story becomes preachy and uninteresting. But too little risks reducing religion to a plot element rather than an animating perspective.

In Oracles, Oser, a professor English at the College of the Holy Cross and a former musician, portrays a very secular setting but one in which his characters cannot quite escape religion. This is not O'Connor territory of a God-drenched South, but is fiction that might have broader appeal than the kind of literary fiction that Elie and company have been discussing. In this post-Boomer world (Oser was born in 1958), religion as an organizing principle is of little importance in the adult lives of the characters, existing at most as a kind of childhood memory. However, the Planets, like most of their generation, search repeatedly for "spiritual" experiences, which Oser cleverly reflects in extracts from their song lyrics at different stages in their career.

"You religious?" Pop asks Bellman at their first meeting, and Bellman answers, "I think so." Pop's comeback is dismissive: "You won't be when I'm finished with you." But that is an empty boast, as Ted, although not a believer, is on his own quest for redemption. But that quest is threatened by Oser's other characters, including voracious television reporters and unscrupulous gossip columnists, who are all after a bit of Pop's legacy, most of all to pin blame for Donovan's death. To provide a sharp contrast to the dissolute rockers, Oser introduces the character of "Baby Mo," a famous basketball player and convert to Islam, and his fiery imam, Omar D. Where a Catholic or evangelical would not be accepted in such circles, here—given the political and ethnic sensitivities of the Hamptons set—the followers of Islam are given a fairer hearing. Meanwhile a Catholic priest, a friend to Bellman who tries to utter the old pieties, is generally ignored by the sophisticates (Oser does include a funny set piece when Ted and his glam wife Joan accompany him to church).

Over the course of the summer, Bellman plumbs the mystery of Pop, and Donovan, with only mixed success, and his relationship with Lexie dissolves. Meanwhile, Bellman has to fend off the seductions of reporter Victoria Lamb, who wants a scoop, and Ginger Drake, who feels that with the death of Donovan, "the hopes of a generation died with him." Like Pop, Drake too is trapped by the past, but while Pop retreated into melancholy, Drake is the voice of the vengeful Boomers, thinking their own youth was the world's last golden age. In these characters, and others, such as Tom Bram, who meets an untimely demise here but in his youth was famous as kind of a pre-heavy metal rocker who dressed up as a vampire in his band The Swingin' Vampires, Oser limns the first generation of victims of the 1960s revolution as it limps towards retirement.

Given his setting among dissipated former rock stars and their coteries in the Hamptons, sexual entanglements would be obvious by their omission. This is a tricky aspect of modern life for a religious novelist who wishes to address and write about the modern secular world. It can be done, of course; some of the opening scenes Powers' Wheat that Springeth Green are surprisingly explicit. Oser handles a few such instances discretely, both in description and emphasis. But what comes through more is the way that his characters use religious language; it is not forced, and sounds, to my ear at least, as how people who need language to express serious things, but who don't actually believe, are nonetheless forced back on the language of faith.

The novel picks up speed toward the end: Ted must confront his past, and Bellman realizes he and Lexie are not meant to be together. As the action culminates, Oser incorporates a death or two and even a hurricane decimating the Hamptons coastline. Some of the dei ex machinis are a bit stretched, and Oser's overuse of similes—I caught three "likes" in one paragraph—can be distracting even when the similes are on point.

When Bellman finally understands how Donovan might have met his end, the insight comes wrapped in a reflection on choice, fate, and the unknown ways of God—a meditation that is both subtle and profound. If Oser is one of Wolfe's novelists writing in a still small voice, maybe because that's because it's in just such a voice that people typically speak of first and last things.

Perhaps it would make a good movie.

Gerald J. Russello is editor of The University Bookman (www.kirkcenter.org).

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In a dramatic 24-hour turnaround, the German family that could have faced deportation after the Supreme Court didn't take their case has been granted "indefinite deferred status" by the Department of Homeland Security.

"We're not entirely sure what it all means, but it's definitely good," Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) attorney Jim Mason told CT. "It permits them to stay in the country and work here."

But it doesn't answer the fundamental question raised by the Romeike family's unusual asylum case that has pushed persecution boundaries: Is homeschooling a human right?

While the family's immigration judge said the German government was frustrating the family's faith by its refusal to let them home school, he was the only judge to rule that way. And the Supreme Court's refusal to take the case seems a clear enough answer.

But even though the Supreme Court thought that the family wasn't entitled to asylum under current law, the Department of Homeland Security apparently doesn't want to send them back to Germany, said Mason.

The HSLDA is working on legislation to make it possible for others to come to the United States if they're facing similar circ*mstances, said Mason. "The denial of certiorari from the Supreme Court makes it more difficult for other families to come in the same ways the Romeikes did," he said. "But the deferred status makes it possible for the Romeike's to stay without worries in the future."

The Romeikes will be able to stay in the United States permanently unless they are convicted of a crime. HSLDA chair Michael Farris announced the news in a Facebook post that garnered more than 7,000 "likes" in the first hour. HSLDA represents the family.

The Romeikes received asylum in 2010 after being severely penalized for illegally homeschooling their children in Germany. (The family was threatened on multiple occasions, fined about $10,000, and had three children forcibly removed from home and driven to school by police, according to the brief.)

After their initial win, the Romeikes lost every case after that, eventually ending up at the Supreme Court. When the Supreme Court decided against taking the case yesterday [Monday, March 3], the HSLDA promised not to give up but to look for another way.

"Educating one's children according to one's religious convictions is a human right," stated Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, in his response to the Supreme Court denial. "Sending this family back to Germany is the repudiation of a great American heritage. This should remind us of how imperiled religious liberty is at home and around the world."

Here is the HSLDA announcement:

BREAKING NEWS!!! The Romeikes can stay!!!
This is an incredible victory that can only be credited to our Almighty God.
We also want to thank those of who spoke up on this issue–including that long ago White House petition. We believe that the public outcry made this possible while God delivered the victory.
This is an amazing turnaround in 24 hours. Praise the Lord.
Proverbs 21: 1 "The king's heart is like a stream of water directed by the Lord, He guides it wherever He pleases."

CT examined how the Romeike case pushes persecution boundaries, and noted how the family has been repeatedly denied asylum in the United States. In Germany, police recently seized 40 Christian children over spanking concerns.

CT regularly covers home schooling.