Christianity Today August 4, 2026 8 min signal 2026-08-04

The Christians you need might be the Christians next door

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

August 4, 2026

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Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Baker Books

Every generation of Christians replays the age-old debate: What does it mean to be in the world but not of it?

The radicals insist you must sell all you have and give the money to the poor (Matt. 19:21). You must go into full-time vocational ministry or be a missionary to an unreached people group. You must join an intentional community and follow a rigorous rule of life.

The normies, meanwhile, insist you can keep your job as a tax collector or soldier and do it unto the Lord by not committing fraud and by being content with your pay (Luke 3:10–14; Col. 3:23). You can get married, have a family, and lead a life that, by many external measures, looks pretty similar to the lives of your non-Christian counterparts. In Martin Luther’s formulation, if you happen to be a tailor, you can be a Christian tailor by making good clothes to “help and serve my neighbor.”

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Each side recognizes a truth. The radicals are right that, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer has it, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Following Jesus requires total commitment.

But the normies are right to forswear the ambition to sit at Jesus’ right hand (Matt. 20:21). Even if we replace worldly measures of wealth and power with a holy-coded aesthetic purity and grand sacrificial gestures, the lure of being a “great” Christian violates the upside-down economy of God’s kingdom. As Paul enjoins the Thessalonians, we should “aspire to live quietly, and to mind [our] own affairs” (1 Thess. 4:11, ESV).

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Charlie Cotherman’s new book Strip Mine Jesus: Hope for the Rural Church, Small Towns, and Overlooked Places embraces both sides of this paradox in its descriptions of radical yet quotidian fidelity. When Christians seek “glory without suffering,” he argues, we’re prevented from recognizing the beauty, goodness, and truth of ordinary lives in communities like his own. We’re just as liable as secular strivers to leave in search of something better rather than staying put and recognizing God’s redemptive presence where we are.

Cotherman’s own story is one of departure and eventual return. Growing up in rural Western Pennsylvania, he and his brother regularly played on the abandoned, unreclaimed strip mine near their home. After leaving for grad school, Cotherman returned with his wife to plant a church in nearby Oil City. In addition to pastoring, he now serves as executive director of the Center for Rural Ministry housed at Grove City College, where I also teach.

Growing up in a region damaged by extractive industries, Cotherman felt the pull of two conflicting narratives. The first, proffered by mining companies and industrialists, is that successful people get what they can from places like Western Pennsylvania, then move on to bigger and better locales. That vision includes believers. Cotherman recounts that when he began discerning a call to preach, his mother wondered if he might be the next Billy Graham. A college trip to Shane Claiborne’s church The Simple Way in Philadelphia made social activism in an urban context seem a lot more “edgy” than a humdrum existence in a shrinking town.

Yet against this pull toward a better life elsewhere, Cotherman also sees the joys of restoring what’s been abandoned. He describes looking through the hollows of his Appalachian landscape as a boy, hunting for trash that could be reclaimed. (His childhood bike, for instance.) How can we see “piles of potential” where most see only worthless junk? By taking up “the slow work of learning to see, appreciate, and then participate in what God has already done, is currently doing, and has promised to do in every corner of creation,” he advises.

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After two introductory chapters on attention and idolatry, Cotherman proceeds to the three transcendentals, showing how disciples of Christ can faithfully realize the beauty, goodness, and truth of their humble locales. With so many Christians blinded by the idols of celebrity, efficiency, and autonomy, we begin our work of restoration by reorienting our attention to the standards of God’s love.

Cotherman cites the wonderful passage in G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy about how the Incarnation calls us to love our places, no matter how neglected and nasty. “If men love Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs,” Chesterton insists, “Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.” The good news, Cotherman adds, is that it’s “not up to us to start the process of loving the place where we find ourselves.” Even our meager work might participate in God’s ongoing redemption.

The challenge is that “the Pimlicos of our world are getting easier to leave and harder to see through the lens of love.” This is certainly true of Oil City, which, as its name indicates, was the site of America’s first oil boom and bust. Yet even here, in the wake of ecological and economic destruction, Cotherman worships alongside ordinary saints who are fulfilling God’s call to love their neighbors.

He also acknowledges the appeal of more radical living. Shortly after Cotherman and his wife were married, they moved from rural Pennsylvania to New Haven, Connecticut, to be part of an intentional Christian community. Yet almost immediately aspirations hit reality and the couple found themselves waiting tables and wondering why they had left home: “We had seen something good (community) and longed for it, but in the process we had lost the rationale for community. When community … became the goal, the relational drive turned inward and became unsustainable.”

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The Cothermans discovered real community arises not via elaborate ritual or manufactured togetherness but simply through people joining together for a particular purpose—to serve the kingdom of God. Our goal shouldn’t be to join some special group of “real” Christians but to foster “attentional community,” to see people already nearby who might be the wise mentors we need and the weaker members we are called to serve. Indeed, Cotherman describes unexpected elders who’ve discipled him in Western Pennsylvania. As he discovers, you don’t need a fancy degree or impressive résumé to encourage others in the faith.

The question for the Christian is never What can I get out of this before moving on to a better opportunity? but How might God be calling me to bear his presence here and now? Cotherman recommends what James Davison Hunter terms “faithful presence” in all its various forms, whether that’s remaining in the neighborhood in which you were born, staying put in the city or church you’ve chosen as an adult, or coming home to the small town you’ve left behind.

In considering the final transcendental, truth, Cotherman warns against an industrial mindset that values people and places on the basis of functionality. On such a view, small towns and ordinary people appear inefficient and insignificant. But the truth of who we are rests not in what great works we can do for God but in the loving relationships into which he invites us. These friendships draw out “deep, multifaceted identities that we can only discover over time within the day-to-day interactions of our relationships with God and others.” Cotherman urges us to imitate Christ in making the “counterintuitive decision to choose relationship over efficiency and mundane acts of service over striving toward [our] own cherished goals.”

In his final chapter, Cotherman confronts directly the reality that this life of quotidian fidelity will be marked by pain, even as our perennial temptation is to “want glory without suffering.” As our mutual colleague Carl Trueman has argued, Luther’s theology of the Cross is a vital “antidote to sentimentality, prosperity doctrine, and an excessively worldly eschatology.” Luther warns that “a theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil.” It is only the “theologian of the cross,” Luther writes, who “comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.” As we comfort a family after a teenage suicide, accompany those who have received terminal diagnoses, or encourage those doing good work in unglamorous careers, we can follow the way of the Cross just as faithfully as a missionary or monastic can.

In reacting against the compromises or even hypocrisies of normie Christianity, we need to avoid being infected by a culture that has confused radical obedience with celebrity, cool aesthetics, and outward success. Wanting to be a radical Christian is a good thing! But let’s be truly radical, putting down deep roots where we are, motivated by the conviction that God’s great glory manifests in the ordinary love and suffering that marks life in places the world deems insignificant.

Jeffrey Bilbro is professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief at the Front Porch Republic. His most recent book is Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope.

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