Some stories are handed to us before we are old enough to resist them.
You are ugly.
You are lesser.
You do not belong.
You will never amount to much.
Stay in your place.
Do not expect too much from life.
And then, if grace intervenes, another story breaks in.
That is what I heard, beneath everything else, in my conversation with Steve Chalke.
Steve is now known as a Baptist minister, theologian, author, and the founder of Oasis, a movement that has grown from one house for wounded young people into a vast network of schools, homes, justice work, and community-building projects across Britain and beyond. But before there was Oasis, before the books and the policy conversations and the public voice, there was a little boy in South London being told who he was by the world around him.
He was the son of a dark-skinned South Indian father and a very white English mother. His father had come from Madras—now Chennai—after the Second World War, answering Britain’s call for help rebuilding the “motherland.” As Steve put it, the invitation was warm. The welcome was not.
His father encountered open racism. People crossed the street rather than walk past him. Work was hard to find. Money was scarce. The family had no car, no bank account, no holidays, no restaurant meals. Steve’s childhood, by his own telling, was not loveless. He never doubted that his parents loved him. But it was, as he put it, “a childhood without opportunity.”
At school, the judgment became explicit. He and children like him were told they were not worth educating, not worth entering for exams, not destined for anything much. They would work with their hands, not their heads. They were being named by a system before they had the strength to answer back.
And on the street, and among peers, there was another name for him: half-caste. Not one thing or the other. Not whole. Not cleanly classifiable. Not fully in.
There is a violence in naming people wrongly. There is a way a culture can preach over a child without ever opening a Bible.
What saved Steve, at least in the beginning, was not argument. It was not apologetics. It was not a carefully footnoted doctrine of human dignity.
It was a better story.
He went to a Baptist youth club because of a girl named Mary Hooper. She was beautiful. She was the reason he showed up. And in one of those cruel little teenage moments that can feel world-ending when you are young, her friend came over and informed him, on Mary’s behalf, that he was ugly.
So he walked home crushed.
But somewhere on that short walk, another realization overtook the wound. At school, he had been told one story: you are worth little, and your future will prove it. At church, however rudimentary the theology, he had heard something else entirely: you are made by God, and your life has meaning, and your life has purpose.
That night, age fourteen, he decided not only to go back to youth group, but to become a Christian, to become a church leader, to start a school worth going to, a house for unloved children, and a hospital.
Mark Twain said there are two important days in life: the day you are born and the day you find out why. Steve found out why while walking home from being called ugly.
Mary Hooper, your loss.
But more to the point: this is how grace often works. Not by erasing the wound, but by interrupting the lie.
That part hit me hard, perhaps because it was so familiar in outline, if not in details. My own childhood was shaped by rupture, custody wars, kidnapping, exile, and the strange condition of being defined by other people’s conflict before I had words for my own life. One of the reasons I wrote The People of the Sign at all was because I needed, in some ultimate sense, to tell the story back—to reclaim meaning from narratives imposed from the outside. So when Steve spoke of receiving a “better story,” I recognized the ground immediately. Sometimes salvation begins, not when all the facts change, but when the interpretation does.
But Steve’s story does not stop with that first rescue. It presses into something deeper—something the church, in my view, has too often obscured.
Late in our conversation, we touched Genesis. That is always dangerous territory for me, because I tend to live there longer than is socially acceptable. But Steve said something simple and, to my mind, deeply right: before you get to the fall, before you get to the serpent, before you get to all our elaborate systems of inherited shame, the Bible first says that the human being—male and female—is made in the image of God. And God calls this very good.
Steve said plainly: “I believe in original goodness.”
That phrase matters.
It matters because so much religion, at least as many of us have received it, begins with suspicion. It begins with a deficit. It begins by telling people what is wrong with them before it ever names what is holy about them. It begins in Genesis 3, or in a distorted reading of it, and never really recovers Genesis 1.
But if you spend your life among neglected children, abused teenagers, poor communities, and violent young offenders—as Steve has—you cannot do lasting redemptive work unless you believe there is something beneath the wreckage worth saving. Not sentimentally. Not naively. But actually.
If a child is only a problem, you will manage him.
If a teenager is only a threat, you will contain him.
If a prisoner is only his crime, you will punish him.
If the poor are only failures, you will pity them at best and despise them at worst.
But if every human being bears the image of God—if original goodness precedes original damage—then no one is disposable, not even when they are shattered, compromised, dangerous, or buried under layers of distortion.
This is not soft theology. It is, in many ways, harder. It requires more. It denies us the ease of writing people off.
Steve now oversees work in Britain with young offenders guilty of terrible crimes—murder, attempted murder, rape, drug violence. And his conviction, stated with force, is that “you cannot hurt someone to heal them.” Love has boundaries, yes. Love is not indulgence. But punishment alone cannot make a person whole.
That line, too, rests on a prior anthropology. If there is no image left, no goodness underneath, no possibility of restoration, then all you can do is cage, shame, and discard. Original goodness is not a denial of evil. It is the refusal to let evil have the first or last word.
And from there, quite naturally, Steve moved to what may be the sharpest distinction in the whole conversation: life after death versus life before death.
He described the gospel he first received in church as something like an eternal insurance policy. Pray the prayer. Receive Jesus. Sit through enough sermons. Endure the difficulties of this life. Then, when you die, you get the payout: the good place instead of the bad one.
Steve did not deny the reality of life beyond death. But he did insist—rightly, I think—that this was not enough. In fact, it was a distortion.
Because what had seized him, even as a teenager, was not a vision of escape but of repair. Not “How do I secure my eternity?” but “What do I do now for the unloved, the unwanted, the uneducated, the unwanted child, the poor, the racially despised?” His was not a call to wait for heaven, but to get to work.
And then India broke him open even further.
He went there first to teach seminars, to earn money, to connect with his father’s homeland. Instead he found himself overwhelmed by a poverty so severe it made much of his inherited theology ring false. Children fighting over apples. Slums of unimaginable scale. A mother holding a dying child whose life might have been saved by a few cents’ worth of sugar and salt.
And under the pressure of those sights, Steve reached a crisis point: either the gospel he had been handed was too thin, too passive, too insulated from reality—or the whole thing had to be abandoned.
That is a serious place to arrive. It is not fashionable deconstruction. It is not adolescent rebellion. It is what happens when real human suffering stands in front of inherited formulas and demands an account.
To his credit, Steve did not settle for a half-baked reconstruction. He knew one cannot merely swap clichés and call it theological depth. But he did come through that crisis with a conviction that now animates everything Oasis does: God is not the author of our passivity. God is not calling us to explain evil from a safe distance. God is doing His best, Steve said, and calls us to join in.
That phrase will trouble some theologians. Fine. Let it trouble them. Steve is not speaking from the comfort of abstraction. He is speaking from the ground, from the side of the road, from the slum, from the home for foster children, from the secure school for violent youth, from the place where one either helps or hides behind doctrine.
And what he hears at the center of Christianity is not “wait” but “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth.”
Not merely later. Here.
Not merely elsewhere. Here.
Not merely for me. For us.
This, to me, is where the article’s three movements lock together.
The half-caste kid heard a better story.
That better story began in original goodness.
And original goodness demanded a gospel about life before death.
Not because the next life does not matter, but because this one does.
It matters whether children are loved.
It matters whether the poor are housed.
It matters whether schools dignify or discard.
It matters whether race becomes a curse or is seen through the lens of image-bearing beauty.
It matters whether the gospel is something we hide inside our private souls or something that takes flesh in neighborhoods, classrooms, courtrooms, kitchens, and crowded streets.
I think that is why Steve’s final words stayed with me. He spoke of vision and frustration as nearly the same thing. To have vision is to long and pray and work for what is not yet. To live with that vision is to be perpetually dissatisfied with the world as it is.
That, too, is part of the calling.
Not cynicism.
Not despair.
But holy frustration.
The kind that keeps building schools.
The kind that keeps opening houses.
The kind that keeps believing that a child called ugly may still hear the voice of God above the noise, and that hearing it may change everything.
You are created in the image of God. And God loves His creation.
— Wade
Sneak Peek: Next on Created in the Image of God
This week, the journey continues in two directions.
Sunday, June 28 at 7:00 AM US Central Time, I’ll be joined by Jason Heinritz—author, entrepreneur, and founder of the Wake Up Jesus People movement. We’ll talk about what it means to stop building our own little kingdoms and begin, in earnest, to build God’s: through spiritual discipline, sacred habits, and the pursuit of deeper peace, joy, and purpose.
Then on Tuesday, June 30 at 8:00 PM Central Time, I’ll sit down with David Truong—author, deacon, and corporate attorney. David will reflect on his journey from communist Vietnam to the United States, and on the faith that carried him through loss, escape, uncertainty, and reinvention. It’s a story of survival, gratitude, and discovering God’s purpose through adversity.
Join us live. And until then, keep listening for the better story.
