I was deeply grateful to spend this morning at The Point in Seymour, Indiana. Matt did an incredible job preparing our hearts and minds for the morning, and Pastor Jon Gibson brought a timely and challenging message about something that sits near the center of genuine discipleship: God does not simply want to modify our behavior; he wants to transform the way we think.

Paul writes:

“You were taught… to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God.” (Eph 4:22–24)

There is something much deeper happening here than positive thinking or simply replacing bad thoughts with good ones. The Greek word Paul uses for “renewed,” ananeoō (ἀνανεόω), carries the sense of being made new or “divinely” renewed again. Even more striking is Paul’s phrase tō pneumati tou noos hymōn—“in the spirit of your mind.”¹ The transformation Christ brings reaches beneath outward behavior into the interior place from which our perceptions, desires, judgments, and actions emerge. Paul places this within the larger biblical movement of old humanity becoming new humanity. Ephesians 4 speaks of taking off the palaios anthrōpos, the “old person,” and putting on the kainos anthrōpos, the “new person.” This is almost clothing language: one identity is stripped away and another is put on. But Paul’s imagery reaches even deeper. The “new person” is created according to God (Eph 4:24). That language echoes Genesis. Humanity was created in the image and likeness of God; now, in Christ, humanity is being recreated toward what it was always intended to become. That makes transformation much more than “How can I become a better version of myself?”

The gospel asks a more radical question: What if Jesus intends to make me into someone new?

This is where Jon’s message connected beautifully with Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2.

Paul contrasts the wisdom of the present age with the wisdom revealed through the Spirit. God’s wisdom cannot finally be reached merely through human intelligence, education, cultural assumptions, or inherited ways of seeing the world. The Spirit searches even “the depths of God” (1 Cor 2:10), and Paul concludes the chapter with an extraordinary declaration:

“But we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Cor 2:16)

The Greek is noun Christou—νοῦν Χριστοῦ.

The nous is more than the modern idea of the brain. It involves understanding, perception, judgment, disposition—the internal framework through which we interpret reality.² Paul is saying that through the Spirit we are learning to perceive reality through Christ. That is spiritual transformation.

The Hebrew Scriptures anticipate something similar. Biblical wisdom—ḥokmâ (חָכְמָה)—was never merely knowing information. Wisdom was knowing how to live faithfully within God’s world. “The fear of YHWH is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10). Wisdom begins when our perception of reality becomes reordered around God. Paul takes that ancient wisdom tradition and centers it upon Jesus. Christ becomes “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). So encountering Christ necessarily challenges the ways we have learned to think without Christ. And perhaps that is where Jon’s message should stay with us beyond Sunday morning.

Before asking, “What do I need to do differently?”, perhaps we should ask: “What is keeping me from thinking like Jesus?”

Maybe it is fear.

Maybe pride.

Maybe resentment.

Maybe the need to control everything.

Maybe an old wound through which we interpret every new relationship.

Maybe success, money, sexuality, politics, reputation, addiction, insecurity, bitterness, or simply an identity we constructed long before we learned who we are in Christ.

Whatever it is, name it.

There is tremendous spiritual significance in identifying the thing that continues shaping our minds. We cannot easily surrender what we refuse to acknowledge.

Paul’s imagery in Ephesians is wonderfully practical: take it off.

Not because God is waiting for us to fix ourselves, but because Christ has already invited us into another way of being human.

Take off the old.

Be renewed in the mind.

Put on the new.

And increasingly discover what Paul could astonishingly say was already becoming a spiritual reality among God’s people:

“We have the mind of Christ.”

The invitation from this morning is therefore much larger than gaining a few new ideas. It is an invitation to encounter Jesus so completely that his Spirit begins reshaping the very way we see ourselves, other people, our circumstances, and ultimately God himself.

So perhaps the challenge for this week is simple:

What is one thing shaping your mind that needs to be surrendered to Christ?

Identify it. Name it. Bring it before Jesus. Give it up.

Then ask the Spirit to teach you to see that same place through the mind of Christ.

Because following Jesus isn’t merely about changing what we do.

It is allowing Christ to transform the place from which everything we do begins.

I’m thankful for Pastor Jon Gibson’s faithful challenge this morning and for the people at The Point who welcomed us so warmly. May we not simply hear the invitation to transformation, but encounter Christ deeply enough that our minds, desires, identities, and lives are continually made new in him.

Notes

1. Frederick William Danker, ed., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. “ἀνανεόω”; cf. Eph 4:23.
2. Danker, Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “νοῦς.” See also Rom 12:2, where Paul similarly connects transformation (metamorphoō) with the “renewal of the mind.”
3. On biblical wisdom as embodied skill and faithful orientation rather than merely intellectual knowledge, see Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 18A (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 31–43.
4. See also Rom 12:1–2; Col 3:9–10; Phil 2:5; 1 Cor 1:18–31; 2 Cor 5:17.

A Review of Adriel Sanchez, Why We Worship: Experiencing Heaven on Earth at Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2026).

This image of ascent gives the book its structure and much of its theological coherence. The opening section considers the church as a people moving toward the mountain of God. The central chapters explore what happens at the summit through the call to worship, confession, song, preaching, Communion, and benediction. The final movement brings the congregation back into ordinary life and vocation. In this sense, Why We Worship is not so much a manual for constructing worship services as it is an accessible biblical theology of Christian liturgy. Sanchez wants the reader to recover a conviction that has often become thin within modern evangelicalism: Sunday worship is not merely a gathering Christians arrange for themselves, but a response to the initiative of God, who calls his people into his presence.

That point is worth emphasizing because it places the book against several habits that have become almost instinctive within contemporary church culture. Worship can easily become something evaluated primarily through the categories of experience, preference, production, or effectiveness. The question becomes whether people were engaged, whether the music connected emotionally, whether the sermon held attention, or whether visitors felt comfortable. Sanchez does not dismiss those pastoral concerns, but he relocates them within a much larger theological reality. Christian worship begins before human response. God summons; the people answer. God speaks; the congregation listens. God gives; the church receives. Worship, then, is fundamentally responsive rather than self-generated.

Sacred Space and the Ascent of Worship

One of the more compelling elements of the book is its use of temple and mountain imagery. The tabernacle and Jerusalem temple are not treated simply as ancient religious structures but as earthly representations of a heavenly reality, sacred spaces in which creation, divine presence, priesthood, sacrifice, and human vocation converge. Sanchez’s approach sits comfortably within a substantial stream of contemporary biblical theology represented by G. K. Beale, L. Michael Morales, T. Desmond Alexander, and others who have drawn attention to the Eden-tabernacle-temple trajectory that runs across the canon.¹

The importance of that trajectory becomes clearer when Eden, Sinai, Zion, Hebrews, and Revelation are allowed to speak together. Eden itself carries features later associated with sanctuary and sacred mountain imagery. Rivers flow outward from the divine dwelling place, humanity serves within the garden, and Ezekiel 28 can describe Eden in relation to the “holy mountain of God.” Sinai becomes another site of divine encounter, a place where God descends and Israel is summoned upward, although access is carefully guarded. Zion and the temple continue this theology of divine dwelling and ordered approach. Hebrews 12 then announces that believers have come not merely to an earthly mountain but “to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb 12:22).

There is also a wider ancient Near Eastern texture beneath these images that helps illuminate their significance. Temples throughout the ancient world commonly represented cosmic centers, places where divine and earthly realms were understood to intersect. Mesopotamian temple complexes and ziggurats participated in a broader cultural imagination in which height, sacred geography, divine presence, and royal authority were interconnected. Israel participates in some of this shared symbolic world while simultaneously resisting its theology. Yahweh is not a deity who can be maintained, manipulated, or localized through human ritual. Solomon’s declaration that even “heaven and the highest heaven” cannot contain God (1 Kgs 8:27) becomes especially significant when read against cultures in which temples could function as houses constructed for localized divine presence.

This background adds depth to Sanchez’s argument because biblical worship does not make God manageable. Quite the opposite occurs. Sacred space confronts the worshiper with the holiness, otherness, and gracious nearness of a God who chooses to dwell among his people while remaining utterly beyond human control. That biblical tension offers an important corrective to forms of worship that unintentionally reduce God to an atmosphere that can be generated through music, lighting, emotional intensity, or carefully managed liturgical movement.

The language of ascent, however, should remain in conversation with an equally prominent biblical movement: God comes down. Yahweh descends upon Sinai (Exod 19:18–20); divine glory fills the tabernacle (Exod 40:34–38) and later the temple (1 Kgs 8:10–11); the incarnation itself is the supreme movement of divine presence toward humanity; and Revelation reaches its culmination not with humanity permanently escaping upward but with the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to earth (Rev 21:2). The biblical story therefore includes both ascent and descent. God comes near so that humanity may approach. Heaven and earth are not finally separated but reconciled within the renewed creation.

This does not weaken the controlling metaphor of Why We Worship. It gives it greater canonical texture. Christian worship participates in an extraordinary meeting of movements: God graciously draws near, and humanity, in Christ, is brought into divine fellowship.

Leviticus, Sacrifice, and the Logic of Approach

The book’s interaction with Leviticus is particularly fruitful. Sanchez draws attention to the Hebrew title of the book, wayyiqrāʾ, “and he called,” and uses that opening word to reinforce the claim that worship begins with divine initiative. Israel does not simply devise a way into God’s presence. God calls, orders, provides, and makes approach possible.

Leviticus is therefore about much more than a collection of sacrifices. At its theological center stands a difficult question: how can a holy God dwell among a people who are vulnerable to impurity, sin, and death? The sacrificial system belongs within that larger drama of divine presence. Approach requires purification, atonement, mediation, holiness, and ultimately a reordered communal life. Worship is not merely ritual performance but participation in a world in which God is present at the center.

Sanchez makes imaginative use of the burnt offering, Hebrew ʿōlâ, connecting the terminology with the concept of “going up.” Morales has developed this motif substantially in his own work on Leviticus, particularly in relation to humanity’s return to divine presence.² The connection works well within Sanchez’s broader mountain theology, especially when sacrificial smoke, priestly movement, sacred geography, and the ascent toward God are considered together.

At times, however, the lexical observation risks carrying slightly more theological freight than a word by itself can support. The verb ʿlh certainly conveys ascent, and the offering “goes up” before God, but the fuller theology of sacrificial ascent comes from the ritual, spatial, and canonical context rather than from etymology alone. This is not a serious problem in the book so much as an example of a tendency that appears occasionally throughout it: the larger theological pattern is often persuasive even when the exegetical bridge could have been developed with a little more precision.

Still, the larger insight remains valuable. The Levitical world reminds modern readers that access to God is never casual in the biblical imagination. Grace makes approach possible, but grace does not make divine holiness trivial.

Revelation and the Shape of Heavenly Worship

Another creative feature of the book is its treatment of Revelation as something resembling a worship order. Revelation 1 situates John’s vision on the Lord’s Day, chapters 2–3 call the churches toward repentance and faithfulness, chapters 4–5 open heaven and reveal the throne room, the scroll is opened, songs and proclamations erupt around the Lamb, and the Apocalypse eventually moves toward the marriage supper and final blessing.

There is real theological value in reading Revelation this way. The book is saturated with worship. Incense, prayers, hymns, elders, altars, robes, temple imagery, heavenly creatures, repeated acclamations, and liturgical responses fill John’s vision. The suffering churches of Asia Minor are invited to see their earthly circumstances from the perspective of the heavenly throne. Rome may appear sovereign, but Revelation repeatedly relocates sovereignty around God and the Lamb.

It is probably best, however, to understand the “worship bulletin” idea as a theological analogy rather than as the literary architecture of Revelation itself. John was not encoding a first-century order of service into the Apocalypse, and the marriage supper in Revelation 19 is first an eschatological image before it becomes a source of Eucharistic resonance. The distinction is important because typological connections are often most persuasive when they are allowed to remain typological rather than being pressed into claims about original literary structure.

Even so, Sanchez succeeds in recovering something that many modern readings of Revelation miss. The Apocalypse is not primarily a chart for decoding the end of history. It is a book that teaches churches how to see reality and whom to worship while empires claim their allegiance.

Confession and the Formation of Christian Desire

The chapter on confession is among the more pastorally useful portions of the book because it recognizes that liturgy does more than transfer theological information. Repeated practices shape the imagination of a congregation. They teach Christians what to notice, what to love, what to lament, and how to understand themselves before God.

This places Why We Worship in productive conversation with Simon Chan and James K. A. Smith, although Sanchez approaches the matter more pastorally than philosophically.³ A congregation that regularly confesses sin develops a theological vocabulary for repentance, mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation. A church that never confesses corporately may eventually find that these categories become increasingly difficult to articulate because its liturgical habits have ceased to rehearse them.

Isaiah 6 provides a particularly rich biblical pattern. Isaiah encounters divine holiness, recognizes his own uncleanness, receives cleansing, and is then commissioned. The movement is neither self-loathing nor therapeutic affirmation. It is revelation, confession, grace, and vocation. Matthew 5:23–24 similarly refuses to separate worship from reconciliation, while Paul’s instruction surrounding the Lord’s Table in 1 Corinthians 11 demonstrates that communal sin cannot simply be ignored in sacred practice.

At the same time, a helpful distinction remains between biblical theology and liturgical prescription. The New Testament strongly supports confession as part of Christian life and communal worship, but it does not clearly prescribe an identical corporate confession at the same point in every Lord’s Day gathering. Historic liturgies have often embodied sound biblical theology through such practices, yet the theological wisdom of a practice should not always be described as though it were a direct apostolic rubric.

That nuance matters particularly for churches emerging from low-church evangelical traditions, where recovering historic practices can occasionally turn into an overcorrection in which later liturgical patterns are retroactively read into the New Testament.

Singing, Allegiance, and the Divine Warrior

Sanchez’s discussion of congregational singing moves in an interesting direction by drawing upon biblical warfare imagery. Exodus 15 is simultaneously a song of worship and a victory hymn. The Psalms frequently portray Yahweh as king and divine warrior. In 2 Chronicles 20, singers move before Jehoshaphat’s army, while Revelation repeatedly places songs of praise alongside the conquest of the Lamb.

This material has an important ANE setting as well. Divine-warrior language, royal hymns, temple praise, and victory songs were common throughout Israel’s cultural environment. Israel does not invent those categories in isolation, but the biblical writers radically redirect them. Yahweh’s kingship relativizes every earthly empire, and the New Testament ultimately reveals divine victory in the crucified and risen Messiah.

That Christological development is essential. Without it, language about “worship as warfare” can easily drift toward contemporary ideas in which music itself is treated almost mechanically, as if sufficient intensity, volume, or spiritual enthusiasm could displace demonic forces from geographic territory. The New Testament offers a more demanding picture. Revelation’s conquering Lion appears as a slaughtered Lamb. Christian victory is therefore cruciform. Praise becomes an act of spiritual resistance because it publicly names the true king, refuses rival allegiances, and forms a people around the Lamb rather than around the liturgies of empire.

Seen this way, congregational song is far more significant than emotional preparation for preaching. Songs teach theology, preserve memory, confess allegiance, and form the identity of the gathered people.

Preaching and the Voice of God

The chapter on preaching reflects Sanchez’s Reformed commitments and provides another needed corrective to contemporary worship culture. The sermon is not an informational interruption between more experiential elements of the service, nor is it simply a motivational talk shaped loosely around biblical themes. Preaching belongs within worship because the congregation gathers to hear the Word of God proclaimed.

His resistance to Christless moralism is particularly welcome. Scripture cannot finally be reduced to a series of character lessons in which David teaches courage, Daniel teaches conviction, and Joseph teaches perseverance. Those themes may be present, but the canonical witness continually draws the reader into the larger redemptive drama that culminates in Christ.

There is, nevertheless, an important theological safeguard when speaking about hearing “God’s voice” through preaching. The authority of a sermon is derivative rather than inherent. A preacher does not possess canonical authority by virtue of occupying a pulpit. The church hears the Word of God through preaching insofar as the preacher faithfully bears witness to the scriptural text. Acts 17 provides a healthy model because proclamation can be received eagerly while still being examined in light of Scripture.

This is not a diminishment of preaching but one of its most important protections. The authority of Christian proclamation should remain tethered to the text rather than to personality, office, charisma, or institutional power.

Communion, Participation, and the Coming Feast

The treatment of Communion may be the strongest theological contribution of the book, particularly for readers formed within low-church evangelical settings. Sanchez resists the thin memorialism that has sometimes reduced the Lord’s Supper to little more than a symbolic reminder of an absent Christ. Instead, he places Communion within the larger biblical worlds of covenant, sacrifice, remembrance, participation, eschatology, and the work of the Spirit.

His discussion of anamnēsis is especially helpful. “Do this in remembrance of me” need not be heard as though Jesus were simply asking disciples to engage in private mental recollection. Biblical memorial language carries covenantal depth. Memorials bring God’s saving acts into the worshiping present and place the community again within the story those acts created.

First Corinthians 10:16 provides an even stronger anchor. Paul describes the cup and bread as koinōnia in the blood and body of Christ. Christian traditions have disagreed sharply over how Christ is present at the Table, but Paul’s language is difficult to collapse into mere mental recollection. Something participatory is happening.

At this point the book enters fruitful conversation not only with Reformed sacramental theology but also with voices such as Alexander Schmemann and the broader Christian tradition, where Eucharistic worship has consistently been understood as participation in Christ and anticipation of the age to come.⁴ The recovery of the epiclesis is particularly noteworthy because it places sacramental life within dependence upon the Holy Spirit rather than within any mechanical understanding of the elements themselves.

The connection between Isaiah 25, eschatological banquet imagery, victory over the enemies of God, and the marriage supper of the Lamb also gives Communion an important forward-looking dimension. The Table remembers the cross, but it does not only look backward. It stands between resurrection and consummation. The church eats and drinks while announcing that the crucified Christ has been vindicated and that the final feast is still coming.

John 6 deserves some caution here. The language of eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood became deeply Eucharistic within the early Christian tradition, but exegetes continue to debate how directly the discourse should be identified with the Lord’s Supper. It may be better to allow the Johannine language to retain both its emphasis on receiving Christ by faith and its unmistakable sacramental resonance rather than forcing the passage into a single later theological category.

Even with that qualification, this chapter is one of the book’s most important correctives. It invites evangelical readers to recover a Table that is simultaneously remembrance, participation, proclamation, thanksgiving, communion, and anticipation.

Descending the Mountain: Worship and Vocation

The ascent motif becomes most useful when Sanchez refuses to leave the church on the mountain. Worship does not terminate in an encounter, however profound. The congregation descends into neighborhoods, workplaces, families, relationships, and ordinary responsibilities as a people whose lives have been reordered around God.

First Peter 2 provides much of the biblical framework for this movement. The church is a “holy priesthood” and a “royal priesthood,” language that joins worship and witness rather than separating them. Priestly identity involves sacrifice, holiness, mediation, proclamation, mercy, prayer, and service.

Isaiah 6 again offers a beautiful pattern: the prophet sees, confesses, is cleansed, and is sent. The movement toward God eventually becomes movement toward the world. Christian worship that never produces compassion, reconciliation, justice, patience, hospitality, witness, and sacrificial love has failed to carry the worshiper very far into the character of the God being worshiped.

This becomes especially important when worship is considered alongside political power. The church’s public vocation is not strengthened when Christian identity is reduced to the acquisition of cultural control. Revelation offers another way. The Lamb conquers through faithful witness, suffering love, and resurrection. The priestly people of God are sent into the nations not merely to secure influence but to embody the life of another kingdom.

In Conversation with Contemporary Worship Scholarship

Within the wider landscape of worship studies, Why We Worship occupies a useful middle ground. Simon Chan’s Liturgical Theology offers a more developed ecclesiology of worship. James K. A. Smith explores the formative power of liturgical practice through the language of desire, habit, and cultural formation. Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong provide the historical genealogy necessary for understanding how the term “worship” came to be associated so strongly with congregational music in many Protestant contexts.⁵ Beale and Morales provide much of the temple and sacred-space theology that supports Sanchez’s ascent imagery, while Schmemann offers a broader sacramental vision in which worship participates in the life of the coming kingdom.

Sanchez does not attempt to match the technical depth of all these works, nor does he need to. The value of Why We Worship lies partly in its ability to gather conversations that often remain separated—biblical theology, sacramental theology, liturgical history, ecclesiology, mission, and pastoral practice—and place them within reach of the ordinary church reader.

Those already familiar with this scholarship will occasionally wish for slower exegetical development at several points. The mountain imagery could have benefited from a fuller ANE context, the Revelation material needs careful qualification, and some of the sacramental connections might have been strengthened by sustained engagement with competing interpretations. Even so, the overall theological architecture is compelling and, importantly, pastorally usable.

Conclusion: Worship That Reorders a Life

Perhaps the most important contribution of Why We Worship is its resistance to a church culture in which worship has become increasingly easy to evaluate according to the categories of consumption. We ask whether the music was good, whether the sermon was interesting, whether the service flowed, whether we felt something, whether we were comfortable, or whether the whole experience was worth coming back for next week. None of those questions are entirely meaningless, but they become dangerously small if they are allowed to define Christian worship.

The biblical vision is far stranger and far more beautiful. The church gathers because God has called a people to himself. Christians come carrying gratitude and sin, faith and doubt, joy and grief, maturity and immaturity. They confess, listen, sing, eat, drink, pray, receive blessing, and then return to lives that may look externally much the same as they did before they arrived. Yet worship assumes that something has happened in the meantime. The imagination has been re-centered. Allegiance has been rehearsed. Grace has been announced. The story of the world has been told again, and Christ has been named as Lord within it.

This is where the mountain image becomes especially useful pastorally. The goal is not to spend the entire Christian life attempting to preserve a mountaintop experience. Scripture rarely allows its people to remain on the mountain. Moses descends. Elijah returns. The disciples come down after the transfiguration. Isaiah is sent. Even the glory of the resurrection drives the disciples toward Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the nations.

The test of worship, therefore, is not whether we managed to feel close to God for ninety minutes. It is whether the encounter with God begins to shape the way we descend.

Do we become easier to reconcile with? Are we slower to anger? Do we become more attentive to the lonely person standing at the edge of the room? Does the Table teach us to stop dividing people whom Christ has welcomed? Does confession make us less defensive when someone exposes our failures? Does hearing the Word make us more willing to obey when obedience is costly? Does singing about the Lamb slowly detach our hearts from the smaller kingdoms competing for our allegiance?

These are not secondary consequences of worship. They are among its fruits.

Romans 12 makes the connection explicit when Paul moves from the mercies of God into the call to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. The sanctuary expands into ordinary life. Worship continues in the marriage, at the workplace, around the dinner table, in forgiveness, generosity, sexual faithfulness, care for the poor, hospitality toward strangers, and courageous witness to Jesus. The gathered liturgy trains the church for this scattered liturgy of everyday faithfulness.

That may ultimately be where Sanchez’s book is most helpful. Why We Worship does not merely ask churches to reconsider what they do on Sunday mornings. It invites them to reconsider what sort of people Sunday worship is forming.

Pastors and worship leaders should probably ask more than whether the congregation sang loudly or whether the service landed emotionally. We might ask whether our people are learning the story of Scripture, whether they know how to confess without despair, whether they know how to receive grace without entitlement, whether the Table is teaching reconciliation, whether preaching is forming allegiance to Christ, and whether benediction is actually sending them into the world as people of peace.

Perhaps that is what it finally means to ascend Zion. We do not climb toward God in order to escape the world. We are drawn into the presence of God so that we may return to the world carrying something of his character with us.

And if our worship never makes us more truthful, more merciful, more faithful, more forgiving, more hospitable, more courageous, and more deeply committed to the way of Jesus, we may need to ask whether we have actually understood what worship is for.

Sanchez has written a helpful invitation to ask that question again.

Notes

1. See G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, New Studies in Biblical Theology 17 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004); T. Desmond Alexander, From Eden to the New Jerusalem: An Introduction to Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2008); and L. Michael Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord? A Biblical Theology of the Book of Leviticus, New Studies in Biblical Theology 37 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015).
2. Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord? Sanchez’s use of sacrificial ascent works particularly well alongside Morales’s larger reading of Leviticus as a movement toward restored access to divine presence.
3. Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006); James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016).
4. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973); Michael Horton, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008).
5. Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong, A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship: Understanding the Ideas That Reshaped the Protestant Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021).
6. For the broader cosmic-temple trajectory from Eden through new creation, see Beale, Temple and the Church’s Mission.
7. Hebrews 12:22–24 is particularly important for Sanchez’s argument because the author does not merely describe Zion as a future destination. The perfect verb proselēlythate portrays believers as those who have already “come” to Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem, and the festal assembly.
8. Chan’s account of ecclesial formation through worship provides an important conversation partner here because it resists treating liturgy as a secondary expression of an already fully constituted church. See Chan, Liturgical Theology, 41–66.
9. Paul’s use of koinōnia in 1 Cor 10:16 remains one of the stronger New Testament challenges to purely memorialist interpretations of the Lord’s Supper. The text does not resolve every later sacramental debate, but it clearly presents the meal in participatory terms.
10. For Revelation’s throne-room worship and temple imagery, see G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). Sanchez’s use of Revelation as a liturgical pattern is most convincing when treated as theological correspondence rather than as a claim about the formal literary structure of the Apocalypse.
11. Sanchez’s discussion of priesthood may also be placed alongside Hank Voss, The Priesthood of All Believers and the Missio Dei: A Canonical, Catholic, and Contextual Perspective, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 223 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016).
12. Romans 12:1 is especially important for bringing the book’s final movement into focus. Paul’s description of embodied Christian existence as logikē latreia prevents Christian theology from placing an artificial boundary between liturgical worship and the life that follows it.

Emma M. Austin. Landscapes of Memory: The Old Testament’s Sensory Engagement with Nature. Foreword by Paul H. Wright. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2026. 176 pp.

Austin develops this idea through the category of mnemonature, by which she describes the relationship between nature, sensory experience, and memory.¹ The terminology is her own, but the underlying argument stands within a substantial scholarly conversation. Walter Brueggemann famously demonstrated that “land” within Israel’s Scriptures is never simply territory but becomes gift, promise, inheritance, loss, exile, and hope. Ellen Davis has shown how profoundly agriculture and the rhythms of land shape Israel’s theological imagination, while Yael Avrahami’s study of sensory perception has helped recover the embodied character of biblical thought.² Austin’s work intersects with these conversations while pressing in a somewhat different direction. Her concern is not simply that nature means something, but that repeated encounters with the natural world may have helped biblical communities remember what God had said and done. A tree, a dry field, the stars, seasonal rain, a particular road, or even an animal could participate in a network of associations that extended well beyond a single literary image.

One of the strengths of Austin’s approach is that it pays attention to matters the biblical writers frequently leave unexplained because their audiences did not need them explained. Judges 6:11 offers a good example. Gideon is found threshing wheat in a winepress, a scene that can pass quickly in modern reading unless one understands that threshing normally required an exposed location where the wind could separate grain from chaff. A winepress was hardly the proper place for the task. Gideon’s behavior therefore communicates before he speaks. The Midianite threat has become so pervasive that ordinary agricultural life has been distorted, and Gideon is attempting to perform a public, wind-dependent activity in a concealed place. Cultural-background scholarship has long helped readers recover such information, but Austin’s method asks a further question: what would an audience accustomed to threshing floors and winepresses have sensed immediately upon hearing this description? Historical information explains the practice; sensory reconstruction helps recover the incongruity.

This distinction between knowing about the ancient world and imaginatively entering its physical texture becomes especially helpful in Austin’s treatment of Genesis. Her discussions of the rainbow in Genesis 9 and the stars in Genesis 15 provide some of the clearest examples of her central thesis. The rainbow is explicitly connected with covenant remembrance, while the stars become connected to God’s promise concerning Abram’s descendants. Readers naturally recognize the metaphor of innumerability in Genesis 15, but Austin encourages us to remain in the scene for a moment longer. Abram has already received the promise, yet the fulfillment appears increasingly improbable. Sarah remains barren, time is passing, and the promise is beginning to stand in tension with visible reality. God takes Abram outside and directs his attention toward the heavens. The stars are therefore not only an illustration of future descendants; they become attached to the promise itself. Abram will see them again. The natural world can continue to recall what was spoken after the divine speech has ended.³

That reading gains additional texture within the wider ancient Near Eastern environment. Celestial bodies throughout Mesopotamian cultures were associated with divine order, calendrical observation, omens, and the interpretation of human destiny. Austin is careful not to flatten Genesis into comparative mythology, but the broader background remains significant. In Genesis, the stars are not deities or autonomous powers determining Abram’s fate. They belong to the Creator who makes the promise. The heavens that surrounding cultures could read as sources of divine knowledge are relocated within Israel’s theology as creatures under YHWH’s authority and, in this particular narrative, as witnesses to his faithfulness.⁴ The theological point is strengthened rather than threatened by comparative study because Genesis participates in the symbolic world of the ancient Near East while simultaneously reconfiguring it.

Austin’s treatment of Abram’s movement through the land adds another dimension to this discussion. Genesis can make travel appear almost effortless because enormous distances are compressed into a few sentences: Abram departs, passes through a region, pitches a tent, builds an altar, moves again, goes down toward Egypt, and later returns. The reader turns a page more easily than Abram crossed the land. Austin slows the narrative down by asking what travel required in an ancient setting: water, animals, household movement, elevation changes, available roads, seasonal conditions, provisions, and exposure to danger. Her approach intersects naturally with historical geography and the work of scholars such as Yohanan Aharoni and David Dorsey, who have demonstrated how roads, routes, and terrain inform biblical narrative.⁵ Yet Austin is particularly interested in the bodily dimension of the journey. Abram’s response to God is not simply intellectual assent to a promise; obedience is expressed through movement. He leaves a known world and walks into an unknown one.

That observation fits well with Brueggemann’s work on the theological tension between landedness and landlessness.⁶ Abram is promised land long before he possesses it. In fact, much of the Abraham narrative is lived inside that tension. He travels through what has been promised without yet owning what has been promised, and the geography itself reinforces the theological shape of his life. Faith takes place between departure and possession. The roads, campsites, wells, and altars are not incidental to that story because the promise is being lived bodily before it is secured materially. Austin’s geographical sensitivity makes that familiar theological theme feel less abstract.

Her treatment of rain and drought develops the argument in another direction. Biblical readers know that Deuteronomy and the historical books associate rainfall with covenant blessing and drought with judgment, but modern readers in highly engineered environments can easily underestimate the immediacy of that language. In the ancient southern Levant, rain was not simply pleasant weather. Agricultural survival depended upon it. A failed rainy season could mean declining crops, empty cisterns, weakened animals, economic desperation, migration, famine, and death. When the biblical writers speak of the heavens being shut, therefore, the imagery is both theological and brutally practical.

This becomes particularly important in 1 Kings 17–18, where Elijah announces drought in a cultural environment in which Baal was associated with storm and fertility. The encounter on Mount Carmel is often remembered primarily as a contest involving fire from heaven, but the larger narrative has already turned the weather into a theological argument. The absence of rain raises the question of who truly governs the fertility of the land. Against the wider Canaanite world, YHWH’s sovereignty is demonstrated not through abstract theological claims alone but through the very natural processes over which Baal was believed to exercise authority. Austin’s emphasis on sensory and environmental experience allows the reader to feel more clearly what was at stake. The polemic is not simply about rival religious ideas. It concerns the conditions under which people survive.

Some of the richest exegetical material appears in Austin’s treatment of Jeremiah. The prophet repeatedly describes covenant judgment through the breakdown of creation: the land mourns, vegetation withers, birds disappear, the heavens darken, and the world begins to look increasingly uninhabitable. Jeremiah 4:23 is especially striking because the prophet looks upon the land and sees tohu wabohu, the same language used of the primordial earth in Genesis 1:2. The imagery is not simply one of destruction but of uncreation. Ordered creation is being reversed under the weight of covenantal collapse.

That pattern is well known within prophetic scholarship, yet Austin adds useful physical texture to it. Drought, dust, scorching winds, ruined fields, devastated landscapes, and darkened skies were not invented merely as poetic symbols. They belonged to the ecological world of the prophet and his audience. Robert Alter has consistently emphasized the concrete force of biblical imagery, and Austin’s work supports that literary instinct by reconnecting the imagery to lived environmental experience.⁷ Jeremiah’s language is powerful because it is both theological and recognizable. A land that once sustained life begins to look like a world moving backward toward chaos.

There is also an important theological implication here. The biblical writers do not generally imagine sin as a private interior problem disconnected from the rest of creation. Human faithlessness, social injustice, violence, failed leadership, idolatry, exile, and the condition of the land continually intersect. Modern readers often divide spiritual concerns from material ones far more sharply than the biblical text does. Jeremiah’s rhetoric resists that separation. Covenant disorder spreads outward, and the natural world becomes part of the prophetic witness against it.

Austin’s discussion of seasonal imagery makes a similar point on a smaller scale. Readers living in northern climates may instinctively associate summer with abundance and winter with barrenness, but those associations do not map neatly onto the ecology of the biblical world. Green vegetation follows the rains, while the intense heat of the dry season rapidly transforms the landscape. Biblical comparisons between human life and grass therefore emerge from an annually recurring visual experience. Grass flourishes and disappears. The image communicates transience because people repeatedly watched transience occur around them. The landscape provided its own vocabulary for mortality.

The treatment of animals works along the same lines. Lions, ravens, wild donkeys, ostriches, horses, and other creatures were not merely decorative additions to biblical poetry. Their behavior, danger, usefulness, unpredictability, or wildness could carry associations immediately recognizable to the audience. Austin is particularly effective when this insight reaches Job 38–41. The divine speeches in Job have long puzzled interpreters because Job’s questions concern justice, suffering, and the moral governance of the world, while YHWH responds by directing attention toward weather, stars, mountain goats, ravens, wild donkeys, ostriches, warhorses, Behemoth, and Leviathan. Scholars such as Carol Newsom and David Clines have explored how these speeches destabilize Job’s assumptions concerning the moral structure of creation.⁸ Austin’s method allows the creatures themselves to retain a greater degree of interpretive weight.

The world YHWH describes in Job is strikingly uninterested in organizing itself around human usefulness. Rain falls where no one lives. Wild animals inhabit places no one controls. Creatures reproduce without human supervision. Some animals are useful, some dangerous, some absurd, and some apparently impossible to domesticate. The point is not that human beings are insignificant, but that creation is larger than the human frame through which Job has understandably been interpreting his suffering. The world belongs to God before it belongs to us, and God’s delight in creation extends beyond what humans can control, explain, or exploit.

This is one of the areas where Landscapes of Memory becomes particularly valuable theologically. Western Christian interpretation can become highly anthropocentric, even when it intends to be biblical. We readily ask what a passage says about our identity, calling, suffering, salvation, or destiny. Job’s divine speeches resist that instinct by turning the reader outward. Austin’s sensory approach reinforces the same movement. Biblical interpretation occasionally requires us to stop asking what creation means for us long enough to recognize that the biblical writers also understood creation as belonging to God in its own right.

Within contemporary scholarship, Austin’s work sits naturally beside several related approaches without merely duplicating them. Brueggemann’s The Land remains a more expansive theological account of land as gift, promise, possession, loss, and hope. Ellen Davis’s Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture offers a more sustained agrarian and ethical reading, while Avrahami’s The Senses of Scripture provides a more technical treatment of sensory language and perception in the Hebrew Bible. Historical geographers provide greater topographical precision, and memory theorists such as Jan Assmann offer a denser conceptual framework for cultural remembrance. Austin’s strength lies in bringing several of these conversations together in a form that remains accessible to pastors, students, and serious readers who may not ordinarily enter all of those disciplines separately.⁹

There are, of course, limits to any attempt at sensory reconstruction. A modern reader standing in the Judean wilderness has not thereby entered Jeremiah’s consciousness, and contemporary travel through Israel, Palestine, or Jordan cannot reproduce ancient experience. Landscapes change, roads change, agricultural practices change, political realities change, and modern assumptions travel with us. The most responsible use of Austin’s method therefore comes when sensory observation is held together with textual work, archaeology, historical geography, ancient Near Eastern comparison, and careful exegesis. Austin generally handles that balance well. Mnemonature works best not as a substitute for historical interpretation but as a reminder that historical interpretation must include bodies, environments, and remembered experience.

Conclusion

What I appreciated most about Landscapes of Memory is that it gradually changes the way you read. I found myself slowing down at details I might previously have passed over: the condition of the ground, the direction of a journey, the absence of rain, the appearance of grass, the stars overhead, an animal mentioned almost casually in a poem. Austin has a way of reminding us that those details were often not casual at all. They belonged to a world people knew intimately, and God repeatedly met Israel within that world.

For pastors and teachers, I think there is something important here beyond a better method of interpretation. We spend a great deal of time teaching people to look for God in ideas, sermons, books, and explicitly religious moments, but Scripture often trains people to remember God through ordinary things. Abraham can look at the stars and remember a promise. Israel can see a rainbow and remember covenant. Rain can remind a community that life is received rather than manufactured. Withered grass can teach the brevity of human life. A wilderness can recall dependence. A road can become a testimony to obedience. Even the animals in Job can remind us that the world is much larger than the problems we are currently trying to solve.

There is something pastorally healthy about recovering that way of seeing. Most people will not spend their lives in seminar rooms, and very few will spend every day studying commentaries, but everyone lives somewhere. We wake beneath a sky, walk across ground, experience seasons, notice weather, hear birds, watch things grow and eventually die. The created world is still around us, even if modern life has made it easier to ignore. Austin’s book made me wonder whether part of discipleship involves learning to notice again.

That does not mean finding a hidden spiritual message in every sunset or turning nature into another form of divination. Scripture gives us something much more grounded than that. It teaches us that ordinary creation can become connected to remembered truth. Once God attached his promise to the stars for Abram, the stars could never be entirely ordinary again. Once Israel learned to associate wilderness with both testing and provision, wilderness carried memory. The natural world did not replace revelation; it helped people remember revelation.

Pastorally, that may be one of the most helpful implications of this book. There are seasons when people struggle to remember what God has said because their circumstances are telling them something different. Abram knew that experience. Jeremiah knew it. Israel knew it. Job certainly knew it. In those moments, faith often depends less upon discovering something new than upon remembering what has already been given. Scripture repeatedly ties that remembrance to things people can see, touch, walk through, and experience.

Perhaps we need more of that.

Perhaps the next time we stand beneath a clear night sky, feel the first rain after a long dry stretch, watch something green emerge from apparently dead ground, or walk through a season that feels more like wilderness than home, we might allow the world around us to remind us of truths we already know but have temporarily forgotten. God has been faithful before. We are creatures rather than masters. Life is received as gift. The world belongs to God. Promises sometimes require long journeys before they are fulfilled. And even when our own understanding becomes painfully small, God remains at work within a creation far larger than the part we can presently see.

Landscapes of Memory is ultimately valuable because it helps us read Scripture with more attention, but I think its deeper gift is that it may help us live with more attention as well. Austin reminds us that the biblical world was not merely a backdrop for encounters with God. It was one of the places where those encounters were remembered. That remains worth recovering.

Notes

1. Emma M. Austin, Landscapes of Memory: The Old Testament’s Sensory Engagement with Nature (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2026)
2. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002); Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Yael Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible, LHBOTS 545 (London: T&T Clark, 2012).
3. Austin, Landscapes of Memory, chap. 2. See also Emma M. Austin, “‘When I See . . . I Will Remember’: Exploring the Memorability of Rainbows and Stars in Genesis through Mnemonature,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 55 (2025): 184–98.
4. Jeffrey L. Cooley, Poetic Astronomy in the Ancient Near East: The Reflexes of Celestial Science in Ancient Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, and Israelite Narrative (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013).
5. Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography, trans. Anson F. Rainey (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979); David A. Dorsey, The Roads and Highways of Ancient Israel (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018).
6. Brueggemann, Land.
7. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
8. Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); David J. A. Clines, Job 38–42, WBC 18B (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011).
9. Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Jeannine Marie Hanger, Engaging Jesus with Our Senses: An Embodied Approach to the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024).

A Review of Jonathan R. Bailey, Dwelling in Christ: Discover the Threefold Path of Spiritual Transformation (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Formatio, 2026).

Bailey writes within a recognizable stream of contemporary spiritual formation associated especially with Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, Renovaré, and the retrieval of historic Christian disciplines. Yet Dwelling in Christ is more than a repackaging of Willardian formation. Its deeper conversation partners include Gregory of Nyssa, John Climacus, Benedict of Nursia, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Teresa of Ávila, Thomas à Kempis, Evelyn Underhill, Kallistos Ware, Thomas Merton, George MacDonald, and several voices from Eastern Christian spirituality. Bailey therefore occupies an interesting middle ground. This is not an academic monograph on ascetical theology, patristic anthropology, or participation in Christ. It is instead a pastoral retrieval of those traditions for Christians who may never read The Ladder of Divine Ascent, The Life of Moses, or The Interior Castle themselves. That accessibility is one of the book’s principal strengths.

From Conversion as Moment to Conversion as Way

The autobiographical opening is particularly effective. Bailey remembers repeatedly “getting saved,” responding to invitations, praying conversion prayers, and expecting these moments to produce an immediate transformation that never quite materialized. His concern is not to demean evangelical conversion or deny the significance of decisive encounters with Christ. Rather, he exposes the inadequacy of a Christianity that knows how to invite someone across the threshold but possesses little theology for the long hallway beyond it.

Here Bailey touches a significant weakness within some expressions of modern evangelicalism. The New Testament certainly contains decisive moments of repentance, baptism, reception of the Spirit, and allegiance to Jesus, yet its dominant language of discipleship is strikingly developmental: walk, follow, abide, grow, bear fruit, put off, put on, be renewed, become mature, run the race, endure, and be transformed. Conversion may have a beginning, but discipleship resists reduction to a beginning.

Bailey’s threefold way gives conceptual shape to that biblical instinct. Purgation concerns the relinquishment of distorted desires and attachments. Illumination involves an increasing awareness of God, ourselves, and the life toward which grace is drawing us. Union describes an ever-deepening participation in the divine life in which the human will is increasingly harmonized with the character and purposes of God. Importantly, Bailey refuses to turn these into rigid sequential stages. Purgation, illumination, and union overlap, recur, and spiral through the Christian life. One does not graduate permanently from purgation; old attachments may surface even amid considerable spiritual maturity. Likewise, moments of profound communion with God may occur surprisingly early in the journey.

This prevents the threefold way from becoming precisely the kind of formula Bailey is attempting to replace.

The progression also gives the book its elegant architecture. Purgation moves from quick fixes toward training, from certainty toward the mystery encountered through affliction, and from perfectionism toward patient progress in temptation. Illumination moves toward a rule of life, prayer, and humility. Union then redirects the mature Christian away from the need to be seen and toward seeing others, away from control and toward charity, and finally away from the illusion of spiritual arrival toward what Gregory of Nyssa described as epektasis, the endless movement of the creature into the inexhaustible life of God.

That final refusal of arrival may be the book’s most important contribution. Christian maturity, for Bailey, is not the point at which one finally becomes impressive. It is the point at which one increasingly forgets the need to be impressive at all.

Image, Likeness, and the Human Vocation

One of Bailey’s most compelling theological moves appears in his discussion of Genesis 1:26. Drawing particularly upon Kallistos Ware and the Eastern tradition, Bailey distinguishes between the divine image as gift and divine likeness as vocation: humanity begins in the image and journeys toward likeness. The image is given; likeness is developed.

This is historically rich Christian theology, though a careful exegetical distinction is useful. The Hebrew terms ṣelem (“image”) and dĕmût (“likeness”) in Genesis 1:26 should probably not be pressed into two entirely distinct anthropological categories on grammatical grounds alone. Ancient Near Eastern studies have increasingly emphasized the royal background of “image” language. Kings could function as images or earthly representatives of a deity; Genesis astonishingly extends this representative vocation to humanity as humanity.¹ Humanity is therefore not merely given some invisible metaphysical quality called the imago Dei. Humans are commissioned to image the Creator within creation.

This ANE texture actually strengthens Bailey’s formative vision.

If imaging God is a vocation rather than merely a possession, then Christlikeness concerns more than private moral improvement. Human beings become increasingly faithful images by representing God’s character and wise rule within the world. The movement from image toward likeness can therefore be understood canonically as the restoration of humanity’s original vocation. Purgation removes those allegiances and desires that deform the image; illumination teaches us to perceive creation and neighbor through the light of God; union increasingly conforms human action and desire to the self-giving life revealed in Christ.

Bailey’s emphasis on becoming “fully human” belongs naturally within this framework. Salvation is not God rescuing humans from humanity but restoring humanity to what humanity was created to become.

Dwelling, Temple, and Divine Presence

The title itself invites another biblical-theological layer that remains somewhat underdeveloped in the book. Bailey primarily uses “dwelling in Christ” relationally and spiritually. Yet Scripture possesses an enormous theology of divine dwelling that stretches from Eden through tabernacle and temple, into the incarnation, the Spirit-filled church, and finally the new creation.

Within the ancient world, temples represented the earthly dwelling places of divine presence. Israel shared this broad cultural vocabulary while simultaneously transforming it: YHWH could not be contained within a human structure (1 Kgs 8:27), yet God graciously chose to place his presence among his covenant people. The tabernacle thus becomes a portable Eden-like sanctuary; the Jerusalem temple becomes the concentrated locus of divine presence; prophetic hope anticipates the restoration and expansion of that presence; John presents Jesus himself as the true temple (John 2:19–21); Paul describes both the gathered church and the believer as God’s temple (1 Cor 3:16; 6:19); and Revelation culminates not in humanity escaping earth for heaven but in God’s dwelling descending to humanity until creation itself becomes sanctuary (Rev 21:1–3, 22).²

Read against this canonical trajectory, Bailey’s language of dwelling becomes even richer. Spiritual formation is not merely the effort to become a better religious person. It is life lived within the presence of God and increasingly permeated by that presence. The biblical movement is not simply humanity trying to ascend toward God but God coming to dwell with humanity and humanity being transformed because God has made his dwelling among and within them.

This also guards ascetical spirituality against becoming anthropocentric. Purgation, illumination, and union are never techniques by which human beings climb successfully into the divine realm. They are responses to divine initiative. Grace precedes the journey, accompanies the journey, and finally constitutes its destination.

The distinction matters. Christian ascent is possible only because God has first descended.

Participation and Union with Christ

Bailey’s treatment of union also resonates fruitfully with contemporary New Testament scholarship. Pauline theology in particular has experienced renewed interest in the participatory dimensions of salvation. Constantine Campbell has demonstrated the pervasive character of Paul’s “in Christ,” “with Christ,” incorporation, participation, and identification language; Grant Macaskill has argued that New Testament union should be understood covenantally and christologically, mediated through Jesus the covenant Messiah; Michael Gorman has pressed further into the participatory and cruciform dimensions of Pauline soteriology.³ Macaskill describes New Testament union as covenantal participation in the life of God mediated through Christ. Bailey’s language sits comfortably within this recovery. Christianity is more than believing truths about Christ. It involves participation in Christ.

John 15 therefore becomes particularly significant. The vine and branches do not present discipleship principally as imitation at a distance. Branches bear fruit because they abide (menō) in the vine. Likewise, Paul can speak of believers being crucified with Christ (Gal 2:19–20), dying and rising with Christ (Rom 6:1–11), being incorporated into Christ’s body (1 Cor 12:12–27), and being transformed “from glory to glory” by the Spirit (2 Cor 3:18). Participation precedes transformation. The branch becomes fruitful because it shares the life of the vine. This provides perhaps the strongest exegetical foundation for Bailey’s rejection of performance-based Christianity. Christian obedience is not an attempt to manufacture the life of Christ independently. It is the embodied manifestation of a life already being received from Christ.

Perfection, Teleios, and the Shape of Love

Bailey’s treatment of Matthew 5:48 is also pastorally valuable: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” He rightly resists the common assumption that Jesus demands neurotic moral flawlessness. The immediate context is enemy-love: the Father gives sun and rain indiscriminately, and the disciples are called to embody that same boundary-breaking generosity.

A small exegetical qualification actually sharpens Bailey’s point. The Greek teleios should not be defined merely through an etymological relationship to telos, as though its lexical meaning were simply “fulfilling one’s purpose.” In context it carries the sense of completeness, maturity, or wholeness. Yet this makes Bailey’s theological conclusion stronger rather than weaker. Jesus is calling his followers toward an undivided love—a love that does not love friends while withholding itself from enemies. “Perfection” in Matthew 5 is the wholeness of a person whose love increasingly resembles the indiscriminate generosity of the Father. Formation, then, is not perfectionism. Perfectionism obsessively watches the self. Christlike maturity increasingly liberates the self to love the other.

This distinction runs throughout Dwelling in Christ and gives the book considerable pastoral power. The Christian who is constantly measuring his or her spiritual performance may appear serious about holiness while remaining profoundly self-absorbed. Bailey instead asks what would happen if holiness were measured less by spiritual self-consciousness and more by the increasing capacity to love. The question is worth lingering over.

Ancient Wisdom Without Antiquarianism

Bailey is particularly successful when introducing ancient Christian voices without treating antiquity as automatically authoritative. Gregory of Nyssa, Climacus, Benedict, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, à Kempis, Teresa, Fénelon, and Underhill appear as companions rather than museum exhibits. Bailey retrieves practices and categories because they help illuminate the journey toward Christlikeness.

In this respect, Dwelling in Christ belongs beside Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines and The Divine Conspiracy, though Bailey’s explicit threefold structure distinguishes his contribution. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism provides an obvious historical analogue, while Gregory’s Life of Moses and Climacus’s Ladder represent much older accounts of the soul’s ascent. Bailey himself acknowledges this lineage, including Dante and Bunyan among the spiritual itineraries that portray Christian existence as pilgrimage rather than static possession.

Yet his book remains thoroughly contemporary. Personal stories, failures, family life, suffering, prayer, ambition, the need for recognition, and ordinary relationships prevent the ancient vocabulary from drifting toward abstraction. This is important because Christian formation literature can sometimes make spiritual maturity sound strangely disembodied. Bailey repeatedly pulls it back toward the ordinary: listening to another person, becoming interruptible, relinquishing recognition, learning patience, establishing rhythms of prayer, loving the people immediately before us. The saint is not necessarily the spectacular Christian. The saint may simply be the person whose presence has become safe for others.

Pastoral Shepherding: From Producing Decisions to Forming People

For pastors and ministry leaders, this may be where Dwelling in Christ becomes most consequential. Much of modern ministry has been organized around moments: the salvation decision, the altar call, the baptism, the conference, the sermon series, the retreat, the emotional breakthrough, the new program. None of these things are inherently wrong. Scripture itself contains decisive moments. The danger comes when shepherds become skilled at producing moments but remain poorly equipped to accompany people through years.

Shepherding is necessarily slower. A shepherd cannot shout a sheep into maturity. A pastor cannot preach someone instantly through purgation, illumination, and union. Formation takes place through Scripture, Spirit, suffering, community, table, confession, correction, imitation, prayer, forgiveness, repeated obedience, and time. Bailey’s treatment of spiritual direction becomes particularly important here. Mature believers eventually become people capable of attending to others. The movement toward union is therefore not an escape into private mystical experience. Its fruit is relational. Those who dwell deeply in Christ become people capable of making space for another person’s life before God. This may offer a needed corrective to contemporary conceptions of pastoral leadership.

The New Testament shepherd is not primarily a religious entrepreneur, content producer, organizational executive, or platform personality. The shepherd knows the sheep (John 10). Elders live among the flock as examples capable of imitation (1 Pet 5:1–4). Paul can therefore tell communities not merely to believe what he teaches but to imitate the pattern of life they have witnessed in him (1 Cor 11:1; Phil 3:17; 4:9). Formation travels relationally.

Bailey’s discussion of mimēsis makes this point particularly well. People learn Christianity partly by inhabiting life beside people who have themselves learned Christ. The pastor’s life therefore inevitably becomes part of the congregation’s curriculum. That should both humble and sober anyone entrusted with shepherding. The question is no longer merely, Did I preach the correct sermon? It becomes:

What kind of people are we becoming together? Are our churches producing people who need to be noticed, or people capable of noticing others? Are we creating increasingly anxious religious performers, or men and women learning to rest in the life of Christ? Are we measuring maturity by biblical information, institutional loyalty, gifting, visibility, and activity—or by patience, courage, humility, reconciliation, generosity, enemy-love, faithfulness, and increasing freedom from the tyranny of self? And perhaps most searchingly: Would living closely beside the leaders of our churches actually help someone become like Jesus? That is the pastoral weight of Bailey’s project.

Conclusion

Dwelling in Christ is ultimately a hopeful book because it removes transformation from the frantic timetable of religious performance. Bailey reminds readers that Christian maturity is neither instantaneous nor mechanical. We are being formed within a relationship that precedes us, sustains us, and will finally outlast death itself. Purgation, illumination, and union are not techniques for becoming spiritually impressive; they describe the long schooling of desire through which grace teaches human beings how to love. There are places where the biblical theology could be developed further. The ANE and canonical background of divine dwelling could deepen the book’s central metaphor. Genesis 1’s image-language could be connected more explicitly to humanity’s representative vocation. Pauline participation could give the category of union a fuller exegetical scaffolding. Yet these are less deficiencies than openings created by a book that succeeds in making ancient Christian formation accessible again. Bailey has not written a technical theology of union with Christ, nor an exhaustive history of Christian spirituality. He has done something more pastoral. He has placed an old path back in front of ordinary Christians and invited them to walk it. For shepherds, that invitation may be especially timely.

The church does not merely need pastors capable of gathering crowds, explaining texts, defending doctrines, or leading organizations. It needs men and women who have remained with Christ long enough that his life has begun to become visible in theirs. It needs shepherds who understand that sanctification cannot be hurried, that suffering cannot always be explained, that people cannot be reduced to projects, and that maturity frequently looks less like certainty and more like patient, self-giving love.

Perhaps the great pastoral task, then, is not simply convincing people to come to Christ. It is teaching them how to dwell there. And then remaining beside them long enough that, together, we begin to look like the One in whom we dwell.

Notes

1. John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
2. On the canonical development of the divine-dwelling motif, see G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, NSBT 17 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004);
3. Constantine R. Campbell, Paul and Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012)
4. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).
5. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1982).
6. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen, 1911).
7. Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988)
8. The threefold language of purgation, illumination, and union has a complex history and should not be imagined as a single rigid developmental scheme. Within the Christian mystical tradition, the three movements have often been understood as overlapping or mutually implicating rather than as strictly successive spiritual ranks. Bailey’s refusal to make them mechanically sequential is therefore one of the strengths of his retrieval.

The parable commonly called “the Good Samaritan” is so familiar that it is easy to reduce it to a general encouragement to be kind. Jesus certainly calls His followers to compassion, but the story is sharper, more disruptive, and more deeply rooted in Israel’s Scriptures than a simple lesson in kindness. It confronts the human desire to define the limits of love. It asks whether we will recognize the image of God in the wounded person before us, and whether we are willing to receive or shepherd an enemy as an example of covenant faithfulness.

A legal expert stands up to test Jesus and asks, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25). The expression “eternal life” refers not merely to going to heaven after death, but to sharing in the life of the age to come—the life of God’s restored kingdom. His question is therefore substantial: What does faithfulness to God look like for someone who hopes to participate in His coming world? Jesus responds in thoroughly Jewish fashion, answering a question with questions: “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” (10:26). Jesus does not dismiss Torah. He directs the lawyer back to it and asks him to interpret it.

The lawyer joins two texts: Deuteronomy 6:5, the command to love God with one’s whole being, and Leviticus 19:18, the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” This combination is not a random collection of religious duties. Love of God and love of neighbor summarize a life ordered around covenant faithfulness. Jesus affirms the answer: “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live” (10:28), language that likely echoes Leviticus 18:5.

Question for the group: Why do you think Jesus asks, “How do you read it?” rather than simply giving the lawyer an answer? What is the difference between knowing the correct text and allowing that text to examine us?

The Desire to Justify Ourselves

Luke then reveals the deeper issue: “But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (10:29). The problem is not that the lawyer lacks biblical knowledge. He gives the right answer. The problem is what he wants the answer to permit him to avoid. “Who is my neighbor?” can sound like a sincere theological question, but in context it is a request for a boundary. If the command says that I must love my neighbor, I may naturally want to know who qualifies—and, more revealingly, who does not. How far does my obligation extend? Where may my mercy reasonably stop?

Leviticus 19:18 originally speaks of “the sons of your own people,” which could be read narrowly. Yet the same chapter commands Israel to love the resident foreigner as oneself: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself” (Lev. 19:34). The Torah itself was already pressing Israel beyond tribal self-interest by grounding compassion in memory: “for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” The lawyer asks Jesus to identify the proper object of neighbor-love. Jesus will instead describe the person who became a neighbor.

Question for the group: Where are we tempted to turn God’s commands into discussions about minimum obligation? Are there people we find easier to classify, criticize, or avoid than to love?

The Road Down from Jerusalem

Jesus places the story on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jerusalem sits high in the Judean hills, while Jericho lies far below sea level. The traveler was literally “going down,” descending through rugged and exposed terrain known as dangerous country. Robbers attack him, strip him, beat him, and leave him “half dead” (Luke 10:30). He is deprived not only of health but also of the ordinary markers by which others might identify him. Without clothing and perhaps unable to speak, his social status, occupation, and even ethnicity cannot easily be determined. Before he can be categorized, he must simply be seen as a wounded human being.

A priest comes down the road, sees the man, and passes by on the opposite side. A Levite does the same. Interpreters often assume they avoided the victim because touching a corpse could produce ritual impurity. That possibility may add tension to the scene, especially because the man appears nearly dead, but the text never provides this explanation. It does not say that either man was traveling to perform temple service, and the priestly corpse regulations do not offer a blanket excuse for refusing mercy. Jesus gives us no access to their private reasoning. What Luke emphasizes is simpler and more troubling: they saw him and moved away.

The failure is not primarily that they lacked religious knowledge. They represent people associated with Israel’s worship and Scriptures. Their danger is one that remains painfully contemporary: it is possible to organize one’s life around sacred things and still step around the suffering person whom God has placed in one’s path.

Question for the group: What explanations might the priest and Levite have given for passing by? Which of those explanations sound like excuses we still use—fear, schedule, uncertainty, personal safety, emotional exhaustion, or the assumption that someone else will help?

The Scandal of the Samaritan

Jesus then introduces a Samaritan. To modern ears, “Samaritan” nearly means “helpful stranger,” but that association exists because this parable transformed the word. For Jesus’ Jewish audience, the Samaritan was not a sentimental hero. Jews and Samaritans carried centuries of religious, ethnic, and political hostility. They disagreed about sacred history, the legitimate place of worship, and the identity of the faithful covenant community. Luke has already shown this tension: in the previous chapter, a Samaritan village refused hospitality to Jesus because He was traveling toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51–56). Jesus does not choose a neutral outsider. He makes the despised religious rival the moral center of the story.

When the Samaritan sees the wounded man, he is “moved with compassion” (Luke 10:33). The Greek verb splagchnizomai describes a deep, visceral movement of mercy. Luke uses such language elsewhere for the compassion of Jesus and for the father who runs to welcome his lost son (Luke 7:13; 15:20). The Samaritan does not merely feel sympathy; his compassion takes bodily and costly form.

He approaches the man others avoided. He bandages the wounds. He applies oil and wine, common resources used for soothing and cleansing injuries. He puts the victim on his own animal, brings him to an inn, and personally cares for him. The next day he gives the innkeeper two denarii and promises to cover any additional expense when he returns. His mercy costs him supplies, money, time, comfort, transportation, and the acceptance of continuing responsibility.

This is neighbor-love in the biblical sense. It is not an emotion entertained at a safe distance. It crosses the road.

Question for the group: Notice each action the Samaritan takes in verses 33–35. Which forms of cost does he accept? Which costs—time, inconvenience, money, emotional energy, reputation, or risk—are hardest for you to accept when someone needs care?

Jesus Reverses the Question

At the conclusion, Jesus does not ask, “Which of these three encountered his neighbor?” He asks, “Which of these three, do you think, became a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” (Luke 10:36, reflecting the force of the Greek). The lawyer wanted Jesus to define the category of people he was required to love. Jesus refuses the category and turns the question back upon him. The important question is no longer, Who qualifies as my neighbor? It is, Will I become a neighbor to the person whose suffering I can see?

The lawyer answers, “The one who showed him mercy” (10:37). Strikingly, he does not say, “the Samaritan.” Perhaps the identity remains difficult even to speak aloud. Yet he correctly identifies the heart of the story: mercy. Jesus replies, “Go and do likewise.” The parable does not end with admiration for the Samaritan, but with imitation of him.

There is also a profound Christ-shaped dimension to the story. We should not erase the parable’s ethical force by turning every character into an allegorical symbol. Nevertheless, the mercy Jesus commands reflects the mercy He embodies. Christ comes near to wounded humanity, crosses boundaries of estrangement, bears our burden, pays the cost, and promises to return. We do not show mercy in order to make God merciful toward us. We become merciful because, in Christ, God has come near to us.

Question for the group: Why is it easier to admire mercy than to practice it? Who is the person—or what is the kind of person—you find most difficult to imagine Jesus placing in the center of this story?

A Neighbor-Shaped Community

This parable speaks directly to the kind of community TOV desires to become. A church can gather around good teaching, worship faithfully, share meals, and still miss the wounded person at the edge of the room. The priest and Levite warn us that proximity to holy things does not automatically produce a merciful life. The Samaritan reminds us that God may reveal covenant faithfulness through someone whom our religious instincts have taught us to distrust.

Neighbor-love does not require pretending that wisdom, boundaries, or safety never matter. Nor does mercy mean enabling destructive behavior. The Samaritan’s response is concrete and ordered: he addresses the immediate wound, brings the man to a place of continuing care, recruits another person, provides resources, and establishes future responsibility. Biblical compassion is neither detached sentiment nor reckless rescuing. It is love that truthfully asks, What would genuinely serve this person’s good?

For a community, “go and do likewise” may mean noticing the person others overlook, listening before making assumptions, sharing the burden of care rather than leaving it to one person, providing food or transportation, making room at the table, protecting someone who is vulnerable, or remaining present after the initial crisis has passed. Mercy is often ordinary. Its holiness lies in refusing to pass by.

Question for the group: If TOV fully embodied this parable, what would become more visible in our life together? Who might feel safer, more welcomed, or more genuinely cared for?

The Question We Carry Home

Jesus never supplies the lawyer with a manageable list of neighbors. He gives him a wounded man, an unexpected hero, and a command: “Go and do likewise.” The kingdom of God is not formed in us merely by correctly identifying the command to love. It becomes visible when compassion moves us toward the person lying in the road.

The parable leaves each of us with a better question than the one with which the lawyer began. Not, How far does my responsibility extend? Not, Does this person belong to my group? Not even, What is the least that faithfulness requires? The question is: Because God has shown mercy to me, to whom am I now being called to become a neighbor?

Closing Reflection

Take a quiet moment and bring one person before God—not an abstract category, but a name and a face. Ask: What would it mean for me to move toward this person in wise, truthful, and costly mercy? Then identify one action that can move compassion from intention into practice this week.

Closing Prayer

Jesus, You did not love us from a distance. You saw us in our woundedness, came near, and showed us mercy at great cost. Forgive us for the times we have used busyness, fear, religious certainty, or social boundaries as reasons to pass by. Give us eyes that truly see, hearts that are moved with compassion, and courage to cross the road. Form TOV into a people among whom the wounded are noticed, the outsider is welcomed, and mercy becomes visible. Teach us to go and do likewise. Amen.

References and Further Reading

• Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1997), especially the discussion of Luke 10:25–37.
• Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 13, “The Good Samaritan.”
• Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (HarperOne, 2014), chapter 3, “The Good Samaritan.”
• Darrell L. Bock, Luke 9:51–24:53, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker Academic, 1996), on Luke 10:25–37.
• For related biblical texts, read Leviticus 19:9–18, 33–34; Deuteronomy 6:4–5; 2 Chronicles 28:8–15; Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:8; Luke 6:27–36; and James 2:8–17.

That is what I appreciated most about the book. Glahn is not merely making an argument for greater inclusion by locating a few forgotten women and adding them back into the conversation. She is asking a hermeneutical question: are we actually reading these stories according to the way they were written? That takes the conversation beyond the usual arguments over office, authority, ordination, or a handful of disputed Pauline texts. Before we decide what women may or may not do in the church, we probably ought to take a more careful look at what women are already doing in the biblical narrative and, just as importantly, how the narrators themselves evaluate them. In that respect, Glahn’s work feels at home alongside Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg, whose studies of Hebrew narrative have reminded us that characterization, repetition, dialogue, narrative gaps, irony, and literary placement are not decorative features surrounding theology; they are often the very means through which the theology of the story is communicated.²

Tamar in Genesis 38 is a particularly good example. I have heard that chapter treated for years as though it were something of an awkward interruption in the Joseph story, almost as if Genesis wandered off topic for a moment before returning to Egypt in chapter 39. But once we begin paying attention to literary placement, the chapter becomes considerably more interesting. Judah has just participated in the betrayal and sale of his brother, and then the narrative turns immediately toward Judah’s own moral failure with Tamar. He withholds from her what he owes, and she eventually forces the truth into the open. The turning point is Judah’s own acknowledgment that she is more righteous than he is. When Judah appears again later in Genesis, something has changed. The brother who participated in selling Joseph is eventually willing to offer himself in place of Benjamin. Genesis 38 therefore looks less like an interruption and more like one of the places where Judah is being transformed. Tamar is not incidental to that transformation; in a meaningful sense she becomes one of its catalysts.

The ancient Near Eastern texture adds another important layer. Tamar is not operating within a modern world of autonomous relationships and individualized economics. Her life is embedded in kinship, household continuity, inheritance, offspring, widowhood, and the responsibilities of the patriarchal household. John Walton has repeatedly cautioned modern interpreters against treating the ancient world as though its social institutions functioned like our own, and that warning is particularly important here.³ Tamar’s actions remain provocative, but the social world of Genesis makes it increasingly difficult to portray her merely as a sexually questionable woman. She is a widow whose future has become precarious because Judah has failed to carry out an obligation that bears directly upon her place in the household and upon the continuation of the family line. The narrator ultimately allows Judah himself to pronounce the moral judgment. In cases like this, historical context does not explain the text away; it often strips away assumptions that later readers have unconsciously added to it.

I found myself thinking similarly when Glahn turned to Exodus 1–2. We naturally remember Moses as the great human figure in the confrontation with Pharaoh, but the resistance to Pharaoh begins before Moses ever walks into the royal court. Shiphrah and Puah refuse the king’s genocidal command. Moses’ mother preserves her son. His sister watches over him. Pharaoh’s own daughter ultimately participates in undermining her father’s decree. The literary irony is hard to miss once someone points it out: Pharaoh decides that the Hebrew boys are the threat and allows the girls to live, yet women repeatedly become the agents through whom his attempt to destroy Israel is frustrated.

There is another subtle narrative texture here that I think Glahn rightly invites us to notice. Exodus begins with shemot, “names,” and yet Pharaoh remains unnamed while Shiphrah and Puah are explicitly remembered. In the ideological world of the ancient Near East, kings are normally the people whose names endure. Royal inscriptions, monuments, dynasties, military accomplishments, and building projects all worked toward the preservation of royal memory. Yet Exodus turns that world upside down. The most powerful man in Egypt becomes simply “Pharaoh,” while two apparently insignificant Hebrew midwives are preserved by name within Israel’s sacred memory. This is exactly where literary reading and ancient cultural background belong together. Walton’s work on the conceptual world of the Old Testament and the broader cultural-background approach associated with scholars such as Craig Keener remind us that biblical texts constantly converse with the assumptions of the worlds in which they were written.⁴ In Exodus, that conversation becomes wonderfully subversive: empire decides who matters, but Israel’s God remembers differently.

The daughters of Zelophehad brought me back to the same observation. Mahlah, Noa, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah are five names that many readers of Scripture could probably not retrieve without looking them up, and yet Numbers goes out of its way to preserve them. Their request in Numbers 27 can sound to modern ears like an early dispute over property rights, but that description is probably too thin. Land in Israel is tied to household, tribe, inheritance, ancestral continuity, and participation in the future of the covenant community. Their concern that their father’s name might disappear because he has no son is therefore not merely economic. They are asking whether their household will continue to have a place in Israel’s inheritance. Moses brings the matter before YHWH, and the divine response vindicates their claim and contributes to the development of Israel’s inheritance law. In other words, the narrative does not portray these women as troublesome exceptions to the system but as people whose discernment helps Israel more faithfully understand covenantal justice.

This also places Glahn in an interesting conversation with several recent books on women and Scripture. Nijay Gupta’s Tell Her Story operates primarily in the world of the New Testament and early Christianity, recovering women such as Phoebe, Prisca, Junia, and others whose leadership and ministry can disappear when the early church is reconstructed primarily through male figures.⁵ Cynthia Long Westfall’s Paul and Gender approaches the question from Pauline theology, rhetoric, social context, and linguistic analysis, while Philip Payne’s The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood works directly through many of the passages traditionally used to construct gender hierarchy.⁶ Glahn is doing something slightly different from all three. She is not primarily beginning with the disputed “women in ministry” texts and then defending a position. She is stepping farther back and asking whether our entire biblical imagination has been shaped by the way we have selected, characterized, and retold these stories. I think that makes her book especially useful pastorally because it reaches readers before the argument becomes a debate over positions.

That same methodology becomes particularly important when we reach the Samaritan woman in John 4. Christian retellings have often supplied an extraordinary amount of information that John himself never gives us. She is frequently described as promiscuous, socially ostracized, and forced to collect water at noon because the other women of the village reject her. Yet John never says any of those things. Jesus says she has had five husbands and that the man she presently has is not her husband, but the Gospel does not tell us how those marriages ended. In a first-century world in which women generally possessed considerably less social and legal power within marriage, widowhood, divorce, repudiation, infertility, and economic vulnerability all become relevant possibilities. Craig Keener’s cultural-background work is particularly helpful here because it reminds interpreters that the social world surrounding the text must constrain our reconstruction rather than our modern assumptions filling in the gaps.⁷ This does not prove that the woman was morally innocent in every respect; it simply asks us not to convict her of sins the narrator does not identify.

What becomes far more interesting to me is John’s literary placement of the encounter. John 3 gives us Nicodemus: male, Jewish, educated, respected, religiously credentialed, and approaching Jesus in darkness. John 4 then places before us a Samaritan woman who occupies almost every opposite social category. Yet she enters into an extended theological conversation with Jesus, recognizes progressively more about his identity, and becomes instrumental in bringing her village toward him. Read alongside Nicodemus, the effect is difficult to miss. John appears to enjoy overturning the categories by which readers decide in advance who is most likely to understand Jesus. Glahn’s larger argument works particularly well here because the woman’s significance does not need to be imported into the story from a contemporary gender agenda. It is already built into John’s narrative architecture.

This is where I think A Woman’s Place Is in the Story makes its most enduring contribution. It is certainly a book about women, but underneath that it is really a book about how we read Scripture. It asks us to slow down long enough to distinguish the biblical narrator from the interpretive traditions we have inherited. That does not mean tradition is always wrong, nor does it mean every neglected woman must become the secret hero of her story. Jezebel, after all, really is condemned. But even there the question matters: what does the biblical text actually condemn her for? Her sins in Kings are tied to idolatry, royal abuse, murder, and the seizure of Naboth’s ancestral inheritance. Later Christian imagination has sometimes transformed “Jezebel” into a vaguely sexualized accusation directed toward manipulative, assertive, or powerful women. The distance between those two things is a reminder that interpretation can accumulate traditions that eventually feel biblical simply because we have repeated them long enough.

Conclusion: Telling the Story More Faithfully

The longer I sat with Glahn’s work, the more I found myself thinking beyond questions of interpretation and toward the actual life of the church. Hermeneutics never really stays in the classroom. The way we read Scripture eventually becomes the way we preach, the way we lead, the way we recognize gifting, the way we form young people, and even the way we imagine who God is likely to use. If we repeatedly tell the biblical story in a way that highlights male courage while overlooking female courage, celebrates male leadership while treating women as peripheral, or assigns motives to women that the text itself never gives them, those patterns eventually become part of the spiritual imagination of a congregation.

That is why I think A Woman’s Place Is in the Story is worth reading beyond the academic conversation. Pastors should read it. Teachers should read it. Men who have spent years teaching Scripture should read it. Women who have sometimes wondered whether there is really room for their voice in the story should read it. Not because every reader will agree with every interpretive conclusion, but because Glahn forces us to ask a more fundamental question: have we been telling the whole story?

For me, that connects deeply with what we have tried to pursue through Expedition 44. Discipleship is not simply collecting correct propositions. It is learning to see the world through the story of God and then allowing that story to reshape the way we live. Jesus was constantly restoring people whom religious systems had learned not to see. He noticed the woman touching the edge of his garment when everyone else saw only the crowd. He allowed Mary to sit in the posture of a disciple. He received theological confession from Martha. He entrusted resurrection witness to women whose testimony carried little public weight in their surrounding culture. Again and again, the kingdom seems to arrive through people whom others have pushed toward the margins.

That should make us careful about whom we overlook in our own churches.

There may be a woman sitting quietly in the congregation who sees something in the text the rest of us have missed. There may be a young girl growing up in the church who needs to hear not merely that she is valuable, but that women have always been woven into the redemptive story as prophets, patrons, witnesses, teachers, disciples, leaders, mothers, theologians, and courageous agents of God’s purposes. There may also be men whose own discipleship becomes richer when they learn to receive wisdom and leadership from sisters in Christ rather than instinctively assuming that spiritual authority always arrives through a male voice.

That is where Glahn’s book becomes more than a corrective. It becomes an invitation. Return to the text. Read more slowly. Notice who is named. Notice who speaks. Notice who sees what others miss. Notice who acts faithfully when the expected heroes fail. Notice where the narrator places moral weight. And then ask whether our churches are making room for the same kinds of people God consistently makes room for in Scripture.

I would recommend A Woman’s Place Is in the Story especially to pastors, ministry leaders, Bible teachers, and anyone involved in spiritual formation. Read it with an open Bible. Read it in conversation with the ancient world. Read it alongside the larger body of scholarship on women and Scripture. But perhaps most importantly, read it with your own church in mind. The goal is not to manufacture a different biblical story. The goal is to recover the one that is already there and then have the courage to let that story form our communities more faithfully.

Notes

1. Sandra L. Glahn, A Woman’s Place Is in the Story (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2026).
2. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011), esp. his discussions of repetition, characterization, dialogue, and narrative reticence; & Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
3. John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
4. Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014).
5. Nijay K. Gupta, Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023).
6. Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016)
7. Keener, IVP Bible Background Commentary

There are places in Caputo’s theological language where I would want to make distinctions or add qualifications, particularly when words such as faith and miracle are extended into the language of organizational development. Yet his central instincts about leadership intersect with several important biblical themes. Scripture does not prescribe modern democratic governance as the singular biblical model, but it repeatedly challenges forms of authority that accumulate power for their own sake. Jesus’ teaching on leadership is particularly important here. In Mark 10:42–45, after James and John seek privileged positions in the kingdom, Jesus points to the political structures familiar to the disciples: “those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.” The verbs are significant. Katakyrieuō carries the sense of exercising mastery or domination, while katexousiazō emphasizes the forceful exercise of authority. Jesus’ response is emphatic: ouch houtōs de estin en hymin, “but it is not so among you.”¹

Jesus does not abolish leadership in this passage; he radically alters its direction. Greatness is measured by service, and authority is directed toward the flourishing of the people under its care. Luke preserves the same teaching in the context of the Last Supper. While the disciples argue about which of them should be considered greatest, Jesus contrasts the rulers of the nations with his own kingdom and says, “I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:24–27). This is one of the clearest examples of what we often describe as the upside-down kingdom of Jesus. The kingdom does not simply replace one hierarchy with another hierarchy occupied by better people. Jesus questions the assumptions beneath hierarchy itself: greatness descends, authority serves, and the one who leads takes the posture normally assigned to the least important person in the room.

John 13 makes the same point narratively. Jesus knows that the Father has given “all things” into his hands, yet his response to that authority is to rise from the table, wrap himself in a towel, and wash his disciples’ feet. The action is striking precisely because Jesus is not relinquishing authority. He is showing what divine authority looks like when it becomes visible. The one who possesses genuine authority uses it to serve, cleanse, prepare, and dignify others. Caputo’s leadership model is not identical to Johannine Christology, of course, but his insistence that leaders can use authority to release the capacities of others belongs within the same broad moral world.

This becomes especially evident when Caputo describes the movement of decision-making closer to teachers and classrooms. He repeatedly emphasizes that leaders did not simply remove structure and walk away. Teachers were trained, supported, given resources, and then trusted to exercise responsibility. Freedom without formation can become chaos, but control without freedom can prevent maturity. The New Testament often holds the two together. Paul’s description of leadership in Ephesians 4 is a useful example. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry” (Eph 4:11–12). The noun katartismos carries the idea of preparing, furnishing, or bringing something into proper working condition.² Leaders therefore do not exist primarily to perform the work while everyone else watches. Their work includes preparing the larger body to participate.

Paul’s argument reaches its climax in Ephesians 4:16, where the body grows as “each part does its work.” That is remarkably close to one of the best features of Caputo’s story. His teachers became more creative because leadership created space for them to exercise gifts already present among them. Parents discovered ways to contribute. Students encountered classrooms shaped by experimentation, art, nature, mathematics, technology, theater, and community participation. Caputo describes the school less as a machine executing a centralized program and more as an environment in which many people learned to contribute to a shared life.

First Corinthians 12 provides another important biblical parallel. Paul describes the church as one body composed of many differentiated members. The Spirit distributes charismata, gifts of grace, among the whole community. No single member possesses everything necessary for the body’s life. The eye needs the hand, the head needs the feet, and even the members that appear weaker are described as indispensable.³ The point is not democracy in the modern political sense, but interdependence. Healthy communities are structured in ways that recognize that meaningful contribution is distributed broadly rather than concentrated narrowly.

Caputo eventually uses the metaphor of a jazz ensemble to describe what happened at Key Largo. The school was not an orchestra controlled at every moment by one conductor. It had a common theme, but participants were given room to improvise within it. That metaphor is perhaps closer to Paul’s body language than Caputo himself intended. Biblical unity does not require sameness. In Paul’s communities, unity exists because people with different gifts remain coordinated around a common Lord, a common Spirit, and a common good.

The story of Moses and Jethro in Exodus 18 offers an older biblical example of the same leadership problem. Moses has become the single point through which the disputes of Israel must pass, and Jethro immediately sees that the arrangement is unsustainable: “What you are doing is not good” (Exod 18:17). The problem is not that Moses lacks authority but that authority has become unnecessarily concentrated. Jethro’s solution is to identify ʾanšê-ḥayil, capable and trustworthy people, and entrust genuine responsibility to them.⁴ Moses continues to lead, but leadership becomes distributed. The result is not the abandonment of authority but the multiplication of responsible leadership.

Caputo’s experience with school discipline reveals a similar movement. The faculty eventually concluded that student behavior could not simply be treated as a problem for the principal to solve. Discipline had to become part of the shared life of the community. Caputo writes that they began to understand discipline less as controlling children and more as creating a community in which teachers, parents, and students shared responsibility for how they lived and learned together. The biblical word paideia is useful here. Often translated “discipline,” it can refer more broadly to education, training, and the formation of character. Hebrews 12 and Ephesians 6:4 both use the term in a formative rather than merely punitive sense. Biblical discipline is ultimately concerned with what kind of person is being formed.

That concern with formation may be one of the strongest points of contact between Caputo’s educational philosophy and a Christian vision of leadership. Good leadership does not merely produce compliance. It develops people who can increasingly carry responsibility themselves. Paul can tell the Roman believers that they are “competent to instruct one another” (Rom 15:14), and in 1 Corinthians 14 he imagines a gathered community in which multiple people arrive prepared to contribute, while everything is ordered toward oikodomē, the building up of the whole body. The New Testament picture is neither authoritarian nor anarchic. It is ordered participation.

Caputo repeatedly argues that trust became a catalyst for this kind of maturity. Teachers who were entrusted with meaningful authority became more willing to assume responsibility, solve problems, and contribute creatively. This should not be confused with the idea that people are inherently trustworthy in every circumstance or that accountability is unnecessary. Scripture is far too realistic about human nature for that. Yet Christian leadership also cannot remain permanently suspicious of the people it claims to be forming. Eventually disciples must be permitted to act, decide, fail, learn, and mature.

Jesus himself demonstrates this pattern. He teaches the Twelve, corrects them repeatedly, gives them authority, sends them out, receives them back, and continues their formation. Luke 9–10 is particularly instructive because Jesus’ ministry begins to reproduce itself through others. They are entrusted with real participation in the mission before they fully understand everything they are doing. The kingdom advances through people whom Jesus is still forming.

This makes Caputo’s story more interesting than a simple argument for educational democracy. At its strongest, The Once and Future School is asking what authority is actually supposed to accomplish. If leadership exists primarily to preserve the leader’s control, Caputo’s experiment will always appear dangerous. If leadership exists to cultivate mature people capable of contributing to a shared mission, then distributed responsibility becomes not a threat to authority but one of its proper outcomes.

There is also something distinctly kingdom-shaped in Caputo’s insistence that the people closest to the work should be heard. The movement of Jesus consistently dignifies people whose voices were easily overlooked by conventional structures: children, women, the poor, the sick, Samaritans, tax collectors, and others located outside the centers of social prestige. This does not mean that every voice possesses equal wisdom in every matter. It does mean that proximity to status is not the same thing as proximity to truth. The kingdom repeatedly overturns assumptions about where wisdom, faithfulness, and significance will be found.

Perhaps that is one reason Caputo’s experience remains worth considering. The most important transformation at Key Largo was not architectural. It was relational and cultural. Teachers discovered greater confidence. Parents became participants. Students experienced a school that increasingly belonged to a community rather than simply being administered over one. Caputo remembers that trust began moving through the system: state leadership trusted districts, districts trusted schools, schools trusted teachers, and teachers increasingly trusted students and the communities they served.

That pattern is not a complete theology of leadership, but it is close enough to several kingdom instincts that Christian leaders should pay attention to it. Jesus consistently turns power outward. Paul understands leadership as equipping. The body of Christ depends upon the contribution of many members. Moses learns that responsible authority can be shared. Biblical freedom repeatedly becomes service rather than independence. Taken together, these themes provide a strong theological framework for appreciating what Caputo witnessed in one unusual school in the Florida Keys.

Conclusion

For the church, this may be the book’s most useful challenge. We can become very good at gathering people, teaching people, and organizing people while never actually forming them to carry responsibility in the kingdom. Jesus did something different. He called disciples close, formed them in community, entrusted them with real ministry, corrected them when they failed, and then sent them again. Discipleship was never simply the transfer of information. It was the formation of people who could increasingly participate in the life and mission of God.

That is why Caputo’s story has significance beyond Key Largo. Healthy leadership should eventually produce people who can lead, healthy teaching should produce people who can teach, and mature discipleship should produce disciples who can make disciples. A church that requires the constant presence of a few gifted leaders may be active and successful while still remaining spiritually immature. The New Testament imagines something much fuller: saints equipped for ministry, gifts released throughout the body, and ordinary people learning to carry extraordinary responsibility for the sake of others.

Perhaps the lasting gift of The Once and Future School is therefore not a particular educational model but a question every leader should be willing to ask: Are the people entrusted to us becoming more dependent upon our leadership, or are they becoming more capable of participating in the work God has given them?

The kingdom of God grows through formed people. The work of discipleship is to help form them.

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Endnotes

1. Walter Bauer, Frederick William Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.vv. “κατακυριεύω” and “κατεξουσιάζω”; R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 415
2. BDAG, s.v. “καταρτισμός”; Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC 42 (Dallas: Word, 1990), 252
3. Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 918
4. Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 128 & a slight reference to William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1–18, AB 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 628
5. David A. deSilva, Perseverance in Gratitude: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Epistle “to the Hebrews” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 436
6. Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 185
7. Edward Caputo, The Once and Future School: A Model for Democratic Leadership, Teacher Satisfaction and Student Success (Stuart, FL: Panthera Publishing, 2026).

Surrender, Formation, and the Presence of the Bridegroom

“New Wine,” – soil must receive seed. Grapes must pass through the press. Vessels must be prepared before they can be filled. What God produces within a person is eventually poured out as an offering for others.[1] This draws on central language from Jesus’s teaching about new wine and wineskins in Matthew 9:14–17, Mark 2:18–22, and Luke 5:33–39. These sayings have often been detached from their Gospel setting and used to support almost any kind of religious change. New wine becomes a new ministry, worship style, spiritual movement, or church structure. Old wineskins become those who prefer established traditions.

Jesus’s meaning is richer than a general endorsement of change. His teaching concerns the arrival of the bridegroom, the formation of his disciples, and their capacity to participate in what God is doing through him. The issue is not whether new things are always better. Luke even records Jesus saying that the person accustomed to old wine will usually prefer it. The issue is whether those encountering Jesus can recognize the moment and become capable of carrying what his presence is producing.

Wine in Ancient Israel

Wine was woven into the agricultural, economic, and religious life of ancient Israel. A vineyard required cleared land, walls or hedges, pruning, protection, harvesting, and years of patient cultivation. Planting a vineyard expressed confidence that a family would remain in the land long enough to enjoy its fruit.

This explains why grain, wine, and oil frequently appear together as signs of covenant blessing (Deut 7:13; 11:14; Hos 2:8; Joel 2:19). To sit beneath one’s own vine and fig tree represented peace and freedom from oppression (1 Kgs 4:25; Mic 4:4). To plant a vineyard and have an enemy consume its fruit represented covenant judgment (Deut 28:30, 39). Wine was more than a beverage. It represented settled life, fruitful labor, communal joy, and the faithfulness of God.

At harvest, grapes were brought to a winepress. Pressing installations discovered throughout Israel commonly include an upper treading floor connected to a lower collection vat. Workers crushed the grapes underfoot, and the juice flowed through channels into the basin. Further pressure could be applied to the remaining pulp and skins. Naturally occurring yeast began transforming the juice soon after pressing.[2] The pressure of fermentation required careful attention. Ancient wine was fermented, stored, and transported in several kinds of containers. Large ceramic jars were common, while skin containers were useful for smaller amounts and transportation. These wineskins were generally made from sheep or goat hides whose openings had been sewn or tied and whose seams were treated to reduce leakage.[3]

A new skin retained enough flexibility to accommodate the movement of young wine. An older skin could become dry, weakened, or rigid. If active wine were sealed inside it, the expanding contents could rupture the container. The result would be the loss of both the wine and the skin. Jesus’s audience did not need the image explained. It belonged to the ordinary agricultural world around them.

The Hebrew Language of Wine

The most common Hebrew word for wine is יַיִן, yayin. The term appears approximately 140 times in the Hebrew Bible and has cognates in several ancient Semitic languages. It generally describes fermented wine, although its quality and strength could vary considerably.[4] The Hebrew Bible presents yayin as both gift and danger (a contranym word). Wine gladdens the human heart in Psalm 104:15 and accompanies offerings in Exodus 29:40. Melchizedek brings bread and wine to Abraham in Genesis 14:18. Yet Noah’s drunkenness exposes his household to shame, while Proverbs warns that wine can master and deceive those who consume it without wisdom (Gen 9:20–27; Prov 20:1; 23:29–35). Wine intensifies the condition of its recipient. Within a feast it can express fellowship and joy. Without restraint it exposes disorder.

A second word, תִּירוֹשׁ, tirosh, is frequently translated “new wine.” It appears primarily in descriptions of agricultural produce and covenant abundance. The word may emphasize wine as the fresh yield of the vineyard, but it should not be equated automatically with modern, unfermented grape juice. Hosea 4:11 places yayin and tirosh together among substances capable of taking away understanding.[5] The word עָסִיס, asis, describes sweet or freshly pressed wine. Joel 3:18 declares that in the day of restoration the mountains will drip with it. Amos 9:13 uses similar language when the prophet envisions Israel’s renewed land producing such abundance that the one plowing will overtake the one harvesting.

This is the larger biblical background behind Jesus’s words. New wine carried associations of harvest, restoration, celebration, and the promised renewal of Israel. When the prophets imagined the age of salvation, they often pictured wine flowing freely. Isaiah 25:6 describes YHWH preparing a feast of rich food and aged wine for all peoples. Amos imagines mountains dripping with sweet wine. Joel connects flowing wine with the day when God restores his people. Jesus did not invent a new spiritual symbol unrelated to Israel’s Scriptures. He announced that Israel’s long-awaited hope was beginning to appear in his ministry.

New Wine and Fresh Skins

The Greek wording of the Synoptic sayings contains an important distinction. The wine is οἶνος νέος, oinos neos, while the skins are ἀσκοὶ καινοί, askoi kainoi. The adjective neos commonly describes something young or recent. The wine is new because it has been newly produced and is still developing. The adjective kainos often emphasizes freshness in character or condition. The distinction should not be treated as absolute, since the meanings overlap, but Jesus’s wording is fitting. Young wine requires fresh skins capable of moving with it.[6] The container does not create the wine. It receives, protects, and carries it. Its value is determined by its ability to serve what has been placed within it. In Matthew’s version, appropriate skins allow “both” the wine and the wineskins to be preserved. Preservation is the goal.

Luke describes what happens when the vessel cannot accommodate the wine. The wine bursts the skins, spills out, and is lost. The tragedy involves more than damage to the container. What the vessel was intended to preserve is also wasted. This gives the saying a more serious meaning than a call for innovation. Churches, traditions, leadership structures, worship practices, and ministries are all vessels. They can preserve and distribute the life of the kingdom, but none of them is the kingdom itself. A new structure that fails to preserve the wine is no better than an old structure that ruptures under its pressure.

The Bridegroom and the Question of Fasting

The discussion begins when people ask why John’s disciples and the Pharisees fast while Jesus’s disciples eat and drink. Fasting was an established Jewish practice associated with repentance, mourning, crisis, and longing for God’s intervention. The question was reasonable. Why did the disciples of Jesus appear less disciplined than other serious religious communities? Jesus responded with the image of a wedding. Wedding guests do not fast while the bridegroom is with them. A time of separation will come, and then they will fast. For the present, the bridegroom has arrived and the appropriate response is celebration. The bridegroom language carries considerable theological weight. Israel’s prophets described YHWH as the husband of his covenant people (Isa 54:5–8; 62:4–5; Hos 2:14–23). By placing himself in the role of the bridegroom, Jesus identifies his ministry with the promised restoration of God’s relationship with Israel.[7] This is why the new wine belongs to a wedding. Jesus is healing the sick, forgiving sins, welcoming social outsiders, and eating with tax collectors. The kingdom is entering places where religious respectability did not expect to find it. The presence of Jesus has changed the meaning of the moment.

Fasting remains appropriate, but its meaning must now be determined in relation to him. The disciples will fast when the bridegroom is taken away. Their fasting will no longer be an undefined religious exercise. It will express longing for the bridegroom and the completion of his kingdom. The new wine therefore represents the messianic reality arriving through Jesus. Forgiveness is being announced. Outcasts are being restored. A renewed covenant community is forming around the Messiah. These developments create pressure against social and religious boundaries that cannot contain them.

Old Wineskins and the Danger of Supersessionism

Christian interpreters have sometimes identified the old wineskins with Judaism and the new wine with Christianity. According to this reading, Jesus came to replace the obsolete religion of Israel with a new religion called Christianity. This interpretation forgets that everyone participating in the discussion is Jewish. Jesus, his disciples, John’s disciples, and the Pharisees are engaged in an internal Jewish conversation about faithful practice. Jesus is not rejecting Israel’s Scriptures. He is interpreting Israel’s story around his own messianic vocation. The language of a new covenant also comes from Israel’s prophets. Jeremiah promises that YHWH will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, writing his instruction upon their hearts (Jer 31:31–34). Ezekiel describes God cleansing his people, giving them a new heart, and placing his Spirit within them (Ezek 36:25–27). Newness means that Israel’s God is acting faithfully to restore his people.

Luke adds a saying that prevents readers from treating everything old as evil: “No one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good’” (Luke 5:39). This may describe the natural human preference for what is familiar. It may also acknowledge that old wine possesses genuine value. Either way, Jesus is not promoting novelty as a spiritual virtue.[8] A similar image appears in Pirkei Avot 4:20, where teachers and students are compared to old and new wine contained in old and new vessels. The Mishnah was compiled after the New Testament period, so the saying cannot be assumed to provide the direct background to Jesus’s teaching. It does demonstrate that Jewish teachers could use wine and vessels to discuss formation, receptivity, age, and wisdom without assigning a fixed moral value to everything old or new.[9]

An old wineskin is therefore not simply an old church, an inherited liturgy, or an older generation. Young people can become rigid. New ministries can become possessive and controlling. A contemporary church can protect its methods as fiercely as the institution it once criticized. Freshness is measured by receptivity to Jesus. A suitable wineskin remains capable of being corrected, stretched, and formed by the life of the kingdom.

Crushing, Formation, and Surrender

Crushing and pressing emerges naturally from the winepress, but it must be handled carefully. Scripture sometimes uses the winepress as an image of judgment. Joel 3:13 summons the nations to the press because their wickedness is great. Isaiah 63 portrays the divine warrior with garments stained from treading the nations. Revelation later draws upon the same prophetic imagery (Rev 14:19–20; 19:15). Pain should not be romanticized as though every wound were directly inflicted by God. Abuse, injustice, illness, betrayal, and grief are not good simply because something may eventually be learned through them. The Psalms of lament give wounded people permission to protest, grieve, and ask why God seems absent.

The gospel reveals a God who enters suffering. Jesus does not stand at a safe distance from the crushing. He is betrayed, rejected, beaten, crucified, and buried. Resurrection does not declare death good. It reveals that death cannot prevent God from bringing life. Surrender, then, is not passive submission to every demand made by a religious leader. Christian surrender is yieldedness to Jesus. The hands shaping the vessel bear the wounds of the crucified Messiah. He forms people for life, communion, and service. The crushing is never the final purpose. Grapes are pressed so that wine can be produced and shared. The vessel is filled so that it can eventually pour out what it has received.

Make Us Vessels

The vessel language of the song also recalls Jeremiah’s vision of the potter reshaping clay in his hands (Jer 18:1–6). Isaiah calls God the potter and Israel the clay (Isa 64:8). Paul describes believers as fragile earthen vessels carrying extraordinary treasure so that the power will be recognized as belonging to God rather than to them (2 Cor 4:7). A vessel does not exist to admire its own fullness. Paul describes his life as being poured out like a drink offering for the faith of others (Phil 2:17; 2 Tim 4:6). What he receives from Christ becomes something he gives for the church.

This movement from receiving to giving provides an important framework for discipleship. A renewal weekend may become a concentrated space of confession, healing, communion, and renewed calling. The talks, music, testimonies, palanca, silence, and table conversations can prepare people to recognize that the bridegroom is near. They cannot manufacture the presence of Christ. They serve that presence. The weekend is also not the completion of discipleship. Participants return to their homes, churches, relationships, responsibilities, and unresolved circumstances. The lasting evidence of new wine will not be the intensity of a weekend response. It will appear in the fruit that follows: a softened heart, a courageous apology, a restored relationship, a growing hunger for Scripture, greater generosity, patient faithfulness, and an increasing resemblance to Jesus.

The deepest prayer of Weekend 53 may not be, “God, give us something new.” God has already given himself to us in Jesus and poured out his Spirit upon his people. The more searching prayer is, “Make us capable of carrying what you give.” Make us receptive to your presence. Make us flexible under the pressure of grace. Teach us to honor what came before without demanding that you act only as you have acted before. Free us from protecting religious structures after they have ceased to serve your kingdom. Form us into a community that welcomes those whom Jesus welcomes.

A wineskin never creates the wine. It receives it, stretches around it, and preserves it until the appointed time. Then it opens, and what it has carried is poured out for others. This is where the image finally leads. Jesus takes the cup and shares it with his disciples. Wine becomes a sign of covenant, communion, sacrifice, and the kingdom that will one day be fully revealed. The life received from Christ becomes a life shared around his table. The bridegroom is among us. The feast has begun. The wine is meant to be shared.

Conclusion: When the New Wine Leaves the Weekend

The prayer for new wine is a courageous prayer because it gives Jesus permission to change more than our circumstances. It invites him to search the places within us that have become rigid, guarded, wounded, or resistant. Most of us want the fruit of transformation, but we are less certain about the surrender that makes transformation possible. We want peace without releasing control, reconciliation without having the difficult conversation, freedom without naming what has bound us, and resurrection without entering the places where something old must finally die.

Jesus meets us there with patience. He does not shame the brittle places within us. He knows how they formed. Some of our defenses were built in seasons when we were trying to survive. Some of our habits grew from disappointment. Some of our hardness began as an attempt to protect a heart that had been wounded too many times. The Shepherd does not approach those places with condemnation. He comes with truth, tenderness, and healing. He shows us that what once protected us may now be preventing us from receiving the life he wants to give.

Becoming a fresh wineskin does not mean erasing your story. Jesus does not discard your history, personality, questions, or scars. He redeems them. The resurrected Christ still carried his wounds, but those wounds no longer represented the victory of death. They had become witnesses to the faithfulness of God. In the same way, surrender allows Jesus to take the places that once testified only to pain and make them testimonies of grace.

For some, the invitation of this weekend will be to forgive. Forgiveness does not pretend that the wound was insignificant. It does not eliminate healthy boundaries, excuse abuse, or instantly restore trust. Forgiveness releases the right to remain the judge and places justice into the hands of God. It loosens the grip that another person’s actions have maintained over your inner life. Sometimes forgiveness is spoken through tears. Sometimes it must be chosen many times before the heart catches up with the decision. Even then, every act of forgiveness creates space where new wine can begin to breathe.

For others, the invitation will be to receive forgiveness. Many people believe that Jesus forgives sinners in general while quietly wondering whether he has forgiven them in particular. They carry old shame into every new season. They assume that their worst moment is the truest thing about them. But the gospel does not announce that Jesus will tolerate you once you have punished yourself sufficiently. It announces that Christ has come near, entered your darkness, carried your sin, defeated the powers that held you, and opened the way home. Repentance is not crawling back to an angry God. It is turning toward the Father who has already come looking for you.

Some will need to release control. Control often disguises itself as responsibility. We tell ourselves that everything depends upon us because trusting God feels too uncertain. We manage people, anticipate every possible failure, and carry burdens that were never given to us. Eventually the soul becomes exhausted from trying to occupy a position that belongs only to God. Surrender does not mean that we stop caring or acting responsibly. It means that we obey faithfully while allowing God to remain God. We tend the vineyard, but we cannot command the rain. We prepare the vessel, but we cannot manufacture the wine.

Others may need to recover their voice. Perhaps someone taught you that humility meant silence or that submission meant disappearing. Perhaps your gifts were ignored because you did not fit someone else’s expectations. The Spirit does not fill people so they can remain hidden forever. He gives gifts for the strengthening of the body. Your voice does not need to sound like anyone else’s voice. Your testimony does not need to resemble anyone else’s story. The question is whether you will offer what God has placed within you. A quiet word spoken in obedience can carry more life than a loud word spoken for attention.

There may also be relationships that require attention when the weekend ends. New wine will eventually press against old patterns of avoidance. If the Spirit brings someone to mind, do not dismiss it as an interruption. Pray about the next faithful step. Make the call. Write the letter. Ask the question. Listen without preparing your defense. Confess your part without explaining it away. Reconciliation requires the participation of more than one person, so not every relationship can be immediately restored. You can still choose honesty, humility, forgiveness, and peace on your side of the relationship.

Do not despise small beginnings. Spiritual transformation is often quieter than we expect. We look for a dramatic moment while God begins with one honest confession, one surrendered habit, one act of generosity, or one conversation we have avoided for years. Fruit grows slowly because it is alive. A manufactured appearance can be produced quickly, but genuine formation takes time. The Father is not impatient with the pace of healthy growth.

This is why you will need community after the weekend. A wineskin is a communal image before it becomes an individual one. Jesus did not call isolated believers to manage private spiritual experiences. He gathered disciples around a table and taught them to carry one another. We need people who will remind us what God has done when our emotions change. We need friends who can celebrate our growth without flattering us, correct us without controlling us, and sit with us when there are no simple answers. Do not leave this weekend with only a memory. Leave with names, relationships, and a willingness to be known.

You should also expect resistance. A meaningful encounter with God does not remove every temptation, heal every wound overnight, or answer every question. The days following a spiritual high can feel surprisingly ordinary. That does not mean the weekend was false or that God has withdrawn. New wine develops in hidden places. What began in a moment must be carried through prayer, Scripture, communion, repentance, service, and life with the church. The work of grace continues when the music has stopped and no one is watching.

Guard what God has entrusted to you, but do not clutch it. The wine was never meant to remain sealed forever. Whatever Jesus heals in you can become a place from which you help another person heal. The comfort you have received can become comfort for someone who is grieving. The freedom you have found can become hope for someone still hiding. Your story does not make you the Savior. It allows you to point more honestly toward the one who saved you.

When you return home, ask yourself a few simple questions. What is Jesus asking me to release? Whom is he asking me to forgive? Where is he calling me to tell the truth? What gift have I kept hidden? What relationship needs a faithful next step? Where have I confused control with responsibility? How can what God has given me become life for someone else?

Do not try to answer every question at once. Begin where the Spirit has placed his finger. Obedience is often one clear step before it becomes a visible journey.

The bridegroom has not invited us to a weekend of temporary inspiration. He has invited us into his life. He is forming a people who know how to feast in his presence, fast in their longing, remain faithful through suffering, welcome the outsider, forgive as they have been forgiven, and pour themselves out in love.

So bring Jesus your whole life. Bring him the fruitful places and the barren ones. Bring him your confidence and your fear, your joy and your disappointment, your obedience and your resistance. Bring him what is still tender and what has become hard. You do not have to arrive already transformed. You only need to stop hiding from the one who transforms.

May Jesus soften what has become rigid, heal what has been wounded, and strengthen what has grown weak. May he free us from religious performance and form within us the quiet faithfulness of genuine disciples. May our homes become places of peace, our churches become tables of belonging, and our lives become vessels of his presence.

And when he pours new wine into us, may we have the courage to receive it, the patience to carry it, and the love to pour it out for others.

Notes

1. Hillsong Worship, “New Wine”, There Is More (Hillsong Music, 2018).
2. Carey Ellen Walsh, The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel (Harvard Semitic Monographs 60; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 35 & Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 167
3. David Van Limbergen et al., “Making Wine in Earthenware Vessels: A Comparative Approach to Roman Vinification,” Antiquity 98 (2024): 361
4. Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. and ed. M. E. J. Richardson, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000), 2:406
5. Hans-Jürgen Fabry, “תִּירוֹשׁ,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, trans. David E. Green, 16 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974–2018)
6. Frederick William Danker, ed., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 497
7. A. Kee, “The Old Coat and the New Wine: A Parable of Repentance,” Novum Testamentum 12 (1970): 13
8. m. Avot 4:20. The comparison is valuable as a later Jewish parallel, but its dating requires caution when reconstructing the immediate historical background of Jesus’s saying.

These questions are not new. Frank Viola began pressing many of them decades ago, first through his early work on house churches and later through Pagan Christianity?, written with George Barna, and Reimagining Church. Viola’s critique was directed toward the institutional habits Christians often assume are prescribed in the New Testament: professional clergy, passive congregations, sermon-centered gatherings, religious buildings, and highly programmed services. His constructive proposal was an organic expression of church in which every member participates and Christ, rather than a professional minister, functions as the community’s center.¹ Whatever one makes of every historical argument advanced by Viola and Barna, they helped a generation of Christians distinguish the church described in the New Testament from the ecclesiastical customs that developed around it.

Brave Cities belongs to this same broad conversation, although McCall and Halter move beyond the living room. Their vision is neighborhood-sized and eventually city-shaped. The subtitle identifies their concern as “the archaeology, artistry, and architecture of kingdom ecosystems.” Archaeology involves digging beneath inherited church forms to recover the kingdom beneath them. Artistry refers to the imagination needed to embody the gospel within a particular community. Architecture concerns the patient construction of relationships, spaces, businesses, homes, and economic practices through which communal life can develop.

That language matters because Brave Cities is not another manual promising reproducible church growth. Its opening image, “Music Not Math,” challenges the belief that ministry can be reduced to transferable formulas. The church is closer to a song than an equation. Its life cannot be produced simply by importing someone else’s methods, terminology, service order, or leadership structure. McCall and Halter encourage communities to listen carefully—to God, to one another, and to their particular place—and then to create faithfully within that setting. A coffeehouse may become important in one city, while a farm, home, school, trade, recovery ministry, athletic program, or shared business may become central somewhere else.

Alan Hirsch’s influence can be felt throughout this approach. His work has consistently called the Western church to recover its missional identity, apostolic imagination, and capacity to operate as a movement. In The Forgotten Ways, Hirsch described the church’s “apostolic genius” as something already present within its spiritual DNA, waiting to be reactivated.² Both The Starfish and the Spirit and Brave Cities draw from this movement-oriented stream. They distrust centralized control, emphasize the gifts and agency of ordinary believers, and view multiplication as something living systems do when they are healthy. Brave Cities, however, places more attention on the physical and economic ecology in which such a movement takes root.

The Soil Beneath the Church

One of the book’s controlling metaphors is soil. Modern agriculture can sometimes force crops from depleted land through chemicals, engineered seeds, and industrial techniques. Something may grow, but the ecosystem beneath it remains unhealthy. McCall and Halter use this as an image of churches that continue producing services, programs, attendance, and religious activity while the communal soil underneath them deteriorates.

Their point is not that Sunday gatherings are inherently harmful. They explicitly acknowledge that traditional, contemporary, house, digital, large, and small churches can all serve people faithfully. Their concern is what happens when the gathering becomes the controlling definition of church. Attendance then becomes the primary evidence of faithfulness, teaching becomes concentrated in a few professionals, and most members learn to receive ministry rather than participate in it. A church can maintain excellent weekly services while remaining relationally thin and largely disconnected from the suffering of its surrounding community.

The alternative proposed in Brave Cities is a “kingdom ecosystem.” Healthy soil contains thousands of organisms interacting in ways that sustain the whole environment. In the same way, a kingdom ecosystem includes disciples, homes, businesses, gathering spaces, friendships, mentoring relationships, acts of justice, shared resources, and places of hospitality. No single element is the church by itself. Together they form a web of life through which the reign of God becomes visible within a particular place.

This ecological language is helpful because it moves the conversation away from deciding which church model is universally correct. Models tend to be copied. Ecosystems must be cultivated. A model can be transported from one city to another with little regard for context; an ecosystem grows from the history, needs, gifts, wounds, and possibilities already present in a community. Lesslie Newbigin made a related argument when he described the congregation as the hermeneutic of the gospel—a community whose shared life interprets the good news before the watching world.³ The credibility of the church’s message is inseparable from the social life created by that message.

Disciples Before Churches

McCall and Halter repeatedly return to Jesus’ investment in people. Jesus did not begin with a building campaign, weekly attractional event, or fully formed institution. He formed disciples who learned his way of life while traveling, eating, serving, confronting evil, caring for the sick, and announcing the kingdom. The book compares disciples to a cover crop planted in depleted soil. Their presence gradually restores what has been damaged.

This is one of the strongest parts of Brave Cities. Discipleship is treated as a life shared rather than a curriculum completed. Teaching still matters, but it occurs within the movement of life. Parents do not ordinarily raise their children through one weekly lecture. They teach through conversation, correction, work, meals, conflict, questions, failures, celebrations, and ordinary experiences. McCall and Halter ask why spiritual formation should be imagined so differently.

Their concern resembles Robert Banks’s study of Paul’s churches as participatory communities in which spiritual formation occurred through mutual contribution rather than dependence upon a single religious professional.⁴ It also echoes the argument of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch that the church is missionary by its very nature and must therefore form disciples capable of embodying the gospel outside ecclesiastical spaces.⁵

The book’s practical picture is compelling. Evangelism happens while coaching, working, drinking coffee, sharing a meal, operating a business, or listening to someone’s story. Teaching happens in homes, conversations, email exchanges, mentoring relationships, and gatherings where more than one person may contribute. Discipleship occurs while people work together and experience enough of one another’s real lives to see character revealed. The gospel becomes credible through proximity.

The book is especially perceptive in recognizing that transformation often occurs in moments of tension. People become open to change when the inadequacy of their present way of living can no longer be ignored. A struggling marriage, addiction, financial crisis, relational rupture, failure, or experience of grief may create an openness that a prearranged lesson does not. This does not make suffering good, nor should crisis be manipulated. It means that wise discipleship is attentive. It listens for the questions people are actually asking instead of forcing everyone through the same material at the same pace.

The Hammer, the Table, and the Grandmother

One of the more memorable sections of the book describes discipleship through three images: the hammer, the table, and the grandmother. The hammer represents work—the activity of building, creating, repairing, serving, and producing something useful. The table represents rest, remembrance, conversation, food, celebration, and belonging. The grandmother represents the steady wisdom of elders who have endured enough of life to remain calm when everyone else is frightened.

These images carry more substance than another ministry acronym. The hammer locates discipleship within meaningful work. People learn generosity, patience, integrity, endurance, reconciliation, and mutual submission when they build something together. The table gives that work a relational center. It creates space to tell stories, process failures, share Scripture, remember Jesus, and receive one another again. The grandmother keeps an energetic movement from becoming captive to the impulses of its most charismatic pioneer.

The book’s preference for grandmothers over formal elder boards is intentionally provocative. Its critique arises from observing leadership teams that protect institutions, preserve existing programs, and manage risk while remaining distant from the daily life of the community. There is truth in that criticism. Biblical eldership, however, should not be dismissed simply because many churches have embodied it poorly. The New Testament vision of eldership is relational, mature, hospitable, and exemplary. In fact, much of what McCall and Halter call “grandmothering” resembles the pastoral wisdom the New Testament expects from its elders. Their argument is strongest when heard as a recovery of lived spiritual maturity rather than a rejection of all recognizable leadership structures.

The same qualification applies to their treatment of teaching and sacraments. Brave Cities rightly opposes the monopolization of teaching by professionals and recognizes that God’s grace is encountered throughout ordinary life. Availability, neighboring, generosity, hospitality, shared meals, care for the poor, and communal rest can all become sacramental in a broad sense. Yet baptism and the Lord’s Supper retain a particular place within the church’s life because they are practices given to the community by Jesus and rooted in the gospel’s central story. Expanding our sacramental imagination need not require flattening every distinction between the sacraments and other faithful practices.

These are places where the book’s rhetoric occasionally moves faster than its historical or exegetical argument. Its account of the Reformation’s understanding of preaching, sacraments, and discipline is too compressed, and its dismissal of inherited church structures sometimes treats their abuses as though they were their essence. Even so, the criticism should not be brushed aside. Many congregations have reduced church life to listening to a sermon, receiving religious goods, and remaining accountable to an organization. Brave Cities is asking whether that can bear the full weight of the New Testament’s vision of a Spirit-filled people sharing life in Christ.

A Free-Market Church?

The most distinctive contribution of Brave Cities may be its treatment of economics. The authors question a financial model in which Christians give primarily to maintain buildings, salaries, programs, and centralized church infrastructure. They ask what might happen if more kingdom resources were invested in small businesses, intentional homes, community spaces, employment, sustainable ministries, and ventures addressing local suffering.

The phrase “free-market church” could easily be misunderstood. McCall and Halter are not simply baptizing capitalism or suggesting that churches operate as profit-seeking corporations. They envision a shared economy in which work, money, property, skills, businesses, and homes are stewarded for the good of the community. Their scriptural center is the economic imagination of Acts and Paul’s collection for Jerusalem: abundance meeting need so that the body experiences a form of equality.

Their distinction between charity and sustainability is valuable, although it should not be pressed too far. Emergency charity remains necessary. Hungry people need food before they need a business plan. Families in crisis sometimes need assistance without an immediate expectation of productivity. Yet the authors are correct that long-term care must take dignity, agency, employment, ownership, and sustainability seriously. Relief that never develops into relationship can preserve the distance between giver and recipient.

The economic vision of Brave Cities resembles John Howard Yoder’s description of the church as a visible social body whose shared practices offer the world an alternative politics. It also recalls Ched Myers’s work on Sabbath economics, particularly the biblical relationship between manna, Jubilee, debt, redistribution, and communal sufficiency.⁶ The church does not announce another way of life only through its preaching. Its handling of possessions, power, property, debt, work, and vulnerability reveals what it actually believes about the kingdom.

“Business is the mission” is one of the book’s more provocative claims. At its best, the statement means that honest work, excellent products, fair employment, beautiful spaces, and genuine care for customers are not secular activities that occasionally finance spiritual ministry. They can become part of the church’s public witness. A coffee shop does not become missional by placing Christian slogans on its cups. It becomes a kingdom expression when it offers good coffee, treats workers justly, knows its neighbors, creates belonging, and allows relationships to develop without turning people into evangelistic projects.

This vision has meaningful precedent in Christian history. Monastic communities joined prayer, hospitality, labor, agriculture, learning, and care for the poor. The Moravians developed businesses and trades that helped sustain a remarkable missionary movement. The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., organized small, disciplined communities around particular callings and concrete forms of service. Mark Lau Branson and Dwight Friesen’s Churches, Cultures and Leadership similarly describes Christian leadership as participation in a network of relationships rather than control from the organizational center.⁷ Brave Cities gathers these instincts and applies them to the economic and communal realities of contemporary cities.

Apostolic Leadership and Its Costs

The final movement of the book focuses on “apostolicing,” the life of the pioneer servant. McCall and Halter describe apostolic people as starters, builders, cultural architects, and stewards who see possibilities before others do. They connect ideas, people, funding, work, and place. They often begin before permission is granted and continue through criticism, uncertainty, and personal sacrifice.

The book offers an important correction to church cultures that have concentrated almost entirely on shepherding and teaching gifts. Pastors and teachers are indispensable, but communities also need evangelists, prophets, and apostles. Paul’s language in Ephesians 4 describes these gifts as serving the maturity and ministry of the whole body. Apostolic leadership is therefore not a higher ecclesiastical rank. It is a pioneering function that helps the church cross boundaries, begin new work, and lay foundations upon which others can build.

McCall and Halter are candid about the costs. Pioneer leaders frequently carry financial uncertainty, criticism, spiritual opposition, and the pressure of holding a vision others do not yet understand. They may invest years of labor without owning what they have created or receiving adequate compensation. The book’s discussion of funding rightly asks donors to support character and calling rather than using money to control outcomes.

Some caution is still needed here. Suffering does not authenticate every vision, and criticism is not necessarily proof that a leader is pioneering faithfully. Apostolic language can become dangerous when it shields strong personalities from accountability or interprets every disagreement as religious resistance or spiritual warfare. The New Testament’s apostles were accountable to the gospel, to one another, and to the communities they served. Genuine pioneering leadership carries authority, but it also receives correction and makes room for communal discernment.

That caution does not diminish the book’s central insight. New work carries a cost, and many of the people who benefit from it will never see what was required to begin it. Churches should become better at identifying, supporting, protecting, and resourcing faithful pioneers—women and men capable of imagining forms of kingdom life that do not yet exist.

A Book for Builders

Brave Cities will resonate most deeply with people who already sense that the inherited forms of Western church life are too narrow for the kingdom they find in the New Testament. It is written for builders, hosts, entrepreneurs, artists, missionaries, neighborhood pastors, community developers, and spiritually restless people who cannot separate discipleship from the life of a city.

Readers looking for a complete ecclesiology will find places where the book needs more historical development and exegetical restraint. Its rhetoric sometimes paints institutional churches too uniformly, and a few of its biblical connections function more as evocative analogies than sustained interpretations. Yet the book does not claim to provide a complete theology of the church. It is trying to restore imagination. It asks Christians to stop measuring faithfulness primarily through attendance, budgets, buildings, and centralized programs and to look for fruit in transformed people, reconciled relationships, shared resources, meaningful work, hospitality, justice, and enduring love.

For those of us working within organic expressions of church, the book offers language for instincts we have carried for years. Church is cultivated in the soil of shared life. It grows through people who know one another well enough to carry burdens, speak truth, share meals, forgive offenses, recognize gifts, and remain together through difficulty. Its witness becomes tangible when the lonely receive family, workers recover dignity, homes become places of hospitality, resources circulate toward genuine need, and ordinary Christians discover that ministry has never belonged exclusively to religious professionals.

A Personal Word for TOV

This book reaches me personally because so much of what McCall and Halter describe is what we have been trying, however imperfectly, to cultivate at TOV. We gather around tables. We bring food. We share communion as part of an actual meal. Children remain close to the life of the community. Different people teach, lead worship, pray, serve, and open their homes. We carry one another through illness, loss, financial pressure, relational difficulty, and the ordinary weight of life. We have never wanted TOV to become another religious event that people attend while remaining strangers to one another. Our hope has been to become a spiritual family learning to follow Jesus together.

This is not a novel recipe invented by the organic-church movement. It is the pattern that repeatedly emerges from the New Testament. In Matthew 28:19, the controlling verb in Jesus’ commission is μαθητεύσατε (mathēteusate), “make disciples.” “Going,” “baptizing,” and “teaching” describe how that command is carried out. Jesus did not command his followers merely to gather audiences, deliver weekly lectures, construct religious buildings, or produce better worship services. He commanded them to form people who would learn his way and order their lives around everything he taught.

The noun μαθητής (mathētēs) means more than a student who acquires information. A disciple is an apprentice whose life is being reshaped through attachment to a teacher. That is why Jesus’ recurring invitation is ἀκολούθει μοι (akolouthei moi), “follow me.” Following involved physical proximity, observation, imitation, correction, participation, and eventually being sent to continue the work of the teacher. Jesus formed disciples on roads and shorelines, inside homes, around tables, among the sick, in conflict with religious authorities, and in the presence of the poor. His teaching was inseparable from the life through which it was demonstrated.

Acts 2:42–47 gives us a glimpse of what happened when that way of discipleship became communal. The believers “devoted themselves”—ἦσαν προσκαρτεροῦντες (ēsan proskarterountes)—to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer. The verb προσκαρτερέω (proskartereō) conveys persistent attachment and continuing devotion. Luke is not describing four items placed into a weekly service order. He is describing a sustained way of life. Their devotion produced shared meals, prayer, generosity, gladness, public credibility, and material care so tangible that needs were addressed among them. Teaching remained essential, but it lived within fellowship. Communion took place around tables. Prayer accompanied shared life. Generosity moved possessions toward actual need.

The modern church has wandered a considerable distance from this pattern. Its evolution may have produced forms that are useful, sincere, and sometimes beautiful. I am not interested in declaring that everything developed after the first century is therefore illegitimate. Yet much of what we now call church does not seem to move with the relational flow of Jesus or the earliest Christian communities. We have become very good at gathering people who barely know one another, teaching people we may never share life with, and measuring participation without knowing whether anyone is becoming more like Christ. A person can attend faithfully for years while remaining lonely, unknown, materially burdened, and largely uninvolved in the lives of others.

The shepherding challenge is not simply to criticize that system. It is to recover the life we were given. If we are going to call one another disciples, we must become close enough to observe how each other follows Jesus. We must share enough life to recognize suffering before it becomes a crisis. We must create tables where confession is safe, correction is loving, forgiveness is practiced, and no one needs to pretend. We must know one another’s children, notice one another’s absence, carry one another’s burdens, and place our time, gifts, homes, and resources at the disposal of the kingdom. That is far more demanding than attending a service. It is also far closer to the life Jesus gave his disciples.

This is my prayer for TOV. I do not want us merely to grow larger; I want us to grow closer, deeper, and more faithful. I want our gatherings to remain an expression of the life we share rather than a substitute for it. I want our tables to remain open, our homes available, our children known, our resources shared, and our hearts tender toward those who arrive carrying wounds from religion, family, or life. I want us to become the kind of community in which people can encounter Jesus through Scripture, communion, friendship, work, hospitality, laughter, patience, and costly love.

I am deeply grateful to Taylor McCall and Hugh Halter for giving language to this hope. Brave Cities reminded me why this work matters and why it is worth the inconvenience, misunderstanding, sacrifice, and patience that genuine community requires. I finished the book grateful for those who have already helped build this life with us at TOV, hopeful about what God is still forming among us, and freshly committed to following Jesus together—not as consumers of a religious gathering, but as disciples, friends, servants, and family.

Notes

1. Frank Viola and George Barna, Pagan Christianity? Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices, rev. ed. (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2008) & Frank Viola, Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2008).
2. Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016).
3. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 222–33.
4. Robert Banks, Paul’s Idea of Community: The Early House Churches in Their Cultural Setting, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).
5. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2013).
6. Ched Myers, The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics (Washington, DC: Tell the Word Press, 2001).
7. Mark Lau Branson and Dwight J. Friesen, Churches, Cultures and Leadership: A Practical Theology of Congregations and Ethnicities, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023).

Most people encounter the Hebrew alphabet simply as the twenty-two letters used to write biblical Hebrew. At the most basic level, that is exactly what they are. Hebrew is a language, and its letters function linguistically. Within Jewish interpretive tradition, however, the letters were also contemplated for their shapes, numerical values, placement, and relationship to the sacred text. Rabbinic and later mystical writers often found theological significance in details that modern readers would easily pass over.

When I started studying Hebrew at Moody Bible Institute and later at the UW Madison Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, it was engrained in my head that care is needed. The meaning of a biblical word does not come from assigning a spiritual definition to each of its letters. Biblical Hebrew still has to be read grammatically, syntactically, historically, and literarily. Later Jewish reflection on individual letters belongs more properly to the worlds of midrash and mysticism. Those traditions can be fascinating and sometimes theologically rich, but they should not be confused with the lexical meaning intended by a biblical author.

The opening word of Genesis provides a good example.

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים
berēʾšît bārāʾ ʾĕlōhîm

Genesis begins with the letter ב — bet. Grammatically, the bet attached to rēʾšît functions as a preposition. The phrase berēʾšît means something like “in the beginning” or, depending on how one understands the syntax of Genesis 1:1–3, “when God began to create.” Nothing in the grammar requires a symbolic meaning for the letter itself.

Rabbinic interpreters nevertheless noticed that the Torah begins with bet rather than aleph, the first letter of the alphabet. Bereshit Rabbah preserves several reflections on this. One observes that the shape of ב is closed on three sides and open toward the direction of reading. The image becomes a meditation on the limits of human inquiry: creation opens before us, while what lies beyond it remains hidden. Another interpretation connects bet with berakhah, “blessing,” since both words begin with the same letter.¹ This is not an alternative translation of Genesis 1:1. It is midrash. The reader begins with the written form of the biblical text and allows that form to generate further theological reflection.

The same instinct becomes much more developed in early Jewish mystical literature. Sefer Yetzirah connects the twenty-two Hebrew letters with the ordering of creation and describes the cosmos through the interplay of letters, numbers, and the ten sefirot.² In that setting language itself becomes part of the theological imagination of creation. Scholars have long noted how strongly linguistic the worldview of Sefer Yetzirah is.³

There is at least a biblical starting point for this fascination with language. Genesis 1 repeatedly describes God creating through speech: “And God said…” Psalm 33:6 similarly declares, “By the word of YHWH the heavens were made.” The Hebrew Bible emphasizes divine speech rather than hidden magical properties in the alphabet, but later Jewish thinkers naturally wondered about the relationship between divine speech, written language, and the letters through which sacred words were preserved.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook takes this kind of reflection in a particularly creative direction in Reish Millin. Written in the early twentieth century, the work meditates on Hebrew letters, vowel points, and cantillation marks as openings into spiritual and theological contemplation.⁴ Kook is working far beyond ordinary grammatical exegesis, yet his approach belongs to a long Jewish tradition of reading Scripture slowly enough to notice even the smallest features of the written text.

That may be the most useful lesson for Christian readers. Hebrew letters should not become a fortune-telling system, and they should not be treated as a secret code behind Scripture. An aleph does not possess one fixed spiritual meaning everywhere it appears, nor does a bet unlock a hidden layer of Genesis inaccessible to ordinary exegesis. Those claims go beyond what the biblical texts themselves support.

Still, Jewish reflection on the letters reminds us how patiently Scripture has been read across the centuries. The biblical world takes words seriously. Creation comes through speech. Prophets consume scrolls. Names carry meaning. Torah is written, memorized, recited, and taught from generation to generation. The first bet of Genesis does not secretly decode creation. It does remind us that readers before us often lingered over the text far longer than we do. There may be something worth recovering in that posture: reading Scripture slowly enough to notice its grammar, its literary shape, its cultural setting, and occasionally even the letter sitting at the beginning of the line.

For those of us who teach, pastor, or simply want to follow Jesus faithfully, there is a pastoral invitation here as well. We live in a culture that rewards speed, certainty, and immediate application, and those habits easily follow us into Scripture. Sometimes we need to recover the discipline of staying with the text before rushing to explain it. Read it slowly. Ask better questions. Notice the words, the repetitions, the structure, the cultural world behind them, and the places that resist easy answers. Not every detail needs to become a doctrine or a sermon point. Some things are worth sitting with for a while. Good shepherding does not always mean giving people quicker answers; sometimes it means teaching them how to become patient readers who love Scripture enough to linger over it.

Notes

1. Bereshit Rabbah 1:10. The passage preserves several interpretations of the opening bet, including reflections on its shape and its association with berakhah (“blessing”).
2. Sefer Yetzirah 1:1–2:6. The work describes creation in relation to the ten sefirot and the twenty-two Hebrew letters.
3. See Tzahi Weiss, “Sefer Yeṣirah” and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), especially his treatment of the linguistic and cosmological world behind the text.
4. Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook, Reish Millin (London, 1917), especially its meditations on Hebrew letters, vowel points, and cantillation.