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For five years I was pastor of a congregation of mostly 20- and 30-somethings, a group some would call postmodern or “emergent.” Spirit Garage was born in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis, an area populated by thousands of young people. In those days people would ask me about our model or formula for this ministry. I always found it hard to describe. But after taking up a new sport, I found an apt comparison: ministry in the postmodern era is like racing mountain bikes.

A decade ago most experts thought of global warming as the largest challenge civilization faced—but one that would happen relatively gradually. That cautious optimism has faded as one study after another has proved that the earth was more finely balanced than we’d understood. The climate crisis is bearing down on us much faster than most people realize. The temperature rise has started melting every frozen thing on earth. In the Arctic Ocean, white ice that reflected the sun’s rays is quickly turning into water that absorbs more of the sun’s heat. And, as the ice melts, there’s the very real chance of a catastrophic rise in sea levels.

On a recent trip to Jordan, no one directing my tour group objected to my meeting with Christian evangelicals. But the evangelicals were nervous.

David Barton, a chief advocate for a Christian America, is a bad historian. When he thunders, "We have lost our understanding of the Founders' intent and teachings. . . . We have been robbed," he is partially right: the founders were at least loosely Christian. But it is historically absurd to dismiss the separation of church and state as a myth.

Yes, the letter written by President Ahmadinejad of Iran to President Bush last spring is a political document, and is no doubt duplicitous, multilayered and deliberately deceptive. Yet the letter, framed as an address by one believer in God to another, received little sensible comment in the American media. Suppose the appeal to Bush to take his Christianity seriously is at least in part genuine. Can we American Christians hear this appeal?

When I was a newly ordained pastor, I heard a speech by a federal judge. The judge said that he kept in contact with every person he sentenced to prison. His rationale was simple: he didn’t want his only impact on an individual to be the act of denying his or her freedom. Though as a pastor I visited hospitals almost daily, I had never been inside a jail. Within a few weeks of hearing that judge’s challenge, I made my first visit to the county jail.

If yesteryear’s evangelical church was a castle in the exurbs, Jacob's Well is a rehabilitated loft in the city. Evangelical churches attract young people with spaces stripped of Christian symbols and tradition; worshipers at JW like its dark wood, stained glass and high ceilings. Other churches would be thrilled to have 1,000 attenders; JW worries that it will lose the intimacy that nurtures community and friendship. And stewardship? Jacob's Well urges members to give time or money only out of gratitude.

Imagine someone who, because he is not driven by fear of death, is able to undergo an absolutely typical lynching at human hands and to do so deliberately—showing that death, rather than being definitive and powerful, is no more than a frightening mirage. Christ calls the bluff of the lynching, enabling humans to be less driven by fear and a desire for revenge.

Last year six men joined a string of theologians who are leaving their Protestant denominations for the church of Rome. They included three Lutherans, two Anglicans and a Mennonite. All of them had strong connections to mainline institutions. All fit the description “postliberal”—accepting such mainline practices as historical criticism and women’s ordination while wanting the church to exhibit more robust dogmatic commitments. All embraced an evangelical, catholic and orthodox vision of the church. And none of them could see a way to be all those things within mainline denominations.

There are great gifts—both theological and musical—in the songs being sung in Japan and Peru and Zimbabwe. If those of us in the Northern Hemisphere do not within the next ten years sing the songs of Asia, Africa and South America in worship, our exclusion of them will be deemed racist. It will be seen as a case of musical apartheid.By joining other Christians in song, we in the body of Christ share the joy and the pain of fellow members, most of whom are black and poor, not white and affluent.

Today, as the center of gravity of the Christian world moves ever southward, the conservative traditions prevailing in the global South matter more and more. To adapt a phrase from missions scholar Lamin Sanneh: Whose reading—whose Christianity—is normal now?

Those weathering Katrina’s aftermath see no end in sight. “It's going to go on for years,” says United Methodist bishop Hope Morgan Ward. "For years and years." “We’re not back to normal, and I don’t know what that would be like,” says Nelson Roth, pastor of Gulfhaven Mennonite Church in Gulfport, Mississippi.