Page 2494 – Christianity Today (2024)

The Bible, Rocks and Timeby Davis A. Young and Ralph F. Stearley IVP Academic, September 2008 510 pp., $21.99

In The Bible, Rocks and Time (IVP Academic), geologists and Reformed Christians Davis Young and Ralph Stearley try to convince young-earth creationists (YECs) to abandon their position. First, they argue that the Creation account in Genesis 1 need not be understood as a historical narrative documenting the creation of the universe and its inhabitants in six normal (rotational) days. Second, they argue that the data from geology point unwaveringly to a planet of exceedingly ancient age.

I particularly appreciated Young and Stearley’s historical overview of church beliefs on Genesis and Creation. Their careful documentation puts to rest the claims of other old-earth proponents that the church fathers held views compatible with an ancient earth. They likewise present the origins of modern geology well, particularly within the broader historical backdrop of Christian influences on scientific thought.

But BR&T is essentially a negative critique. Theologically, the authors seek to show that Genesis 1 need not be understood as describing six rotational days. But if so, which competing view should we adopt? They clearly dislike the “ruin-reconstruction theory” or “gap theory” (there was a large gap of time between the first and second verses of Genesis), and display reservations about the day-age view (the six days were much longer periods). The authors favor some kind of allegorical view (e.g., the “framework hypothesis”), but are steadfast that they will not make a positive case for any of these. The result is that the authors do not present their own views clearly enough for critical evaluation.

The authors’ discussion of Noah’s Flood is similarly vague. They argue strongly against the Flood as a global, geologically formative event in history. But what are Christians to make of Genesis 6-9? BR&T makes no case for what the Flood actually was, or whether the authors even believe it occurred.

BR&T, though rigorously argued and well-documented, is too limited. It is not that the arguments do not hit hard against YEC—they do. The YEC community should learn from this work. But a robust concept of the Creation cannot be articulated when Genesis 1 is evaluated in near isolation from other relevant Scripture (e.g., Gen. 2, 3, 6-11; Rom. 1 and 8; 2 Pet. 3). Were Adam and Eve historical individuals? Where was the Garden of Eden? Was the Fall an actual event? And how does this relate to evil? These and many other questions are never addressed.

Young-earth creationism is a complex system. YEC’s conception of history includes not merely a six-rotational-day Creation, but also a young age of the earth, miraculous creation of plant and animal life, a commitment to a historical Adam and Eve, a historical Fall with universal spiritual and physical consequences, and a global catastrophe.

This comprehensive framework fosters understandings of sin, the problem of evil, divine nature, judgment, Christ as the Second Adam, salvation, and eschatological redemption. A full view of the Creation can only be acquired from the whole of Scripture—from Genesis to Revelation—not by focusing, even intently, on but one chapter.

Marcus R. Ross, assistant professor of geology at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

The Bible, Rocks and Time is available at ChristianBook.com and other book retailers.

Christianity Today has more book reviews.

Other articles on origins include:

At Origins’ Margins | Michael Behe wonders how much Darwinism can really explain. (March 27, 2008)

Living with the Darwin Fish | Why the discovery of yet another ‘missing link’ doesn’t destroy my faith. (March 12, 2007)

The Art of Debating Darwin | How to intelligently design a winning case for God’s role in creation. (September 1, 2004)

Intelligent Design: Searching for a Blueprint | Discovery Institute reshapes the orgins debate. (November 15, 1999)

I was sick in bed, my poor wife by my side, during a class reunion weekend in South Carolina this past weekend. I usually make sure I get the remote control quickly in hand, so I can steer the programming toward the exercising of my mind: ESPN and Fox Sports are two of my top choices. But my wife beat me to the coveted piece of gadgetry in our hotel room. So I spent the day watching or hearing HGTV design shows. I had nausea when they started, but after awhile watching design shows, I told my wife it was getting worse.

Really I did like some of the shows, like Color Splash by this cool Asian guy with tats on his arm. But the take away after a saturation of design tips and styles were some thoughts on how design is a reflection of us, how we see ourselves, and who we want to become.

Have you ever wondered what your church space says about you and God? We often pick our cars based upon our personalities. (Is that why we get so offended when someone cuts us off? In the Middle East and Asia, this happens every two seconds. They don’t seem to care.)

We can look at our homes and see what type of people we are by the way we arrange furniture, paint or don’t paint walls, the type of art we have, what we use as our focal point for guests to see, the rooms that we care about usually get more resource dollars.

How about the church? The truth about design is that it reflects values, perspectives, priorities and beliefs. Design is also a good way to define the reality of your heart. When many of the early missional movements began, the focus was on resourcing the people in optimum settings of growth with tools to enable them. The focus in these movements isn’t physical structures as much as it is human beings.

Again, questions may lead us to answers. Instead of just giving a few thoughts on what I believe about space perhaps some questions may guide us to a reality that we didn’t know existed. It may be different depending upon the culture we live in. We may soon discover as we ponder these questions, termites have been quietly eating away the very values we said our buildings were built with and some fissures have appeared in that firm foundation.

Here are some questions that can help define reality:

?Do people mostly refer to your building as the “church?”

?What does the design of our space tell us about where and how we see the maximum growth happening?

?What does the allocation of the dollars you spend on your space indicate about your priorities? Is it where you want it to be? How does this jive with movements historically?

?How does the Internet reshape your values towards space, especially since the emerging generation doesn’t see a difference between their on-line and off-line life?

?When people look at the design focal points of your facility, what do they feel you focus upon? Is this where you want the primary focus to be?

?What creative space around you – outside the walls of the facility you rent or own – can you use for free or very low costs?

?Do you need pastoral offices?

?Can we show better stewardship in how we share space with our people?

?Do you have a room for innovation? In the past, people created “WAR rooms”. I think it may be time for some new metaphors as well. How about rooms for Creativity, Innovation, Research, Design and Development? Can you think of new rooms or spaces that would clearly articulate what you value?

?Are you reduplicating what Disney can do better? Is it necessary?

?Do the spaces in your church represent a passion for a Volunteer Revolution? How?

?What parking space do you park in at your facility? Where is it?

?What building or space are we to focus on designing anyway?

There was an incredible statistic an entrepreneurial kingdom-minded friend, Bernard Moon, sent me. Did you see it? Here it is: The church spends an average of $347,000 per baptism.

Okay, I know souls are priceless. But this number begs for us to look at how we may have gone down a road we didn’t really want to take. Nike spends $100 per customer for what they call customer acquisition costs. What do you spend to see a life radically transformed?

Flip the Script

What if we turned this thing around and understood the primary buildings we are called to build are the living temples walking around us? What would happen if we put as much emphasis in actually equipping our people with customized assessments, close mentoring, residencies, tools, and other experiences that may not be captured primarily inside a weekend experience or a large group setting or one space?

Maybe it’s time we do a hard assessment of what we’ve already designed and let an outsider or a group of them come in, people who aren’t Christians and ask them as they walk around your facility what does your space say about your values. You may be surprised at how your design really does define what you believe.

Cross-posted from The Christian History Blog

When theologian George Kalantzis returned to the Wheaton College campus last fall after spending the summer in the Holy Land, he had a very pleasant surprise. While he was out of the country, two donors had approached the college administration about funding a program that would encourage interaction between Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism over their mutual legacy from the early church.

No one at Wheaton knew just how much these donors would fund, but George and his colleagues decided to dream big: they envisioned a Center for the Study of Early Christianity, with a vertically integrated program from undergraduate courses up through master's and doctoral studies.

Their big vision was rewarded.

Two physicians from San Diego, Frank and Julie Papatheofanis, have now made that dream possible. (Julie Papatheofanis is a Wheaton alum.) You can see the beginnings of this vision at the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies website.

Evangelical Christian interest in the early church has been growing for about 30 years. Much of the impetus for that interest can be traced to the work of the late Robert Webber, who was teaching at Wheaton in 1978 when he wrote Common Roots about the importance of the early church for evangelical life. "Without the work of Bob Webber, this would not be possible," George told me over coffee in Wheaton's Beamer Student Center. "He plowed the ground," George continued, alluding to 1 Corinthians 3:6.

There seems to be a real hunger for the systematic study of the early church. Wheaton College has not yet begun to advertise this program and already, George says, he has close to 30 students engaged with it. On his desk are about 10 applications for the master's program, a similar number for the undergraduate certificate program, plus a number of students applying for the doctoral program (only one doctoral student can be accepted each year).

A handful of teachers at the conservative Protestant colleges and seminaries have specialized in patristics. Dan Williams at Baylor University is a leading light. Others George mentioned to me include Bradley Nassif at North Park University, Bryan Litfin at Moody Bible Institute, and Jeff Bingham at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Students interested in patristics can take courses here and there, but Wheaton is the first to offer such a concentrated and structured study opportunity.

What does George Kalantzis hope to accomplish? He is very clear that this should not be a nest from which students can swarm to Eastern Orthodoxy. It is not what the donors had in mind (although they are themselves Greek Orthodox). Instead, this program is about seeing the early church tradition as the common roots of evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox.

"By studying the early church," George says, "we are studying about our commonalities much more than our differences.

"Our goal is to understand our common tradition, explore it, live with it, be with it, instead of just going back and plundering it – finding the eight quotes to justify whatever I want to do."

One reason for George's emphasis on the tradition we hold in common is his own biography. He was born in Greece in a Greek evangelical home. As a fourth-generation Greek evangelical, he is unwilling to surrender the Great Tradition to the Orthodox, as if it were their exclusive property.

The Tradition belongs to Protestants as well, he reminds us. Without the story of the early church, the Protestant Reformation would make no sense. The Reformers appealed to the pattern of the early church. We cannot be true Protestants without knowing that history.

A few other facts about George:

• He came to America to study medicine, but after his first year of medical school, he says, God opened his eyes to a different calling, the study of history and theology.
• He chose to do his doctoral work at Northwestern University in order to stay in Chicago and relate to the Greek evangelical community here. While at NU, he wrote his dissertation on Theodore of Mopsuestia's Christology.
• After his doctoral work, he taught at Garrett Evangelical Seminary for 10 years. If you visit ratemyprofessor.com, you'll see what his students thought about him. One student from 2006 wrote: "George is FABULOUS and his lectures are brilliant. He doesn't coddle anyone but has very high expectations."

Well, we think Wheaton College and the Doctors Papatheofanis are FABULOUS for opening a new Center for the Study of Early Christianity. And we have very high expectations. Congratulations to all on a ground-breaking move.

Image credit: Icon of the First Council of Nicaea via Wikimedia Commons.

Anna Kocher is an artist in the greater Philadelphia area whose work has been displayed at her alma mater, Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, the Center Art Gallery at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Church of the Good Samaritan, where she and her family attend.

In this interview with Elrena Evans, Anna talks about what it means to be a Christian and an artist, and how motherhood has impacted her work.

Where do your faith and your art intersect?

My faith and my art have both been a part of who I am as far back as I can remember. I always believed; I always drew. Both have changed and matured and gone through times of drought and times of abundance.

In high school and early college, I had this feeling that I should do something practical …. But when I decided to pursue art in college, I had this rare moment of clarity and knew that it was the right thing for me to do. I’ve been grateful for that moment of insight and find myself clinging to the memory when I start to feel like maybe I should have been an accountant or something. (For anyone who knows me, the idea of me as an accountant is laughable.)

You write on your website, “We live in a society obsessed with the material and ideal but terrified of true, gritty physicality.” It strikes me that motherhood – pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and just the day-to-day experience of raising small children – is steeped in “gritty physicality.”

[M]otherhood … strips away the facade in so many different areas. I always had a sense that life was fragile, though I don’t think I dwelt on it much. People always talk about how miraculous infants are, which I always took to mean something about how amazing and precious they are. After actually having an infant (two, as a matter of fact), I would say that the miracle is that they stay alive at all. It seems to defy reason that this tiny, helpless creature with sporadic, phlegmy breathing who spews up strange substances and seems, at times, intent on refusing everything that would help it sustain itself (sleep, milk, socks) would grow and flourish and become an individual with thoughts and opinions (strong, strong opinions).

Motherhood also strips away illusions you hold about yourself. Physically, you get to know your own body in a very different way. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not always pretty. It is also very revealing in less tangible ways. You find yourself coming face to face with the deepest parts of yourself, which, again, are not always pleasant …. Somehow being a mother manages to be so much more joyful and beautiful than I could have imagined before, but also more painful and difficult than I could have anticipated. It’s humbling to realize how one-dimensional my understanding of motherhood was before having children, and instructive to apply that insight to issues of faith and truth.

What is the role of a Christian artist? One of your paintings, for instance, shows a man sitting on a toilet – is there anything fundamentally Christian about that piece?

I think the role of the Christian artist is the same as that of a secular artist: to make the best artwork possible …. My work is inherently Christian because I am a Christian and my work comes out of who I am. I don’t think the highest calling for the Christian artist is to use his or her art as a platform for opinions, convictions, or beliefs. If art is to be anything other than preaching, illustrating, decorating (all of which have their place), it has to transcend what you, as an artist, are trying to say and actually become a living thing in its own right.

My Awakening series (of which the infamous man-on-toilet painting is one) was actually one of my more intentionally Christian projects. I might even call it allegorical. In doing those seven paintings, I was thinking about spiritual transformation and how you expect it to happen in the blink of an eye but it often happens incrementally. For me, going from being asleep to being awake and ready to face the day is a process … and involves lots of elaborate routines (revolving mostly around hot beverages). This relates to the process of going from spiritual deadness, stagnation, and denial to being spiritually awake and ready to face life or whatever you are presented with …. Discipline, or routine even, plays a role in this. You go through these small, seemingly insignificant processes and find yourself changed at the end without being able to see the exact moment when the change occurred.

[I’m] disappointed that my Awakening series is probably among the least likely of my projects to be displayed in a church or Christian setting, in spite of the fact that it was more consciously influenced by my faith than much of my other work. I think that art has a much higher capacity for being influential, in a positive way, in the church, but we have to be less afraid of incorporating things that we may not completely understand or be able to define.

Much of your work feels very intimate. There’s an intimacy to a painting of people sleeping, and an intimacy to your depictions of the Stations of the Cross, but very different sorts of intimacy.

We have these bodies that are beautiful, miraculous, luminous, but are also teeming with bacteria, so fragile that they can be destroyed in a moment, and capable of moments of such embarrassing ungainliness. We have a tendency to want to idealize, to airbrush over the blemishes and wrinkles, both literally and figuratively.

But the truth has to encompass both sides of the dichotomy, not just the parts that are pleasant to look at. My tendency to gravitate toward this sometimes uncomfortable intimacy is motivated by my pursuit of truth.

What’s your advice for Christian women (and men) aspiring to be artists?

The biggest thing I would say, based on my experience to date, is that you have to work. It’s easy to decide to be an artist, to have art-related conversations and think a lot about other people’s art, to spend a lot of time planning your next project and amassing all of the necessary supplies. But actually sitting down, facing that daunting blank canvas over and over, and making something out of it will eventually allow you to find your artistic voice.

As far as being a Christian artist, I would just say that if you pursue your faith and your art wholeheartedly, but independently of one another, they will naturally come together in a more organic, authentic way than if you just say to yourself, “How could I go about making art that is ‘Christian’?” Be an authentic, passionate Christian, and make good art.

When theologian George Kalantzis returned to the Wheaton College campus last fall after spending the summer in the Holy Land, he had a very pleasant surprise. While he was out of the country, two donors had approached the college administration about funding a program that would encourage interaction between Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism over their mutual legacy from the early church.

No one at Wheaton knew just how much these donors would fund, but George and his colleagues decided to dream big: they envisioned a Center for the Study of Early Christianity, with a vertically integrated program from undergraduate courses up through master’s and doctoral studies.

Their big vision was rewarded.

Two physicians from San Diego, Frank and Julie Papatheofanis, have now made that dream possible. (Julie Papatheofanis is a Wheaton alum.) You can see the beginnings of this vision at the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies website.

Evangelical Christian interest in the early church has been growing for about 30 years. Much of the impetus for that interest can be traced to the work of the late Robert Webber, who was teaching at Wheaton in 1978 when he wrote Common Roots about the importance of the early church for evangelical life. “Without the work of Bob Webber, this would not be possible,” George told me over coffee in Wheaton’s Beamer Student Center. “He plowed the ground,” George continued, alluding to 1 Corinthians 3:6.

There seems to be a real hunger for the systematic study of the early church. Wheaton College has not yet begun to advertise this program and already, George says, he has close to 30 students engaged with it. On his desk are about 10 applications for the master’s program, a similar number for the undergraduate certificate program, plus a number of students applying for the doctoral program (only one doctoral student can be accepted each year).

A handful of teachers at the conservative Protestant colleges and seminaries have specialized in patristics. Dan Williams at Baylor University is a leading light. Others George mentioned to me include Bradley Nassif at North Park University, Bryan Litfin at Moody Bible Institute, and Jeff Bingham at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Students interested in patristics can take courses here and there, but Wheaton is the first to offer such a concentrated and structured study opportunity.

What does George Kalantzis hope to accomplish? He is very clear that this should not be a nest from which students can swarm to Eastern Orthodoxy. It is not what the donors had in mind (although they are themselves Greek Orthodox). Instead, this program is about seeing the early church tradition as the common roots of evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox.

“By studying the early church,” George says, “we are studying about our commonalities much more than our differences.

“Our goal is to understand our common tradition, explore it, live with it, be with it, instead of just going back and plundering it – finding the eight quotes to justify whatever I want to do.”

One reason for George’s emphasis on the tradition we hold in common is his own biography. He was born in Greece in a Greek evangelical home. As a fourth-generation Greek evangelical, he is unwilling to surrender the Great Tradition to the Orthodox, as if it were their exclusive property.

The Tradition belongs to Protestants as well, he reminds us. Without the story of the early church, the Protestant Reformation would make no sense. The Reformers appealed to the pattern of the early church. We cannot be true Protestants without knowing that history.

A few other facts about George:

• He came to America to study medicine, but after his first year of medical school, he says, God opened his eyes to a different calling, the study of history and theology.
• He chose to do his doctoral work at Northwestern University in order to stay in Chicago and relate to the Greek evangelical community here. While at NU, he wrote his dissertation on Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Christology.
• After his doctoral work, he taught at Garrett Evangelical Seminary for 10 years. If you visit ratemyprofessor.com, you’ll see what his students thought about him. One student from 2006 wrote: “George is FABULOUS and his lectures are brilliant. He doesn’t coddle anyone but has very high expectations.”

Well, we think Wheaton College and the Doctors Papatheofanis are FABULOUS for opening a new Center for the Study of Early Christianity. And we have very high expectations. Congratulations to all on a ground-breaking move.

* * *

Image credit: Icon of the First Council of Nicaea via Wikimedia Commons.

Today, hospice is an accepted part of American medicine. One out of three terminally ill Americans uses hospice care. People increasingly assume that hospice is part of the dying process. They also assume a key hospice principle: that people should be cared for in such a way that they can live fully until they die. Few realize that the modern hospice movement is young and that Christian faith motivated its founder.

The modern hospice movement is rooted in a much older idea of hospitality. Indeed, the term comes from the same Latin root as hospital and hostel. Places of hospitality were not confined to the Latin-speaking world, however. Greeks, Indians, Romans, early Christians, and Muslims all built places where pilgrims and travelers, particularly the sick, could rest and find care. In modern times, Christians showed their commitment to hospitality for the hurting by building hospitals and, at the end of the 19th century, the first institutions dedicated solely to caring for the dying. Called hospices, these institutions lacked the fully formed philosophy that would characterize the modern movement, they but did offer inspiration to the movement's founder, Dame Cicely Saunders.

Saunders established the first modern hospice, St. Christopher's, in 1967. Located in London, St. Christopher's was the result of Saunders' experience treating dying people, her belief that people could flourish even as they died, and her sense of Christian call.

A wind behind her

Saunders' route to both medicine and faith took some time. Born in 1918, she went to Oxford in 1938 and studied politics, philosophy, and economics. World War II sent her on a different path. She stopped her studies in 1940 to become a nurse. When a bad back forced her from nursing in 1944, she returned to school and became a medical social worker. In the midst of her schooling, she went on vacation with some Christian friends and converted to Christianity. "It was as though I suddenly felt the wind behind me rather in my face," she reflected afterward.

In 1947, it became clearer what she would do with God's strength at her back. While working at a London hospital, she met David Tasma, a Polish survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and a terminally ill cancer patient. They fell in love. They also agreed that the care dying people received did not allow dying to be what it could be: a time to make peace with friends, family, and one's own life. When Tasma died, he left Saunders his fortune of 500 pounds and told her, "I'll be a window in your home." Saunders later remembered that David's words felt like God tapping her on the shoulder and saying, "You've got to get on with it."

Getting on with it was not simple. Saunders worked for several more years among the dying before training to be a doctor. After completing her studies, she worked at St. Joseph's, one of the hospices started by the Catholic Church at the end of the 19th century. There she began to develop and disseminate her philosophy about caring for dying people. Saunders recognized that terminally ill patients dealt with more than physical pain. Doctors needed to consider their "total pain," or the combination of their physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental pain. Rather than acceding to the medical field's final words on a dying patient—"there is nothing more we can do"—Saunders proposed that the medical community could do much. In addition to managing pain, Saunders advocated listening to patients' stories and concerns and responding with emotional and spiritual support.

Her time with patients confirmed that dying was a spiritual matter. St. Joseph's taught Saunders that "a hospice is a stopping place for pilgrims. For many of ours it is the last journey. If we can help them to be quiet by relieving their physical and mental burden, we can see so clearly that the real work is not ours at all but Our Lord's, Who by His saving death draws near to all the dying."

In the midst of Saunders' work, she experienced personal loss. While at St. Joseph's, she fell in love with another dying patient, Antoni Michniewicz. His death in 1960 was followed by the death of Saunders' father in 1961. Saunders later described this time as one of intense grieving. Both her work and her own experience demonstrated that families and friends of terminally ill patients needed support.

The first modern hospice

In 1967, Saunders opened St. Christopher's hospice, a place dedicated to patient treatment as well as to teaching and research. Although Saunders had published many articles about caring for terminally ill patients and had become a recognized authority on the subject, she knew that spreading her message would take time and more research. Her success, however, was remarkable. Her hospice philosophy spread abroad—the first hospice in America opened in 1971—and St. Christopher's became a center of training, study, and care. Her reception of the title "Dame Commander of the British Empire" in 1980 and the prestigious Templeton Prize in 1981, as well as a host of other awards, demonstrated the significant influence of her work in the medical community and beyond.

Saunders also used St. Christopher's to show how religion could be integrated into the experience of dying. Her hospice was open to Christians and non-Christians alike but had, she said, a Christian foundation. She also claimed that treating physical pain gave patients freedom—a freedom she saw them use "in time for family reconciliations, in deepening relationships, and in all the sorting out of beliefs and memories that can help others say, with Pope John XXIII, 'My bags are packed—I can go with a tranquil heart at any moment.'"

Even after her retirement in 1985, Saunders actively promoted her movement as well as her beliefs about the intersection of faith and dying. She strongly condemned euthanasia. Hospice, according to Saunders, encouraged people to live fully until they died. Convinced that with modern drugs people need not die in pain, she claimed that euthanasia precluded the work of a good death—the reconciliation with mortality, with family, and with God that occurred as people died. "It is not for us to say that the suffering is fruitless," she wrote, "nor that there is nothing more for the patient to do or learn in this life." People were not the own masters, she claimed.

Saunders' last decades were marked—as her life had been—by loss, joy, and faith. In 1980, she married a man she had long loved, Polish artist Marian Bohusz-Sysko. When they had first met in 1963, he was married but estranged from his wife. Saunders and Bohusz-Sysko married after his wife's death, and he died at St. Christopher's in 1995. As he was dying he told Cicely, "I am completely happy. I have done what I had to do in my life, and I am ready to die." Cicely believed Marian's death was a "good death," the kind that hospice encouraged by bringing into the secular world of medicine Christian ideas of hospitality, reconciliation, and God's presence in suffering. Hospice, she asserted, also brought people of various faiths and no faith together in a way that was deeply rooted in Saunders own Christian faith. As she wrote, "Death remains a mystery, but we have been shown that while it divides it can also unite."

Dame Cicely Saunders died in 2005—in the hospice she founded.

Sarah E. Johnson is assistant professor of religion at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, MN.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

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In the United States in 2007:

• 37.3 million people (12.5%) were in poverty.
• 13.3 million children under the age of 18 (18%) were in poverty.
• 3.6 million seniors ages 65 and older (9.7%) were in poverty.
• 36.2 million Americans (23.8 million adults and 12.4 million children) lived in food-insecure households.
• 3.9 million of all U.S. households (3.4%) accessed emergency food from a food pantry one or more times.

Source: Feeding America (feedingamerica.org/faces-of-hunger/hunger-101/hunger-and-poverty-statistics.aspx)

Make a Difference

According to Feeding America, more than 72 percent of the food banks surveyed at the end of 2008 were unable to adequately meet the demands of the hungry without limiting their operations or reducing the amount of food offered. Here’s how you can help:

• Write a check. Make a contribution to your local food bank, Feeding America, or another organization that fights hunger.
• Volunteer. See the face of hunger for yourself. Most pantries have several tasks available, such as shopping, stocking shelves, sorting donations, or assisting clients.
• Donate food you would cook for your own family. Think healthy and simple. Avoid large, price club-sized cans or bags (most organizations can’t split these into smaller portions). Reject the impulse to clean out your pantry.
• Let your local and state politicians know you care about hunger, and vote accordingly. For updates on political issues affecting hunger, visit FeedingAmerica.org and click the “Advocate” tab.
• Host a neighborhood, school, church, or youth-group food drive. Ask your local food pantry what types of food are needed. Include that information when you solicit donations.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

This article was posted today with “Hunger Has a Profile.” Christianity Today has a special section on world hunger.

Learn more about domestic hunger through Feeding America, which bills itself as the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief charity.

First out of the donation bag were the chocolate Santa Clauses, long after the Christmas season was over. Next was a can of Campbell’s soup, three years past its expiration date. An assortment of foil-wrapped hotel coffee packets followed, then Halloween candy in a trick-or-treat bag, a jar of maraschino cherries, and a dented tin of sweetened condensed milk.

I was doing my monthly shift at the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry, housed in a church in an affluent Chicago suburb. While waiting for our clients to arrive, I sorted donations and stocked shelves. As I went through bag after bag, box after box—and threw into the trash what some people considered “good enough for the hungry”—I felt increasingly angry. I also felt ashamed.

I used to think these things were good enough, too.

Food pantries are often the mainstay of refugees, single moms who can’t make it on one paycheck, the disabled or mentally ill, and retirees on fixed incomes. As the economic crisis deepens, that clientele is changing. Food pantries saw a 30 percent average increase in emergency food requests in 2008, according to Ross Fraser, media relations manager of Feeding America (formerly known as America’s Second Harvest). The $657-million-revenue charity provides more than 2 billion pounds of groceries through 205 food banks that serve 63,000 food pantries, and estimates that it serves 25 million people who are at risk for hunger. Among these are 9 million children and almost 3 million senior citizens.

Of those who use the pantries, 36 percent live in households where at least one person is employed. Food pantries are seeing more of the working poor who can’t make ends meet on low wages, Fraser says, as well as the white-collar middle class who work in hard-hit industries such as the housing sector. Some states, such as New Hampshire, Florida, Massachusetts, and Ohio, have had a much higher spike in food pantry use, and the percentages could increase.

“If the economy continues to decline, it will just get worse,” Fraser says. “Millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They are only one paycheck away from catastrophe.”

Understanding the Hungry

When I first volunteered at the food pantry five years ago, I had a vague sort of guilt about world hunger, brought on by newspaper headlines about children dying in Africa from malnutrition. Growing up, when I was exhorted to “think about the starving children in China” and clean my plate, I knew some people didn’t have enough to eat. In my family, the preparation of good food was a way of showing love, so the knowledge that some people went hungry haunted me in more than just a logical way. Volunteering at the food pantry seemed like a salve for my conscience.

The interdenominational pantry where I volunteer is supported by 17 churches in my town—Protestant and Catholic working together—as well as schools, businesses, and personal donations from the community. Last year, the pantry scheduled about 3,500 appointments for local families to pick up food. Clients must prove they live in Glen Ellyn or a bordering community, but do not have to show proof of need. They may visit up to six times a year, and no more than once a month. Emergency bags are also available for walk-ins at the discretion of the supervisor.

The client first chooses from a list of staple foods (meat, cheese, eggs, milk) that are bagged by volunteers. While waiting for his or her staples to be bagged, the client receives a basket to use to shop for other foods to supplement those basics. I began as a bagger, then moved to a shopper, helping clients one on one choose from the assortment of extras on the shelves.

During a two-hour shift, I help maybe eight people. Each client is as different as the patterns in a kaleidoscope: retirees, the mentally ill, single mothers, young men fallen on hard times. Many are immigrants who speak no English: a Vietnamese woman with children, a refugee family from Sudan, an elderly woman from Ukraine. When confronted with such donated items as Suddenly Salad, Hostess Ding Dongs, bags of pastel-colored marshmallows, or SpaghettiOs, they are baffled. Even with an interpreter, they have difficulty bridging the culinary cultural barrier. If you have always shopped at an open-air market for your family, how do you understand instant mashed potatoes? Hamburger Helper? Fruit Roll-Ups?

Not everyone is grateful. Some clients, angry about their circ*mstances, refuse eye contact, choose foods as quickly as possible, and leave without saying more than a few words. Others take their frustration out on the volunteers. One woman lectured me on my “short shorts” (it was July, and we were sweltering). Another badgered me to let her pack her basket past the “full line,” refusing to take no for an answer until a supervisor intervened. A few take advantage, packing their baskets with the most expensive items on the shelves while telling me that “other food pantries have a much better selection than yours.”

If you volunteer to feel good about yourself, you’ll work a few shifts, then give it up. Lofty ideals shatter like a stained-glass window pelted by rocks. Some days I wonder, Do food pantries really help?

“Who are we to judge who is truly hungry?” asked Susan Papierski, assistant director at the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry, acknowledging that she gets discouraged sometimes, too. “It’s that one person who really needs our services. I look at them and say, ‘That’s why I’m here.’?”

She reminded me that hunger isn’t always obvious. “It can look like you and me, or it can be your neighbor and you don’t even know about it.” What helps her, she said, is hearing from donors who used to be clients, got back on their feet, and now help support the pantry.

When I am discouraged, I also think of the kids. As Fraser at Feeding America told me, “Children are not responsible for their circ*mstances.” Then he quoted a popular saying at his organization: “A child who is hungry cannot learn; they become an adult who cannot earn.” Making sure no one goes hungry makes not only moral sense but practical and economic sense as well.

It’s the grateful clients and the success stories that stick in my mind:

• The refugee mother whose son went on to attend Harvard on a full scholarship.
• The suburban mom who thanked me and “God blessed” me more times in 15 minutes than I could count.
• The kind, elderly man from Florence who cracked jokes and laughed at my attempts to speak a few words of Italian as we selected pasta and cannellini beans.
• The mother of the refugee family of six who showed palpable relief as she loaded her basket with rice, beans, and vegetables. That month, she could feed her family. Her smile said “thank you” in every language.

Seeing Faces

As my food pantry changes to meet the needs of its clients—offering fresh garden produce in the summer, keeping an eye on what local clients prefer and changing their staples to reflect this—I am changing as well. Now when I donate food, I think twice about what goes into my bag. Rice, cooking oil, chicken broth. Pasta and peanut butter. Canned beans. Tomato sauce. I remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:35: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, …”

Instead of a vague notion of “the hungry,” I see the Muslim woman with the shy, dark-haired four-year-old boy who has the most luminous eyes I’ve ever seen. The badly injured Asian woman unable to work but cheerful and smiling nonetheless. The neatly dressed professional man who was laid off but has kept his dignity.

I think of two blonde girls ages six and eight. I coax their names from them. Then, warming up, they tell me about their favorite subjects in school. I think about them leaving the pantry, sitting down for dinner, and eating until they are full. I think of their exhausted mother packing their lunches for school the next day. I think of these girls growing up, healthy and strong.

Now when I think of the hungry, I no longer see headlines, but faces. And that has made all the difference.

Cindy Crosby is the author of five books, including the

Ancient Christian Devotional: Cycle C

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This article was posted today with “Hunger by the Numbers.” Christianity Today has a special section on world hunger.

Learn more about domestic hunger through Feeding America, which bills itself as the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief charity.

LPETTET

"The most humiliating day of my life was the day I walked into my doctor's office. I looked around, alone and ashamed. My face grew hot, and I whispered, 'I came for an AIDS test.'"

Pam was sharing a painful season in her life, but more than that, she was confronting the pain of being wounded and the subsequent loneliness of feeling isolated from her church.

"After my husband walked out on our twenty-year marriage for another woman, I was devastated," she told me. "I wish someone from the church expressed care, understanding, or support. But instead people avoided me. No one called or came to pray with me. After meeting with Pastor, I realized even he had no clue how much pain I was in. I rarely go to church any more. It hurts too much."

I wished Pam lived closer, so she could find a church like ours that was finding new ways to comfort broken people.

Misery needs company

At Western Seminary I teach a class called "Women in Pain." Each school term I hear students tell stories of wounds—divorce, widowhood, abortion, infertility, death, sexual abuse. Women often tell me my seminary classroom is the first place they could admit their source of hurt and feel accepted and understood.

Women need to talk about their pain with someone who understands, to get it out in an affirming environment before receiving direction. Empathetic listening skills are critical. Understanding is essential. Women desperately need the comfort only other women can give.

I have discovered that once my students hear the story of a woman who has experienced the pain of abortion, divorce, or domestic violence, they begin to grow in compassion. They open their hearts for a deeper understanding of the pain, and an eagerness for helping those who feel it.

At the same time, a woman who has had the opportunity to share her own story of pain in a safe environment also grows in healing and compassion. A woman who has overcome intense hurt often feels an intense desire to help those with similar wounds.

I began to see my students as Titus 2 at work. In that passage, Paul exhorts Titus to train the older men, the younger men, and the older women. But Paul directs the older women of the church to take charge of training the younger. My students were demonstrating that a woman inexperienced with a certain emotional wound could find great comfort and guidance from another woman who had experienced it. Paul's instructions addressed exactly what our church was missing—an empathetic friend and mentor our hurting women could turn to.

I began to wish we had a group of women who had experienced divorce (for example), received grace and healing, and were available to help other women through this kind of pain; women who had felt the tremendous pain and could say, "I've been there, I want to help."

This was the very element my friend Pam was missing. We needed to bring this concept from my classroom to my church.

Connecting women with each other

Our first step was to uncover the often hidden hurts that our church's women were dealing with. We conducted an unusual survey. Beside a long list of emotionally painful issues, respondents could check either "need help" or "can give help."

The responses surprised many. We had no idea how many women were presently experiencing, or had in the past experienced, emotional trauma.

Once the results were tallied, we informed our church of the top five needs and our desire to address those needs in the coming year. Then we issued a general invitation, while also hand-selecting women to take part in a training seminar. We personally invited women we saw as potential shepherds—women who had experienced intense emotional pain, who had been restored to emotional health, and who were willing to help others with similar pain—who had answered "can give help."

The focus of the first seminar was training women to help others. We laid the biblical foundation from Titus 2 for women mentoring women. We also included training in shepherding skills and opportunities for the participants to practice them.

The first seminar lasted three hours. Since then, we have expanded the course to seven hours.

Our next step was to schedule open-invitation seminars, one Saturday morning each month for a year, to address the different expressed wounds. Any woman who had experienced the subject covered was invited to attend such seminars as "Understanding the Pain of Stress" or "The Pain of Divorce."

Most of our instructors were women who have been through both pain and healing. Ordinary women, they have allowed God to use their pain to help others.

At the end of each seminar, we provided opportunity for the women to respond and to sign up for follow-up support. The atmosphere freed our church's women to begin sharing their own hurts. It provided a safe place to talk about it with others who understood.

Kati was just beginning to move from shock to anger after her husband died. Carole, a shepherd who identified widowhood as her area of experience, spontaneously connected with Kati. She was able to bring understanding, help, and comfort during Kati's tough months.

Trish was overwhelmed with mothering three preschoolers. Cindy, a trained shepherd who identified young motherhood as her area of experience and health, agreed to spend time with Trish. Eventually they invited other young mothers to their meetings and established a small group ministry for young moms.

A sustained ministry to women

Next we shifted our focus from events to ongoing pastoral care for women.

Teams of women began to form around each pain area. Some were dealing with divorce, others with death or mentoring. We borrowed four categories from Ezekiel 34:4—nourishing the healthy, strengthening the young, caring for the lost, and bringing healing to the injured.

We call these "branches." New ministries are developed as each branch, led by a "branch shepherd," focuses on the best way to minister to its people group—the healthy, young, lost, or injured.

As the needs arise, so do the ministries, and the shepherds. Melinda, for example, was tormented by the isolation she felt from her stepdaughter. A call to one of our shepherds in the area of blended family put Melinda in touch with help and hope.

Carrie, a college student, wanted to learn from an older woman how to grow in her relationship with the Lord. Betty, gifted in mentoring, agreed to meet with Carrie, and they together defined areas where Carrie could grow.

I have dreamed of the church becoming a place where people understand the depths of pain, where they are vulnerable enough to comfort others with the comfort they received. While there may be more kinds of pain than we can ever have shepherds for, those who lend support from an empathetic heart are changing the lives of the women in our church.

We are still looking for someone who can relate to Mary. Her daughter's death left her with a grandchild to raise. Trained shepherds who have experienced loss have come alongside her for now.

Someday I envision Mary offering the understanding she receives today to another grandmother suddenly faced with grandchildren to raise—a grandmother who will find a God-sent answer when she asks, "Does anyone really know what I am going through?"

Beverly Hislop is the team leader of pastoral care to women at Grace Community Church in Gresham, Oregon.