This Online Articles area (formerly our Library) gathers reflections, op-eds, and essays that engage the pressing questions of faith, justice, and public life. Here, you’ll find hundreds of thoughtful and engaging pieces from scholars, practitioners, and everyday Christians — leaders and writers who bring fresh insight and faithful imagination. These articles are meant to spark deeper discipleship, fuel courageous action, and equip the church to embody the gospel in a complex world. We invite you to explore, learn, and join the ongoing conversation toward a fuller expression of Christian faithfulness and a more just society.
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CSA’s free weekly publication, a carefully curated collection of original articles at the intersection of spiritual formation and social action.
By Liz Cooledge Jenkins
(Editor’s Note: Every person who walks into a church carries a story. Some come seeking community. Others arrive bearing invisible wounds from spiritual abuse, exclusion, grief, injustice, or other painful experiences that have left them wondering whether the church is truly a place of refuge.
By Mark Labberton, Nikki Toyama-Szeto, and Laurel Bunker
In early 2021, CSA Executive Director Nikki Toyama-Szeto and Fuller Theological Seminary president Mark Labberton spoke on the changing state of American evangelicalism. This presentation was part of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities’ online conference, “Faithful Leadership: Race, Politics & Evangelicalism in America.”
“Evangelicalism is paddling in the shallows … but Jesus invites us into the deep.”
Nikki opens her portion of the presentation with a meditation exercise that offers tremendous calm ahead of a fraught conversation.
We talk with Makoto Fujimura about his art, the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, and the intersection of justice.
By Michael Stalcup
What if, instead,
we had a monstrous steel statue,
a modern-day Molech,
its bloodstained stainless steel
altar rimmed with polished wood,
serviced by priests and acolytes
By Kathy Khang
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published on September 5, 2016, as This Is My Country and is used by generous permission of the author.
The older man walks up to the closed register next to me and looks at the wretched KFC/Pizza Hut menu at the travel oasis/rest stop near Elkhart, Indiana.
By Alex Haskins
Three nonviolent alternative approaches to navigating conflict in scripture include: “principled pluralism”, “public confrontation”, and “parting ways.” Christians committed to social justice can continue to usher in the kingdom and serve the least of these while nonviolently navigating conflict with coreligionists (and others) who might otherwise impede progress on a range of issues and forms of advocacy.
By Bill White and Brenna Rubio
Dear Pastor Conflicted about LGBTQ+ Inclusion, we have been in your shoes. You’ve started to wonder whether the church – YOUR church – needs to become more inclusive, especially of LGBTQ people, and you feel conflicted. Your heart is torn, your mind is spinning.
By Alli Bobzien
In our home we study the traditionally popular women in scripture like Esther, Ruth, and Mary. But we have added the beautiful stories of Hagar: the first female theologian who names God, Miriam and Deborah: leaders of their people, and the sisters Mahlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Noah, and Milcah: who advocated for more just laws due to their unwavering faith.
By Rick Barry
Ultimately, the culture war paradigm is not just destructive to Christians or to the church—it is also destructive to the country.
Alex Shippee describes himself as “your average half-White, half-Latino, gay, former-missionary-in-the-Middle-East-turned-urban-planner.” These experiences, while also growing up in a Jesus-loving, theologically traditional family, have profoundly shaped his journey with his sexuality and his faith. Wrestling to find the integration of these two has produced both deep grief and rich insights, painful growth and surprising joy.
By Kristyn Komarnicki
When we make space to lean towards each other with attention, to listen and to hear, not just the words we speak to each other but the actual hopes and hurts and fears and joys, we are offering each other the most sacred gift available to us.
By Lē Weaver
The Chicago Declaration was intended to serve as a framework for concrete evangelical engagement with the pressing social issues of the day. Christian Feminism Today (known originally as the Evangelical Women’s Caucus) came into being as a direct result of that Thanksgiving workshop, and with it a movement known as biblical feminism was born.
By Heidi Weaver-Smith
If liberation is so central to the message Jesus came to accomplish and proclaim, it must also be to those of us who profess his name and take part in his resurrected body. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection point us towards the liberative future of shalom he has accomplished for us, the already-but-not-yet Kingdom of God which breaks into our world daily, yet has not finalized its work.
By Lē Weaver
This Women’s History Month, we remember the women who helped shape the Chicago Declaration of Evangelicals for Social Action, CSA’s founding document. The Chicago Declaration, signed by 53 evangelical leaders in 1973, was written as a call for Christians to engage in issues of justice and to reject racism, economic injustice, violence, and sexism. While the group that signed the document were diverse theologically, they lacked the racial and gender diversity we strive for today.
By Kristan Pitts
May peace never come until justice is actualized. Expose to everyone injustice that is both overt and covert. Then make it so that inequity may never be hidden again.
By Liz Cooledge Jenkins
Even in the warmest and most welcoming evangelical churches, patriarchy looms as an ever-present force, suppressing women’s possibilities and debilitating whole communities. Well-intentioned churchgoers and church leaders have bought into deeply-entrenched male-dominated mindsets, power structures, and theologies that are not working—not for women, and really not for anyone.
By Inés Velásquez-McBryde
Racism has joined with sexism to dismember women of color at a cost to our heads, hearts, bodies, and souls. It has also dismembered women from women and women from men. We must repent, restore, and re-member back the places long devastated and rebuild the broken bride of Christ.