RELEVANT - Issue 81 - May/June 2016

MORGAN FREEMAN | THE NEIGHBOURHOOD | SETH GODIN | CLAIRE DIA Z-ORTIZ | ROB BELL | JOHN GRAY FAITH, CULTURE & INTENTIONAL LIVING

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

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MAY/JUNE 2016, ISSUE 81 Just Stirring the Pot on Page 32 Publisher & CEO | CAMERON STRANG Editorial Director | AARON CLINE HANBURY Senior Editor | JESSE CAREY Associate Editor | DARGAN THOMPSON Editorial Coordinator | LINDSEY STATON Social Media Coordinator | TIFFANIE BRUNSON Contributing Writers: Kara Bettis, Matt Damico, Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Rob Fee, Mack Hayden, Clayton King, Brett McCracken, Johnnie Moore, David Roark, Kevin Selders, C. Christopher Smith Senior Account Manager | MATT BLAHNIK Account Manager | RACHEL DOUGLASS Designer | JOHN DAVID HARRIS Designer | DANIEL BARCELO Videographer | DOUG JACKSON Photographer | ABBY COX Audio Producer | JEREMIAH DUNLAP Contributing Photographers: Hannah Beatrice, Shawn Brack, Eddie Chacon, Neil Favila, Trever Hoehne, Bradley Siefert, Trunk Archive Operations Manager | NIKKI GRAHAM Circulation & User Experience Manager | AME LYNN DUNN Customer Experience Coordinator | CAROLINE COLE Finance Manager | MERCEDES SIMON Special Projects Coordinator | ERIC WARD Operations Assistant | JESSICA COLLINS Systems Administrator | JOSH STROHM ADVERTISING INQUIRIES: www.RELEVANTmagazine.com/advertise

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Issue #81 May/June 2016 (ISSN: 1543-317X). RELEVANT 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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DISCOVER S EU

Top 10 fastest-growing Christian universities in the U.S. The Chronicle of Higher Education

Follow us @seuniversity.

17

Graduate Degrees

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FIRST WORD

A LET TER FROM THE EDITOR

AGREE TO DISAGREE

BY CAMERON STR ANG

here are a lot of things in this issue we might hear about. For example, there’s Ewan McGregor talking about playing both Jesus and Lucifer in the new arthouse film Last Days in the Desert, which takes dramatic license as it explores Jesus wrestling with temptation and his own humanity in nuanced ways that aren’t alluded to in Scripture. Then there’s the article that tries to figure out who all these “evangelicals” are that political pundits keep talking about (Trump makes an appearance). And then, in Reject Apathy, there’s a piece that—wait, it’s not advocating for the legalization of marijuana, is it?

People might write in about any of those things, and understandably so.

But I predict the article in this issue we’re going to catch the most flak for is none of those. It’ll be the conversation we have with Rob Bell on page 70.

Side note: The most irate feedback we receive is consistently from people who don’t actually read the article they’re irate about. They shoot off of a venomous Facebook comment, email or tweet simply based on the headline and their perception of what the article says, instead of what it actually says. Which, you know, is super helpful.

Bell is the author of popular books like Velvet Elvis and Jesus Wants to Save Christians. He turned the sermon into an art form with his groundbreaking Nooma videos. He founded what was one of the most influential churches in the country.

But a lot of people’s feelings about Bell changed five years ago when he published his highly controversial book Love Wins, which asked big questions about the existence of hell. Soon thereafter, Bell resigned from Mars Hill, moved to LA to pursue TV, and prominent faith leaders publicly bid him “farewell.” When he re-emerged, partnering with Oprah a couple of years later, people saw that as confirmation he’d left the faith and was simply embracing a universalist “spirituality” message now.

But most people assumed that probably without hearing what Bell was actually

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teaching on Oprah’s platform. They probably watched a promo video and assumed the rest—which is exactly why we wanted to sit down and talk with him in this issue.

Whether or not you feel Bell crossed a heretical line with Love Wins, there is a larger perspective we can take with it. At its core, what Bell did was ask a massive question about which aspects of our theology are based on what Scripture actually says, and which of our beliefs are traditions or assumptions we just added on. Bell came to one conclusion, and maybe you come to another. But the act of asking the question is important.

We shouldn’t shy away from exploring ideas outside of our comfort zones. In fact, we should actively engage the practice.

As Christians, it’s important that we have discernment, but it’s also important to stretch ourselves. We should dialogue with those we disagree with—to better understand their perspective, and better understand why we believe what we believe.

Growth can happen in a lot of ways, and one is learning from those who don’t see the world the way we do. Do we have to take all opinions as Gospel truth? Of course not. Chew the meat and spit out the bones.

But to avoid dialogue with people we might disagree with (hello, political year) is small-minded. We should be humble enough to realize we don’t know everything and aren’t always right. And yes, God can speak outside of the box we put Him in.

When people like Bell say something we disagree with, let’s resist the urge to write off completely the other things God might say through them that could positively challenge us. Let’s have discernment but remain teachable.

Imagine how things would be different if we weren’t afraid of people who might believe differently from us. We might find more common ground than we realize.

I vote that we actually “read the article” and see what a person has to say instead of just scanning the headline, assuming the rest and lobbing grenades.

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

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FEEDBACK

ON ISSUE 80 MAR/APR 2016

MAKE MUSIC GREAT AGAIN This music issue was a perfect mix of artists I know and love (Cage the Elephant and Rend Collective), artists I don’t know much about (BØRNS and LANY) and artists I’ve never heard of (Gallant). It was fun to read more about each of them and about the broader things that are happening in music as a whole. I’m loving this new generation of genre-blending musicians.

JULIE L AWRENCE / Via email

T W E E T N E S S

@ J ON E S_TON E S

@RELEVANT magazine is continuing to amaze me with its ability to bring quality content to me at the times that I’m most receptive to it. @ R U SSFALLE TT

@RELEVANT Recommends on Spotify is so good it makes a grown man want to cry. @ SN IE QU IST

You know how much I love the @RELEVANT team. Thankful to be included in this issue. :)

I enjoyed reading “Rise of the Cool Catholics.” I used to be Catholic and love the Catholic church. I still love mass. I now go to a Baptist church and some of the things about the mass and liturgy are spot on. A lot of Protestants knock the Catholic church, but we really should all be working together.

BRETT SCOTLAND / Via RELEVANTmagazine.com

Wow! @RELEVANT magazine has had some seriously great stuff the last several months. I want to share all the articles.

Matthew Paul Turner’s article “Fear Not” was really impactful. It has been concerning to see American Christians let concern for their own safety make them forget about the call to serve the “least of these,” which include refugees, immigrants and those who are different from us. I’m sure we’ll continue to see terrorist attacks happen, but that shouldn’t make us vilify all Muslims. That will just weaken our witness.

HENNA PATEL / Via email

DANI B. / Via Twitter

Fun memories out of “9 People Who Definitely Went to Your Childhood Church.” The question now is, which one of these types will the kids in my church remember me as?

ANDY / Via RELEVANTmagazine.com

XAN KELLOGG / Via RELEVANTmagazine.com

MAY_JUN 2016

Thanks for the great article on our story “Marked for Good” @RELEVANT #UNREASONABLEHOPE #Gtat @ D E AN HAR DY23

Our media center specialist got us a school subscription to @RELEVANT and if anyone on campus deserves a raise, it’s her. @ G OE B E LWAR MIN G __

Thank you so much for Shauna Niequist’s “Wholehearted.” I’m at the beginning of the journey of truly learning this lesson in my heart, and it’s encouraging to hear from someone who has already gone through this. The practical advice is so helpful!

I know I need to internalize this truth, but I wasn’t sure where to start. Thank you for sharing.

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@ C HAD C V E AC H

Every article I’ve read from @RELEVANT was been... well... relevant. Great writing that pushes you. @ B E THAN Y_B B

The latest @RELEVANT issue has great tips for making friends after college. Perfect for an introvert like me!

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JUST GREAT ... WE’RE THE MOST ANXIOUS GENERATION EVER TECHNOLOGY IS ISOLATING US AND WE’RE FEELING MORE PRESSURE THAN EVER, BUT THE SPIKE IN ANXIETY MIGHT BE DUE TO SOMETHING WAY BIGGER

T

he world is getting more and more anxious.

“Modern life doesn’t give us as many opportunities to spend San Diego State University social psychologist Jean time with people and connect with them, at least in person, comTwenge recently published a paper that examined “Mulpared to, say, 80 years ago or 100 years ago,” Twenge told New tiphasic Personality Inventory” data dating back 80 York Magazine. She also pointed to millennials’ tendency to desire years. Surveys were issued in schools and colleges fame and money as a possible contributing factor. and asked students a variety of questions, including “There’s clear evidence that people who focus some that indicated levels of personal anxiety. on money, fame and image are more likely to be deAnxiety The findings are pretty startling. Despite adpressed and anxious,” she said. vancements in technology, ever-increasing access to But another study, also led by Twenge, may ofhas been wealth and longer life expectancy, anxiety has been fer another clue. Not only is belief in God at an allsteadily rising steadily rising since the 1930s. In 2013, 30 percent of time low, but the amount of people who say they since the college students reported feeling “overwhelmed” by pray is five times less than the number of individuall they had to do, as opposed to 20 percent in 1989. als who prayed in 1980. And the demographic that 1930s, and Forty-four percent of college students have besaw the biggest drop in both categories was 18- to 44 percent low average emotional health, up from 37 percent 29-year-olds. of college in 1989. The National Alliance on Mental Illness Though correlation isn’t necessarily causation, estimates that more than 5 million college students a study of college students from the National Instistudents have struggle with mental health—including anxiety tute for Health Care Research found that religious below average and depression. students actively involved in ministry not only reemotional Though there’s no way to link the rise in stress to ported less stress during difficult times—they even any single factor, some researchers have suggested visited doctors less. health. that isolation because of technology and a lack of It turns out, dropping out of your community community could be contributing to the problem. group probably wasn’t the best way to find margin.

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SLICES

M I S C. [HE Y, IT ’S SCIENCE ] Chick-fil-A stores across the country are doing their part to restore in-person conversation and good oldfashioned eye contact to meal time. They’ve created a “phone coop” for diners to put their phones into while they eat, rewarding those who use it with a free “Icedream.”

Seth Rogen and Adam Goldberg (the team behind Superbad, Pineapple Express, and This Is the End) are making a live-action version of Where’s Waldo, showing that Hollywood is officially out of ideas.

Rapper 50 Cent recently declared bankruptcy. In an effort to liquidate his assets, the rapper sold his 21-bedroom, 25bath Connecticut mansion, which is now reportedly being converted into the world’s blingiest assistedliving facility.

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WANT TO IMPROVE YOUR RELATIONSHIP? GO TO CHURCH Yep. Some new research from “The Institute on Family Studies” found a link between couples being happy and regularly attending a worship service. Only 67 percent of couples who did not attend religious services reported having “very” or “extremely” happy relationships, compared to 78 percent who did.

The study’s researchers deduced that “religious services may be particularly effective in turning the hearts and minds of men toward their partner’s welfare and the relationship more generally.”

‘Scandal’ star Kerry Washington

WHY IS HOLLYWOOD SO AWFUL AT DIVERSITY? A NEW STUDY SHOWS HOW WIDESPREAD THE PROBLEM IS

H

ollywood has never been great at diversity, and it’s not just the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. A new study from the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California found that while in 2014 and 2015 non-white minorities made up 37.9 percent of the overall American population, they got just 26.7 percent of speaking roles in movies.

The ratio wasn’t much better for scripted TV shows on cable (29.2 percent), broadcast networks (29.7 percent) or on streaming platforms (29.4 percent). Even more discouraging? The lack of non-white filmmakers behind the camera in Hollywood. Less than 12.7 percent of Hollywood movies are helmed by a minority director, and network TV is even worse (9.6 percent).

Ironically, among the highest-rated scripted shows of 2015 were Empire (No. 1), Scandal (No. 4), How to Get Away with Murder (No. 5) and Grey’s Anatomy (No. 7), all of which were created by an African-American and feature non-white actors in starring roles.

JOEL MCHALE IS ABOUT TO TAKE ON MILLENNIALS JOEL MCHALE may soon be back in primetime. The former Community and The Soup star is headlining a sitcom pilot that is essentially a sendup of millennial subculture. In The Great Indoors, McHale plays a middleaged outdoor magazine reporter who is forced back into the office by an injury. There, he leads the magazine’s digital marketing department, which is filled with a bunch of Twitter-using, culture-savvy, hipster twentysomethings. Curmudgeonly hilarity is sure to ensue.

SLICES

M I S C.

4 T O

43 athletes have been selected to potentially be a part of a team of refugees to compete in this summer’s Olympic games in Rio. “We want to send a message of hope to all the refugees of the world,” International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said in a statement.

KEYS S U R V I V I N G

WEDDING SEASON

BY ROB FEE

t’s summer, which means one thing: wedding season. Sure, it’s wonderful if you’re getting married. But for those of us who aren’t flying to Jamaica after the ceremony, it’s usually not quite as exciting. So how do you make it through all the weddings you’re invited to this summer? Here are a few keys: EAT BEFOREHAND No wedding in the history of weddings has ever taken place at a convenient time. Sure, the ceremony may only last an hour, but where they get you is that Lord of the Rings trilogy-feeling wait between the ceremony and the reception. You can’t be expected to Cha Cha Slide if you haven’t been given the proper Cha Cha Slide nutrients. This is why you need to eat a full meal before you leave your house. That way, the worst case scenario is just that you’re too full to go through the buffet line again.

HAVE FUN, BUT REMEMBER THE PHOTOGRAPHER By all means, enjoy your day by cutting loose, but remember, this is an event with a professional team of photographers and dozens of relatives all snapping photos like paparazzi watching Justin Bieber give CPR to a beached dolphin. You don’t want the biggest takeaway from the day to be that your dance moves look insane on camera.

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BUY COMFORTABLE SHOES Guys, get some black shoes that aren’t those shiny bowling shoes. Ladies, those giant heels are cool, but you don’t have to worry about Dikembe Mutombo trying to dunk on you during a candle lighting ceremony, so slip on some comfy flats and save your feet the agony of balancing on leopard-print stilts for nine hours.

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, JUST BUY A GIFT Your friends want you to attend their wedding, but in the same way that love covers a multitude of sins, a nice gift masterfully replaces the fact that you couldn’t attend their ceremony. No one has ever said, “Wow, that was so nice of Harold and Rebecca to attend our wedding even though they didn’t bring a gift.” If you buy a new couple a Wii U, they won’t care if you returned their RSVP letter covered in dog hair and baby spit. After all, that’s what wedding season is really all about: getting a Wii U.

Disney is making another High School Musical, because if something works once, why not do it three more times?

Details of the plot for High School Musical 4 haven’t been released, but we’re guessing it will have plenty of drama and singing.

NFL quarterback and outspoken Christian Russell Wilson recently launched a men’s clothing line called “Good Man” that aims to inspire men to do good.

The brand will donate a portion from each item sold to a nonprofit.

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RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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M I S C. The governor of Indiana recently signed a bill that bans abortions from being performed because of fetal genetic abnormalities.

The law will take effect in July and will also prohibit abortions from being performed because of a fetus’s race, sex or ancestry.

Jenna Dewan Tatum and Channing Tatum are executive producing a new dance competition show for NBC. Details about the format are being kept under wraps, but the project is described as a “fresh take” on the genre.

A church in Seattle recently had to be evacuated when a backpack left in a bathroom began emitting “cough inducing fumes.”

The entire street ended up being shut down. The culprit? A leaky can of Axe body spray.

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THE PLANNED PARENTHOOD SCANDAL MAY NOT HAVE CHANGED MUCH

[SAD BUT TRUE]

MORE CHURCHES FEAR REFUGEES THAN HELP THEM

A

new study has found that Christian churches are more likely to fear refugees displaced by war, ISIS and poverty than they are actually to help them in any way.

Recent research sponsored by World Relief and World Vision and conducted by LifeWay Research asked nearly 1,000 Protestant pastors about their congregations’ feelings concerning the Syrian refugee crisis. They found that 44 percent had “a sense of fear about global refugees coming to the United States,” and only 27 percent are doing anything to help them.

There was some good news in the study, however: 86 percent of pastors said their church believes “Christians have a responsibility to care sacrificially for refugees and foreigners.” Still, only 8 percent are doing anything about it locally.

The issue may soon be one many churches will need to address. The United States government has announced plans to resettle 85,000 refugees this year alone.

About a year ago, pro-life activists from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a series of undercover videos that show officials from Planned Parenthood negotiating payments for donated fetal remains.

Pro-life advocates hoped the videos would reignite the nation’s abortion discussion, but LifeWay Research surveyed 1,000 Americans and found 7 in 10 people (43 percent) are either unaware of the sting-style videos or “have not spoken out” since viewing them. Overall, LifeWay found that after viewing the videos, 18 percent spoke out against Planned Parenthood, and 12 percent spoke in support of Planned Parenthood.

THE NUMBERS

How are U.S. Congregations Helping Refugees?

Financially Suppor ting a Relief Organization

19

%

Volunteer ing With Relief Wor k

8

%

Politic al Ad voc ac y

6

%

EXONERATIONS ARE AT AN ALLTIME HIGH THERE’S A REASON SHOWS like Serial and Making a Murderer have become so popular: Recent research shows that something is very broken in the justice system. The National Registry of Exonerations found that at least 159 people were exonerated in 2015 after serving time for crimes they didn’t commit. It’s the highest number of exonerations in America since records began nearly three decades ago. The registry says the growing influence of innocence projects are partly to thank for the increase.

RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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SLICES

I . C .Y. M . I .

IN C ASE YOU MISSED IT

ENTERTAINMENT ACTUALLY WORTH YOUR TIME

F IL M /T V AUDIO B O O KS

ISIS crucifies a Christian teen in Syria

200 MILLION CHRISTIANS ARE CURRENTLY FACING PERSECUTION 2 J O H N GIVEZ: SOUL REBEL John Givez’s sophomore release is full of catchy, impactful hip-hop.

3 D E F E NDERS OF T H E U N B ORN A fascinating history of the pro-life movement before Roe v. Wade.

4 T H E B IG SHORT

Adam McKay’s inside story of the housing crash is maddening, hilarious and surprisingly enjoyable.

5 THE OH HELLOS: D E A R WO R M WOOD Fantastic folk with C.S. Lewis-inspired lyrics. What could be better?

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hristians around the world today are facing persecution on an almost unimaginable scale. According to a recent report from Christian Freedom International, more Christians have been killed for their faith in the 21st and 20th century than in the previous 19 combined.

As their findings note, “every five minutes, a Christian is martyred for their faith.” And with more than 200

THE NUMBERS

1 BE T T E R CA L L S AU L If you’ve been missing well-crafted, gripping drama since Breaking Bad went off the air, now is the time to catch up on this excellent spinoff.

million Christians currently facing persecution because of their beliefs, Christians remain the most persecuted religion in the world.

Globally, the situation seems to be getting worse: Other religious minorities and moderate Muslims face violence from ISIS across the Middle East, and tens of thousands of Christians are currently being held in North Korean prison camps.

Christians have dropped from

1.5 MILLION to

300,000 In Iraq

25

%

The rise of a radical Hindu movement in India has led to attacks on Christians

of Syria’s Christians have had to flee the country

STEPHEN KING’S FAITH HEALER NOVEL IS BECOMING A MOVIE ONE OF STEPHEN KING’S MOST CONTROVERSIAL books is headed

6 T H E F ISHERMEN

Chigozie Obioma’s story of three brothers growing up in Nigeria is redemptive fiction at its finest.

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to the big screen. Filmmaker Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) will adapt Revival, the story of a charismatic preacher who loses his faith after his family dies in a tragic accident. But, because this is King, things get creepy fast: The tent revivalist starts conducting experiments to give himself god-like powers.

Ashley’s morning commute looks a bit different in the village she calls home during a team outreach in the mountains of South Sudan.

A land where uncommon adventure rewards those who make unconventional choices.

Like a Social Worker who left city life to share Christ in a remote community unreached by the gospel.

It’s a daring move for anyone — a teacher, a nurse, an analyst, or whatever else you may be.

But the greatest risk is not considering it. Because you might leave life’s biggest questions unanswered and your most significant work undone.

Find your way to an unreached mission field.

AfricaIsUnexpected.com

SLICES

IS YEEZUS SPARKING A REVIVAL?

W

hen Kanye West revealed that the name of his latest album was The Life of Pablo, many hip-hop critics assumed it was a reference to either the artist Pablo Picasso or the infamous cartel leader Pablo Escobar. West’s revelation that it was actually about the Apostle Paul may have been surprising to some fans, but the reference— not to mention the frequent themes of spiritual wrestling on the record—are becoming more and more common for this generation’s self-proclaimed “most impactful artist.” And the same is true for just about every artist West had appear on the album.

THE GUEST ARTISTS ON THE LIFE OF PABLO ALL SEEM TO HAVE A COMMON THREAD OF WRESTLING WITH BIG QUESTIONS:

CHANCE THE RAPPER “Today’s the last day my old life, last day smoking cigs. Headed to church for help. All things are possible thru Christ who strengthens me.”

KENDRICK LAMAR “God put something in my heart to get across and that’s what I’m going to focus on, using my voice as an instrument and doing what needs to be done.”

— TO COMPLEX

— TWITTER

JILL SCOTT “Here I am again asking questions, waiting to be moved ... Where is the turn so I can get back to what I believe in? God, please hear my call ... I need your healing.”

— “HEAR MY CALL”

KELLY PRICE “The dictionary definition of the word ‘gospel,’ [is] not religious by definition. It just means ‘good news’ so when you can articulate good news, you are, in fact, delivering the gospel.”

— T0 BILLBOARD

KIRK FRANKLIN “[Condemning Kanye] is a dangerous message I believe we send to the world when our posture is they have to meet certain requirements before they are worthy to kiss the ring … It says people are not redeemable, forgivable or candidates for grace.”

— FACEBOOK

Analog.

You know the best thing about subscribing to RELEVANT (other than getting all that thought-provoking, entertaining content)?

Paper is scratch-resistant, never needs to be plugged in and you can drop it.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY R E L E VA N T M A G A Z I N E . C O M / S U B S C R I B E

SLICES

THE H T LIST BIMONTHLY CULTURE POWER RANKINGS

RETRO ACTION MOVIES [HOT TEST] Independence Day! TMNT! Ghostbusters! These aren’t your favorite rentals, this is your 2016 summer movie lineup.

TINY HOUSES [HOT TER] These affordable homes are having a moment, but mortgage-free home ownership has a cost: zero living space.

PTL! TELEVANGELISM IS ON NETFLIX BECAUSE WHO DOESN’T WANT TO BINGE-WATCH SERMONS?

EMOTICONS [HOT] Once Facebook jumped on board with its own emoticons, cartoon-inspired smilies finally became our primary form of communication.

SUNBURN [COLD] Nothing ruins a weekend at Coachella like having to bathe in that blue aloe gel for a week after you get home.

NICKELODEON REBOOTS [COLDER] Let’s leave Rugrats, Hey Arnold! and the rest where they belong: in the memories of every ’90s kid.

HOVERBOARDS [COLDEST] These handleless Segway things are known to burst into flames without warning, which technically makes them hot, but you get the idea.

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Y

ou may notice some new kinds of programming showing up in your Netflix feed.

The streaming platform recently struck a deal with four high-profile pastors to offer sermon series to subscribers. Along with Fellowship Church’s Ed Young, who helped organize the deal with Netflix, preachers Joyce Meyer, Steven Furtick and Andy Stanley signed on to release teachings for your binge-watching pleasure. And though Netflix didn’t ask them to change their messages for the platform, they did have one stipulation: They’re not allowed to ask people to send in money.

THE LONELY ISLAND IS THROWING IT ON THE GROUND—AGAIN SATURDAY NIGHT IS ABOUT to get a lot funnier. The Lonely Island—the comedy trio of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone—have teamed with comedian Paul Scheer to produce a new sketch comedy show for Fox. Party Over Here will feature three up-and-coming female comedians— Nicole Byer, Jessica McKenna and Alison Rich—in a series of live sketches and pre-produced shorts.

But, just because it’s on Fox doesn’t mean Samberg and cohorts are going up against Saturday Night Live. The show will air at 11, a half-hour before SNL starts on NBC.

Digital.

NOW YOU CAN NETFLIX AND CHILL WITH ED YOUNG, SR.

You know the best thing about subscribing to RELEVANT’s tablet edition (other than getting all that thought-provoking, entertaining content)? When was the last time you saw paper have stunning motion graphics and audio?

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SLICES

FINALLY, A GROCERY STORE FOR HIPSTERS You know you’ve been there: You’re shopping for a bag of locally sourced kale chips, and you think, “While I’m here, I might as well get a new tattoo.”

Well, Whole Foods has just the solution you’ve been waiting for. The chain is launching a new series of lower-price grocery stores designed to reach millennial customers, calling them 365 by Whole Foods Market.

Wait, is this idea just a copy of Trader Joe’s? Why no! The new stores will invite other businesses to set up shop on their patios, including body-care product sellers, record shops and, yes, tattoo parlors. The first 365 store opens in Los Angeles in May.

WHY AREN’T ENTREPRENEURIAL MILLENNIALS STARTING BUSINESSES?

M

illennials may not actually be as self-employed or own businesses. entrepreneurial as they like to Numerous factors play into the lack of think. Despite nearly 70 percent young entrepreneurs, but one may be strictof those polled telling Bentley ly financial: Millennials carry more student University researchers they’d loan debt than any generation in history. like to start companies, millen- According to Edvisors, the average 2015 nials are the least entrepreneurial genera- college graduate finished school more than tion in 70 years. $35,000 in debt.

New research from The Millennials also may be Kauffman Foundation found taking a more cautious ap20- to 34-year-olds make up proach than all-in business In 1996, 34.3 just a quarter of all entrepreowners because they want to percent of neurs. When the previous protect their flexibility. Regeneration was in that same search from the site FlexJobs entrepreneurs age range, they comprised found nearly a third of all unwere ages 20nearly a third of entrepreder-35 professionals would 34, compared neurs. Another study from prefer to work part-time so the Office of Advocacy of the they could also freelance, and to only 24.7 Small Business Administra39 percent said they like to percent in 2014. tion shows that fewer than spend their free time pursu2 percent of millennials are ing passion projects.

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HUGE ARTISTS TEAM UP TO MAKE AN ALBUM TO END POVERTY Ellie Goulding, Mumford & Sons, Kanye West and The National are among the artists working on a new album called Metamorphoses, which they hope can help change the world. The 12-track project, headed up by Mumford’s Ben Lovett, will feature lyrics submitted by fans online. Lovett said the goal is to give “voice to the words that might well inspire change, give hope or provide healing.” Proceeds from the record, which drops this fall, will support Global Citizen, an organization that aims to end extreme poverty.

L E CT I O DIVINA

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:

J OURNAL

The Lectio Divina Journal has awakened me to an enriching way to welcome both the Word and the Holy Spirit in forming my soul in prayer. Beginning my day with this journal has profoundly aided me in attending to God’s presence and activity throughout the day and I’m confident it will do the same for you.

SILENCE. READING. MEDITATION. PRAYER. CONTEMPLATION. INCARNATION.

DR. DENNIS EASTER | DISTRICT SUPERVISOR SOCAL FOURSQUARE CHURCHES The Lectio Divina Journal is one of the most practical prayer resources for our time; bringing the best of ancient contemplative practice to the modern world.

PHILEENA HEUERTZ | FOUNDING PARTNER, GRAVITY, A CENTER FOR CONTEMPLATIVE ACTIVISM In a season of busyness, of checking scriptures off my spiritual to-do list, I received a copy of the Lectio Divina Journal. Quietly, thoughtfully, it led me into a more rhythmic, intentional practice of meditation on the Scriptures, and freed me from mindless reading plans. Because of the Lectio Divina Journal, my times in the Scriptures are richer, more mindful. It is a journal for the contemplative; it is a journal for you.

SETH HAINES | AUTHOR COMING CLEAN - A STORY OF FAITH

Lectio Divina or ‘Divine Reading’ has been a formative practice for millions of Christ followers from the 3rd century up through today. This particular invitation offers stillness to ones mind and body — providing entry into the sacred gift of listening and being. Through the advocacy, guid-

The Lectio Divina Journal offers Christians a way to experience new words from the Spirit in very old ways.

LEAH PAYNE | ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY, GEORGE FOX UNIVERSITY In our fast paced culture we rarely create the space necessary to listen well, and even our devotional practices can become hurried and task oriented.

Lectio Divina helped me to rediscover the power and simplicity of quiet reflection. It’s careful construction helped me to relearn the practices that have shaped Christ Followers for centuries.

JON MCINTOSH | LEAD PASTOR GRACE CHURCH FEDERAL WAY, WA

ance, and companionship of God’s Spirit, the daily readings and direction offered in the Lectio Divina Journal, strengthens our awareness of God in the world, while bringing wholeness to our fragmented selves.

Our hope is this journal will refresh and awaken… welcome.

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Q +A

MORGAN FREEMAN’S SEARCH FOR THE STORY OF GOD

M

ORGAN FREEMAN MAY HAVE PLAYED GOD in Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty, but recently, the legendary actor felt he needed to travel the world to learn more about Him. The idea for the epic quest started when Freeman and producing partner Lori McCreary were in Istanbul and their tour guide told them how Jesus fits into Islam.

“That started a conversation about what else we

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don’t know about other religions, and maybe what other people in America and around the planet don’t know about different faith traditions,” McCreary told RELEVANT. “That was the genesis of the project.”

The result is the new series The Story of God on the National Geographic channel, which follows Freeman as he visits sites of religious significance around the world. We talked with Freeman and McCreary about the journey.

WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE SHOW’S VISION THAT INTERESTED YOU?

Morgan Freeman: I’ve been fascinated by these kinds of questions since my childhood. Physics and the idea of space and the universe and cosmos and the relationship those ideas have to the idea of creation—they’re fascinating.

So we came up with the idea of doing this show. It’s really daunting if you think about it. But you can do anything you set out to do.

And one of the most fascinating things about coming up with the idea is that you may now sit having accomplished it— five full continents, 100,000 miles, and 10,000 years in history.

HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE THE SHOW?

Freeman: It’s this instructive, sometimes entertaining, look and examination of a very serious subject.

Lori McCreary: It feels both epic and personal at the same time, especially through Morgan’s eyes. It’s interesting to see these people light up when they’re speaking about their own faith traditions and also see Morgan light up when he learns something he didn’t know before.

THE EPISODES ALSO MODEL A KIND OF CIVIL INTERFAITH DIALOGUE. WAS THAT PART OF WHAT YOU WERE TRYING TO DO?

Freeman: That’s absolutely an intentional part of it. We didn’t set out to compare; there’s no comparison between religions. We don’t say, ‘Look at this one.

This is better than that one.’ Or, ‘People who are doing this think they’re better than this one.’

All we’re doing is pointing out that, primarily, I think—and we don’t point it out explicitly—most religions are after the same thing. We’re asking the same questions for the same reasons.

McCreary: There was something very personal for each person in their interaction with God or their god. That’s what was interesting to us. It was this deeply personal, moving moment with individuals around the world.

AT THE END OF EACH EPISODE, YOU GIVE A SUMMARY OF WHAT YOU’VE SEEN. IN YOUR MIND, ARE YOU ANSWERING THESE BIG QUESTIONS ABOUT GOD?

Freeman: No, I don’t think so. I hope we did not seem to have attempted to give definitive answers to these ques-

tions. I still think that no definitive answers really exist. If everybody is asking questions, the idea is to point out that we’re all asking the same ones.

WHAT WILL MAKE THE SHOW A SUCCESS IN YOUR EYES?

McCreary: For me, part of the success of the show is already happening. We’re talking to people from all over the planet about God. It’s quite fascinating.

Most of the time when we have projects, we’re talking about the subject of the show, and it’s not always something I enjoy talking about so much and that I feel has the ability to connect people. [But for this project] we end up talking about how we grew up and what our belief is and things that aren’t normally talked about on a red carpet.

Freeman: End wars!

In The Story of God, Morgan Freeman explores the end of the world, afterlife, creation and the nature of God with people in places like Egypt, India and Rome.

RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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THE NIGHTMARE THE WORLD IS IGNORING

South Sudanese soldiers in Paloch, South Sudan

WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT THE DEVASTATING TOLL OF THE ONGOING CIVIL WAR IN SOUTH SUDAN? n 2015, during a long-running conflict between government forces and militant rebels in the young country of South Sudan, thousands of civilians were raped and executed. A report published earlier this year by the U.N. human rights office outlines atrocities so horrific, it’s almost unimaginable that they went largely unreported for months.

The report contains details of how instead of paying its military forces, the South Sudanese government allowed them to rape civilians. During a five-month span in a single state in the country, the investigation uncovered more than 1,300 rapes committed by soldiers.

In a New York Times report, one victim recounted how the forces murdered her husband, then tied her to a tree and forced

I

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her to watch them rape her teenage daughter. One African Union report even cited incidents of forced cannibalism.

“This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, with massive use of rape as an instrument of

often the hardest to reach,” says Jessica Bousquette, World Vision’s Policy Advisor for Child Protection. “And with 20 percent of the South Sudanese population displaced, that challenge is enormous.”

Some organizations have set up clean

“THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST HORRENDOUS HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATIONS IN THE WORLD.” terror and weapon of war,” said the United Nations high commissioner for human rights in a statement. “Yet it has been more or less off the international radar.”

Despite a cease-fire, the violence has been ongoing, displacing millions and pushing the country to the brink of famine.

“People who are in the greatest need are

water projects throughout the country, and are trying to vaccinate livestock to protect them from disease.

Even with a full-fledged effort, the devastation in South Sudan could take years to reverse. And if the international community doesn’t take notice—and action—it could get much worse.

RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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BLUNT TA L K DATA N O W S H O W S T H E ‘ WA R O N D R U G S ’ H AS DONE MOR E H A R M T H A N G O O D. I S T H E R E A C T U A L LY A CHRISTIAN CASE FOR LEGA LIZING M A R I J UA NA?

BY MARGO ROBINSON

ast fall, nearly 6,000 inmates around the country were released early from their prison sentences. They all had one thing in common: All were nonviolent drug offenders. It’s the single largest federal prisoner release in American history.

The move to release these prisoners is a signal that one of the main strategies in America’s “War on Drugs” is beginning to change. Each of the offenders who walked free was serving a sentence handed down years ago that was longer than it would be if they were sentenced today. Many were subjected to “mandatory minimums” that initially aimed to crack down on drug crime.

Leaders on both sides of the political aisle now believe that strategy is broken.

Currently, nearly 25 percent of all incarcerated people in the world are in the United States, a country home to less than 5 percent of the global population.

With almost 2.3 million prisoners, the U.S. has—by far—the largest number of people behind bars of any country. And nearly half of them are serving time for nonviolent crimes related to drugs.

Ironically, the harsh penalties associated with drug use in the U.S. have done little to actually stop people from using drugs, especially marijuana—a substance that a team of researchers at Scientific Reports recently found to be safer than legal drugs like alcohol and cigarette tobacco (drugs that happen to be highly taxed).

In fact, according to government data, from 1990 to 2007, illegal drugs became even cheaper and easier to obtain than alcohol and tobacco.

How badly has the War on Drugs failed? “About 4 million people above the age of 12 in the United States used an illegal drug in 1970, before we started the war,” says Jack Cole, a retired police

officer and founder of the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Today, the DEA tells us we have 121 million people above the age of 12 who’ve consumed an illegal drug in the United States. So we went from 2 percent drug users to 46 percent drug users under the War on Drugs.

“It’s hard for me to even contemplate how we could have come up with a worse policy if what we really wanted to do was reduce drug abuse.”

Beyond its failure to actually stop people from using drugs, the War on Drugs—with its harsh criminal penalties and prohibition of constantly used substances—has deeper problems. Its enforcement has become unjust and broken, and suddenly, reform is an issue Christians are taking seriously.

Bias Enforcement “Mass incarceration is one of our most vivid and dramatic and shameful public issues,” says the Rev. Alexander Sharp, executive director of the group Clergy for a New Drug Policy. “In many ways, this is truly a justice issue—the War on Drugs oppressing people of color to a shameful degree.”

Sharp is pointing to the blatant racial disparagement in the way drug policy has been enforced. Research from Forbes found that even though white individuals are just as likely to actually use illegal drugs as African-Americans, they are far less likely to go to jail for it. In 2006, one out of every 14 black men in America was behind bars; for white men, that number was just one in 106.

“The War On Drugs paradigm has been used in many ways to marginalize vulnerable populations, to incarcerate individuals who do not have violent records,” says the Rev. Kathryn Ray, the project coordinator for Clergy for a New Drug Policy.

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“WE’VE IMPRISONED PEOPLE IN GHETTOS ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY, ESPECIALLY PEOPLE OF COLOR, BECAUSE OF THE DISCRIMINATORY IMPACT OF THE WAR ON DRUGS.” —Rev. Alexander Sharp

“Whether they will remain incarcerated or not, it will keep them in a perpetual state of poverty.”

Prison time isn’t simply a temporary— though often extended—punishment. It can be the first step in a cycle of poverty that some individuals will never be able to break out of. Even when a prison term ends, the consequences of a felony conviction, even for a small amount of pot, can be devastating.

“An awful lot of people can’t vote.

There are all sorts of collateral consequences. You can’t get food stamps. You can’t get education grants. You can’t get housing, and most importantly, you can’t get jobs,” Sharp says. “We’ve imprisoned people in ghettos all around the country, especially people of color, because of the discriminatory impact of the War on Drugs.”

And though there are countless drugs on the streets across America, one is far and away the most common, leading to more arrests than any other drug: marijuana. According to a Washington Post investigation, in the last 25 years, arrests for marijuana possession have tripled as a percentage of overall arrests.

But that may start to change.

Mixed Messages Even though 23 states have decriminalized marijuana to some degree (including recreational use in some states), federal law still says it is a controlled

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substance that is illegal to possess in most cases.

The decriminalization trend has had an impact. Crime novelist Don Winslow—who adamantly discourages people from using any type of drug— has spent much of his career studying Mexican drug cartels. His best-selling books The Power of the Dog and The Cartel may be works of fiction, but they are based on a horrifying reality: Cartels will do anything to grow, produce and sell drugs to Americans.

During a recent interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Winslow explained that in the past, Mexican drug cartels routinely kidnapped women and young girls—after murdering their husbands and fathers—and forced them into slave labor on giant marijuana farms.

The marijuana was then trafficked to the U.S., where it was purchased and consumed by people who may not have been aware (or even cared) that their cheap high was the result of a system involving slave labor.

But, after several states started the decriminalization process and started allowing local growers to produce their marijuana crops under specifically outlined regulations, something dramatic happened: The cartels’ business plummeted.

Winslow told Gross that Mexican marijuana imports dropped by 40 percent “because they can’t compete with

AMERICANS IN PRISON

VS

350,000 BEFORE THE

WAR ON DRUGS

the American quality and market.”

The Christian Imperative Many Christian leaders strongly disagree with the recreational use of marijuana, pointing to Bible verses that prohibit intoxication. But data is increasingly indicating that the policies that regulate it are broken. Even if someone doesn’t agree with the morality of using certain kinds of drugs, the injustice of the broken system is taking a devastating toll.

“For the most part, Jesus didn’t go around changing people through punishment and retribution,” Sharp says. “He did it in a much more healing, embracive and compassionate way. That’s just the opposite of the War on Drugs.”

Sharp says reforming drug laws and ending the failed policies of the War on Drugs should be a Christian imperative.

“There’s no such thing as ‘paying your debt to society,’ and in Christian terms, the notion of forgiveness and giving people a second chance is simply not a reality if you have any drug offense on your record,” he says.

Even from a pragmatic standpoint, the policy does not seem to be working, impacting even the average taxpayer who does not use drugs.

“In the 46 years we’ve been fighting the War on Drugs, we’ve spent well over $1.5 trillion of our tax dollars on it,” Cole says. “And all we have to show for that money basically is that during the same 46 years, we have made more than 60 million arrests in this country on nonviolent drug offenses. Some countries don’t even have that many people, and yet we’ve arrested that many people in our country.”

Groups like Clergy for a New Drug Policy seek to reform the enforcement laws to get to the root of real problems like addiction and poverty, instead of just locking up millions of people, turning them into felons for life.

“It’s been demonstrated that prison is simply not a good deterrent,” Ray says.

Instead, her group calls for more money to be allocated toward education, allowing people to make informed decisions and break the cycle of drug abuse.

“As a youth minister, I absolutely do not want my youth experimenting with drugs if we can avoid it,” she says. “I would never encourage them to smoke marijuana or to experiment with alcohol.

“But as much as I fear that, I even more fear them being incarcerated for it.

Because they are youth, they are capable of rational decision-making, but they are also in an experimental phase. And I would hate to think that the consequences of them experimenting with alcohol or with marijuana for the first time would lead to an arrest that would stay on their record and affect their chances of going to college.”

The decriminalization of marijuana remains a controversial issue, and there is nuance to how reforms would be implemented. But as more and more states bring decriminalization measures to the ballot, it’s important for voters to be informed not just about the use of marijuana itself, but also about the consequences of making it a crime.

“I think it’s a justice issue at the core” Ray says. “Justice is very much related to the Gospel mission of Christ to seek out the marginalized and to bring them back.”

It’s hard to bring someone back when they are locked away alongside millions in the biggest incarcerated population in the world.

Next Steps As America prepares for another election season, the public has a chance to reengage with policies that affect the lives of millions of Americans.

And though Christians may come to different conclusions concerning their convictions about drug laws, being informed about the current state of incarceration and the long-running War on Drugs is the first step in forming an intelligent opinion.

The decriminalization of pot and other drugs is controversial, and many Christians disagree about its implications. But much of the moral issue surrounds how offenders are treated.

Rethinking how sentencing guidelines are created, what treatment programs could look like for those suffering from

INCREASE IN PEOPLE TRAFFICKED FOR WEED CULTIVATION 2011 TO 2012

81% ARE CHILDREN

addiction and the effectiveness of mass incarceration is part of trading in the “war” strategy for something more nuanced and effective.

Christians can disagree about the use of drugs like marijuana, alcohol and their legal statuses, but believers should be united in the agreement that the criminal justice system is badly broken and needs to be reformed.

“Putting people in jail is not anything that you’ve heard about in the New Testament,” Sharp says. “Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery, ‘Go and sin no more.’ He healed people. He forgave people. He spoke compassion. He tried to change people’s hearts. Putting people in jail for drug offenses, unless they’ve harmed other people, is not a Christian response.”

MARGO ROBINSON is a writer and justice advocate living in Baltimore, Maryland.

RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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STATEMENT STATEMENT

IS IT TIME TO EVACUATE CHRISTIANS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST?

BY JOHNNIE MOORE

IT

was 1938, and George Weidenfeld was a young Jewish boy living in Austria. He narrowly escaped the horrors of the Holocaust thanks to the generosity of Christians who smuggled him from Austria to England.

After coming to England as a penniless refugee, Weidenfeld became a publishing mogul and was knighted as a British “Lord.” He died in January at the age of 96. Toward the end of his life, he started using the fortune he amassed to “repay his debt” to Christians by saving Christians one by one from ISIS. “I can’t save the world, but there is a very specific possibility on the Christian side,” he told The Times of Israel when talking about his choice to fund the rescue of 2,000 Syrian and Iraqi Christians.

When CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked Weidenfeld why he was only saving Christians, he replied: “I want to focus on something I can—with great difficulty and effort—achieve. I have tremendous sympathy for Muslim victims, but … Muslims could be shifted a few hundred kilometers away, but the Christians will have to find safe havens at the other end of the earth.”

Tragically, the Western end of the earth isn’t open to these Christians. They can’t find safe haven in the United States because the government continues to deny them visas. When asked why, the U.S. government has repeatedly provided stock answers about “weighing a variety of factors” in determining who gets into the country. But

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the government doesn’t seem to be taking many steps to help Christians who are facing the potential eradication of their ancient faith and culture in the cradle of Christianity.

This isn’t the first time the United States denied asylum to people fleeing danger in their home country. The last time, most famously, was in 1939.

In May of that year, the transatlantic ocean liner St. Louis sailed from Germany bound for America. On board were 937 Jews attempting to flee the terror they saw coming. Yet, when they reached the U.S., they found a country unwilling to take them in.

U.S. officials denied them entry and turned their ship back to Europe. In the end, hundreds of the Jewish passengers were carted off to Nazi concentration camps, and more than half of them died.

Jewish people like Lord Weidenfeld recognize the similarities between that time and this one—between the Nazis and ISIS. Arab Christians like Father Douglas Bazi are begging the world to open its borders.

Terrorists first attacked Bazi in 2006, when he lived in Baghdad. He was shot and tortured. They broke his back and smashed his face and knees with a hammer. He also survived attempted bombings of his church, and he was kidnapped for nine days.

Bazi has had a front row seat to the decade-long assault and persecution that has nearly eradicated Christianity from its ancient heartland. Now, he concedes that it’s time to consider leaving.

“If you love us,” he says, “let us leave.”

Christians in the West should commit to sustaining, supporting and praying for those who want to stay in their homeland, but should also commit to opening countries, welcoming the “stranger” and raising money to save those who want to leave.

Since the Holocaust, a simple phrase has found currency in our language. We’ve heard it on the lips of presidents and preachers, humanitarians and human right officials: “never again.”

JOHNNIE MOORE is a Hollywood executive, faith leader, humanitarian and author of books including Defying ISIS. Find him on Twitter at @JohnnieM.

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INNOVATIVE INDIE POP INFUSED WITH SPIRITUAL LONGING ild Nothing is the sort of band you go to when you want to remember how to dream. Jack Tatum’s group has been churning out reverb-laden indie pop since 2010’s Gemini.

The band’s latest, Life of Pause, is yet another step forward into an even more soulful direction.

“My thinking behind not only just this record but trying to progress as a songwriter in general is that you have to change,” Tatum explains. “I sort of have a ‘fight or die’ mentality. I have to keep pushing myself. I don’t want to make the same record again.

It feels better to introduce a handful of new things record to record.”

W

“I’ve tried to tap into the ways music alone can evoke a mood.”

38

MUSIC THAT MATTERS

Life of Pause may reveal a new set of tricks, but it stays in step with Tatum’s dual ear for the catchy alongside the innovative. He knows how to write a pop song in a vocabulary only he can teach you.

One of the most impressive things about Wild Nothing is how well the band conjures up feelings of near-spiritual longing and wistfulness. When asked how intentional it was to use Life of Pause as a sort of door into some greater, transcendent experience, he responds with humility.

“It’s not so intentional. It’s a hard quality to put your finger on. I’ve always been attracted to bittersweet moments in songs. It comes back to the idea of pop melodies with a twist. Maybe it’s a happysounding song but the lyrics are kind of a bummer.

It can be as simple as that. But I think, from the first record, I’ve tried to tap in to the ways music alone can evoke a mood. Sometimes you don’t need to even say anything to convey that sense of longing or whatever it might be.”

W H Y W E L OV E T HEM:

Wild Nothing draws on everything from indie pop to soul to punk to craft innovative landscapes of sound that make Life of Pause both diverse and cohesive.

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THE DROP

ARTISTS TO WATCH

THE SINGER-SONGWRITER IS OFFERING UP HER OWN VULNERABILITIES IN BEAUTIFUL WAYS the music video for Liza Anne’s song “Lost,” off her latest album, Two, a black-clad dancer stands against the wall in a plain white room. As the song progresses, the dancer bends and moves, sweeping down to the floor, folding her body into itself.

It’s stark, lyrical and beautifully simple, much like Anne’s music itself. Anne took dance classes while she was growing up, and she cites that as one of the reasons her music and lyrics are emotional— she grew up relating words with movement.

“Writing for me is very therapeutic,” she says, “so as deep and as dark and as into myself I can

IN

“The truest thing I can say is just being totally vulnerable and really blunt.”

40

MUSIC THAT MATTERS

go, I will go.

“The truest thing I can really say is just being totally vulnerable and really blunt,” she says. “Because I’m not really good at communicating in normal life. I have a hard time getting my point across. So for songs, it’s just literally whatever I’m thinking, no matter how dark or strange. This is my place to do it.”

That kind of vulnerability, paired with Anne’s angelic voice and ethereal instrumentation, has gained her millions of listens on Spotify and attention from tastemakers such as NPR. For Anne, songwriting is a craft she’s learned and a muscle she has to exercise, but it’s also “this mystical thing.” As someone who wrote her first album at 18, touring and writing songs is still helping her know herself better, digging into the layers of her experiences and who she truly is.

“Writing is slowly peeling back those layers,” she says.

W H Y W E L OV E HER :

Liza Anne has one of those voices that soothes your soul. Her mellow, atmospheric sound makes her music the perfect soundtrack for rainy days.

F OR FA NS OF:

Lorde, Jessie Ware, Noah Gundersen

RIVERS & ROBOTS

T HE DROP

Stream these albums (& tons more) on The Drop at RELEVANTmagazine.com

RIVERS & ROBOTS LOVE WORSHIP MUSIC. The Man-

chester, England band’s new album, The Eternal Son, draws straight from Psalms for singable, fun songs they hope point people toward Jesus.

But Jonathan Ogden, the band’s founder and lead singer, also aims to bring more creativity than is often found in Church music.

“Worship music shouldn’t become a genre,” he says. “It shouldn’t need to be one sound or one style. Because we’re worshipping a creative God, the music should reflect the creativity as well.”

TYSON MOTSENBOCKER

Letters to Lost Loves

WHY WE LOV E THE M:

The band is proving that worship music can have a broader appeal to fans outside the Church.

JAMESON ELDER

Prodigals & Thieves FOR FANS OF:

Young Oceans, Bellarive, Colony House

SLEEPING AT LAST

Hearing

J U DA H & T H E L I O N

Folk Hop N Roll

JOSEPH N ATA L I E R O YA L

My Last Prayer

H E A R T WAT C H

Heartwatch

“JOSEPH” MAY SEEM LIKE AN ODD NAME FOR A GIRL BAND, but the masculine title has special meaning to the sisters turned folk trio. Developed while recording their debut album after visiting their grandpa Joe in Joseph, Oregon, the band name also draws on the biblical story of Joseph. The sisters aren’t a “Christian” band per se, but they believe their music and their generation has a bigger purpose. When asked what they want people to feel when listening to their music, Natalie and Meegan Closner instantly reply in unison: “Not alone.”

“Like somebody else feels what they feel,” Natalie explains. “That’s why I listen to music, to find new words for my human experience.”

WHY WE L OVE THEM:

With biblical imagery and three-part sibling harmonies weaved throughout, folk never sounded so gorgeous.

FOR FANS OF:

First Aid Kit, Lucius

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41

THE DROP

CONVERSATION

Q +A

KIM WALKERSMITH art of Jesus Culture since its beginning, Kim WalkerSmith has become one of the most respected leaders in worship music.

In the year leading up to the band’s newest album, the Jesus Culture team helped plant a church in Sacramento, California, where they experienced tragedy from multiple angles.

We talked to Walker-Smith about the music that produced.

P

WHAT THEMES DO YOU EXPLORE IN YOUR

WATCH KIM PERFORM “ALIVE IN YOU” AT THE RELEVANT

NEW ALBUM, LET IT ECHO?

STUDIO, PLAYING NOW ON YOUTUBE AND RELEVANT.TV

All the songs on this album are originals, and they all come out of our experience with planting the church.

It was a stretching time. All of us moved to plant the church, leaving our families and homes. Then Chris [Quilala, the co-leader of Jesus Culture] and Alyssa lost their baby. A few months later, my stepdad passed away. Within our community, we had two other moms lose their babies. What we believe really got tested in that time. What we all rallied around as a community was that what we believe about God is still true. He is still good. He does heal. He’s the same God despite whatever circumstances we may be experiencing right now.

HOW DID THOSE DIFFICULT CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECT YOU CREATIVELY?

It was a fight, but it didn’t provoke us to want to sing about the pain as much as we wanted to sing about the goodness and the greatness of God. Even in the face of what could feel like defeat, we know we’re not defeated. We know God is still great, He’s still bigger and He’s still sovereign. It’s not a denial of pain, but it’s making a choice to say that even though we don’t understand, we’re still going to proclaim how good He is—because that’s what pulls us through the hard stuff.

42

MUSIC THAT MATTERS

HOW HAVE YOU SEEN WORSHIP MUSIC CHANGE IN THE YEARS YOU’VE BEEN IN JESUS CULTURE?

“What we believe really got tested.

What we all rallied around as a community was that what we believe about God is still true. He is still good. He does heal.”

We definitely have become more accepting of greater creative elements within churches. We don’t think songs necessarily have to be within this one little key range. We don’t think songs have to be a very simple chorus. It’s really amazing where worship has grown and evolved and is allowing greater creativity into worship songs and into our worship services.

HOW DO YOU BALANCE STAYING OPEN TO THE MOVEMENT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT WHILE YOU’RE LEADING PEOPLE IN WORSHIP?

To be a worship leader, you have to be a really good multitasker. I’ll always make a plan. I know what songs I want to sing, and I’ve spent some time in prayer before I take the stage. I have my ideas, but there could even be a song I’m really excited about singing and then I feel like the Holy Spirit says, “I want you to throw that out the window; I want you to do this.” In the same way, I think a lot of worship leaders will get hung up on “Well, my pastor only gives me a 20-minute window.” We have to get that kind of thinking out of our minds, because the truth is that the Holy Spirit can do whatever He wants in five minutes or an hour.

THE QUIET SCIENCE THE QUIET SCIENCE THE R EKINDLING OF THE STARS THE R EKINDLING OF THE STARS

a worship album available may 3 on a worship album available may 3 on

QUIET SCIENCE The rekindling of the stars

QUIET SCIENCE The rekindling of the stars

THE

E VA NGE L I C ALS T H E W O R D ‘ E VA N G E L I C A L’ G E T S T H R O W N A R O U N D A L O T, E S P E C I A L LY IN T HIS ELECTION Y E A R . SO W HO A R E T H E S E P E O P L E , E X A C T LY ?

BY A ARON CLINE HANBURY

T

he biggest surprise of the 2016 presidential race has easily been the unexpected rise of outsider candidate Donald J. Trump. His brash style, liberal past and controversial statements about minorities and women would seemingly alienate him from the traditionally conservative Christian voting bloc that makes up the majority of the Republican base.

So when poll after poll indicates that the voters carrying Trump are evangelicals, it raises eyebrows. According to The Washington Post, Trump has received about 36 percent of the so-called “evangelical vote” in the primary races. His closest competitor was around 20 percent.

However, the Trump-evangelical love story isn’t entirely storybook. Among Trump’s loudest detractors are evangelical Christians, almost always citing his questionable morals as a reason for their disapproval. And a study by the Barna Group found that evangelicals who actually attend church are significantly less likely to favor Trump.

Add into all of this Trump’s highly public endorsement from Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, the largest evangelical university in the world, and another study by Barna that found evangelicals are the least likely even to pay attention to this election (compared to other faith traditions and nonbelievers)—and all of this talk about evangelicals gets thoroughly confusing.

Of course, differing views on presidential candidates is hardly news. But this disconnect seems deeper. Who are these evangelicals that both heavily support and disdain the same candidate?

GOSPEL PEOPLE In a sense, the definition of an evangelical is pretty simple, at least according to Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. He says the “really short description is that evangelicals are people who take the Bible seriously and believe in Jesus as Savior and Lord.”

The term itself comes from the biblical word for “good news,” referring specifically to the news (the Gospel) about Jesus Christ. From this perspective, “evangelical” refers to a person (or church) committed to the message of Jesus.

Beyond this, probably the most widely accepted definition of what it means to be evangelical comes from David Bebbington in his famous book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. He describes four characteristics that define an evangelical: 1) Belief in the Bible; 2) Theological focus on the cross of Jesus; 3) Participation in evangelism and social work; and 4) Emphasis on individual conversion from sin.

Of course, you can’t miss how much room outside a few core traits this leaves for different beliefs and practices. That’s why we see evangelicals who are Anglican, Methodist, charismatic, Lutheran, Reformed and everything in-between.

Still, deciding exactly who to call “evangelical” has posed a problem for media outlets and researchers. Pew Research considers as evangelical anyone who selfidentifies as one—leading them to say that 35 percent of the U.S. population is evangelical. Contrast that to Barna Research, which defines an evangelical based on answers to nine theological questions, and the percentage drops 6 percent.

Evangelicals are a diverse group of Christians who share unity around the Gospel, which makes caricatures of them as a political subgroup all the more confusing.

A VOTING BLOC?

“Evangelicals are people of Christian faith, not people of partisan politics,” he continues. “Most of the hundreds of millions of evangelicals in the world wouldn’t know the difference between Democrats and Republicans. Being an evangelical Christian is a whole lot bigger than being an American who votes.”

CHRISTIANS WHO VOTE Anderson says Christians shouldn’t merely concede their identity to the political-industrial machine. Rather, they should insist that their political interests flow from who they actually are.

“Before talking about the politics of poverty, start with a reminder that the Bible has more than 2,000 verses about poverty,” he says. “When the discussion is about immigration, begin with the 92 Bible verses on immigrants and how to treat them.

When we start with the Bible, it becomes clear that we are Christians who happen to vote rather than voters who happen to be Christians.”

This kind of belief-based participation in politics chips away at popular, misguided and divisive definitions of evangelicalism.

After all, if being an evangelical just means actively living out the Bible’s message that the world can have hope in Jesus Christ, then true evangelicalism is not about a particular earthly kingdom—or political party—but about being part of the Kingdom of God.

The politicization of American evangelicalism formalized back in the 1980s, with the formation of political action groups like Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority.

The idea that evangelicals have shared A ARON CLINE HANBURY is the editorial director of RELEVANT. Follow him on Twitter at @achanbury. values and would make a consistent voting bloc makes sense on the surface, but that assumpDonald Trump and Jerry Falwell Jr. speak at a tion misses the diversity Trump campaign event in Sioux City, Iowa of the group.

“Politicians and the news media have mistakenly assumed that evangelicals are primarily white suburbanites,” Anderson says. “There is a high percentage of American evangelicals among Hispanics and African Americans, although they are seldom or never mentioned in political analysis.

RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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G R A Y_

M AT T E R S WOR DS BY K AR A BET TIS P H O T O S B Y TA N N E R W E N D E L L S T E WA R T

YOU M IGH T YOU SEE J O H N G R AY S L AY I N G AN ARENA WITH U PROA R IOUS H U MOR , R ECOR DING A LI V E WOR SHIP A L BU M, H A NGING W ITH JUSTIN BIEBER OR SH A R ING A PULPIT W ITH JOEL OSTEEN. JUST W HO IS THIS GUY?

J

ohn Gray is preaching on stage at Houston, Texas’ Lakewood Church, in front of thousands.

In the middle of the sermon, without warning, he turns— and launches into a full-body rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

“His name is Jesuuus, Jesus Christ,” he belts to the tune of the iconic song. “Bled and died and rose just to give eternal life.”

The audience laughs and cheers, by now accustomed to Gray’s habit of turning a passionate sermon into a brief stand-up routine or performance.

Gray is the associate teaching pastor at Lakewood, which means he regularly preaches at America’s largest church. His style can be almost paradoxical to that of the church’s senior pastor, Joel Osteen— the famous televangelist and best-selling self-help author.

In the pulpit, Osteen has a calm, positive demeanor, and his sermons are fairly simple and motivational. Gray’s style, on the other hand, is spirited, hilarious and unexpected—he’s as likely to break into a song with his jaw-droppingly good singing voice as he is to drop a bomb of Scriptural substance.

Gray, 43, may seem like an odd fit to carry the pulpit of such a famous conservative church. But he sees himself as a complement to Osteen.

“Pastor Joel’s going to give you hope

every day. He’s not going to beat you up,” Gray says. “I’m a little more boisterous.”

Or, he offers another metaphor: “Pastor Joel is God’s handshake to unbelievers, and I’m the guy that tells you more.”

Along with pastoring at Lakewood, Gray is one of the most in-demand speakers at Christian conferences today. He headlines several arena-filling conferences each year, and is one of the few speakers you can find on the stages of America’s most influential churches, like City Church in Seattle, Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama, Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, and Hillsong NYC. In a church world often divided by denominations, racial and cultural boundaries, Gray has a knack for building bridges—a tendency all Christians can learn from.

John W. Gray III was born in Cincinnati, Ohio into a family that was heavily involved in music and Christian ministry.

At the age of 7, he was already directing the choir at Bethel Baptist Church.

In the mid-’90s Gray joined a gospel music group that starred Kirk Franklin.

Gray recalls being on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, at 21 years old, when he felt the Lord calling him out of performance and into full-time ministry.

“I firmly believe that if I hadn’t listened

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to God at that moment, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he says.

In 2009, after Gray had worked at churches in New Jersey, Georgia and Alabama, he met Osteen at a Hillsong conference. Osteen recognized him from Gray’s preaching on Trinity Broadcasting Network. The next morning at the hotel, Gray ran into Osteen at breakfast. They hit it off.

Gray says he admired Osteen’s ability to unite diverse groups.

In August 2012, Gray received his first invitation to speak at Lakewood. Two months later, he was offered a six-month contract to teach at the church, which quickly turned into a permanent position. By January 2013, Gray had stepped into his role as associate pastor.

He’s even written a play, MannaGod: The Journey, which depicts a conversation between two characters—his “flesh”

“I’M NOT A SURFACE ENTERTAINER. I’M NOT JUST HERE TO MAKE YOU LAUGH. I’M HERE TO BRING YOU JOY, AND THROUGH THAT, LAUGH. I WANT YOU TO ENGAGE.”

Lakewood averages around 44,000 in weekly attendance, and the nondenominational megachurch’s pastors are followed by millions more around the globe.

But Gray is branding himself outside of Lakewood, using John Gray World—or John Gray Ministries—to reach a broader audience and use his other talents.

“I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into just preaching,” he explains. “I want to use whatever else God has given me.”

For the pastor, “whatever else” includes acting, singing, playwriting, writing and comedy. But it’s not just entertainment—he sees mission behind his talents.

“I’m not going to minimize the gifts God has placed in me,” he says. “I’m not a surface entertainer. I’m not just here to make you laugh. I’m here to bring you joy, and through that, laugh. I want you to engage.”

On any given Sunday, that could mean Gray breaking out into song while preaching or making a point through comedy.

“I integrate all that I am,” he says. “When somebody asks me to [speak], I bring everything God created—nothing less and nothing more. I’m not Joel Osteen, I’m not anything else. Everything I am comes with me.”

and his “spirit.” With this, Gray hopes to encourage others with stories of how God has redeemed him and to aid the Church in dialoguing about the doctrine of depravity.

“The Church runs from our true condition,” he says. “I think that’s a tragedy.”

In 2016, Gray says he plans to produce a docu-series and a new musical recording. The value of pop culture, he says, is to make hard topics palatable for younger generations, much like Jesus told parables—a lesson through a story—in His sermons.

One of Gray’s passions is reconciliation.

He took part in two musical stage tours around the theme before he stepped into pastoral ministry, and he continues to talk and preach on the subject. He has seen both the ugly sides of racial disparity and the joy of uniting groups.

“I’m a firm believer that Jesus is the only uniting factor,” he says.

With his entertaining style and ability to connect with people, Gray is becoming a notable unifier, but he says he doesn’t want to be popular, just authentic. He says he would preach just as hard at a tiny, unknown church as he does at Lakewood or Hillsong or anywhere else.

For him, his authenticity is more about his mission than his personality. He’s accessible so people can access Jesus.

“Be authentically you. The world is not looking for copycats, they’re looking for originals,” he says. But, he clarifies, “You’re not a rock star. You’re supposed to reflect the character of Jesus. He was touchable, and He touched.”

K AR A BET TIS is a Boston-area reporter and freelancer on topics of faith, politics and culture. She tweets at @karabettis.

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MAY_JUN 2016

CHURCH PLANTING & MULTIPLICATION

{ {ONLINE} JOEXFT FEV TFNJOBSZ ] RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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BY KEVIN SELDERS

T H E L . A .- B A S E D NORW EGI A N SINGER IS M AKING WAV E S W I T H A N IR R ISISTIBLE, HOPEFILLED BR A ND OF S Y N T H P O P.

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MAY_JUN 2016

M

onica Birkenes, aka Mr Little Jeans, is still getting used to being in the spotlight.

The Norwegian-born singer went from quietly writing synth-pop tunes for herself to seeing her cover of Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” get millions of plays on SoundCloud and YouTube in 2011. Her 2014 critically acclaimed debut, Pocketknife, garnered immediate buzz, and the popularity has been a lot for the introverted chanteuse to take in.

“It can be exhausting,” she says. “But I just read a book on introversion and it said you come out of your shell if it’s really something that you care about and it’s important to you.

I feel like that’s the case. I’m pretty passionate about what I do. It doesn’t feel so taxing putting myself out there.”

Now living in Los Angeles, Birkenes is putting the finishing touches on a soon-to-benamed EP, while developing ideas for her sophomore full-length.

“I think maybe the EP will lean a little more toward the poppier stuff I’ve done,” she says.

“It’s kind of random the way songs turn out.”

A SOUND INFLUENCED BY SIGHT Birkenes adopted the Mr Little Jeans moniker from a character in an early Wes Anderson film.

“I’d just watched Rushmore with my manager

and somehow that came up, and I just decided to go with it,” she says. “I don’t think I thought about the fact that it might stick.”

Birkenes ended up working with the actor who plays Mr. Little Jeans, Kumar Pallana, and got to know him before he died in 2013 at the age of 94.

“We actually did a little film, but we never used it. He didn’t take direction very well,” she says, laughing. “That’s probably why Wes Anderson loved him. He taught me how to cook Indian food, we did yoga, etc. He was a fun guy.”

Film’s influence on Birkenes’ career goes

After an initial trip to LA, Birkenes met producer/songwriter Tim Anderson (Twenty One Pilots, Lykke Li, Best Coast). She fell in love with the area and decided to move there.

“It was pretty lonely in the beginning,” she says. “LA is a hard place to make friends because everything is spread out. It took a long time to build a circle of people.”

As she settled in, she began working on Pocketknife with Anderson and producer/ songwriter John Hill (Florence + the Machine, Santigold, Phantogram).

Music journalists may group Mr Little Jeans in with artists like The xx and Lykke Li, but

“A LOT OF MY WRITING TENDS TO BE, ‘IT KIND OF STINKS RIGHT NOW, BUT IT’S GOING TO BE OK.’ SOME OF IT’S LOVE; SOME OF IT’S JUST LIFE. THAT SEEMS TO BE RECURRING WITH ME.”

POCKETKNIFE

Birkenes’ debut album is full of pulsating, cinematic synth pop.

beyond her stage name. She attributes the cinematic feel of her music to her love for movies, and she enjoys writing songs for film, too.

She’s had songs appear in Iron Man 3, Celeste and Jesse Forever, and her song “Heaven Sent,” from Pocketknife, was originally written for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, but didn’t make the final cut.

“It’s really nice to have somebody else’s story to focus on and try to interpret,” she says.

Birkenes’ brand of synth pop is unique: over pulsating and mysterious synth backdrops, her songs offer hope. When you feel like you’re out there on your own/ Know there is someone watching over you, she sings with a youth chorale on “Oh Sailor.”

“A lot of my writing tends to be, ‘It kind of stinks right now, but it’s going to be OK,’” she says. “Some of it’s love; some of it’s just life.

That seems to be recurring with me.”

FINDING HER VOICE

READY FOR WHAT’S NEXT

At the age of 5, Birkenes began singing in her church choir in rural Grimstad, Norway.

“I couldn’t read, but they gave me solos, so my mom would draw pictures so I could remember what the words were,” she remembers.

Birkenes says her mom always pushed her to get involved in the performing arts. That’s how she developed her love for music and the stage.

At 18, she moved to London to study drama.

“I was writing [music] on the side and trying to get everything going, but London is a big place,” she says. “I had no idea how to go about it. I was answering the equivalent of Craigslist ads for musicians.”

Then, the man who would end up being her manager discovered her MySpace page. He reached out to her and got her to start investing in writing and recording her music.

But Birkenes didn’t feel like she fit into the high-end pop and soul scenes prevalent in London at the time. She and her manager decided a change was necessary.

Following the success of her first album, Birkenes says she’s ready to take things higher.

“Once you get somewhere, you want to go even further,” she says. “It sort of feels like it’s never enough. I don’t know if it’s healthy.

You’re trying to reach the next goal, which is good and ambitious, but it can also be taxing.”

As Birkenes wrestles with finding the balance between ambition and contentment, she has a clearer idea of what success looks like in terms of her career. She really just wants to work with new producers and tour places outside of the United States, like Australia and Europe.

“All I’m interested in is working with the people I want to work with and being able to pay my rent,” she says. “I feel like if I go to the next level, maybe I can stop at the next level.

That’d probably be a good place to stop.”

KE VIN SELDERS is a freelance writer living in the Kansas City area. Follow him on Twitter at @KevinSelders.

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Ewan McGregor the gospel [ACCORDING TO]

I N T H E C R I T I C A L LY A C C L A I M E D F I L M ‘ L A S T DAY S I N T H E D E S E R T,’ J E S U S H A S A S C O T T I S H A C C E N T. S O D O E S T H E D E V I L .

W E S AT D O W N W I T H E WA N M c G R E G O R T O TA L K A B O U T H I S G R O U N D B R E A K I N G TA K E O N T H E 4 0 - D AY T E M P TAT I O N O F J E S U S , A N D T H E EXPER IENCE OF GET TING INSIDE THE HEA DS O F H I S T O R Y ’ S M O S T FA M O U S F O E S .

“I

B Y B R E T T M C C R AC K E N

started reading the script, and the first three or four pages were just a man walking in the desert, with no reference made as to where it is or when it is or who he is,” Ewan McGregor recalls.

The script described a man sleeping under a bush, shading himself from the sun, walking endlessly through the landscape. The man is alone in the desert, But who he is and why he’s there aren’t clear.

The script was for a film called Last Days in the Desert. Director Rodrigo García had emailed it to McGregor with the proviso that it was unlikely he would want to do the film. It was too risky.

McGregor had just met García over the Christmas holidays after being introduced by mutual friend Emmanuel Lubezki (Oscarwinning cinematographer of The Revenant, Birdman and Gravity). He didn’t know what García meant by “risky.” But being an actor who likes challenges, he was intrigued.

“There was something beautiful, poetic and unusual about the writing,” McGregor says. His curiosity built as he read the script’s opening pages. The unidentified man walks across a wide-open desert and sees another man walking toward him in the deep distance. As he gets closer and closer, the man begins to recognize that the other man is actually himself.

“As I was reading this, I was like, ‘Wow. What the f*** is going on?’”

McGregor says. “When the two men meet face to face, the other man speaks first. Above his first line of dialogue, the script said ‘LUCIFER.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my god. Now I know who’s in the desert!’”

McGregor took the part.

McGregor is not a religious man. As he describes it, the extent of his faith experience was “a very brief religious moment” when he was about 14, back in Scotland.

“It didn’t leave any mark on me except that I was sort of glad it was brief,” he says.

The son of two teachers who themselves “weren’t really religious,” McGregor’s childhood experience of church mostly consisted of special occasions related to school or attending Sunday school because it “was just something to do.”

This is not to say McGregor has never explored faith in his films. The Scottish actor played a high-ranking Vatican official in Angels and Demons (2009), and in Moulin Rouge! (2001), his redemptive leading man was not named “Christian” for nothing.

Even if they don’t explicitly deal with faith or God, many of McGregor’s films are about morality (Cassandra’s Dream), sacrifice (Black Hawk Down), family (Big Fish, The Impossible, August: Osage County), or heartfelt romance (Beginners, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen). And, of course, McGregor went deep into “The Force” as Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi in the three Star Wars prequels.

Though he formerly had a bit of an indie bad-boy reputation (see Trainspotting and Velvet Goldmine) and battled alcoholism, the 45-year-old actor is today regarded as one of Hollywood’s genuine “good guys.”

He is a longtime UNICEF U.K. ambassador and an active supporter of charities like the orphan-centered GO Campaign.

His efforts to bring polio vaccines to hard-to-reach children in India and Nepal were chronicled in the 2012 BBC series Cold Chain Mission, and his motorcycling adventures around the world (chronicled in 2004’s Long Way Round and 2007’s Long Way Down) benefitted charities like Children’s Hospice Association Scotland and Riders for Health, a charity that works to provide health care by motorbike to isolated areas in Africa.

McGregor is also a family man. He has been married to French production designer Eve Mavrakis since 1995, and they are raising four daughters in their home in Los Angeles.

Fatherhood and family life may be inspiring a softer new direction in his acting choices. Instead of boundary-pushing films like NC-17 rated Young Adam (2003)

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The camera crew films McGregor on the set of Last Days in the Desert

or LGBT love story I Love You Phillip Morris (2009), McGregor’s upcoming roles include Lumiere in Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast (2017) and of course, Jesus in Last Days in the Desert.

McGregor says his family life inspired him in the making of Last Days, especially the Jewish faith of his wife. In preparing for the film, he says he drew more on experiences of her Judaism than his experiences with Christianity. Observing men praying in the synagogues, feeling the things they were praying and the way they prayed helped him get inside of the mind of the Jewish Jesus, who prayed a lot in the desert.

“I was trying to find the man who was a preacher, a holy man and whose father is God. There were many sides to Him.”

Directed by García (Nine Lives, Albert Nobbs) and shot

by Lubezki (who is Terrence Malick’s director of photography), Last Days in the Desert is a minimalist art house Jesus film, closer to Pier Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew than Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

With relatively little dialogue (“action over words always,” as Jesus says in the film) and almost no special effects, this quiet film is a far cry from the recent spate of CGI-heavy Bible blockbusters like Exodus: Gods and Kings or Noah. But in its haunting, speculative portrait of the struggles and temptations of Jesus at the end of his 40-day period of fasting, Last Days lingers in ways those epics do not.

The 98-minute movie, which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, narrates an extra-biblical episode in the “40 days in the desert” period of the life of Christ. The story opens with a hungry, bedraggled “Yeshua” (McGregor) shivering alone in the desert, weak and afraid.

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We see him pray in desperation for clarity and direction (“Father, where are you?”

“Father, speak to me.”) before stumbling across a nomadic family trying to survive in the desert.

The family, comprised of a world-worn father (Ciarán Hinds), dying mother (Ayelet Zurer) and restless adolescent son (Tye Sheridan), is a bit dysfunctional, particularly in the father-son relationship.

Much of the film finds Yeshua quietly trying to “untangle the knot” of the family’s complex dynamic.

Though the plot is invented, it comes off as thematically and (somewhat) theologically harmonious with what Matthew (4:1-11), Mark (1:12-13) and Luke (4:1-13) say about this pivotal, preparatory chapter in Jesus’ story. It’s a story about temptation, with Satan (played also by McGregor) a constant pestering presence seeking to derail the mission of Jesus before it begins.

It’s a story about the humanity of Christ, who fasted and was hungry, spent the night in the desert and was cold, saw people suffer and wept. And it’s also a story about Jesus finding clarity about his identity and mission, praying and preparing for the road to Calvary by grasping his identity as the son of God. The film presents the family’s fatherson dynamic as something Yeshua relates to deeply. In the boy’s frustrations with feeling drawn to ambition but also devoted to his father’s will, Jesus sees a bit of himself. This father-son motif

helped McGregor, himself a father and a son, enter into the character of Jesus as he prepared to shoot the film.

“I started reading books about Jesus and tried to find him that way, but the books were trying to disprove the idea of him being the son of God, and that was not helpful to me,” he says. “I was playing the son of God, a man whose father was God. This was a man who had trouble communicating with his father and wanted answers about his calling from his father, who is asking him to do this thing, to ultimately die a painful death.”

McGregor stopped reading books about Jesus and started thinking of him as a man, albeit a man with divine heritage.

“I was trying to find the man who was a preacher, a rabbi, a teacher, a holy man and whose father is God. There were many sides to him,” says McGregor, who liked that the film showed the strength but also the searching, doubting and frailty of the divine-human Christ.

“I thought it was interesting, this idea of a young preacher who isn’t absolutely self-assured on everything. I like that he had moments of uncertainty.”

The human side of Jesus is indeed a focal point of Last Days, though not in as jarring or sacrilegious a way as, say, Martin Scorsese’s controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). But García certainly foregrounds the fleshliness of Jesus and the world in which he walks.

It’s a world of dirt and decaying animals, a place where rocks get in shoes (as happens to Yeshua) and unexpected farts are funny. (Yes, this is a movie where Jesus laughs at a fart). It’s a world of work (Jesus puts his carpentry skills to use) and one of sleep and sexuality and slimy bugs.

And it’s a world where death is an inescapable part of life. Last Days doesn’t shy away from the breakability of mortal bodies, underscored in a haunting series of shots showing the death and cremation of a main character. One minute, the character is alive and here. The next, ashes.

McGregor’s Jesus is keenly aware of his mortality, struggling with his finitude as he fasts in the desert, even as the devil tempts him to transcend such limitations.

In Last Days, McGregor portrays Jesus’ 40 days of fasting and prayer in the desert

“We were completely cut off, just out there in the desert. It was very simple and pure.”

Unlike so many other Jesus movies, Last Days isn’t so much an Easter film as it is a Lenten one.

The 40 days of fasting and discipline in Lent have for centuries helped Christians identify with Christ in the desert, finding beauty in the sparse, simple landscapes of barren deserts both physical and spiritual.

Deserts in the Bible are rarely enjoyable places, but they are the places where God brings His people to teach them things, to refine and prepare them. Think of the wilderness wanderings of Israel for 40 years prior to entering the Promised Land.

Deserts are places of vulnerability and yet spiritual illumination, which is one of the things McGregor enjoyed most about shooting Last Days.

“There was something beautiful about making the film. There were no cell signals out there. We were completely cut off, just out there in the desert,” says McGregor, who rode his motorcycle three hours from his LA house to the desert and back each of the five weeks of shooting the film.

In contrast to the chaos and over-stimulation of LA sprawl, the isolation of the desert was inviting and replenishing for McGregor.

“It was very simple and pure,” he says.

Jesus isn’t the only star of the “40 days” story in the Bible, of course. Satan gets some serious screen time too. The Jesus-devil showdown in the desert takes on a particularly interesting tone in Last Days, however, in that McGregor plays both characters.

Always wearing the same costume but with slightly different accessories (Satan wears an earring and rings, vain guy that he is), Jesus and his tempter are intentionally portrayed as mirror images, hinting at the fact that temptation is often self-inflicted and one’s own ambition and insecurity is often the most insidious enemy.

“I suppose they are versions of the same guy,” says McGregor, who, in spite of his good-guy image (Obi-Wan!) admits the role of Satan “came a little bit more naturally” than did Jesus.

Some of the best moments in Last Days come in the back-and-forth dialogues between Yeshua and

Lucifer, a forsaken son and a fallen angel.

McGregor rehearsed these scenes with his friend and longtime stunt double Nash Edgerton, who read Satan’s lines when McGregor played Jesus, and vice versa.

The resulting McGregor-to-McGregor conversations are strangely compelling and often very thought-provoking.

Audiences might be surprised to see Lucifer portrayed with a semblance of empathy, a fallen angel who was once in God’s presence but is now cut off and bitter, looking at favored son Jesus with disdain and jealously, like the older brother in the Prodigal Son parable.

“There is a fraternal nature to their relationship,” McGregor says of the film’s Jesus-devil dynamic. “The devil’s job is to try to get Jesus to doubt himself and distrust his father, convincing him that he doesn’t have to do his father’s bidding, that he doesn’t have to die. But Jesus, of course, has a different idea.”

When it came time to assume the iconic posture of Christ on the cross (yes, the film has a crucifixion scene), McGregor expected to have some sort of transcendent experience or religious connection.

Yet, when the cameras were rolling and he saw crewmembers and wires all around

Ciarán Hinds, director Rodrigo Garcia and McGregor discuss a scene on set

During a 20-minute period of downtime as they waited for the light to change, the crew asked McGregor if he wanted to get down from the cross. He said no, and as he stayed on the cross, he realized everyone behind him had disappeared and the crew had suddenly become very quiet. As they filmed the shot, McGregor found a bit of what he’d been looking for.

“I felt a connection in that moment,” he said. “It was quite special.”

In that shot, beautifully framed by Lubezki with surprising angles and subtlety, McGregor’s Jesus stares out at the desert from which he had come. It’s an ambiguous gaze. What does he see in the desolation? Is there anything there? What is he thinking?

The blank slate of that gaze is fitting for the film as a whole. What do we see when we look at the desert? Do we see desolation and the absence of God? Or do we see something beautiful and sacred? The anachronistic final shot of the film poses this question in a provocative way, but it’s also a question audiences are prompted to ask of Jesus. How do we see him?

Is the Christ of this film a God-man with divine purpose and power? A mysterious sage with an unnecessary death wish? A bohemian carpenter who talks in riddles and parables?

Or maybe we see him in the way McGregor first encountered him on the pages of the script: a desert-wanderer who shivers and sunburns, hungers and thirsts, hopes and fears just like any of us. A man so normal and nondescript we almost miss him in the desert. To some a mirage, to some the savior of the world.

“The devil’s job is to try to get Jesus to distrust his father, convincing him he doesn’t have to die.” him as he hung on the cross, it all felt disappointingly mundane.

“There was something ordinary about it that was pushing against my hopes and expectations,” he says, adding that he was frustrated and annoyed that he couldn’t just have his moment on the cross alone, apart from all the cameras and crew.

“That’s such a stupid thing to say, but it’s how I felt. I wasn’t having the experience that I wanted to have on the cross, because, of course, it was just another shot in a movie.”

BRET T MCCR ACKEN is a Los Angeles-based film critic and author of the books Hipster Christianity and Gray Matters. Follow him at brettmccracken.com or @brettmccracken.

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NO LAUGHING MATTER A N E W G E N E R AT I O N O F COMEDI A NS IS SEEKING MOR E T H A N J UST L AUGHS — THEY’R E USING THEIR S TA G E T O C A L L O U T INJ USTICE.

BY JESSE CAREY

IN

late 2014, stand-up comedian and actor Hannibal Buress was performing at a small club in Philadelphia when he made a joke that would eventually take down one of comedy’s most legendary names. “[Bill Cosby] gets on TV: ‘Pull your pants up, black people! I was on TV in the ’80s! I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!’” Buress said during the set.

“Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby, so that brings you down a couple notches.”

Buress pointed out that dozens of allegations of sexual assault against Cosby had been public knowledge for decades, but no one seemed to care. He joked that Cosby had a “public Teflon image.”

The bit was a regular part of Buress’ set, but at that show, someone happened to be filming it with a cell phone from the back of the audience. That person uploaded the clip to YouTube, where it went viral.

At the time, Cosby was still performing sold-out shows and speaking at large events. He was in talks to star in a new NBC sitcom. But in the months after Buress’ joke went viral, the rape allegations against Cosby became national news.

More alleged victims came forward and filed lawsuits. NBC canceled the planned sitcom. Colleges around the world revoked the awards and honorary degrees they’d given Cosby.

Now, Cosby is no longer just an iconic celebrity. He is a man accused of serially assaulting more than 50 women and getting away with it.

For Buress, the bit has become a doubleedged sword: Yes, it led to Cosby’s arraignment and a massive social movement. But, in some ways, the attention has overshadowed Buress’ other work and made him into something he never intended to be: A social justice warrior.

Buress refuses to talk about Cosby, the material or the cultural firestorm it sparked. (When RELEVANT asked, he simply said, “Move on.”) But it still has become one of the most high-profile examples of the power of comedy to expose injustice.

Young comedians like Buress are tackling social issues with biting humor, revealing cultural hypocrisies and sparking major cultural conversations. And whether they like it or not, comedy is

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COMEDIANS SPEAK OUT JOHN OLIVER ON THE DEATH PENALTY “The death penalty is like the McRib. When you can’t have it, it seems so tantalizing.

But when they bring it back, you think, ‘Wow, this is ethically wrong.’”

TREVOR NOAH ON RACIAL INEQUALITY “For South Africa to achieve that kind of black-white wealth gap, we had to construct an entire apartheid state denying blacks the right to vote or own property. But you, you did it without even trying. We trained for decades and you just waltzed in and won the gold medal.”

WHITNEY CUMMINGS ON FEMINISM “Here’s the thing: I think feminism is working, but I think you guys are mad about it, and it’s coming out in nefarious ways. Like, the way guys talk about women has gotten more aggressive.”

CHRIS ROCK ON #OSCARSSOWHITE “I’m here at the Academy Awards— otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards. If they nominated hosts, I would never have gotten this job. You’d be watching Neil Patrick Harris right now.”

MICHAEL CHE ON GUN VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES “There’s a gun for every man, woman and child in this country; what are we preparing for, a rap beef? I know the forefathers said you have a right to own guns, but they also said you had a right to own people… the Constitution is a lot like our grandfather, he’s wise, we love him, and he means well, but he’s getting really, really old.”

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becoming something bigger than trivial punchlines. It’s becoming a movement.

THE BIG ISSUES Even though he prefers not to talk about the Cosby fallout, Buress acknowledges that comedy has the power to change people’s perspective.

“You can talk about serious issues in a fun way and kind of make people listen,” he says. “I mean, The Daily Show and other shows like that have tackled politics in a smart and intelligent way [and] make complex issues easily digestible.”

Real stats back that up. A 2014 study from the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute found that more people trusted The Daily Show as a news source than trusted the actual news network MSNBC. Satirical news shows hosted by former Daily Show correspondents have become late-night staples. The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (who has also been a vocal critic of Cosby) was named to noted TV critic David Bianculli’s best new shows of 2015. In its debut season, TBS’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee has tackled issues including the Syrian refugee crisis, sexual harassment and cultural appropriation.

Segments from HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver have consistently

gone viral, with Oliver delivering smart, funny takedowns of social issues including food waste, state lotteries, torture and the War on Drugs.

Buress points to the film The Big Short, which looked at the housing crash caused by shady financial industry practices as “being a comedy about something that’s kind of complex but breaking it down so the average person can understand.”

Nicole Byer, a cast member on Fox’s new Saturday night sketch show Party Over Here—which is produced by The Lonely Island and Paul Scheer—says comedy can actually spark real change.

“Comedy is powerful,” she says. “Look at what Hannibal’s Cosby bit did to Cosby. I mean, it’s sad that it took a man saying something for people to believe dozens and dozens of women. But he changed s***.”

Evan Gregory understands the funny side of politics and big social issues. As part of The Gregory Brothers satirical musical group, he’s helped “songify” political season with auto-tuned mashups from debates and news coverage.

“If people are using our videos as their primary resource, then there’s probably larger issues at stake that we need to have a national conversation about,” he jokes.

But pointing out the hypocrisy of what people say they believe compared with

The Gregory Brothers

Nicole Byer, a cast member on Party Over Here

what they’re actually OK with makes for easy material, Gregory explains.

“There are unique insights to be gained by looking at something with a comedic mindset that would otherwise go unnoticed,” he says. “Everyone walks around every day with all kinds of cognitive dissonance—namely, holding beliefs but then doing things to contradict those beliefs.

Comedy is the most effective way to shine a light on that and say, ‘This is hilarious.’”

THE JESTERS Zack Pearlman has been featured in Workaholics, Married, Community and Key & Peele. He also appeared alongside Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro in the movie The Intern and will star in the upcoming comedy Why Him? with James Franco and Bryan Cranston.

Pearlman says comedians are modern culture’s equivalent to the court jester, whose job was “to take all the hard news that was floating around in the kingdom and make the king laugh.”

But the court now lives online, he says, and in an era where things can circulate so rapidly and spark large conversations, there’s no shortage of difficult issues to talk about. But it’s often a funny video, tweet or meme that gets attention.

“Comedy is a spoon full of sugar that helps the medicine go down,” Pearlman says. “The truth is, if you watch that Hannibal thing, he didn’t go out there to alienate an audience. But it was tough to listen to. Ultimately, what he did was unbelievably important.”

Jokes like Buress’ Cosby bit work because even though they tackle difficult and nuanced topics, they show that

“cognitive dissonance” in a way that makes the absurdity of it funny. And when it’s funny, it actually changes things.

Byer gives the example of a two-minute SNL bit: “Sasheer [Zamata] on SNL did a [Weekend] Update piece on the lack of representation with emojis. We now have black emojis.”

Aziz Ansari’s show Master of None gained critical acclaim because of its unflinching and hilarious takes on racism and prejudice. When Amy Schumer jokes about gender inequality, she’s both poignant and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Key & Peele can make sketches about police brutality because they know how to do it in a way that’s not heavy-handed.

“As comedians, you have this blessing and curse of constantly looking toward your surroundings for material,” Pearlman says. “And because you put yourself in this hyper-aware space, you ingest everything. That includes social injustice. That includes misogyny or patriarchy. That includes calling out things that are not OK.” Buress agrees. “I think it does help people to be able to examine issues in a different way,” he says.

There have always been comedians who’ve used their platform to spark conversations about social justice—Moms Mabley, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin, to

“YOU CAN TALK ABOUT SERIOUS ISSUES IN A FUN WAY AND KIND OF MAKE PEOPLE LISTEN.” —Hannibal Buress name a few legends—but for much of this new generation, it has become the norm. The comedy still has a stinging edge, but it’s being done in a way that makes people more comfortable admitting and confronting their own hypocrisies.

BALANCING THE BLOWBACK In a culture where Internet outrage has become a part of talking about any controversial issue, there is a risk. People might get mad or offended. In Buress’ case, a comedian might find themselves as the face of a massive legal movement.

“There’s always somebody that’s gonna get upset about something,” Buress says. But taking on the bigger issues in an irreverent manner may be the best way to get people’s attention. As Pearlman points out, “Comedy is the alternative to thinking everything is fine.”

Pointing out broken systems has the power to take down an icon, to shine a light on injustice, to challenge people to make themselves better, and maybe even to change the world. It helps if you can make people laugh while doing it.

“If you are not relieving the stress that is life with your opinion that makes me laugh, all you’re going to do is make me more stressed out,” Pearlman jokes.

And that’s no laughing matter.

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

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B Y C L AY T O N K I N G

SE X UA L T E M P TAT I O N IS A LOT LIKE A I R . YOU C A N’ T R E A L LY G E T AWAY F R O M I T. SO HOW C A N CHRISTIANS FIGH T IT?

“DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE?” The young lady approached me at my book table, waiting until almost everyone had left after I’d given a talk about temptation. She seemed a bit nervous and kept looking around to make sure no one was listening in on our conversation.

“I’m 26 now and not married, but I want to be eventually,” she told me. “My problem is, I love Jesus and I want to be a good Christian, but I always seem to mess up with guys. Maybe it’s bad habits from college or some of it may be that I just lack willpower to say no.

“But sometimes I just feel stupid, because I give in to temptation, then I feel ashamed of myself for making the same mistake again. I always crave intimacy, but all I get is sex, and then I feel like God is mad at me, so I withdraw from church. Am I crazy?

Am I even a Christian?”

This woman is just one of thousands of people I’ve talked to who get frustrated at their inability to stand up under the sexual temptations they face daily. Most of them know theoretically that they have victory in Christ, but in their daily lives, they feel weak and defeated. They try to resist, but they get frustrated when they keep giving in to the same temptations. Then they feel guilt and shame if they look at porn, hook up or can’t control a thought life that is often inundated with lust.

I’ve often felt the same way. Is there a way forward through these struggles?

In the right context, sexual desire is a good thing.

Sex is a beautiful gift from God, meant to bring us joy and connect us more intimately with our spouse.

The Church has not always done a great job at affirming that. Too often, Christians have made sex a taboo topic, shamed those who have engaged in premarital sex as “damaged goods” and acted like the only way to avoid temptation is to withdraw from “secular” culture altogether.

Those attitudes aren’t healthy or helpful, but pretending that sexual temptation isn’t a big deal is problematic, as well. These days, sexual temptation seems unavoidable. You can hardly pick up a magazine, turn on a TV or drive down a highway without being faced with sexualized images. And in a world that sees no problem with viewing porn and engaging in casual sex, it can be hard to know what to make of it all. There’s no “temptation-free” zone

we can retreat to, because ultimately, temptation originates inside of us, in our broken, sinful hearts (James 1:13-16).

But while it’s impossible to remove all sexual temptation from your life, it’s totally possible to resist it (James 4:7).

Ultimately, our strength to fight temptation comes from our willingness to submit to God, relying on Him for strength. Christ fights the real battle for us, and He has already won, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything beyond remembering a few verses.

It is not a sin to be tempted, because even Jesus was tempted, and He never sinned. We can resist temptation before it turns into sin.

In my own struggle against temptation, I’ve consistently gone back to Psalm 119:97-104. When you want to win over lust and temptation, here are some principles drawn from that passage that can help:

THE BATTLE PLAN Hate it. Psalm 119:104 plainly states that the writer hates “every false way.” This is not about shifting the blame for your actions, or hating yourself or anyone else. This is about hating what God hates, and God hates sin. He hates sin because He is holy and because He loves you, and sin hurts you and threatens to separate you from Him. We also should hate every false way that leads us away from intimacy with God. The idea of hating something often makes Christians uncomfortable, but we know intuitively that it’s OK to hate bad things. Is it wrong to hate cancer, rape or racism? Of course not. Cancer, rape and racism are terribly wicked things that shouldn’t be tolerated. Sin is the root cause of all such things, and it can be more devastating than cancer.

Begin now to hate sexual sin, because it’s harmful and destructive like cancer. Decide you won’t tolerate it. Get angry about the way it offends God. Despise the negative ways it hurts you and your body.

Move away from self-pity and take the offensive.

Starve it. Every enemy loses when their food supply is cut off. French General Napoleon Bonaparte said an army marches on its stomach. To defeat sexual temptation, quit feeding it. This may mean ending a relationship, putting filters on your computer, getting rid of cable or high-speed Internet, staying off Instagram for a season, or avoiding clubs and

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RESOURCES BOOKS TEM PTE D A ND T R IED B Y RUSS EL L MO O RE

Moore dives into the bigger picture behind temptation— and how we can defeat it.

THE T RUT H ABO U T L I ES TI M CHAD D I C K

Chaddick reveals why facing temptation can actually be an opportunity to grow in faith.

WEBSITES XX X CHU RC H.C O M

Resources, accountability groups and help lines for those struggling with pornography addiction.

FI GHTT HENEW D RU G .C O M

An online community fighting porn addiction.

bars where you know you’ll meet people who want to hook up.

The boundaries will be different for everyone. This isn’t about arbitrary rules, it’s about knowing and choosing what’s best for yourself.

In the Psalms passage, the writer says he’s kept his feet from every evil path. He decided to avoid things and people that led to sinful outcomes. Instead of moving toward temptation, he pursued something better: intimacy with God. This can be our model for starving our appetite for sexual sin. It’s not enough to cut off the food supply, because you will still be hungry for nourishment. Instead of feeding our desires with unhealthy things, we should feast on things that will actually satisfy us. We should read God’s word, meditate on His wisdom, grow closer to Christ through worship and get stronger in community. Our faith grows stronger when we feed it. Lust and temptation grow weaker as we starve them and keep our feet from evil paths.

Outsmart it. Get out ahead of your enemy by predicting the ways you’ll be tempted. Don’t get blindsided. Recognize the places and times you’re most vulnerable to giving in to temptation and set up guardrails for yourself. Maybe this means not having a TV or computer in your room, or turning off your smartphone every night an hour before bed, or reading reviews of movies before you buy a ticket to make sure there aren’t gratuitous sex scenes.

The Psalms writer says God’s commands make him “wiser” than his enemies. Submitting to God’s word is the only way we can outsmart sin with insight and wisdom. We know we can’t win on our own. The good news is that while we can fight against sin, we don’t have to devise some complex plan full of intricate tricks to resist temptation.

The way we outsmart temptation is to read, know and obey the Bible. Jesus did this. Jesus was fully God, but He was also fully man, which meant He had the capacity to sin. When Satan tempted Him, Jesus relied on the simplicity of Scripture by quoting it in the moment of His weakness. And it worked.

We outsmart temptation by submitting to God and applying the wisdom of Scripture.

Again, this isn’t about legalism. Relying solely on yourself and your strategies to avoid sin will never work in the long run. Stay humble, keep praying and allow people around you to ask you tough questions.

ADOPT AND ADAPT Each of us struggles with sexual temptation, but those desires look different for everyone.

Unhealthy sexual temptation always stems from something deeper. You may gravitate toward porn when you’re having a hard time connecting with other people. You may feel the overpowering pull on your heart to go back to an old flame any time you get lonely or depressed.

Get to the root issue and adapt this battle plan accordingly.

When Jesus died on the cross and said, “It is finished,” He was announcing that the mission He came to accomplish was completed: The Kingdom of God had begun to spread on earth.

We have a place in that Kingdom, which is infinitely more satisfying than the quick pleasure of sexual sin.

We’re not fighting this battle alone. The victory is already ours. We’re not fighting for victory. We’re fighting from victory. Understanding this simple truth is a game-changer.

FAITHFUL AND FREE As you know from your elementary school history class, nearly 250 years ago, the people in the American colonies were living under the tyranny of the British Empire. They declared their independence from England, launched the Revolutionary War and became a free people.

Though those of us in America today didn’t personally fight in that war, we enjoy the freedoms our ancestors won because they fought a war for us.

Like our ancestors fought for our freedom long before we were ever born, Jesus died for our freedom thousands of years before we faced temptation. Through His sacrifice on the cross, He triumphed over all enemies. We enjoy the benefits of His victory. This is the good news of the Gospel. Because He was faithful, we are free. We’re no longer enslaved to sin.

I told the young lady who approached me after my talk that her struggle with temptation did not mean she was not a Christian. In fact, struggling with temptation can be a sign that we truly belong to Jesus and that the Holy Spirit is working in us. So take heart.

CL AY TON KING is an evangelist, pastor and Distinguished Professor of Evangelism at Anderson University. He and his wife Sharie recently rewrote “True Love Waits” with a greater emphasis on grace.

Connect with him on Twitter @clayton_king.

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Refugees are caught in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.

The Church must respond.

Âť Seven-year-old Sedra and her family live in a refugee camp in Jordan, where World Vision has been working to improve living conditions.

HOST A REFUGEE SUNDAY Learn more at

worldvision.org/church World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families, and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice. Motivated by our faith in Jesus Christ, we serve alongside the poor and oppressed as a demonstration of God’s unconditional love for all people.

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bourhood B Y DA R G A N T H O M P S O N

A S T H E Y A DA P T TO BEING A BUZZ WORT H Y B A N D, T H E NEIGHBOUR HOOD MEMBERS A R E FINDING THINGS A R E N’ T SO BL ACK AND WHITE

Back in 2013, right as they were starting to blow up, The Neighbourhood turned down an appearance on The Tonight Show.

This would be a strange move for any band, but the reason seemed even stranger: The Tonight Show only filmed in color. And from the beginning, The Neighbourhood branded themselves in black and white—only.

They’ve fiercely adhered to their monochromatic aesthetic in music videos and photos. At their Coachella debut, they asked to only be photographed in black and white. After the guys initially turned down The Late Show, too, the show agreed to make an exception and film their performance in black and white. The Tonight Show never did. But there are things the band values more than fame.

In addition to being in control of their own image, the black-and-white vibe represents The Neighbourhood’s desire to make straightforward and honest music. On their latest album, Wiped Out!, the band is more honest than ever. But not everything is as clearly defined as their image. Musically, they fall into the gray area between genres, moving from brooding guitars on one track to a synth breakdown in the next.

Lyrically, they’re wrestling with issues that are far from black and white.

Fittingly enough, the members of The Neighbourhood grew up in the same community. They started playing together as part of the music scene in Newbury Park, California, during their high school years, and by 2011, they had officially formed the band (adopting the British spelling of “neighborhood,” since another band had already claimed the American spelling).

Lead singer Jesse Rutherford had a brief rap career before he joined the band. The other members grew up on classic rock.

Together, they blurred genre boundaries, mixing elements of hip-hop, R&B and electronica into their pop-rock sound.

“With the Internet and how much people put out music, we just tried to really sound different,” says guitarist Zach Abels. “It just kind of came out how it did.”

Everything took off quickly from there.

After a handful of EPs caught the attention of critics and tastemakers, the band’s debut full-length, I Love You., exploded on the scene in 2013. Soon, the single “Sweater Weather” became an inescapable radio fixture, selling more than 1 million copies.

But along with fame came growing pains. Drummer Bryan Sammis left the

“Everyone was in close quarters for many months, so that vibe definitely carried over,” Fried explains. “Then we did the second half of the record at Zach’s parents’ house. That brought it back to the roots and what the band was back in the day when the guys were writing songs in high school. That made everyone go back to the basics.”

Like the band’s debut, Wiped Out! was an instant hit, reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s U.S. alternative chart and No. 2 on the rock chart. Lyrically, the album shows how much the band has matured since their debut. The first song, a 30-second silent track aptly titled “A Moment of Silence,” sets a somber tone for an album that explores the hard parts of growing up, dealing with fame and struggling with loss.

Even the most upbeat, pop-inf used track on the album, “Cry Baby,” comes at love from an angle of selfaware insecurity: “I think I try too hard,” Rutherford sings. “How I look, what I do, what I’m saying. I spend too much time explaining myself. I hope there’s time to change it.”

On other songs, Rutherford reflects on the death of his father. He uses music as a sort of public therapy by way of confession.

“All I know how to do is express myself,” he says. “I’m very emotional. It’s a gift and a curse, but I think it’s meant to be if expressing my emotions gets to be my job.”

Rutherford and bassist Mikey Margott grew up in the Church, and though Rutherford has since walked away from organized religion, his upbringing still influences his music.

“My mom raised me to believe in a

“THE IDEA OF GOD HAS ALWAYS INFLUENCED ME TO A DEGREE. I TALK TO GOD FROM TIME TO TIME. MAYBE I’M JUST TALKING TO MYSELF, BUT IT MAKES ME FEEL A LITTLE MORE CLEAR-HEADED.” band in the summer of 2014 and was replaced by Brandon Fried. Fried quickly integrated into the band, and he brought a fresh sound to Wiped Out!, which they wrote mostly while touring for I Love You. To hear Fried tell it, creating the album was a fun, collaborative project.

“From a creative standpoint, it was everyone kind of collectively working on songs together,” he says. “The whole work ethic of the band kind of evolved.”

This collective energy carried over into the recording process. The band recorded the first half of the album at a house in Malibu where all the band members were living along with their producer and engineers.

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nhbd higher power, so the idea of God has always influenced me to a degree,” he says.

“I talk to God from time to time, but not from a religious mindset. Maybe I’m just talking to myself, but it makes me feel a little more clear-headed occasionally.”

The Neighbourhood has come a long way from their high school garage band beginnings, but two albums in, the guys are nowhere near ready to call it quits.

“We’re fortunate to have accomplished what we have thus far, but I’m still not satisfied,” Rutherford says. “It feels like we have had one bite of a very large cake. One bite clearly won’t do.”

But while they have experienced commercial fame, the band doesn’t define success by radio play or album sales.

“Success to us is knowing that we did better than we did before,” Fried says.

“Keep moving forward and evolving and experimenting more and writing better songs. If we keep doing that, we’re always going to look back at each record and say, ‘Yeah, I think that’s success.’”

This kind of success isn’t always cut and dry, but it makes sense for The Neighbourhood. This is the band that turned down The Tonight Show because they value their brand more than airtime.

Despite what their look might tell you, the members of The Neighbourhood know things aren’t always black and white.

DARGAN THOMPSON is RELEVANT’s associate editor. Find her on Twitter at @darganthompson.

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B Y I S A AC E D WA R D S

F I V E Y E A R S A G O, ROB BEL L W ROT E A CON T ROV ER SI A L BOOK, LEFT THE H UGE CH U RCH H E S TA R T E D A N D MOV ED TO L . A . BU T H E S AY S W H AT H E ' S DOI NG NOW IS MOR E PA S T O R I N G T H A N EVER.

P H O T O / DAV I D T O S T I

ack

ack in the summer of 2000, Rob Bell was doing backflips on his wakeboard when he fell and suffered a closed head injury. That means his brain knocked against his skull and caused pretty severe trauma.

In this case, Bell lost the ability to remember the past—and really conceive of the future. His brain was working so hard to restore all of its functions that it just didn’t have room for anything other than the immediate.

“I remember they brought my boys into the hospital room and I just kept going, ‘Wait, these are ours?’” Bell recalls. “I’m asking [my wife] Kristen where we met and what my job is, and I’m seeing it all as if I’m seeing it for the first time. I was getting this tour of my life, and it was absolutely astonishing.”

It took about a week for his symptoms to subside. As scary as his injury was, Bell says the experience forced him to learn a lesson he would never forget.

“I had tasted an entirely different mode of living where you’re only in the present moment,” he says. “I was like everybody else at the time, going to meetings, responding to emails, busy, busy, busy.

Then I tasted this different way of living, and I didn’t have any muscles or skills or techniques for this.”

In February this year, Bell published a new book, How to Be Here. In it, he tells the story of his injury and explains how his newfound appreciation for living in the moment reshaped his life. And because he’s Rob Bell, he packed the book with plenty of inspiration and provocation for his readers to follow suit.

B

“I was taught how to work hard, how to strategize, how to network, how to multitask, how to climb the ladder,” Bell says, “but nobody taught me how to be fully present. So, in many ways, this book is what I’ve learned over the past 15 years about how to feel like you’re not skimming the surface of your own life.”

But for those who have followed Bell’s ministry career, the last 15 years aren’t nearly as interesting as the last five.

FIRESTORM AND BRIMSTONE Prior to 2011, Zondervan had published four books by Bell, then-pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, including the insanely popular Velvet Elvis. But they didn’t publish the next one.

Officially, Zondervan executives said they never had the opportunity, but a spokeswoman told CNN, “If the promotional video for the book accurately reflects its contents, it is highly unlikely that Zondervan would have accepted Love Wins for publication.”

The book Bell did publish, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, questioned one of the most widely held beliefs within Christianity—the existence of hell and the nature of the afterlife. Basically, he built his book around one question: "Would a loving God really punish people forever?"

The arrival of Bell’s Love Wins was one of the rare occasions when saying it caused a “firestorm” isn’t an exaggeration.

TV networks ran stand-alone specials about the book and its author. Publications like The New Yorker covered the brouhaha surrounding the controversy. More than a few colleges and seminaries hosted panel

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discussions and debates with and without Bell present. Love Wins also created an entire publishing market for books written in response.

Publishing executive Justin Taylor runs a blog more than a few people have called the “evangelical Drudge Report.” He’s made a habit of documenting all kinds of news within the Church world. In large part, it was Taylor who first highlighted Bell's controversial book when he posted the trailer for Love Wins on his blog.

Looking back, Taylor thinks the con-

bound to be loud—both from his detractors and from his defenders.”

Not long after the book's release, in late 2011, Bell resigned from the pastorate at the church he founded.

Officially, he was off to Los Angeles to pursue a career in television. But from just about every vantage point, it looked like Bell had fractured his relationship with the Church world, and it kicked him out.

GO WEST, ROB BELL It’s true, since Bell disappeared from

I’m doing what I’ve been doing the whole time, just in different settings."

Bell and wife Kristen have three kids now, and they all live in the middle of Los Angeles. He still writes books. He hosts a popular podcast. He does speaking tours.

Oh, and he surfs as much as possible.

In the settings he's in now, he's often the only Christian in the room, which is a stark difference from his earlier career pastoring a 10,000-member church. But, for Bell, this new reality is not a problem; it's part of the appeal.

Bell says his departure from Mars Hill wasn’t a run from the faith, or even from that church.

After Love Wins came out, some of the church’s leaders asked Bell what was next for him as a way of making sure the church could serve him well. As he and Kristen thought about what was next, he says, they kept coming back to this sense of the end of a season.

FINALLY PRESENT

ditions were just about perfect for Bell’s book to land all of the attention it did.

“Bell had a charismatic persona and a popular reputation (especially among younger evangelicals) for creative envelope-pushing without crossing over into anything heterodox,” Taylor says.

"Opposite from his appeal to young Christians, many older evangelicals had a vague suspicion that he was a good communicator who was increasingly untethered from sound doctrine and careful exegetical theology, such that his trajectory looked sketchy and worrisome.

"These two things combined as background for why, when Bell seemed to be coming out with a more definitive move away from orthodoxy, the reaction was

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Bell’s head injury 15 years ago gave him a glimpse into a new kind of thinking: What does life look like without distractions?

He still remembers the PHOTO / BR ADLEY SIEFERT feeling: “My brain doesn’t have any capacity for the future, which is where worry and anxiety come from, and the evangelical radar, he's only really my brain doesn’t have any energy or capacappeared publicly in scattered events and ity to think about the past, which is where TV appearances with people like Oprah, regret comes from. My brain can only be with whom he even toured. It seemed like present. I am getting a tour of my life, but a 180-turn from the Bell many had known my brain is only able to take in what is through his groundbreaking Nooma happening in the exact present moment.” teaching videos and popular books. But he A decade and a half later, Bell is no longer doesn't see it that way. overseeing a megachurch. He’s not respon“It doesn’t feel like a 180 at all,” Bell sible for a congregation. He’s gone from says. “It feels like a long, slow, very natu- one of Christian culture’s biggest names ral trajectory and evolution in the same to a speaker who appears onstage with direction.

Oprah, reaching an entirely new audience.

“It doesn’t feel like a departure at all.

And, in many ways, he’s free from the It feels like I’m doing what I’ve always expectations of many evangelicals who been doing: Trying to give language to bid him "farewell" during the Love Wins the deep stream. Everything is spiritual. aftermath. For the second time in Bell's There is depth in the everyday, and that’s life, a difficult experience brought a new at the heart of the Christ story. It feels like kind of clarity.

“For many people, being a pastor means you’re also running an organization,” Bell says. “That’s why so many pastors are so burned out and barely hanging on: They signed up for [preaching and pastoring], but actually, day in and day out, the preservation of the institution becomes paramount.”

Now, he says, instead of dealing with the responsibilities of running a megachurch, the expectations from fellow evangelicals or the weight that comes from the pressure, there are fewer distractions.

Maybe this is what being a pastor is supposed to feel like, he says.

“When you don’t have that on your shoulders, then it’s just you and the person,” Bell says. “It’s just you and them and the space between you and whatever it is they want to talk about. So it’s been very interesting to me, because I get endless moments when I am doing the thing people would say would be pastor-y, but there’s nothing in the way.”

Bell doesn’t link what happened with Loves Wins to any kind of traumatic experience. He doesn’t speak ill of anyone from his past and doesn’t seem overly concerned with defending himself to critics. But he still seems to have learned something from suffering—whether a head injury or a wave of criticism. He’s figuring out what it means to allow pain to bring clarity.

“Often, it takes suffering to heighten our senses and raise our awareness of this moment and the life we get to live,” he says. “Often, it takes some sort of trauma or soul-crushing loss to wake us up.”

WOKEN UP Even his most ardent critics will concede at least one thing: Rob Bell is an incredible communicator. In this new phase, with a new sense of focus, he’s figuring out what that can look like, free from the noise of his previous life.

Ironically, that means taking it back to the beginning. It means revisiting the sermon itself, and reimagining how it can change the world.

“The sermon is an art form that needs to be reclaimed,” he says. “It’s the original guerrilla theater, somewhere between a recovery movement, a TED Talk and a revival. This art form has been hijacked in our culture. For many people, the sermon is how you build bigger buildings.

But the sermon is about the sacred disruption.”

Bell now tours, writes and even takes his sacred disruptions into LA’s comedy scene. He has a residency at Largo, an LA comedy venue that also hosts the likes of Zach Galifianakis, John Mulaney and Sarah Silverman.

It turns out, there are still a lot of people eager to hear the reinvention of the sermon. “[Comedian Pete Holmes and I] have a two-man show we do,” he says. “So I will be with Oprah and then a couple days later I might be at Largo, and then a couple days later I might meet with a bunch of activists and entrepreneurs. And then I might go out and talk at a conference on

Rob and Kristen Bell

Sunday morning or a Sunday evening,” he says. “I think it should compete with all other art forms, so that’s what I’ve tried to do. Leaving the local church in some senses was, ‘I have to keep going’ and ‘I have to keep announcing good news and the death and the resurrection mystery built into the fabric of creation.' I have to see how far you can take it."

Hitting his head showed Bell what a fully present life could be like. But starting

"IT FEELS LIKE I’M DOING WHAT I’VE ALWAYS BEEN DOING: TRYING TO GIVE LANGUAGE TO THE DEEP STREAM. EVERYTHING IS SPIRITUAL." science and spirituality. And then I might go surfing.”

Bell still has his critics. And he’s on a non-traditional path for the man Time magazine once called “The Next Billy Graham.”

But he says his passion is the same.

“I find the Jesus story and message more compelling than ever,” he says.

Instead of churches and pulpits, he’s in nightclubs and stadium tours. Life has changed dramatically for the guy who started a church, broke new creative ground with videos and books, and became one of the most polarizing figures in modern Christianity. But for him, that’s OK. He didn’t leave the Church. He’s just trying take what he does best and move beyond church walls.

“I don’t believe this art form should be confined to a particular building on a

over showed him how to enjoy it.

“Everything that could go wrong for me already has,” he says. “Lots of places I’d go to speak, there would be protesters out front. So at some point, you might as well be doing something you love.”

Choosing to live that way can be risky, but, for Bell, the risk has been worth it.

“Many people are stuck. They’re catatonic in some life they know isn’t their true path,” he says.

“It’s like, ‘Well, if I did that, people might not understand.’ That’s correct.

‘Well, if I did that, I might have to live in a smaller house.' Yep. ‘Well, we might lose a bunch of money.’ Yep. ‘Well, I might be misunderstood.’ Yep. But you would be alive, and what is better than that?”

ISA AC EDWARDS is a culture and religion writer based in Brooklyn, New York.

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MAKER

B Y C L A I R E D I A Z- O R T I Z

W H AT I F T H E K E Y TO LI V ING MOR E I N T E N T I O N A L LY I S A C T U A L LY D O I N G L E S S? E N T R E P R E N E U R A N D AU T HOR CL A IR E D I A Z - O R T I Z L AY S O U T HER METHOD FOR WOR K I NG L ESS TO WOR K BE T T ER .

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or much of my adult life, people have asked me how I get so much done. I sleep more than anyone I know, read 200 books a year, travel more than 100,000 miles a year, work hard in my career, write books and have a family I love. It’s a lot.

And it wouldn’t be possible without my obsessive passion for productivity.

I don’t think you need to get rid of Netflix or tell your friends you’ll see them in six months or try sleeping in 90-minute increments in order to achieve all the things on your to-do list.

Over the years—as a nonprofit founder in Africa, as an early employee at Twitter, and now in my entrepreneurial life—I’ve started thinking more about what exactly it is I’m doing, and I’ve begun sharing those ideas, in hopes that other folks can find ways to rock their lives by doing less. Because that, I am convinced, is the key.

I believe you can be just as productive— and usually much more so—by working less.

My method, the “Do Less” method, is an acronym that encompasses six steps key to achieving more while maintaining fulfillment in your work and personal life:

F

STEP 1: DECIDE We won’t get where we’re going unless we know where we want to be. Deciding what matters most to us in our lives is essential to being a productive, fulfilled person.

The first and most important thing you need to do to increase your productivity is to think about what’s important. I recommend doing this by first coming up with a Word of the Year (or a Word of the Season)—one word that encompasses all that you want to be and think and feel in the year ahead.

Many of my readers have come up with amazing ones over the years: “Focus.” “Family.” “Hustle.” “Rest.” Last year, mine was a phrase (complete with a hashtag): #BanBusy. This year, it’s #WorkByDesign.

Whatever you come up with, the word should serve as your North Star when you do the next big thing and come up with your annual goals. Remember that goals should follow Peter Drucker’s SMART goals framework: Each goal should be specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and timely.

STEP 2: ORGANIZE This is all about implementing key productivity strategies in order to reach the SMART goals you’ve set for yourself with four critical ideas:

STEP 3: LIMIT Pare down your work so you are focusing on only the things you do well. Pareto’s Principle (or the 80/20 Rule), posits that 20 percent of our efforts will reap 80 percent of our results. The converse is also true; 80 percent of what we do only delivers 20 percent of our results. Becoming more productive requires extreme intention when it comes to saying yes—and no.

STEP 4: EDIT Studies show that our productivity plummets when we work too many hours, so this step is all about doing our best work by working less, but being more focused.

During my years in Silicon Valley, I regularly saw that a few hours in a coffee shop could be worth an entire day in Twitter’s open office. Without distraction, you can accomplish enormous amounts of work in a fraction of the time.

STEP 5: STREAMLINE This involves a series of strategies to do the work you need to do as efficiently as possible.

One such strategy is the concept of batching your work—or grouping together similar tasks to do in the same “batch” of time.

We all know the frazzled feeling of trying to answer a phone call, read an email and talk to a colleague at the same time. It doesn’t work. Batching is the answer to this.

For example, I try to hold all phone meetings on one or two days of the week, and I keep writing and content creation days focused on those activities. It helps enormously to keep my brain on track.

STEP 6: STOP Any personal trainer will teach you that in order to achieve your fitness goals, you must combine exertion with recovery. We need to do the same in our work lives. Disconnecting is essential to preserve our energy to do focused, powerful work. Taking regular breaks throughout the day, keeping strict work hours and taking a digital Sabbath will skyrocket your productivity.

Like most of you, I want a life full of the things I love—work, family, faith and fun. I have found that being intentional is the only way to ensure the busy doesn’t take over. My own journey to learn about productivity has been life changing. Looking back, I’m grateful for each caffeinated, multitasking day I spent with 27 open tabs on my Internet browser. They all brought me here. Here’s hoping that most of them are in my past.

CL AIRE DIAZ-ORTIZ is an entrepreneur, speaker, early Twitter employee and author of several books, including her most recent, Design Your Day.

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HOW COULD A GAME MAKE YOU FEEL THIS MUCH?

BY JESSE CAREY

T H E T RU E STORY BEHI N D

T H AT D R AG O N , CA NCER, T H E C R I T I C A L LY ACC L A I M E D V I DEO G A M E T H AT ’ S M A K I N G P L AY E R S L I T E R A L LY C R Y— AND RETHINK HOW T H E Y V IE W GOD

THERE ARE STORIES OF PEOPLE playing That

Dragon, Cancer at gaming expos breaking down in tears as they click through the virtual world created by Ryan Green and Josh Larson.

It’s one of those rare pieces of art that’s tearing down walls between mediums and challenging everything we know about video games.

Wired called the game’s creation a “quest to make the most profound video game ever.” The Guardian said playing the game was an “unforgettable experience.” And a reviewer for the gaming network IGN called it a “crushingly intimate game that left me thankful for the people who are still in my life.”

It’s been featured by Radiolab and The New Yorker, and a documentary about the harrowing story of the making of the game has drawn rave reviews from the likes of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

That Dragon, Cancer isn’t just changing the idea of what a video game can be. It’s changing the way people think about life, death and, most of all, God.

A MIRACLE IN WAITING Ryan and Amy Green expected a miracle.

The young parents believed God would heal their son Joel of cancer. Even though doctors only gave Joel a few months to live when he was diagnosed shortly after his 1st birthday, the Greens chose not to believe what the doctors told them.

Against the odds, months turned into years, and the Greens held onto hope that full healing for Joel was just around the corner. For the couple, the journey toward that miracle was an opportunity to show the world what God was capable of through an art form they were both passion about: Video games.

For years, Ryan worked as a software developer and dabbled in indie video game creation.

The concept of a young boy’s battle with cancer—and his parent’s faith that sustained them through treatment—may seem like an odd subject for a video game, but the Greens had a vision for the project. Not only would it help communicate to others the struggles of families fighting cancer, it would also be a testament

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to the power of faith, community and prayer—all of which would be incorporated into the gameplay.

But, when Amy, Ryan and Ryan’s development partner Josh Larson began the project when Joel was just 4 years old, still fighting a brain tumor, one critical element was still unclear: How the game would end.

NAMING THE DRAGON Before Joel’s fight with cancer became the subject of a video game, it was part of a story Amy and Ryan would tell to their other young sons to help them process what was going on with their brother, who was constantly in and out of the hospital.

“We were trying to figure out how we could talk to them about Joel’s situation,” Amy explains. “We were still praying for him to be healed, so we didn’t want to tell them anything that would make it hard for them to pray about Joel. And we didn’t want to scare them unnecessarily about where Joel was, because they were little.”

Instead of telling them Joel was fighting a disease doctors said was unbeatable, they came up with a metaphor: Joel was fighting a dragon named cancer.

“We started telling them this story at night: Joel was a knight, and he was fighting this dragon, and this dragon was called ‘cancer,’” Amy says. “We would never end this story. We knew we could kind of set up this epic story we’d continue to tell, and we wouldn’t tell an ending until we knew we needed to.”

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Ryan remembers the first experience that made him consider turning that story into a game for mass audiences. Joel had come down with a terrible stomach virus in the midst of radiation treatment. During a sleepless night at the hospital, attempting to comfort Joel, who had been crying for hours, Ryan did the only thing he knew to do in a moment of such desperation: He prayed.

Miraculously, Joel finally fell asleep.

“I felt like it was a direct answer to prayer,” Ryan says. “I thought about that as a game—just reflecting how sometimes we’re at the end of ourselves and there’s nothing we can do. We need mercy and we need grace. So it kind of started out as a way to encourage people.”

Ryan set out to create a game that would show the struggles that accompanied Joel’s cancer, but also all the little victories God provided along the way.

“Our mindset was, ‘Let’s show all the hard things we had to go through, but [also] that Joel is still here,’ so people could understand everything he had overcome and everything God had done in his life,” he says.

Their team was able to get funding from an investor and eventually a Kickstarter campaign. In a gaming world full of shoot-’em-up action and online fantasy worlds, the development of an indie project about a child’s cancer was something entirely new. Soon, the project garnered interest from video game magazines and blogs.

“Part of creating the game was us making this grand testimony in the biggest way we

could think to make it,” Amy says. “As media gained interest and people supported it, we couldn’t help think, ‘Wow, God’s doing something really huge here. Joel’s going to be healed, and the whole world is going to see it.”

As development progressed, so did Joel’s fight against cancer.

And with the media, the gaming press and the Green’s church community watching, all they needed was their miracle.

REDEFINING THE GAME It’s safe to assume That Dragon, Cancer is unlike any conventional “video game.” There really isn’t any element of skill involved.

Aside from a few in-story microgames (like one where the player actually battles dragons as “baby knight” Joel), there is little action or competition.

“GOD IS NOT IN THIS BOX I HAVE PUT HIM IN. HE’S SO MUCH BIGGER. I DON’T GET TO FORCE GOD’S HAND.”

Instead, That Dragon, Cancer is almost like an interactive film, where the player walks through dreamlike scenes and vignettes that document stages in Joel’s life and express the emotion of walking beside him.

There’s a doctor’s office that slowly fills with water—eventually transforming into a raging sea. There’s a canoe adrift in an ocean of letters inside bottles written by individuals who have lost family members to cancer.

There’s a pond where Joel feeds ducks. There’s an enchanted forest infested with thorny clumps of cancer that pulsate ominously in the shadows.

Instead of simply being a linear story, the game is about exploring places, emotions and questions. It’s about what it felt like to be Amy and Ryan.

“Our game is focused on a feeling of presence,” Josh explains.

“We’ve spent so much time in developing them and trying out all these different ideas, I feel like [players] will find this kind of history or sense of place.”

There’s a sense of uncertainty

that follows players through the game. Not only do they encounter literal cancer cells and dragons throughout, they also hear desperate prayers to God, proclamations of a faith in healing and difficult, blunt questions openly wrestled with in the form of inner monologues, phone messages and conversations.

There are certainly spiritual elements to the gameplay, but what makes many of the scenes so striking is how grounded they are in earthly imagery: The plainness of a hospital room; the familiar structures of a playground; the messiness of a child’s room.

The realism of the imagery and gameplay run somewhat counter to Ryan and Amy’s upbringings in the charismatic church, where healings, spiritual warfare and miracles were taught to be expected in the life of a Christian.

Ryan says his childhood faith involved “the gifts of the Spirit, healing and the belief that God is active and alive and talking to us now.” He references author Frank Peretti— who wrote contemporary adventure novels about actual angel and demon battles—as an influential figure.

Amy had a similar experience: “I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, very much from under the Kenneth Hagin ‘name it, claim it’ sort of faith,” she says.

“I was right there in the Bible Belt, and it seemed obvious that if we just believe in God, of course He always wanted to heal.”

A scene where But, deep into the Joel drifts process of developing through an ocean That Dragon, Cancer, of condolence something happened letters in bottles that challenged their faith and the direction

of the game they were building.

After years of treatments, countless prayer meetings and nightly stories to their other children about a brave young knight attempting to defeat a dragon, Joel died. He was 5 years old.

The game they were building now had its ending—but it also had a new purpose.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS From the beginning, Ryan, Amy and Josh believed they were making a game about healing. But they ended up creating a piece of art that explores God’s grace, mercy and peace—even in the midst of unexplained tragedy. In an era of pop-Christian art that often involves neat, satisfying endings, That Dragon, Cancer is something totally different. And it’s moving.

At first though, the grieving was difficult to process.

“It’s kind of like Elijah building an altar and then God not sending the fire,” Ryan says. “It’s like, ‘Oh crud, I gathered all these cameras and all these people and now what?’ Our doubt and our questions are on display, not our answers and our assurance. Our assurance looks different.

It’s in the form of the hope that remains, but it’s not what I set out wanting to do.”

The game doesn’t have the ending Ryan, Amy or Josh expected. It doesn’t reveal a miracle, but that doesn’t mean it can’t reveal something incredible about God.

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“That’s the thing about a lot of spiritual art—and maybe the tradition I come from when it comes to Christianity and art,” Ryan says. “It’s mostly from this place of ‘I have a principle or I have a sermon illustration for you and we’re going to convey it in artistic ways.’ I can’t give you the reasons God let Joel get cancer and God let Joel die. I could try to justify it, but all those feel hollow to me, so why would I try to justify it to you?”

Instead of individual answers to impossible questions, That Dragon, Cancer tackles big truths.

“For me, there’s just been this reset of ‘God is bigger and more mysterious and beyond what I understand. But I have hope that since He calls himself Father, He must, in some way, be like how I feel about Joel,’” Ryan says. “I have to hold on to that tether. I feel like that is a reflection of creation: It’s messy, it’s brutal and it’s full of pain and suffering. And yet, I feel like there must be something really intrinsic about creation in that story.

[That’s] the thing I’m wrestling with and trying to understand, but kind of resolving that I won’t understand.”

A DIFFERENT KIND OF HEALING That Dragon, Cancer set out to be a game about physical healing, but it ended up being a journey to find spiritual healing.

“It took Joel dying for me to go, ‘Oh, God is not in this box I have put Him in,’” Amy explains. “He’s so much bigger than my box. I don’t get to force God’s hand, no

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matter how spectacular my faith is. My righteousness adds absolutely nothing to the will of God. “Creating the game felt really meaningful,” she continues. “It almost felt like, ‘Well, here’s a way God can redeem this terrible situation,’ even though, as you’re creating, you know that nothing can really redeem the loss of your child.

“Somehow, our understanding of God was bigger now than it had ever been. I think we realized the message we wanted to share before would probably hurt a lot of people who had been disappointed

by God—who had believed and had the answer be ‘no.’ Perhaps sharing a story of a time God said ‘no’ is actually more comforting to a lot of people, and more relatable to a lot of people than the story we had hoped to tell.”

Ryan and Amy say the game has created opportunities for conversations they never expected to have before.

“Video game culture is not one that’s usually conducive to religious dialogue, because it’s a very systematic, very naturalistic approach,” Ryan says. “A lot of the worldviews are very engineer and optimization focused, so they’re moral in a lot of ways, but your internal spiritual life is not something you really talk about.

“But they’ve been very inclusive of us.

We’re sharing our heart. We’re sharing our story. We’re sharing our pain. We’re sharing our hope, and that was perfectly OK with people.”

“Along the way,” Amy adds, “we had to

realize that it was OK to let go of the idea we would create something that would be able to absolutely and fully introduce someone to the love of God. And instead just say, ‘We’re going to create a tool God can anoint if He wants to’ and trust the Holy Spirit to do what the Holy Spirit does.

“God can use any part of the game,” she continues. “Our job is just to create it and to pray over it and to let it have its life, because everyone’s going to respond to it a little bit differently.”

BEAUTY IN THE UNRESOLVED There’s a scene in the game where Joel goes under anesthesia and dreams of being in another place. The player can click on constellations of animals in the stars that come to life for Joel to ride on. It’s early in the game, and it’s a welcomed moment of levity, fun and beauty in a story that is full of tension and sadness.

During that level, it’s unclear what will come next, or when the scene will end. But players can hear Joel laughing.

The game soon goes on, and there is difficulty ahead. But the scene is so elegantly rendered that all the player can focus on is the grace of the moment.

What comes next? What lies ahead?

Why are players being taken away from the story for a ride in the stars with Joel?

Maybe the questions are actually the answers: Sometimes, you just have to have peace in knowing that there is grace, even in the unresolved.

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FOR

KING A ND

COUNTRY B Y M AT T DA M I C O

B Y M AT T DA M I C O

SH A PED BY CH A NGE A N D H A R D S H I P, T H E S E AUST R A L I A N-BOR N BROT HER S A R E W I N N I NG T HE HE A RTS OF CR ITICS A N D P O P S TA R S .

T

here must be thousands of covers of Taylor Swift songs floating around the Internet, but not many of them have gotten praise from the star herself. Last fall, brothers Luke and Joel Smallbone, who make up the duo for King & Country, found their cover of “Out of the Woods” on the short list of those Swift has expressed excitement about.

“This is one of my favorite covers I’ve heard ... amazing job,” Swift tweeted about the band’s version, which they recorded during a live session with Rdio. Luke and Joel say they are proud of how the cover turned out, but they hadn’t expected the amount of attention it received.

“It was really all very unexpected, to be totally honest,” Luke says.

It’s not the first time the duo has seen success, and with their anthemic, powerful pop-rock sound, it surely won’t be the last.

For Luke and Joel, the path to the music industry felt something like coming into the family business. Their father was a concert promoter, and in the late ’90s and early ’00s, they worked on tour with their sister, Rebecca St. James. Joel worked as the stage manager, and Luke started running spotlight at age 11 before becoming the lighting director at 15.

Luke calls the experiences “just crazy opportunities.” And the exposure got the brothers thinking what other opportunities might await them.

This thought would eventually lead to the formation of the brothers’ band, for King & Country. But they didn’t simply want to write songs and play shows. They wanted to channel the power of music and of the live show to create something “that could move somebody’s heart, that could change somebody’s soul.”

The Smallbone brothers know a little something about change.

Joel and Luke moved with their family from Australia to Nashville before either of them turned 10. Things had fallen apart for the family in Australia, so when their dad received a job offer in Nashville, the family—which included six children and a mother who was six months pregnant — packed up, hoping for a new start. But the job was gone shortly after, and the family fell on hard times again.

Luke recalls “sleeping on beds made out of clothes in the car,” and how the family had no way for the baby on the way to be born in a hospital.

“So we raked leaves, we mowed lawns and we kind of found a way for ourselves,” he says. “It was a very difficult and trying time in our family.”

For Joel and Luke, the ceaseless transition of their early years makes it difficult to say definitively where they’re “from.” But that ambiguity fits their music. For King & Country is not concerned with labels.

“People can define [our sound] however they want,” Luke says. “What I say takes on less credence than what a fan does. So if they come to us and they say, ‘You’re this’ or ‘You’re that,’ to them, that’s what we are.

And that’s fine.”

More important than defining their music is ensuring its quality.

They’ve found inspiration in movie soundtracks, because of the way movie scores move listeners. Soundtracks “tell the story with music,” Luke says.

“When we write our music, we have the benefit of being able to use lyrics. So if we can get the lyric side of things right, and we can get the music side of things powerful and moving, you have something that becomes almost nuclear, something so powerful.”

With their latest album, Run Wild. Live Free. Love Strong., for King & Country appears to be getting it right. The album, which includes a collaboration with Andy Mineo, reached No. 2 on Billboard’s

Christian albums chart and remained there for more than 70 weeks. One single from the album, “It’s Not Over Yet,” has seen success on the charts and airwaves, becoming “an anthem for people in trying times.”

That’s a fitting description, given that the album grew out of a period of intense difficulty for Luke, who has struggled with a digestive disorder for the last three years.

“I got really, really sick, and I had to come off the road for about two and a half months,” he says. “During that time, my wife thought there was a chance I wasn’t going to make it. Those were some of the darkest days and weeks of my life.”

Luke’s wife, Courtney, sings on one of the album’s songs, “Without You.” The song explores what it was like to endure Luke’s illness together. With the worst of his illness behind him, Luke is grateful to see the album inspire others.

“I don’t want to go through the struggle of sickness again,” he says. “But I’m thankful for it because of the amount of people we’ve had come up to us saying, ‘That song you wrote literally changed my life.’ It’s a very, very powerful thing.”

The brothers are venturing into new mediums. This fall, they’re coming out with a movie called Priceless. Luke says it’s one of the harder things they’ve ever worked on.

“We’re used to telling a story in three minutes and 30 seconds,” he says. “With a movie, you have an hour and a half; that’s your canvas.”

On that canvas, the brothers hope to portray what they often communicate on the concert stage.

“Culture says for women to talk, dress and act like they’re worth nothing more than a penny,” Luke says. “But we believe there’s a God who says you’re priceless.”

The film, which Luke deems “a love story drama,” is “a dream come true” for the brothers.

Luke and Joel saw more dreams crash than come true in some of their formative years. But the brothers keep getting the music and lyrics right, and it looks as though they’ll keep getting things right, whatever continent they’re on and whatever medium they jump to next.

MAT T DAMICO is a writer, editor and the worship pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. He’s on Twitter at @mattpdamico.

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WANT TO C H A N G E TH E W O R LD?

SETH GODIN KNOWS HOW

N

OT TOO LONG AGO, the world worked pretty simply. Right at the turn of 19th century, the industrial revolution was changing the economic world. For almost 200 years, everything trekked along just fine. Then everything changed— again. And according to author and business guru Seth Godin, this affected everything about how our culture operates. You’ve probably felt the shift. This generation views money, work and success differently than our parents. Sit in a coffee shop or hang out in a major urban area, and you’re much more likely to hear conversations about crowdsourcing and social entrepreneurship than climbing the so-called corporate ladder. We sat down with Godin to pick his brain about this new world.

WHY DO YOU THINK THIS GENERATION VIEWS SUCCESS DIFFERENTLY?

The biggest shift in our culture is the death of the industrial era—mass production, mass marketing, mass distribution.

This means you can’t get the job your parents got because it doesn’t exist the way it used to, where you sit in an office, do what you’re told, get positive feedback, money and security. Also, the way we absorb ideas doesn’t come from three dominant TV networks and two newspapers per town.

When we blow those things up, culture has to get shifted as a result. And that means new forms of expression and new ways of measuring success are going to come along.

door neighbors reflected back to you whatever they wanted about their perception of your success.

Now, thanks to digital tribes, thanks to the fact you’re connected to more people, you can surround yourself with fellow travelers who agree with your definition of success—which makes it a lot easier to feel successful. I’m trying to imagine Woody Guthrie’s life or Che Guevara if they would have been surrounded by more people who agreed with them as opposed to always being seen as outsiders.

That, I think, is the giant shift. We’re finding these tribal connections, giving people sustenance they used to look for in an office.

IS THAT CHANGE GOOD OR BAD?

DOES THAT MEAN SUCCESS ISN’T REALLY ABOUT MONEY ANYMORE?

I don’t think things shift around money as much as they shift around who we look to to know if we’re doing the right thing, who we look to to know if we’re a success.

Somebody who made a lot of money in 1975 but was doing it in a way their peers frown on was not as happy as someone in 1975 who was making less money but was embraced by her peers for doing the right thing. That’s always been true. The difference now is it’s so much easier because everyone has their own media channel to be really clear about what is important to them and to get feedback as to whether they’re on the right path.

You used to be geography-bound: The people at the country club and your next

All of these changes are always good and bad; you get one thing and then you lose something else.

For people who say this will inevitably lead to a loss of industrial productivity, which will inevitably lead to a loss of world power, they are correct. You definitely can create more success in an industrialized economy if it’s a lockstep, top-down, great-firewall-of-China obedience-based system.

That doesn’t mean the goal needs to be more productivity. Maybe the goal needs to be more connection and more happiness. I think what’s happening is the people who are better connected than ever are thriving, and the people who feel like they’re being belittled or bullied or left out are hurting.

It’s up to us, in our culture, to figure out how to weave more inclusive bonds. Our goal in life shouldn’t be to see who can make the most widgets before they die; our goal should be to see who can make the biggest difference before they die.

IS THERE A SIMILAR SHIFT IN WHAT IT MEANS TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

I think it’s pretty simple but incorrect to say there’s an entire generation of philanthropists coming along.

[Blake Mycoskie] has done a really brilliant job of TOMS Shoes, and they’re wellmarketed, but most people who are buying TOMS are not buying them because they’re trying to get shoes to the unshoed.

They’re buying them because the circle they’re in will admire them for buying them. First and foremost, they are shoes, and those shoes carry a label, an emblem, a symbol that buys them some credibility with their crowd.

What’s really interesting to me is how many people are embracing micro-social action, social entrepreneurship, figuring out how to create experiences or products that literally change their corner of the world.

HOW DO YOU ADVISE PEOPLE TO GAIN INFLUENCE WITH THOSE AROUND THEM?

I’ll divide it into two pieces. The first one is “First 10.” Find 10 people—not a hundred, not a thousand, but 10 people—to lead. Ten people you can make a difference for, 10 people you can share your idea with. If they spread it for you, then you’re on to something. If they don’t, then you need a better idea.

It’s tempting in this world of social media to race around trying to acquire big numbers, but big numbers aren’t your friend. The goal here is not to use these tools to get big, the goal is to use these tools to be missed, to be important, to do work that matters.

The second thing I would say is if you want to be part of something bigger, then you can’t keep following instructions. You will not be able to fit all the way in and be rewarded. You will be rewarded by standing out, by becoming a linchpin, by leaping.

It’s this idea of acting as if you are the person who can make a difference, as if you are the person who is the key to the

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world. As you’re saying to yourself, “I’m not old enough or not powerful enough,” I’m calling that bluff. You can’t change the world, but you can change five people.

Why don’t you just change five people today? Because if you change five people today, you might be able to change six people tomorrow, and then you’re on your way—because most people change nobody.

The way we change the world is with the smallest possible group. Change them.

Repeat. You’re probably surrounded by people who say they are holier than you, or they’re more qualified than you or more authorized than you. But you don’t need a permit to change someone. You just need to care.

WHEN YOU SAY ‘CHANGE PEOPLE,’ WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN MIND?

whole thing. When you act that way and contribute at that level, your organization will either embrace you and reward you or another one will steal you away.

WHAT COULD THAT LOOK LIKE?

Most of us work in an office with a laptop.

There’s a certain amount of work you’ve been assigned to do, but it generally doesn’t take 10 hours a day to do. So who is the person organizing the office lunch?

Who is the person inventing the new way of talking about what you do? Who is the person organizing your customers? There probably isn’t anyone doing those things.

So why don’t you do those things?

If you are relentlessly asking “What if?” volunteering, connecting, leading within, a line will form outside your door. Particularly—and this is the important part—if you are willing to take responsibility and give away credit.

you’re not responsible on the work chart.

But when things go wrong, you take the blame. Don’t try to point fingers. When things go wrong say, “Yeah, I did that, but I’ll get better at it.”

Giving away credit means when things go right, let other people take a bow. If you’re the person in the office who’s always taking responsibility and giving away credit, everyone will want you to do

“YOU NEED TO FIND SOMEONE WHO’S DISCONNECTED, SOMEONE IN PAIN, SOMEONE WHO NEEDS A HAND UP, AND FIGURE OUT HOW TO SHINE YOUR LIGHT ON THAT PERSON.” it again, and sooner or later, they will figure out who’s really doing the good work.

HOW DO WE TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AND GIVE AWAY CREDIT?

WHAT DO THOSE OF US WHO WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD NEED TO DO?

If you’ve tried everything you can and you’re not getting authority, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Taking responsibility means doing things even though

I know people, some of whom are my dear friends, who are at the top-leveraged spot with massive nonprofits, political power, etc. None of them can change the whole

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You are an email away from someone who makes $3 a day, $4 a day in Hyderabad, India; you are a block away from a senior citizen who hasn’t seen someone under 50 face to face in three weeks; and everywhere and in-between.

Having worked with people in the slums of Kabira and in Bareilly, India, I can imagine how difficult life is for someone who has almost nothing. But they don’t want to wait for you to get your act together. What needs to happen is you need to find someone who’s disconnected, someone who’s in pain,

someone who needs a hand up, and figure out how to shine your light on that person.

That’s not eliminating genocide in Darfur, but it might be finding one person who survived Darfur and helping him get a job. Or it might be finding a student who’s been left behind and teaching her how to read. That’s enough. Start there. And then repeat.

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RELEVANT RECOMMENDS

THE RELEVANT

summer reading GUIDE

THE VERY GOOD GOSPEL: HOW EVERYTHING WRONG CAN BE MADE RIGHT

LISA SHARON HARPER (WaterBrook / Multnomah) Most Christians will agree that the Gospel is good news, but what does that really mean?

In this enlightening new book, Lisa Sharon Harper explores the concept of shalom, the health and well-being that God intends for every human and indeed for all creation.

Shalom is the idea that lies at the heart of the Gospel’s goodness. The Very Good Gospel will undoubtedly inspire Christians to a deeper sort of faith.

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YOU ARE WHAT YOU LOVE: THE SPIRITUAL POWER OF HABIT JAMES K.A. SMITH (Brazos Press) We are constantly being formed by the choices we make and by our dayto-day relationships. This is the central idea at the heart of You Are What You Love. Given that we are always being formed by the people and things surrounding us, James Smith argues that church community should be at the very heart of formation as Christians. This important book challenges readers to take a hard look at what and how we love.

SILENCE AND BEAUTY: HIDDEN FAITH BORN OF SUFFERING

MAKOTO FUJIMURA (IVP Books) This year marks both the 50th birthday of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence and the release of Martin Scorsese’s film about this story of martyrs.

Artist Makoto Fujimura used this to pen one of the most elegant nonfiction books in recent memory. We enter the world of Silence, and cannot help but be transformed by the beauty and the suffering of those who have gone before.

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TOM SINE (Cascade Books)

C. CHRISTOPHER SMITH

Tom Sine, a futurist and longtime provocateur, challenges Christians to pay attention to social entrepreneurship and community empowerment movements and to consider how they might connect with their faith.

EVICTED: POVERTY AND PROFIT IN THE AMERICAN CITY MATTHEW DESMOND (Crown Books) Following in the footsteps of revelatory books like Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, Desmond explores the delicate housing market within which an increasing number of lower-class urban Americans live.

In what will inevitably be one of the most important books this year, the Harvard sociologist tells stories of eight Milwaukee families struggling to keep a roof over their heads and invites readers to imagine a society in which housing is a basic human right.

SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF EASE AND PLENTY RAMONA AUSUBEL (Riverhead) On Labor Day weekend 1976, the Keating family of Martha’s Vineyard discovers that their inheritance is gone. In telling the story of the Keatings’ undoing, Ramona Ausubel turns the American fairytale of upward mobility on its head.

HEAT AND LIGHT: A NOVEL JENNIFER HAIGH (Ecco) A follow-up to Baker Towers, this novel traces the struggles of Bakerton, Pennsylvania. Previously abandoned by the coal-mining industry, the small town needs the economic jolt that drilling for gas would bring, but is wary of the inevitable hazards. Jennifer Haigh creates a gripping story, set in a believable world where neighbors confront the moral complexities of life in the 21st century.

AUTHOR OF READING FOR THE COMMON GOOD: HOW BOOKS HELP OUR CHURCHES AND NEIGHBORHOODS FLOURISH EXECUTING GRACE: HOW THE DEATH PENALTY KILLED JESUS AND HOW IT’S KILLING US

SHANE CLAIBORNE (HarperOne) In the wake of Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, many Christians are beginning to rethink the American criminal justice system. Few, however, have voiced opposition to the death penalty. In his straightforward and winsome style, Shane Claiborne sets out to change this, offering a compelling theological case against capital punishment. He challenges readers to consider our role in not obstructing God’s forgiving and redeeming work, even in the hardest of criminals.

WHY DID YOU WRITE READING FOR THE COMMON GOOD?

Reading and conversat ion have probably been the most transformative practices for our church, and I wanted to articulate why and invite other churches into similar practices.

HOW DOES READING SERVE THE ‘COMMON GOOD’?

Reading offers us the opportunity to gain some perspective on the experiences of others and to imagine the possibility of other worlds. In order to work in meaningful ways for change, for justice, we have to imagine the possibility of a different, more just world.

DOES IT MATTER WHAT WE READ, OR JUST THAT WE READ?

Certainly. There’s a lot of garbage being published—bad theology, bad art, bad politics—and we need to be focusing our minds on things that are true, just, beautiful, excellent. That said, I do encourage people to read broadly.

WHY DO YOU SAY WE SHOULD READ SLOWLY?

Slow reading helps us learn how to appreciate nuanced details we might otherwise miss.

Cultivating this sort of attentiveness will immensely benefit us in our relationships and our general appreciation of life.

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RELEVANT RECOMMENDS

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In typical Santigold fashion, even her latest album cover is a cultural critique, showing the singer shrink-wrapped and labeled with a price tag. The album follows suit, with songs about selfie culture, feminism and the devaluing of music. She has a lot to say, and she’s having a lot of fun saying it.

In two decades of albums, Andrew Bird has rarely given away personal details, opting instead for fun (sometimes nonsensical) wordplay. But on his latest, Bird lets listeners in, singing about falling in love and overcoming cynicism, layered with his catchy violin riffs and distinct whistling.

JACK GARRATT Electronic pop has been offering up some great new artists in the last few years, and Jack Garratt exemplifies everything right with the genre. The young Brit was building buzz long before this stunning debut album, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Garratt’s beautiful, floating falsetto is enough to give you goosebumps, but paired with explosive beats, complex EDMinspired layered synths and alt-R&B smoothness, it’s pure magic. Lyrically, he dips into being almost cheesily earnest at times, but in a world of cynicism, his outlook is refreshing.

“FAITH NEVER KNOWS WHERE IT IS BEING LED, BUT IT LOVES AND KNOWS THE ONE WHO IS LEADING.” OSWALD CHAMBERS

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On his major-label debut, Gallant performs the kind of vocal acrobatics you haven’t heard since the peak of ’90s R&B. From ballads like “Borderline” to confessional anthems like “Weight in Gold,” Gallant layers raw emotion and genre-bending production into something entirely fresh.

Greta Kline started writing music when she was 13, and her initial solo releases were the epitome of lo-fi. With her sophomore album Next Thing, the singer, now 22, is coming into her own. The album production complements Kline’s twee, floaty vocals with hefty, driving drums and guitars.

This Time Around signifies a new start for Tedashii, whose last album catalogued the pain of losing his young son. This new EP starts with news headlines and ends with him declaring “I’m good.” He’s not denying his past, but through his upbeat hip-hop, he’s showing the world it can’t beat him down.

Here As In Heaven is a reminder of truths we often forget: God’s Kingdom is already spreading on earth, God’s Spirit lives in us and nothing can stand against us.

Throughout the 13 tracks, the band calls listeners to be part of God’s bigger story through joyfully praising the author.

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J.J. ABRAMS

[PARAMOUNT PICTURES]

While not as visually striking as Scorsese’s work, The Big Short says everything that Wolf of Wall Street did about greed, capitalism and corporate America without making you feel as if you should take a bath or visit a confessional afterward. Based on Michael Lewis’ best-selling novel that chronicles the breakdown of the housing credit bubble of the 2000s, the film is anchored by an outstanding set of performances from the likes of Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt and Steve Carell.

[WALT DISNEY PICTURES]

Marriage is central to the human experience, but it’s rarely explored in cinema. That fact alone makes 45 Years a rare movie experience, with a story that does little besides focus on marriage, specifically that of a couple whose 45 years together finally meets its potential breaking point.

The Force Awakens may not be a masterpiece, but what Stars Wars movie is? J.J. Abrams reboots the franchise far better than George Lucas did. The film plays it safe at times, but it never fails to entertain. It’s clever, fun and filled with just enough depth to make you care.

WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE, BUT KNOW NOT YET WHAT WE MAY BE. Wi l l i a m Sha kes pea r e

There is within you—way down deep—a dream. Something God has given you to accomplish in this world. At Northwest University near Seattle Washington, we’ve been helping students discover and unlock their dreams since 1934. Here, all things are still possible. Interested in learning more? Visit us at discovernu/relevant.

Undergraduate | Graduate | Doctoral | Adult Degree Completion On Campus or Online

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MAY_JUN 2016

THE REVENANT

JOY

WESTERN

MUSTANG

ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU

DAVID O. RUSSELL

BILL AND TURNER ROSS

DENIZ GAMZE ERGÜVEN

[20TH CENTURY FOX]

[20TH CENTURY FOX]

[COURT 31 PRODUCTIONS]

[CG CINÉMA]

The Revenant won big during awards season, and it’s not overrated. Through a revenge story about a frontiersman left for dead, Iñárritu creates an intense, moving meditation about the emptiness of vengeance and the bond between a father and son—all expressed by beautiful visuals.

A showcase for the talents of Jennifer Lawrence, Joy tells the story of a down-and-out young woman who tries to make it as a divorced single mom and ambitious entrepreneur. Russell has established a consistent style that blends grit, nostalgia and dark comedy with an unwavering sense of hope.

This documentary tells the story of a Texas town near Coahuila, Mexico. Faced with the challenges of drug violence and border security, the town must come to grips with change.

Yet, the Ross brothers don’t get political. They’re more interested in making you feel the essence of Western life.

When five sisters are wrongfully accused of misbehaving, they are locked away from society. This leads to a planned escape with mixed consequences. With help from her young cast, Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven paints a powerful portrait of female empowerment.

YOUR LIFE WILL

HAVE STORMS

STAND STRONG Jesus braces us to live boldly in the midst of life’s challenges.

Book: 90 readings | DVD: 6 lessons

dhp.org/resilient

RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

93

RELEVANT PODCAST HERE ARE SOME NOTABLE RECENT EPISODES OF THE WEEKLY RELEVANT PODCAST

AUDREY ASSAD

REND COLLECTIVE

ROB BELL

EPISODE 486

EPISODE 485

EPISODE 483

Audrey Assad’s latest album, Inheritance, is a collection of hymn covers with two original songs in the mix. She stopped by the RELEVANT studio to perform stripped-down versions of a few favorites off the album, including her originals and her revamped version of “Oh, the Deep Deep Love of Jesus.” It’s enchanting.

Don’t miss it.

Rend Collective started in a tiny church community in Ireland, but the band has since gained a following all over the world. With their folk-infused brand of worship, it’s not hard to see why. They visited the RELEVANT studio to perform a few songs off their new album, As Family We Go. We also talk to author Nabeel Qureshi about his new book, Answering Jihad.

Five years ago, Rob Bell published his controversial book, Love Wins, prompting several evangelical leaders to bid him “farewell.” But Bell never really went away. He teamed up with Oprah for a new show, kept preaching and wrote a handful of books, including his latest, How to Be Here. We talk to Bell about the book and what he’s up to now.

PROPAGANDA AND JOHNNYSWIM EPISODE 480 On this episode, we talk to rapper, author and poet Propaganda about the state of racial diversity in America.

We also hear from the band Johnnyswim about their new live album, which features redone versions of some of the husband-wife duo’s best songs.

Plus, Jesse brings us another story about how he almost died.

MAKE A SEVEN PROGRAMS TWELVE CONCENTRATIONS MULTIPLE LOCATIONS 100% ONLINE OPTIONS AVAILABLE *check JohnsonU.edu for available program locations

94

MAY_JUN 2016

RELEVANT.TV SOME OF THE CURATED VIDEOS AND SHORT FILMS PLAYING NOW ON RELEVANT.TV

“ALWAYS”

UNASHAMED WORLD

TYSON MOTSENBOCKER

LECRAE

“WHEN I SEE YOU” (LIVE AT RELEVANT)

I’M POSSIBLE JEREMY COWART

RELEVANT “Always,” is a love letter, but, in keeping with Motsenbocker’s simple, singer-songwriter sound, it’s more honest storytelling than cheesy clichés. The music video for the song—which comes from his debut full-length album, Letters for Lost Loves—is filmed in beautiful double exposure, making for a creative twist on the boy-meets-girl premise.

Lecrae recently told his background story in his book Unashamed, and this documentary follows the hip-hop artist’s journey from his first gigs to launching Reach Records and starting a worldwide movement. It goes behind the scenes with the 116 Clique (which includes Trip Lee, Andy Mineo, Tedashii and others) as they tour the world.

Phillip LaRue’s second solo album, You, is full of songs written for special people in his life. He stopped by the RELEVANT studio to perform a few songs off the album.

LaRue wrote “When I See You” for his sister, Brianna, who has cerebral palsy, but it’s moving for anyone who has ever doubted their own strength.

Jeremy Cowart has photographed celebrities, launched a successful app and started a nonprofit, but things didn’t come easily. In this video, he tells his story of failures, taking risks and learning to believe in himself.

He talks about how he realized “greatness should serve a greater purpose.” Watch it if you want some major inspiration.

Proclaiming Jesus Christ as Life!

TRAINING for Full Time Christian Service Regardless of Occupation!

LEADERSHIP Through Servanthood by Christ’s Indwelling, Resurrection Life.

PRACTICAL Bible Teaching Genesis to Revelation: Christ Revealed in the Written Word. s Bible School s Conferences s Outdoor Education s Private Retreats s Personal Getaways

C A P E R N W R AY . C A RELEVANTMAGAZINE.COM

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CONTENTS

MAY/JUNE 2016 ISSUE 81

FEATURES 44

THE EVANGELICALS You hear about “evangelical voters” all the time. But who are these people, really?

50

MR LITTLE JEANS The Norwegian singer is making waves with her irresistible, hope-filled synth pop.

58

HANNIBAL BURESS How he and a new generation of comedians are provoking social change—like it or not.

62

NSFW Sexual temptation is just about everywhere.

How can Christians fight it?

52

66

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD The LA band is exploding with a unique brand of substantive indie pop.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO EWAN MCGREGOR Why the acclaimed actor took on the most complex role of his life

70

THROUGH HELL AND BACK Catching up with Rob Bell five years after the fallout from his controversial book.

74

JUST DO LESS A Silicon Valley innovator shares her strategy for living more intentionally.

82

FOR KING & COUNTRY The Australian-born brothers have a new film, new album, and love from Taylor Swift.

84

SETH GODIN Business guru Seth Godin knows how to change the world—but it’s not how you think.

46 JOHN GRAY

8

FIR ST WOR D

10

FEEDBACK

38

THE DROP

Wild Nothing, Liza Anne, Rivers & Robots, Kim Walker-Smith and more artists you need to keep an eye on.

96

MAY_JUN 2016

76 THAT DRAGON, CANCER

12

SLICES

Why are millennials so anxious?; Hollywood’s diversity problem; 4 ways to survive summer weddings; Kanye’s squad on faith; The all-hipster grocery; Stephen King’s faith-healer; 20-somethings aren’t starting businesses; Morgan Freeman’s search for God; Christians in ISIS’s path.

30

R E J E C T A PAT H Y

South Sudan: The biggest humanitarian crisis no one is talking about; Is there a Christian case for legalizing marijuana?

88

R E L E VA N T R E C O M M E N D S

Our summer reading guide, plus the music and movies we’re excited about.

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Christian Community Credit Union is privately insured by American Share Insurance up to $250,000 per account. By members’ choice the Credit Union is not federally insured or insured by any state government.

" I f y ou l ive for people' s ac c eptance, you' ll die fr om t heir rejection. " BUY Lecraeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s debut book today UNASHAMEDBOOK.COM