THE NEEDLE

My read: the “machine” has improved beyond recognition since 1966 and the human instinct has not moved at all. People will tell their troubles to whatever seems willing to listen, and the newest research says that for those who are already isolated, the comfort does not hold. The church has something here that cannot be copied, and most congregations have not yet named it out loud.

That year an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum built a program called ELIZA. It ran on a simple script that turned a person’s words back into questions, and by any technical measure it understood nothing at all. When his own secretary sat down with it, she asked him to leave the room so she could continue the conversation in private.

Stanford researchers published findings last month from a study of 1,131 Character.AI users, 244 of whom shared their actual chat transcripts. Only 12 percent said companionship was their main reason for using the platform. More than half went on to describe the chatbot as a friend, a companion or a romantic partner.

The part that should get our attention is what happened to the people with the smallest offline networks. Those who leaned on the chatbot most heavily for emotional support reported lower well-being, and so did the participants who disclosed the most sensitive personal information to it. Opening up usually strengthens a human relationship. Here it ran the other direction.

This issue looks at where that leaves the local church.

THE SIGNAL BOARD

See below for a detailed analysis of each of these Signals.

Read more

It usually starts in the parking lot.

You turn off the car. You have about forty steps between the driver’s seat and the front door of the church, and somewhere in those forty steps the face goes on.

Someone at the door asks how you are.

“Good. Busy. Blessed.”

You have said it so many times you no longer hear yourself say it.

Then you sit down. You sing. You nod in the right places. You leave.

And the thing you were actually carrying when you turned off the car gets carried right back out to it.

A few weeks ago I posted one sentence on Substack.

The Church does not need people pretending.

I wrote it in about thirty seconds.

I have thought about it every day since.

It was one sentence. I want to give it the article it deserves.

Pretending is older than the Church

The first thing human beings did after sin entered the world was not repent.

They sewed.

Fig leaves, stitched together in a hurry, so that when God came walking in the garden He would find two people who looked fine.

“I was afraid,” Adam said, “because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

That is the whole history of pretending in one sentence.

Fear. Then covering. Then hiding.

We have upgraded the fig leaves. Now they look like a steady smile, a full calendar and a testimony with the hard part edited out.

The pattern has not changed.

Notice what God did. He did not compliment the outfit. He asked a question.

“Where are you?”

He was not looking for information. He knew where Adam was.

He was giving Adam a chance to come out.

He still does that.

Jesus had a word for it

When Jesus wanted to describe religious people who performed their faith, He reached for a word from the theater.

Hypocrite.

In the Greek it meant an actor. Someone who spoke from behind a mask.

It is worth sitting with the fact that the word Jesus reached for most often when He rebuked religious people was not “sinner.”

It was “actor.”

He was not angry at people who were failing.

He was angry at people who were performing.

Whitewashed tombs, He called them. Beautiful on the outside. Something dead underneath.

I do not think the Pharisees were pretending because they were evil. I think they were pretending because they were afraid of what would happen if the mask came off.

That fear is not ancient.

I have felt it in my own chest on a Sunday morning walking toward a pulpit.

Pastors are some of the best pretenders in the room.

I say that as one.

The woman who tried to be healed in secret

There is a woman in Mark 5 I think about often.

She had been bleeding for twelve years. She had spent everything she had on doctors and was worse, not better.

Her plan was simple.

Get to Jesus in the crowd. Touch His clothes. Slip away before anyone noticed.

She wanted the healing without the story.

And she got the healing. The bleeding stopped the moment she touched Him.

But Jesus stopped too.

“Who touched Me?”

The disciples thought it was a ridiculous question. Everyone was touching Him.

He kept looking.

Mark says she came trembling, fell down in front of Him, “and told Him the whole truth.”

The whole truth.

Twelve years of it.

In front of everyone.

Then Jesus said the words He had been waiting to say. “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”

He did not call her daughter until she stopped hiding.

I do not believe Jesus made her speak to embarrass her. I believe He knew that a healing she had to keep secret would have kept her half-hidden for the rest of her life.

He wanted her whole.

Not just her body.

What pretending costs

Pretending is not free. It is just billed later.

It costs you intimacy, because nobody can love a version of you that does not exist.

It costs you prayer, because you cannot bring God a problem you are pretending not to have.

It costs you the healing you are performing. James did not say confess your sins to God alone and you will be healed. He said confess them to one another. Somehow the honesty in front of another person is part of the medicine.

And it costs the Church.

Every person who pretends makes the room a little less safe for the next person to tell the truth.

Every person who stops makes it a little safer.

That is how a church becomes honest. Not through a program.

One person at a time.

So what do you actually do on Sunday?

Stop confusing composure with maturity

The most put-together person in the room is not always the most mature.

Sometimes they are the most afraid.

Maturity is not the absence of struggle. It is what you do with the struggle in the light.

Paul, who gave us thirteen books of the New Testament, also wrote “I do not do what I want” and called himself the foremost of sinners.

He was not performing.

He was reporting.

Tell God the true sentence first

Before you tell anyone else, tell Him.

Not the polished version. The Psalms are full of prayers nobody would put on a church sign.

“How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?”

That is Scripture.

David told God’s people to pour out their hearts before Him. Then he did it himself, psalm after psalm, and God kept the transcripts.

Try this one tonight:

“God, I am not fine, and I do not want to keep telling You I am.”

Then be quiet for a minute.

He was not fooled anyway.

But something changes in you when you stop trying to fool Him.

Pick one person, not a platform

Stopping the pretending does not mean standing up on Sunday and announcing everything.

There is a time to keep silent.

But there should be one person who knows the whole truth. A spouse. A friend. A pastor. A small group that has earned it.

Say to them what the woman said to Jesus.

The whole truth.

You will be surprised how often the answer is “me too.”

Retire the words that pretend for you

Some words have been doing your pretending for so long you do not notice them anymore.

“Blessed,” when the true word is tired.

“I’ll pray for you,” when you will not.

“It’s fine,” when it is not.

Jesus said to let your yes be yes and your no be no.

Try one week of true sentences.

Watch what it does to your relationships.

Go first

If you are a leader, a parent, a pastor or the person who hosts the small group, the room is waiting on you.

Nobody in it will be more honest than the person up front.

The one who goes first gives everybody else permission.

John says that if we walk in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus cleanses us.

Read that order again.

The light is not where you go once you are clean.

The light is where you go to be cleaned.

Fellowship lives in the light.

Pretending lives in the dark.

What the Church actually needs

If the Church does not need people pretending, what does it need?

It needs witnesses.

A witness has one job. Tell what actually happened.

The Church was not built by people who had it together. It was built by a denier, a doubter, a tax collector and a man who had made a name for himself arresting Christians.

Their stories were not clean.

That is why they were believable.

The most powerful thing you can say on a Sunday morning is not “I’m blessed.”

It is “Here is what God did with the mess.”

God is not waiting for the version of you that has it together.

He is waiting for the true one.

I still believe that one sentence.

The Church does not need people pretending.

It needs you. The real one. The one who turned the car off in the parking lot.

When did you finally stop pretending, and who made it safe for you to do it?

You do not have to tell the whole story. One true sentence is enough.

Christian writers on Substack, I want to find you.

If you’re writing about Jesus, faith, Scripture, revival, culture, or what God is doing in your life, drop your Substack below.

I want to read your work. I want to discover new voices. I want to support more people boldly writing about Jesus.

Even if you only have 10 subscribers, share it.

Let’s find each other.

I did not have an elaborate strategy.

I was not testing a sophisticated growth formula.

I genuinely wanted to find more Christian writers.

Then the post took off.

It eventually reached 56,355 impressions.

It received 1,712 likes.

There were 984 replies, 44 restacks and 73 shares.

More than 1,200 people visited my profile.

The Note brought 667 new free subscribers.

Substack recorded 4,150 total interactions.

By any reasonable definition, it went viral.

But the most important thing it produced happened four minutes after I posted it.

UPDATE: The numbers have increased since I originally posted this article on the morning of 9/1.

Four minutes later, Matt Brewer messaged me

At 10:20 p.m., showed up in my inbox.

Matt is a children and family pastor in West Tennessee who has spent more than a decade helping families build discipleship into ordinary life.

I was newer to Substack.

He had been here longer and immediately offered to help me learn how the platform worked.

That eventually moved from messages to a phone call.

We talked about ministry.

We talked about writing.

We talked about the strange experience of trying to build something meaningful while watching numbers rise and fall every day.

Matt encouraged my preaching. I started reading his work on family discipleship. The conversation stopped feeling like networking and started feeling like two pastors comparing notes.

I consider Matt a friend now.

That relationship matters more to me than one additional subscriber.

It also gave me the first clue that I had misunderstood what was happening.

I thought the Note was succeeding because thousands of people could see it.

Maybe it was succeeding because the right people could find one another.

Nearly 1,000 people started introducing themselves

The replies kept coming.

Some people simply dropped a link.

Others told me enough of their stories that I could immediately understand why they were writing.

told me he had been an atheist for 20 years before becoming born again.

He was not trying to manufacture an inspirational brand.

He had a testimony.

described years spent trying to earn her way toward wholeness. She is now building a place where women can encounter Scripture, restoration, rest and healing without feeling that they have to perform.

said he wanted to write about what faith looks like when it has to be lived instead of merely discussed.

Obedience.

Doubt.

Failure.

The ordinary parts of following Jesus that rarely become polished testimonies.

was helping Christian writers, creators and entrepreneurs become who God made them to be and do what He called them to do.

These were not merely content categories.

They were assignments.

That distinction became increasingly important to me.

An algorithm can recognize that two people write about Christianity.

It cannot understand why one of them is writing.

That requires a conversation.

I even found a professor from my seminary

One of the more unexpected moments was discovering here.

He is writing Renewal Theology, bringing sound doctrine, the work of the Holy Spirit, leadership and practical discipleship into the same conversation.

There was something strangely encouraging about finding a professor from an earlier season of my life on a platform I was still learning to use.

We spend so much time online trying to be discovered by new people.

Sometimes a platform helps us rediscover people who helped form us.

Then I made the invitation more personal.

A couple of weeks later, I posted another Note:

Christians on Substack—I want to meet more of you.

If you’re seriously writing about faith, culture, Scripture, calling, ministry or what following Jesus looks like in real life, DM me.

Send me your Substack and tell me what you’re trying to build here.

I’d rather discover great Christian writers through a real conversation than another algorithm.

That Note did not produce anything close to the numbers of the first one.

It received 851 impressions, 42 likes and 10 replies.

By the normal measurements, it was a much smaller post.

But my inbox began filling with hundreds of people explaining what they were actually trying to build.

I answered every message.

Not with a copied response.

Not with a polite “Thanks for sharing.”

I opened their publications.

I read what they sent.

Then I tried to ask a real question.

The first Note created reach.

The second created depth.

I needed both before I could understand Substack.

Ruth Snyder and I are writing something together now

reached out wanting to explore a collaboration.

Ruth grew up in a church-planting family in southern Africa and now lives in Alberta, Canada, where she helps nonfiction writers develop and publish their books.

She brought experience I did not have.

She also brought a conviction that Christian writing has to remain rooted in prayer.

We started discussing the questions Christian writers are actually facing.

How do you build a prayer team around your writing?

When should an author begin thinking about marketing?

What opportunities and dangers come with self-publishing?

Ruth eventually sent me a draft titled “Why Every Christian Writer Should Have a Prayer Team and How to Build Yours.”

We are working on it together now.

At one point, she admitted that God had been convicting her about treating prayer like an option instead of the foundation.

That line stayed with me.

This is exactly the kind of collaboration I hoped Substack might produce.

It is practical.

It is honest.

And it emerged from two people getting to know one another before trying to create something together.

Caitie Wood had been on Substack for three days

first messaged me when she had launched her Substack three days earlier.

Three days.

Caitie was building Kitchen Table Faith and already thinking carefully about the overlooked parts of familiar Bible stories.

She was especially interested in the older brother in Luke 15.

The younger brother left the father’s house.

The older brother stayed.

But it is possible to remain inside the house while your heart moves far away from the father.

That idea became the foundation for a collaboration we are now developing called “Inside the House, Outside the Heart.”

Caitie wrote the first section.

I read it and sent her my thoughts.

We created a shared document and are building the piece together.

A few weeks earlier, we did not know one another.

Now we are creating something that may help longtime Christians recognize the difference between being near the Father’s activity and actually sharing His heart.

The platform made the introduction.

The relationship is making the article.

Then a father from Prague sent me a 500-page world

One of the most unexpected messages came from Ondřej, the writer behind .

He lives in the Czech Republic, one of the most secular and post-communist parts of Europe.

His writing brings together faith, quantum physics, history, theology and his love of detective stories.

I realize that sounds like several different publications.

He somehow made it one.

The Creator’s Archives is a high-concept theological science-fiction world built around a detective and an AI “Librarian.” Ondřej is attempting to bring Genesis and modern science into the same room without reducing either one to a shallow talking point.

He sent me the manuscript.

It is roughly 500 pages.

We are planning a written Q&A that will explore the theology, science and story behind the project.

What moved me most was not simply the ambition of the work.

It was the reason underneath it.

Ondřej lives among people who may be open to scientific arguments but deeply resistant to the Bible and traditional spirituality. His writing is an attempt to build a bridge toward people who would never begin with a sermon.

That is a very different assignment from mine.

It is still an assignment worth encouraging.

Some conversations became more personal than I expected

Not every message became a public collaboration.

Some should remain private.

People told me about church wounds.

They described health battles, unfinished books, strained relationships and seasons when they were trying to understand what God was asking them to do next.

One person was unsure whether a deeply personal story was ready to be published.

I told her to take her time.

The story belonged to her.

She did not owe the internet a version of it before she was ready.

That conversation reminded me that attention creates responsibility.

When someone trusts you with a real story, you do not automatically own the right to repeat it.

The goal is not to mine your inbox for content.

The goal is to honor the person who trusted you enough to enter it.

I thought publishing was the work

This is where I think most people misunderstand Substack.

They write an article.

They publish it.

They share the link.

Then they disappear until the next article is ready.

I understand why.

We are writers.

Writing feels like the work.

It is visible.

It can be scheduled and measured.

Conversation is harder.

It takes time to read someone else’s article.

It takes time to leave a thoughtful response.

It takes time to ask another person what they are building without immediately redirecting the conversation toward what you are selling.

There is no dashboard that fully measures what happens when someone feels heard.

But I am beginning to think that may be some of the most important work available on this platform.

The article gives people something to read.

The conversation gives them a reason to remember you.

Substack is not merely a newsletter platform

When I started, I thought Substack was primarily a place to send emails.

You publish.

People subscribe.

The email arrives.

Eventually, some readers decide to pay.

That is technically how it works.

I just do not think it is the best way to understand what happens here.

Substack is closer to a neighborhood built around ideas.

People begin recognizing familiar names.

They recommend one another.

A Note becomes an introduction.

A public reply becomes a conversation.

A DM becomes a phone call.

A phone call becomes a friendship.

Two writers who would never have met begin creating something together.

The mistake is treating every doorway like a funnel.

Not every person who replies needs a pitch.

Sometimes they need encouragement.

Sometimes they need an honest question.

Sometimes they need someone to read the project they have quietly carried for years and tell them where the strongest idea is hiding.

Sometimes you need that from them.

The algorithm can make the introduction

I am grateful that the Note went viral.

I am grateful for every one of those 56,355 impressions.

I am grateful that 667 people subscribed.

Reach matters.

Good ideas deserve to travel.

But when I think about what that Note actually gave me, I do not begin with the dashboard.

I think about talking with Matt on the phone.

I think about building an article with Ruth around prayer and writing.

I think about opening Caitie’s document and seeing the older brother in Luke 15 from a different angle.

I think about entering the theological world Ondřej created from Prague.

I think about finding Dr. Gilbert again.

I think about Vegard’s journey from atheism to Jesus, Valerie’s vision for restoration, Sebastian’s desire to write about unpolished faith and Alison’s commitment to faith-led creators.

Those are people.

Not analytics.

The algorithm helped us find one another.

It could not build the relationships for us.

That part still required attention.

It required reading.

It required answering.

It required staying after the post had finished spreading.

What I am doing differently now

I still care about writing strong articles.

I still study titles, recommendations, subscriptions and growth.

But I am trying to stop confusing audience size with community.

An audience can know your name without knowing you.

Community begins when people become more than numbers to one another.

So I am asking different questions now.

Who responded?

What are they carrying?

What are they trying to build?

Whose work should I recommend?

Is there someone I should call?

Could we create something stronger together than either of us would create alone?

Those questions are harder to measure.

I suspect they produce more durable growth.

Maybe “viral” needs a better definition

The viral Note reached more than 56,000 people.

That is the number everyone notices.

But its most important results may be the ones Substack cannot place on a chart.

A friendship.

A phone call.

A rediscovered professor.

A new collaboration.

A writer deciding that 10 subscribers are enough reason to keep going.

That last one matters to me because it was part of the original invitation.

“Even if you only have 10 subscribers, share it.”

I meant it then.

I mean it more now.

A small audience does not mean a small assignment.

The next writer God uses to encourage you may not have thousands of subscribers.

They may be sitting at a kitchen table trying to finish their fourth post.

You may only find them because they leave a reply and you become curious enough to click their name.

So yes, I think most people are using Substack wrong.

We are treating it like a place to distribute content when it may be one of the best places left online to form relationships around meaningful ideas.

Write the article.

Publish the Note.

Pay attention to what works.

But when a real person walks through the doorway your writing opened, do not become so focused on the next post that you miss them.

The algorithm may make the introduction.

The relationship is still up to us.

If you are seriously writing about Jesus, faith, Scripture, revival, culture, calling, ministry or what God is doing in your life, I still want to find you.

Share your Substack below, I want to help you.

But this time, tell me something more than the link:

Why does the thing you are building matter to you?

We talk about how his Christian worldview shapes his work in Congress, what his personal prayer and Bible-reading rhythms look like, and why he believes believers should be actively engaged in their communities, schools, government, and the voting process.

Congressman Cloud also shares his perspective on immigration, borders, artificial intelligence, religious liberty, the rise of competing ideologies, and the importance of preserving the principles that helped shape America.

One of the clearest themes of the conversation is simple: faith was never meant to remain private. Christians are called to be salt and light, to steward the places God has entrusted to them, and to have the courage to stand when silence would be easier.

We also discuss the Nehemiah Alliance and its 52-day call to prayer, fasting, and rebuilding the spiritual walls around our homes, churches, communities, and nation.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why the era of passive Christianity has to end

• How Congressman Cloud integrates faith into public service

• His daily prayer and Scripture habits

• Why Christians should be engaged in government and civic life

• A biblical framework for immigration and national borders

• The responsibility Christians have to protect their communities

• The rise of competing religious and cultural worldviews

• How AI could reshape the way we think about human dignity

• Why America’s founding principles still matter

• The role of prayer and fasting in national renewal

• The vision behind the Nehemiah Alliance

This conversation is a challenge to every Christian who has wondered whether their voice, vote, prayers, or involvement really matter.

They do.

THE NEEDLE

My read: Dolly Parton understood that public faith becomes credible when people can see what belief produces. She spoke about God freely and served neighbors at scale. She also kept her public identity larger than a party label.

Dolly died in Nashville on Tuesday after a brief battle with cancer, according to a statement released by her publicist and reported by the Associated Press. She was 80.

The tributes have reached far beyond country music. People who agree on almost nothing have found common ground in their affection for a woman from East Tennessee who spoke freely about faith and remained proud of her roots. Success kept becoming something useful for other people.

That combination is rare in American public life.

This issue examines her public witness. God alone knows the heart, and celebrity affection cannot settle theology. Still, Dolly understood something the church urgently needs to recover: faith in public becomes harder to dismiss when it arrives with humility and leaves a trail of mercy.

THE SIGNAL BOARD

Faith language: Open

Dolly spoke often about God, Jesus, Scripture and prayer. Her earliest performances came through church, and gospel music remained present across her career. Christianity Today notes that two of her eleven Grammy Awards came through collaborations with contemporary Christian artists, including “There Was Jesus” with Zach Williams and “God Only Knows” with for KING & COUNTRY. Her faith was never confined to a private footnote.

Read more

Nothing does.

That is when the questions start creeping in. You remember seasons when God seemed to speak everywhere, through Scripture, a sermon, a conversation at exactly the right moment, and now heaven feels strangely quiet. You have not walked away from God. You may actually be seeking Him harder than you were before, which makes the silence even more confusing.

I have seen this happen to deeply faithful people, and the quiet can become more unsettling than an obvious crisis because you do not know what to fix. Eventually you begin wondering whether you missed God somewhere along the way.

There is another possibility, though, and understanding it changed the way I think about spiritual dryness: some of the deepest work God does in us begins during seasons that feel like almost nothing is happening.

1. Stop measuring closeness by intensity

We tend to assume a strong relationship with God should always feel strong.

Real relationships do not work that way. Closeness has rhythms, and some of the most meaningful parts of a relationship happen in ordinary moments that do not feel remarkable while they are happening.

Faith can grow like that too.

There are mornings when a passage of Scripture hits you so deeply that you remember it for years. Then there are mornings when you read, close the Bible and go make coffee without feeling much of anything.

Both can matter.

Psalm 42 is striking because the writer does not pretend to be in a better place than he is. He remembers what God has done while admitting how discouraged he feels, and somehow both truths fit inside the same prayer.

A quiet season does not automatically mean you have drifted from God.

2. Make the next step simple

When people feel spiritually stuck, they sometimes respond by trying to overhaul their entire spiritual life overnight. The plan gets bigger while the guilt gets heavier.

Try something smaller.

Read one Psalm slowly. Take a walk and talk to God without trying to sound spiritual. Ask Him what He wants you to pay attention to today, then give yourself enough quiet to listen.

There are seasons when God gives direction a few feet at a time. We can become so focused on getting an answer about the next year that we overlook the obedience sitting directly in front of us.

3. Pray the thing you are actually thinking

Christians can become very good at cleaning up their prayers before they ever reach God.

The Psalms do something different. They are full of people asking hard questions, admitting disappointment and bringing God emotions that would sound uncomfortable in a church service.

That kind of honesty has always struck me.

God already knows what is happening underneath the polished version of your prayer, so you may as well start there. You can tell Him you do not understand this season. You can admit that you miss feeling close to Him.

Sometimes a prayer as simple as, “God, I don’t know what You’re doing, but I want to stay close to You,” is enough.

4. Go back to what you already know

When God seems quiet, our instinct is often to search for a new word.

It may be worth asking what He has already made clear.

Maybe there is a conversation you have been avoiding. Perhaps you know something needs to change and have been waiting for another confirmation before acting on it.

I have watched people spend months asking God for direction while quietly stepping around something He had already put in front of them.

Often, the best way through a quiet season is to keep obeying the light you already have.

5. You may understand this season later

I wish every season with God felt obvious while we were living through it. Most of them do not.

Some of the deepest work God does in us happens slowly enough that we only recognize it in hindsight.

You may eventually look back on this season and realize that what felt like distance was teaching you how to trust God without needing constant reassurance. The faith that grows there tends to have deeper roots because it has learned how to keep walking when the experience is quiet.

So tomorrow, open your Bible again. Pray honestly. Do the next thing you know God has asked of you.

Then leave some room for Him to meet you in His own way.

You might discover that the season when you thought nothing was happening was doing more in you than you knew.

Have you ever walked through a season when God felt unusually quiet? What helped you through it?

I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

WASHINGTON — Somewhere in the middle of a conversation about artificial intelligence, I asked Congressman Brian Babin a question that would have sounded absurd in a congressional office not very long ago.

Could AI become sentient?

Babin barely hesitated.

“It could very well happen,” he said, before adding that there was a real likelihood artificial intelligence could eventually reach that point.

Then came the line that stayed with me after the interview.

“We want to be very, very careful that we don’t become a bunch of human beings that are run by machines.”

This was more than a casual prediction from somebody speculating about where ChatGPT might be headed. Babin is chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, placing the Texas Republican near the center of congressional decisions involving artificial intelligence, quantum computing and America’s space program.

His committee has spent much of this year working through the less cinematic realities of the AI revolution: security standards, manipulated digital content and the enormous amount of energy required to keep increasingly powerful computers running. In June, the committee advanced 10 bipartisan AI bills covering several of those areas.

Babin’s answer about sentience also arrived during an unusual moment in the development of artificial intelligence. Capabilities continue to improve rapidly; Stanford’s 2026 AI Index found frontier systems pushing past benchmarks that were designed to remain difficult for years, while researchers studying consciousness still lack agreement about the basic conditions that would allow anyone to declare a machine conscious. Nature recently described the field rather plainly: scientists do not even agree on what produces consciousness in humans, much less in a chatbot.

Nobody can responsibly say that today’s major AI systems have been shown to possess humanlike consciousness. Some companies building frontier models have nevertheless begun treating the possibility seriously enough to study it. Anthropic, for example, has devoted research to what it calls “model welfare,” while acknowledging deep uncertainty about whether advanced models could possess experiences or interests that deserve moral consideration.

Babin was looking farther down the road.

His concern was rooted in a conviction considerably older than computer science: human beings are made in the image of God.

“We’re all created equal,” he told me. “We’re image bearers of Him.”

That belief shapes the way Babin thinks about the limits society may eventually need to place around machines capable of performing tasks once reserved for humans. Artificial intelligence can produce tremendous good, he said, while technological power can also be bent toward harmful purposes. His committee therefore faces a problem with no comfortable setting on the dial. Moving too slowly risks giving China an enormous strategic advantage; moving carelessly could leave Americans exposed to consequences that are difficult to reverse.

For Babin, both risks are real.

The Dentist Overseeing the Future

Babin is an unusual figure to find at the center of questions about artificial consciousness.

Before Congress, he spent more than 30 years practicing dentistry in East Texas. He worked his way through school doing jobs that included merchant seaman and letter carrier, served as an airborne artilleryman in the Texas Army National Guard and later became an Air Force captain stationed in Germany. His political résumé includes time as mayor of Woodville, Texas, along with service on the city council and school board. He entered Congress in 2015.

His district helps explain how he eventually became one of Washington’s most influential voices on science and space policy: NASA’s Johnson Space Center sits inside it.

The chairmanship now gives Babin influence over questions extending far beyond rockets. His committee has been examining the infrastructure that will determine how quickly American AI can expand, and that brings the conversation from futuristic questions about consciousness into something remarkably physical.

Warehouses full of computers.

Power plants.

Transmission capacity.

Data centers.

AI may appear on a laptop screen as a box waiting for a prompt, though the intelligence behind that box depends upon enormous industrial facilities consuming extraordinary quantities of electricity. Babin told a congressional hearing in February that U.S. data centers consumed 183 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, more than four percent of the nation’s total, and he has repeatedly framed the ability to build more computing infrastructure as part of America’s competition with China.

That argument has become politically combustible.

Across the country, communities are fighting proposed data centers over electricity prices, water consumption and the disruption that giant facilities can bring to nearby neighborhoods. The backlash has become strong enough to produce resistance from politicians in both parties, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who said this weekend that the industry had brought much of the anger on itself through poor engagement with communities. President Trump, by contrast, continues to argue that communities rejecting the facilities are making a mistake.

I did not have to travel far from home to find the debate.

The Fight Next to the Nashville Zoo

In Nashville, a proposal from DC BLOX to develop a data-center campus beside the Nashville Zoo sparked one of the city’s fiercest development fights in recent memory.

Plans showed an initial 69,000-square-foot facility and a substantially larger second building, with the proposed campus eventually drawing around 50 megawatts of power. Zoo officials raised concerns about noise, backup generators and possible effects on sensitive animals; hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition opposing the project, and Metro government eventually approved a temporary moratorium on new large data centers while giving the city authority to pursue the property through eminent domain.

I asked Babin about the Nashville controversy because the same questions are surfacing around the country: Are these facilities safe? Will they drive up utility bills? How much water will they consume?

His answer quickly moved to China.

Babin said the public should be wary of what he described as an organized effort to frighten Americans away from building the infrastructure needed for AI.

“There is an absolute campaign to turn the American people against data centers,” he said.

He spoke about a wealthy figure based in Shanghai and alleged connections between Chinese interests and campaigns opposing American data-center construction, arguing that stories about soaring electricity prices and resource depletion were being amplified to weaken American resolve.

“If we don’t build data centers,” Babin said, “the Chinese win the race.”

That claim deserves some precision because the reality is more interesting than either extreme.

There is documented evidence that China-linked actors have attempted to manipulate the American debate over data centers. OpenAI reported in June that it had banned clusters of accounts likely originating in China after they used its tools to create content attacking American AI infrastructure, including messages claiming data-center construction was raising electricity prices for ordinary families. The company said those influence efforts appeared to gain little meaningful traction.

Other, broader accusations remain contested. Investor Kevin O’Leary and Trump administration officials have blamed Chinese-linked networks for portions of the anti-data-center movement, while researchers and some conservative analysts have cautioned that genuine foreign influence does not explain the scale of domestic opposition. Americans living near proposed projects often have concerns that require no overseas propaganda campaign to produce.

Babin’s own committee has acknowledged the underlying resource questions through legislation directing the National Institute of Standards and Technology, working with the Department of Energy, to improve measurement of data centers’ energy and water consumption. That is significant: Congress can consider data centers strategically important while still needing reliable answers about what they cost communities.

The dilemma reaches well beyond Nashville.

China has been constructing its own computing infrastructure aggressively, pairing large data-center developments with energy capacity while the United States confronts permitting delays and local opposition. At the same time, America retains important advantages; Babin recently pointed to Stanford data showing American private investment in AI companies dramatically outpacing China’s, even as Chinese models close portions of the technical gap.

So the race is real.

The harder question is what exactly America is racing toward.

When the Tool Starts Looking Back

Sentience is one of those words people use easily until somebody asks them to define it.

Intelligence can be measured through performance. A model solves a difficult equation, writes functional code or identifies something in an image, and researchers can compare its result with somebody else’s.

Conscious experience is harder.

A machine might speak as though it were afraid without feeling fear. It could describe loneliness while experiencing nothing at all. Increasingly sophisticated systems may become extremely good at convincing humans that something exists behind the words, which leaves researchers confronting the possibility that outward behavior alone may eventually tell us very little.

That uncertainty gives Babin’s warning its force.

He does not argue that the AI on somebody’s phone has quietly awakened. His concern is prospective. Technology is developing quickly enough, in his view, that policymakers should begin thinking about the boundary before anyone discovers it by crossing it.

The question becomes especially important because society is already handing algorithms consequential decisions without waiting for sentience.

Babin pointed to China’s surveillance system as the kind of future he wants America to avoid, describing cities where technology can track people constantly and feed information into systems capable of affecting everyday life.

“We cannot allow that to happen,” he said.

His fear of machines controlling human beings therefore does not require a conscious machine. A perfectly unconscious algorithm can still exercise enormous power when governments or institutions place enough authority behind it.

That may be the more immediate warning buried inside our conversation.

Faith Inside the Committee Room

Babin’s thinking about all of this returns, repeatedly, to his Christian faith.

The morning we spoke, he had come from a Bible study with members of Congress in the Longworth House Office Building. Babin plays guitar during the gathering and told me he was encouraged that Democrats had joined Republicans that morning.

His Christianity has been part of his life long before his committee chairmanship. Babin and his wife, Roxanne, attend First Baptist Church of Woodville, where he has served as a deacon and Sunday school teacher. They have five children and 17 grandchildren.

The grandchildren come up when Babin talks about public service because his sense of technological policy is decidedly generational. Choices made during this period could shape a world his grandchildren will inhabit long after his congressional career has ended.

“I try to get into the Scripture every day, pray every day,” he told me.

Washington tends to place AI questions into familiar policy categories: competitiveness, regulation, national security. Babin introduces another category into the conversation through his belief that technological decisions eventually become questions about the human person.

If a machine can imitate a person almost perfectly, what remains uniquely human?

If an algorithm becomes more capable than its creator in broad areas of reasoning, who should possess final authority?

And if artificial intelligence ever develops something resembling consciousness, what obligations would its creators suddenly have toward what they made?

Congress has years of legislation ahead of it before those questions are settled, assuming they can be settled at all.

“Protect the Souls of Our People”

Toward the end of our conversation, Babin summarized his responsibility in language unlikely to appear in a technical white paper.

America needs to win the competition in science and technology, he said, while remaining attentive to what technological change does to the people living through it.

“We’ve got to protect the souls of our people.”

That sentence captures what made the interview different from the normal Washington conversation about AI.

Babin is enthusiastic about American technological power. He wants data centers built and innovators free to compete. He believes China presents a serious threat to American leadership and views technological superiority as part of national security.

Within that worldview sits a firm boundary: the machine exists in a world populated by human beings whose value, in Babin’s theology, comes from God.

That became the bridge into our conversation about the Nehemiah Alliance, the 52-day call to prayer, fasting and repentance leading into America’s 250th anniversary. Babin told me he was “100 percent behind” the effort and connected its purpose with the biblical story of Nehemiah returning to rebuild Jerusalem after exile.

For him, national strength eventually depends on something deeper than computing power.

Perhaps that is why the prospect of sentient artificial intelligence did not lead Babin into a long technical discussion about neural networks. He went almost immediately to the problem of human authority.

America may spend hundreds of billions of dollars constructing the infrastructure needed to create increasingly capable machines. Congress will write rules around them, companies will push their limits and the competition with China will keep pressure on everyone to move faster.

The machines will keep changing.

Babin wants the country to decide, before they change too much, who remains in charge.

FULL INTERVIEW HERE:

I hate waiting at restaurants. I hate sitting in traffic. I hate waiting for a text message that should have come 20 minutes ago. I hate the slow-moving line at the airport where everyone else somehow seems to have boarding privileges before you do.

And I really hate the DMV.

Most of us have built our lives around eliminating waiting. We pay extra for faster shipping. We preorder our coffee. We use apps to skip lines. We upgrade the Wi-Fi because the spinning wheel on the screen feels almost personally offensive.

But there is one kind of waiting we cannot engineer our way around.

Waiting on God.

It is one thing to wait eight minutes for a table.

It is another thing entirely to believe God has placed something inside you — a calling, a promise, a dream, a prayer — and then watch the years pass without seeing it happen.

That kind of waiting creates a particular tension in the soul.

You know what you prayed.

You remember what you believed God said.

You thought you knew where your life was headed.

And yet here you are.

Still waiting.

Forty Years of Nothing

Moses understood that tension better than most.

Long before the burning bush, before the plagues, before the Red Sea split open, before Moses became one of the defining figures of Scripture, there was simply a man who believed there was something he was supposed to do with his life.

He had grown up inside Pharaoh’s household while knowing he belonged to the Hebrew people being oppressed outside its walls.

Acts 7 suggests Moses understood that God intended to use him to help his people. But at 40 years old, he tried to intervene in their suffering on his own terms. He killed an Egyptian and fled.

Then came the wilderness.

Not four months.

Not four years.

Forty.

The man who would eventually stand before Pharaoh spent four decades tending somebody else’s sheep on the backside of a desert.

There must have been mornings when Moses wondered whether he had misunderstood everything.

Maybe I missed it.

Maybe I ruined it.

Maybe I waited too long.

Maybe that thing I thought God was going to do with my life isn’t going to happen after all.

Scripture does not give us a diary from those 40 years. We do not know how often Moses thought about Egypt or how many nights he wondered what had become of his people.

We only know this: the waiting lasted as long as the first 40 years of his life had.

And then, at 80 years old, he saw a bush burning.

The Bush Wasn’t the Miracle Yet

A bush burning in the wilderness may not have been particularly extraordinary.

Dry places burn.

What was extraordinary was that this bush did not burn up.

But there is another detail in the story that fascinates me.

Moses noticed.

He was still tending sheep. He still had responsibilities. He was still living what probably felt like an ordinary day inside an ordinary season.

But something in him remained awake enough to turn aside.

He had not allowed 40 years of waiting to make him completely numb.

That may be one of the great dangers of disappointment.

It isn’t always that we stop believing in God.

Sometimes we simply stop looking for Him.

We become so accustomed to ordinary life that when God begins moving around the edges of it, we no longer recognize what we are seeing.

Moses did.

He saw something unusual and thought, I will go over and see.

And when God saw that Moses had turned aside to look, He called his name.

“Moses, Moses.”

“Here I am.”

Three words.

But maybe those three words explain what God had been forming in Moses during all those years when nothing seemed to be happening.

Here I am.

Not: Here is my résumé.

Not: Here is my five-year plan.

Not: Here is what You should have done 20 years ago.

Here I am.

God Can Do More in a Moment

Years ago, I walked into a little store in Leiper’s Fork on a Monday.

The store was not even normally supposed to be open.

A woman happened to be there cleaning. She was visiting from New England and working in her son’s shop. We started talking, and eventually the conversation turned toward faith.

She told me about something that had happened years earlier involving her family and the Catholic Church. Because of decisions surrounding fertility, she said she had been prohibited from receiving Communion.

For roughly 12 years, she had carried that loss.

For her, Communion represented something sacred, access to the presence of Jesus, and she felt that access had been taken away.

Standing there in the store, I told her, “We can take Communion right here.”

She looked at me almost incredulously.

“Can you do that?”

She locked the door.

I went next door and found crackers. She had wine.

And there, in the middle of a little store that was not supposed to be open that Monday, we took Communion.

I read Isaiah 53. We talked about Jesus, the torn veil and the invitation believers have to come before God.

And then the tears came.

Twelve years of carrying that burden, and suddenly something shifted.

There was no cathedral.

No elaborate service.

No carefully orchestrated altar call.

Just a store, some crackers, a little wine and two people who realized God was present.

It was a God moment.
I have become convinced that some of the most significant encounters with God arrive disguised as interruptions to otherwise ordinary days.

The question is whether we have eyes to see them.

Holy Ground Rarely Announces Itself

When Moses approached the burning bush, God told him to remove his sandals because the ground beneath him was holy.

Think about that.

A few minutes earlier, it was just dirt.

Moses had probably walked across ground like it thousands of times.

What changed?

God was there.

Holy ground is not always a geographic location.

Sometimes holy ground is a conversation you almost didn’t have.

A person you almost walked past.

A prayer you almost didn’t pray.

A prompting you almost ignored.

A moment that appears insignificant until you realize God has stepped into it.

And there is a profound difference between noticing something unusual and recognizing something holy.

Moses did both.

He turned aside.

Then he took off his sandals.

Curiosity became reverence.

That movement matters because we live in an age that has made us very good at consuming moments and very bad at inhabiting them.

We photograph dinner instead of tasting it.

We record concerts instead of listening.

We check notifications while somebody is talking to us.

Even in church, we can become so accustomed to the machinery of worship that we forget the point was never the machinery.

It was His presence.

The great tragedy would not simply be living through a season in which God seems quiet.

The greater tragedy would be God finally answering and finding that we have become too distracted to notice.

Then God Said Two Words

The burning bush was not the conclusion of Moses’ encounter.

It was the beginning.

God told Moses that He had seen the misery of His people. He had heard their cries. He knew their suffering.

Then God said He was coming to rescue them.

That must have sounded wonderful to Moses.

Until God explained how.

“So now, go.”

God was sending Moses.

The encounter became an assignment.
And almost immediately, Moses began doing what human beings have done ever since.

He started explaining why God had chosen the wrong person.

Who am I?

What if they ask questions I cannot answer?

I’m not eloquent.

I don’t have the right gifts.

Eventually Moses essentially said: Please send somebody else.

Every excuse revolved around Moses’ inadequacy.

God’s answers did not.

That may be one of the most important details in the entire story.

When Moses said, “I’m nobody,” God did not launch into a motivational speech about Moses’ greatness.

He said, in effect, I will be with you.

When Moses worried that he did not know enough, God revealed who He was.

When Moses complained about his speech, God reminded him who made the human mouth.

When Moses begged Him to find someone else, God provided Aaron — but He did not remove Moses from the assignment.

God answered Moses’ insecurity not by convincing Moses that Moses was impressive, but by revealing that God was sufficient.

That changes the question.

The question is no longer:

Am I enough for what God has called me to do?

You probably aren’t.

Neither was Moses.

The question is:

Is God enough?

Maybe the Waiting Wasn’t Empty

We often interpret waiting as inactivity.

If we cannot see progress, we assume nothing is happening.

But what if the wilderness was not merely the place where Moses waited for his assignment?

What if it was part of the assignment?

Egypt had taught Moses power.

The wilderness taught him dependence.

The palace had taught him how rulers operated.

The sheep taught him how to shepherd.

And somewhere during those 40 hidden years, the man who had once tried to accomplish God’s purpose through his own strength became the man capable of standing barefoot before a burning bush and saying:

Here I am.

Perhaps you are in one of those seasons now.

You are waiting for the prayer to be answered.

Waiting for your body to heal.

Waiting for clarity about what comes next.

Waiting for the career you poured yourself into to finally feel meaningful.

Waiting for a relationship.

Waiting for a door.

Waiting for God to explain what He has been doing with this strange chapter of your life.

I cannot tell you how long the waiting will last.

Moses would probably warn us against anyone who tries.

But I can tell you this:

Waiting is not evidence that God has abandoned the story.

When God finally spoke to Moses, He introduced Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

In other words: Moses, you have arrived in the middle of a story I have been writing for generations.

God had been working before Moses recognized Him.

He was working while Moses was in Egypt.

He was working while Moses was running.

He was working while Moses was tending sheep.

And He was working during every year Moses might have mistaken His silence for absence.

“I am who I am.”

The God who met Moses in the wilderness was not showing up late.

Moses was finally seeing what God had been doing all along.

Keep Your Eyes Open

This, I think, is what waiting asks of us.

Not passivity.

Attention.

Keep praying.

Keep reading Scripture.

Keep worshiping.

Keep serving people.

Keep your heart tender enough that when something begins burning at the edge of your ordinary life, you are still willing to turn aside and look.

Because the God moment you have been asking for may not arrive with an announcement.

It may arrive on a Monday.

In a store that was supposed to be closed.

In a conversation you almost avoided.

In an interruption to the life you thought you were supposed to be living.

Or on the backside of a mountain after 40 years of wondering whether you missed your chance.

Moses was 80.

His greatest assignment was still ahead of him.

He had not outgrown his purpose.

He had not aged out of God’s plan.

The wilderness had not disqualified him.

And the waiting had not been wasted.

The bush was burning.

Moses turned aside.

God called his name.

And after 40 years of waiting, everything changed in a moment.

There is a moment in Evan Raugust’s story when everything could have remained relatively ordinary.

He was a teenager in Las Vegas, raised in a non-denominational Christian home and attending Calvary Chapel. He knew contemporary worship. He knew the sermon, the altar call and the monthly communion service. He liked church. His family still lives largely inside that evangelical world.

Then the pandemic arrived.

Raugust was 15, with more time to read and an increasingly stubborn sense that if Christianity were true, he wanted more than a casual relationship with it. He started attending church more seriously, showing up at young-adult gatherings, talking with pastors and trying, as he put it when we sat down together, “my best to love it.”

Something still felt incomplete.

So he began visiting other churches.

Catholic. Anglican. Orthodox. Baptist. Different Protestant traditions. The variety itself became a theological problem for him. If all of these communities claimed some connection to the same Jesus, he wondered, how was a young person supposed to decide what Christianity actually was?

Eventually, Raugust concluded that Catholicism most closely reflected what he understood to be the faith of the early Church. He was baptized and confirmed Catholic.

But the most revealing way he explained the decision to me was much simpler.

“I’m a follower of Jesus Christ first and foremost,” he said. “I just find myself most spiritually fulfilled in the Catholic Church.”

That sentence stayed with me.

Because behind the theological arguments, the YouTube debates and the endless Catholic-versus-Protestant content that the algorithm seems eager to place in front of Christians, Raugust’s story is really about hunger.

And he is hardly the only young person who seems hungry.

Something Is Happening

Scroll long enough through the Christian side of the internet and you will eventually encounter some version of the claim: young people are returning to ancient Christianity.

There are packed Easter vigils. Conversion stories. Young men discovering Orthodoxy. Young adults learning the rosary. Protestant creators discussing liturgy, the Church fathers and weekly communion. Videos about Latin Masses routinely generate hundreds of thousands of views from audiences that, a decade ago, marketers assumed had little interest in organized religion at all.

Raugust sees the phenomenon up close.

“Gen Z are running to Catholic churches,” I told him during our conversation. “Catholic churches are skyrocketing in attendance.”

He agreed with the broader instinct, though the actual American picture deserves more care than a viral montage allows.

Pew Research Center estimates that about 1.5 percent of American adults are converts to Catholicism — roughly four million people — and found that converts attend Mass weekly at a higher rate than lifelong Catholics. But the same research complicates claims of a sweeping Gen Z Catholic revival: among Americans ages 18 to 24, Pew found that considerably more have left Catholicism than entered it.

So this is not yet a simple demographic reversal.

It may be something more interesting.

A religious institution can be shrinking in one measurement while becoming newly compelling to a particular kind of seeker. A generation can be less religious overall while some of its most spiritually curious members are becoming more serious. The internet is particularly good at making those intense minorities visible.

And intensity is what struck me about Raugust.

He did not become Catholic because Catholicism seemed easier.

He became Catholic because, to him, it seemed deeper.

He talked about the Eucharist with the excitement of someone who had found something rather than merely adopted a position. He described the stability of Catholic moral teaching as appealing in a culture that seems to rewrite its assumptions every few months.

For a generation living inside constantly updating feeds, he suggested, there is comfort in entering a church that does not appear to be updating itself every morning.

“You have this world that changes so frequently,” he told me. “It’s nice and comforting to have a church where we’re like, ‘Hey, this church is pretty similar to how it was a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, and 2,000 years ago.’”

There is something worth hearing in that, even for those of us who remain Protestant.

I am not Catholic. Raugust and I disagree on important theology. We have spent hours talking about the Eucharist alone, and neither of us walked away from those conversations pretending the differences are trivial.

But disagreement does not require caricature.

And one of the more encouraging things about Raugust is that his conversion has not required him to declare that every Christian experience outside Catholicism was fraudulent.

His grandfather, for example, battled drug addiction as a young man and later became what Raugust described as an on-fire, born-again Pentecostal who tells almost everyone he encounters about Jesus.

Raugust sees spiritual fruit there.

He sees it in evangelical churches.

He sees it in Pentecostal churches.

And he sees it in Catholicism.

That generosity became one of the most important parts of our conversation.

The Christian Internet Has a Unity Problem

Christian social media can make theological disagreement profitable.

Catholic creators can build audiences explaining why Protestants are wrong. Protestants can build audiences explaining why Catholics are not really Christians. Charismatics can attack cessationists. Reformed Christians can attack charismatics. Everyone can clip the worst 14 seconds of someone else’s theology and post it beneath a thumbnail designed to suggest that civilization may collapse if you do not watch immediately.

Raugust wants to do something different.

He told me about describing Pentecostal healing testimonies to Catholic friends who had never encountered anything like them. Then he described telling evangelical friends about Catholic claims of Eucharistic miracles that they had never seriously considered.

His conclusion was not that every doctrinal claim must therefore be accepted.

It was that Jesus may be doing more across His Church than our tribes are willing to acknowledge.

“Look at all these great things happening in all these different denominations and different believers,” he said. “I really want to help unite the church in that way.”

I told him that sounds remarkably close to the New Testament.

Christian unity cannot mean pretending convictions do not matter. Paul was not indifferent to doctrine. Neither was Jesus.

But biblical unity is also considerably larger than getting Baptists, Pentecostals and Methodists into one room and congratulating ourselves for crossing denominational boundaries.

If the blood of Jesus really has purchased a people from every tribe and tongue, the family is bigger than the corner of Christianity in which any of us happened to grow up.

That means Catholics and Protestants should be capable of looking across the aisle and recognizing a brother or sister before identifying an opponent.

Raugust knows the suspicion personally. His own family has sometimes asked whether he is “Catholic or Christian,” as though the categories must necessarily compete.

His answer remains: Christian first.

That may sound obvious. In some corners of the Church, it is still quietly radical.

Then He Started Getting on Airplanes

If Raugust’s story ended with his conversion, it would be interesting.

It did not.

Somewhere along the way, he began making YouTube videos about the things he was discovering. At first the concept was straightforward: learn something fascinating about Christianity, then explain it to other people.

He made a video about how the apostles died.

Then he had a more ambitious thought.

What if he actually went to the places?

That question changed the scale of his life.

Raugust began traveling internationally to film Christian history where it happened. He has gone to biblical locations, retraced stories connected to the apostles and crossed borders that are considerably less simple to navigate when you are 20 or 21 years old carrying camera equipment and explaining to immigration officials that your occupation is making YouTube videos.

There is an almost comic version of his airport-security problem.

Where have you been recently?

Five countries.

Why are you going to Israel?

To visit the places associated with the deaths of the apostles.

How do you pay for this?

YouTube.

How old are you?

Twenty-one.

As Raugust joked to me, he checks nearly every box that makes an immigration official ask another question.

But behind the humor is real risk.

He traveled through India while filming material connected to the apostle Thomas, frightened at times and navigating places where Christianity exists as a small minority faith. He has gone alone on trips that would exhaust experienced travelers with full production crews.

And the point, he told me, is increasingly not to make a video telling viewers to trust God.

It is to let viewers watch someone try.

“Rather than just saying, ‘Trust in the Lord,’” he said, “let’s show us trusting in the Lord.”

That distinction may explain why his videos connect.

The Christian internet has no shortage of advice.

Raugust is trying to create experience.

You do not merely hear that the apostles carried the Gospel across continents. You watch a 21-year-old try to reach the places where tradition says they went.

You do not merely hear that faith requires courage. You watch him arrive somewhere unfamiliar with a camera, a plan that may or may not work and the belief that God will meet him there.

In that sense, his videos belong as much to the world of MrBeast-style YouTube as they do to conventional Christian media.

Raugust studies YouTube obsessively. He told me he maintains a document containing so many ideas that opening it on a phone can cause problems. He thinks constantly about concepts, titles, execution and reach.

He admires creators willing to spend enormous resources making something extraordinary and asks a question that should make Christian media uncomfortable:

What if believers brought that level of ambition to telling stories about Jesus?

“I like to think that what if we apply that same level of obsession to making videos about Christianity,” he said.

Not obsession with fame.

Obsession with excellence.

There is a difference.

The Pope, a White Sox Jersey and a Decision

Then came Rome.

In July 2025, the Vatican hosted its first Jubilee specifically for Catholic digital missionaries and influencers, an official recognition that social media has become a mission field the Church can no longer treat as peripheral. Pope Leo XIV told the creators gathered in Rome to carry Christian hope into online spaces and urged them to help ensure technological culture remains human.

Raugust was there.

He had brought a Chicago White Sox jersey.

Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, is from the Chicago area, and Raugust had developed a plan that sounded improbable even as he described it: somehow, he wanted to get the jersey to the pope.

At first, the moment passed.

Leo walked near him. Raugust hesitated.

The pope went forward to speak.

Then something changed.

Raugust found himself with another opportunity. He held up the jersey and called toward him. This time, Pope Leo noticed.

Raugust shook his hand.

They briefly spoke.

The moment was later shared through the pope’s social media presence.
For Raugust, however, the significance was not that he had met one of the most recognizable religious leaders on earth.

It was what he did next.

He had been preparing to go to college.

Instead, he interpreted the encounter as confirmation that he should give himself more fully to the work he had begun online.

He quit his job.

He did not go to college.

The following day, he booked a ticket to Israel.

The resulting video, he told me, eventually drew nearly three million views.

One can debate the wisdom of discerning God’s direction through extraordinary circumstances. Christians have been debating questions like that for centuries.

But you cannot miss the pattern in Raugust’s life.

He keeps moving toward the open door.

Faith at the Speed of YouTube

There is a peculiar tension in Raugust’s life.

He is extraordinarily ambitious and surprisingly unconcerned with conventional measures of success.

He wants videos that reach millions.

He also told me he would shut the entire channel down tomorrow if he became convinced God wanted him to.

He dreams about reaching every major biblical site in the world, finding experts in each location and creating a definitive piece of Christian storytelling — the kind of project that would require access to countries where access itself can become the central problem.

At the same time, he is candid about money.

Sometimes he does not know how the next month of travel will be funded.

His operating philosophy is essentially that if God wants something done, God can make a path for it.

That posture could become irresponsible in the wrong hands. In Raugust, it is paired with an unusual work ethic. Faith does not replace the spreadsheet, the visa application, the editing timeline or the thousands of ideas.

It sends him back to them.

A year before our conversation, he said, his YouTube channel had roughly 5,000 subscribers.

Now he says it has around 170,000.

During that stretch, he traveled through roughly 25 countries, met the pope, appeared on “Beast Games,” quit his job and watched a life he could not have predicted begin assembling itself in real time.

He is 21.

That is the detail I kept coming back to.

Not because youth automatically makes someone profound. It doesn’t.

But there is something revealing about a member of Gen Z — a generation supposedly doomed to distraction — choosing to spend his life chasing stories that are 2,000 years old.

The most modern tools imaginable have led him toward the ancient world.

The algorithm led to the apostles.

The camera led to church history.

YouTube led, eventually, to a conversation about communion.

Maybe the Search Is Bigger Than Catholicism

It would be easy to write Raugust’s story as evidence that Catholicism has figured out Gen Z and Protestantism has not.

I do not think that is true.

Some Protestant churches are seeing remarkable signs of spiritual hunger among young adults. So are Catholic communities. So are Orthodox churches. The data does not support announcing a nationwide Catholic takeover.

But the stories do suggest that something about the old assumptions is breaking down.

Young people may not be asking churches to become more like the internet.

They already have the internet.

They may be asking whether the Church possesses anything the internet cannot give them.

Mystery.

Authority.

Sacrament.

Conviction.

A story older than themselves.

A reason to put the phone down.

Or, in Raugust’s strange case, a reason to pick the phone up, turn on the camera and carry that story halfway around the world.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked him to imagine his future. His answer quickly grew into enormous ideas: biblical locations, teachers using his videos, a generation discovering that Christianity is far more interesting than the flat, corny religious content many of them remember from childhood.

Then he stopped himself.

The last year had already become bigger than anything he could have planned.

So why pretend he knows exactly where the next five will go?

That may be the part of his story that crosses the Catholic-Protestant divide most easily.

Raugust has convictions. So do I.

We do not need to flatten them to become friends.

We do not need to pretend the Reformation never happened.

We do not need to agree on every question surrounding the Eucharist, Mary, the saints, papal authority or church government before we can recognize something beautiful happening in another believer’s life.

There is a 21-year-old getting on airplanes because he believes Jesus is worth telling the world about.

I can cheer for that.

And perhaps the most important thing about the young Christians showing up in old churches is not which denominational scoreboard gains a percentage point.

Perhaps it is that they are showing up at all.

In a culture that has spent years telling them transcendence is unnecessary, some of them are beginning to wonder whether they were sold something too small.

They are searching.

And when Raugust talks about where that search has taken him, his invitation is remarkably uncomplicated.

Come and see.

FULL INTERVIEW:

THE NEEDLE

My read: A real spiritual stirring appears to be developing in scattered parts of America. I am not ready to call the nation awakened. I am convinced the early signals deserve our attention.

That is the tension at the center of this first Culture Compass.

For years, the American religious story moved in a familiar direction. Christian identifica…

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Congressman John Moolenaar said it almost in passing near the end of our conversation, but the sentence stayed with me.

There may be few people in Washington whose work forces them to think more seriously about intelligence than Moolenaar. He is chairman of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, the congressional panel charged with examining the economic and national-security challenges posed by China and recommending how the United States should respond. He also serves on the House Appropriations Committee.

Before politics, he was a chemist. Today, the Michigan Republican is helping navigate questions involving semiconductors, military power, artificial intelligence, TikTok, Taiwan and technologies that did not exist when many of America’s governing institutions were built.

Yet when I asked him about the future, Moolenaar did not begin with an algorithm.

He talked about God.

That tension ran through our entire conversation in Washington: extraordinary technological capability sitting beside ancient questions about human dignity, truth, power and wisdom.

America may be entering an age in which machines can process more information than any human being could absorb in a lifetime, while the decisions about how that power is used still fall to imperfect people sitting around tables in places like Capitol Hill.

Moolenaar happens to sit at one of the more important of those tables.

His committee’s formal name is cumbersome, but its assignment is not difficult to understand. China has become an economic, technological and military competitor to the United States, and Moolenaar believes the contest reaches well beyond tariffs or traditional foreign policy. In his view, it involves fundamentally different ideas about government and the value of the individual.

When I asked him about competing ideologies taking hold around the world and increasingly appearing inside the United States, he went back almost immediately to America’s founding.

It made him appreciate, he said, a country built around the belief in “inalienable rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness,” with rights understood as coming from God rather than government.

“The government doesn’t force things on people,” Moolenaar told me. “We serve the people.”

He called that “a great mission statement for a country.”

It was an unexpectedly philosophical beginning for an interview that would eventually reach computer chips and a possible confrontation in the Taiwan Strait, but perhaps it should not have been.

Moolenaar’s argument is that competition with China cannot be understood only by counting aircraft carriers, factories or advanced processors. Underneath the economic contest is a disagreement about the relationship between people and the state.

When I asked him what he believed Americans needed to understand about China, he pointed to that distinction.

“China has done very well economically the last several years,” he said, while also building its technological and military capability. But Moolenaar argued that the deepest contrast appears in the treatment of the individual.

America’s founding premise, he said, recognizes people as created in the image of God and possessing rights that government is meant to protect.

Under the Chinese Communist Party, he said, the direction of authority moves differently: the party determines what people can do and expects citizens to serve the party’s objectives.

Moolenaar’s public work shows how seriously he takes that threat. In recent months, he has backed legislation aimed at restricting Chinese-linked purchases of American farmland near sensitive sites and worked across the aisle on proposals addressing Chinese-linked connected vehicles and surveillance technology.

His China committee has also focused heavily on advanced semiconductors and the possibility that American technology could accelerate Chinese military and artificial-intelligence capabilities.

These can sound like distant Washington concerns until you realize how quickly they reach into ordinary American life.

Your car is now a computer.

A farm can sit near a military installation.

An algorithm developed for consumers may have national-security implications.

A chip small enough to disappear beneath your fingertip can become one of the most strategically important objects on earth.

And the same artificial-intelligence revolution promising medical discoveries, scientific breakthroughs and enormous increases in productivity could also reshape surveillance, warfare and propaganda.

That brought our conversation to AI.

I told Moolenaar about what I had been watching back home in Tennessee, where debates over data centers have made artificial intelligence suddenly local. The national conversation often sounds abstract: America must win the AI race. Communities experience the race through power grids, water usage, land development and infrastructure.

So I asked him the obvious question.

Where are we?

“Technology-wise, America still has a lead when it comes to the highest-end chip technologies,” Moolenaar said.

He considers that lead enormously valuable because innovation does not remain confined to a laboratory. It moves into commerce, defense and eventually nearly every layer of the economy.

“We want to keep that lead,” he told me.

But then he added something important.

“We also want America to set the guardrails.”

The country that leads the technology, in his view, has a chance to influence the values that govern it. Moolenaar worries about what advanced technology looks like in the hands of governments that do not share American assumptions about individual liberty and human dignity.

At the same time, he resisted the idea that winning a global technology race gives Washington permission to dismiss the people who actually live beside the infrastructure required to run it.

Residents have legitimate concerns about electricity costs and water, he said. They deserve accurate information, and communities should retain a meaningful voice in deciding what gets built around them.

His answer was more nuanced than the usual binary politics surrounding development. He wants America to lead. He wants manufacturing and innovation to happen here. He also believes local communities should understand what is being proposed and participate in determining their future.

Then we arrived at Taiwan.

It is difficult to discuss China for very long without the island entering the conversation. Taiwan sits near the center of some of the most consequential strategic calculations in the world, including military deterrence, semiconductor supply chains and the broader balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.

I could have asked Moolenaar only about policy.

Instead, I wanted to know how a Christian sitting in a position of unusual responsibility processes decisions in which a miscalculation could affect millions of people.

So I asked him how he prays.

How does he seek the Holy Spirit’s wisdom while helping shape American thinking about China and Taiwan? What happens privately before the public statements, hearings and votes?

Moolenaar paused and answered simply.

“Each day I try and pray in the morning and be directed by God.”

He told me that he believes God invites people to participate in the work He is doing. When dealing with China, Moolenaar said he tries to follow the biblical instruction to speak the truth in love.

“I love the Chinese people,” he said, before drawing a sharp distinction between the people of China and the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, which he considers dangerous both to Chinese citizens and to the wider world.

His approach to deterrence is similarly straightforward. Moolenaar invoked Ronald Reagan’s formulation of “peace through strength,” arguing that American power is most useful when it prevents aggression from occurring in the first place.

What interested me most, though, was how naturally he moved between geopolitics and discipleship.

There was no dramatic claim that God had handed him a classified foreign-policy blueprint during prayer. There was something quieter happening.

He was describing dependence.

That became clearer when I asked him about his actual spiritual routine.

Moolenaar told me he tries to begin his mornings with a devotional, Scripture and prayer. Then he volunteered something politicians rarely have an incentive to admit publicly: he is not always as disciplined as he wants to be.

“I confess,” he said, explaining that some days are better than others.

He has found comfort in believing that God knows the desire of a person’s heart even on the days when spiritual disciplines do not look as consistent as they should. He also recognizes that he functions better when those disciplines are present.

Just as important, he said, is Christian fellowship.

In Washington, Moolenaar meets with other believers during the week — including a group of men on Tuesday nights and another gathering Thursday mornings — because he knows he needs people around him who will encourage him in his faith.

That may sound mundane beside a conversation about Chinese military power.

I am not sure it is.

Washington is filled with systems designed to accumulate information. Members of Congress receive intelligence briefings, staff memos, polling, constituent data, news alerts and advice from experts with years of experience studying narrow corners of the world.

Moolenaar’s life raises a different question: What happens after you have the information?

Knowledge does not automatically produce judgment.

Access does not guarantee discernment.

And power certainly does not manufacture wisdom.

Moolenaar told me that as he has gotten older, he has become increasingly convinced that the teachings of Jesus apply far beyond Sunday.

He admitted that earlier in life he tended to place those teachings into a religious category, useful for church but somewhat disconnected from ordinary decision-making. Age has changed his perspective.

“The older I get and the wiser I believe I get, the more I see the relevance of those teachings in everyday life,” he said.

If he could speak to his younger self, he told me, he would urge him to study Jesus more carefully, spend time in Proverbs and ask God for wisdom.

That led us eventually back to technology.

TikTok came up because it is nearly impossible to talk about China, young Americans and information without it. Moolenaar supported the legislation designed to force the platform’s separation from Chinese control, but his concern reaches beyond corporate ownership.

He worries about the formation of young people living inside algorithmic environments.

Social media has given almost anyone the ability to speak to enormous audiences, often with little relationship between confidence and expertise. Artificial intelligence is about to multiply that problem by making the creation of information nearly effortless.

Moolenaar’s response was not to reject technology.

He wants the next generation to be technologically capable.

But capability, again, is not the same thing as wisdom.

“Artificial intelligence,” he said, “intelligence isn’t wisdom.”

He wants young people who can discern what they are seeing, recognize what is true and remain anchored to convictions deeper than whatever technology becomes dominant next.

“These eternal truths are what we need to keep our focus on,” he said, “because that doesn’t change with whatever technology emerges.”

That sentence may explain more about the China debate than most of the shouting surrounding it.

The temptation in moments of enormous change is to believe the newest thing has made the oldest questions obsolete.

It has not.

AI may transform how humans work, communicate, discover drugs, conduct warfare and educate children. It cannot decide what a human life is worth unless human beings first give it an answer.

A surveillance system can become extraordinarily intelligent without becoming moral.

A government can become technologically sophisticated without becoming just.

A nation can become powerful while losing the convictions that once explained what its power was for.

Moolenaar seems acutely aware of that last possibility.

I asked whether he feels optimistic about America or increasingly concerned by what he sees.

“I trust God,” he said.

He acknowledged how much lies outside any one person’s control and returned again to the country’s founding ideals. If Americans live according to those principles, he believes the country has reason for confidence. If the nation drifts from them, history offers plenty of warnings about what can happen to powerful civilizations.

Then his answer shifted from politics toward something closer to revival.

“I really believe this is a time for renewal for our country,” Moolenaar told me.

He spoke about repentance, seeking God, prayer and fasting. America has fallen short of its ideals before, he said, and part of renewal requires acknowledging those failures while moving toward a better future.

“I believe America has tremendous promise,” he said.

The timing gives that conversation additional weight.

America is marking its 250th year.

Moolenaar remembers the bicentennial in 1976, when he was a teenager. He remembers the celebration, but he does not remember carefully studying the Declaration of Independence or meditating on what its principles demanded.

Fifty years later, he sees the semiquincentennial differently.

He has been spending more time talking with young Americans, some of whom love their country but are less certain what makes it distinctive. The anniversary, he believes, creates an unusual opportunity to revisit first principles without pretending America has always lived up to them.

That distinction matters.

Moolenaar talked openly about the country’s treatment of Native Americans, racial minorities and the struggle for civil rights. He referenced Martin Luther King Jr. as someone who called America back toward the fulfillment of its own stated ideals rather than simply discarding them.

Patriotism, in that formulation, does not require historical amnesia.

It requires stewardship.

The inheritance is valuable enough to preserve and unfinished enough to keep working on.

That is also why our conversation intersected so naturally with the Nehemiah Alliance, the 52-day call to prayer, fasting and repentance I am helping lead as America approaches this anniversary season.

Moolenaar understood the connection almost immediately.

The threats facing a country are not all external.

There are foreign adversaries, military calculations and technological competitions that require serious public policy. There are also questions no congressional committee can answer for us: whether families remain strong, whether people can still distinguish truth from noise, whether Christians live what they profess and whether Americans still understand freedom as something more demanding than personal preference.

Moolenaar told me he appreciated the focus on prayer and renewal.

Near the end of our conversation, he offered a phrase that seemed to hold urgency and patience together. People should live with an awareness that history can move quickly, he said, while still planning responsibly for generations they may never meet.

For a politician dealing with China, that is not a theoretical exercise.

The factories built today matter decades from now.

So do alliances.

So does military readiness.

The data centers being debated in American communities will help determine the shape of an AI economy that our children will inherit.

The moral architecture matters, too.

Moolenaar is not naïve about the scale of what the United States is confronting. His own committee work reflects an increasingly serious view of Beijing’s ambitions, and in July he described the Chinese Communist Party as the greatest threat facing the country while discussing legislation aimed at Chinese robotics, military surveillance risks and security in the Indo-Pacific.

Still, fear was not the dominant note when we finished.

Hope was.

Not optimism based on favorable polling or the assumption that American primacy will continue automatically. Moolenaar’s confidence appears rooted somewhere else: in the conviction that nations, like people, are capable of returning to what they have neglected.

Prayer matters to him because wisdom matters.

Repentance matters because drift is possible.

Truth matters because a society drowning in information can still become confused about what is real.

Moolenaar spends his days studying one of America’s most formidable competitors, but he does not appear to believe China alone will determine America’s future.

Americans will have something to say about that.

Before we finished, he made an observation about Washington that could just as easily have been about the internet, social media or the new artificial-intelligence age.

People who come to Washington, he said, “can usually find what they’re looking for.”

Then he asked the more important question.

“What are you looking for?”

We are entering a world in which Americans will soon be able to ask machines almost anything.

Moolenaar’s question may be the one worth asking ourselves first.

What are we looking for?

“You know what that sound means?” David Harris Jr. asked his audience. “It means it’s time for tonight’s silver lining.”

I was waiting on the other side of the camera, prepared to talk about a country that often feels as though it is coming apart. Yet the words silver lining shifted the frame of the conversation. They reminded me why I had agreed to appear on the program in the first place.

I was not there to catalog everything wrong with America. Anyone with a television or a social media account already has access to that list. I wanted to talk about what could happen if millions of believers stopped allowing frustration to become passivity.

David and I have known each other for some time. He recently spoke at a men’s conference at my church in Tennessee, where I serve as teaching pastor. Before we addressed anything serious, he joked about whether the men had left after hearing him speak. I assured him they had not. In fact, people were already asking when he would return.

Then he asked the question that brought me onto the program: What is the Nehemiah Alliance, and why are national leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson, supporting it?

The answer begins with the strange moment America is living through.

Faith is becoming increasingly public again. Prayer gatherings are growing, revival movements are emerging, and Christians who once kept quiet about their beliefs are speaking with new conviction. At the same time, ideas that directly challenge the Christian understanding of human dignity, freedom and responsibility are gaining influence.

Those developments can leave believers feeling disoriented. We see evidence of spiritual hunger while watching parts of our culture move farther from the convictions that shaped our families and communities.

The Nehemiah Alliance was born inside that tension.

From Sept. 10 through Nov. 1, Christians will participate in a 52-day period of prayer, fasting and repentance. The length follows the account in the Book of Nehemiah, where the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt in 52 days by ordinary people who accepted responsibility for the section in front of them.

Participation is intentionally simple. We are asking people to pray a short unified prayer each day, fast for three of the 52 days as the Holy Spirit leads them, and become gatekeepers in their own communities.

For most people, being a gatekeeper will never involve standing behind a podium or appearing on television. It may mean praying over a struggling marriage, becoming more attentive to a child, serving a church, caring about a neighborhood or bringing integrity into a workplace that has grown cynical.

The wall in front of your house may not look important to anyone else. It still matters.

That is part of what national leaders have recognized in this movement. Their support is meaningful, although the future of the Nehemiah Alliance will not be decided in Washington. It will be decided in homes and churches where people choose to seek God with humility.

America approaches its 250th anniversary carrying a complicated inheritance. Fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence knowing they were placing their lives and reputations at risk. The document appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the world” and expressed reliance on divine Providence. Whatever disagreements exist about the precise faith of each founder, they understood that liberty required an authority higher than government.

David spoke about the First Great Awakening and the unlikely friendship between Benjamin Franklin and the evangelist George Whitefield. Whitefield preached to enormous crowds throughout the Colonies, insisting that spiritual renewal began with a transformed heart. Franklin, whose theology differed considerably from Whitefield’s, admired him, published his sermons and supported his work.

Their friendship offers a lesson for the present. America has always contained profound disagreement. Its most consequential moments have often depended upon people who could recognize a shared responsibility despite those differences.

The Nehemiah Alliance is inviting Christians from various denominations and backgrounds to return to the center of their faith. We are not asking them to erase meaningful theological convictions or pretend every disagreement is insignificant. We are asking whether we can seek Jesus together while confessing our own need for repentance.

That question is more demanding than criticizing the culture.

Repentance forces us to examine the condition of our own hearts. Fasting reveals the appetites that govern us. Prayer places us before God without the illusion that we can repair a nation through human effort alone.

During the interview, David asked what I would say to people who feel discouraged about America’s direction.

I told them to get their hopes up.

That may sound naïve in a culture where cynicism is often mistaken for wisdom. Christian hope, however, does not depend on favorable circumstances. The disciples watched Jesus die and spent three days believing the story was over. The resurrection changed their understanding of what was possible, and Scripture teaches that the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead lives in those who belong to Him.

If death could not have the final word, discouragement does not deserve it either.

America has endured wars, depressions, assassinations, terrorism and periods of extraordinary division. Through each crisis, people chose to rebuild what appeared lost. Christians should be among the first to accept that responsibility now.

Our faith was never meant to remain passive. Every person carries some measure of influence, even if it reaches only a family, a classroom or a few people at work. The size of that influence matters less than our willingness to steward it.

David made a similar observation during the conversation. When a believer steps into a conversation and quietly asks God to reach someone, room is created for something unexpected to happen. A person cannot control the outcome, but obedience makes an encounter possible.

That is how renewal often begins—not as a national spectacle, but as one person deciding to act faithfully in the place God has already assigned.

When David asked what I believed could emerge from 52 days of united prayer and fasting, I found it difficult to limit the answer.

I thought about generous people funding missionaries in places they may never visit. I pictured marriages recovering affection after years of distance and men and women finally accepting the calling they have spent much of their lives avoiding. I imagined churches making room for people who are hungry for God, including those who have never felt comfortable inside a sanctuary.

Most of all, I imagined a renewed fear of the Lord.

That phrase can sound severe until it is properly understood. The fear of God is not terror that causes us to hide from Him. It is the awe that returns when we recognize that God is holy, present and worthy of our affection. It rearranges our priorities because we understand that our lives are accountable to Someone beyond ourselves.

David ended the interview by asking about my own path into ministry. I began leading friends to Christ while I was in high school, although my journey since then has included failures and difficult seasons. Through all of it, I never lost the fear of God.

Yet ministry is not reserved for pastors. God has placed an ability inside every person to affect the lives around them, and that responsibility does not require a title.

“Your life is too important not to step into all that God has for you,” I told the audience.

David repeated the sentence before announcing that he would join the 52 days of prayer and fasting. His response mattered because movements become real when people move beyond endorsing an idea and decide to participate.

The sound that introduced the segment promised a silver lining. By the end of the conversation, I realized the silver lining is not the comforting belief that America’s problems will disappear on their own.

It is the knowledge that God is still working through people willing to pray, repent and rebuild the section of the wall in front of them.

That work belongs to all of us.

Will Hart ran out of the room and vomited.

He had been sitting at lunch with pastors in northern Mozambique while they described what war had done to their families. Some had watched relatives die. Others knew that abducted wives or children were still being abused. The stories kept coming until Hart’s body could no longer absorb what his mind was hearing.

He returned to the room, listened to the rest and watched the men pray. Worship rose from the room, followed by laughter.

When Hart told me this during our conversation, I could hear how deeply the memory still affected him. He has spent much of his life around missions and has served as CEO of Iris Global for the past decade. The language of revival is familiar to him, along with miracles and the responsibility of leading a global ministry that requires tens of thousands of dollars each day to operate. Yet the faith of those Mozambican pastors left him feeling spiritually unprepared.

“I need help,” he told one of them the following day.

Hart wanted an explanation that could make their joy understandable. A Scripture verse might have given him somewhere to place it. The pastor answered with a memory.

As he fled his village, bodies were lying along the road. He began reciting Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Then he reached the verse about God preparing a table in the presence of enemies.

The pastor looked at Hart and pointed to the meal they had just eaten.

“We just had chicken, Will,” he said. “He prepared a table before us.”

That sentence has stayed with me.

Most American Christians read Psalm 23 in quiet rooms. We print it on wall art and recite it at funerals. This man had prayed it while stepping around bodies, then recognized God’s provision in a plate of chicken. The promise had become solid enough to touch.

Hart admitted that he did not know how to hold what he saw. He and his wife had endured cancer twice, an experience he described as brutally difficult. Their family also had access to Vanderbilt physicians and thousands of people praying for them. In Mozambique, he met believers carrying losses that seemed impossible to survive. Their worship came from a depth he could not imitate.

The encounter exposed something in him. Listening to Hart, I felt it exposing something in me too.

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After the interviews ended, the camera lights were still standing in the room. Aides moved through the hallway outside. There were votes to take and political problems waiting for attention.

Then we prayed.

Those moments happened with more than one of the leaders I recently interviewed inside the Capitol. They felt different from the public conversation that had just taken place. Nobody was trying to land a line. For a few minutes, the titles in the room mattered less than our shared need for God.

With Speaker Mike Johnson, I watched that dependence show up before the conversation was over. His job can consume almost every hour he has, and a narrow House majority means one disagreement can change the day. He told me that prayer has become an ongoing posture as he walks through the building.

“We count on a Red Sea moment here almost every day,” he said.

That answer caught me. Johnson did not sound like a man reaching for a religious phrase. He sounded like someone describing the only way he knows to carry a responsibility that is bigger than him.

John Rose spoke from the middle of another demanding season. He is serving in Congress while campaigning for governor of Tennessee, and he has felt the strain that political ambition can place on relationships. One of his regular prayers is for the grace to respond well when people attack him.

Ralph Norman kept bringing our conversation back to Scripture. At one point, he recalled asking about the central message of the Museum of the Bible. The answer he received was almost comically simple: “Read the Bible.”

I left Washington with a question that felt larger than any single interview.

What has already been formed in a leader before Washington turns up the pressure?

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There is a photograph from 2021 that still startles me.

I am lying flat on my back beneath a white hospital sheet at Vanderbilt. A breathing apparatus is positioned over my mouth. Sensors are attached near my face. Blue tubing stretches across the bed, wires disappear into machines around me, and a monitor glows a few feet from my head.

In another photograph, taken closer, my eyes are open.

I look trapped because, in many ways, I felt trapped.

Until then, health had been one of the assumptions underneath my life. I exercised every day. CrossFit was part of my routine. I ate reasonably well and had spent so little time around doctors that I did not have much of a framework for becoming seriously ill.

Then I contracted the Delta variant of COVID.

What followed became severe long COVID. I eventually counted around 173 symptoms, an almost absurd number for someone whose body had always seemed dependable. Suddenly I was learning the vocabulary of hospitals and monitors while trying to understand why ordinary functions no longer felt ordinary.

At Vanderbilt, strapped into that bed and surrounded by machines, the thought that frightened me most had little to do with career plans.

I wondered whether God would ever use me again.

Five years later, I was sitting inside the United States Capitol with the Speaker of the House.

That distance still feels difficult to explain.

Speaker Mike Johnson and I were talking about faith, America and the burden I had been carrying for the country. During the conversation, he told me he wanted to help. He committed to sharing my contact information with members of Congress and encouraging them to connect with me.

I thanked him.

Then I left.

Afterward, he followed through.

Members of Congress began reaching out. Doors that ordinarily require repeated emails, staff relationships and a great deal of patience began opening in ways I could not have arranged for myself.

My first response was gratitude.

My second was attention.

I have come to think of favor as directional. When God opens a door that I could not force open myself, I try to look through it carefully. There may be an assignment on the other side.

So I walked through these doors.

I sat with members of Congress. I asked questions about faith and public life. Conversations moved through national security, religious liberty and artificial intelligence. I listened to people whose responsibilities gave them access to information and perspectives most Americans rarely encounter firsthand.

Something unexpected happened along the way.

The closer I came to the center of American political power, the more responsibility I felt for what happens far away from it.

Washington matters enormously. Presidents make decisions with global consequences. Congress writes laws that shape the life of the country. Judges interpret those laws. Public servants carry responsibilities that deserve our prayers.

Still, the spiritual condition of America cannot be delegated to them.

A president cannot pray in my place.

Congress cannot repair a marriage.

No committee on Capitol Hill can disciple the children in my neighborhood or make a church spiritually alive.

Those assignments remain much closer to home.

For Christians especially, I think we have sometimes become too comfortable sending responsibilities that belong in our own hearts toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or the Capitol dome. We watch elections with enormous intensity. We learn the names of candidates in other states. We study polling averages and court decisions.

Meanwhile, the most consequential section of wall in our lives may be sitting across the dinner table.

That conviction is at the heart of the Nehemiah Alliance.

Beginning Sept. 10, believers are being invited into 52 days of unified prayer, fasting and repentance, continuing through Nov. 1. The period follows the 52 days in which the Book of Nehemiah says Jerusalem’s wall was rebuilt. A Sacred Assembly is planned for Oct. 31, followed by churches joining in unified prayer the next day.

We have used the language Rebuild. Restore. Renew.

For me, those words describe something very practical.

When I talk about rebuilding America’s walls, I am thinking about communities where people know one another and accept responsibility for the place they live. I am thinking about families strong enough to withstand pressure. I am thinking about churches capable of forming people whose faith holds when the culture around them becomes confusing.

Those are the structures that have historically given America much of its strength.

Their renewal begins with people.

That is what I see when I read Nehemiah.

Nehemiah was a cupbearer, serving the Persian king, when news reached him that Jerusalem remained devastated. The walls were broken. The gates had been burned. A city sacred to his people remained exposed.

He carried the news personally.

He wept. He fasted. He prayed.

Eventually the king noticed the sadness on his face and asked what was wrong. Nehemiah explained the condition of Jerusalem and requested permission to return.

The king gave his blessing.

That part of the story has become especially important to me.

Nehemiah did not treat government as irrelevant. He approached the king. He respected the authority the king carried and sought his support for the work.

Then he went to Jerusalem and rebuilt with the people.

That gives us a helpful blueprint for the Nehemiah Alliance.

I describe our engagement as governmental because Nehemiah himself engaged government. We want the blessing and prayers of people who hold public office. We can meet with them, listen to them and invite them into something larger than the normal rhythm of politics.

That kind of engagement does not require complete ideological agreement.

I do not need to share every policy position held by someone in order to sit with that person and ask for prayer for America. The Nehemiah Alliance has room to engage people from different backgrounds because the central invitation concerns our posture before God.

The work eventually lands with ordinary people.

That is another reason the Nehemiah story has become so compelling to me.

Jerusalem’s wall was rebuilt section by section. People repaired the places near their homes. Families became involved. The assignment was distributed across people whose names most of us would never recognize.

Speaker Johnson brought that up when I interviewed him about Nehemiah. He talked about the forgotten people in the account, those who carried seemingly unglamorous assignments and did them faithfully. His point was simple: the whole wall mattered.

A breach anywhere still left the city exposed.

That is how I hope people understand the Nehemiah Alliance.

There will be recognizable names involved. Public leaders can bring attention to the invitation and help open doors. I am grateful for every person who uses influence that way.

The movement itself will live in places cameras never reach.

Someone may spend these 52 days praying for a son or daughter who has walked away from faith. A pastor may gather a church that has spent years thinking about growth and lead the congregation into genuine repentance. Somewhere, a husband may finally have the conversation that begins repairing his marriage.

Nobody may ever know those stories publicly.

Heaven will.

I am increasingly comfortable with that.

My own fascination with America started early enough that I can trace it back to an elementary-school election.

I grew up beyond rural in a community of fewer than 500 people. Gravel roads were normal. Families had animals that were sometimes pets and sometimes dinner. Summers belonged to baseball and the Current River.

During the presidential election of 2000, my school created its own campaign to teach us how elections worked.

I was 10 years old and completely captivated.

My class selected me to run. I went from classroom to classroom giving campaign speeches, trying to persuade other students to vote for me. When the ballots were counted, I won in a landslide.

The teacher gave me the cardboard ballot box afterward.

I kept it in my closet for years.

Every so often I would pull it out and conduct another recount, apparently concerned that an elementary-school version of an election dispute might emerge several years after the polls had closed.

The total never changed.

I had won.

What stayed with me was the possibility behind the experience.

Here I was, a kid from a tiny rural community, imagining that I might someday become president of the United States. America seemed large enough for that kind of dream.

A few months later, career day arrived.

Naturally, I dressed as the president.

By then I had also taken responsibility for raising and lowering the American and Missouri flags outside the school. I learned how to fold them properly and began recruiting other students to help with the job.

When our class gathered for a photograph, the guidance counselor walked by reading the labels that explained what everyone had dressed to become.

She got to me and misread mine.

“Preacher,” she said.

The tag actually said “President.”

I was embarrassed and did not correct her.

Then something shifted inside me.

Every Sunday, a church van picked me up. Pastors occupied the highest place of respect in my childhood imagination. Their work seemed sacred to me. I actually considered their influence greater than the influence of the president.

Until that moment, I had never seriously imagined myself becoming one.

I took off the president label.

For the rest of the day, I let people guess.

Looking back, that little mistake almost seems too neat. Two themes that would follow me for the next two decades had collided in a school photograph: a fascination with America and a sense that my life belonged to ministry.

By my freshman year of high school, I was preaching.

God opened opportunities for me in churches around the region. I was young, still learning, and convinced that the gospel was worth giving my life to.

College complicated the picture.

At Missouri State University, I majored in public relations and minored in ethical leadership. Politics came back into view. I considered law school and began thinking seriously about a path that could eventually lead to becoming the youngest governor in Missouri history.

I could picture the route.

Then God interrupted it.

I was in my one-bedroom apartment in Springfield, lying on a lumpy red beanbag chair with worship music playing from my computer. I regularly spent time that way, praying and listening to worship by myself.

That day felt different.

The presence of God filled the room with a weight I had never experienced. The closest word I have for it is love, though that still feels insufficient.

Something in me knew I had found the center again.

Within days, I was offered an opportunity to serve in youth ministry.

I said yes.

The political future I had been sketching gradually lost its appeal. My interest in America remained. My sense of where I belonged had become clearer.

Years later, illness would force me to examine that calling again.

Long COVID did not arrive as a theological crisis. I never stopped believing in God. I never lost my fear of the Lord.

It did become a battle over usefulness.

When your body suddenly refuses to cooperate, plans that once felt solid become hypothetical. Ministry was still happening in the world. People were preaching. Churches were gathering. Life continued.

I was going home from Vanderbilt with a blood-pressure monitor strapped around my waist.

It went off every hour.

The regular compression of that cuff became part of the soundtrack of a lonely season.

I had people who cared about me. Still, there are parts of sickness that nobody else can fully enter. The days narrow. The future becomes harder to imagine. Small symptoms take on enormous significance because you do not know what they mean or when they will stop.

I kept returning to what I knew.

Scripture.

Prayer.

Worship.

My relationship with God became less interested in presentation because illness leaves very little energy for pretending.

One prayer eventually came to express the posture I wanted my life to carry:

Speak, Lord. Your servant is listening and ready to respond.

I still pray it.

The sentence has become a way of yielding.

I am telling God that my attention belongs to Him. I am making myself available before I know what He may ask. When direction comes, I want obedience to follow.

That posture has shaped the way I think about opportunities now.

When the Speaker of the House tells me he is going to introduce me to members of Congress, I do not assume I earned the access.

I ask what I am supposed to do with it.

When somebody tells me something in an interview that makes the world look different, I pay attention.

Retired Maj. Gen. Kurt Fuller once spoke with me about Iran and nuclear weapons. He gave me an assessment that landed heavily. In his view, an Iranian nuclear weapon would not simply become another instrument of deterrence. He believed the regime would use it.

I left that conversation thinking about how distant international threats can feel to ordinary Americans.

Most of us receive national-security information in fragments. A headline appears. Somebody argues about it on television. Our phone serves us another subject thirty seconds later.

Sitting across from someone who has carried military responsibility changes the texture of the conversation.

I experienced something similar with Rep. Brian Babin.

Babin chaired the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology when we spoke, which put questions about emerging technology naturally within the conversation. Artificial intelligence came up.

One of the central public fears around AI is sentience.

So I asked him what happens if artificial intelligence becomes sentient.

I remember his response catching me off guard.

“It probably already is.”

Whether one agrees with that assessment is almost secondary to what the moment did inside me.

A light came on.

I thought: People need to hear conversations like this.

That response has followed me through many of these interviews. Access has allowed me to hear people think aloud about subjects that are often flattened into political talking points.

I have left some rooms with greater urgency.

I have also left them with greater clarity about the limits of politics.

The most sophisticated artificial intelligence in human history will still raise ancient questions about wisdom, dignity and the nature of a person.

A dangerous geopolitical moment will still require courage and moral judgment.

Those qualities are formed somewhere.

They are shaped in homes and churches, through Scripture, discipline and relationships that teach us who we are before power ever reaches our hands.

That is why I keep coming back to Nehemiah.

For several years, I have watched the cultural environment around Christianity become more complicated.

There was a time when openly living as a Christian in America felt relatively ordinary. People disagreed with Christianity, certainly, but public faith itself occupied a familiar place in national life.

That comfort has eroded.

Christians now navigate institutions where biblical convictions may be viewed with suspicion. Younger believers encounter competing visions of identity, morality and purpose every time they open a phone.

Politics intensifies the problem because almost every cultural question is eventually absorbed into partisan combat.

Faith can get pulled into that machinery too.

I do not want the Nehemiah Alliance to become another expression of it.

The country has enough political movements.

What I believe we need is a spiritual response grounded in repentance and prayer.

The burden came gradually for me.

There was no single afternoon when I decided America had reached some precise threshold. I simply watched enough cultural changes accumulate that eventually my response became: Let’s do something.

Let’s pray.

Let’s believe God can move in America again.

That hope is especially meaningful during the nation’s 250th year.

The semiquincentennial gives Americans an obvious reason to look backward at the astonishing experiment in self-government that began in 1776. The country those founders launched survived long enough for us to inherit it.

Their generation had no guarantee that would happen.

Neither do we.

Every generation receives a country it did not build from scratch. We inherit institutions and stories, along with wounds that previous generations failed to heal. Stewardship means asking what condition we will leave that inheritance in.

For Christians, the 250th anniversary also invites another historical memory.

Long before the Declaration of Independence was signed, the First Great Awakening swept through the colonies. The movement changed the spiritual landscape of early America as preachers traveled, churches filled and ordinary people encountered the message of personal conversion with new intensity.

I find myself wondering what spiritual renewal could look like now.

I am careful with the language.

I am not declaring that the Nehemiah Alliance is a Third Great Awakening. History does not need us to name something before it happens.

I simply believe the ingredients for renewal are still available to us.

People can pray.

Hearts can repent.

God can move.

That leaves me profoundly optimistic.

When I imagine America a decade from now, one of the first things I picture is construction equipment outside churches.

The buildings are expanding because there is nowhere to put everyone.

Existing sanctuaries cannot hold the number of people coming to faith, so congregations are adding space while trying to keep up with the deeper work of discipleship.

I picture crowded airports for a different reason too.

Missionaries are leaving from American cities to take the gospel into places that have never heard it. Churches and families have become so generous that people called to go are being sent with the resources they need.

Elsewhere, marriages that once seemed finished are alive again.

Children are growing up inside homes where faith feels substantial and joyful.

Creativity begins flowing from people who have spent time in the presence of God. The wider culture grows curious because some of its freshest ideas are coming from believers who have stopped copying the world around them.

The church becomes a place people look toward when they are searching for imagination.

That is the future I can see.

I do not expect government to create it.

Government can protect the freedom that allows churches to preach and people to worship. Good leaders can defend religious liberty. Wise policies can strengthen the conditions in which families and communities thrive.

Spiritual harvest belongs to another kind of work.

That realization has helped me navigate one of the tensions surrounding the Nehemiah Alliance.

Any movement that involves elected officials will quickly be assigned a political identity.

I understand why.

We are living through an intensely partisan period. People see a photograph with a Republican and make one assumption. A photograph with a Democrat would produce another.

I want our actions to communicate something more durable.

Nehemiah sought the blessing of government.

So will we.

Then the people went home and built.

So must we.

Our success cannot be measured by how many famous people stand beside the movement.

If anything significant happens, much of it will be nameless.

That matters to me personally because public ministry always creates a subtle tension around recognition.

Influence is useful. A large audience can help spread an invitation. Relationships can open doors that move an assignment forward.

Recognition can also become addictive if you allow it to tell you who you are.

Long COVID helped cure me of some of that.

Hospital rooms are remarkably unimpressed by résumés.

The monitor beside my bed did not know whether anyone had watched a sermon I preached. The breathing apparatus did not care how many people followed me online.

I was simply a man lying beneath a sheet, dependent on God.

There is something about remembering that image that keeps public opportunities in perspective.

If the Nehemiah Alliance grows and my name fades from the story someday, I can live with that.

Heaven’s recognition would be enough.

The question that matters is whether we were faithful with the assignment in front of us.

Nehemiah was a cupbearer when the burden found him.

He had access to a king, and he used that access.

Then thousands of hands did the rebuilding.

Maybe that is why the story feels so alive to me now.

At 10 years old, I was fascinated by the presidency.

At Vanderbilt, I wondered whether my useful years were behind me.

Five years later, I found myself inside the Capitol talking with the Speaker of the House.

The strange thing is that reaching that room has made me think more about the rooms in ordinary homes across America.

That is where much of our future is being decided.

A kitchen table where a family starts praying together matters.

A pastor who chooses courage matters.

A believer who forgives someone matters.

The sections of wall closest to us may seem small when compared with the scale of the country.

Nehemiah teaches me to see them differently.

Fifty-two days is not a long time in the life of a nation.

It is long enough to establish a new rhythm.

Beginning Sept. 10, we are asking people to pray. During those days, we are asking them to fast and examine their own hearts before God. By the time people gather for the Sacred Assembly on Oct. 31, my hope is that the deepest part of the work will already be happening in homes and churches nobody outside those communities will ever see.

Then Nov. 1 will come.

The 52 days will be finished.

The rebuilding, I hope, will continue.

I sometimes look at those hospital photographs and think about how little I knew.

The man beneath the white sheet could not see five years ahead.

He could not see the Capitol.

He could not see members of Congress calling him.

He could not see the Nehemiah Alliance.

Maybe that is why the prayer means more to me now.

I do not need to see everything ahead.

I want to remain available for the next act of obedience.

And as America enters the next chapter of its story, that is the posture I am praying millions of other believers will discover too.

Speak, Lord. Your servant is listening and ready to respond.

To learn more, go to www.na52.org.

Near the end of my conversation with Representative Ralph Norman, we stood together in Speaker Mike Johnson’s conference room, where I had been recording a series of interviews about faith in public life.

An American flag filled the corner behind us, and a camera light remained on its stand as I placed my hand on Norman’s shoulder and prayed.

The photograph from that moment says something the interview alone could not quite capture. Norman received the prayer with his head bowed and the easy stillness of someone familiar with being prayed for, and perhaps with needing it.

Washington has a way of flattening people into voting records and cable-news clips. Across from me sat a man who has spent most of his life building businesses, raising a family, and trying to understand where faith belongs in the public square.

Norman is a lifelong resident of South Carolina’s 5th District. He graduated from Presbyterian College in 1975 and later joined his father’s construction business, helping it grow into a successful commercial real estate operation.

Public service came later. He served in the South Carolina House before winning a 2017 special election for the congressional seat vacated by Mick Mulvaney, and he has represented the Rock Hill area in Washington ever since. His official congressional biography still reads like the résumé of a businessman who gradually found himself pulled deeper into government.

I wanted to know how a Christian carries his faith into decisions that affect hundreds of millions of people. Norman’s answer began with the habits of an ordinary morning.

He wakes up, prays and asks Christ for guidance. That practice, he told me, changes the way a person sees everything that follows.

Norman remembered visiting the Museum of the Bible shortly after it opened and asking about its central theme. The answer was wonderfully plain: “Read the Bible.”

Scripture, he was told, requires neither protection nor introduction. It has survived every empire that attempted to suppress it and every generation that assumed it had outgrown its wisdom.

That story stayed with Norman because it removed the impulse to make Christianity clever. The Bible already carries the weight; our responsibility begins with opening it.

I told him about the Nehemiah Alliance and our hope of gathering millions of Americans for a defined 52-day season of prayer and repentance, with fasting built into the practice. A short unified prayer would be said each day, while participants took responsibility for the people and places within their influence.

“You’ve got to do it,” Norman answered.

He understood the importance of placing dates around a spiritual commitment. Concern can remain abstract for years, while a dedicated season gives conviction somewhere to take root.

No one can predict what will happen if millions of Americans begin praying together each day. I suspect the earliest fruit will appear in the people who pray, because asking God to change a nation eventually forces us to consider the condition of our own hearts.

Norman believes America’s spiritual decline has become visible in family life and in the formation of young people. His answer keeps returning to the same place: begin in Genesis, continue through all 66 books and allow Scripture enough time to reshape the way you see the world.

The most memorable image he offered was a seed.

Norman sometimes carries one with him when speaking in churches and asks the audience to consider how something so small can remain dormant until it is placed in the ground. Life emerges through a process no person can manufacture, though the gardener still carries responsibility for tending what has been planted.

“We have to bear fruit,” he said.

Sin, in Norman’s telling, resembles the weeds that slowly overtake an unattended garden. Neglect eventually becomes its own decision because whatever remains uncultivated will soon be claimed by something else.

That image explains much of Norman’s outlook. His Christian faith came through a Methodist upbringing where church attendance was expected and belief could be seen in the lives of his parents.

Politics eventually became a calling.

When I asked how that calling developed, Norman spoke about pursuing a particular office that he believed God had placed before him. The campaign ended differently than he expected, and the outcome was difficult to understand at first.

He never named the race in that moment, although the timing made his recent campaign for governor difficult to overlook. That effort had ended the previous month after he finished outside the Republican runoff, closing a statewide campaign he had spent nearly a year building. Local coverage of his Senate filing noted how quickly the political landscape changed afterward.

Norman said God’s guidance frequently becomes clearer with distance. A person can pray about a decision and still spend time wondering why it failed, only to recognize later that a closed path was part of the direction.

Christian faith, as Norman described it, forms people through discipline and often asks for obedience before the outcome makes sense.

His favorite passage is Esther 4:14, where Mordecai tells Esther she may have come to her position “for such a time as this.” Norman believes every person carries a calling that unfolds as God directs each season.

The verse has given him language for public service, especially when the path ahead remains unclear. It also carries unusual weight in light of what happened shortly after our conversation.

South Carolina was grieving the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham, who had represented the state in the Senate since 2003. Norman remembered him as a man with an unmatched personality and a gift for communicating through humor.

Politics, Norman said, is a blood sport. Graham spent decades living inside that world, where every friendship can become a negotiation and every conviction eventually acquires a political cost.

Our brief conversation about Graham carried the quiet awareness that every public career ends. Titles expire, elections pass and the questions of faith become personal in a way no campaign can manage.

On July 18, soon after our interview, Norman announced that he would run for Graham’s Senate seat.

Read more

In this conversation, R.T. reflects on the Book of Nehemiah, the condition of the American Church, the disappearance of the fear of God, and why he believes revival must bring the Word and the Spirit back together.

He also shares stories from more than seven decades of ministry, including the moment God confronted his ambition while he was pursuing an endorsement from Nelson Mandela and the remarkable story of praying for Yasser Arafat for 20 years before unexpectedly getting the opportunity to meet him, share the gospel, and pray with him.

R.T. talks candidly about Islam, politics, evangelism, cessationism, charismatic Christianity, Jonathan Edwards, Cane Ridge, and what separates a genuine awakening from the way the word “revival” is often used today.

We also discuss the Nehemiah Alliance, a 52-day call to prayer, fasting, repentance, and rebuilding leading to a sacred gathering in Washington, D.C., on October 31, 2026.

The conversation closes with R.T. praying over America, the Nehemiah Alliance, and the possibility that God could once again awaken a nation.

In This Episode

• R.T.’s surprising relationship with the Book of Nehemiah

• Why Nehemiah refused to come down from the wall

• The danger of trying to manufacture influence

• R.T.’s failed attempt to get Nelson Mandela to endorse Total Forgiveness

• Why “the devil always overreaches himself”

• The loss of gratitude and the fear of God in America

• What Nehemiah 8:10 really means

• Why pleasing God matters more than pleasing people

• R.T.’s 20 years of prayer for Yasser Arafat

• What happened when he finally met Arafat

• Loving Muslims while taking Islamic theology seriously

• Why R.T. avoids becoming overly political in his preaching

• The “silent divorce” between the Word and the Spirit

• Why he calls cessationism dangerous

• What charismatic churches can learn from theological traditions

• Whether revival is actually happening in America

• Jonathan Edwards and the First Great Awakening

• Cane Ridge and the Second Great Awakening

• What a Third Great Awakening could look like

• R.T.’s prayer for October 31 and the Nehemiah Alliance

Featured Quote

“There has been a silent divorce in the Church between the Word and the Spirit.” — R.T. Kendall

Learn more about the Nehemiah Alliance and join the 52-Day Rebuild at www.na52.org.

At 91 years old, R.T. Kendall has very little interest in pretending he knows more than he does.

I found that out almost immediately when I asked him about the Book of Nehemiah. I assumed he had preached through it at some point during his long tenure at Westminster Chapel, where he spent 25 years in a pulpit previously occupied by some of the most recognizable names in British evangelicalism. He quickly corrected me.

“I have not done Nehemiah,” he said.

Then he smiled and added, “I’ve read it. That’d make me an authority. Anything I read, I’m now an authority on?”

It was classic R.T., self-aware enough to laugh at himself while still carrying the weight that comes from more than seven decades of ministry. He has written 92 books, preached across the world, spent years studying Scripture verse by verse and somehow remains suspicious of anyone, including himself, who gets too impressed with his own résumé.

We were talking about Nehemiah because the book has become deeply personal to me over the last year. The Nehemiah Alliance grew from a burden to call people toward 52 days of prayer, fasting and repentance beginning September 10 and leading into a sacred gathering in Washington on October 31. The biblical picture has guided much of how I have thought about the effort: Nehemiah carried a burden, prayed before he moved and eventually found himself standing before a king with the opportunity to act on something that had been forming privately in his heart.

R.T. recognized that part of the story immediately.

“When God gives you favor like that, there’s a reason for it,” he told me.

Then the conversation became personal.

He said he saw something similar in my own life, particularly in the relationships that have opened over the last several years. I told him those doors mean more to me because of how badly I once tried to open them myself. Early in ministry, I had watched people work rooms, climb ladders, and find ways to get close to whoever seemed important, and for a while I was tempted by the same instincts. Eventually I felt convicted by it, moved to pastor in a small town, and gave up trying to manufacture proximity.

Then a famous pastor called me out of the blue.

I had not chased him. I had not positioned myself for it. He simply told me he felt the Lord wanted him to mentor me, and that moment reshaped the way I thought about influence. I decided I never wanted to spend my life forcing doors that God could open on His own. And it opened doors for me I could never have dreamed of.

R.T. knew the feeling.

Years ago, he was flying from Johannesburg to Cape Town because he hoped Nelson Mandela might endorse his book Total Forgiveness. Mandela seemed like the perfect person to put his name on the cover, and R.T. was imagining what such an endorsement could do for sales.

On the plane he read a verse from Jeremiah: “Seekest thou great things? Seek them not.”

“I thought, ‘Oh, God is not in this,’” he remembered.

The endorsement never happened.

R.T. admitted his motives had become tangled up with ambition. He wanted the book to become a million-seller. He laughs about it now, although the lesson stayed with him. The experience taught him something that has surfaced repeatedly throughout his ministry: the things God gives us often arrive without the machinery we would have built to get them.

That idea followed us through much of the conversation.

R.T. remembered another burden that began in 1982 while he was sitting in Trafalgar Square listening to a story about Yasser Arafat. Something happened in him during that conversation, and he began praying for Arafat every day.

He prayed for roughly 20 years without any expectation that the two men would ever meet.

Then, in July 2002, R.T. received word that Arafat would see him in Ramallah. A meeting expected to last about 15 minutes stretched close to two hours, and R.T. eventually shared the gospel with one of the most controversial political figures of the modern Middle East.

The part of the story that stayed with me happened when R.T. told Arafat, “Jesus loves you.”

Arafat barely reacted.

Later R.T. looked at him and said, “Rais, I love you.”

Tears filled Arafat’s eyes.

That exchange reveals something about R.T. that can be easy to miss when people know him primarily through theology books, sermons, or debates. He has strong convictions and very little fear of saying what he believes, yet decades of ministry have left him deeply interested in the human being sitting across from him.

Our conversation eventually turned toward Islam, particularly the changes R.T. watched take place during the decades he lived in Britain. He carries real concern about its growth in Western nations and speaks about the theological differences without hesitation. Yet almost every time the subject became political, he pulled the conversation back toward evangelism.

“These are just human beings,” he said. “They’re going to stand before God one day.”

His years of praying for Arafat seemed to have taught him that concern for a worldview can exist alongside a genuine love for the person who holds it. He believes Christians should understand what Muslims believe, take those beliefs seriously, and approach Muslim neighbors with enough compassion that they can see it in our eyes.

At one point I moved the conversation toward the political landscape of the coming midterms. R.T. knew exactly what I was talking about. He reads the news, follows elections closely and describes himself as a “political animal.”

Then he told me he has felt a warning from the Holy Spirit about allowing politics to consume his preaching.

That distinction matters right now.

The Nehemiah Alliance has received support from leaders in government, including Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator Marsha Blackburn, while we have worked deliberately to keep the effort centered on prayer and repentance. R.T. was emphatic about that guardrail.

“You will blow it if you endorse candidates,” he told me.

He encouraged us to seek the blessing of leaders without allowing the movement to become another political rally carrying Christian language. In a country where nearly everything becomes partisan within minutes, I appreciated the clarity.

Eventually I asked R.T. about revival.

His answer came faster than I expected.

“No sign of it yet.”

I laughed because there was something refreshing about hearing a 91-year-old revival preacher refuse to manufacture optimism. R.T. has spent much of his life praying for awakening, and he sees encouraging things happening among younger Christians, especially reports of growing interest in church among Gen Z men. He simply reserves the word “revival” for something heavier.

He pointed back to Jonathan Edwards and the awakening that swept New England in the 18th century, then described the scenes that surrounded Cane Ridge in Kentucky decades later, where crowds gathered and accounts spread of people falling under overwhelming conviction. These events left marks that historians are still discussing centuries later.

R.T. has visited the site in Enfield, Connecticut, where Edwards preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He told me he has gone out of his way more than once to stand there and pray the same simple prayer: “God, do it again.”

At 91, he is still praying it.

What would such a movement look like now?

For R.T., part of the answer lies in healing a divide he has watched deepen inside the church. He describes it as a “silent divorce” between the Word and the Spirit. On one side are Christians who care deeply about sound doctrine and biblical precision, yet leave little room for the supernatural work described throughout the New Testament. On the other are charismatic believers who expect miracles and spiritual gifts while sometimes neglecting the theological depth needed to sustain those experiences.

R.T. wants them together.

He is a Calvinist who believes in miracles, a theologian who expects the Holy Spirit to move, and a charismatic who would like Christians to read more than the conference schedule.

That may be the clearest window into what he means when he talks about awakening. He longs for a church carrying biblical depth with the unmistakable activity of God among ordinary people. He believes renewed fear of the Lord would follow.

Near the end of our conversation I asked him to pray for America and for the Nehemiah Alliance.

His voice slowed.

He prayed that October 31 might somehow become part of something larger than any of us can see right now. He prayed for courage, for the blood of Jesus to cover the effort and for another awakening to come in our lifetime.

Then he used an image I cannot shake.

R.T. referenced Isaiah 53 and described Jesus as something like a small twig appearing from the ground, easy to overlook at first, carrying within it the plan of God.

Maybe October 31 becomes a moment people remember.

Maybe its significance is quieter.

I have learned enough by now to leave room for God to decide the size of the thing.

R.T. Kendall has spent 91 years learning that lesson, and he is still waiting to see what God might do next.

To watch the interview:

In this conversation, recorded after a chance encounter inside the U.S. Capitol, Lorenzo tells the remarkable story of how President Trump came to his church in Detroit, what happened when members of his own congregation pushed back, and how that moment eventually led him to pray at the presidential inauguration.

Lorenzo takes us behind the scenes of that prayer, including what was going through his mind as he stood near presidents, political leaders and some of the most influential people in the world. He shares why he felt led to invoke the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., what President Trump said to him afterward, and the unforgettable reactions he received as he walked away.

We also talk about Lorenzo’s upbringing, ministry in one of Detroit’s most difficult communities, his unexpected entrance into national politics, and why he believes pastors can no longer remain disconnected from decisions being made in government.

The conversation moves into election integrity, the influence of media and culture, the political divide inside churches, and Lorenzo’s conviction that Christians should view civic engagement as part of their responsibility to their communities.

In this episode:

• How a chance encounter in the Capitol led to this conversation
• The phone call that brought Donald Trump to Lorenzo’s Detroit church
• Why Lorenzo says he lost roughly half his congregation
• The fear and pressure surrounding Trump’s visit
• How Lorenzo went from local pastor to praying at the presidential inauguration
• What the Holy Spirit impressed on him moments before the prayer
• Why he incorporated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream
• President Trump’s reaction when Lorenzo finished praying
• Lorenzo’s unexpected interactions with former presidents and national leaders
• His personal story of growing up around violence and hardship
• The experiences that led him to focus on election integrity
• Why Lorenzo believes pastors need to become more involved in civic life
• The political conversations happening inside his own family
• His vision for churches serving their communities and influencing public policy
• Why he believes the American church is facing a defining moment

This is a wide-ranging conversation about faith, political power, spiritual conviction and what can happen when a pastor from Detroit suddenly finds himself standing at the center of American public life.