Page 1444 – Christianity Today (2024)

Five years ago, "inappropriate sexual behavior" led Jim Bolin to resign from the Georgia megachurch he founded and led with his wife Robin, also a pastor, for 30 years.

Now Trinity Chapel Church of God in Powder Springs has re-installed Bolin as senior pastor, though the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that "it will probably take months if not years to determine whether the multicultural congregation that grew from five families to 7,000 members over 25 years will ever fully recover."

The Bolins' son, Jason Bolin, had been serving as senior pastor in his father's absence, while he completed a "'restoration process' through the Church of God," as CT noted in 2009.

Jim Bolin isn't the only pastor to step down over adultery, but few receive pardons and return to their same church. However, most National Association of Evangelical board members say pastors can be restored to church roles after marital infidelity. The highest-profile case study: Ted Haggard.

CT previously has reported on how churches can recover after a pastor commits adultery, as well as on accountability groups for Christian leaders in Washington, D.C., where the well-being of one's marriage often impacts voters' decisions.

Why is a small Chicago-area church preparing to go to trial against the world's second-largest sporting-goods company next month?

It's the latest phase of a long-running trademark dispute over a tithing slogan claimed by the church as a “prophetic word spoken” more than a decade ago.

Christian Faith Fellowship Church (CFFC) of Zion, Illinois, has refused to accept a $5,000 offer from Adidas in exchange for the church’s surrender of its “Add-A-Zero” logo, which the church trademarked in 2006 to use on products sold in connection to its "righteous" building campaign. The slogan is used to encourage church members to “add a zero” to each week’s tithe.

In 2009, Adidas’s “adizero” logo was denied trademark registration in the United States due to the similarity with the church’s existing trademark. Adidas has continued to market its lightweight “adizero” shoes, while trying to get the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the church's trademark. Two weeks ago, Adidas's request was denied, prompting a July trial.

The church, which has expressed a willingness to settle if Adidas adds a few zeros to its previous $5,000 offer, is attempting to get Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose, whose line of Adidas shoes features the “adizero” logo, to support its cause, even suggesting it will request a deposition from the hometown basketball player.

Although the church filed its logo prior to Adidas’s attempt, Adidas’s product output significantly trumps that of the church, leaving the court’s future decision unclear.

CT has previously noted debate over church trademarks, particularly in connection with a 2011 naming conflict involving a church plant of Seattle's Mars Hill.

On a recent Sunday morning, Jenny Yang stood beside a giant wooden cross and made a case for immigration reform to members of an evangelical church.

"As Americans, we have a responsibility when the laws are not working for the common good to change them," she intoned from the pulpit.

The talk was part of a broader, cross-country effort to persuade evangelicals to back the bipartisan immigration bill that's working its way through Congress.

Yang, 33, is one of the leading voices behind the Evangelical Immigration Table, a coalition of influential pastors and lobbyists working to drum up support for reform among believers and members of Congress.

As the vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, she frequently appears in the media urging a path to citizenship for the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants.

But before the interviews with NPR and her op-ed in

The Washington Post

"I thought people would discount my voice as an Asian American," she said. "I thought they would say, 'Oh, of course she would talk about immigration because she's an immigrant.'"

Yang was born in Philadelphia to South Korean immigrants and grew up attending a Korean Presbyterian church. In her younger years, she didn't give much thought to her family's immigrant identity—their U.S. citizenship meant they didn't have to face the hurdles that confront many unauthorized immigrants.

"I was probably in the same boat as any American in struggling over how to think about this, as an American and as a Christian," she said. "I think a lot of people who immigrated here legally almost look down on those who came here on undocumented status."

But Yang's perspective changed when she began working at World Relief. She saw the struggles of recent immigrants up close—parents who couldn't drive, children who couldn't go to school.

"It's the saddest thing because these people cannot continue on in their lives," she said. In 2009 she and her World Relief colleague, Matthew Soerens, published the book Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion and Truth in the Immigration Debate. (See also: CT's review of Welcoming the Stranger)

She braced herself for criticism, which came swiftly. Some mistakenly dismissed her as an "illegal alien" backing this cause out of self interest, she recalled. Others criticized the book, saying it downplayed the law breaking done by immigrants who come here illegally.

Yang is familiar with these views. She meets regularly with members of Congress or their staff and hears about the flood of calls they receive from constituents who oppose what they see as amnesty for people who enter the country without permission.

She knows many of the callers are angry and many of those callers are Christian.

"The more hateful people became, the more impassioned I became to make this an issue about biblical values," she said, referring to the multiple Bible verses about caring for "the stranger."

But this tactic remains contentious among Christians.

"I think very often they're taking some Bible quotes and making sweeping social and political claims that the text itself would not necessarily support," said Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. "The scriptures and Christian tradition call for people to be treated decently and mercifully, but there's also the distinction between the obligations of the civil state, which is of course to uphold order and law, and the church, which is of course to extend mercy and compassion to all people."

While the majority of white evangelical Christians say there should be a path for unauthorized immigrants who meet certain requirements to stay legally, only four in 10 back a path to citizenship. Most evangelicals see immigrants as a burden to society and a threat to American values, according to a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center.

But Yang and Soerens, who often tag-team their speaking gigs, say many congregations open up to their message because of its biblical roots. Even some resistant churches "go from being slightly antagonistic to slightly supportive," said Soerens.

And some audiences respond to the message with cheers and fist pumps, as seen at Yang's recent talk at Chicago's New Community Covenant Church.

After the service, Yang pointed to this congregation's diverse flock—a kaleidoscope of immigrants and non-immigrants—to explain another source of support.

This church, she said, is emblematic of how "immigration is changing the face of the evangelical church," making this moment ripe for a policy overhaul.

To some, this move is merely a political grab. America's demographics are changing and conservatives are playing catch up. Yang recognizes that for some leaders, that's exactly what's going on, but to her, "it's not an issue of pandering, but about being biblically informed and realizing that immigrants are part of our community."

It's that vision, she said, that sustained her through her initial doubt and gave her hope that this movement could drive home the mission at the heart of her work: to replace a broken system with one that's more humane.

Superman is a complex character, as superheroes go, too complicated to reduce into hero stereotypes and character-bio shorthands. He is Clark Kent, farm boy from Kansas; he is Superman, hero of Metropolis and symbol of Freedom, Justice, and The American Way; and he is Kal-El, alien from Krypton, his parents killed and homeland destroyed. And the most interesting, human moments experienced by Superman always show up in the interplay between his coexistent identities.

But in Zach Snyder's Man Of Steel, Superman (Henry Cavill, best known for his work on The Tudors) is there mostly to satiate that part of the American conscious that wants their messiahs to punch things, too. It's understandable why Snyder, director of stylish, brooding action movies like 300 and Watchmen, chose to go this route: the film is packed densely with information and plot, covering the death of planet Krypton, Clark Kent's upbringing in Kansas, his antagonists and their objectives, and the myriad twists and turns that result.

The hand of Christopher Nolan (who shares a story credit) is clear here—anyone who sat through The Dark Knight or Inception will recognize Nolan's proclivity for stories with climaxes that go on for half an hour. So amid all the action scenes, flashbacks, and cutaways that follow around Lois Lane (a precedent-breaking redhead, Amy Adams) as she investigates into who exactly this superhuman person is, there simply wasn't room to earnestly explore Superman's identity issues.

Unfortunately, the movie's climax still depends on Superman feeling torn between his respective roles, human/alien/messiah, all of them in some way true and all of them impossible to entirely fulfil. But we almost never have a good handle on why Clark does the things that he does, on how his identity motivates his actions. And when we are given reasons, they aren't very believable.

Clark returns to Kansas after discovering the details of his origins and says to his mother, "I know where I'm from, and who I am." It's a moment that takes the true-if-overwrought moments— a young Clark pleading with his father, "Can't I just be your son?"—and radically simplifies them. What at first seemed to hint that there's a burgeoning tension in Clark's psyche are now just moments of weakness, and Superman's strength within the movie isn't found in embracing his inherent personality pastiche, but in rejecting it.

"I'm an American through and through," announces Superman at the end of the movie, but he didn't have to go very far to get to that point. Superman's father, Jor-El (or more accurately a holographic program of his personality, portrayed by Russell Crowe) explicitly rejects the plans for earth harbored by evil general Zod (played to cold militaristic perfection by the always-terrifying Michael Shannon), and that turns Zod's character from a genuine moral threat for Superman into a Balkanesque nationalist who will sacrifice anything for the sake of his homeland—and thus, into someone we have no fear of Superman coming to resemble.

Superman's test is never a moral one. It isn't based on how closely he holds his human identity to heart. Instead, the challenge is based on punching things hard, or flying quickly, or even punching things hard while flying quickly.

This is fun to watch, of course, but the problem is that we, as an audience, are as capable of questioning our own allegiances and backgrounds as we are incapable of punching things while flying. So in simplifying Superman thus, the movie sacrifices the only point on which Superman is genuinely relatable for the sake of spectacle.

But if Zach Snyder is badly suited to making a movie that humanizes Superman, he is perfect for one that showcases the hero's raw power—and this is one of the most spectacular things to make it to the big screen in years. The fight scenes are immaculate: Snyder stylizes the action not by having the fight scenes resemble normal fighting sped-up, as most superhero movies do, but by giving the alien characters a pure kinetic gravity we never see in the superhero-movie genre. They move with a simultaneous speed and weight that violates the laws of physics, and yet there it is, happening on screen—and rather than taking you out of the movie, the effect draws you in, reminding you that these human-looking aliens are not like us.

So Man of Steel is a good movie because of its action, and because of its actors—Amy Adams and Laurence Fishburne give otherwise stock and uninteresting characters a depth that simply can't hold up to retrospective scrutiny, and the action scenes are some of the most thrilling to occur in a superhero film possibly ever, easily trouncing the best The Avengers had to offer—and on that front, the film is pure spectacle, amazing, an unqualified success.

It's only in memory that things start to fall apart: characters fade into their stereotypes without the charisma of their actors to bolster them, and the plot fades into a series of escalating fights born out of uncertain motivations, and you realize that, whatever that incredible space opera/spectacle/drama/action was, it certainly wasn't human.

In stark contrast, the independent coming-of-age film The Kings Of Summer (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance) rings true in a way most films either can't or don't have the guts to. Three boys, all from radically different homes, are sick of their lives. Joe (Nick Robinson) hates his overbearing, authoritarian father Frank (Parks and Recreation's Nick Offerman), especially since the death of his mother left them alone together. Patrick (Gabriel Basso) is so tired of his relentlessly annoying, patronizing, hyper-protective, accidentally emasculating parents that he is literally breaking out in hives.

Together, the boys decide to flee to the woods and build a house together—live off the land! Make our own food! Kill our own meat! Et cetera. Along the way they pick up the strange and small Biaggio (Moises Arias), who, while undergoing character growth of his own, is too silly to be considered a focal character in his own right, and is incidental to the central story of Joe and Patrick's growth together.

What makes The Kings of Summer function so well is the way in which it cares for its characters as people, rather than as 2-D cutouts around which writer Chris Galletta can construct jokes.

A prime example is when Frank, after being serenaded a cappella by his daughter's boyfriend (Eugene Cordero), makes a comment that would be par for the course in an average summer comedy, about how emasculating of an experience it was to be serenaded. And the audience laughs. But then Cordero's character is actually hurt, and Frank's daughter (Allison Brie) is upset with her father, and that prompts Frank to ask a her question that's been a whole movie in the making, pleadingly: "Am I a bastard?" It's a moment of depth and frankness that'd be out of place in almost any other movie, but works perfectly with Summer's dedication to emotional realism.

However, Summer is a movie that is above all other things about manhood, and what it means to the adolescent Patrick and Joe. In case the viewer misses this fact, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts makes it explicit via long panning shots of bare trees, slow motion shots of Joe pounding nails into a birdhouse, the boys' decision to grow out their terrible, patchy facial hair in the wild (in what is one of the best running gags of the film), and a scene where—during a tense game of monopoly after the reveal of a love triangle—Joe relentlessly fingers, sniffs, and gestures with a cinematically flagrant cigar, and that's not even delving into the host of serpentine imagery on display. So the directorial style can be heavy-handed; Vogt-Roberts is a relative newcomer, having mostly done sketches for the web series Funny or Die, and sometimes it seems like he can't decide if he's making a Malick homage (long shots of boys running through color-filtered fields juxtaposed with close-ups of the token girl's dress and skin) or a Snyder one (slow-motion hyper-vivid examinations of movement and physicality).

But that aside, the movie feels familiar to me, familiar and right and true. It is an almost universally relatable portrayal of adolescent men, of dorky high school sophom*ores who dream of something greater, of wanting personal responsibility without being willing to suffer for it.

In one scene, Joe is caught red-handed with a haul of rotisserie chickens from Boston Market—chickens he said he'd killed and cooked on his own—and it is not just one of the funniest scenes of the movie, but says something very profound about what it means to be a boy growing into a man: someone whose responsibilities and entitlements interact in weird and uncomfortable ways, who is simultaneously pressured to engage and be responsible while at the same time spending most of his life receiving the message, "You're not responsible enough." The film captures perfectly what it is to be a developing boy trapped in the seemingly worst possible overlap of "not yet" and "already."

That the film so perfectly evokes this particular experience means it might not play well to all audiences. It is much better at evoking an experience than it is explaining it, or re-formatting it so that the empirically unfamiliar could understand. And without the feeling of "me too," (had I been viewing the film as a woman who never struggled with establishing a masculine identity), the visual glitz, effects, and heavy emphasis on cinematic style may distract.

What I do know is that—having been through the kind of experience Vogt-Roberts and Galletta are trying to capture (me, along with roughly half the world)—it's true, and real, real about what it means to be an awkward and insecure human being, maybe real in the sense that an expressionist painting is real, with all the outlines of fact bent and distorted just enough to make the truth behind it ever-so-slightly more visible.

The Family Corner

Man Of Steel is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence, action and destruction, and for some language; characters use mild language in fear, but it's so close to the action that it's barely noticeable. The movie's violence is bloodless and cartoonish-feeling, and while intense, is not disturbing. Also, flashbacks to Superman's youth include some quick shots of baby nudity. The Kings Of Summer is rated R for language and teen drinking. Characters frequently swear, including f- and s-words, as well as swearing to and around their parents disrespectfully. There are also a few crude jokes about bodily functions (but none about sex specifically). There is a brief scene involving alcohol at a party, but none of the characters get drunk.

Superman is a complex character, as superheroes go, too complicated to reduce into hero stereotypes and character-bio shorthands. He is Clark Kent, farm boy from Kansas; he is Superman, hero of Metropolis and symbol of Freedom, Justice, and The American Way; and he is Kal-El, alien from Krypton, his parents killed and homeland destroyed. And the most interesting, human moments experienced by Superman always show up in the interplay between his coexistent identities.

But in Zach Snyder's Man Of Steel, Superman (Henry Cavill, best known for his work on The Tudors) is there mostly to satiate that part of the American psyche that wants their messiahs to punch things, too. It's understandable why Snyder, director of stylish, brooding action movies like 300 and Watchmen, chose to go this route: the film is packed densely with information and plot, covering the death of planet Krypton, Clark Kent's upbringing in Kansas, his antagonists and their objectives, and the myriad twists and turns that result.

The hand of Christopher Nolan (who shares a story credit) is clear here—anyone who sat through The Dark Knight or Inception will recognize Nolan's proclivity for stories with climaxes that go on for half an hour. So amid all the action scenes, flashbacks, and cutaways that follow around Lois Lane (a precedent-breaking redhead, Amy Adams) as she investigates into who exactly this superhuman person is, there simply wasn't room to earnestly explore Superman's identity issues.

Unfortunately, the movie's climax still depends on Superman feeling torn between his respective roles, human/alien/messiah, all of them in some way true and all of them impossible to entirely fulfill. But we almost never have a good handle on why Clark does the things that he does, on how his identity motivates his actions. And when we are given reasons, they aren't very believable.

Clark returns to Kansas after discovering the details of his origins and says to his mother, "I know where I'm from, and who I am." It's a moment that takes the true-if-overwrought moments— a young Clark pleading with his father, "Can't I just be your son?"—and radically simplifies them. What at first seemed to hint that there's a burgeoning tension in Clark's psyche are now just moments of weakness, and Superman's strength within the movie isn't found in embracing his inherent personality pastiche, but in rejecting it.

"I'm an American through and through," announces Superman at the end of the movie, but he didn't have to go very far to get there. Superman's father, Jor-El (or more accurately a holographic program of his personality, portrayed by Russell Crowe) explicitly rejects the plans for earth harbored by evil general Zod (played to cold militaristic perfection by the always-terrifying Michael Shannon), and that turns Zod's character from a genuine moral threat for Superman into a Balkanesque nationalist who will sacrifice anything for the sake of his homeland—and thus, into someone we have no fear of Superman coming to resemble.

Superman's test is never a moral one. It isn't based on how closely he holds his human identity to heart. Instead, the challenge is based on punching things hard, or flying quickly, or even punching things hard while flying quickly.

This is fun to watch, of course, but the problem is that we, as an audience, are as capable of questioning our own allegiances and backgrounds as we are incapable of punching things while flying. So in simplifying Superman thus, the movie sacrifices the only point on which Superman is genuinely relatable for the sake of spectacle.

But if Zach Snyder is badly suited to making a movie that humanizes Superman, he is perfect for one that showcases the hero's raw power—and this is one of the most spectacular things to make it to the big screen in years. The fight scenes are immaculate: Snyder stylizes the action not by having the fight scenes resemble normal fighting sped-up, as most superhero movies do, but by giving the alien characters a pure kinetic gravity we never see in the superhero-movie genre. They move with a simultaneous speed and weight that violates the laws of physics, and yet there it is, happening on screen—and rather than taking you out of the movie, the effect draws you in, reminding you that these human-looking aliens are not like us.

So Man of Steel is a good movie because of its action, and because of its actors—Amy Adams and Laurence Fishburne give otherwise stock and uninteresting characters a depth that simply can't hold up to retrospective scrutiny, and the action scenes are some of the most thrilling to occur in a superhero film possibly ever, easily trouncing the best The Avengers had to offer—and on that front, the film is pure spectacle, amazing, an unqualified success.

It's only in memory that things start to fall apart: characters fade into their stereotypes without the charisma of their actors to bolster them, and the plot fades into a series of escalating fights born out of uncertain motivations, and you realize that, whatever that incredible space opera/spectacle/drama/action was, it certainly wasn't human.

In stark contrast, the independent coming-of-age film The Kings Of Summer (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance) rings true in a way most films either can't or don't have the guts to. Three boys, all from radically different homes, are sick of their lives. Joe (Nick Robinson) hates his overbearing, authoritarian father Frank (Parks and Recreation's Nick Offerman), especially since the death of his mother left them alone together. Patrick (Gabriel Basso) is so tired of his relentlessly annoying, patronizing, hyper-protective, accidentally emasculating parents that he is literally breaking out in hives.

Together, the boys decide to flee to the woods and build a house together—live off the land! Make our own food! Kill our own meat! Et cetera. Along the way they pick up the strange and small Biaggio (Moises Arias), who, while undergoing character growth of his own, is too silly to be considered a focal character in his own right, and is incidental to the central story of Joe and Patrick's growth together.

What makes The Kings of Summer function so well is the way in which it cares for its characters as people, rather than as 2-D cutouts around which writer Chris Galletta can construct jokes.

A prime example is when Frank, after being serenaded a cappella by his daughter's boyfriend (Eugene Cordero), makes a comment that would be par for the course in an average summer comedy, about how emasculating of an experience it was to be serenaded. And the audience laughs. But then Cordero's character is actually hurt, and Frank's daughter (Allison Brie) is upset with her father, and that prompts Frank to ask a her question that's been a whole movie in the making, pleadingly: "Am I a bastard?" It's a moment of depth and frankness that'd be out of place in almost any other movie, but works perfectly with Summer's dedication to emotional realism.

However, Summer is a movie that is above all other things about manhood, and what it means to the adolescent Patrick and Joe. In case the viewer misses this fact, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts makes it explicit via long panning shots of bare trees, slow motion shots of Joe pounding nails into a birdhouse, the boys' decision to grow out their terrible, patchy facial hair in the wild (in what is one of the best running gags of the film), and a scene where—during a tense game of monopoly after the reveal of a love triangle—Joe relentlessly fingers, sniffs, and gestures with a cinematically flagrant cigar, and that's not even delving into the host of serpentine imagery on display. So the directorial style can be heavy-handed; Vogt-Roberts is a relative newcomer, having mostly done sketches for the web series Funny or Die, and sometimes it seems like he can't decide if he's making a Malick homage (long shots of boys running through color-filtered fields juxtaposed with close-ups of the token girl's dress and skin) or a Snyder one (slow-motion hyper-vivid examinations of movement and physicality).

But that aside, the movie feels familiar to me, familiar and right and true. It is an almost universally relatable portrayal of adolescent men, of dorky high school sophom*ores who dream of something greater, of wanting personal responsibility without being willing to suffer for it.

In one scene, Joe is caught red-handed with a haul of rotisserie chickens from Boston Market—chickens he said he'd killed and cooked on his own—and it is not just one of the funniest scenes of the movie, but says something very profound about what it means to be a boy growing into a man: someone whose responsibilities and entitlements interact in weird and uncomfortable ways, who is simultaneously pressured to engage and be responsible while at the same time spending most of his life receiving the message, "You're not responsible enough." The film captures perfectly what it is to be a developing boy trapped in the seemingly worst possible overlap of "not yet" and "already."

That the film so perfectly evokes this particular experience means it might not play well to all audiences. It is much better at evoking an experience than it is explaining it, or reformatting it so that the unfamiliar could understand. And without the feeling of "me too" (had I been viewing the film as a woman who never struggled with establishing a masculine identity), the visual glitz, effects, and heavy emphasis on cinematic style might distract.

What I do know is that—having been through the kind of experience Vogt-Roberts and Galletta are trying to capture (me, along with roughly half the world)—it's true, and real, real about what it means to be an awkward and insecure human being, maybe real in the sense that an expressionist painting is real, with all the outlines of fact bent and distorted just enough to make the truth behind it ever-so-slightly more visible.

The Family Corner

Man Of Steel is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence, action and destruction, and for some language; characters use mild language in fear, but it's so close to the action that it's barely noticeable. The movie's violence is bloodless and cartoonish-feeling, and while intense, is not disturbing. Also, flashbacks to Superman's youth include some quick shots of baby nudity. The Kings Of Summer is rated R for language and teen drinking. Characters frequently swear, including f- and s-words, as well as swearing to and around their parents disrespectfully. There are also a few crude jokes about bodily functions (but none about sex specifically). There is a brief scene involving alcohol at a party, but none of the characters get drunk.

As a girl, Father's Day underscored the other 364 days of the year, bringing a blaring reminder there was no father around to celebrate. The absence of that single, critical male relationship didn't just make me feel lonely and left out, it impacted my understanding of the world and my place in it. .

After reflecting on how my father's absence has impacted me as a girl and now woman, wife and mother in my memoir, The Artist's Daughter, others have shared with me similar stories of abandonment and struggle. Our collective stories confirm what statistics scream: that the bond from father to child is essential. Whether our dads were good, bad, or not there at all, this relationship shapes our understanding of our very identities.

Yet, we live in a country where too many of us have broken relationships with Dad. In America, 1 in 3 kids live apart from their biological fathers. A recent Washington Post article addressed the dad dilemma with the eye-catching title: The new F-Word – Father. In it, Kathleen Parker addresses a question being asked as we discuss the latest stats on America's female breadwinners: In the evolving 21st-century economy, "what are men good for?"

Parker concludes:

Women have become more self-sufficient (a good thing) and, given that they still do the lion's share of housework and child rearing, why, really, should they invite a man to the clutter? Because, simply, children need a father… . Deep in the marrow of every human child burbles a question far more profound than those currently occupying coffee klatches: Who is my daddy? And sadly these days, where is he?

While single mothers may have enough grit, love, and know-how to raise us, the absence of Dad will still have its effect. Study after study shows that a children with absent fathers are more likely to live in poverty, drop out of high school, have a failing marriage, even be incarcerated than those whose fathers are involved in their lives. The data confirms how much a father matters to a child's physical and emotional wellbeing and development. Fatherhood, it turns out, is a social justice issue.

But that's unfortunately where the church often ends the conversation. We lament the shift in the family structure, express outrage at the latest statistics. We bring absent fathers into the culture wars, wrapping them up with changing definitions of marriage and family. As we preach and debate, Father's Days go by and millions of children remain without the single, most influential male relationship that will continue to shape their identity throughout their lives.

If we take James' words seriously and see true religion as caring for orphans and widows (James 1:27), we must see strong parenting, orphan prevention, as part of the call. How do we practically support the idea of children maintaining relationships with their fathers, if the ultimate responsibility lies on the father himself?

We can—without fanfare—support the fathers we know, including those that live with their children and those that do not. As Christians, we can offer dads opportunities to connect with their kids. That doesn't mean plan another church carnival or father-daughter dance, though those are nice events.

Instead, as Christian families and communities, we should help foster organic relationships between fathers and children. Though relationships can be redeemed at any stage, the earlier the father-child bond is cultivated the larger the benefit is to the child. We can invite a dad and his kids into our lives, the things we are already doing, so they can experience life together. We support fathers as we ask a family over for dinner, ask them to go camping with us or signing up for T-ball together. Putting on the father-daughter dance is easier to execute because at the end of the night it's over, while organic relationships are open-ended. It's this side-by-side kind of journey that presents father and child the opportunity to be together.

We support mom and dad's relationship, despite the cultural shifts around marriage. Many couples choose to have kids before deciding if they will marry; the latest figures show 48 percent of all first births are to single women. While plenty of single or remarried dads remain committed to their children despite not being in a relationship with their mother, that arrangement becomes more difficult and more complicated. Quite simply, a father is more likely to be involved a child's life if he and the child's mother are together.

So, as Christians who care about fatherhood, we need to affirm the importance of the relationship between mom and dad, even if they aren't married. For some of us this is uncomfortable territory, to support relationships that may not look like we'd like. We can practically support these couples so they don't feel isolated. When we offer to babysit for friends to go to counseling or out to dinner, we are we are helping build healthier relationships—both between parenting partners and between parent and child. When we pray with and for couples who are struggling, when we openly discuss our own struggles in marriage we are modeling sticking it out in the difficult and that in turn supports fathers who are present.

Sadly, we must acknowledge that not every father is a safe person, and a severed relationship is in the child and mother's best interests. However, in the cases where connection and reconciliation is possible, we can extend our support.

We do it all clothed in love. Our goal is not to fight a culture war, but to love God with our whole hearts and to love others as we want to be loved. Our goal is to care for orphans and widows, to foster loving earthly families that reflect the love of our Divine Father. To do this, we as Christians must act clothed in love for parents and kids. Supporting fatherhood does not require a project or political campaign, but something much more meaningful: actual relationships with people in our midst. We should acknowledge and be grateful for the responsible, caring fathers we know. We should be patient and helpful with men working towards being better fathers. We should encourage reunion and reconciliation for fathers who live away from their children or who have grown distant over time.

God refers to himself as "Father" on purpose. The title embodies trust, provision and security. Let us help one another move closer to that holy representation, knowing we will always be stumbling and always fall short, but it is a critical relationship worth nurturing.

Alexandra Kuykendall is Mom and Leader Content Editor at MOPS International (Mothers of Preschoolers) a ministry to moms of young kids. Her memoir, The Artist's Daughter, explores her own journey of identity development and significance from childhood to marriage and motherhood. Connect with her at AlexandraKuykendall.com

When it comes from nonprofit media directors and rock-band frontmen, good news can be hard to stomach. We at Christianity Today receive constant waves of marketing—e-mail ad blasts, book publicity campaigns, interview requests—touting new methods among goodhearted fellow believers to "eradicate extreme poverty" or "end global sex trafficking." And then we read the morning news and realize the world still needs saving.

But every so often, we get good news that makes us smile—no small accomplishment among a band of jaded journalists. One such tidbit came this winter from Bruce Wydick, whose credentials gave him a wide hearing: An economist at the University of San Francisco, Wydick has consulted for the World Bank, taught at Harvard and Princeton, and cofounded a development nonprofit in the Mayan highlands of Guatemala. (Oh, he's also writing a novel about fair-trade coffee. Slacker.) He came to ct with astounding news about the effects of child sponsorship in six majority-world countries—effects that were verified time and again and were published this spring in the Journal of Political Economy. "I stared at the charts on my screen to make sure I was seeing correctly," writes Wydick about the results in his cover story. It turned out he was.

Since at least the 1938 founding of the Christian Children's Fund, child sponsorship has been something of a darling of Christian charity models. And even amid a recession, it's growing: From 2007–2011, evangelical giving to sponsorship groups increased 74 percent, making child sponsorship the fourth-largest segment of our philanthropy. No doubt Wydick's research will inspire more giving.

But there's a profound truth to child sponsorship that transcends metrics. Several colleagues and I have sponsor children, and part of what compels us is the connection that forms between two people separated by geography, language, and even religion. One colleague and his wife have sponsored a Ugandan boy for 8 years. "Sometimes you wonder if they or the volunteer has written the letter. But it doesn't bother us. We know it's for the greater good."

And then there's hope, that immeasurable yet vital factor in the equation of human life. His studies, Wydick told me, "made me realize the importance of hope":

What is powerful to me is how Jesus gives many of these sponsored children hope by caring for them through the local staff and sponsors. These sponsors are usually people they will never meet in person, but it is a powerful idea to a child that across some ocean, far away out there, someone cares for them. Perhaps in this way, God's love for them is made more concrete.

May it be so.

Next issue: Christopher J. H. Wright shows us how to love Leviticus (and all those other confusing Old Testament books); Andy Crouch examines the gospel of LGBTQIA identity; and Amy Simpson remembers growing up with a mom with schizophrenia.

What can an ordinary person like me do to help the poor?" When people find out at parties and social gatherings that I am a development economist (and yes, we economists do attend such events), often they ask me this question. For a long time my response was the same: "Perhaps sponsor a child?"

I suppose I gave this answer because I myself sponsored a child, and if I was supposed to know something about helping the poor, I should encourage people to do what I was doing. After all, child sponsorship makes sense: By focusing on youth instead of adults, it aims to nip poverty in the bud, providing children in the developing world access to education, health services, and, in some programs, spiritual guidance. But over time my autopilot response started to annoy me. The truth was that I hadn't the slightest clue about the effect child-sponsorship programs had on children.

Dissatisfaction with my pat answer began to inform conversations with my graduate students. "Have you considered researching the impact of child sponsorship?" I would ask. One student was interested, and she followed the topic long enough to find out that no one had ever investigated the topic, despite 9 million children sponsored worldwide, and the more than $5 billion per year being channeled into sponsorship programs from ordinary people wanting to help. But we were having trouble finding a sponsorship organization willing to work with us. What if the research discovered that sponsorship didn't work? This was the risk that some organization out there had to take.

A couple years later, another graduate student, Joanna Chu, became interested in the topic, in part because she was sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Chu put out some feelers with Compassion's research director, Joel Vanderhart, who decided to risk what no other child-sponsorship organization was willing to risk at that point: to allow its program to be scrutinized. We were able to carry out the study with one major condition: Compassion would remain anonymous. They would be referred to as "a leading child-sponsorship organization" in any academic publication.

In the course of talking with Vanderhart, we stumbled upon a vein of gold for any development economist: He casually mentioned that Compassion had used an arbitrary age-eligibility rule when they underwent a major worldwide expansion during the 1980s. When one of Compassion's programs entered a new village, typically only children who were 12 and younger were eligible for sponsorship.

With that, our strategy for identifying the causal impacts of the program became clear. We would obtain early enrollment lists from different village projects introduced during the 1980s, and track down the families of those who were first sponsored in these projects. Then we would obtain information on the life outcomes of these formerly sponsored children—now adults—and compare them to their adult siblings who had been slightly too old to be sponsored when the program arrived in their village. In this way we would be able to control for genetics, family environment, and a host of other factors that the siblings held in common. The only difference that could affect adult life outcomes across the sample would be the fact that Providence had allowed some of these siblings and not others to be age-eligible for child sponsorship.

The Results

Chu found a partner for her research project: Laine Rutledge, now a doctoral student in economics at the University of Washington. The two graduate students spent the summer of 2008 in Uganda, where they obtained data on 809 individuals, including 188 who were sponsored as children. The students had a number of adventures in the field, including a run-in with a wild dog that took a bite out of Rutledge's leg. A couple of months after they returned, Chu and Rutledge stopped by to share the results. A nervous excitement quickly filled my small office.

You could beat this data senseless, and it was incapable of showing anything other than extremely large and statistically significant impacts on educational outcomes for sponsored children.

We loaded the data onto my computer from Rutledge's flash drive, and I rattled off some code to replicate their estimations. I was looking at the results of Compassion's impact on educational outcomes in Uganda—I stared at the statistics on my screen to make sure I was seeing correctly.

"This is … amazing," was all I could mumble. We tried slicing the data different ways, but each showed significant educational improvements. You could beat this data senseless, and it was incapable of showing anything other than extremely large and statistically significant impacts on educational outcomes for sponsored children.

A few months later, I presented the Uganda findings in the weekly development economics seminar at UC–Berkeley. The Berkeley seminar was familiar turf, but not a place to suffer fools gladly. We received a number of constructive comments, but the consensus was that the underlying methodology was sound. What was obvious was that the study needed external validity. Uganda was one country. Compassion was one organization. We would try to expand the study to multiple organizations and countries.

Vanderhart flew out to San Francisco to talk about expanding the study. This was our first in-person meeting. Vanderhart is a big, conservative man with a lumberjack beard who instantly reminded me of Merlin Olsen from Little House on the Prairie reruns I watch with my kids. I wondered how he felt about trusting a bunch of San Francisco academics with the public credibility of his organization. We strategized about expanding the study to include other major child-sponsorship organizations. But those organizations weren't interested. So with Compassion remaining as the only organization amenable to the project, we drew up a plan to carry out the study in six countries: Uganda, Guatemala, the Philippines, India, Kenya, and Bolivia—two countries on each of the three continents that make up the developing world. They represented Compassion's work worldwide.

But to expand the project, we needed grant money. Based on the preliminary results in Uganda, we were able to obtain usaid funding through basis, a development economics research network based at the University of California at Davis. Rutledge coordinated the fieldwork in the remaining five countries. By August 2010, we had obtained data on 10,144 individuals over an array of variables: primary, secondary, and tertiary education; type and quality of adult employment; community leadership; church leadership; assets owned as adults; and a number of other variables that would measure that slippery word that economists love, development.

We presented the results at a number of universities and research institutions: Stanford, the World Bank, UC–Davis, Georgia Tech, the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, and Cornell, among others. I had asked Paul Glewwe, an expert on the economics of schooling and children's issues in developing countries, to join the project. I had met Glewwe, a professor at the University of Minnesota and former economist at the World Bank, through the Association of Christian Economists. I knew he would bring additional expertise in program analysis and econometrics (a branch of statistics for testing economic hypotheses) to the larger research project.

The results in our other five countries confirm the positive impact of Compassion's child-sponsorship program in Uganda. In all six countries, we find that sponsorship results in better educational outcomes for children. Overall, sponsorship makes children 27 to 40 percent more likely to complete secondary school, and 50 to 80 percent more likely to complete a university education. Child sponsorship also appears to be the great equalizer in education: In areas where outcomes are worse, such as sub-Saharan Africa, impacts are bigger. In countries where existing outcomes aren't as bad, like in India and the Philippines, impacts are significant but smaller. In countries where existing outcomes are higher among boys, the impact on girls is larger; in countries where the existing educational outcomes are higher for girls, the impact on boys is larger. We even find some evidence for spillover effects on the unsponsored younger siblings of sponsored children.

To put it simply, thes educational impacts of sponsorship are large—roughly equal to the substantial effects of the Rosenwald Schools program that from 1913–31 educated blacks in the Jim Crow South. They are roughly double those of Oportunidades, the celebrated conditional-cash-transfer program that gives cash to mothers in Mexico for keeping their children in school. It's so successful, it has been replicated in dozens of developing countries around the world with financial incentives from the World Bank.

Compassion's results extend beyond school attendance. We found that child sponsorship means that when the child grows up, he is 14–18 percent more likely to obtain a salaried job, and 35 percent more likely to obtain a white-collar job. Many of the Compassion-sponsored children become teachers as adults instead of remaining jobless or working in menial agricultural labor. We found some evidence that they are more likely to grow up to be both community leaders and church leaders.

The academic paper containing the full methodology and results of our study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Political Economy. Edited by the department of economics at the University of Chicago, the JPE is comparable to, say, The New England Journal of Medicine for medical researchers, accepting only a small fraction of submitted papers whose results are often pertinent to the general population.

Compassion inquired politely: Do you think we could remove the anonymity clause?

The Hope Hypothesis

Compassion asked me to visit Colorado Springs to present the results of our research. I had an appointment with Wess Stafford, then president of Compassion, a man I had always respected from a distance but now had a chance to meet. His secretary ushered me into his office, where a large wooden skipper's wheel was mounted on the rear wall. It was a big ship to pilot: Compassion sponsors 1.3 million children in 26 countries.

Stafford greeted me with a warm handshake and ushered me into a comfortable chair in front of his desk.

"Your program works," I said.

"I know," he smiled.

"But I am analyzing this data as a dispassionate scientist, not as an advocate of Compassion like yourself," I replied. "We're not just finding positive correlations, but substantial causal effects from the program—in every country—especially Africa. I'm wondering what is happening here. You're a former academic. I think there is something deeper going on in the program that would interest the greater development community. I need some leads."

"Try hope," he said.

I raised my eyebrows. "Hope?"

Hope is a fuzzy concept for economists. I squinted my eyes. He explained:

For my dissertation, I asked a bunch of kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. Some were Compassion kids, some were unsponsored. There was a little bit of a difference between the two groups. But then I asked them later what they realistically expected to be when they grew up. Here, there was a big difference between the sponsored kids and the other kids. You see, poverty causes children to have very low self-esteem, low aspirations. The big difference that sponsorship makes is that it expands children's views about their own possibilities. Many of these children don't think they are capable of much. We help them realize that they are each given special gifts from God to benefit their communities, and we try to help them develop aspirations for their future.

Portraits of Change

Stafford's story brought to mind another one I had heard in the field from Compassion workers in Kenya. A pilot from Kenya Airways had visited a number of Compassion projects to talk about his job. The children were fascinated to meet someone who flew the planes they saw zooming across the sky. They had never met such an amazing and interesting person, and after his visit, most of them wanted to be pilots.

Whatever it was, something that Compassion was doing was working, and we wanted to explore the mysterious black box of poverty and child psychology. To test the hope hypothesis, we carried out a follow-up study on currently sponsored children. Did sponsored children have higher aspirations than nonsponsored children who were just like them in other ways? If there were no statistical differences in aspirations between sponsored and nonsponsored children, we could rule out the hope hypothesis and explore something else.

We carried out three studies—in Bolivia, Kenya, and Indonesia—with 1,320 children. The sample included sponsored children, their unsponsored siblings, and other unsponsored children from the same communities. In each of the studies, we found that sponsored children consistently had significantly higher expectations for their own schooling than unsponsored children, even when controlling for family and other factors. They also generally had higher expectations for adult employment. (Years later, a disproportionate number of Kenyan kids still wanted to be pilots.) Many of these findings came close to mirroring the adult differences we measured between formerly sponsored children and nonsponsored children.

The puzzle pieces are beginning to fall into place: the patient nurturing of self-worth, self-expectations, dreams, and aspirations may be a critical part of helping children escape poverty.

In Indonesia, my graduate students carried out a unique experiment with 540 children living in the slums in Jakarta. Of these 540 children, 288 were sponsored and the rest were either siblings of sponsored children, children on the waitlist to be sponsored, or siblings of children on the waitlist. We sat each child at a desk with a blank piece of paper and a fresh box of 24 colored pencils. We asked each to "draw a picture of yourself in the rain."

Child psychologists have demonstrated that self-portrait drawings reveal a cornucopia of information about the psychological health of children. Different facets of children's drawings have been empirically correlated with various emotional disorders: missing facial features correlate with shyness; a tiny figure, with insecurity; big teeth and monster figures, with aggression; choice of dark colors over light colors, with depression. In self-portraits set in the rain, drawing yourself holding an umbrella could indicate an enhanced view of self-efficacy—dealing with a challenging situation proactively rather than being a victim of it.

One of my graduate students, Teddi Auker, spent dozens of hours coding these drawings with 1s and 0s to account for 20 different features for each drawing. What the self-portraits revealed was remarkable. Compassion children were 12 percentage points more likely to choose light colors to draw pictures of themselves than nonsponsored children. They were 13 percentage points less likely to draw themselves as a tiny figure, 6 percentage points less likely to draw themselves as a monster, and 9 percentage points more likely to draw themselves holding an umbrella. Overall, when we combined these characteristics into aggregated psychometric indices, controlling for other factors, we found that Compassion children's drawings displayed significantly lower levels of hopelessness, higher levels of optimism and self-efficacy, and higher levels of overall happiness.

We can't yet establish a clear causal link between the increased levels of hopefulness and aspirations among sponsored children and their improved adult lives. But the puzzle pieces are beginning to fall into place: the patient nurturing of self-worth, self-expectations, dreams, and aspirations may be a critical part of helping children escape poverty. It is a holistic approach that secular antipoverty initiatives have largely downplayed, but an approach that Christian development groups have championed for decades.

Creating Givers

The traditional approach to development work has been to provide things for people. If people lack education, we build them schools. If they are unhealthy, we build them hospitals and provide doctors, or we drill a freshwater well. If their small businesses are stagnant, we provide microcredit so they can borrow. While each of these interventions can be helpful in the right context, mere provision fails to address the root of poverty: the behaviors, social systems, and mindset that are created by poverty. The key to ending poverty resides in the capacity of human beings—and their view of their own capacity—to facilitate positive change.

Indeed, every time we provide something for someone else in need, we send a subtle message to them that we believe they are incapable of providing for themselves. W hile some interventions are necessary, especially in the area of health, they come at a cost of reinforcing an inferiority complex among the poor. Good development organizations understand this. Along with providing some basic resources that allow children to progress farther in school, the child-development approach advocated by Compassion appears to get under the hood of human beings to instill aspirations, character formation, and spiritual direction. In short, it trains people to be givers instead of receivers.

When someone asks me what an ordinary person can do to help the poor in developing countries, I tell them about our research. The most common response is, "That's good to know. I always wondered if all that was a scam." At this point we can confidently state that it is not.

Bruce Wydick is professor of economics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. His novel about coffee growers in Guatemala is forthcoming from Thomas Nelson.

For today’s entry in the Friday Five interview series, we catch up with Rebekah Lyons. Alongside her husband, Gabe, Rebekah serves as cofounder of Q Ideas, a nonprofit organization that helps Christian leaders winsomely engage culture. Rebekah Lyons is the author of Freefall to Fly: A Breathtaking Journey Toward a Life of Meaning.

Today we talk to Rebekah about mental illness, speaking with vulnerability, and how Christian moms can navigate the tension between home and career.

-Daniel

You are pretty open in your book and in your recent public speaking about your struggles with anxiety and depression. Was it difficult to admit this, given your role as a Christian leader?

Actually, no. I’ve been an “over-sharer” all my life.

This story overtook me. I never intended to write a book, but it was an earnest effort to get it down, for my own healing and processing. The week I began writing, I realized this wasn’t a story of my anxiety or spiral, but God’s story of redemption and rescue. The best advice I received early on was, “Don’t hold back.”

I didn’t unearth how much my story would resonate with others until I started hearing feedback in the early stages. It seemed everyone shared angst over someone they loved struggling with the same thing—especially within the church.

What can church leaders do to create a culture where its people are free to talk about anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses?

Church leaders can lead by being vulnerable themselves. It must be so difficult to do this when everyone is looking to you for answers, but simply put, we are all broken people in desperate need of a Savior.

When we lead with vulnerability, we invite others to do the same. It connects us with each other, and our secrets lose power when they exit the dark. We can also be better friends. We can show up, check in on those that are hanging by a thread, and press in. Not with answers, but with our presence. We also need to know when symptoms are worsening and should not be ignored.

The church could create a posture from the stage where this isn’t shamed. Mental illness doesn’t equate with spiritual weakness. We need love and grace more than ever in this season, as 26 percent of Americans struggle with this. Every family has someone that faces depression or anxiety periodically. Let’s embrace how to love them well when they do.

How can busy moms like you find space to pursue their God-given callings while caring for their families?

This certainly helps when parenting is shared. Gabe has been my biggest advocate in unearthing my calling. He gently prompted and prodded even before I was ready to receive it.

The greatest step is to create space, time each week for replenishment in four practices: physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual. I know many moms are thinking, Yeah, right. I’m happy to get in a daily shower! It doesn’t have to be large blocks of time, but an intention with our schedules saying, “I need this.”

I believe those carved moments of silence create space to imagine again, to explore and ask the tough questions. If we begin to dream again, over time, clarity will come.

How can pastors and church leaders affirm women in their gifting?

The past few weeks my home church, Trinity Grace in New York City, has been spotlighting different women in all nine parish locations via video: women sharing stories of calling and vocation, with captured footage in their weekly environments as they surrender to God’s prompting to live faithfully in our city. I tear up every time. To hear how bold and empowered these women are sets a precedent for the rest of the women in our church.

If you could give one piece of advice to a woman experiencing these tensions between home and career, what would it be?

The beauty is, there is no canned answer. Only you can navigate when you are pulled too steeply in one direction or the other. I’ve felt this tension often. In those moments, I have to ask, What am I making an idol? Usually it’s the thing I’m most stressed about. Once that surfaces, confession follows.

I believe God supplies all we need to live out the calling he’s put in our hearts. But our ambition can turn that calling into a selfish thing. I often lay my assignments before him saying, “You do this. If I’m making it about me, please take it and give it to someone else.”

Ultimately, I want to live a life of surrender.

Sojourners CEO Jim Wallis revealed today that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer last December and underwent major surgery last week.

"There were no symptoms or problems, just some results from a routine blood test that needed to be checked out," wrote Wallis in a blog post announcing the diagnosis, which came just ahead of the release of–and 18-city tour for–his latest book, On God's Side. As a result, he was blindsided by the news–and by the sudden loss of control he felt.

After months of waiting and praying, though, Wallis had the cancer removed during surgery last week.

"It all went very well; the cancer was contained and removed with no signs of further spreading, pending more pathology reports," he wrote.

Wallis is not the only well-known Christian to reveal a cancer diagnosis lately. Last month, Christian recording artist experienced an unexpected career boost after he divulged his cancer diagnosis to fans, who generously funded a Kickstarter campaign for his new recording project. In addition, Christian philosopher and professor Dallas Willard announced in May his diagnosis with stage 4 cancer; Willard died less than a week later.

CT previously has interviewed Wallis on multiple occasions and first reported on his work as an evangelical activist in Washington, D.C., in 1999. Most recently, CT reported that Wallis "reversed course" from the traditional marriage position he defended to CT in 2008, publicly shifting to support gay marriage.