My Wish For 2025

More Re-enchantment in the Church

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed something telling. Nearly 300 people engaged with a Note I shared of

Malcolm Guite

speaking on re-enchantment, and nearly 200 resonated with a longform essay I wrote about Evangelicalism. These aren’t just numbers—they’re a sign of the times.

Here’s what I’m hearing: People are starving for depth, beauty, and mystery, especially in the church. The shallow sterility of modernity will not do. The world is restless, and if the church refuses to offer the awe and wonder of the living God, people will seek it elsewhere—sometimes in places that distort or counterfeit the divine.

Pastors, churches, we cannot let this happen. We’ve been entrusted with the message of a God who is not only true but also good and beautiful. Yet too often, we reduce this message to something transactional, pragmatic, or hollowed out. This is not what people need. This is not what they hunger for.

We must lead the way in removing the film of familiarity from their eyes so they can behold the enchantment of God’s presence all around them. Preach the mystery of Christ. Cultivate worship that envelops them into the heavenly liturgy. Show how the beauty of creation, art, and Scripture all point to the Creator.

Let the church become, once again, a sanctuary of wonder—a place like Rivendell, which Tolkien described as a refuge where one could encounter “the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful.”

If we fail to embrace this calling, we risk losing people not because they reject the Gospel but because they’ve never truly encountered its depths. Let us not give them reason to search elsewhere for what we should be offering all along: a faith alive with beauty, meaning, and mystery. The time to respond is now.

Let the bells of old Christendom ring out once more, driving away the spirit of the age and calling us back to prayer, no matter where we may find ourselves.