Francis Chan was once a leading evangelical brand—a pastor, speaker, and author who could stand before thousands. But, ultimately, his time on the national stage led him to question the meaning of fame. Over the past decade, he faded from the spotlight. Now, he's back with a new book and ready to talk about his journey.
It started in the early 2000s, when Chan was perhaps the most widely known Asian American pastor in the evangelical world. He was speaking at conferences in predominantly white evangelical spaces along with other star speakers such as megachurch pastor John Piper and popular Bible teacher Beth Moore. His sermons ranked in the top 20 Christian podcasts on iTunes.
Chan preached against “lukewarm Christianity,” something he railed against in his 2008 book Crazy Love, about being countercultural and crazy for God. More than 3 million copies of Crazy Love have been sold, and it spent 80 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. But his new book, Beloved (David C Cook, out now) reflects a shift in his life. It's a meditative book that encourages believers to return to a much simpler faith.
The shift began when he realized his period of widespread popularity also made him deeply uncomfortable, he told PW. “I guess there was so much of that world that I didn't have peace about,” Chan said. “It's very strange to become famous by preaching. People start treating you really well. And then you look at Scripture and see they didn't treat Jesus really well or the apostles or the prophets. I started enjoying the accolades and the benefits, and even some of the prestige, and it wasn't right. I was fighting it.”
A new direction
Chan’s step back from the evangelical spotlight wasn’t completely by choice. One year, Passion, the big evangelical conference that had hosted Chan three times, replaced him in 2016 with Ravi Zacharias, a popular evangelical apologist before his death in 2020. “That didn’t work out too well” for Passion organizers, Chan said. After Zacharias’s death, reports surfaced—including a report by his own ministry—that Zacharias engaged in a pattern of sexual misconduct.
Chan also moved away from the evangelical megachurch scene, even though he had grown his own Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, Calif., to 6,000 congregants. After he left Cornerstone in 2010, he took his family to Asia to see other church models. He returned to the U.S. to start a new church-planting network that would have 10-20 people in each church. He was more interested in cultivating leaders than in building a large number of followers.
Then, in 2019, he moved to Hong Kong, the country where Chan had spent the first five years of his life. When his visa was rejected, he returned to the U.S. in January 2021. A day after he posted a video announcement of his plans, Christianity Today reported, dozens of pro-democracy activists, including Christians, were arrested in a police raid. He recalls the difficulties Christians in China faced just to worship together.
“I remember being very burdened by the way I saw believers in other countries and how much they were sacrificing in, and their commitment level,” he said. “They didn't get anything from following Jesus. They were losing everything.”
Resting in grace and mercy
He resumed planting small groups for worship, and he returned to writing. At 58, he said, he now wishes he had written Beloved long before Crazy Love. The new book encourages believers to a very passive faith engagement, “one where you realize you don't need to do anything to win God's love or affection.”
“I have this concern that people who maybe read Crazy Love but didn’t have a deep assurance of God’s love for them, that they would end up trying to do a lot of the things that are right, but not maybe out of security, maybe it’s insecurity,” Chan said. He attributes his own urgent drive for love to growing up in a performance-driven Asian American culture.
“A lot of us grow up struggling with the concept of love,” he said. “It’s like, I want to earn God’s love by proving to him how much I love him, which is not what God wants of us. “That can really damage your understanding of God and his grace and mercy.”
Chan said his faith was simpler when a youth pastor told him about Jesus when he was in high school. Then Chan went off to Bible college, where, he said, he doesn’t remember one class dedicated to something as simple as the love of Christ. The new book, he said, is more about God’s actions instead of what a Christian can do.
“I missed out on some of the peace and joy and enjoyment of God over the years because I didn't understand the message in this book,” he said. Beloved marks a return to that simple idea.
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