The Christian fraternity house at the University of Michigan looks like a stone castle with two towers and an arched entryway. During the last week of June, 21 high-school students lived here along with six staff members from Knox Presbyterian Church. Their goal: to advance Christ’s kingdom in their hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich. 

David Powlison (1949-2019) died of pancreatic cancer on June 7. I knew him. He balanced my checkbook once in his front parlor when I was a widow. I don’t let just anyone balance my checkbook, but he started as a math major at Harvard, so it seemed safe enough.

I don’t suppose that moment will make it into an official biography. Nor will the official biography likely include that, when my single-parent friend’s daughter was a tad prodigal, he would drive over to their house in the mornings and chauffeur the girl to school.

A New York moment: 

On a warm, rainy night last week, I took the train up to the South Bronx to join a room of mostly black and Hispanic church leaders listening to pastors Ray Rivera and Tim Keller talk about the future of the urban church globally. 

On an August Sunday afternoon, the streets of central Munich, Germany, showed signs of approaching Oktoberfest: Huge beer tents filled the festival grounds and hundreds of temporary cell towers were in place to support the two-week influx of 7 million visitors.

On a Sunday morning in Phnom Penh, motorcycles, SUVs, and colorful tuk-tuks (motorcycle-pulled rickshaws) try to squeeze past each other on a busy road. Off the main drag and next to a multistoried mall stands New Life Fellowship, its open doors facing an indoor shoe market. Inside, past the megachurch’s coffee shop, greeters hold open doors to a dark, air-conditioned sanctuary where hundreds of young Cambodians have gathered for worship. Colored lights flash as rock-concert-style worship music booms loud enough for shoppers next door to hear. 

On Jan. 16, elders at the Chicago-area megachurch Harvest Bible Chapel announced that Senior Pastor James MacDonald would take an “indefinite sabbatical.” The announcement came a month after WORLD detailed accusations by former elders and staff members that MacDonald and other leaders at the multicampus church had fostered a culture of deception and intimidation (see “Hard times at Harvest,” Dec. 29, 2018).

Today’s social justice debate in the evangelical church feels eerily similar to the debate that led to division in the Protestant church in the early 20th century. Then, the debate didn’t center on social justice but the social gospel.