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Interview by Ashley Hales
A conversation with pastor and author, Nicholas McDonald, about Christian witness in a cynical age.
Nicholas McDonald, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, and author of The Light in Our Eyes: Rediscovering the Love, Beauty, and Freedom of Jesus in an Age of Disillusionment, sits down with Ashley Hales, CT’s editorial director for features, to discuss his book, spaces of beauty, and imaginative moves the church can make in a cynical age.
You wrote The Light in Our Eyes about the beauty of Jesus for disillusioned and cynical people. What was the felt need you saw?
Tens of millions of people have left the church, more than those that came to faith in the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham Crusades combined. Those aren’t just numbers; those are people I know.
My original approach was not very helpful: giving them apologetic answers to their questions. It’s not the first thing they needed, because I realized the first thing that they were looking for is a sense of hope, a sense of purpose. What they were seeing in the evangelical landscape around them was a lot of cynicism, despair, fear, insecurity, and anxiety. I started to change from giving apologetic answers to telling my story: I was disillusioned with my American evangelical upbringing but then found a lot of beauty, restoration, and freedom in the ancient historic gospel that we’ve been proclaiming for the last 2,000 years.
I left the church after college but continued to read the four Gospels of Jesus—and Augustine. I found Confessions very stirring. After Augustine, it was really going abroad outside of my context where, as an artist and filmmaker, I read C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy. He speaks about a universal human longing for something we never had. That very much spoke to me, and I had never thought that these feelings I had when I encountered literature or music were somehow tied to Christianity. That was my first step back in the door.
Then it was really encountering a church in England that called itself evangelical but looked vastly different than anything I had experienced: It was high liturgy but also spoke about the importance of fair-trade items at the supermarket. Jesus cares about the created order.
Ashley Hales
Russell Moore
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it looks like to have an imagination primed to receive the gospel and how we make that plausible again. Can you connect this imaginative impulse and the need to renarrate the gospel for a cynical age?
Central to the book is the story of Zechariah. He’s a man I relate to; he’s very much a cynic. In the Anglican tradition, they pray Zechariah’s prayer from Luke 1 every day. In Zechariah’s muteness after he doesn’t believe the angel’s pronouncement about John, he has an opportunity to rethink and be quiet. In that silent, creative space, he must have thought, What is the story that God’s telling? How am I part of that story? What comes out of his mouth when his son, John, is born is this beautiful story of what God has been doing all throughout the world and how he’s getting to participate in that story.
When I think about being restoried, I think of Zachariah. We’re all telling ourselves a story. Most of us are telling ourselves either cynical stories or naive stories, but Jesus’ story is utterly real. It is the only story I’ve heard that gives me real, concrete hope for the future.
What would you say are the strongest barriers to not only believing Jesus’ story is true but living it?
I think the story that we tell in the American evangelical context is a cynical story. The story I grew up with was “We’re all sinners,” which is true. “Jesus died for our sins.” True. But then the story continues: “So that we could abandon this world, which is destined to burn away and get worse and worse, and we go somewhere else.” When people walk into the church, I always think of that verse in Peter when Peter says, “Always be prepared to give an answer.” I heard that part of the verse growing up as “Know the answers to the questions.” But the other half of the verse no one ever taught me was “for the hope that’s in you.”
I think people are walking away from a cynical presentation of the gospel, and that’s not what the historic church has taught the gospel is. The gospel is not a story of abandonment. It’s a story of healing and restoration of all things. The world has enough of anger, fear, and cynicism. The gospel offers something different.
Russell Moore
Karen Swallow Prior
We’re headed toward the end of the year, and a lot of us are thinking about inviting neighbors for a Christmas party or service. How can we stoke an imagination, in us and our neighbors, that inclines us toward this hope found in Jesus—rather than polarization, fear, or cynicism?
In all the themes you find in movies and in music around Christmas, if you trace all these sunbeams back to the sun, you’ll find the gospel somewhere. What is everybody longing for? We can start seeing seasons as being holy. Oftentimes, I think what people need is to feel the gospel and to see the gospel. So at our church, one way we do that is we really lean into our liturgical seasons.
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We have this group of artists here at Redeemer, and they redecorate our sanctuary every few months depending on the liturgical season. Last year, when we were talking about Christmas and the Incarnation, I walked into the sanctuary, and there are wooden DNA helixes up, and there is a giant, kind of papier mâché, x-ray vision of a woman’s pregnant body, which is not something you’d necessarily see in a lot of church sanctuaries. It really made you stop and think, What are we doing here? I’ve known so many people who have left the church or have felt disillusion with the church step into that space at Redeemer and say, “I just felt like this is what I’ve needed. I’ve needed to be in this place.”
What is one concrete thing you do to keep yourself embedded in the story?
I try to stay in conversation with dead Christians. It’s easy to get caught in the moment that we’re in, which it just feels like we go from one cultural moment to the next, one Twitter storm to the next. Being able to step away from those things and read what my church fathers and mothers have said about what the faith is and what faithfulness looks like over the centuries is one of those things that can help you see beyond the moment.
Christianity is much bigger than this little blip on the screen. It’s old. It’s ancient. It’s not threatened. Jesus’ kingdom has been growing for the last 2,000 years.
Nicholas McDonald is author of The Light in our Eyes and assistant pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis.
Ashley Hales is editorial director for features at Christianity Today.
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