Here's what beautiful discipleship can look like.

An example from immigration advocacy.

In 2020 while we were mastering sourdough baking and wrestling with the realities of ongoing racism on our streets I started thinking about not only what it means to reflect God’s beauty in our discipleship, but how it looks in our actual lives.

I was honored to think through this publicly in an article for Christianity Today and I still stand behind what I wrote then. Here’s a preview.

Outside a US congressman’s office, Christians holding homemade protest signs and clergy dressed in their robes and collars attend a march to challenge the separation of families seeking asylum at the US–Mexico border. They join in impassioned chants of “Keep the kids, deport the racists!” and “Lock them up!” referring to those who work for the US Border Patrol. In protesting the dehumanizing ugliness of children being separated from their parents they dehumanize others in return, calling for their rights to be taken away and their freedoms restricted.

Inside the offices of a Christian nonprofit organization that provides legal assistance to immigrants, volunteers from a local church assist young immigrants with their DACA applications. These young men and women came to the US with their families when they were children and now find themselves undocumented, unable to live, work, or attend college in the US without the threat of deportation. The volunteers chat with the eager immigrants over donuts and coffee as they navigate the complex paperwork that will allow them to legally remain in their communities.

While the Christians in both these scenarios may believe very similar things about immigration, they have chosen to live out their convictions in dramatically different ways. But what makes us immediately recognize them as distinct from one another?

You can read the rest of the article right here: Our Advocacy Should Reflect God’s Beauty

Do you have any other examples of beautiful discipleship coming to mind? I would love to hear them!

In pursuit of beauty,