RELEVANT - Issue 70 - July/August 2014

CLIMATE CHANGE | TEDASHII | JOHNNYSWIM | SHARON JONES | K ARI JOBE | BILL HYBELS FAITH, CULTURE & INTENTIONAL LIVING

R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M

REJECT APATHY A SPECIAL SECTION ON SUSTAINABLE CHANGE

STATE OF THE UNION HOW MILLENNIALS ARE CHANGING MARRIAGE

CAGE THE ELEPHANT

EXPLORING THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE IN A NEW ERA OF HOLLYWOOD MARVELS

8 WAYS TO CHANGE THE WORLD KEY LEADERS TELL HOW THEY DID IT

WITH

EMMA STONE JAMIE FOX X R ALPH WINTER ANDREW GARFIELD & MORE

ISSUE 70 | JULY_AUG 2014 | $4.95

To whom it may concern

We are not interested in finding the “qualified.” This is a search for the brave few who find value in serving others and showing mercy.

This is not a program to participate in but a new way of being, a life dedicated to intentional community, humble service, and the stewardship of grace.

The requirement is caring. The measurement is empathy. There will be no credit or accolades. This is not a box to check.

Only apply if you are poor in spirit. You mourn. You’re meek. You’re a peacemaker, persecuted and insulted, but also blessed, made righteous and redeemed.

Only apply if you believe in giving, not taking. When the world tells you to consume, collect, gain, and prove—you choose to share, help, heal, and love.

Christ bids you come and die, to be part of a generation of healers, not those who harm; of those who are here to serve not to be served.

JOIN US THIS FALL. SERVE SEATTLE.

Sincerely The brokenhearted, The bruised, The weary, The redeemed.

APPLY NOW

A ministry of Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission

SERVESEATTLE.ORG

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THE ART OF CELEBRATION AVA I L A B L E WO R L DW I D E

CELEBRATE WITH US! Following their ground-breaking album CAMPFIRE and hit single “Build Your Kingdom Here,” Rend Collective presents THE ART OF CELEBRATION.

FEATURING THE HIT RADIO SINGLE “MY LIGHTHOUSE”

T H E M AGA Z I N E O N FA I T H , C U LT U R E & I N T E N T I O N A L LI V I N G

JULY/AUGUST 2014, ISSUE 70 With special thanks to guest photographer Peter Parker Publisher & CEO | CAMERON STRANG > cameron@relevantmediagroup.com Associate Publisher | JEFF ROJAS > jeff@relevantmediagroup.com Account Manager | WAYNE THOMPSON > wayne@relevantmediagroup.com Managing Editor | TYLER HUCKABEE > tyler@relevantmediagroup.com Copy Editor | DARGAN THOMPSON > dargan@relevantmediagroup.com Contributing Editor | JESSE CAREY > jesse@relevantmediagroup.com Contributing Writers: Jon Acuff, Kara Bettis, Jenni Catron, Mack Hayden, Bill Hybels, Ben Lowe, Emily McFarlan Miller, David Roark, Laura Studarus, Lysa TerKeurst, Scott Todd Designer | EVAN TRAVELSTEAD > evan@relevantmediagroup.com Designer | LAUREN HARVILL > lauren@relevantmediagroup.com Production Designer | LINDSEY WEIGLEY > lindsey@relevantmediagroup.com Director of Audio & Video | CHAD MICHAEL SNAVELY > chad@relevantmediagroup.com Photographer & Videographer | MARK KAMMEL > mark@relevantmediagroup.com Contributing Photographers: Jacob Blickenstaff, Quantrell Colbert, Dusdin Condren, Jeremy Cowart, Frazer Harrison, Colin Lane, Dean Reinford, Art Streiber, Robert Viglasky Project Manager | AME LYNN DUNN > ame@relevantmediagroup.com Customer Experience Coordinator | CAROLINE COLE > caroline@relevantmediagroup.com Marketing Assistant | MORGAN BECK > morgan@relevantmediagroup.com Web/App Developer | STEVEN LINN > steven@relevantmediagroup.com Systems Administrator | JOSH STROHM > joshs@relevantmediagroup.com ADVERTISING INQUIRIES: www.RELEVANTmagazine.com/advertise

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RELEVANT Issue #70 July/August 2014 (ISSN: 1543-317X) is published 6 times a year in January, March, May, July, September and November for $14.99 per year by RELEVANT Media Group, Inc., 900 N. Orange Ave., Winter Park, FL 32789. Periodicals postage paid at Orlando, FL, and at additional mailing offices.

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Our seven-part film series, FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD, examines God’s surprisingly wonderful “economy of all things” — from LOVE to WONDER to EXILE. And it’s done in a way that’s totally irresistible. Now, go on and get your free sample. You’ve earned it.

sEe ThE tRaIleR At L eTteRsToTHe ExIleS .cOm/ Gift © 2014 Acton Institute

first word

A WORD FROM THE EDITOR

FINDING TRUTH IN UNEXPECTED PLACES

BY CAMERON STR ANG

will admit it: I’m not a comics guy.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side like any other kid with a sense of humor, but as far as the superhero graphic novel thing went, I never really connected.

I think I had a hard time immersing into those worlds because to do so, you pretty much had to suspend reality. Where’s the drama if bullets can’t hurt the tights-wearing hero? I’ve never really liked entertainment where I felt like I had to turn off my brain to enjoy it.

Then, a few years ago, I learned that some of my smartest friends loved graphic novels. This made no sense to me, until they introduced me to a world I didn’t know about, one where some of the most thoughtful, intelligent fiction writing happening today just happens to be in graphic novel form.

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Then when Christopher Nolan revolutionized the Batman franchise, he gave the story a gravitas and depth that had eluded previous incarnations. He matured the superhero genre and gave the character a humanity that was believable to me. I finally got it.

I’m still not really a superhero fan, but I can appreciate the genre in a way I didn’t before. With most of these characters, there is a significant backstory that drives who they are (good and bad). There are layers to most of these stories that, when explored, can be eye-opening, evocative and challenging.

With RELEVANT, one of the things we’ve always enjoyed has been finding truth in unexpected places and illuminating it on these pages. It’s important for Christians to see ways

God is speaking outside the four walls of their church. We should seek a greater understanding of culture, especially if we’re called to reach and influence it.

That’s not to say believers should blindly consume culture. Just the opposite, in fact.

Christians should always thoughtfully discern, seeking to view things through a Godcentered lens.

When we do that, it requires we look more deeply. Sure, it may be easy to dismiss superhero movies as mindless entertainment, but is there something more actually happening? That’s what Tyler Huckabee explores in our cover story, and what he found is fascinating—even to a non-comics guy like me.

It turns out there is spiritual significance everywhere. That is, if you’re looking for it.

To learn that the creators of Superman intentionally based him on a biblical character (spoiler alert: It’s not Jesus) changes the entire way I see that narrative now.

Truly considering the weight of the statement “With great power comes great responsibility” challenges all humans who feel called to make a difference.

Pursuing greater understanding, discerning and pushing to see past the surface isn’t just how we should engage entertainment— it’s how we should approach life.

Looking to find an element of truth in something we dismissed or otherwise disagree with can fundamentally disrupt the widening gap of partisanship in our culture.

Trying to have a greater understanding for our neighbor’s story, seeing past the surface, would forever alter how we see and engage those around us.

So, for all those things we’ve written off over the years, what if we chose to re-engage them with a different perspective? Not that we have to agree or even like the things, but we can ask God for discernment and see what He can say to us through it.

It’s a posture we should always pray for—that we would have ears to hear and eyes to see what He’s wanting to speak to us through any situation.

And yes, that can happen through something as unexpected as superheroes.

CAMERON STRANG is the publisher and founder of RELEVANT. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @cameronstrang.

recoveringredemption.com

feedback

MAY/JUNE 2014 ISSUE 69

[ T W E E T N E S S ] RE: THE FANTASTIC MR. WES @ _MAN D IJ E AN

Thanks for the article on Wes Anderson.

He’s always been one of my favorite directors, so I really enjoyed getting a glimpse behind the scenes after seeing The Grand Budapest Hotel. And he’s a great example of an innovator and creative, so it fit that he was on the cover when you introduced the “Maker” section!

RHIANNA WESLE Y / Via Facebook

[“So, Who is the Holy Spirit Anyway?” May/ June 2014] is a fantastic article! I read Francis Chan’s book Forgotten God a few years back, shortly after reading Young’s The Shack. Both books have been steps in the meanderings of thought regarding what the Word of God actually has to say about the Spirit of God. I think this Darren Wilson will be another guy to give a listen to. While I cannot say I 100 percent agree with [everything he says], his statement that our common cause must be “to reach this world for Jesus” keeps us on the right track.

Dear @RELEVANT, by my book, you’ve always been on top of your game, but the past two issues have been next level. @ E R IK J FISHE R

Wes Anderson on the cover AND an article by @Claire? You’ve outdone yourself, @RELEVANT. @ YOYOIN G ADAM

@RELEVANT Loved the article on the Holy Spirit. Unity first; then work through practices without dismissing legit failures/hurts OR positive experiences.

I am really glad you decided to talk about the controversial issue of marijuana in your magazine [“Half-Baked” May/ June 2014]. But I just wanted to say that people who believe smoking weed is OK because of Genesis 1:29 are stretching it. God said Adam and Eve could take advantage of every seed-bearing plant, but this was before the fall of man, so of course they could. After sin entered the world, things went bad. Please stop trying to take Scriptures like that out of context to back up your point about marijuana!

BECCA STITZINGER / Via email

JOSHUA MATHEW / Via RELEVANTmagazine.com @ RY4N 3V 4N 5

@RELEVANT @peteholmes Great article about my favorite comedian.

Even though it got a little weird.

I don’t think the generation discussion is very useful [“Generation Rising” May/June 2014].

No one of us should have to carry the weight of a generation’s weaknesses. We aren’t all fallen because of Adam’s original selfie.

@ MATTE HR E SMAN

JOHN WRIGHT / Via Facebook

@tylerwardis Really enjoyed and appreciated your article on balance in @RELEVANT. Thanks for sharing those important facts!

Thank you for “Life Change Starts With Your Focus” in the May/June edition. I was just told my organization was eliminating my position when I went to the mailbox and saw my new RELEVANT. Now I feel encouraged instead of discouraged!

@RELEVANT Love the new “Maker” section of the magazine! Interesting and motivating articles!

@ J U L IE QK E E FE

Incredible article on Carl Lentz in the new issue. I’ve been hoping for one for a while and you guys nailed it.

Great article on “Finding a Work/Life Balance” [May/June 2014]. I never hear anyone talking about this topic or its dangers. We are out there killing ourselves to “feed the machine” and keep it going at the cost of our health and relationships. The imbalance is just another reminder that we long for the perfect, restored Kingdom of God. On that day, we’ll all finally be working in beautiful harmony together. I can’t wait to hear that new song!

SEAN KERNOHAN / Via Twitter

ERIC PERRY / Via RELEVANTmagazine.com

ABBE Y TUT TLE / Via Facebook

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@ TSTAN L E Y1299

@RELEVANT magazine’s digital edition is by far the best periodical experience available. #brilliant @ AL E JAN D R OR E YE S

Out of the magazines and blogs that I read, @RELEVANT is easily the most inspiring thing I read each month.

NEW FROM MATT CHANDLER

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[S TAGE S OF BEL L]

Look closely and you may be able to see your house

N OOMA

A series of 24 short videos that became popular with Bible studies, NOOMA featured Bell teaching about Christian perspectives on various real life situations.

THE RETURN OF ROB BELL CAN THE POLARIZING AUTHOR AND FORMER PASTOR MAKE THE JUMP TO TV?

M

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V E LV E T E LV IS

Bell’s first book offered “a fresh take on Jesus and what it means to live the kind of life He teaches us to live.” He invited readers to re-examine what faith is and what it is not.

L OV E WIN S

Bell’s 2011 book addressing the afterlife caused an uproar in the Church. The ideas in the book led some to label Bell a Universalist and even a heretic.

P H O T O C R E D I T: F A C E B O O K . C O M / R O B B E L L

ore than three years after Desir- idea for a talk show started to take shape. It helped ing God founder and pastor John that Bell soon found a fan in TV icon Oprah WinPiper famously tweeted “Farewell frey—who knows a thing or two about hosting a Rob Bell” (linking to a blog post successful talk show. She invited Bell to be a guest about Bell’s controversial book Love on her Super Soul Sunday program last fall, and Wins), Bell is making a comeback. this fall will feature him as a speaker on her “The In 2011, after the release of the book, Bell—who was Life You Want” arena tour. the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church But Bell will soon take his bignear Grand Rapids, Mich.—received gest stage yet as the host of The criticism for questioning the exisRob Bell Show. In May, he began Bell began taptence of hell and presumptions about taping the new talk show for the the afterlife. Not long after, Bell aning his new talk OWN cable network, though denounced he was stepping down from tails of the format are still unclear. show, The Rob the church he founded and would be Bell remains a polarizing figure moving to Hollywood to pursue opin the evangelical community, but Bell Show, for portunities in television.

Winfrey’s track record of findthe OWN cable Though his initial project—a scripting talk show hosts in unlikely ed series called Stronger that Bell colnetwork in May. places is pretty strong. So despite laborated on with Lost producer Carlwhat Piper says, Bell may just be ton Cuse—failed to get picked up, the getting started.

ACADEMIC RIGOR SERVANTHOOD

“This education will absolutely influence and change the way you live your life.”

BRENDAN MCALPINE

At Wheaton College Graduate School, we create a community where the culturally and theologically diverse student body engages in rich dialogue and pursues excellence in and out of the classroom. “For Christ and His Kingdom” is integral to our students’ experiences, with classes that equip scholars to become better learners, practitioners and Christians.

We invite you to explore our programs and discover how YOU can become better equipped to serve the body of Christ and His worldwide church.

Check out the video viewbook to hear more from Brendan, other students and faculty at WHEATON EDU/RELEVANTGRAD

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CHINA COULD SOON BE THE WORLD’S LARGEST CHRISTIAN NATION DESPITE BEING OFFICIALLY AN “atheist”

‘THE SHACK’ HEADS TO HOLLYWOOD THE CONTROVERSIAL BOOK IS GETTING A BIG-SCREEN ADAPTATION ollywood star Forest Whita- Trinity—portrayed as a Middle Eastern man ker is bringing William Paul (Jesus), an African-American woman (God Young’s best-selling 2007 nov- the Father) and an Asian woman (the Holy el The Shack to the Spirit)—who manifests in human big screen, and he’s looking to Idris form to comfort a grieving father.

Elba, star of Pacific Rim, Thor and Whitaker, who will reportedly Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, to also write and star in the $30 milstar in his adaptation. lion film for Lionsgate, has tapped The book, which has sold more Oprah for a role. In all likelihood, than 18 million copies, was conshe’d be playing The Shack’s verForest Whitaker troversial among many evansion of God the Father, which certakes on the Holy Trinity in The Shack gelicals for its depiction of the tainly won’t cause any controversy.

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250 MILLION

christians could live in china by 2030

POLL: CHRISTIANS WANT BIBLE MOVIES TO BE MORE ACCURATE THOUGH DARREN ARONOFSKY’S Noah was a

certified hit (it brought in more than $300 million globally in its first month), it drummed up as much controversy as it did ticket sales. In light of the blowback, Bible Gateway conducted a poll to gauge Christians’ attitude for accuracy in blockbuster adaptations. Just 28 percent said they

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“feel that Bible stories are a good fit for the big screen and can withstand artistic license,” while a whopping 60 percent answered that “Hollywood adaptations of Bible stories are acceptable only if they adhere strictly to the details of the original story.” Will this mean no rock monsters in future biblical epics?

P H O T O C R E D I T: B B C / R O B E R T V I G L A S K Y

Idris Elba: Hollywood’s most unique soon-to-be household name.

country under communist rule, China could soon be home to more Christians than any other nation on earth.

According to research from Purdue University professor Fenggang Yang, the religion is spreading so quickly through the nation of 1.3 billion, that by 2030, there could be nearly 250 million Christians living in China.

Within the official Protestant church alone, from 1949 to 2010, the community grew by nearly 57 million members.

There has also been massive growth among the country’s Catholic believers and members of the unsanctioned “underground” church.

As evidence of Christianity’s growing impact on Chinese culture, another recent study found that there were more online searches for the terms “Christian Congregation” and “Jesus” originating from the country than searches for “The Communist Party” or China’s president Xi Jinping.

NEXT GENERATION EDUCATION

Northwest Nazarene University delivers the flexibility of a fully online Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies built on a century long legacy of Christian education.

nnu.edu/online

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Nothing like the smell of ethically produced coffee in the morning.

THE RISE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE COFFEE E

very day, millions of coffee drinkers turn to their favorite flavor of java for morning kick-starts and afternoon pick-me-ups. But several brands are using the daily beverage fixture to do more than just provide

NESPRESSO The Nestle-owned single serving coffee pod maker recently launched an advisory board to help oversee the brand’s global sustainability initiatives. Along with supporting farmers and coffee growers in Costa Rica, Ethiopia and Kenya, the brand is also working to expand to Sudan as part of a plan to make the country less reliant on oil exports.

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LAND OF A THOUSAND HILLS Founded in the wake of the Rwandan genocide to give locals a way to earn a living and help rebuild their country, Land of a Thousand Hills’ coffee business empowers farmers around the world. LTH also partners with churches in the U.S. to support the needs of international communities where they work.

customers with a high-end brew—they’re changing lives around the world. Here’s a look at five coffee makers employing philanthropy, ethical business practices and fair trade values into their products—ensuring a great cup of coffee and real social change.

TOMS ROASTING CO.

PEET’S COFFEE & TEA

The brand known for their buyone-give-one line of footwear has turned their attention to coffee. Sourced through a direct trade relationship with farmers around the world, TOMS coffee is freshly roasted in the U.S. In line with its one-for-one business ethic, for each bag of coffee purchased, TOMS provides clean water for a person in need.

With an emphasis on supply chain transparency, environmental sustainability and giving to organizations that support international growers, Peet’s Coffee & Tea has become a model of social and ethical responsibility in the industry. Today, it ships ethically produced roasts to customers around the country.

AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

EXPERIENCE MORE

NOW ON IPAD AND ANDROID TABLETS

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THE H T LIST RELEVANT ’S BI-MONTHLY CULTURE POWER RANKINGS DIRTY LAUNDRY [HOTTEST] Levi’s CEO Chip Bergh announced that his tip for great jeans is to never wash them.

Who are we to argue?

DINOSAURS [HOTTER] Scientists in Argentina have discovered the fossil of the world’s new largest dinosaur.

It’s the hottest dinosaurs have been since the Jurassic era.

AXL ROSE [HOT] A recent poll determined the Guns N’ Roses frontman to be the greatest vocalist of all time. In your face, Mariah Carey.

NETFLIX’S PRICE INCREASE [COLD] It now costs $1 more to aimlessly browse a collection of movies you forgot about and watch reruns of The Office.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler: comedy’s favorite BFFs.

TINA FEY: TV’S NEXT SUPER MOGUL? he’s written a best-selling book (2011’s Bossypants), broken new ground in latenight (she was Saturday Night Live’s first female head writer) and become a comedy mainstay on TV and the big screen. Tina Fey’s reign as comedy queen will continue this fall as she oversees sitcoms on two major networks.

Fey is teaming up with a former 30 Rock writer for a sitcom about a formerly allgirls college admitting men for the first time, which will debut this fall on Fox.

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Over on NBC, Fey is heading up Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, starring The Office’s Ellie Kemper as the title character, who escapes a cult and goes to work as a nanny for a Manhattan socialite (played by 30 Rock’s Jane Krakowski).

Fey is also producing and starring in the big-screen comedy The Nest with Amy Poehler (due out next year), and working with her husband on a musical adaptation of her hit movie Mean Girls.

She’s become a media mogul so successful even Jack Donaghy would be jealous.

THE EXPENDABLES 3 [COLDER] One shoot ‘em up movie starring senior-citizen action heroes was more than enough.

SHARK WEEK [COLDEST] Sorry, Discovery Channel, with last year’s fake Megalodon documentary, Shark Week officially jumped the ... well, you know where we’re going here.

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WELL, WHAT DOST THOU KNOWETH? According to recent research, the King James Bible is far and away the most popular translation among Americans. According to the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis’ “The Bible in American Life” report, 55 percent of American Bible readers preferred the classic KJV translation, compared to 19 percent who chose the NIV (the second most popular). Bible Gateway’s Stephen Smith also found that the KJV is growing in popularity on the Internet: Though many English Bible translations have tapered off online since 2005, KJV searches have risen.

Just how popular is the King James Bible? According to a 2011 Lifeway study, more than 60 percent of all U.S. households own at least one copy.

BIBLE TRANSLATIONS USED BY READERS King James Version 55%

New American Bible 6%

New International Version 19%

Living Bible 5%

New Revised Standard Version 7%

Other Translations 8%

P H O T O C R E D I T: A R T S T R E I B E R / N B C

KING JAMES IS KING OF TRANSLATIONS

"I love Ocean's Edge and their heart…

The environment the team creates is both personal and purposeful– they have a way of drawing out every student's best and setting them up to win. Can't speak highly enough of Ocean’s Edge."

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BRINGING SUSTAINABILITY HOME sing environmentally sustainable technology isn’t just a way to conserve resources, it can also help save you money.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average family of four in the United States can use as much as 400 gallons of water every day, and numbers from the U.S. Energy

U

1. OCCUPANCY SENSING LIGHT SWITCHES Several brands (Leviton, Maestro, Zenith) make affordable versions of these light switches that come equipped with motion sensors, ensuring usage (and your home’s energy output) doesn’t increase when you’re not around.

Information Administration show that American households consume hundreds of billions of dollars in energy each year.

Installing solar panels or building a rooftop garden may be out of your budget range, but thanks to some new developments in green tech, bringing sustainability home doesn’t have to be expensive.

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2. ECOFLOW SHOWER HEAD

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5 3

These low-flow showerheads from Waterpik offer solid pressure while saving water (and money).

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5. JAVA-LOGS

3. NEST THERMOSTAT The Nest thermostat actually programs itself to “learn” your daily schedule, so that the temperature in areas of your home is only adjusted when you’re actually in them. Nest can be controlled through smartphone and tablet apps that also monitor energy use and savings. It’s a little expensive, but if used properly, it can pay for itself.

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4. RUBBER MULCH Made from recycled tires—that, thanks to you, won’t end up in a landfill—rubber mulch from companies like GroundSmart provides a green way to bed gardens (it allows easy water flow and prevents weeds) or create an outside play surface that’s more forgiving than gravel. It’s more expensive than wood mulch, but it can also last a lot longer.

Java-Log firelogs are made from discarded coffee grounds and burn with more energy than wooden logs. They divert 12 million pounds of coffee grounds from being trashed every year and create less than half the amount of carbon monoxide as traditional logs.

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I.C.Y.M.I IN C ASE YOU MISSED IT

M OVIE M US IC TV

1 . DA M ON A LBARN : E V E RYDAY ROBOTS

You know him from Blur and Gorillaz. Over the course of his 25-year career, Albarn has done it all—all, that is, except release a solo album.

It was well worth the wait.

2 . L A S T WEEK TONI G HT WI T H JOHN OL IVER

Oliver’s HBO show reveals his talent and cheeky pluck. It’s a force to be reckoned with.

Lucy Griffiths as Liv in the NBC pilot of Constantine

BRINGING A DARKER SPIRITUALITY TO PRIME TIME here are plenty of spiritual TV projects in the works (NBC’s A.D.: Beyond the Bible, Fox’s Nazareth), but several shows are taking the programming trend in a different direction—examining the dark side of the supernatural. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are teaming up with former Breaking Bad co-producer Sam Catlin to adapt the controversial comic Preacher, the story of a minister possessed by a supernatural being. Here are four more series that are exploring darkness and spirituality:

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THE LOST YEARS 3 . TURN

Few of the new wave of spy shows are as promising as AMC’s look at a spy ring in Revolution-era America.

4 . L O CKE

This entire movie just follows Tom Hardy on a car ride, but you won’t be able to look away.

5. B E A RS

Only the coldest heart will be able to resist Disney’s documentary about a year in the life of a family of bears.

6 . LUCI US : WILDE WO MAN

Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig give a fresh Brooklyn spin on Americana.

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CONSTANTINE

Controversial horror director Eli Roth imagines Jesus’ early years—as an exorcist— for the History Channel.

NBC is adapting the DC Comics series about an occult detective this fall. Sadly, this version will be Keanu-free.

DAMIEN

THE LEFTOVERS

Lifetime’s spinoff of The Omen features a look at the dramatic coming-of-age years of the future Antichrist.

HBO and Lost mastermind Damon Lindelof are behind the new TV adaptation of the 2011 novel about a global rapture.

HOW THE INTERNET IS CHANGING RELIGION A NEW REPORT FROM MIT SUGGESTS THE

Internet—and even higher education—has led Americans to lose their religion. The “Religious Affiliation, Education and Internet Use” report analyzed decades of religious demographic data and found that the percentage of Americans who say they have no religious preference has more than doubled between 1990 and 2010

(from 8 percent to 18 percent). Though fewer individuals being raised religiously was a leading factor for the decline, the report also identified two other major causes: the Internet and college education. According to the report, the rise of the Internet can account for as much as 20 percent of the drop-off because it allows more personal interaction with people of other religions.

P H O T O C R E D I T: Q U A N T R E L L C O L B E R T / N B C

OUR LOOK AT ENTERTAINMENT WORTH YOUR TIME

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ROBERT REDFORD MAY TAKE ON ORAL ROBERTS THE STORY OF FORMER megachurch

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targets set on a new set of remakes and sequels to bring nostalgic twenty- and thirtysomethings back to the movies. Steven Spielberg is reportedly trying to reunite some of the original cast of The Goonies, and there’s a rumored Gremlins remake in the works. Here’s a look at a few more of your favorite childhood franchises poised for Hollywood comebacks.

STUDY: RELATIONSHIP DRAMA KILLS LOOKING FOR AN EXCUSE TO CUT off

PEANUTS

JUMANJI

Snoopy, Charlie Brown and Charles Schulz’s entire gang of beloved comic strip characters are getting the computer animation treatment in this Paul Feigproduced blockbuster due out in the fall of 2015.

The 1995 film about a magic board game that brings the jungle to life is getting a makeover at the hands of Zach Helm, a screenwriter who has worked on Stranger than Fiction and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

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FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR Disney’s 1986 sci-fi time travel adventure that made every kid want his own alien spaceship is reportedly getting a reboot with the help of Safety Not Guaranteed director Colin Trevorrow.

GOOSEBUMPS Jack Black will star as author R.L. Stine in a very meta movie about the Scholastic catalog favorites. It will likely involve several characters from the novels as Stine’s Goosebumps monsters are unleashed in the real world.

a stressful relationship? This ought to work. A study from the University of Copenhagen found dealing with stressful relationships is actually linked to early death. The researchers examined nearly 10,000 people and found those who had constant conflicts with their friends or partners doubled their risk of dying, and those who feuded with neighbors tripled it. But just because drama can be bad for your health doesn’t mean you should abandon relationships. A researcher at Brigham Young University told Reuters, “Social isolation is bad for us as well ... that’s why it might be important to foster the positive aspects rather than just focusing on cutting people out of your life.”

THE GOONIES - WARNER BROS. PIC TURES / ROBERT REDFORD - NBC NE WSWIRE

his August, the ’80s crimefighting foursome of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will join the list of millennial heroes being given the big-screen treatment with the help of Michael Bay and lots of CGI. But it’s not just old-school superheroes being reborn as blockbuster stars anymore. Hollywood has their

P H O T O C R E D I T:

HOLLYWOOD IS REMAKING YOUR CHILDHOOD

pastor Carlton Pearson—made famous by a 2005 episode of This American Life titled “Heretics”—is headed to the big screen. In Come Sunday, Jeffrey Wright will play the controversial minister, and Hollywood icon Robert Redford is reportedly in talks to play Pearson’s former mentor, the evangelist Oral Roberts. Pearson was a rising star in the evangelical community until he claimed to have a revelation from God that there was no hell. The movie will tell how Pearson’s new beliefs cost him his ministry and many close relationships—and why the issue of hell is so polarizing in contemporary evangelicalism.

SS TL A I CT EE SM E N T

THERE IS NO PERFECT DECISION B Y LY S A T E R K E U R S T

recently surveyed people through social media with this question: “What do you think is the biggest reason people struggle to make decisions?” Overwhelmingly, as in almost every answer, was fear.

Fear of the unknown. Fear of failure. Fear of what others will think. Fear of missing out on something better.

Some wrestling with fear is good. It can keep us from temporary bouts of stupidity.

But then other times, I find myself wrestling with fear to the point that I’m paralyzed.

I’ve stayed stuck in analysis paralysis so many times trying to figure out which choice is the perfect one. And if I couldn’t pick the perfect one, I’d rather stay stuck. Or at least, that’s what my irrational mind thought. But in actuality, being stuck was the most disappointing place. Perfection is an illusion.

Are there good choices and bad choices?

Yes, of course. But more often, I find myself

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stuck between a good choice and another good choice trying to figure out which one is perfect.

But here’s a secret answer you must know when trying to pick the perfect choice: There is no perfect choice. And if you understand this, it will set you free from the fear of making a mistake.

As long as you desire to please God with your decisions, no decision you make will be completely awful. Nor will any decision you make be completely awesome. Every decision is a package deal of both. Every leap of faith has moments of uncertainty. Every great success story has elements of failure. Since there is no perfect choice, I don’t have to be paralyzed by the fear that I’m not making the exact right decision.

Again, I want to please God with this decision. But I also want to

demonstrate my trust in Him by actually making a decision—having made peace with the fact it won’t all be perfect.

There is no perfect job. There is no perfect spouse. There is no perfect ministry. There is no perfect church. There is no perfect way to raise kids.

Each of these choices will have just enough imperfections to make them some combination of good and not so good. Even if you are following God and He clearly directs you to make a certain decision, that choice will not be perfect.

There is no perfect decision—only the perfectly surrendered decision to press through our fears and know that God is working in us to bring good about through us.

Here’s where the certainty is: My imperfections will never override God’s promises.

God’s promises are not dependent on my ability to always choose well, but rather on His ability to use well.

God will use the good and not so good parts of the decisions we make. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.”

Don’t miss this crucial part—“for the good of those who love Him.” We must have, at the core of our hearts, a love for God and a surrender to God if we want to be guided by Him. If your heart and your mind are aligned in the direction of God, you don’t have to agonize

God’s promises are not dependent on my ability to always choose well. to the point of paralysis over the decisions before you. We will steer where we stare. So stare mightily at God and His plan. And if you don’t know His plan, stare mightily at living out His Word in your life, and His plan will unfold day by day, decision by decision.

LYSA TERKEURST is the bestselling author of Made to Crave and Unglued. She is president of Proverbs 31 Ministries and lives in N.C. with her husband, Art, and five kids.

Adapted from The Best Yes by Lysa TerKeurst, used with permission by Thomas Nelson

JENNIFER KNAPP TO RELEASE MEMOIR

THE DYLAN/CASH COMEBACK?

THEIR HEYDAYS MAY BE OVER, BUT THE LEGACIES OF JOHNNY CASH AND BOB DYLAN ARE BIGGER THAN EVER he story goes that John Carter Cash (Johnny and June’s son) stumbled across a trove of his father’s “lost recordings” that are only this year seeing the light of day. Out Among the Stars released in March to solid critical acclaim and great fan enthusiasm.

Apparently, the elder Cash was unimpressed by the music he was making in this era—he put all these recordings into a dusty Nashville attic. To the modern ear, it’s not clear why. Out Among the Stars is proof that Cash was the sort of musician who could write a great song in his sleep, and the cultural interest around the release shows the staying power of one of American music’s most definitive musical heroes.

The only other folk singer who might come

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close to Cash’s status is also having a bit of a rebirth (though he hardly needs it—Bob Dylan’s last few albums have quietly been some of his best since the ’80s). Dylan and The Band famously wrote a collection of “basement tapes” in the ’60s, and producing icon T Bone Burnett has wrangled together a collection of contemporary artists to write new songs inspired by Dylan’s Basement Tapes lyrics. Marcus Mumford, Elvis Costello, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and others are all pitching in on the effort, which will release this fall.

Of course, both endeavors are harkening back to a time when people actually bought records, so the music industry may be hoping to tap into that crowd. But there’s another force at work here: An acknowledgement that even as music soars into the EDM-soaked, Pharrell-produced future, some stuff is just too good to stay in the past.

been full of surprises. In 1998, she showed up on the Christian music scene and quickly gained a following, releasing three albums in four years and earning several Dove Awards and a Grammy nomination. Then, at the height of her career, she abruptly abandoned music, going on a hiatus that ended up lasting seven years.

To top it all off, when she returned to music and released her latest album, Letting Go, in 2010, Knapp shocked the Christian world by revealing that she was in a samesex relationship. The album earned her a Grammy nomination, but the accompanying announcement also made her a controversial figure in the Christian music industry.

Now she’s writing a book telling the whole story. Facing the Music: Discovering Real Life, Real Love and Real Faith will release in October through Howard Books.

According to the publisher’s website, the book will tell the story of Knapp’s rise to fame, departure from music and “years of trying to come to terms with her sexual orientation.”

POOLSIDE TUNES LOOKING FOR SOME

new music to pass the time? Here’s a playlist of a few of our favorite tunes from bands we love. It’ll carry you through the rest of your summer. relevantmagazine.com/poolsidetunes

P H O T O C R E D I T: B O B D Y L A N - G E T T Y I M A G E S / J E N N I F E R K N A P P - I N VA S I O N G R O U P. C O M

JENNIFER KNAPP HAS ALWAYS

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THE DROP

ARTISTS TO WATCH

ou know the story. Boy meets girl. He woos her with a song. She informs him that she’s not a half bad musician herself.

They start playing music together and, at some point along the way, they tie the knot.

Most of those stories don’t end up with the couple headlining a tour or playing on The Tonight Show or at Bonnaroo, but maybe that’s because not many husband/ wife duos find the sort of artistic chemistry generated by Abner Ramirez and Amanda Sudano.

The pair’s particular blend of strippeddown pop with a deliciously soulful vibe is surprisingly heartfelt and experimental— not nearly as blandly sweet as you might think coming from a couple who’s clearly head over heels for each other. Their

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darkly emotive harmonies are stormy, pretty, fragile and enduring—perhaps not unlike marriage, in that sense. And maybe that’s their secret.

“Marriage really strengthens our ability to write together, and our ability to write together strengthens our marriage,” Sudano says. “We’re fortunate.”

“Part of our daily conversation is songwriting,” Ramirez agrees. “I don’t mean we talk about songwriting. Writing together creates its own dialogue, its own form of communication. It’s great for us.

“We don’t know how to balance our relationship and our songwriting,” he continues. “Maybe we should. But a big element of our relationship has been being able to create together. We’ve figured out that we write quicker if we bring in a third party who doesn’t know they’re acting as our marriage counselor.”

WHY WE L OV E THE M: Plenty of couples have attempted the boy/girl duo, but Ramirez and Sudano seem to have mastered it. Their songs range from sultry and blues-inspired to hauntingly beautiful ballads to all-out jamming fun. And they somehow manage to nail every mood, writing about love, heartache and conflict in delicious harmonies that invite you to sing and sway along.

JOHNNYSWIM’S DIAMONDS

FOR FANS OF:

The Lone Bellow, Delta Rae, The Head and the Heart

THE WAR ON DRUGS

[ S T R E A M I N G N O W ]

Adam Granduciel might be the first musician to successfully synthesize late ’60s heartland rock like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty into contemporary, hazy shoegaze. The result would sound right at home in both a Williamsburg night club and a Chevrolet pickup commercial. And according to him, that’s the whole point.

“It’s a natural progression. I love writing songs that I think are timeless and classic, like the guys I grew up listening to. But also just trying to have fun with it and playing to my strengths. I figured out how to just write whatever comes naturally, and I felt like I was getting a lot more joy out of making music.”

These albums (and a lot more) are streaming on The Drop at RELEVANTMagazine. com. Listen in!

PRO PAG ANDA

Crimson Cord

WHY WE L OV E HIM:

The War on Drugs makes the kind of music you would blast on a cross-country road trip, songs that you want to listen to on repeat. You’ll find yourself listening all the way through Lost in the Dream time and again.

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Kurt Vile, Sun Kil Moon, Real Estate, Angel Olsen

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Drew Holcomb’s band takes their name not from the fact that they all live next door to each other, but more as an invitation. They play the sort of earthy, heartfelt songs that invite everyone on the block to start singing along. If you’re listening to his music, you’d better believe Holcomb considers you a neighbor. And, he says, that sort of friendly feel plays into their

ambitions as a band, too.

“We’re not trying to rewrite the book. It’s just ‘How do you continue to bring people together?’

“There’s no grand vision. We don’t want to be Coldplay. We just want to play great venues where people come to engage what we’re writing about and hopefully do that for a long, long time.”

WHY WE L OVE THEM:

The band keeps to the basics, making simple, singable Americana rock with lyrics anyone can relate to.

FOR FAN S OF:

Ben Rector, Beta Radio, Ivan & Alyosha

RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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THE DROP

PROFILE

KARI JOBE ON CONNECTING WITH GOD AND THE BREAKTHROUGH OF WORSHIP ari Jobe has a lot going on. Between touring, music festivals and leading worship at her home church, Gateway, near Dallas, she doesn’t have much free time.

But to hear her tell it, she loves life on the road.

We caught up with her to talk about her new album, touring and the unifying power of worship music.

K

Q: TELL US ABOUT YOUR NEW ALBUM, MAJESTIC.

It’s a live, new worship album. Everything is new.

I think some people were confused thinking it would be older songs that I just redid live, but all the songs are brand new. It’s really exciting.

A:

Q: MUSIC AND MINISTRY ARE BOTH AREAS KNOWN FOR A LOT OF BURNOUT. HOW HAVE YOU PROTECTED YOUR PERSONAL TIME? A: Call me crazy, but I just love doing what I do. To me, if my normal is doing what I do and traveling and ministering to people, I love it. I do get tired, but I get good sleep at night. My personal time and my time on the road—I love both of them.

Q: HOW DO YOU KEEP YOUR HEART CENTERED ON JESUS WHEN YOU’RE LEADING WORSHIP? A: I think if I let my most intimate worship be onstage it’d be really dangerous, because my role as a worship leader is to facilitate the room and really sense the Lord and what the night needs to look like.

My personal worship time I have to make sure is offstage in my room ... I turn on worship music, I spend time with the Lord.

“I LOOK BACK AND REALIZE THAT GOD WAS TEACHING ME HOW TO LEAD WORSHIP IN SO MANY DIFFERENT DENOMINATIONS.”

church is about community and connecting with people and being encouraged, but it might not be the most intimate place of finding God for people.

Q: WHAT WAS GROWING UP LIKE FOR YOU? A: My mom and dad, when I was really young, traveled a lot doing evangelism. They were singers, so they would sing in these little Baptist churches. When I was about 6 or 7, my parents took a full-time position at a nondenominational charismatic church.

Growing up, the big formative years of my life, church was a big deal. I loved worshipping. I just started as a young girl realizing, “Man, there’s something to music and there’s something to worship that moves people to really seek the Lord.”

I look back and realize that God was teaching me how to lead worship in so many different denominations. I realized God was meeting with us at the Baptist church and He was meeting with us at my parent’s church, and it was just different for how different people wanted to worship God.

Q: WHAT WOULD YOU TELL SOMEONE WHO’S WRESTLING WITH FINDING GOD AT CHURCH?

Q: DO YOU SEE EXPERIENTIAL WORSHIP UNITING SEG-

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MENTS OF THE CHURCH THAT WERE DIVIDED BEFORE?

ON THE TABLET EDITION Watch the live video Q&A with Kari Jobe.

A: I remember being at prayer meetings—charismatic, you know, real Spirit-filled prayer meetings when I was young— and I would hear people praying, “God, break down denominational barriers in our churches, make the Church one Church.”

I can honestly say I think we’re experiencing the fruit of those prayers. I think we’re experiencing that breakthrough now in the Church, and it’s amazing.

P H O T O C R E D I T: D AV I D D O B S O N

For me, I just learned to really respect how people wanted to meet with God. I knew that being at church wasn’t the time to judge or to have my own personal time with God. My best times of finding God were at home in my bedroom. At church, it was like, “You know what? I get to meet with God here,” but it wasn’t always fulfilling. It was just always more fulfilling to find God on my own time. I realized that A:

MAKER

CAN MILLENNIALS SAVE ENTREPRENEURISM? MILLENNIALS’ EDUCATION AND PASSION COULD TURN THE TIDE IN CREATING NEW BUSINESSES espite Silicon Valley success sto- offered nearly 5,000 courses on entrepreneurism ries and Kickstarter-fueled inno- compared to only about 100 offered in 1970. Payscale’s vation, the reality is entrepreneur- 2013 Generation at Work Report even cited entrepreship in America is dying. That is, neurship & marketing as the top major for millennials. according to a recent report from The education—paired with online and digital rethe Brookings Institute. Their re- sources—seems to be making a difference. A Kauffsearch indicates American entrepreneurism has been man Foundation study found that just over half of slowly declining for the last 30 years, and recently—for all millennials plan on starting their own business in the first time since the U.S. Census the next five years. But beyond just a Bureau started measuring the related change in knowledge and resources, stats—the amount of failing businesses the generation also possesses a facAmerican has eclipsed the amount being created tor that may help turn the tide of by entrepreneurs. entrepreneurism: a new system of entrepreneurSo, can entrepreneurism be saved? career values. ism has been And are millennials the ones to do it?

A study by the iOpener Institute Numbers show millennials—roughreported that millennials value fulfillslowly declinly defined as those born between 1980 ment—like the knowledge that owning for the last and 2000—are the most educated gening your own business meets personal eration in history. A report from The goals—over career benefits such as job 30 years.

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation security or even salary that were imfound that last year, American colleges portant to previous generations.

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[ T H E

S T A T S ]

51% of millennials plan to start a business within 5 years

42% of college freshman in 2012 said “influencing social values” was “essential” or “very important”

5,000+ courses in entrepreneurism were offered in 2013, compared with only 100 in 1970

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WHERE: Manchester, Tenn. (June 12-15)

WHERE: Manchester, Tenn. (June 12-15)

BANDS: Elton John, Jack White, Kanye West, Lionel Richie

BANDS: Elton John, Jack White, Kanye West, Lionel Richie

DAY 1 : Bonnaroo is for

DAY 1 : Bonnaroo is for

hardcore campers, so you’ll want to booby trap your tent against bears, wolves, hippies, etc. Sa prem fugiate ne nobis quate natusapitam eum, sunt, cumquat volore, consequiat.

Olores erum endi que con re nonsero blabore pudipsam quam,

hardcore campers, so you’ll want to booby trap your tent against bears, wolves, hippies, etc. Sa prem fugiate ne nobis quate natusapitam eum, sunt, cumquat volore, consequiat.

Olores erum endi que con re nonsero blabore pudipsam quam,

MAKER

LEADING WHEN YOU’VE LOST CONTROL

God. Our confidence as leaders comes not from having control but from trusting in God. When we wrestle with a tendency to control, we have to position ourselves to trust first. When a large project or challenge is looming, my nature is to scramble to organize and structure it—to essentially create the illusion of control.

The better way to wrestle with this tension is to first take it to God in prayer and trust that He will provide the direction that we need. It’s choosing to release control to Him and then using the gifts He’s given us to intentionally work through the challenge.

I used to think that trusting meant abdicating my responsibility, but trusting means choosing God first and believing in faith that He is ultimately in control. My control issues force me to confront my propensity to ignore my dependency on God. Control feeds my independence and develops a false sense of personal responsibility.

Leadership expert John Maxwell wisely explained: “Successful leaders ... know the difference between being in charge and being in control. We kid ourselves if we think we are in control. We may have charge of a group, but the best we can do is remain under control. God is the ultimate leader, and He is forever in control.”

I believe God does His greatest work through us when we are aware of our limitations and have to trust and lean into Him

B Y J E N N I C AT R O N

he historian and moralist known as Lord Acton is credited with saying, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

The “great men” Lord Acton referred to are those in positions of power—leaders and influencers. What a despairing viewpoint of something that was intended to be a Godgiven gift!

But why is it common for those who are given power to succumb to corruption? Is it possible for leaders to have influence without yielding to the ills of control? Can we lead and motivate others without relenting to the seduction of power?

In a quick examination of my life as a leader, it doesn’t take long to see that the need for power—the need to control—weasels its way into my leadership quite frequently.

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I like to believe I have control. It makes me feel secure. It’s a deceptively safe feeling.

Feeling being the critical word.

I fight for feelings of control all the time. But feelings deceive us. Feeling in control is a dangerous place for a leader to be.

When I feel in control, I open myself up to pride. I begin to rely on my own ability. I distance myself from God. I take others for granted.

A longing for power—a desire for control—is an indicator that we’re not content with the influence we’ve been given. It’s a sign that we’re trying to manufacture influence we don’t have. We’re seeking significance from a source that won’t satiate.

While I hate the feeling of losing control, leading when I’ve lost control keeps me positioned to rely on

You are responsible to be faithful. God is responsible for outcomes. for outcomes that are too large for us to tackle on our own. You are responsible to be faithful. God is responsible for outcomes.

The irony of our control issues is that the power we seek in our controlling tendencies is actually realized when we discover the power of God’s work through us as we place our trust and faith in His ability rather than our own.

JENNI CATRON serves as the executive director of Cross Point Church in Nashville, Tenn. She leads the staff of Cross Point and oversees the ministry of its five campuses.

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PROFILE

JEREMY COWART

THE CELEBRITY PHOTOGRAPHER IS he word “photographer” is technically right for Jeremy Cowart, but it doesn’t really give the full picture of what he does. Although he’s a goto talent for celebrity portraits, shooting everyone from Taylor Swift to Tim Tebow, Cowart’s creative zest goes far beyond hobnobbing with big names.

At some point between hopping back and forth between Nashville and Los Angeles, Cowart developed a reputation as a humanitarian innovator and tech guru. But the term he takes to most readily is “artist.”

“Essentially I’m a creator,” he says. “I don’t try to come up with more ideas, but I feel like God keeps laying them on me.”

One of his latest creations is the app OKDOTHIS, which serves as a “source of ideas” for other artists. The app presents a forum for creative inspiration where artists can share everything from artistic technique to what to do when you feel like you’ve lost your creative drive.

And while Cowart has provided a lot of resources for artists, it’s his work for those in need that seems nearest to his heart.

One of those is Help-Portrait, an organization that shoots free photos for people in need. The idea is to assemble a team of stylists, makeup artists and photographers to take professional portraits of people in need.

“The responses have been overwhelming,” Cowart says. “There are people who haven’t seen their families in 30 or 40 years, so we mail these portraits to family members who haven’t seen them in that long.”

In all of it, Cowart is looking for the story.

“We’re in over 70 countries, so the stories are really like a novel,” he says. “There’s an endless, endless amount of stories to be told.”

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SPITTING IMAGE > Whether you know it or not, you’re almost certainly familiar with Jeremy Cowart’s work.

He’s shot photos for some of your favorite bands and actors. Here’s just a small sampling of people he has photographed.

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F

or most of us, it’s our dream from a young age: We want to change the world.

Once you start getting older, that dream starts taking on substance. Maybe you dream of being a musician, touring the world and using your influence to give back. Maybe you plan to start a company that will transform business or a nonprofit that will end poverty. Or maybe you just want to help make a change, whatever that looks like.

They’re all different plans, but they’ve got something in common: They’re not easy. Big ideas never are. Changing the world doesn’t happen by accident.

We spoke with seven leaders making a difference in their field—from business, to ministry, to music, to nonprofit work—to get an inside view on making a real impact. It’s never going to be easy, but going in with some advice can make it easier.

IT WILL BE HARDER THAN YOU EXPECT, BUT IT’S STILL WORTH IT TYLER MERRICK: This isn’t meant to sound like a Debbie Downer, but it’s going to be harder than you think, cost more than you think and take more time than you think.

And before you say “not me” or “I can handle that,” I share this tip for you to check yourself before you start the journey, but more than anything for you to file these words away for a day when you hit a wall and wonder if it has been this hard for others—for the days when you wonder why you’re doing it.

You’re not alone, and it’s worth it, win, lose or draw. Why? Because no matter what man’s idea of success looks like, you never know what God is working out in your heart in the process, and that counts for a lot more than the world’s applause. But pack some Band-Aids and some rainy day funds, and keep my number handy if you need someone to cry to.

CRAIG GROESCHEL: Don’t give up when things don’t happen quickly. You’ll probably overestimate what God wants to do through you in the short run. But you’ll also likely underestimate what God could do through a lifetime of faithfulness.

[THE BOARD]

In the pursuit of justice, we sometimes try so hard to be a voice for the voiceless that we forget they already have a voice—oftentimes, we just aren’t listening. We unknowingly trample over those we are trying to serve. We break instead of restore. But in learning from the voices of the world, we begin to recognize that culture does not define our worth, but dignity is an inherent gift from God. Jesus is always seen through the eyes of the neglected, the oppressed and the abused.

As we collaboratively pursue our vocation, let us listen better to the stories of those around us. Let us identify in the brokenness of our world so that we can be transformed through the stories of healing and restoration. Let us respond to the injustices of our world by partnering together and helping to achieve the dreams of the poor.

NIKOLE LIM:

JOSHUA DUBOIS Consultant and spiritual adviser to Obama

JON FOREMAN Lead singer of Switchfoot

CRAIG GROESCHEL Pastor of Lifechurch.tv

In the effort to improve the art or craft of your work, don’t become so focused that you lose sight of the bigger picture: the humanity, the humor, the beauty, the pain of those around you.

JON FOREMAN:

NIKOLE LIM Co-founder of Freely in Hope

DON’T DISCOUNT THE SMALL THINGS Start where you are. You can’t change everything at once, but you can change something.

CR AIG GROESCHEL:

TYLER MERRICK Founder of Project 7

DEBBIE STERLING President of GoldieBlox

BE WILLING TO ADMIT YOU DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING JOSHUA DUBOIS: I would encourage an emerging “world changer” to be humble and hungry. Humble enough to know that she/he doesn’t have it all figured out, still

needs to asks plenty of questions and likely is more wrong than right. But hungry enough to be bold, break some rules and throw out traditional playbooks in service of chasing God’s creative impulses wherever they might lead.

JIM WALLIS President of Sojourners

Don’t discount what you can do locally, regionally or for just one person. We’re people who have a passion to change the world, and that naturally has a really big scope and vision, but it’s a lot. Jesus taught us to be faithful with the little things. Check your ego and steward things and see what happens after that.

I know I’ve tried to do too much and had to back up and refocus and check my motives, and I didn’t like what my heart revealed. I’m learning to get back to the things God used to move my heart as the reason to do Project 7 to begin with, which is helping people.

I don’t want to get lost in the numbers, I want to get back to the people.

TYLER MERRICK:

JON FOREMAN: Every day you’re alive you change the world. Even a lack of involvement

LEAD THE CHANGE

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MAKER

is a decision with lasting ramifications.

No matter who you are, your actions and thoughts every moment of every day have powerful implications for not only your life but the lives of those around you.

MAKE ROOM FOR PERSONAL GROWTH In the early years, I made the mistake of not caring for my soul.

Because I overestimated my importance, I didn’t take adequate time off. Bill Hybels once said, “The way I was doing the work of God was destroying the work of God in me.” Those words pierced my heart. Now I’m learning to do ministry out of the overflow of God’s work in me.

CRAIG GROESCHEL:

JOSHUA DUBOIS: Instead of focusing on changing the world, focus on inner renewal, day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16). When we allow God to change us, God can then do the world changing through us.

Discover who you are. Spend time alone with your Maker. Turn your phone and computer off. Get involved with the messy humanity that lurks within and around you in the context of your identity as a human being, crafted and loved by the Creator.

JON FOREMAN:

DON’T TAKE ON TOO MUCH DEBBIE STERLING: Something I would have done differently is that would have asked for more help from the start. I also thought, in the beginning, that [GoldieBlox] had to make a range of products. I had this idea that as a startup, we had to work around the clock all the time until we were just about ready to drop. It spread my team really thin and wasn’t realistic.

TYLER MERRICK: One mistake I made was growing too fast. There were some business deals I should never have done. My eyes were bigger than my stomach—and it cost me. It cost me a lot. There is a reason you train for a marathon.

Another mistake was trying to be all things to all people—this is a niche economy, and by trying to appeal to everyone you really limit yourself. People go to Chickfil-A because they have great chicken—not burgers, fish, etc., but chicken.

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“It’s worth it, win, lose or draw. Because no matter what man’s idea of success looks like, you never know what God is working out in your heart in the process.” —Tyler Merrick

LET THE PROBLEMS LEAD YOU TO CHANGE If you want to make a difference in your own community or neighborhood or world, start by looking at what’s wrong and then figuring out how to make things right.

In particular, what most breaks your heart or offends your sense of justice? Where do you feel the pain of the world most personally and passionately? Then find the other people who feel the same pain and passion around that reality and work with them to make a difference.

But it has to take concrete shape in real contexts and situations, not just in our heads and rhetoric. What things have gotten your attention that you think are wrong? That is how every movement for justice starts, and changing the world through justice is as simple as that.

I’ve learned the most about this world from being in places I wasn’t supposed to be and being with people I was never supposed to be with. Meeting and befriending people who Jesus would probably call “the least of these” has changed my life over and over again. I’ve learned more from so-called “outsiders” than I ever did from the insiders.

So if you want to change the world, start by letting the broken places and people of this world change your heart first.

JIM WALLIS:

NIKOLE LIM: Brokenness is not something to be concealed, but unveiled as a thing a beauty—a point of transformation that encourages us to be better.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO SPEAK UP DEBBIE STERLING: One of the biggest challenges I faced was convincing others to believe in my ideas. I had to constantly remind myself to make my voice heard. It starts by speaking up in meetings and ends with going way outside of your comfort zone and

establishing relationships with people you normally wouldn’t.

At GoldieBlox, we always say that “no” means “maybe?”

Rather than sitting on the sidelines, you have to get out there, create your own luck and make it happen. If you believe your mission is greater than the company and you work hard toward that end, you’re destined to succeed.

Put yourself out there in a big way and you won’t be disappointed. Eventually, you will find people who believe in what you’re doing, and these are the individuals you’ll want to be surrounded by in the long run.

DON’T WORRY TOO MUCH ABOUT OTHERS’ OPINIONS AND EXPECTATIONS JOSHUA DUBOIS: I was a young man in pretty big positions early in my career, and I probably spent too much time obsessing over what others thought about me. I learned later that my assumptions about other people’s opinions were either wrong or irrelevant.

I discovered that it’s best not to guess others’ thoughts, opinions and motivations and simply operate in love with all you encounter. Figuring this out has saved me a lot of time and a lot of stress.

When I think of mistakes I made, what comes to mind is not just a single mistake but the need to continue to resist the lures of success, influence and access. In a town like Washington, D.C., access is everything, but nobody asks what the access is for—what are the results, how does this change the world? Being content with “influence” or “success” is the temptation, when the prophets always ask the hard questions and make sure they are connected to the hard places.

I would also add the constant temptation to respond to the “tyranny of the urgent” instead of asking, “What is my vocation and therefore what should I be doing?”

JIM WALLIS:

LEAD THE CHANGE

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EXPOSING CHILD LABOR ON AMERICAN TOBACCO FARMS IN A NEW REPORT, HUMAN RIGHTS

SUPPORT FOR THE DEATH PENALTY IS FALLING STUDIES SHOW FEWER MILLENNIALS SUPPORT CAPITAL PUNISHMENT he tide could be turning on capital punishment in America. According to a study from the Pew Research Center, though a majority of Americans (55 percent) still favor the death penalty, that number is down dramatically from 78 percent in 1996.

Millennial Christians are among those shifting the opinion on the issue. A Barna study from earlier this year found that among boomers (born between 1946 and

T

ONLY 5 PERCENT OF AMERICANS THINK JESUS WOULD SUPPORT THE GOVERNMENT EXECUTING THE COUNTRY’S WORST OFFENDERS. 44

SUSTAINABLE CHANGE. SACRIFICIAL LIVING.

1964) 42 percent agreed that “the government should have the option to execute the worst criminals.” But among millennial Christians (born between 1980 and 2000), that number fell to 32 percent. Interestingly, the study found only 5 percent of Americans think Jesus would support the government executing the country’s worst offenders.

The change in public opinion comes at a time when several states have found themselves at the center of controversies over lethal injection procedures. A recent botched execution in Oklahoma—in which the procedure was called off midway through only to have the prisoner die of a heart attack—even caused the state to place a six-month delay on future lethal injections.

Watch has found that children as young as 7 years old face dangerous working conditions on tobacco farms throughout the American South. In states such as Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, some child labor in tobacco fields is legal with a parent’s permission as long as the work does not interfere with school hours.

In their report, “Tobacco’s Hidden Children: Hazardous Child Labor in U.S. Tobacco Farming,” Human Rights Watch found that nearly 75 percent of the child workers they interviewed experienced serious health ailments from exposure to nicotine, toxic pesticides, dangerous equipment and brutal heat during long hours in the fields. Many children experienced nausea, headaches, vomiting and rashes. HRW is bringing their findings to tobacco companies in an effort to get them to more closely regulate working conditions on farms in their supply chains.

1,800

Number of nonfatal injuries to children working on farms in 2012

75%

Percent of children interviewed who experienced health problems

$44

BILLION

Amount American consumers spent on tobacco in 2012

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ONLINE LEARNING

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HIGH-TECH SOLUTIONS FOR THE DEVELOPING WORLD Google is developing drones that can bring Internet connection to developing countries.

hile some tech industry experts are using their talents to push Silicon Valley innovation and Wall Street excitement, many have turned their attention to a new arena, as well: solving the problems of the developing world.

From simple, easy to use creations such as water filtration systems and low-cost health care, to advanced technologies spreading Internet access, these inventions have the potential to save lives around the world.

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GOOGLE’S INTERNET DRONES

THE DRINKABLE BOOK

With the acquisition of Titan Aerospace, a tech startup that makes solarpowered drones, Google has ambitions beyond the search engine. They want to bring the Internet to the developing world via high-altitude aircrafts that will essentially work like satellites. There are obvious commercial incentives to the project, but Google also aims to empower developing communities with the communication benefits and resources associated with online connection.

The organization WaterisLife has created a high-tech book that could potentially save the lives of millions who do not have access to clean drinking water. Contained on every page—along with messages that promote safe water consumption—are nanoparticles that kill bacteria, making each a water purifying filter. And because each filter can be used for 30 consecutive days, the book’s 300 pages can provide a family with clean, safe drinking water for nearly four years.

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SUSTAINABLE CHANGE. SACRIFICIAL LIVING.

EMBRACE NEST

THE FOLDSCOPE

Founded by a group of Stanford graduates, the Embrace Nest seeks to help premature infants in communities that don’t have access to expensive medical equipment like incubators. At the price of just $300, the Nest (which looks like a high-tech sleeping bag), uses a special “phase change” material (sort of like wax) that can keep a baby warm for hours before being reheated. And because of its lightweight design, it can be quickly transported to remote villages, potentially saving thousands of lives.

Also developed by Stanford researchers, the Foldscope offers a low-cost solution to a major problem in the developing world: malaria.

Because many rural villages don’t have access to the lab microscopes necessary to properly diagnose the illness, life-saving treatment options are often limited. The Foldscope, which can be assembled from a specially designed folded piece of paper and a tiny lens—at the cost of just 50 cents—can give these communities easy access to the essential technology.

ON THE TABLET EDITION Take an in-depth look at how these technologies work

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Afghanistan

THE WORST PLACES FOR PERSECUTION

North Korea Syria

ast year, the number of Christians martyred for their faith around the globe was nearly double the amount killed in 2012. According to the report from the group Open Doors International, there were 2,123 documented cases of believers killed for their faith in 2013. Other groups recorded a much higher number, noting that many of the murders go unreported.

Each year, Open Doors creates a list of the 50 countries responsible for the worst persecution of Christians, which is then audited by the globally recognized International Institute for Religious Freedom.

Here’s a look at where persecution is the worst:

L

Iraq

Saudi Arabia

Somalia

Extreme Persecution Severe Persecution Moderate Persecution

NORTH KOREA

SOMALIA

SYRIA

Under the Kim regime, simply owning a Bible can result in a death sentence. Currently, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are imprisoned.

Along with a weak government—which is often hostile toward Christians—the alShabab terrorist organization routinely targets non-Muslims.

The civil war has put the nation’s Christian population in the crossfire of Islamic rebels and the Assad regime. Last year, 1,213 Syrian Christians were killed for their faith.

NUMBERS OF COUNTRIES WHERE RELIGIOUS GROUPS WERE HARASSED (June 2006-December 2012)

A RECENT PEW STUDY found the number of

countries with a “high level of social hostilities involving religion” reached a 6-year high in 2012.

150

120

90

60

IRAQ

AFGHANISTAN

SAUDI ARABIA

According to Open Doors, every two to three days, a Christian is abused, killed or kidnapped in this nation, where they are increasingly a minority.

In some parts of Afghanistan, not adhering to Islamic beliefs can be a crime. Many Christians must practice their faith in secret or risk imprisonment.

For Saudi citizens, conversion to a religion other than Islam is punishable by death.

For non-Saudis, public Christian worship and evangelism is illegal.

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1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1. Christians

4. Others

6. Hindus

2. Muslims

5. Folk Religionists

7. Buddhists

3. Jews

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CHANGING OUR EXPECTATIONS

Literacy rates are climbing. Those gains were made in less than 10 years.

In April 2013, the Development Committee of the World Bank set the goal of ending extreme poverty by the year 2030. The U.N. General Assembly claimed, “eradicating poverty in a generation is an ambitious but feasible goal.”

It’s possible, but not inevitable. It will require intelligence, wisdom, perseverance and resources. I hear someone still insisting, “No, it will require a miracle from God.” Maybe He’s already done His part. Who gave us all the resources and wisdom in the first place? Maybe He’s waiting for us to do what He has repeatedly told us to do.

We need to understand the engines that drove us from 52 percent to 21 percent, and we need to decide if those same engines are adequate to finish the task. Because the final 21 percent will be difficult. But there should be no question of whether it is possible. It is absolutely possible.

But before we can take that journey, the critical work of overthrowing our low expectations must be done.

For the first time in human history, we have the realistic possibility of ending extreme global poverty. But the presence of poverty is so historically familiar that the change is difficult to imagine. And it if is hard to imagine, it will be nearly impossible to expect.

Many Christians have been trapped by

BY SCOTT TODD

xpectations are everywhere.

They escort every thought, and they set life’s agenda. The sun will come up. I will eat. My car will start. My employer will pay me.

Expectations are not the same as hopes.

They are hopes injected with confidence.

Expectations also differ from possibilities.

Possibilities are imaginable, perhaps even realistic, scenarios of the future. Expectations, on the other hand, are probable, seemingly inevitable scenarios for our futures. Expectations provide a scaffold for our decision making, and we gamble on them every day. You can’t expect what you don’t believe possible.

I’ve mentioned a lot of mundane expectations, but what about the big ones, such as war and hunger? Did you expect extreme poverty to be gone by now?

Maybe that’s why it isn’t.

We don’t expect ourselves to end extreme poverty. We don’t expect our governments to

E

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SUSTAINABLE CHANGE. SACRIFICIAL LIVING.

end it. We don’t expect God to end it.

Instead, we expect it to exist as it always has.

Maybe you’re convinced the problem is too big. Ending extreme poverty isn’t realistic.

Here is the astounding truth: When we look at the numbers, we see that the tyranny of extreme poverty is already being broken.

In 1981, 52 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty.

Today, that number is 21 percent. We have already cut the percentage of people living in extreme poverty in half! And we did it in one generation.

Every day, there are 19,000 fewer children dying of preventable causes, despite the fact that the total number of births is increasing. A third of the children who were uneducated because of poverty can now go to school.

Did you expect extreme poverty to be gone by now?

Maybe that’s why it isn’t. low expectations for the future. Thankfully, the old idea that the world is supposed to get worse is losing dominion. A new idea is surfacing. Maybe, just maybe, the world can get better. And maybe we will do our part to make it happen.

SCOT T TODD is the senior vice president for global advocacy at Compassion International, where he has worked for 10 years in a number of different posts.

Adapted from Hope Rising with permission from Thomas Nelson

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www.oc.edu

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BY BEN LOW E

T

The area around Lake Tanganyika, located in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, is touted as one of the few “unspoiled ecosystems” on the planet. The longest freshwater lake in the world and the second deepest, Tanganyika’s crystal blue depths hold around 18 percent of all available fresh water at any given time. It also contains well over 200 species of fish that occur nowhere else in the world.

For generations, communities along the shoreline have thrived on the lake’s clean water, vibrant fishery and accessible boat transportation.

It’s an amazing place, but it’s also a threatened place.

Financially speaking, it’s one of the poorest parts of the world and among the most war-torn. Four countries border the lake: Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC and Burundi in particular have been plagued by decades of violence and corruption, some of which continues to this day.

Millions of people in the region depend on fish caught from the lake as a source of income and one of the cheapest sources of food. But over the last couple of decades, the fishery has registered an unprecedented decline. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is climate change.

What do you think of when you think of climate change? A polar bear hanging onto a chunk of ice surrounded by the ocean? A timelapse of vanishing glaciers?

That used to be true for me, too, but it all changed when I found myself standing on the banks of Lake Tanganyika one summer,

witnessing firsthand how climate change affects the people who live in the area.

Lake Tanganyika is a nutrient poor lake.

Such lakes typically don’t sustain as much biomass as more nutrient rich ones. Tanganyika is an exception, however, due to seasonal winds that blow across the lake and help mix the water column. This wind-powered mixing causes nutrients trapped in the depths of the lake—where there is no oxygen to support life—to upwell to the surface, fertilizing the oxygen-rich zones and forming the basis of a surprisingly robust ecosystem.

Over recent decades, however, warming across both land and water in the region has caused the seasonal winds to weaken and the water column to stratify more strongly. With less wind, there is also less mixing. With less mixing, there are fewer nutrients replenishing the oxygen-rich surface waters where biological productivity takes place. With fewer nutrients, less life can be sustained—beginning at the bottom of the food chain and making its way to the top. Before long, the fishery begins to crash.

Tragically, as the main open water fishery declines rapidly, fishermen are moving into shallower waters and using nets with smaller mesh sizes to try and catch enough fish. In the process, however, they’re depleting already vulnerable species and catching juveniles before they have a chance to mature and reproduce.

This further undercuts the fishery and spells bad news for the ecosystem and for the welfare of the many human communities that depend on it.

During my time in the area, I was working as a student researcher for a team of U.S. and U.K. scientists in collaboration with the Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute out of Kigoma, Tanzania. We were trying to understand and quantify what was happening to the fishery.

This involved many hours collecting data from fishermen as they returned to the local beaches in their dugout canoes. It was a fascinating but challenging job.

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a local fishermen as I was surveying his catch one morning. The fisherman asked me why he wasn’t able to find fish like he used to.

250 MILLION

PEOPLE IN AFRICA COULD EXPERIENCE MORE WATER STRESS DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE BY 2020

140,000

PEOPLE DIE EACH YEAR DUE TO INCIDENTS AND DISEASES RELATED TO CLIMATE CHANGE

I enthusiastically launched into an explanation of how the warming climate was impacting the mixing of the water column and the flow of nutrients in Lake Tanganyika. Or at least, I attempted to in my limited Swahili.

As I floundered around trying to communicate, he stopped me and said: “Just tell me, what should I do about it?”

I fell silent. No good answers came.

After all, he and others in their part of the world aren’t responsible for most of the carbon pollution that’s been disrupting the global climate. We in the more developed world are. But they’re being hit hardest by the impacts.

As I stood on the lake shore, listening to the stories of various local fishermen and residents, reality set in for me: Climate disruption is about much

SUSTAINABLE CHANGE. SACRIFICIAL LIVING.

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more than polar bears, it’s also about people—real people who are experiencing real impacts right now. This isn’t just an “environmental” issue, it’s also a justice issue and a humanitarian crisis that is making life more desperate for many families.

What’s happening around Lake Tanganyika is also happening in different ways and varying degrees across the world.

Climate change itself is not new, per se.

Pacific, was asked about the biggest longterm security threat for that region, he didn’t choose North Korea, China or terrorist groups. He chose climate change due to its impact on sea level rise and extreme weather events. “If [climate change] goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced, and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly,” he told The Boston Globe.

THIS ISN’T JUST AN “ENVIRONMENTAL” ISSUE, IT’S ALSO A JUSTICE ISSUE AND A HUMANITARIAN CRISIS THAT IS MAKING LIFE MORE DESPERATE FOR MANY FAMILIES. The climate has always changed over time.

However, it’s now changing at an unusually fast and disruptive rate.

Not only are many species of plants and animals struggling to adapt in time, but we humans are, as well. Organizations such as the Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA) and the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), which work with numerous relief and development organizations, have found climate disruption has become one of the biggest challenges facing their work around the world. It’s undoing the progress they’ve made over the years to help people get access to clean water, stable food supplies and safe environments.

In 2013, when Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, the commander of U.S. forces in the

ince the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of fossil fuels, human activity has been responsible for billions of tons of carbon emissions. The consequences of these actions have now become clear to a large consensus of scientists: Irreversible climate change, the melting of arctic glaciers and inevitable sea level rise.

Here’s a timeline of the modern plan to fight climate change.

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SUSTAINABLE CHANGE. SACRIFICIAL LIVING.

As the latest report by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms, climate disruption has already begun increasing and intensifying thirst, hunger, poverty, disease, disaster, conflict and displacement around the world.

And these impacts will continue to spread and worsen unless something changes.

This makes the amount of misinformation and obstruction around climate action in the U.S.—especially among Christians—all the more costly and troubling.

As Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, puts it: “While others debate the science and politics of climate change, my thoughts go to the poor people who are neither scientists nor politicians. They will never study carbon

1988

dioxide in the air or acidification of the ocean. But they will suffer from dry wells in the Sahel of Africa and floods along the coasts of Bangladesh. Their crops will fail while our supermarkets are full. They will suffer while we study.”

To help change this, EEN and YECA recently partnered with Tearfund and the Malawi Eagles Relief and Development Program to bring a team of Christian leaders from America to witness firsthand the impacts climate disruption is having on communities in Malawi.

On the ground in Malawi, we heard from farmers who were having trouble growing their crops because of unpredictable rainfall patterns. We heard from chiefs whose villages had been partially washed away from flash floods caused by torrential downpours when the rains finally did come. We stood in the middle of what used to be a flowing river filled with fish that has literally become a highway of dry sand.

So, yes, there is a lot of bad news of climate impacts, and it’s sobering. But there are other lessons to take away from Malawi. The country also serves as an example of the good news of climate action; an example of what it can look like when people and churches come together to address this challenge and help their communities adapt and grow.

There are farmers implementing sustainable agriculture practices to conserve water and increase their harvests even during periods of drought. There are levees that villages constructed and maintain to protect themselves from flash floods. There are

THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL

on Climate Change is created to investigate growing concerns that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels could lead to man-made climate change.

1995

THE S ECOND IP CC AS S E S S M E N T

Report notes that “human influence” was likely a factor in climate change and predicts more serious warming in the future.

AS PART OF THE KYOTO P ROTOCOL ,

37 nations around the world (not including the U.S.) agree to efforts to reduce carbon emissions by 5 percent in the coming decades.

1997

GET INVOLVED Here are a few organizations working to combat climate change:

350.ORG

Join campaigns against environmental destruction, start petitions and find groups working against climate change in your community.

YO UNG EVAN G EL I CALS FO R C L I MAT E AC T I O N

Become an advocate in your community, encourage elected officials to commit to policies to limit emissions and join prayer rallies.

EPA.G OV

Calculate your greenhouse gas emissions and learn how you can make small lifestyle changes to reduce your carbon footprint.

2001

IP CC ’S T HI R D AS S ES SM E NT

Report reveals higher temperatures and more evidence that man-made climate change was the cause.

reforestation projects that are producing natural resources and reverse desertification. There are innovative micro-finance programs that provide greater economic security.

And all of these efforts are being facilitated and supported by local churches and Christians.

When we think about climate change, we often focus on the challenges without seeing the opportunities; we emphasize the bad news while neglecting the good.

The truth is, there’s much to be hopeful about.

Our hope is ultimately in the God who created this world, sustains it, and remains determined not only to redeem it (see Colossians 1:15-20 and Romans 8:19-21), but also to use us in the process.

God has blessed each of us with the knowledge, gifts, skills and resources, along with the Holy Spirit, to truly do good and help bring healing and wholeness to the earth and our neighbors.

Consider the Université Chrétienne Bilingue du Congo (UCBC) in the DRC. UCBC is a bilingual Christian university based in the beautiful but war-torn province of North Kivu. In the midst of challenging circumstances, UCBC has prioritized stewardship and climate action as part of their university-wide initiatives. They’re investing in solar power, planting peace gardens and teaching their students why and how to live well on the land.

They see such efforts as an integral part of Christian discipleship and witness, an opportunity to serve their communities and an essential aspect of nurturing human health, life and development.

We already have what it takes to tackle climate disruption. We have the required understanding, expertise, technology and resources.

2006

A N INCONVENIENT TRU TH

Al Gore’s controversial documentary releases, sparking a national dialogue about climate change.

E VAN G EL I C AL L E A DE RS DR A F T A

Climate Initiative pledging to fight climate change, noting that “our poorest global neighbors” will be the ones affected.

2014

And, according to the latest IPCC report, the necessary solutions—including market-based approaches to reduce carbon pollution and transition to clean energy economies—are also affordable. Further breakthroughs certainly won’t hurt, but there’s plenty we can do right now at every level. We need only the moral and political will to act.

Together we’re causing this era of climate disruption, together we’re groaning from its negative impacts and, by the grace of God, together we can overcome it. In doing so, we’ll foster a more just, peaceful and healthy world. We’ll unleash new entrepreneurship, innovation and technologies. We’ll help sustain and protect life on this planet both in the present and for generations to come.

According to the National Climatic Data Center, the world hasn’t experienced a month with below-average temperatures since February of 1985. That’s over 250 consecutive months. For most millennials, a warming world is all they’ve known. This is the world they’re inheriting.

“You are the light of the world,” Jesus taught. “A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-16).

BEN LOWE is on staff with the EEN and serves as the national spokesperson for YECA. He is a graduate of Wheaton College and author of Green Revolution.

THE NATIONAL CLIM ATE AS S ES S MEN T

says change is irreversible. The report says the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has passed the point of no return and massive sea level rise is in our future.

HACKERS LE AK THOU SANDS OF FILES FROM A

2006

2009

Climatic Research Unit that lead some to believe scientists were silencing critics and creating a conspiracy. Researchers stand by climate concerns after more reviews.

RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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HOW ONE FAMILY ABANDONED THE AMERICAN DREAM FOR SOMETHING MORE

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P H O T O C R E D I T: C O U R T E S Y O F J O E Y L A N K F O R D / L A N K F O R D L I F E . C O M

BY K AR A BETTIS

very morning, Joey Lankford sips his coffee while gazing through double glass doors at the landscape of the Southern Peninsula in South Africa. Thirty minutes north, Cape Town rests at the feet of four steep mountains, tumbling to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

The scene is a stark contrast from what the Tennessee native’s life looked like just a few years ago, when he lived on the comfort of a six-digit salary on a vast property in Nashville.

These days, from his home on a hill, Lankford can look down on a township of about 45,000 people. Dividing the hill and the township are the 100-foot-long hydroponic tunnels (the local term for greenhouses) where he teaches locals about agricultural development.

Lankford uprooted his family and moved to South Africa more than three years ago, but he still has a thick Southern drawl. He even talks like a Tennessee preacher, attributing everything to God. And, well, in this story, it’s hard to tell how it could be attributed to anyone else.

Few people who have tasted the American dream are drawn to leave it 8,300 miles behind. But one night in Tennessee, Lankford found himself in his barn in passionate prayer. God had gotten a hold of him. He didn’t leave the barn for two days.

“I just knew something was going to be different,” he says.

Lankford felt his job as President and COO of his family-owned business was no longer fulfilling. He and his wife, Courtney, started discussing what it really meant for them to live for the Lord and began to pray together for the first time in their marriage.

They applied through the International Mission Board, eager to be placed abroad.

They sold all they had—their livestock, purebred German Shepherds, furniture and vehicles.

But they received a letter back—the Board had suspended the program they were applying for due to lack of funding.

Determined, Lankford approached his pastor and informed him of the situation.

His pastor suggested Living Hope, a mission organization based in South Africa. At the time, the ministry hoped to start a branch focusing on job creation. Lankford was thrilled. “God wired me to do that,” he says.

Still, the family delayed another year.

They were in the process of adopting a little girl from Ethiopia and were dealing with

Africa estimates that 80 percent of South Africa’s population is black, but their annual income averages to be a sixth of what white South Africans earn.

And while millionaires reside along the picturesque Atlantic Seaboard, more than 6 million South Africans live with HIV/AIDS, according to a 2012 United Nations estimate.

Over the past few years, as South Africa has circulated throughout international media, Christians have begun to establish ministries in the post-apartheid nation.

These Numbers Have Faces funds young students of all races and religions to attend prestigious universities. Paradigm Shift works with local churches to train new entrepreneurs and provide discipleship training.

In 2006, Bono and Bobby Shriver initiated the (RED) campaign to engage the private sector in raising funds for HIV/AIDS. Currently, their parent organization, The ONE Campaign, is researching immunizations for children, opportunities for women

“YOU CAN’T SAVE EVERYBODY. YOU REALLY HAVE TO LOSE THE GOD COMPLEX. LET GOD BE GOD, LOVE THE PEOPLE HE PUTS IN FRONT OF YOU.” adoption papers and transitioning out of jobs. Within two days of securing their newest child’s passport, the family of six flew to South Africa on October 22, 2010. Lankford brought little more than his business skills and an eagerness to serve.

“I don’t know if you can ever prepare yourself,” he says.

The town where the Lankfords live now in South Africa is still very segregated, even 20 years after apartheid officially ended.

The hill they live on is in the white neighborhood, and Lankford’s hydroponic tunnels stand as a bridge between it and some of the poorest neighborhoods.

Cape Town, the main city nearby, is contradictorily one of Africa’s most economically stable cities and also one with the most significant income inequality.

This isn’t surprising, since South Africa is known for having one of the most unequal income gaps in the world. Statistics South

and farming and agricultural development.

Living Hope began in 2000 through the work of pastor John Thomas in South Africa to minister to South Africans suffering from HIV/AIDS. The ministry consists of multiple branches to address the problems of homelessness, health care and economic development.

Unemployment rates in South Africa are still the highest compared to other emerging market economies. Statistics South Africa estimates that about one-quarter of the South African population is unemployed, so economic development is vital to assisting post-apartheid culture.

Upon arrival, Lankford’s mission was to establish an agricultural branch of Living Hope’s economic development program, Living Way. Using the 14 buildings of a former college campus complex, the ministry uses a three-tier economic empowerment approach. Each step completes a different

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Joey and Courtney Lankford moved their family to South Africa in 2010

level of skills South Africans can utilize in their communities. The program specifically pulls students from under-resourced regions in the country.

Lankford describes himself as a volunteer.

Most of his days are filled with checking on the plants in the tunnels. He has about 7,000 individual plants to manage throughout the year—all of which are in high demand from the local markets and wealthy customers.

“I’m not a farmer,” he says. “I think that’s God joking through the whole thing.”

Farmer or not, Lankford and his team grow the best produce in the region. Their vegetables are in high demand in the neighborhood. The team mainly sells commercially, to the equivalent of the local Whole Foods store, which gives dignity and value to the farmers who sell the produce.

“You know that fair trade stuff? It’s that on steroids,” Lankford says.

And he even claims that his thick drawl has added to his ministry.

“African people have an authenticity gauge like nobody else. From day one, I have been embraced with open arms,” Lankford says.

In the early days of the classes, Lankford struggled to solve the low numbers of attendees. He realized locals were not responding to advertising because they would be sacrificing a day’s wages in order to attend. So he started the work-study

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approach on their campus, where students could earn a wage while learning hands-on skills.

In the first phase, approximately 30 students spend 14 weeks learning basic hard and soft employment skills—such as résumé building and personal finance.

About half of these students graduate into the second phase: management and handson work, which includes about 20 hours in the classroom and 20 hours in the tunnels each week. They celebrate their accomplishments six months later with a full graduation ceremony.

Of those who complete the second phase, a few are chosen for entrepreneurial training. These students must create their own business plan. They are able to rent out part of a tunnel, borrow a microloan from the ministry and hire consulting advice from Lankford and his partners—but it’s all on their own.

Beyond stage three, most students are required to return to their hometowns to start local businesses. One of Lankford’s closest friends, Itai, was their first student and employee. After graduating the program, he returned to Zimbabwe to run a farm along with his family.

Although the ministry has been expanding rapidly, there are hard days.

“Sometimes you think the despair is

greater than anything you could ever get through,” Lankford says. “Obedience—that one step journey that got you here—is going to sustain you while you’re here. Because you can’t save everybody. There are kids walking around without parents and you really have to lose the God complex. Let God be God, love the people He puts in front of you.”

He and Courtney now have five children: Briley, Braxton, Barron, Bristol—a 4-year-old they adopted from Ethiopia—and Baylor, the newest addition to the family who was born late last year.

“I feared they would come out as weird, introverted missionary kids, but my kids are very mature, wise, fun-loving, very spiritually balanced children,” Lankford says. “As a family we surrender the daily things ... but to see God moving and to know that you are in the center of His will is the most amazing place to be.”

An average day for Lankford is spent mainly in the tunnels, side-by-side with his students. The projects he works on range from fish farming to vermiculture to composting. He has a team of about 15 Americans and South Africans who work alongside him as employees, volunteers and students.

Often, he spends time discipling students one-on-one.

“I realized through the process that when God calls you to something, His plans never lack His provision,” he says.

Lankford does not teach classes, leaving that to his team—many of whom are young post-grads eager to teach in their fields.

In the evenings at home, he studies, pursuing the undergraduate degree he never finished.

Although his work is hard and he lives far from relatives, Lankford is grateful. His living situation isn’t always the most comfortable (sometimes baboons raid his house, which lacks heat and air conditioning), but with a swimming pool in his backyard and weather akin to Los Angeles, his missionary job description could be worse.

“Seeing the way God is moving through this—that’s what keeps me going,” he says.

“But let’s be real: For most of us, it’s not Africa. It’s just a matter of surrendering your life to God’s plan and letting Him bless what you’re doing.”

K AR A BET TIS is a recent graduate of The King’s College in New York City. She writes for The News & Observer and Christ and Pop Culture.

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he first thing you hear when you listen to Tedashii’s latest album, Below Paradise, is a string section ominously whining over a choirlike voice. For 30 seconds, the record quietly builds until a scream shatters the haunting effect, and Tedashii’s explosive rhymes let listeners know this is a different kind of record than the ones they’ve come to expect from the Houston-based rapper.

Look around I see paradise disappear/ It’s a mirage to the people who are still living here Tedashii says in the opening verse of the title track.

The album paints a picture of an artist wrestling with darkness and looking for hope. The latest chapter in Tedashii’s story has been painful, but it’s a story he thinks others need to hear.

“Ultimately, I did my best to let loose with everything I had, just because I wanted people to see where I was sincerely,” he says. “People’s stories—and the ability for people to be honest and open about where they are—give people a sense of encouragement and freedom to do the same. I hope it’s apparent, but I did my best to be as honest as I could be.”

UNIMAGINABLE LOSS Since 2005, Tedashii has been part of one of Christian hip-hop’s most acclaimed outfits, 116 Clique. The evolving lineup of rappers—which includes Trip Lee and Lecrae—has helped the genre become a force among religious fans while beginning to gain the recognition of the mainstream hip-hop world, as well.

Tedashii’s first three solo albums, which blend his Southern hip-hop sensibilities and fierce vocal power, made him one of the group’s most recognizable acts. But his world, and the wave of success he’d ridden since coming onto the scene, all seemed to crash around

him last year when he and his wife faced every parent’s worst nightmare.

The couple suddenly and unexpectedly lost their 1-year-old son in March of 2013. Even though Tedashii had been a man of faith for many years, the tragedy shook him.

“Honestly, life in that moment felt fleeting, and death’s permanence just hit home,” he says. “That may seem weird for Christians to have that attitude. But unless Jesus shows up and does something miraculous, I won’t see [my son] again until eternity. So that was kind of the permanence that I saw of, ‘OK, God alone controls this area of life, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’”

Though the couple received spiritual support from pastors and elders at their church in Houston and even financial support from fans through a campaign organized by Reach Records, Tedashii

says recognizing that God can heal even in the midst of unimaginable pain motivated him to keep nothing back.

After his son passed, he says, many Christians would use a verse out of context to simplify the grieving process or become uncomfortable when attempting to console their hurting a friend. For him, this album was a way to cut through the clichés and social niceties and get real.

“Ultimately, I’m just hoping people will ... become aware and accept the reality that’s there: That this world can be a hard place, and for many people, it is,” Tedashii says. “And for those who are going through something, that they won’t try to cliché their way out of or belittle what they’re in.”

When making Below Paradise, Tedashii realized the album he was creating was shaping up to be pretty heavy. While producing the record, he says he considered adding some “festival songs” in an effort to lighten it up. But in the end, attempting to “liven it up and make it happy” just didn’t mesh with what he was going through in real life.

“IT’S HARD TO RECONCILE A LOVING GOD, YET ALLOWING SUFFERING. AND FOR A SEASON I WAS LIKE, ‘THESE JUST DON’T GO TOGETHER, AND I DON’T GET IT.’” says coming to terms with what he believed in light of the tragedy of losing his son wasn’t easy.

“Probably three or four months after the fact, it drove me to a place of frustration,” he says. “It’s hard to reconcile a loving God, yet allowing suffering. And for a season I was like, ‘These just don’t go together, and I don’t get it. And I don’t want to get it. I’d rather just move on.’

“Realizing moving on is not really a reality—it’s kind of a false reality we live in. So facing things, you begin to go, ‘I have to reconcile what God says, what happened, and who God is, has always been, is currently.’ And those two things are just hard to do.”

GETTING HONEST While most of Tedashii’s albums contain a mix of big anthems, thoughtful rhymes and catchy hooks, Below Paradise takes a heavier tone, getting brutally honest about the difficulties of life—even for people who believe in a loving God. He

“That just wasn’t happening,” he says. “There are some very up-tempo songs and some songs that may be bring happiness to people, but for the most part, I had to be honest about where I was every step of the way. I hope that people would be able to recognize the transparency there.”

Because even as honest—and heavy—as Below Paradise is at times, it’s this raw transparency that ultimately has led to a new understanding of a God who allows suffering.

“We have a God who sits in the nest with you, who meets you where you are and then sits in it with you,” Tedashii says. “Even though you may have, in the process, offended BELOW PARADISE Him or been offended On Tedashii’s latest

by Him, He embraces album, which released at you where you are, the end of May, he deals meets you where you with the suffering and are, abides with you doubt he felt after losing in it.” his 1-year-old son.

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“And then here’s the beauty of faith: My faith is strong enough and His love for me is strong enough, [that] I can be as honest with Him as I need to be. And He’s OK with it. And the beauty of that is when I am honest with Him, it’s almost like He loves on me harder.”

After contacting estranged family members, Tedashii was able to eventually find his father, who was living in the Samoan Islands. And despite the fact that his father only spoke broken English, the two instantly connected over the thing Tedashii came to share with his father in the first place: faith.

“WE HAVE A GOD ... WHO MEETS YOU WHERE YOU ARE AND THEN SITS IN IT WITH YOU.” FINDING GRACE Though the album deals heavily with ideas like loss and grief, thoughts on grace, forgiveness and faith are laced throughout, ultimately making Below Paradise about more than dealing with sadness. It’s about finding a God who offers healing, which is an idea Tedashii knows firsthand.

After a mentor in college led Tedashii to faith, he encouraged Tedashii to try and find his biological father, a man he’d never known. Even if for no other reason than to share his newfound faith with his father, Tedashii knew he had to try. But it wasn’t an easy proposition.

“I was like, ‘I could share the Gospel with him. Maybe he’s not a Christian,’” Tedashii remembers. “And in my head I’m thinking, ‘Well of course he’s not a Christian. Any loser who would leave their kids, they’re not a Christian,’ just thinking all of these thoughts that were really stemming from my own bitterness and frustration as a kid.”

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His father had become a Christian years before after witnessing his brother die in a car accident.

“I was super humbled, because the entire time I was willing to forgo a relationship with him, God never did,” Tedashii says.

“Even more so, He saved him. And that actual act of salvation was the thing that resonated with both of us, and I think it was where we found common ground to grow closer together.”

The same spirit of openness to risks and honesty about his feelings that led Tedashii to meeting his estranged father has also made him into one of the genre’s game changers. Though he admits taking risks and being vulnerable isn’t easy, it’s helping to usher in a shift in hip-hop.

“It’s frightening, but it’s also kind of freeing,” he says. “I’m hoping it’s a doorway for me to be able to step into a role to encourage and enlighten as we talk about these hard things.”

CHANGING THE GENRE For the most part, Christian audiences are used to up-tempo, happy hip-hop, Tedashii says, so performing the emotionally raw material from Below Paradise may be difficult.

“I’m hoping that culture changes,” he says, mentioning that artists such as Lecrae and Andy Mineo—with edgier sounds and more nuanced lyrics—are helping to make a shift.

“You started seeing people embrace a new sound within the genre,” he says. “And I’m hoping people will go there with me, but I’m nervous that they won’t, so it’s a definite fear in that regard.”

But no matter how Below Paradise is received by certain fans, Tedashii says that as a genre, hip-hop is about more than just creating catchy party songs—it’s about looking for truth.

“I’m definitely inspired by what I see happening, from a movement perspective,” he says. “Cultures seem to demand attention, and movements seem to demand attention. So the West Coast movement, with its ability to hit you emotionally and still get you to move and groove; what’s happening in Houston with the movement there within the hip-hop scene; how people are being seen as honest as they can in their music, and even with the new stuff that’s popping off within Christian music—people are making music that is true to the Lord and true to who they are as a person.

“I call it lifestyle music. And so I really wanted to kind of further that idea and create lifestyle music.”

But as evident on Below Paradise, lifestyle music means embracing the bad, as well as the good. It means discussing faith—but also struggle. It means creating music for Christian fans looking for festival anthems, but also songs for people wrestling with tragedy, heartbreak and loss. But most of it all, it means getting real.

“With every other album, I tried to think of the entirety of the situation—from creating the song, to doing a song on stage after the album comes out,” Tedashii says.

“With this one, I was nowhere in that headspace. All I thought about was, ‘I want to do an album, and I want to express where I honestly am. And I refuse to compromise that.’”

JESSE CARE Y is an editor for RELEVANT and a mainstay on the RELEVANT Podcast.

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HIGH DIVORCE RATES HAVE MADE MILLENNIALS WARY OF TYING THE KNOT. DOES MARRIAGE STAND A CHANCE?

C Cara Strickland assumed she’d get married right out of college, just like her mom had.

She wasn’t allowed to date until she turned 18. That didn’t leave her a huge window, but she half expected to open the door on her birthday and find a godly Christian man waiting there to date her, she says.

“After a while, it didn’t happen that way,” she says.

In fact, the first person who expressed interest in dating Strickland was both a pothead and a committed Buddhist—not exactly what she had in mind. Things seemed to get back “on track” after she transferred to Taylor University in Upland, Ind., she says.

The campus was full of great Christian guys.

Two years later, she was “engaged to be engaged” to one of them.

But then, she says, “my sort-of pseudofiancé began to doubt his faith and question a lot of things, and we didn’t feel that it was going to work to have our relationship move forward.”

“That was my Christian college experience,” she says.

And then she, like so many other millennials, started to question many of the assumptions about marriage she had grown up with in what she described as a conservative evangelical Christian church and home. She watched most of her friends marry. Some of those marriages ended in divorce, and others continued through various types of abuse.

Strickland is now 26. She’s living at home with her parents in Spokane, Wash., pursuing a career as a communications professional and food editor for a magazine. She is wrestling with both being happy being single and still wanting to be married.

“It’s still very in process in the sense that I’m not married, and I’m living in the tension of I may never be married and yet I desire marriage,” she says. “I have to live with those two realities and hold that tension in myself while still having joy in the moment and still pursuing the call I have over my life.”

A CHANGING LANDSCAPE That appears to be a common feeling for many millennials who are getting married later. They’re finding meaningful relationships elsewhere and changing the way they’ve been brought up to think about marriage—everything from the roles husbands and wives play to their attitudes toward divorce.

A report released in March by the Pew Research Center about millennials in adulthood describes the generation—those born in 1980 or afterward—as “relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry— and optimistic about the future.”

Only about one in four, or 26 percent, of millennials are married, according to

Pew. That’s compared to 36 percent of Generation X at the same age (between 18 and 32 years old), 48 percent of baby boomers and 65 percent of the silent generation.

That makes this the first group of twentysomethings “in which being married with a kid on the way makes you a minority among your peers,” something that was considered conventional in the 1960s, David H. Kim writes in “20 and Something: Have the Time of Your Life (And Figure It All Out Too),” published earlier this year by the Barna Group.

And that comes amid huge societal changes to the institution of marriage as a whole: A 2013 USA Today article proclaimed cohabitation “the new norm” for unmarried couples with children.

The “first union” is cohabitation for almost half of women ages 15-44, compared to marriage for less than a quarter of women the same age, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The fact that millennials are getting married later than previous generations isn’t necessarily always a bad thing. Dr. Gary Chapman, marriage counselor and best-selling author of Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married and The 5 Love Languages, says he thinks “the fact [millennials] are taking it more seriously and they’re delaying marriage” is good.

“The idea is they want to make a good decision,” he says.

DELAYED MARRIAGES The median age of those getting married for the first time now is 28.2 years old for men and 26.1 for women, according to 2010 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s an increase from 26.8 and 25.1 in 2000, it says.

More telling, perhaps, is how few are seeing marriage as a rite of passage. Only 2 percent of millennials see marriage as a marker of adulthood. Emotional maturity (57 percent) and financial independence (20 percent) top the list of what it means to be an adult, according to

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the Barna research that went into “20 and Something.” In fact, getting married doesn’t even make the top five things millennials want to do before turning 30. Those include becoming financially independent, starting a career, finding out who one really is and following one’s dreams.

Those priorities ring true for Ashleigh Slater, author of Team Us: Marriage Together, released in June. Slater “always tended to be more career-focused and less

“I have always wanted to be in a relationship, and I appreciate the partnership. I appreciate what marriage brings out in the women that I know, as well as the men that I know,” she says.

At the same time, she says, “I would rather be single than try to force something into being.”

And Strickland has tried that, she says. She assumed growing up and getting married and having kids was what she was supposed to

I can pay rent and get my oil changed,” she says. “I don’t fear that if I never get married, there won’t be anyone to take care of me, which was a real fear in the ’50s. I’ve tried to build life skills so that getting married will not be like hiring a handyman or a bodyguard or any of those other reasons people got married because it literally was impractical not to.

“Now I could go my whole life without being married and be fine. I would like to

marriage-minded,” she says. So it came as a surprise, even to herself, when she married as a 24-year-old graduate student.

She also says, anecdotally, she has seen many couples “overthink getting married— perhaps because they are afraid of it ending in divorce—which results in a kind of analysis paralysis and sometimes regrettable delay.”

That’s not to say millennials don’t want to get married someday: 69 percent say they do, according to Pew—just not yet.

Strickland stresses that she definitely wants to be married; it’s not something she feels she purposefully has delayed.

do. She tried being who she thought others wanted her to be, asking what she thought she was supposed to ask, like what her partners’ plans for spiritual leadership were.

But those relationships all crashed and burned pretty quickly.

Still, Strickland says, she’s not so naïve as to believe a husband would complete her or fix all her problems or make her never feel lonely again. Nor does she feel the outside pressure to marry like many previous generations did. Marriage simply isn’t a “must” anymore.

“I know I can make it on my own. I know

be married, but I could do it, and I would if that was what I was asked to do.”

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‘REAL PEOPLE’ IN A DIVORCE As Slater noted, another reason Chapman says he has observed millennials delaying marriage is because they’ve watched the painful breakdown of their parents’ and friends’ relationships. Divorce rates peaked in the 1980s, Kim noted. And, partly for that reason, only about six in 10 Millennials were raised by both parents— a much smaller number compared to older generations, according to Pew.

MARRIAGE AND MILLENNIALS

that when they’re preaching or even counseling people.”

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“I think a lot of it is what they’ve observed from their parents,” Chapman says. “I remember a conversation I had with one young man whose mom and dad divorced after he went to college.

He was 35 and hadn’t married. He said, ‘Look, my parents were active in church.

They were married for 35 years. If my parents can’t keep it together, what hope is there for me?’ He was sharing his gutlevel feelings.”

Natalie Trust, 30, of Portland, Ore., says she grew up with a “beautiful” picture of marriage from her parents. They always have treated each other with love, respect and compassion, she says.

“I grew up seeing that modeled, and so I definitely wanted the same thing and expected the same thing,” Trust says. “I never would have imagined myself in the place I eventually found myself.”

That place was a laundromat parking lot, listening to a sexually explicit message left by another woman on her husband’s voice mail. She had called to let him know she had booked reservations for a trip celebrating their first wedding anniversary, she says.

She still can’t say why, when she couldn’t get ahold of him, she decided to call his voice mail and listen to the messages with the password he’d given her back when they were dating.

Later, “a miraculous Google” search also uncovered what he had been doing online at the private Christian school her parents run, where she also teaches.

“We had disks and disks filled with email correspondence between him and other women and pornography just all over these school computers,” she says.

“That was the hard evidence I needed to say I needed to proceed with a divorce.”

That sent Trust spiraling into her “desert days,” as she calls them. She had grown up in conservative evangelical churches with the idea that marriage is a picture of Christ and His Church, that God hates divorce, that “you only get one chance at love and at marriage, and you better make sure you’re in God’s will,” she says. Those with what she calls “failed marriages” may not have been openly disdained by the Church, she says, but they certainly wore “a scarlet letter.”

Within a year, she had legally changed her last name to “Trust,” staking a claim on the promise that God would restore that word and its meaning to her. Later, she remarried, and she and her second husband now are parents to a 2-year-old.

As she watched other women in church groups struggle through difficult marriages and worked through her own healing, Trust came to the conclusion that divorce

Anthony and Emily Parrott of Spirit Lake, Iowa, thought they had a healthy relationship until their friends cornered them about it during a spring break trip to Florida.

The two had passed more than a year as friends before they started dating at Bethel College in Mishawaka, Ind., where Emily was a year ahead of Anthony. Anthony’s friends had seen the stack of books he had brought with him on the trip. They’d seen his relationship with his then girlfriend. Didn’t he know what the Bible says about a man being the head of a relationship? they asked.

“I think that’s when we realized what we were doing—,” says Anthony, 27.

Emily, 28, finishes, “—was apparently controversial, and we didn’t know it.”

Both had grown up in Indiana, in evangelical Christian homes, they say. Emily’s parents always had worked together as a team, she says, but she definitely had intuited from church youth group culture that a man should be the head of a household and leader of a relationship—“something, without thinking about it, I looked to because that’s what Christians did,” she says. That message was more explicit in Anthony’s family, he says.

But their assumptions about the roles of a husband and wife began to shift in college.

First, for Anthony, as a professor asked provocative questions and he began to search the Bible passages used to defend complementarianism, the belief that men and women play different, “complementary” roles within marriage. Then, the two friends began to

“There’s not enough nuance in the way pastors talk about divorce from the pulpit. These are real people involved, and I think they forget about that when they are preaching.” —Natalie Trust is sometimes just the best option in a bad situation, she says.

“There’s not enough nuance in the way pastors talk about divorce from the pulpit,” she says. “These are real people involved, and I think they forget about

date, and “the laboratory experiment kind of started,” he says.

“I definitely see the emerging generations caring less and less about gender roles, and I think it does have an impact on marriage,” Emily says.

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GO DEEPER T HE M E A N IN G O F MA R R IAGE

“I think a lot of times the Church has communicated an idea that is not really very biblical: The man is the breadwinner and the woman stays home.” —Gary Chapman

by Tim Keller Keller, with help from his wife, Kathy, examines what marriage is supposed to look like according to the Bible, dispelling popular beliefs about soul mates, sex, romance and divorce. The result is profound and rich in theology, but also full of practical wisdom as Keller shows how to apply Scripture.

MAD ABOUT US

by Gary and Carrie Oliver Conflict is an inevitable part of marriage, but if handled correctly, it can actually lead to deeper intimacy instead of division. Based on their experience as counselors as well as their own marriage, the Olivers offer ways to work through frustration, engage in healthy conflict and restore intimacy.

T HE I N T IM AT E MYS TE RY

by Dan Allender and Tremper Longman This short but contemplative read unpacks the outline for marriage given in Genesis: leave, weave and cleave. Allender and Tremper don’t sugarcoat the problems and pain that can arise in marriage, but offer a beautiful and poetic picture of hope.

MARR IAGE REBRA N DE D

Chapman says he hasn’t seen enough research to conclude whether millennials are driving the conversation about complementarianism and egalitarianism in the Church, but, he notes, the freedom the generation feels “to make their own decision about what they’re going to do” is healthy.

“I think, a lot of times, the Church has communicated an idea that is not really very biblical: The man is the breadwinner and the woman stays home. Women have always worked. Eve worked in the garden before the fall,” he says.

“There’s not that kind of pattern in the mind of millennials. They’re much freer to recognize, ‘We both have interests and gifts, and we need to decide for ourselves, not the culture.’”

For the Parrotts, that means their responsibilities at home adjust to their circumstances.

They decided to move to Iowa when Anthony was offered a job as a worship director at a church in the Reformed Church in America. He picked up some of the cooking and cleaning when Emily transitioned from a part-time to full-time job as the administrative assistant to the dean of students at a local community college.

“The call for the Christian life is to submit and serve each other and ultimately submit to Christ, so I feel like acting that out, we’re both looking to serve each other selflessly. I feel like that’s a big part of marriage, and that’s a big part of what we do for each other,” Emily says.

by Tyler Ward Why is it that we still want to get married even though we know the divorce statistics? Tyler Ward seeks to answer that question and bust a few common misconceptions about what marriage is about. If done right, he argues, marriage can change the world.

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ALWAYS CHANGING How Strickland feels about singlehood and marriage is “a moving target,” she says.

“It depends on the day. It depends on my mood. It depends on whether I have a wedding to go to the next weekend. It depends on whether I’ve just had dinner with friends whose marriage is falling apart,” she says. “I think that’s good, and I think people who

are married—their views on marriage are always changing.”

Some of the changing views millennials have adopted can be negative, such as the increasing popularity of cohabitation, or living together before marriage, according to Chapman.

But, Kim writes, “Given all these statistics, perhaps twentysomethings are delaying marriage not because they have a low view of it; rather, because they value marriage so much, they’re willing to push it off to increase the likelihood of a successful marriage.”

To those millennials, Chapman says, there are ways you can begin to work toward a successful marriage even before you are engaged and married—or even dating.

For one, many spend at least four years preparing for a vocation. There are many relationship skills that can be learned and carried into marriage, as well, he says.

Couples engaged to be married or newly married also should keep in mind that their euphoric feelings won’t last forever and that they may not communicate and receive love in the same way, he says.

And they can learn to deal effectively with their failures because, the marriage counselor says, “you will say some things and do some things that are hurtful to each other.”

That’s partly why Slater says her 11-year marriage actually has been “easier than I anticipated”: She and her husband, Ted, “both entered it freshly reminded that we were two imperfect people.”

“I’ve come to see that while marriage is sometimes hard, there are ways we can make it easier, more simple. Things like extending grace and choosing to assume the best of each other and deferring to one another,” she says.

EMILY MCFARL AN MILLER is an award-winning journalist and truth-seeker based in Chicago.

Connect with her at emmillerwrites.com.

EDUCATING doers • followers • changers •

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Grow your leadership skills with disciplined study of Scripture, vibrant community life and dedicated faculty mentors. Ground your ministry in peace and justice, worship and witness.

Start where you are with our Master of Divinity Connect program. Or come and immerse yourself in campus life with our Master of Divinity Campus and Master of Arts programs.

Learn more at www.ambs.edu. Or call 800.964.2627 to visit our campus in Elkhart, Ind. 69 RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

W H AT T H E S P I R I T U A L O R I G I N S OF SUPERHEROES TE ACH US ABOUT CALLING

BY T YLER HUCK ABEE

When Michael Joseph was 10, a heart attack landed his father in the hospital. Joseph found himself in the waiting room, hoping for a positive outcome of his father’s sudden, serious heart surgery.

“I was at an age where I didn’t understand very much of what was going on,” he says. “But I remember it was touch and go for a few days.”

This was back in the ’70s, a time when racks of comic books still populated public spaces. Rows and rows of spectacularly costumed, impossibly athletic, primary colored characters lined the rows of libraries, convenience stores, grocery markets and, yes, hospital gift shops.

Joseph was distraught, flipping through comics while waiting to hear back about his dad. He was already a fan of superheroes, his older brother having introduced him to Marvel Comics a few years before.

“I was pretty defeated,” he recalls.

“There was a sense of inadequacy that popped up again and again. I was reaching

out. Comic books had helped me before, maybe they’d help me again.”

In the gift shop, he happened upon the first issue of Luke Cage: Hero for Hire.

Unlike Spider-Man and Captain America, Cage—a streetwise do-gooder whose super strength was the result of a medical experiment gone awry—never became a household name. His primary claim to fame is being one of the first African-American superheroes to carry his own series.

But for Joseph, something about the story rang true.

“Here’s this superhero who came out of a dire environment and it gave him power.

I took my frustration and my own sense of inadequacy in controlling my environment and launched it into his life. I clutched that comic book throughout the hospitalization of my dad. I just found myself reading that Luke Cage story every day, poring over that story. It became a crutch for me that helped me have some kind of release of my emotions.”

Ultimately, Joseph’s father pulled through, but a bond had been forged between Joseph and superheroes that lasts to this day.

“There was always a distinction of a messy world, but you’ve got to be able to figure out what the right thing to do is,” Joseph says. “That held with me. I knew I needed to look at life that same way. It took hold in my own character. I wrestle that still—in my actions and life circumstances. I push myself to say, ‘What would be the right way?’ Watching superheroes wrestle with that helped me.”

Popeye was strong. Flash Gordon could zip through space. But the two wanted their character to be taken seriously. Both practicing Jews, they drew on the idea of a strongman more interested in social justice than Herculean labors.

Over the years, as Hitler rose to power, rumors of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews reached Shuster and Siegel, drawing to mind another time and another villain of their people. That time, a baby had been put in a basket and sent down the Nile, from where he would one day return to save his people. That was the sort of gravitas their “super man” needed.

So they gave him a new, more alien name, Kal-El (which in Hebrew roughly translates to “all that is God”), and had his father, Jor-El, send him to earth from a distant world. Kal-El could do what humans couldn’t do for themselves.

He could provide not just the rescuing humanity needed—but the example as well. And he could stand against tyranny and oppression: All the might of the Third Reich was helpless against him.

The Nazis saw this hero as a personal affront. Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, gave a speech calling Siegel “an intellectually and physically circumcised chap” and ridiculed his creation for having, “an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind.”

IT’S A BIRD. IT’S A PLANE. In 1933, a pair of Cleveland high school students named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster came up with the idea for a character who would put a modern spin on mythic heroes. They gave him the physique of Douglas Fairbanks, famous for playing Zorro and Robin Hood. They gave him a human name that was a mash of movie stars: Clark Gable and Kent Taylor.

His costume was a then-bizarre mix of influences: the colorful splashes of pulpy space heroes, the skintight spandex of a circus strongman and, most importantly, a dashing, Victorian-esque cape to tie it all together.

Shuster and Siegel had a hero, but they were worried he seemed cartoonish.

Nicolas Cage as Captain Rayford Steele in Left Behind

Henry Cavill in Man of Steel.

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The Nazis were right to take the offense personally. One in four American soldiers were carrying comic books into World War II. Superman was the first superhero, and the biblical side of his origin remains the heart and soul of the superhero mythos, according to Dr. B.J. Oropeza, professor in Biblical Studies at Azusa Pacific University and author of The Gospel According to Superheroes.

“Deep within the psyche of human beings, there’s this idea that we had this

communication with God and things were really good and we lived in a paradise,” he says. “And now humans are in the process of trying to restore this paradise. And they need shamans, priests, heroes or a messiah to bridge that gap between deity and humanity to bring back the idea of a paradise.

This I see as a running theme that intrigues humanity. We are wired that there is something greater than us.

This is one of the attractions of superheroes: people made in God’s image.”

SUPERPOWER The idea of superheroes as a subject for serious thought—let alone spiritual significance—was common enough in the ’30s and ’40s, but was significantly toned down following the implementa-

Lee and Kirby had Peter Parker show off his new powers on TV, and even pass the buck on stopping a robbery. Of course, that arrogance ended with him losing his uncle and surrogate father.

Instead of ending with the usual Sturm und Drang of most superhero stories, the final panel of Amazing Fantasy #15 has Parker shuffling off into the night, under the now famous caption explaining that he is “aware at last that in this world, with great power there must also come great responsibility!”

That sort of tragic coda to a superhero story was unheard of in 1962, though it’s been retold time and again in comics, television and film ever since.

“That’s the thing about Peter Parker that’s so devastating,” says Emma Stone, the co-star in the latest Spider-

“THAT’S THE THING ABOUT PETER PARKER THAT’S SO DEVASTATING. HE HAS TO EXPERIENCE SO MUCH IN ORDER FOR US TO LEARN FROM HIM. THAT’S ONE OF THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS ABOUT THE CHARACTER.”

Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone talk it out.

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tion (at the behest of the U.S. government) of a “Comics Code,” ensuring that the adventures of Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America and the rest were suitable for children.

The once grim and deadly Batman was given a young sidekick, and Superman’s adventures were reduced to ho-hum, “villain-of-the-week” type stories.

It took DC’s competitor, Marvel, to reinject a sense of gravitas into costumed heroes. In the early 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four and the Hulk as heroes.

They gave them a sense of maturity and even tragedy. But the relative popularity of those titles was dwarfed by a character Lee brought to life in issue 15 of Amazing Fantasy, in which a lonely teenager got bitten by a radioactive spider and promptly turned the world upside down.

The origin of Spider-Man was unique in that Spider-Man does not act particularly heroic throughout. Instead,

Man films. “He has to experience so much in order for us to learn from him.

That’s one of the beautiful things about the character.”

Stone is referring to Peter Parker’s ongoing tragedies, as depicted in this year’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2. She plays Gwen Stacy, Parker’s love interest and the source of a good deal of his superhero guilt. It’s a role she takes with more seriousness than is probably demanded of her, but she does seem to have a genuine attachment to the character.

“He’s way more inspiring than an alien guy—not to insult Superman, but his only fault is kryptonite. There’s a lot going on with Peter Parker.”

“A lot going on” seems to be the general consensus among the cast of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. To a person, they affirm that there’s much more to Spider-Man than just swinging around and webbing bad guys. In fact, to Spider-Man himself, Andrew Garfield,

P H O T O C R E D I T: S O N Y P I C T U R E S

– EMMA STONE

it’s the fact that he was not able to save his Uncle Ben, and he was even responsible in a certain sense. With great power comes great responsibility.”

Of course, just because superheroes might have that mandate doesn’t mean they’ll always live it out.

“That’s the power of Spider-Man,” Oropeza says. “He’s not perfect. That’s why we all can relate to him. Yes, he suffered a huge tragedy and he felt a big responsibility for that, but instead of turning his anger inward like a lot of young people do—and a lot of older people, too—he looks outward ... He could have gone toward a more destructive way. But other events occur and he thinks, ‘Maybe I can do something beautiful with this.’”

GIFTED YOUNGSTERS

“We’re going to need a different stunt double.”

Professional superhero on a closed course. Do not attempt at home.

Spider-Man isn’t even the main draw of the story.

“Spider-Man has the skill and the gift,” Garfield says. “But what Peter brings ... ” here he trails off for a second, trying to think of the right word. “Peter is what makes Spider-Man special. The compassion and humanity. The idea of ‘love thy neighbor.’”

Oropeza says that the “idea of ‘love thy neighbor,’” and moreover, the Golden

Rule of Matthew 7, is the driving factor behind not just Spider-Man, but all of Stan Lee’s protagonists. “[Lee] says he tried to have his superheroes abide by the principle of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’” he says. “From that aspect, the Golden Rule, you see elements of spirituality that will be carried over from the comic books to the films. [In Spider-Man’s case]

When Ralph Winter decided to produce a movie about the X-Men back in 2000, people called him crazy. Up to that point, superhero movies had been more cartoonish in tone, but Winter had a different vision for the X-Men franchise.

“It was a tremendous risk,” he says. “[Director] Bryan Singer brought to the movie a seriousness about the characters, their journey, their feelings and story that wasn’t silly. Comic books movies before X-Men tended to be silly, trying to make fun of themselves. X-Men was serious.”

Singer was really following in Lee and Kirby’s footsteps, who created the X-Men back in 1963 as a class of teenage mutants under the guidance of a wheelchair bound Professor Charles Xavier.

The X-Men was at least partially inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, and the metaphor was as thinly veiled as they come. Lee and Kirby’s mutants were a minority, feared and mistrusted by the population at large. Professor X was Lee’s Martin Luther King Jr., working for the acceptance of his growing class of students.

The X-Men’s primary antagonist, Magneto (brought to life by Sir Ian McKellen in the first film), was a standin for Malcolm X, and remains one of Marvel’s finest characterizations.

Instead of being bent on world domination or fabulous wealth, Magneto was an oppressed outcast. He didn’t see

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P H O T O C R E D I T: X- M E N - 2 0 T H C E N T U R Y F O X / G U A R D I A N S O F T H E G A L A X Y - WA LT D I S N E Y S T U D I O S

Nicholas Hoult, James McAvoy and Hugh Jackman set an x-ample.

“IT’S MOST PRONOUNCED WHEN YOU’RE IN JUNIOR HIGH ....YOU REALIZE, ‘I’M DIFFERENT. IS THAT DIFFERENCE A SUPERPOWER OR DOES IT MEAN THAT I’M INADEQUATE?’” – RALPH WINTER

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himself as a villain. He didn’t want to beat the X-Men so much as to convince them to see his side. Mutants would never be accepted, so why should he bother?

That’s a sentiment echoed by another Marvel villain, Electro, in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. As played by Jamie Foxx, Electro is “a very, very smart guy who should be celebrated for building big things,” Foxx says. “Instead, he gets nothing. He resents it, but he doesn’t know how to react.”

That sense of alienation has become as much a part of the superhero motif as secret identities and leaping tall buildings.

The X-Men are cool precisely because they aren’t cool—they’re lonely rejects. It’s no wonder comic books have a reputation for appealing to nerds. Those who are rejected by society find they have the most in common with the characters in comic books.

Winter says that feeling is universal.

“I think that issue of how you fit in or don’t fit in is an issue that resonates in our culture, whether you’re 13 or you’re 33,” he says. “It’s most pronounced when you’re in junior high and high school. You

realize, ‘I’m different. Is that difference a superpower or does it mean that I’m inadequate?’ You see that in the way kids dress and they act and they socialize. It’s a keen issue as people are trying to figure out ‘Where am I? Why am I here?’ I don’t think that ends. You see it in midlife crisis.

You see it in our culture.”

Other than the “power and responsibility” trope, this has been Marvel’s most notable contribution to the superhero myth: The idea of a unique ability that both makes you special and sets you apart—a gift and a curse. Adolescence was still a blooming idea in the early ’60s, and Lee and Kirby tapped into both its appeal and its angst by making their teenage heroes unique in the way their readers felt unique—different from everyone else, and not quite sure whether those differences were good or not.

“There’s an aspect of identification with superheroes,” Oropeza explains. “We would like to be like the superhero. With the X-Men, [there’s] a spiritual theme of social justice and marginality. It’s that these characters are considered freaks of nature.”

As freaks of nature, the X-Men create a model for anyone who has ever felt like they don’t fit in. But Winter says that model has always steered away from easy answers.

“You look at Wolverine and you see how sometimes he fits in with Charles Xavier and the other people in Charles’ family,

reasons there is this intrigue for the battle between good and evil. It’s built into the fabric of our being. It’s who we are. It’s how we’re wired. To recognize that then is to make a choice: What side am I going to be on?”

In Spider-Man, Garfield sees the call to do unto others what they can’t do for

GOD IN COMICS

MAN OF STE E L

Superman has been depicted as a superhero Messiah virtually since his conception, and while no film has ignored the parallels, few have been as blatant as Zack Snyder’s.

SILV E R SU R FE R

L-R: Chris Pratt, a tree, a raccoon, Dave Bautista and Zoe Saldana: are the Guardians of the Galaxy.

and there’s times where he doesn’t fit in,” Winter says. “He’s still struggling. It’s that struggle that’s interesting and that people resonate with.”

That struggle has made Wolverine one of comic’s most iconic characters. He has been replicated in an increasing number of titles, including Marvel’s 2014 summer tentpole, Guardians of the Galaxy.

GREAT RESPONSIBILITY Siegel and Shuster may have created Superman with Moses in mind, and Lee and Kirby may have kept the Golden Rule as their characters’ guiding directive, but in an age where the deeper themes are frequently buried by million-dollar explosions and goofy costumes, it’s understandable if superheroes frequently get written off as the children’s toys they’re frequently made into. Is there more to comic book characters than a tip of the hat to spiritual moralism?

Oropeza thinks so.

“There are aspects that are more than just appreciation of these themes,” he says.

“One is to recognize that we are creatures created in God’s image. That’s one of the

themselves, but he also sees the temptation to take on more than one should, what he calls Parker’s “overdeveloped sense of responsibility.”

“You can’t save everybody,” he says.

“Sometimes the world will throw you a gut punch. From the inside, that’s Peter’s perspective. Peter’s perspective is ‘I [messed] up. Me, it’s me, it’s all me. I should have done more.’”

Stone agrees with him, though she says that sense of guilt doesn’t change Parker’s character. “There’s nothing better to watch than someone pick themselves up by the bootstraps and have to go on after loss. He’s a true hero in every sense of the word, no matter how tortured he is by it.”

“I see these themes from superheroes that could actually help us as human beings to live in a better way,” Oropeza says. “This culture has adopted this theme of ‘do unto others’ without recognizing the Author of that.

“That’s where we need to point people.”

T YLER HUCK ABEE is the managing editor of RELEVANT magazine.

Stan Lee described the powerful, pure Surfer as his take on an “apostle,” and sent him to battle Mephisto, Marvel’s Satan, who tempts heroes with visions of power.

FAN TASTIC FOU R

In FF #511, the heroes “meet” God—an artist bearing a suspicious resemblance to Jack Kirby. He gives them a sketch of all four of them enjoying old age— “a happy ending.”

CAP TAIN AME R ICA

In The Avengers, Cap isn’t having any of this nonsense about Thor being a god. “There’s only one God, ma’am,” he corrects the Black Widow. “And I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that.”

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B Y M AC K H AY D E N

you talk to Brad Shultz, the guitarist from Cage the Elephant, for even five minutes, you’ll catch that his desire for honesty in music is definitive of his personality in general.

“We don’t have a message, per se,” he says. “We just write songs from an honest place. We try to write songs that mean something to us. We’re just trying to portray our thoughts and communicate.”

In today’s culture, this kind of desire for integrity in art is dying out on the radio and in the mainstream, but Cage

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the Elephant has been leading the resurrection brigade for a while now. In 2008, “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked,” a single off their debut album, reached No. 3 on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart. In 2011, Rolling Stone named them the year’s best new artist.

Hitting that level of acclaim didn’t sway any of the band members’ dedication to portraying themselves truthfully and progressing their music.

“Because of our first record and the radio success we had, people may have thought that was all there was to our band,” Shultz says. “We wanted to make sure we were progressing musically and doing this because we loved it.”

L-R: Jared Champion, Matt Shultz, Daniel Tichenor, Lincoln Parish, Brad Shultz

Cage the Elephant has always been a band that tells it like it is. They’re just learning to tell it in different ways with each new album. Their latest offering, Melophobia, is Shultz’s pick for the band’s best record so far. Fans and critics are mostly in agreement with him.

Melophobia means “fear of music,” but Shultz is quick to assure that isn’t meant to be taken very literally. It’s not the music itself that is frightening to him and his bandmates but the pressures put on musicians to conform.

“I feel like there’s so many different pressures for bands to fit into some specific mold,” he says. “Sometimes it inhibits the songwriting and the actual beauty of music in bringing people together and using it as a strictly communal form of communication.”

Shultz is as big on community as he is on communicating truth when it comes to music. Whether it’s the bands he’s gotten to tour with or the records that shaped him, his sense of gratitude, reverence and admiration for others within the music scene is palpable and infectious.

Cage the Elephant has toured with some of the biggest names in rock, and the frontmen for groups like Queens of the Stone Age and Foo Fighters were more than happy to mentor the band along the way.

It’s no surprise the thing Shultz appreciated most about the bands was their desire for honesty and growth, both for themselves and for his band, too.

“Josh Homme [of Queens of the Stone Age] can do so many things,” he says. “He’s a true artist, and he made a big impact on us when we were on that tour.

He really helped us push ourselves forward.”

As for Dave Grohl, drummer from Nirvana, frontman for the Foo Fighters and a veritable rock icon, Shultz’s opinion was similarly high.

“When we were on that Foo Fighters tour, just talking to Dave Grohl—that guy is what he is. He doesn’t hide anything about it. He’s a totally honest person musically and he does it because he loves it,” Shultz says.

Anyone who listens to Cage the Elephant knows this is a band of old souls making music for the modern world. Theirs is a sound as influenced by oldschool blues as ’70s punk in its heart-on-its-sleeve aggression. Throw some ’80s college rock such as Pixies into the mix and you’re on the way to figuring out what went into the recipe for Melophobia. It may come as a surprise how the band were late bloomers when it came to this kind of musical fandom.

The original members of the band, including Shultz and his brother, Matt, are from a small town

in Kentucky where their exposure to modern music was limited.

“We really hadn’t been exposed to a lot, and we were kind of sheltered from a lot of the depths of different eras of music,” he explains. “The only way we experienced or heard bands was through our college radio or classic rock stations.”

This lack of musical exposure may be responsible for how truly youthful, wild and vibrant the band sounded on their self-titled first album. When they debuted, they were a band coming straight from the roots of rock and roll—in large part because the

“WE WANTED TO DIG DEEPER INTO WHAT MUSIC IS ABOUT IN ITS BAREST BONES AS A FORM OF COMMUNICATION.” roots of rock and roll were almost all they had the opportunity to listen to back then.

It was after moving to London in 2007 that Shultz and his bandmates began their odyssey into the deeper crevasses of musical ingenuity. It has showed up in their own sound in spades.

“We were able to find out about a lot of music when we were a little bit more mature, when a lot of people found out about music when they were in high school,” Shultz says. “For the first time, we were finding out about bands like Pixies, Mudhoney and Gang of Four. I feel like we may have had a deeper appreciation.”

Looking back, Shultz remembers this time with both fondness and amused self-awareness.

“We’d go back to people we were hanging with and say, ‘We just found this incredible band: the Pixies.’ And they’d just say, ‘Yeah, I’ve basically been listening to that band since I was 15,’” he laughs. “We were late bloomers, in a sense.”

It was this kind of musical exploration he feels shaped their second record, Thank You, Happy Birthday, in particular.

“The falter on that record was that we were listening to so much more music and discovering so much,” he says. “We were so excited about the stuff we were finding out about, and it was a whole new world opening up to us. So we faltered a bit because we were wearing our influences on our sleeves a little too heavily.”

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KENTUCKY BANDS Cage the Elephant originated in Bowling Green, Ky., where they grew up listening to classic rock and blues.

They’re in good company.

Here are a few other bands from the Bluegrass State:

H O UN DM O UT H

MY MOR N IN G

WIL L OLD HAM

The fourpiece from Louisville uses the old Southern rock sound in full force on their recent debut album.

JAC K E T

Better known as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Oldham pairs his wobbly vocals with sparse folk music.

All this heads straight into Melophobia. It seems Cage the Elephant was fully aware of how important releasing a defining third album was. For a band that flirted so early on with radio success and widespread popularity, they knew they’d need to deliver consistent evolution and goods to stay in the game in the music scene.

Their method of doing so was to go back to the roots of who they are—instead of worrying what

The group expanded on their country roots, experimenting in different genres.

the mold of a certain genre or into being the kind of influential band all the blogs and magazines are going to write about,” he explains. “You feel like you’ve got to be ‘the geniuses’ or ‘the super successful band with the radio hits.’”

It’s admirable to see the band trying to discover themselves in their purest essence while fully aware of how much is at stake. Luckily, this kind of quest for self-discovery was encouraged.

Tiger Merritt, frontman of Morning Teleportation and friend of Cage the Elephant, passed along a piece of advice he’d heard from Isaac Brock, the main songwriter and lead vocalist for Modest Mouse.

“Isaac told Tiger that if you’re not slightly embarrassed of your lyrics, you’re probably not writing very good songs,” Shultz recalls. “That struck home with Matt because he was having trouble writing lyrics at the time.”

But Merritt’s encouragement and influence didn’t just stop with sharing the wisdom of indie rock icons.

“Matt was telling Tiger, ‘I just can’t come up with the right lyric,’” Shultz says.

“Tiger told Matt that he thought his biggest downfall was that he was trying to be too poetic instead of writing songs the way he speaks. That’s the real poetry of songwriting. So that was another light bulb moment for Matt.”

A lot of talk has generated about how the Shultz brothers were raised in a very religious environment, but it’s not something Brad thinks affected the songwriting or the band’s outlook as a whole very much. Less than adhering to or rebelling against the Christianity they were raised in, Cage the Elephant just wants to be honest about who they are and what it means to be a human being.

“Any way that a person’s been raised is going to affect them in different ways,” Shultz says. “We don’t really think about how our beginnings affected us too much. The stuff we were digging into was how to be as honest as we possibly could.”

anyone expected them to be—and what music is at its very core.

“We wanted to dig deeper into what music is about in its barest bones as a form of communication,” Shultz says. “If you think about the earliest history, there are tribes hanging out around a fire screaming at the top of their lungs to try and cultivate some communal thing.”

It’s ironic that Cage the Elephant’s most modernsounding record would be the one most conscious of reaching into the earliest human impulses to create sounds and then call them music. Still, tapping into these kinds of instincts was the best way to avoid legitimate melophobia for Shultz and company. The modern world is much too fraught with reasons for musicians to be anxious, Shultz says.

“A lot of pressures are put on bands today to fit in

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P H O T O C R E D I T: F R A Z E R H A R R I S O N / G E T T Y I M A G E S

“IF WE’RE NOT STRUGGLING ON THE RECORD, I DON’T THINK WE’RE GROWING ENOUGH. IF WE’RE NOT GROWING, IT BECOMES STALE AND STAGNANT.”

MELOPHOBIA Cage the Elephant’s third offering has been hailed as the band’s best yet.

Another new factor influencing the creation of Melophobia and the resulting tour was the birth of Shultz’s first child. He’s quick to reassure that all the clichés about how much having a child changes you are true.

“It definitely changed me as a person, and it’s hard to describe how,” he says. “People always say, ‘When you have a kid, it changes your life.’ It really does, though. It’s unexplainable. The first time I saw my daughter take a breath was an indescribable, life-changing moment.”

Shultz is watching his daughter enter the first stages of life at the same time his band is growing into maturity. But even if Cage the Elephant is growing up, they still haven’t lost their exuberant youthfulness. Their live shows remain upbeat and wild, and Melophobia is shot through with as much

calculated chaos as ever.

“As people, we’re typically kind of hyper,” Shultz laughs. “Maybe to an annoying point. It’s not like we’re sitting backstage with incense on yoga mats or anything.”

The band continues to embrace their wild spirit as well as mature, but writing new music is still no easy task. That’s something Shultz doesn’t expect to change, and in fact, he hopes it doesn’t.

“If we’re not struggling on the record, I don’t think we’re growing enough,” he says. “If we’re not growing, it becomes stale and stagnant. I hope the next one is even harder to make.”

MACK HAYDEN is a budding writer and college student.

He blogs at Biola University’s Culture in Context and tweets @unionmack.

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BY BILL

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JULY_AUG 2014

H Y BELS

from an altitude of 30,000 feet, would you find that you’re on course for a life of deep and sustainable satisfaction?

HOW SATISFIED ARE YOU?

HOW TO CLEAR OUT YOUR FAITH’S EXCESS CLUTTER very would-be pilot has to demonstrate navigational proficiency in order to pass the flying test. Early in my training, an instructor helped me plan a 200mile round-trip flight to a neighboring state.

I took off in a small Piper Tri-Pacer, flight plan at my side, and all was going according to plan until an upper-level air disturbance blew me off course. Way off course. It wasn’t long before I had to admit to myself I was hopelessly lost.

As I watched my fuel level slowly deplete, I knew I was running out of time to sort things out. If I couldn’t determine my location soon, this flight was going to end badly.

Eventually, I spotted a small town and was able to regain my bearings. I charted a new course back to my home airport, landed the plane safely, and told my instructor the flight had been uneventful.

Getting a little off course in that small plane only cost me 45 minutes of time and about 15 gallons of aviation fuel. But getting off course in the big picture of life exacts a far higher price. No one wants to look in the rearview mirror of life and realize they spent time and energy heading off course but didn’t know it. You can’t retrace those lost years.

There is no turning the plane around.

How can you be certain you’re on course in the big picture things that matter most?

You may be on the road to a simplified life, but if you were able to see your life’s journey

It’s no wonder we often find ourselves looking for satisfaction in all the wrong ways.

You and I are deluged from every side by advertising designed to foster dissatisfaction with our current lives. From what I’ve seen on television, my life would be much more satisfying if I were to eat Special K for breakfast, buy my car insurance from GEICO and wear a Breitling watch. No one is impervious to advertising’s influence.

On a scale of one to 10, take a moment to assess your current satisfaction levels: • How satisfied am I with my job?

• How satisfied am I with my marriage?

Or with my singleness?

• How satisfied am I with my home? With my car? With my computer or cell phone or closet full of clothes?

Here are some harder questions: How satisfied should I be? How satisfied could I be? Are my expectations too high or too low? Am I in denial about my satisfaction level, or am I expecting a 360 degree paradise on this side of heaven? Should I lower the bar on my expectations?

The real root of our dissatisfaction goes deeper than our response to the blitz of media advertising. It resides somewhere deep in our souls and traces its origins all the way back to Eden. The serpent’s question to Eve strikes home in all of our hearts: “Did God really say ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

Before this, Eve had delighted in God’s provision, but now she wants more. She decides the only fruit that will satisfy her hangs from the branches of the one tree God forbade her to eat from. But upon partaking of the fruit, she finds—as we all have—that living outside of God’s boundaries and provision leads to fatal dissatisfaction. Once humanity crossed the threshold into a broken relationship with God, we’ve been dissatisfied ever since.

WHAT MATTERS MOST? Few people in history have truly been successful at pushing the quest for satisfaction to its ultimate limits. On the short list of those who have tried is Solomon, son of David and king of Israel during the 10th century B.C.

With limitless wealth at his disposal, Solomon pursued satisfaction with breathless abandon. He recorded his findings in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes—12 chapters of bare-fisted, intellectual street fighting about what matters in this world and what does not.

Solomon’s raw, irreverent reflections on the subject of satisfaction and the true meaning of life are shocking and sometimes offensive. But they’re honest. He wastes no time in expressing his existential observations. Here’s the big opener to his book: “Meaningless! Meaningless ... Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

Now that’s a happy thought!

In the first two chapters of Ecclesiastes, Solomon builds a fairly convincing case to support his depressing worldview. One by one, he uncovers the temporal value of the meaningless pursuits most of us think will satisfy. In the end, he says, these worldly pursuits are as productive as “chasing after the wind.”

IN THE END There’s no point in simplifying your life if you are steering toward an end point that doesn’t matter to begin with. In my opinion, Scripture records Solomon’s’ hedonistic odyssey to help us avoid wasting our lives like he did. We have the option of learning from his mistakes.

Spare yourself the heartache. Spare yourself decades of chasing rabbit trails. Don’t get to the end of your days and realize you spent your one and only life on distractions.

Don’t arrive at the end of your life still saying (in the words of the U2 song), “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

And remember: You don’t simplify your life by just avoiding or removing the things that don’t satisfy; you have to fill your life with the things that do.

FURNISHING THE SACRED SPACE When we eradicate clutter from our lives, we create a vacuum that aches to be filled.

Once you’ve uncluttered your soul and swept the place clean, you’ll quickly discover that plenty of things beg to crowd themselves back into the sacred space you’ve so carefully carved out.

How do you keep your life from becoming re-cluttered? How should you furnish your new, simplified, inner world? In short, how do you live an ongoing life of simplicity?

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I have never found it easy to say no to the myriad opportunities that knock on my door. To help ensure that I furnish the sacred space in my soul with the right things, I first run every opportunity, commitment and relational investment through three filters:

GO DEEPER Further reading from Bill Hybels:

FILTER #1: SATISFACTION Key question: Will it bring true satisfaction?

Because Solomon has given us a clear outline of the things that amount to nothing more than chasing the wind, I know better than to get suckered into saying yes to such things. Nonetheless, when a wind-chasing idol comes my way and catches my eye, I ask myself the hard question: What unmet desire in me is being tempted here?

By understanding the greater desire of my soul, I can better determine God’s plan for filling that desire with something that brings true satisfaction. When the God-given desires of my heart are met in God-given ways, it becomes easy to say no to the things I know will never satisfy.

JUS T WA L K ACRO S S TH E RO O M

Hybels addresses our fears of evangelism and explains why it’s often much more simple than we tend to think.

FILTER #2: PURPOSE Key question: Does it align with God’s purpose for my life in this season?

Sometimes, I’m tempted to fill a space in my life with something good—but it doesn’t line up with God’s call on my life, at least not in this season. I find it easier to say no to something when I can tell myself, Not now. Perhaps later, but not in this season. If, in seasons to come, I sense God redirecting my purpose, I can revisit those things to which I said no earlier.

TO O B US Y NOT TO P RAY

FILTER #3: SIGNIFICANCE Key question: Does it help me lead a life of significance?

By keeping my eye on the eternal horizon, I can filter out those things that hold only temporal value. This doesn’t mean I say yes only to deep, spiritually significant commitments. If something of godly but temporal value fills my energy bucket and keeps my life well balanced, I recognize that the balance and emotional stamina it provides empower me to lead a life of significance.

Some might say, for example, that a turtleseeking adventure in a wooden rowboat with my grandson doesn’t have deep spiritual significance. But I know better. I know it refuels me like few other sources of joy in my life; and I know it infuses in that young boy a sense of his inexpressible value to me—and to God. Be quick to say yes to things that empower you—directly and indirectly—to lead a life of eternal significance. These are the legacy builders, friend. Don’t miss them.

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Hybels presents practical ideas on making time for prayer and how to pray and also reminds us just why it’s so important.

TH E POW E R O F A

When you get to the end of your life, you will no doubt ask yourself two questions: Am I right with my family? Am I right with my Maker?

It’s pretty simple, really. In the end, everything boils down to this. If you know in your soul that you can answer yes to both these questions, then when it’s your turn to lie in that final bed, you will experience joy, peace and satisfaction. And you will have left a rich legacy for others to follow.

What legacy are you leaving behind? On your final day on this earth, when you look in the rearview mirror of your life, will you see a legacy that brings a sense of deep satisfaction?

Or will you see a string of cluttered days filled with things that didn’t really matter in the end?

Simplifying is not merely intended to make your life easier—like uncluttering a drawer or closet might. You simplify your life for reasons that matter for eternity: to give clarity, purpose and power to the things that matter most in the world.

You intentionally say no to things that clutter the soul—like jam-packed calendars, out-ofcontrol finances, deep-seated fears and broken relationships. You turn away from rabbit trails that would take you off the main road and distract you from what your life is really all about.

And you say yes to things that matter, like family, friends, Christian community, satisfying work and ministry roles that maximize the gifts God has given you to further His Kingdom.

Solomon ends the book of Ecclesiastes with this cut-to-the-chase conclusion: “Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind.”

This is what life is all about, friend. This is what fills the void in your soul. Do whatever it takes to radically simplify your life. It’s the only way you’ll be able to say on your final day, “I’m satisfied.”

We get one shot at this life. Choose a purposeful, God-first life, and you will reap rewards for today and for eternity. Choose a life where the God-shaped void in your soul is filled to overflowing, and you will leave a legacy for those who follow you. Invest your one and only life with all the clarity and focus you can give it. This is simplified living. This is the life that satisfies.

WHISPER

Hybels unpacks what it means to hear from God and encourages believers to step out in faith to answer His call.

BILL HYBELS is the founding and senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill. He is the best-selling author of more than 20 books.

Adapted from Simplify by Bill Hybels. Copyright © 2014. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

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SHE’S BEATEN THE ODDS, BUT SHE’S JUST GETTING STARTED

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B Y L AU R A S T U DA R U S

hen Sharon Jones picks up the phone, it doesn’t matter who you are—she’ll address you like a friend.

After a brief hello, she launches into a description of her day. It’s been a rough one. After only being declared cancer-free a month prior, the singer is now days into her tour with her backing band, The Dap-Kings.

On stage, she’s working hard to maintain her upbeat persona—equal parts big tent revival preacher and Motown diva.

But at the moment, she’s playing hooky from the soundcheck for tonight’s show in favor of resting in her hotel room.

She announces the fact with a hint of frustration. But the soul singer wants to make one thing clear: She’s not angry or bitter about the health issues that plagued her in 2013—she’s simply thankful to be alive.

“When the doctor told me it was cancer, and it was pancreatic cancer, and it had spread into my lymph nodes, I thought I was going to die,” she says.

“I didn’t even think I was going to be here to perform ... It was a shock, but I was so grateful for everyone. I think once I announced what was really going on, all of the positive energy I got back from the fans made me want to get out here.”

P H O T O C R E D I T: J A C O B B L I C K E N S TA F F

A LATE START It’s obvious right away that joy is laced into every aspect of Jones’ life. Another reoccurring facet is her love for her fans.

The 58-year-old singer spent most of her life waiting for people to care about her talent. Growing up in the Church, Jones found plenty of opportunity to exercise her big-voiced soul style.

But outside the chapel walls, in the age of disco, no one was buying her style.

And then there was the matter of her appearance—which most deemed too uncommercial to sell. (Horrifyingly, one record executive went so far as to suggest she bleach her skin.)

Unwilling to give up, Jones contented herself with taking gigs as a wedding or

session singer—augmented by a string of odd jobs. (In a piece of “too good to be true” trivia, she briefly worked as a prison guard at Rikers Island, where the inmates asked her to sing Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All.”) Jones’ break came when she met Daptone founder Gabriel Roth at a recording session. Jones partnered with house backing band The Dap-Kings, and in 2002, her album Dap Dippin’ With Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings became the label’s first release.

Looking back, Jones takes the career delay in stride. To hear her tell it, she’s thankful for the extra years she spent out of the limelight.

“I look at everything in my life, people in my life, things that come was part of God’s plan,” she says. “Even me starting out late in life, even getting sick, this cancer here, it’s all just part of God putting that on you.

“So some people look at things as, ‘God, this is the worst thing that happened in my life,’ but sometimes it takes the worst thing that happened in life to get you through another step in your life.

That’s the way I look at it.”

STRONGER More than a decade after Jones got her break, she has toured all over the world and recorded five albums.

The band’s latest album, Give the People What They Want was recorded before Jones’ diagnosis, but she’s had to deal with the effects of her cancer and chemo throughout the touring and promotion process.

The video for the album’s fiery second single “Stranger to My Happiness” proved to be a challenge for the singer.

It was a moment, for better or for worse, that she was forced to heal in the public eye.

“I was happy I was doing the video, but I wasn’t happy during the video because I was bald-headed,” she says.

“I wanted my hair. The effect of the chemo, my nails and hands—I was concerned how I was going to look. But this is how I am. I’m not wearing a weave, and I’m not going to wait until I’m healed and looking good until I come back out to the people.”

To heal, both emotionally and physically, Jones found herself relying on God, who the singer says has always been a part of her life. “[Cancer] just made GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT my relationship stronJones and The Dapger,” she says. “Just Kings once again give like my pastor will say, old-style soul new life.

I haven’t been at the church recently, but all of those years that I did go to church, she said it was like all of my prayers and stuff was on layaway—left everything on layaway to take me through. When you’re away from church and can’t get there, the years you come, that’s all a part of me, a part of my life. I was raised in there.”

Her journey, combined with her faith, is something Jones doesn’t downplay or take for granted.

“The energy I have, the starting out late in my life, I always say that that’s God’s blessing,” she says.

“It’s totally Him blessing me. And over these years, even now, it’s still coming. It might be slow, but it’s been blessing me. So my faith has gotten stronger.

“When you come and see one of my shows, you see I get up and I tell people how it is. I don’t play,” she continues. “I’m very truthful on the stage about stuff. I’m just grateful that God has blessed me, and I express that on the stage.”

GIVING THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT The road ahead for Jones looks good. Sure, she’s not feeling 100 percent, but she’s cancer free.

“I’m just happy that I’m alive, and I’m happy to be back out here and seeing fans,” she says.

Many fans had been praying for her, she says, and “at my shows now when they come up to me and I’m fine, they’re taking pictures, some of them hugging and crying, telling me I’m such a big inspiration.

“To find out I’ve been an inspiration to them, that’s my happiness,” she says breathlessly. “All of these years, I always felt that was a gift God gave me, and I told people that one day people would accept me for my voice, not the way I look.

“All of these years that we’ve been working, now it’s finally paying off. It’s just like my work that I’ve been doing is speaking for me now. And so that’s my joy. That’s my happiness.”

L AUR A STUDARUS is a writer living in Los Angeles.

She’s a regular contributor to Under the Radar, Filter, eMusic and RELEVANT.

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SHOULD I JOIN THIS

FACEBOOK DEBATE? A Q U IZ

BY JON AC U F F

7 QUESTIONS TO ASK BEFORE YOU THROW DOWN ONLINE

T wenty years ago, it was a lot harder to get into arguments with people.

For one thing, a face-to-face argument takes bravery. You have to care enough about your position to engage another person in the awkwardness that is arguing.

You also probably didn’t know many people who liked to argue.

Sure, you had a few argumentative friends, but you didn’t see them every day.

You didn’t have much interaction with them. You bumped into maybe 30 people in an average day and the opportunities to disagree with someone were few and far between.

Now though, you and I live in a virtual wonderland of disagreement. With the click of a button you can instantly run into

more people than your parents did during the entire year of 1987. And—this is going to surprise you—but not all of those people share the exact same beliefs as you do.

About anything.

The massive numbers of people, ease of use and ability to say bold things while hiding behind a computer has made Facebook more than just a social site. It’s a factory churning out invitations to arguments.

But which ones should you get into?

That’s the challenge. We now have an endless buffet of discourse and debate, topics and tantrums. Where should you aim your plate? There are so many to choose from that it gets overwhelming. Until now.

Here are seven questions you should ask before joining a Facebook argument.

!

1

DO I CARE ABOUT THIS TOPIC?

You would think this one would be intuitive, but you’d be surprised. Have you ever had an argument with a spouse, boyfriend/girlfriend or friend and during the middle of the argument someone yells, “What are we even fighting about?”

We have the ability to fight about things that don’t really matter to us. It’s also easy for arguments to start in one place but quickly head somewhere different. As you look at a post on Facebook, honestly ask yourself, “Do I care about this topic?”

If you have a hard time answering that, ask, “Would my friends say I care about this topic?”

If the answer is “yes,” proceed with the rest of the questions. If the answer is “no,” move on. Arguing with people on Facebook just for the sport of it is dumb.

@

2

DO I REALLY KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS TOPIC?

There are large segments of the Internet populated by “instant experts.” These are the bold souls whose volume of arguing greatly outweighs the volume of knowledge they actually possess about the topic.

Don’t be like that. Instead, engage in arguments you either already know a lot about or want to learn about. (Debating something and asking questions of someone who legitimately knows a lot can be a great way to learn.) Got a strong political stance that has been built primarily off of fourthhand knowledge gained from a co-worker who really hates some politician? That’s not knowledge. That’s gossip.

Before you jump into an argument, get informed. You have the greatest, easiest information tool known to man. And if you’re already on Facebook, you are one Google search away from learning more. Read before you argue. Research before you debate.

#

3

DO I KNOW THE PERSON WHO STARTED IT?

Before you argue with a stranger online, go find a random apartment complex in your town.

Knock on the door of someone you’ve never met. When he opens the door, start telling him about the evils of gluten, the importance of essential oils or your favorite movie.

That’d be weird, right? Then why do we do that exact same thing on Facebook without thinking twice? Arguing with a friend is a completely different experience. You have a relationship with them. You have some degree of history that will set some boundaries of civility during the argument.

You won’t be drunk on the false sense of courage social media offers us. You’re more likely to be honest, kind and measured in a discussion with a friend.

A stranger though, tends to bring out the exact opposite in us. The problem is we don’t see that person as a person, we see

FACEBOOK IS MORE THAN JUST A SOCIAL SITE. IT’S A FACTORY CHURNING OUT INVITATIONS TO ARGUMENTS.

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RAGE NEVER LEADS TO DISCUSSION. IT LEADS TO MORE RAGE AND WORDS YOU CAN’T TAKE BACK ... OUR WORDS, EVEN OUR ONLINE WORDS, LEAVE A RESIDUE ON THE LIVES THEY LAND ON. them as a screen name. They are not an individual, they are an idea. And it’s easy to hate an idea. Which brings us to our next question.

$

4

AM I STARTING FROM A PLACE OF ANGER?

I know that when we Christians are angry we’re supposed to use the story where Jesus cleared the temple as an example that it’s OK for us to be angry. I understand that, I do, I’m just suggesting that your anger over a Facebook argument might not be the same as that of a Savior who cleared a temple He had been visiting His entire life.

If you’re already angry about the topic or just mad from a bad day you had, put your participation on pause. Rage never leads to discussion. It leads to more rage and words you can’t take back even if you delete the comment you left.

Our words, even our online words, leave a residue on the lives they land on. Be careful.

I don’t think you should count to 10 before you post anything on Facebook, I just think in some situations you should sleep on your idea overnight before you launch into a discussion you might be too hot for.

%

IS IT WORTH MY TIME?

Arguing online takes two types of time from you: The first is the time you spend creating your comment. The second is the time you spend thinking about your comment and the argument.

The first type is pretty small—it doesn’t take too long to write out a response. Even one that is well thought-out only takes a few minutes. It’s the second type of time that is so expensive and sneaky. Have you ever been in an argument with someone at work? As you drive home, you still think about it. Over dinner, what he said to you gnaws at you. Depending on the size or

5

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severity of the argument, you might even have a hard time sleeping that night.

You’d think an argument on Facebook wouldn’t cause the same damage, but you’d be wrong. Online or off, arguing leaves a mark.

So before you get involved, ask if this conversation deserves some time from the rest of your day. Maybe you’re not busy.

Maybe your weekend isn’t that important.

Maybe you need a new hobby and thinking about how some jerk responded to you on Facebook costs less than taking up racquetball. Your call really, but I promise if before you jumped into arguments online you asked, “Is this worth four hours of thinking time?” you’d engage in a lot less arguments.

^

WHAT’S MY MOTIVE?

The Internet would be a lot nicer place if everyone had noble motives. It’d be wonderful if people only brought up topics to discuss so they could educate friends and strangers on important issues of the day in a kind, compassionate manner.

If you’ve used Facebook for 12 seconds though, you know that’s not the case. People argue online for a variety of reasons that we can’t control. But we can control our own motive, and that starts with honestly admitting what it is. Are you getting into an argument because you felt like a loser all day and just want to win something? Are you trying to embarrass someone you don’t like? Are you revenge-commenting because the person who started a new post hurt your feelings a month ago? Are you just trying to make a bunch of strangers think you are smart and articulate?

If your motive is anything other than, “I think I have something helpful to add to this discussion,” rethink your desire to participate. Good motives lead to good discussions. Bad motives start bad and tend to stay bad.

6

&

WILL IT CHANGE ANYTHING?

Know what no one has ever said? “The way you belittled me and heatedly yelled at me online changed my long-held personal beliefs about that topic. Thank you!”

Does that mean you can’t change someone’s opinion or maybe impact a discussion for the better on Facebook? Not at all.

Change is possible. I’ve seen people come around on issues because of conversations online. I think there is a lot of healthy discourse happening online. Just know ahead of time though that if your desire is to change people’s opinions every time you get into an argument online you are not going to enjoy the Internet very much.

If someone is arguing with profanity, abusive words and anger, don’t engage.

You’re not going to change what they believe, they’re just going to change how much time you have left in your day.

The reason it’s important to ask questions like this is that no generation has ever dealt with Facebook arguments before.

Have you ever thought about that? You can’t ask your parents how they handled Facebook when they were your age because it didn’t exist. You and I are part of the first generation to ever engage with the Internet from a young age.

There are few precedents. We are the pioneers, and that comes with great opportunity and responsibility. That sounds like something I heard in Spider-Man, but if you want to argue that it was actually a quote from Batman, have at it.

I’d argue back with you, but I’m pretty sure my motive is to make you think I’m a smart writer who knows a lot of pop culture references.

I should probably sit this one out.

7

JON ACUFF is the New York Times best-selling author of four books. He lives in Franklin, Tenn. with his wife and two daughters. Read more from him at his blogs, Acuff.me and StuffChristiansLike.net.

YOU’RE NOT THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO WOULD GO TO SEMINARY. OR ARE YOU?

Looking for an open, invigorating environment to explore your spiritual side? Learn how theology engages the arts, social justice and spirituality through an interfaith lens.

Come discover Education for Transformation. unitedseminary.edu RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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CONTENTS

relevant recommends ISSUE _68

MUSIC

JACK WHITE LAZARETTO

[THIRD MAN RECORDS/COLUMBIA]

In the first act of Jack White’s career, he was like Jerry Lee Lewis, glorying in how much rock and roll he could make with so little.

Since the dissolution of The White Stripes, he’s become more of a P.T. Barnum, keeping fans guessing as to what might come out of his bottomless bag of tricks. For his second solo album, that bag of tricks delves deeper into the wounds he hinted at on 2012’s Blunderbuss. It’s a darker affair, with stomping bass lines and seething guitar solos. White’s always been at his best when he’s just slightly unsettling, and he perfects that edge here. He’s a master of trickery, but never more arresting than when he’s at his most authentic.

SHOVELS & ROPE

SHARON VAN ETTEN

SWIMMIN’ TIME

ARE WE THERE

[D U A LT O N E R E C O R D S]

[ J AGJ AGU WA R]

It’s easy to draw Johnny Cash and June Carter comparisons to Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst, given that they’re both husband/wife duos for whom Southern-soaked folk music comes as easily as sneezing.

But Shovels & Rope are more than just a throwback to the ’60s.

These songs sound both vintage and modern, and they’re better than most music you’ll find today.

There aren’t many singersongwriters on the scene right now with Van Etten’s sense of immediacy. “Break my leg so I can’t walk to you,” she croons on this album’s towering, six-minute masterpiece, “Your Love Is Killing Me.” That lyric tells you a lot of what you need to know about this album—it’s plain, simple and stark, with just a hint of beauty.

Background music, it ain’t.

IMAGINE...

walking down a narrow path while people are streaming out of their homes to greet you.

They are celebrating your arrival because you’re the person who brought the good news of Christ to their village.

GOING LIKE THIS

BE INTERESTED Text “internships” to 804.504.1813

COME, DISCOVER THAT JOY.

OPENINGS AVAILABLE

Mission Internships & Field Positions

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PH :

804.225.5517 | go@WorldHorizons.org

WorldHorizonsUSA.org/go facebook.com/worldhorizonsUSA

THE HOTELIER

PROPAGANDA

BANKS

JESUS CULTURE

HOME, LIKE NOPLACE IS THERE

CRIMSON CORD

GODDESS

UNSTOPPABLE LOVE

[HUMBLEBE A ST]

[HARV EST RECORDS]

[TONETREE MUSIC]

Propaganda is a rapper, but he’s so bound and determined to stretch his music beyond the bounds of the genre that calling it “rap” almost doesn’t do it justice. Crimson Cord sounds as influenced by Muse as it does by Mos Def, but the lyrics are purely Propaganda’s as his deeply felt convictions about the Kingdom of God come across as more potent than preachy,

She’ll get Lorde comparisons, but Banks has more in common with Aaliyah. Her first full album comes saddled with the sort of hype usually reserved for bands on their third or fourth release because Banks spent the past few years amassing diehard fans by virtue of her spooky pop melodies. Her songs will make you want to dance even as they haunt your deepest dreams.

For a lot of bands, the live album is a lazy cash grab. For Jesus Culture, it sort of feels like the main point. Jesus Culture thrives in a live setting, where their passion and drive can cut loose over a full auditorium instead of being shoved into a recording studio.

With staples like “10,000 Reasons” as well as new gems like “Light of the World,” this is the next best thing to a live concert.

[TINY ENGINES]

The Hotelier’s sound owes a lot to the emo bands of the early ’00s like Brand New, but frontman Christian Holden’s lyrics set them apart. “Your Deep Rest” tackles the death of a friend with quivering maturity, but it’s got a deceptively catchy hook to go with it. In high school, you would have pumped your fist to this. Now, it’ll take your breath away.

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relevant recommends

MOVIES + BOOKS

MOVIES

JOE

NOAH DARREN ARONOFSKY

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

MISTAKEN FOR STRANGERS

DAVID GORDON GREEN [RO A D S I D E AT T R A C T I O N S]

[PA R A MOUN T PIC T UR ES]

WES ANDERSON

[ABRAMORAMA

[FOX SE A RCHLIGH T]

E N T E RTA I N M E N T ]

The Grand Budapest Hotel boasts every signature Wes Anderson move, from the kitschy set pieces, to the cast, to the symmetrical camerawork. At the same time, it breaks new ground, emerging as Anderson’s most absurd work yet in terms of humor and violence.

Like all of Anderson’s films, it’s a masterpiece.

Mistaken for Strangers focuses on the brother of The National’s lead singer, Matt Berninger, as he joins the band on tour. The film isn’t really about The National at all—though it definitely humanizes them—but rather about Tom Berninger and his struggle to live in the shadows of his rockstar sibling while trying to find his place.

Nicolas Cage may have plenty of flops, but in Joe, Cage proves he can act. A return to the indie film for David Gordon Green, the film features Cage as an ex-con who gets a shot at redemption when he meets a young drifter played

by Tye Sheridan (The Tree of Life, Mud). Set in rural Texas, the Southern Gothic tale is stark and gritty but hopeful.

Noah may be an ideological vacuum as the atheist director tries to please every religion with a hand in the flood story. But it’s also a visual spectacle with spectacular performances and special effects.

Darren Aronofsky’s message is confused, but the vehicle carrying it is striking. It’s not true to Scripture, but the film makes for a fun and fascinating experience.

TOM BERNINGER

THINK SEMINARY IS

ONLY FOR PASTORS? THINK AGAIN. Christ has a unique role for each of us within His Kingdom. Are you equipped to respond?

Ashland Theological Seminary can prepare any leader for a life of ministry—not just those behind a pulpit.

Visit seminary.ashland.edu/ThinkAgain to begin your unique journey.

Ashland Theological Seminary equips leaders for kingdom impact by blending solid theological training and dynamic spiritual formation.

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BOOKS

GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD

CUBED

THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST

TRIVIAL PURSUITS

NIKIL SAVAL

AMY ROWLAND

IAN DIORIO

ELIZABETH ESTHER

[D O U B L E D AY ]

[ALGONQUIN BOOKS]

[BAKER BOOK S]

A book offering the “history of the workplace” may sound dull, but Cubed is anything but. Saval weaves in pop culture, work trends and history, examining power roles, how offices really function and the changing nature of where and when we work.

Cubed offers insights we can all learn from—whether you work in a cubicle or not.

A transcriptionist who records other people’s words for a living, Lena feels she is living a secondhand life until a mysterious news story prompts a quest for truth.

A story of a woman searching for deeper meaning as well as a portrait of a the decline of the newspaper, Amy Rowland’s debut novel explores hard questions packaged in beautiful prose.

The “pursuit of happiness” is built into our social conscience in America, but so often our search for happiness leaves us feeling empty. DiOrio diagnoses the problems with our constant pursuit of comfort, entertainment and money and offers some ways to change focus. It’s a refreshing reminder of what really matters and the only One who can truly satisfy.

[CON V ERGENT BOOKS]

Growing up in a fundamentalist movement, Elizabeth Esther was trained in street preaching and apocalypse preparation. Her memoir detailing her experiences and journey out of the movement is fascinating and jaw-dropping— the kind of book you accidentally read in one sitting because you simply can’t put it down.

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CONTENTS

relevant podcast ISSUE _68 CHECK OUT THESE RECENT EPISODES OF THE RELEVANT PODCAST

BOB GOFF & DON MILLER

JOHN MARK MCMILLAN

PETE HOLMES

CARL LENTZ

APRIL 11, 2014

APRIL 18, 2014

MAY 2, 2014

MAY 16, 2014

Two years ago, Bob Goff inspired the world to live lives of extraordinary, unbounded love with his book Love Does. Goff has certainly lived an extraordinary life, but it can be hard to know how we can live out love in our ordinary, everyday lives. We sent Donald Miller, author and close friend of Goff, to talk to him about some ways to live with whimsical adventure—and we recorded their conversation so you can listen in.

John Mark McMillan’s music is hard to categorize. His latest album, Borderland, is self-produced, full of indie sensibilities, but also a worshipful and authentic examination of faith. He and his band stopped by the RELEVANT studio to perform a few hauntingly beautiful songs for this episode, which is one for the ages, clocking in at almost two hours. You’ll want to listen all the way through.

Comedian, podcast host and late-night personality Pete Holmes comes from a past you might not expect. Before he was the host of his own show on TBS, Holmes was a college student studying to be a pastor. And he thinks ministry and comedy have a lot in common. We talk to him about how his views on religion have changed, his friendship with pastor Rob Bell and the calling of comedy.

He’s made Justin Bieber cry from the pulpit and discipled NBA MVPs, but there’s more to Hillsong NYC Pastor Carl Lentz than just being a “celebrity pastor.” We talked to him about dealing with criticism, ministering in the spotlight and engaging with tough topics. It’s a conversation you won’t want to miss. Also on the episode, we introduce “Andy Talk,” a new segment with one of our favorite photographers.

Bridging difference Listening generously Tell i n g Good News

Lanie Smart, MDiv Student Westerville, Ohio

800.264.1839 | lpts.edu

Explore these degrees | Master of Divinity, MA Marriage & Family Therapy, MA (Religion), Doctor of Ministry

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relevant .tv ISSUE _68 CONTENTS

CHECK OUT THESE MUST-SEE ORIGINALS AT WWW.RELEVANT.TV

JAMIE TWORKOWSKI THE RELEVANT Q+A

4 QUESTIONS EVERYONE SHOULD ASK

‘HOLY GHOST’ (IN-STUDIO)

‘O FOR GRACE’ (IN-STUDIO)

JOHN MARK MCMILLAN

BRADY TOOPS

John Mark McMillan has been a major player in the worship and wider music scene for more than a decade. His fourth album, Borderland, which released in March, showed that McMillan’s talents as a musician and songwriter have only grown. If you’re a McMillan fan, you won’t want to miss this live performance of “Holy Ghost” off his new album.

And if you’re not a fan yet, this is sure to sway you.

Brady Toops makes the kind of music that speaks to your soul. The lyrics are refreshingly honest—simple, yet profound, with the kind of rich, beautiful vocals that never go out of style.

Toops stopped by the RELEVANT studio to perform a few songs off his self-titled album (which you can listen to on The Drop). If you haven’t heard of him yet, it won’t take long to see why Toops is one of our favorite new artists.

WITH JON ACUFF Since 2006, the organization To Write Love On Her Arms has been offering hope to those struggling with depression, addiction and self harm. We talked to TWLOHA founder Jamie Tworkowski about his organization, the shifting views toward mental illness within the Church, how to help a friend dealing with depression and more.

The conversation about faith and mental illness is an important one—and one infused with hope.

It’s remarkably easy to get offtrack from what we really want our lives to look like. We get busy, we disconnect from meaningful relationships, get stuck or forget we still have a lot to learn. In this video, Jon Acuff presents a few questions everyone should ask themselves on a regular basis. No matter where you are in life, it’s a great reminder of some truths that are sure to make you think.

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contents

JULY/AUG 2014 ISSUE 70

REJECT APATHY High-tech solutions for the developing world, where persecution is worst and more.

52

THE HUMAN FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE Why climate change harms people in developing nations around the world.

56

LEAVING IT BEHIND How one family abandoned the American Dream in search of something more.

FEATURES 60

TEDASHII The rapper tells us what he learned about God when his life fell apart.

70

WHY WE NEED SUPERHEROES

64

STATE OF THE UNION Millennials are waiting longer than ever to get married. Does marriage stand a chance?

As a new wave of superhero blockbusters hits theaters this summer, we talk to the cast of The Amazing SpiderMan 2 and X-Men producer Ralph Winter about what the need for heroes shows us about ourselves.

76

CAGE THE ELEPHANT The band on their defining album, influences and what music is really about.

80

SIMPLE SPIRITUALITY How to simplify your faith—and fill your life with the things that truly satisfy.

84

SHARON JONES The soul singer reflects on her late start and her battle with cancer.

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60 TEDASHII

08

FIR ST WOR D

10

FEEDBACK

12

SLICES

The return of Rob Bell, bringing sustainability home, how Hollywood is remaking your childhood and more.

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JULY_AUG 2014

Seven questions to ask yourself before diving into a debate on social media.

76 CAGE THE ELEPHANT

28

THE DROP

Johnnyswim, The War on Drugs, our summer playlist and more.

34

MAKER

Jeremy Cowart, how millennials are bringing back entrepreneurism and 7 leaders on how to change the world.

SHOULD I JOIN THIS FACEBOOK ARGUMENT? A QUIZ

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R E L E VA N T R E C O M M E N D S

Music, movies, books and digital media you should know about.

CHECK OUT OUR TABLET EDITION! Now available on iPad and Android.

RELEVANTmagazine.com/tablet

a r m e d w i t h t r u t h .co m

THE NEW ALBUM J U LY 1 hillsong.com/worship