From the Archives: Mikhail Gorbachev and Christianity

A selection of articles on the late leader’s global legacy.

When Mikhail Gorbachev first took his place as the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, many people, including CT writers, assumed he would “continue [the Soviet government’s] campaign against religious believers regardless of who leads the country.” But perceptions about his faith changed as the fall of the Soviet Union transpired and visits to the Crystal Cathedral and the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi sparked debates about his thoughts on religion. While some Chistians speculated about Gorbachev’s relationship to end times prophecy, CT writers looked for new signs that the former Soviet might be open to the Christian message.

In light of Gorbachev’s death, check out a compilation of CT archive articles with a chronology of the former leader’s relationship with Christianity.

Click here for more from the CT archives.

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Evangelical Report: Creation Care Is an Act of Worship, Hospitality

The National Association of Evangelicals focuses on the impact of the changing environment.

The National Association of Evangelicals unveiled a sweeping report on global climate change, laying out what its authors call the “biblical basis” for environmental activism to help spur fellow evangelicals to address the planetary environmental crisis.

“Creation, although groaning under the fall, is still intended to bless us. However, for too many in this world, the beach isn’t about sunscreen and bodysurfing but is a daily reminder of rising tides and failed fishing,” reads the introduction of the report, penned by NAE President Walter Kim and released on Monday

“Instead of a gulp of fresh air from a lush forest, too many children take a deep breath only to gasp with the toxic air that has irritated their lungs.”

But the authors admit persuading evangelicals is no small task, considering the religious group has historically been one of the demographics most resistant to action on the issue.

The nearly 50-page report, titled “Loving the Least of These: Addressing a Changing Environment,” opens with a section that insists protecting the environment is a biblical mandate.

“The Bible does not tell us anything directly about how to evaluate scientific reports or how to respond to a changing environment, but it does give several helpful principles: Care for creation, love our neighbors and witness to the world,” the report reads.

The authors go on to cite passages such as Genesis 2:15 (“God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it”), Matthew 22 (“Love your neighbor as yourself”), and Deuteronomy 15 (“Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart”).

“We worship God by ...

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World Vision Employee Sentenced to 12 Years Prison in Israel

Humanitarian organization calls verdict “unjust” as questions about lack of public evidence of terrorism persist.

Update (Aug. 30): A World Vision International employee has been sentenced to 12 years in prison in Israel for terrorism. The humanitarian organization says Mohammad el-Halabi’s conviction is unjust and the Israeli court’s ruling is “in sharp contrast to the evidence and facts of the case.”

According to prosecutors, the former director of aid to Gaza diverted funds and resources meant for hungry children and farmers to Hamas terrorists building tunnels and planning attacks on Israel.

“These are very severe deeds, the defendant funded terror with millions of shekels, helped strengthen the Hamas tunnel network,” prosecutor Moran Gez told press.

Citing security concerns, little of the evidence has been made available to the public. According to Gez, however, “The court left no stone unturned in this case.”

Outside observers have questioned not only the court’s verdict, but even the plausibility of the allegations. An independent audit of World Vision’s finances found no missing funds. The US Agency for International Development and the Australian and German governments investigated and found no evidence of wrongdoing. The audits concluded that Halabi did not have access to the amounts of money the government said he gave to Hamas.

Halabi, who has been in jail for six years as the trial dragged on, did confess to some of the charges after he was arrested. He has since claimed he was under duress and he is innocent. The confession itself is classified.

He was convicted in June. The full text of the verdict is also classified.

“The arrest, six-year trial, unjust verdict and this sentence are emblematic of actions that hinder humanitarian work in Gaza and the West Bank,” ...

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Stop Applauding Pastors Who Publicly Confess Their Sins

When leaders admit wrongdoing, we should respond with quiet sobriety, not clapping.

Yesterday, I finished a 17-year ministry at Southern Hills Baptist Church in Sioux City, Iowa. Our attendance was the highest it’s been in a long time. I did what I’ve done week after week, Sunday after Sunday, since August 28, 2005: preach a text of Scripture.

After church, we had a potluck dinner and enjoyed warm fellowship. Members expressed love for my wife and me, sorrow that we were leaving, and prayers for our future. We received a basket of cards with some generous gifts and messages that made my wife cry. It was a wonderful way to wrap things up.

What I didn’t receive was a standing ovation.

Yesterday, Matt Chandler stood before his congregation to admit to inappropriate text interactions with a woman other than his wife and to announce he was taking a leave of absence. He claimed the messages were not sexual or romantic, but he withheld any further details.

With that in mind, I’m not addressing Matt Chandler’s sin (or whatever other words he used to describe it). Reading about his imbroglio just got me thinking.

In the accounts of Chandler’s actions, I looked for one thing and, sure enough, saw that after he confessed to his congregation, the church gave him an ovation. Another pastor stood to “define the narrative” by telling them what their ovation meant, and then congregants gave Chandler another round of applause.

I am annoyed at this response. I’m an old codger, so I am authorized to do “get off my lawn” rants. When did it become appropriate to give standing ovations to those who have committed disqualifying (or near-disqualifying) sins in ministry?

You might remember Jules Woodson’s public story of sexual abuse. After years of denial and evasion, ...

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Died: Rodney Stark, Sociologist Who Said Religion Is a Rational Choice

His theories of conversion and competition shaped widely held views of church growth and decline.

Rodney Stark, the influential and controversial sociologist who argued for rational choice in religion, died last month at age 88.

Stark made the case that religious conversion, commitment, and cultural vitality should be understood in terms of costs and benefits. He rejected the common assumption that people practice a religion because they agree with the theology, arguing creedal affirmations are secondary to social connections. And he rejected academic accounts of belief as “false consciousness” or fundamentally irrational.

In more than 30 books published across seven decades—including The Churching of America 1776-1990, with Roger Finke; The Future of Religion, with William Sims Bainbridge; and The Rise of Christianity, by himself—Stark countered that religious life wasn’t any different from other human activity. It could only be understood in terms of social connections and people’s rational choices.

“That is the basis for my whole sociology of religion: people are as thoughtful and rational about their religious choices as they are about other choices in life,” Stark once said. “If you assume that people make rational choices about religion, you start seeing how the world works a whole lot better.”

The “rational choice theory,” as it was called, also led Stark to make influential arguments about religious competition and why some movements grow and others decline. According to his research, religious groups that make it easier to join and participate will—counterintuitively—see fewer people join and participate. Those who emphasize their difference and social deviance, on the other hand, will see numbers increase.

“Thousands of articles ...

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Helper: You Keep Using That Word for Women

But it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

A recent LifeWay Research study asked American Protestant pastors if women in their congregations were allowed to take on six specific leadership roles.

Views on preaching were predictably split, but roughly “9 in 10 pastors say women could be ministers to children (94%), committee leaders (92%), ministers to teenagers (89%), or coed adult Bible study teachers (85%) in their churches,” according to Aaron Earls. Fewer (64%) said women could be deacons.

The question of where a woman can serve in church “has been debated for centuries with biblical scholars in different denominations coming to different conclusions about what Scripture means,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research.

The first part of the Bible, in particular, plays a key part. Generations of Christians have looked to the creation stories in Genesis 1 through 3 as the paradigm for gender roles. “As Genesis 1–3 go, so goes the whole Biblical debate,” says Raymond C. Ortlund Jr.

The word “helper” from Genesis 2:18 has long been a hinge-point in these debates. Some use it to argue that a wife’s main role is to support her husband’s leadership. Others deploy it to justify strong views on female submission and service. And still others have construed the idea as softly as possible, saying, “God made man as a gracious leader and woman as an essential helper in marriage.”

But what if we’ve gotten that word wrong? The subservient overtones that often come with it are nowhere to be found in Scripture. And our misinterpretation has gotten us into trouble in how we view male and female roles.

The more accurate take, at least as I see it, is significant to those in both the ...

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Christian Radio Reacts to Ukraine Restrictions on Russian Language

Slavic broadcasters take different approaches as legal and societal efforts to combat propaganda impact worship and evangelism.

A new language law in Ukraine has complicated ministry to Russian-speaking citizens. Comparing restrictions to the Soviet era, one Christian broadcaster is relocating to Budapest, Hungary.

“I don’t want our staff busted on the air for reading the Bible in Russian,” said Dan Johnson, president of Christian Radio for Russia, which operates New Life Radio (NLR) from Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. “We were expecting bombs to wreck our radio operations, but it turned out to be this law.”

Last month, Russian missiles landed one mile from their studio.

But earlier in July, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed into law a near-complete ban on Russian music on radio and television. Passed by parliament with a two-thirds majority, it exempts pre-independence classical artists like Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich as well as modern composers who have condemned the war.

About 65 percent of NLR airtime is music. Though local Christian anthems have inspired many during the war, Johnson said most contemporary worship songs are in Russian, even those originating from Ukraine.

A 2021 national survey identified 22 percent of the Ukrainian population as native Russian speakers, with 36 percent speaking the language primarily at home. Concentrated in the eastern Donbas and southern regions where Russian troops have prioritized attack, there are fears that Moscow is preparing to annex certain occupied areas.

Johnson has fled restrictions before. He moved to Russia in 1991 and by 1996 began radio ministry in Magadan, a featured city in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Kicked out in 2006, he continued ongoing satellite-based radio work in Moscow, broadcasting throughout the former Soviet Union. ...

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Court: HHS Can’t Require Christian Providers Perform Gender Transitions, Abortions

The appellate ruling sides with the Christian Medical and Dental Society and a Catholic hospital system that opposed the federal rule.

The Biden administration has received another setback from a federal court—this time at the appellate level—in its effort to institute transgender rights even at the expense of freedom of conscience.

The US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans blocked last Friday a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rule that required doctors and hospitals to perform gender-transition procedures, as well as abortions. The unanimous opinion by a three-judge panel upheld a 2021 permanent injunction by a federal court in Texas that barred enforcement of the regulation—an action also taken by a federal judge in North Dakota.

The Biden administration’s support for transgender rights experienced another court defeat in July, when a federal judge in Tennessee blocked enforcement of guidelines from the Department of Education (DOE) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) while they are being legally challenged by 20 states. Those rules mandated schools must permit students to use the restrooms and locker rooms, as well as to compete on sports teams, of their gender identity instead of their biological sex.

A Southern Baptist ethics leader cited the Baptist Faith and Message in commending the decision.

“Baptists have long recognized ‘God alone is Lord of the conscience,’” said Brent Leatherwood, acting president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “This ruling adheres to that truth and protects doctors and health-care providers from violating their consciences by conducting gender-transition surgeries or abortions.

“The government must understand that asking medical personnel to go against their sincerely held religious beliefs is an abuse of state ...

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Is Student Loan Forgiveness Biblical?

Christians are divided over whether Biden’s promise to cancel student debt is ethical and just from a scriptural standpoint.

Once President Joe Biden followed up on his promise to cancel $10,000 to $20,000 per borrower in student loan debt for eligible households, Christians responded by invoking a host of biblical references from Old Testament concepts like jubilee to the parables of Jesus in the New Testament.

Over a two-day period last week, searches for debt-related topics surged to 20 times above average on BibleGateway. Four verses—for and against loan forgiveness—were the top-gaining passages on the site:

• Exodus 22:25 — “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.”
• Deuteronomy 23:19 — “Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest.”
• Psalm 37:21 — “The wicked borrow and do not repay, but the righteous give generously.”
• Ecclesiastes 5:5 — “It is better not to make a vow than to make one and not fulfill it.”

Searches for keywords “usury,” “paying debt,” “charging interest,” “debt,” “forgiveness of debt,” “debt paid in full,” and “paying your debts” were up. We heard from three Christian thinkers about how scriptural principles inform our stances on governmental debt forgiveness.

Matt Tebbe, cofounder of Gravity Leadership, author of "Having the Mind of Christ" and Anglican priest in Indianapolis

As Christians, we owe our very existence to debt forgiveness.

Christ loved us by forgiving us the debt of our sins (1 John 4:10), and he commanded us to love each other in the same way (John 13:34). To love as Jesus loves us is to participate in the ...

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Our Quest for Control Has Gotten Out of Control

More and more, it’s causing broken relationships, burnout, and anxiety. But that doesn’t mean we’re called to “let go and let God.”

Over the past few years, I started noticing a pattern in my life.

If my housemates didn’t wash their dishes quickly enough, I would jump in and do them myself.

If my fiancé didn’t communicate weekend plans enough in advance, I would barrage him with a half-dozen ideas and desires.

If my boss started micromanaging me, I retreated into insecurity and passivity.

If the circumstances in my life felt chaotic, I would focus extra attention on diet and exercise.

The thread I noticed was one of control: of other people, my body, my work, or my future. Simultaneously, I was noticing that I experienced regular anxiety over work projects, relational conflicts, or fears about the future. I know I’m not alone. According to one widely cited statistic from the Centers for Disease Control, about one-third of adults experienced symptoms of anxiety during the height of the pandemic.

Others have noticed this connection, including Sharon Hodde Miller, a teaching pastor at Bright City Church in Durham, North Carolina. In her latest book, The Cost of Control: Why We Crave It, the Anxiety It Gives Us, and the Real Power God Promises, Miller examines our often destructive relationship with control and points us to solutions in Christ.

“When the pandemic robbed us of certainty and predictability, it laid bare an idol that had been strangling us, invisibly, for years,” Miller writes. That idol is our illusion of control, which she argues is one underlying reason that our culture is chronically anxious, and many people—not just teenagers!—are feeling the effects of burnout.

Illusions of control

Miller defines control as “the power to influence the world around us and the sense of empowerment that gives.” ...

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Hymns and Neurons: How Worship Rewires Our Brains and Bonds Us Together

Scientific data suggests that singing in community reshapes our physical selves and our corporate connections.

One of the curious results of the COVID-19 lockdown back in 2020 was the opportunity to experiment with what I might call “soul only” worship. This approach prioritizes the invisible activities of the heart and mind over and against the visible activities of the body. According to this mindset, the “real” action of worship takes place in our immaterial spirits, not in these very earthy frames.

But that’s not how God has designed us as human beings, nor how the Spirit of God has wired us to experience corporate worship. It’s the Spirit’s pleasure, I contend, to work not just in our heads and hearts but in and through our physical bodies to form us wholly into Christ’s body.

And because the Spirit is the author of all things natural, not just supernatural, the sciences offer invaluable insights regarding the unique power of communal song to corporeally unite Christians in “Spirited” ways. In our relationally fraught and estranged times, this is good news for the church, I believe.

Here, I’d like to draw attention to two phenomena: entrainment and interactional synchrony.

What is entrainment? As Jeremy Begbie defines it, entrainment is “the synchronization of one rhythmic process with another.” In other words, it describes the way the body gradually syncs with another body or with an external rhythm, often unconsciously.

Entrainment happens all the time in corporate worship, it turns out. A particularly catchy hymn, for instance, may cause a person’s feet to start tapping unconsciously. A rousing rendition of a hip-hop worship song may find a group of people bobbing their heads in a synced way. Or, as the case may be at a ...

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Matt Chandler Steps Aside After Inappropriate Online Relationship

Elders at The Village Church said Instagram direct messages “revealed something unhealthy.”

The Village Church pastor Matt Chandler announced on Sunday that he had an inappropriate online relationship with a woman and is taking an indefinite leave of absence from preaching and teaching.

The relationship was not sexual or romantic, Chandler told his church, but the elders believed the frequent and familiar direct messages exchanged over Instagram were “unguarded and unwise” and “revealed something unhealthy in me.” Chandler said he agreed with their assessment and was grateful for the spiritual oversight.

“We cannot be a church where anyone is above the Scriptures and above the high heavenly call into Christ Jesus,” Chandler said. “The Word of God holds me to a certain standard. And I fell short.”

The Village Church is a large and influential Southern Baptist congregation in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Chandler, 48, has been pastor since 2002 and president of the church-planting network Acts 29 since 2012, when he replaced Mark Driscoll, who was later deemed to be disqualified from leadership because of his personal character.

Chandler has said he and Acts 29 have learned over the years to better guard against narcissistic leaders, both by increased vetting before the pastors sent out to plant a church and by increasing accountability in ministry. In January, he told CT that pastors need to be “in the kind of community [where] they might be encouraged or challenged if you start getting red flags.”

For Chandler, the red flag came “several months ago” when a woman approached him in the foyer of The Village Church with concerns about how he was communicating with a friend of hers, Chandler said. He told the congregation he didn’t think he’d ...

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How Americans Got Away with Abortion Before ‘Roe v. Wade’

Looking ahead, Christians should focus less on enforcement than on changing cultural attitudes.

What does the history of abortion tell us to expect, now that the Supreme Court has decided to give states the option of protecting unborn children? If half the states have protective laws, will the laws be enforced? Or will abortion statutes in many places have as much effect as Section 10-501 of Maryland law (which reads: “[a] A person may not commit adultery. [b] A person who violates this section is guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction shall be fined $10”)?

I cannot find any indication that the state of Maryland is enforcing this law, or that its treasury is bulging from infidelity fines. Enforcement of many laws is disappearing in cities nationwide. For instance, voters in a May referendum in Austin, Texas, where I live, decided in an 86 percent landslide that city police will not arrest anyone found with fewer than four ounces of marijuana.

Initial press coverage of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ominously suggested that governments would prosecute women and even use data from apps that millions of women use to track menstruation. Journalists rarely told stories of instances when an unexpected pregnancy didn’t ruin a life but enriched it. On the other hand, some of my fellow pro-life advocates were triumphalistic, foreseeing an era in which abortions vanish.

Here’s the historical reality: From the 1840s through the 1940s, public opinion concerning abortion was more negative than it is now, but even during that era, enforcement of abortion bans was rare. Millions of abortions occurred during that century, but only a tiny percentage of doctors did prison time. It was hard to get police to arrest, juries to convict, or judges to support jury decisions and turn ...

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Christians Shouldn’t Kill Christians—Even on Death Row

There are lots of reasons to oppose capital punishment. Among them: When a prisoner is a fellow believer.

Recent statistics show that the vast majority of 2022’s executions have or will take place in the Bible Belt, a fact in keeping with broader historical trends. White evangelicals are the strongest supporters of capital punishment in the United States, often drawing on biblical concepts like “an eye for an eye” to justify their position.

In fact, those carrying out the executions sometimes understand themselves as doing God’s work and draw on Christian ideas accordingly. One former prison warden (now the head of Mississippi’s’ corrections system) has regularly spoken of his ministry in offering to pray with prisoners while overseeing their lethal injections.

But as the recent death penalty case of Ramiro Gonzales reminds us, some men and women on death row embrace faith in Christ during their time in prison. More broadly, there are thousands of Christian believers behind bars—many of whom bear the brunt of punitive policies and sentiments that are promoted, in no small part, by some of their fellow American Christians.

And so, while some Christians may see prison primarily as a place where unregenerate souls need saving alongside their harsh punishment, my encounters with incarcerated people have ultimately challenged that perception.

A few years ago, I began volunteering for a North Carolina prison ministry and saw firsthand how God is at work in our nation’s prisons. In fact, the longer I served, the more I realized how much of the incarcerated population already includes our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

Such men and women should be seen not solely as those in need of our ministry focus but as ministers themselves—doing gospel work and offering examples of faithfulness ...

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Prison Ministries Try to Break Back in After COVID-19

Staffing shortages and ongoing pandemic restrictions have kept volunteers out—and left the incarcerated craving the kind of spiritual support they had before.

James Hyson hasn’t had access to ministries, classes, or mentoring groups since before the pandemic.

That’s because the ministry staff who volunteer at the New Jersey prison where he is incarcerated haven’t been able to return.

Though pandemic restrictions have loosened in most parts of American life, many state prisons and jails still limit outside volunteers. Ministries reported to CT that states have either not lifted their 2020 ban on volunteers, blocked volunteers whenever there is a COVID-19 outbreak, or cut the number of volunteers allowed in.

Some states and individual facilities have restored full access to volunteers—ministry leaders reported Michigan, Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma were very open—but many across the country still cannot get through prison doors.

Jumpstart, a ministry that works in 17 prisons in South Carolina, cannot access 75 percent of the facilities it serves right now because they remain in lockdown. Kairos Prison Ministry, which operates in 37 states, said it still can’t send volunteers into Connecticut facilities.

State prisons and local jails—which house the vast majority of the 1.9 million people incarcerated in the US—have been slower to open up than federal prisons, which have been letting volunteers back in since November 2020.

“There are certain things out of our control, and we have to trust God to provide. We would love to be in there and be ministering and providing tools,” said Evelyn Lemly, the CEO of Kairos Prison Ministry. “But we honor and recognize that it’s [the state’s] house. And we serve at their pleasure.”

Prison ministries, motivated by the scriptural call to “remember those in prison,” ...

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Filled with the Spirit amid the Hungry Ghosts

As the Chinese festival ends, theologians explain why pneumatology matters more in Asia.

On the 15th day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar, the gates of hell fling open and ghosts roam the earth freely to visit their living relatives.

Or so goes the origin story of the Hungry Ghost Festival, a day celebrated predominantly by the Chinese diaspora across East and Southeast Asia. It occurs during Ghost Month, which began on July 26 and concludes on August 26 this year.

While the Hungry Ghost Festival is often said to have Buddhist roots, it is more accurately described as a Chinese folk religion arising from Taoism, says Justin Tan, coeditor of Spirit Wind: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in Global Theology—A Chinese Perspective.

“In folk religions, good and evil is always around you,” he explained. “There [is a sense that] demons and angels are everywhere.”

Many Asian Christian leaders would agree with that sentiment. But most believe celebrating the holiday seems to raise ghosts to the level of God. Instead, this month serves as an important time for the church to reflect on its own convictions about spirits and the Holy Ghost himself.

This starts with Chinese Christians openly acknowledging the existence of the spirit world, says Tan.

“This is an active power in Asia, so we have to tackle it,” he said. “In the West, you can say that you don’t need to care about this. You have to in Asia. We reject it to our own disadvantage.”

Defending and honoring

An all-pervading awareness of the spirit world often leads people to feel afraid that evil spirits—“hungry ghosts” that experienced unfortunate or violent deaths or committed bad deeds in their lives—may attack them during Ghost Month. Countless websites ...

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AI Can Preach and Sing. So Why Can’t It Worship God?

Why praising the Most High requires a physical body.

Visit the Kodaiji Temple in Tokyo, Japan, and a six-feet-four, 132-pound robot priest named Mindar will give you a 25-minute sermon on Heart Sutra. Mindar’s ability to preach suggests a near future where artificial intelligence (AI) robots broadly replace human religious leaders.

Christian churches may soon be considering how AI and smart machines can shape their liturgies. One case in point is a Christian AI musician created by Marquis Boone Enterprises. Based on software algorithms, this AI musician recognizes different patterns of songs and composes new ones through replication of the patterns.

But does AI’s ability to replicate religious service elements mean that it is capable of worship or leading religious gatherings? Or does the relationship between our bodies and our consciousness give us a unique capability to praise the God who made us in psychosomatic unity?

Never independent

The hope for human-level AI and the concern about AI robot ministers are both largely rooted in the conviction that human consciousness can be reproduced through emulating the human brain. In the past several decades, AI researchers have developed artificial neural networks (ANNs), also known as simulated neural networks. These neural networks are silicon-based systems––contra the carbon-based human brain––and comprised of many interconnected nodes. The nodes mimic biological neurons and work together to perform functions of the human brain in AI systems.

Those endorsing conscious AI see ANNs and the human brain as computers. They more often than not blur the distinction between human consciousness and artificial consciousness. For example, some advocates of the computational model of the brain even argue ...

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Christian Colleges Look for ‘Missing Men’

Faced with overall enrollment declines, schools are working to close higher education’s gender gap.

Indiana Wesleyan University didn’t start a football team just to boost male enrollment, but it was a factor.

The evangelical college is also starting an engineering program with the same issue in mind.

“Not that engineering is only for male students, but we know historically schools that have engineering draw a higher percentage of male students,” said Chad Peters, the vice president of enrollment management and marketing at IWU.

As evangelical colleges and universities across the country worry about overall enrollment declines, many schools are especially worried about “missing men.” Women in the US currently earn six out of every 10 degrees, and the gender gap has widened with the pandemic. Male undergraduate enrollment dropped by 5 percent in fall of 2020, compared to a less than 1 percent decrease among women.

And for men who do enroll in college, only about 40 percent earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, compared to half of women.

The Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) has formed a Commission for Innovative Enrollment and Marketing in part to brainstorm ways to increase the number of men in higher education. Indiana Wesleyan is one of 10 CCCU-affiliated institutions that are part of the commission.

“We've really tried to stabilize our recruitment processes and systems to make sure that we looked at any gaps or internal processes keeping us from serving students and families,” Peters said.

Evangelical colleges face the same challenges as secular schools in enrolling men, school officials told CT. CCCU schools frequently adopt or adapt the strategies piloted at secular institutions to enroll ...

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Prayer in Ukraine After Six Months of War

On national independence day, evangelical leaders reflect upon their answered and unanswered petitions to God.

On the six-month anniversary of Russia’s invasion, today Ukraine marked a somber national holiday. Last year on August 24, large crowds flooded Kyiv to celebrate 30 years of independence from the Soviet Union.

For year 31, Ukrainians were ordered indoors—yet remain defiant.

“On Feb. 24, we were told: You have no chance,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky, encouraging the nation. “On Aug. 24, we say: Happy Independence Day, Ukraine!”

President Joe Biden also bolstered Ukrainian spirits with an announcement of $3 billion in new military aid. The American leader noted the “bittersweet” holiday as he praised the nation’s resiliency and pride in the face of Russia’s “relentless attacks.”

The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) called for prayer.

“On this day of independence, we want to declare our dependence on God,” it stated on behalf of Ukraine, “the One who can bring true peace to the hearts of each individual person, each family, and even entire peoples.”

Joined by the affiliated European Evangelical Alliance, the WEA petition specified prayers to end the suffering, to spare the world from further repercussions, to strengthen the church’s response, and to marshal peace not through weapons, but through prayer.

Ukraine must defend itself, the WEA clarified; but Christians have a deeper hope.

“Throughout history, God has changed hopeless and dire situations in surprising ways,” stated the petition. “Let us also pray for healing and for reconciliation, and that Russia and Ukraine could live in peace as independent, sovereign nations.”

An accompanying guide for parents offers similar prayers for children.

It will not ...

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Kallistos Ware: Theologian Who Explained the Orthodox Way to Other Christians

English bishop and Oxford scholar cultivated unity, dialogue, and respect between the ancient faith and evangelicals.

As Orthodox Christians commemorate Metropolitan Archbishop Kallistos Ware, who fell asleep in the Lord early Wednesday morning in England at age 88, evangelicals also have a loss to mourn and reason to pray, as Orthodox funerals do, “May his memory be eternal.”

Born Timothy Ware in 1934 and raised in an Anglican family, he converted at age 24 and became one of the most influential Eastern Orthodox theologians in the English-speaking world in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

His most famous books were The Orthodox Church, the standard introductory textbook for nearly 60 years; The Orthodox Way; and The Philokalia, a classic text of Orthodox spirituality which he co-translated. He served as the Spaulding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies at Oxford University for 35 years until his retirement in 2001, and many of his doctoral students acquired influential posts.

After Oxford, Ware continued to publish but focused the remaining years of his life on strengthening the internal life of the Orthodox Church and on building bridges with non-Orthodox Christians, including Catholics, Anglicans, and evangelicals. A person like him only comes around once in a century.

Bishop Kallistos’ work changed the landscape between Orthodoxy and evangelicalism, and his contributions can best be understood by situating them at a time when evangelicals first developed interest in the ancient faith.

This interest began indirectly in the 1970s with Robert Webber, a theology professor at Wheaton College. His writings made the early church attractive to evangelicals by stressing the positive role of church tradition and liturgical forms of worship. He also documented a sizable movement of evangelicals into Anglicanism in his book, Evangelicals ...

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Shame Off You: How God’s Love Lifts the Guilt of Trauma

The gospel message redeemed my childhood pain.

Over the last several years, the abuse crisis has brought the phrase trauma informed into our sanctuaries and homes. Pastors and layleaders are learning to understand trauma alongside the victims in their midst. Families and friends are doing it too. But what does awareness actually mean, and where does it start?

In my experience, those who’ve experienced injury often struggle with realizing something simple: It’s not my fault.

As a pastor, I’ve had many conversations with congregants who’ve been subjected to various kinds of serious abuse. Somehow in the process, they’ve internalized responsibility for the mistreatment. Women who’ve been exploited by powerful men feel they’re somehow to blame and are often too afraid to speak up due to fear and shame. Young adults reeling from years of sexual exploitation turn in on themselves, only deepening their wounds.

That’s the agonizing truth about suffering: Not only do we carry the pain of being hurt, but we often bear the internal condemnation as well.

In a broken world, trauma—and the attending shame—will continue to be with us. But, by the grace of God, it doesn’t have to consume us. It can be redeemed. For all its strangeness, that is the good news of the gospel.

I’ve discovered that good news in my own life journey.

When I was growing up, my family was very wealthy. Our wealth, however, was notmeasured in padded bank accounts, large homes, or expensive cars. In fact, we were quite poor as far as money was concerned. Our wealth was measured in joy, love, and warmth.

For several years, our family was on public assistance to help make ends meet. Back then, government funds were not put on a debit card. Instead, ...

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Stopping Abuse Is Sexual Ethics 101

Christian efforts to protect the body often fail to protect women.

As the abuse crisis roils American evangelicalism, church leaders are finally paying attention, if only because the accretion of cases is now impossible to ignore.

Commentators on the Left have eyes on it, too. Among the various cries, some progressives are calling out Christian conservatives for policing the issue of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) while simultaneously dismissing abused women in their own midst.

“Youth leaders were fondling us and raping us and shaming us into silence,” said Julie Rodgers at the start of the #churchtoo movement. “Meanwhile, we heard the gays were the greatest threat to the church and society.”

“If the SBC hated abusers as much as they do gay people … we literally wouldn’t be having this conversation today,” tweeted Matthew Manchester in response to the recent Southern Baptist Convention report revealing widespread abuse and coverup. Others have voiced similar concerns about “a perverse double standard.”

Although the Left’s view of sex is misguided, their critique still carries weight. Christians should not complain about the sexualization of culture while simultaneously ignoring the sexualization of women inside the church.

We’re looking at “the largest crisis of institutional religion in the United States,” according to Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, and that crisis has been caused in part by Christians losing sight of the fundamentals. While biblical sexual ethics most definitely apply to SOGI—as well as marriage and singleness—they start with the simple act of protecting women and men from exploitation. Everything else follows from that.

Put another way: Abuse prevention ...

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New Zealand Authorities Investigating Nation’s Largest Megachurch

Arise Church leadership said it was going to “listen and learn,” but its senior pastors tried to stop publication of a report on allegations of intern abuse.

New Zealand’s largest megachurch is being investigated by the country’s Department of Internal Affairs following a damning report that the church commissioned but then refused to release.According to the 49-page report, there were “egregious and systemic” failures in the leadership of Arise Church. The independent review, conducted by Pathfinding, a Christian critical response management company, called for board resignations and new leadership to address widespread problems, including the ill-treatment of volunteers and interns enrolled in the Arise Ministry School.

Interns were reportedly asked to work excessively long hours and do cleaning, driving, babysitting, and gardening for pastors. There were also allegations of sexual harassment, bullying, and manipulation. Pathfinding surveyed 545 current and former members of Arise, a 10,000-member, 13-campus Pentecostal church.

Senior pastor John Cameron, who was also chair of the board and had sole authority to approve new board members, has previously admitted the church “allowed a culture of performance … and this negatively affected Arise Ministry School students.”

When he announced in April that he was “stepping aside from his pastoral duties” and Pathfinding was opening the independent review, he promised that things would change.

“We are going to listen and learn,” Cameron said. “We are open for dialogue, and will be making the organizational changes recommended.”

The following month, Cameron resigned as senior pastor. In July, Pathfinding made 92 recommendations. They ranged from the formation of a Māori group to encourage diversity to an independent review of the church’s finances and pastors’ ...

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Salman Rushdie Is the Canary in a Free Speech Coal Mine

But the liberty at stake is moral and spiritual, not just intellectual.

In the days since a brutal attack on Salman Rushdie, the world has seen an outpouring of solidarity. The phrase “We are all Salman Rushdie” appeared on Twitter profiles and in countless articles, acknowledging that threats to one person’s freedom of expression are a threat to all.

In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik anticipated efforts “to somehow equalize or level the acts of Rushdie and his tormentors and would-be executioners.” That approach is despicable, he wrote, “because the right to be insulting about other people’s religions … is a fundamental right, part of the inheritance of the human spirit. Without that right of open discourse, intellectual life devolves into mere cruelty and power seeking.”

In The Atlantic, Graeme Wood eviscerated “those who muddle the distinction between offense and violence, and between a disagreement over ideas and a disagreement over whether your head should remain attached to your body.” He continued, “Now that Rushdie’s head has been partially detached, and on American soil, I hope these distinctions will need no further elaboration.”

These articles, like countless others, anticipated mealy-mouthed responses condemning the attacks while suggesting the novelist maybe had it coming. But instead of that debate, the attack has renewed extant culture wars related to moral boundaries and who draws them.

School boards across the country are a particularly combustible battleground. Phrases like “cultural genocide,” “erasure,” “heteronormativity,” and “CRT” are hurled like grenades at board members responsible for adjudicating objections to curricula ...

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Most Evangelical Pastors Say Women Can Lead Bible Studies, Ministries

In a recent survey, Baptists are the least likely to endorse women in deacon or senior pastor roles.

Most Protestant pastors say a woman could be the senior pastor at their church, but that varies dramatically among denominational groups.

A Lifeway Research study asked US Protestant pastors about six potential leadership roles and if women are permitted to hold them in their congregations. While a slight majority say the position of senior pastor is open to women, a broader consensus exists for other positions.

Close to 9 in 10 pastors say women could be ministers to children (94%), committee leaders (92%), ministers to teenagers (89%), or coed adult Bible study teachers (85%) in their churches. Fewer say a woman could be a deacon (64%) or senior pastor (55%), while 1 percent say none of these roles are open to women. Fewer than 1 percent say they are not sure.

“Someone without context may think differences of opinion on where women can serve in church are simply fickle or archaic perspectives. But these are not questions of opinion as much as biblical interpretation,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. “This question has been debated for centuries with biblical scholars in different denominations coming to different conclusions about what Scripture means.”

Denominational differences

Due to specific convictions about biblical interpretation, different Protestant denominations have varying levels of openness to women serving in certain leadership positions. In general, pastors at mainline congregations say their churches have fewer restrictions on the roles in which a woman can serve compared to evangelical churches.

Large majorities of pastors at both evangelical and mainline churches say women can be ministers to children (94% and 97%), committee leaders (93% and 95%), ministers ...

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Save the Girl: India’s Christians Lead Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs on Ending Gendercide

With 9 million girls “missing” due to sex-selective abortions over the past two decades, Pew report examines changes in “son preference” or “daughter aversion” among India’s biggest faiths.

Nine million girls have gone “missing” in India over the past two decades due to sex-selective abortions, according to a new report on sex ratios and gendercide in the world’s second-most populous nation.

The problem rests mainly within the Hindu and Sikh communities, according to government-backed data, while the subcontinent’s Christians have maintained a “natural balance” of sons and daughters since 2001, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released today.

Pew estimates that Christians account for 53,000 of the “missing” girls in India, whereas Hindus account for 7.8 million, Muslims account for 590,000, Sikhs account for 440,000, and other religious groups such as Buddhists and Jains account for 110,000. (The tally for Hindus and Sikhs was disproportionately high compared to their share of the population.)

However, bias toward sons is waning among all religious groups in India, and researchers concluded the number of missing girls has dropped annually from about 480,000 in 2010 to about 410,000 in 2019.

“The new data suggests that Indian families are becoming less likely to use abortions to ensure the birth of sons rather than daughters,” stated Pew research associate Yunping Tong. “This follows years of government efforts to curb sex selection—including a ban on prenatal sex tests and a massive advertising campaign urging parents to ‘save the girl child’—and coincides with broader social changes such as rising education and wealth.”

Pew’s latest report on religion in India examines the sex ratio at birth among Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs, as other religious communities were too small to study. The report ...

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There Are Many Mansions in Heaven, but We’d Like Something Sooner

How US homebuyer woes can reorient us toward the eternal.

I refresh my email compulsively, stealing moments between toddler snacks and sunscreen reapplications, cracking open a LaCroix as I scroll through my inbox. When my real estate agent’s name pops up, my heart skips a beat. Each email from her, or rather from the automated home listing search she set up for us under her name, is bursting with possibility: Would it be brick? Stone? Would there be a butler’s pantry, or a mudroom for catching our family’s wellies and coats and dog leashes and backpacks?

The longer I wait, it seems, the more elaborate my imagined forever home becomes. A big tree fit for a tire swing! A kitchen garden! A soaking tub!

But time and time again, the home in my inbox underwhelms. It is overpriced or ugly or in need of more repairs than financially sensible—or more often than not, all three. When something within our (reluctantly stretching) budget finally catches our eye, we call our agent immediately—only to find the property is already under contract. Sight unseen. All cash.

The real estate world calls this a “seller’s market.” I call it the slow death of my forever-home dreams.

We sold our first home, nestled in a quaint and desirable neighborhood just outside Washington, DC, in the summer of 2020. The offer we accepted for the small craftsman, where we brought home both of our babies, was well above asking price (all contingencies waived). We were flying high.

Armed with the confidence that comes from a great investment and a wad of cash to put toward our next down payment, we traded a walkable coffee shop and innumerable takeout options for a rental home in the country with wide-open green spaces and a farmer’s market down the road. The plan was ...

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Four Out of Five Victims Don’t Report Sexual Assault. Can Christian Colleges Do Better?

Title IX coordinators look for ways to combat silence and shame.

Only two Anderson University students have filed reports on sexual violence or harassment so far this year, according to Title IX coordinator Dianne King.

That number might seem encouraging, but King is actually worried about it. Just because someone doesn’t report something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Anderson is a private liberal arts college affiliated with the South Carolina Baptist Convention. The school, like all colleges and universities that receive federal funding, is required to enforce Title IX, a federal civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination. That includes tracking sexual violence and attempting to prevent it.

That’s a challenge for every college and university. And some Christian schools may inadvertently discourage reporting, with policies that prohibit all alcohol, drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage. That can leave coordinators like King second-guessing their own data.

“There are students who are having sex. We know that, and that there are those who misbehave in a sexual manner, whether it’s sexual harassment, sexual assault, stalking, or interpersonal violence,” King told CT. “We have those things here.”

There is some evidence that sexual assault is slightlyless likely at religious colleges, though numbers are hard to come by. Overall, more than 26 percent of female undergraduates experience rape or sexual assault, according to statistics from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). But the same data shows that only about 1 out of every 5 female students who are assaulted report it to authorities—and the reporting percentage is even lower among the 7 percent of male undergraduates who are raped or assaulted. ...

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Don’t Run for the School Board

Education is important. But the answer lies in family discipleship, not culture wars.

Back to school this election year will mean back to school-board battles. Back to viral clips of distraught parents reaming out officials; back to politicized debates about parental rights; back to enjoinders, both earnest and conniving, for evangelicals and political conservatives to take over their school districts because America’s future depends on it.

This is but the latest iteration of a longstanding strategy, the result of primary education’s re-emergence as a source of partisan realignment in the last two years, significantly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The basic argument is familiar culture-war fodder.

When I was an evangelical kid in the 1990s, worries around the moral devolution of American public schools felt ubiquitous. Then controversies emerged over evolution, sex ed, and school prayer. America was in trouble because we’d “taken God out of schools.” Now the focus is policies and curricula on race and gender. Again we hear that America is in trouble because we’ve “taken God out of schools” and that the solution is to claim political power and force God back into the schoolhouse.

There’s a compelling logic to this plan. Whatever your politics, the core idea of joining or regularly lobbying the school board to improve our kids’ education has an obvious appeal. Who doesn’t want their child’s schooling to be virtuous, rigorous, and healthy? It may seem not only sensible but glaringly obvious to seize this power where available.

But what if culture war is the wrong approach entirely? What if we’re confusing a symptom for the illness itself and therefore applying a mistaken remedy?

More than 70 years ago, C. S. Lewis confronted very similar ...

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Father Stan Swamy: Courageous Indian Priest Accused of Terrorism

He fought the government over how it treated its most vulnerable. They hit back.

On January 1, 1818, the British-led army of 800 Dalit soldiers defeated a 2,000-person battalion composed almost entirely of high-caste Brahmin elite. The battle was one of the many confrontations that ultimately led to the British overthrow of the ruling Peshwa. Today, thousands of Dalits gather annually in the village of Bhima Koregaon, in the modern-day West Indian state of Maharashtra, to commemorate the anniversary of the group’s victory there.

In the months leading up to the 2018 battle bicentennial, high-caste Maratha and right-wing Hindu groups began to voice displeasure with the planned celebration, arguing it was an anti-national act to celebrate the victory of the British. On the first day of the year, hundreds of thousands of celebrators and protesters arrived. Clashes broke out between Maratha and the lower-caste Mahar, killing one person and injuring five.

Initially police investigated Hindutva leaders as possible instigators of the violence. But within six months, they identified new culprits: human rights activists and attorneys who had organized a public meeting that they called Elgaar Parishad on December 31, 2017, in the city of Pune.

Over the course of the next couple years, the police arrested 16 human right defenders, social activists, attorneys, and church leaders—including Father Stanislaus Lourduswamy, the oldest person to be accused of terrorism in the country.

A priest who stood up for the rights of tribal and Dalit youth in East India, Father Stan Swamy insisted he had never attended Elgaar Parishad, yet he remained under police custody for months. Then, last summer, he died while still incarcerated. He was 84.

A fight for justice

At the time of his death, Swamy (also known as Father Stan) ...

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Chine McDonald on the UK’s ‘Beautifully Messy’ Diverse Churches

The author and new director of Theos offers a look at the race and faith conversation from the other side of the pond.

They didn’t teach her about James Cone at Cambridge.

Chine McDonald says she came late to the Black theologian but wishes she had been reading him at university. Lately, more Black American authors have stacked up on her book shelf: Esau McCaulley, Austin Channing Brown, Dante Stewart.

McDonald—the new director of the London-based evangelical think tank Theos—is one of the most prominent Black evangelical voices in Britain, but she has one eye gazing across the pond as she considers the dynamics of race and faith in her home country.

“I think one of the differences is that in the UK we have fooled ourselves to thinking we’re not like [America],” she told CT. “The past few years are showing us that actually we haven’t moved as forward as we would have liked to in terms of race and racial justice in our country.”

For one, “there’s almost this unwritten understanding in the UK that you can never be British if you’re not white,” she remarked.

Yet, Black Christians like McDonald represent one of the most vibrant and growing segments of the British church. Black-majority churches, filled with third- and fourth-generation immigrants, are responsible for boosting church attendance and growth in London as Anglican parishes shrink. McDonald spoke with CT in 2019 about how the growth of African and West Indian Christianity is changing the UK.

Both in England, where she grew up, and in Nigeria, where she was born, McDonald’s faith came through a British cultural lens. It wasn’t until her 20s that she began to rethink the expectations that came with it. Last year, she wrote a book called God is Not a White Man: And Other Revelations.

“I write about ...

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TobyMac ‘Put Words to Grief’ in First Album Since His Son’s Death

His DC Talk bandmates are back as collaborators.

Since Truett McKeehan, an aspiring rapper, died at age 21 in 2019 after an accidental drug overdose, his father, the Grammy-winning Christian artist TobyMac (also known as Toby McKeehan), has not produced much original music, releasing a few “lost” demos and a concert recording that included “21 Years,” a song mourning the loss of Truett.

Now, a new album reflecting the trajectory the songwriter has traveled in the almost three years since the death of his oldest son was released on Friday, a collaboration with Truett’s sister, Marlee, Sheryl Crow, and TobyMac’s former bandmates from DC Talk—the Christian rap trio formed at Liberty University that launched TobyMac’s career.

Life After Death is filled with songs of lament and sadness, as well as a mourning father’s declaration about the goodness of God.

“God has been kind enough to show me that there is life after death,” TobyMac told an intimate gathering of dozens of fans, staff, and donors at WGTS, a Christian music radio station in Rockville, Maryland, on the night before the album’s release. “It’s hard to even say because I almost at times don’t want life. I think I’m cheating somehow on my son. But somehow or another I’ve learned that God is good.”

But in an indication that the album’s title refers to those Truett left behind, TobyMac points to a song he performs with DC Talk veterans Michael Tait and Kevin Max.

“The second verse on that song is my favorite lyric on the record,” said TobyMac. “It says: ‘Would you step across a party line? Would you walk into my cold cell? Can you see me in a different light? Would you meet me at the well?’” ...

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Chinese Christian Pop Star G.E.M.’s New Song Is Courageous

Deng Ziqi’s “Gloria” music video embeds gospel messages and shares a journey from wasteland to gospel hope.

In July 2022, the singer G.E.M., Chinese name 邓紫棋 (Deng Ziqi), released her 14-track album Revelation. On August 9, the music video of the album’s first song, “Gloria,” was released online. G.E.M. also recorded and released a short video sharing her spiritual journey in the creation of the song.

Deng, nicknamed “China’s Taylor Swift,” is one of China’s most popular and successful female singers. She is a Christian who has openly talked about her faith on social media. She said in the recorded message that “Gloria” was actually her real English name, given to her by her father when she was a child. She liked this name very much since childhood “because it feels like being full of glory” and she named the song after her real name to “present the real me to everyone without framing.”

The background of most scenes in the “Gloria” music video is a gray, desolate wasteland. The computer-generated imagery creates a vibe of the metaverse. The singer stands in the wasteland, with tears “falling into the wilderness.” She walks into the “Afterland” only to find it is not paradise but a place full of pain and numbness.

However, the light of hope gently shines through, and the singer hears a whisper from heaven that was “indistinct and healing.” She slowly turns around and walks through ruins to a seaside where the dawn is emerging. The background begins to change color. As the singer is moved to tears and kneels to pray, the sea parts. As the lyrics of “I’m waiting for you, waiting for you to come back” play, she walks toward a glowing door.

Deng said that she hopes the visual effects of the music ...

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A Nonconservative’s Plea to Those Leaving Conservative Churches

Roger Olson sympathizes with liberal leavers, but he draws the line at liberal theology.

In the preface of Roger Olson’s new book, Against Liberal Theology, we meet a particular type of exvangelical all too familiar in this age of disillusionment and deconstruction. As Olson describes this tribe, “They grew up in fundamentalist churches, found them stifling, anti-intellectual, legalistic, whatever, and rushed past the middle ground to the opposite end of the Christian spectrum, to liberal Christianity.”

These people haunt him. Olson fully sympathizes with their desire to escape the militant dogmatism of churches on the far-right fringe. But he is baffled by the flying leap they have taken from one extreme position to its opposite. It is a leap that carries them over the broad fields of Christianity itself, skimming lightly past every actual position of any churches along the entire scale of theological possibilities.

Why not touch down somewhere before the antipode? Olson is vexed by this quantum leap. But he is more vexed by the actual landing point: the position known as liberal theology, against which he has written this short book.

Cutting the cord

The book’s title is admirably clear about its main goal. Olson’s thesis is “that liberal Christianity has cut the cord of continuity with the Christian past, orthodoxy, so thoroughly that it ought to be considered a different religion.” But the book also has a secondary goal, indicated in the subtitle: “Putting the Brakes on Progressive Christianity.”

About this thing called progressive Christianity—“whatever that means, exactly,” as Olson mutters in one aside—the book has very little to say. He is not sure that the phrase has any specific meaning, and he suggests that it is “simply ...

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Interview: Meet the Christian Rap Duo from ‘Reservation Dogs’

Hip hop artists Lil Mike and Funny Bone got their start performing at churches. Now they’re acting on FX’s critically acclaimed television series.

When Lil Mike and Funny Bone (who perform as the hip-hop duo Mike Bone) auditioned for the television show Reservation Dogs, they never expected the series to gain much attention outside the Native American community.

Co-created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, the show follows the lives of four Native American teens in Oklahoma and finds humor in some of the dark realities of reservation life. Now in its second season on FX, the critically acclaimed series received a Peabody and has been nominated for numerous other awards.

Fans of the show may not know that Lil Mike and Funny Bone—who appear as Mose and Mekko, respectively—have been Christian hip-hop artists for nearly 25 years. Using a style that draws together rap, dance, and comedy, they got their start performing at churches and house parties and eventually appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2013.

CT spoke recently with the duo about using music to fight Satan, throwing pajama parties for Jesus, and working on Reservation Dogs.

Some of our readers will be familiar with you through the show Reservation Dogs, but they may not know about your musical work and careers up to this point. How long have you been making music as Mike Bone, and how did you get started?

Lil Mike: So I started making music in 1992, and it was a form of therapy. I had anger issues. I would black out and try to hurt people. So, they told me, write out your problems instead of acting out. In 1997, we joined together. Funny Bone came and got in and did some comedy.

Funny Bone: Yeah, I would jump on stage and do something funny while he was switching out songs. And then I slowly started to write my own rhymes. I got some skits on different tracks where I’m like slapping Satan, ...

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Egypt Church Fire Kills 41, Sparks Blame of Building Law’s Legacy

Reforms have legalized 2,400 Christian structures, yet Abu Seifein represents problems from when construction and repair permits were impossible to obtain.

As Egypt reels from the tragic church fire that killed 41 worshipers on Sunday, many search for where to put the blame.

“God forgive the fire department,” said Ishak Henin, a deacon at Abu Seifein Coptic Orthodox Church in Imbaba, a dense urban neighborhood of Cairo. “If they had come earlier, they could have saved more people.”

Egyptian authorities stated they arrived almost immediately after the 9 a.m. fire was first reported. Eyewitness testimony varied; some stated 15 minutes, others over two hours.

Abu Seifein means “the father of two swords” and is the Arabic moniker for second-century martyr Saint Mercurius, whose icon reflects his military origins.

But the word church may give the wrong impression to overseas audiences, as the sanctuary was located between ground floor shops and towering residences. Illegally repurposed in 2007 from one of many tightly packed apartment complexes, the now-charred chapel traced back to an era when Egyptian Christians were unable to obtain permits to build new houses of worship.

The law was changed in 2016, and a Coptic legal expert stated Abu Seifein was officially licensed in 2019. Since the latest batch in April, the slow-moving process has now legalized 2,401 churches and affiliated service centers.

Yet many remain in their original condition, below safety codes, and according to the law full legality can only come once all regulations are satisfied.

Abu Seifein's four-story building housed two daycare facilities, and 18 children died in the blaze. Around 100 people were present at worship that morning; authorities stated most deaths—which included the local priest—were caused by smoke inhalation and the resulting stampede.

One family ...

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Ukrainian Seminary President: 400 Baptist Churches Gone

As refugees flee, the war-torn country is left in a pastoral leadership crisis.

About 400 Ukrainian Baptist congregations have been lost in Russia’s war on Ukraine, said Ukrainian Baptist Theological Seminary (UBTS) president Yaroslav Pyzh, who is working to restore pastoral leadership to impacted cities.

While volunteers at six humanitarian relief We Care Centers across Ukraine are helping internally displaced people winterize their homes, replacing roofs, windows, and doors, Pyzh said the real challenge for UBTS is to rebuild pastoral leadership in places pastors have been displaced.

“Since the war started, six months already, we lost about 400 Baptist churches. And so the real build is the rebuilding of leadership capacity, because if you rebuild buildings and you have no pastors to lead churches, I don’t think it’s going to do any good,” Pyzh, a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, told Baptist Press last week. “So the real challenge is not so much rebuilding walls and windows and doors.”

“The real challenge is similar to Nehemiah’s challenge,” he said, referencing the biblical story of Nehemiah. “It’s not only rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. It’s rebuilding the nation of Israel, of worshiping God. … That’s the same thing here in Ukraine.”

Many pastors were displaced from war-torn areas, Pyzh said, leaving no one to bring godly hope in the midst of fear and hopelessness. About 2,300 Baptist congregations existed across Ukraine before the war began in February, according to the All-Ukrainian Union of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists.

“Our main challenge in the future, when the war will be over, is to bridge the gap in leadership that we lost,” ...

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4 Sri Lankan Christians Seeking Their Nation’s Rebirth

How believers are living out their faith amid unprecedented political upheaval.

On July 9, after months of taking to the streets, Sri Lanka protesters successfully pressured President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign and flee the country. Demonstrations began in early April as prices of fuel, food, and medicine began to soar.

Gotabaya’s tenure, which began in 2019, failed to mitigate much of the damage that his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa had put in place when he served as president from 2005 to 2015. Corruption and disastrous economic policies characterized their respective administrations. COVID-19 dealt the final blow to an already struggling, poorly managed economy, with Sri Lanka even defaulting on external debt for the first time in its history. No one in the island nation of 22 million people has emerged unscathed.

“For the first time in my living memory, the protests have united people from all walks of life and all ethnic and religious communities,” said Christian political blogger and International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) leader Vinoth Ramachandra.

This includes Christians, who comprise 7.4 percent of the population (evangelicals comprise less than 2 percent). Despite suffering persecution and scores of casualties in 2019 terrorist attacks, many have felt compelled to come alongside their countrypeople in this political moment.

“What better way to love God and love our neighbor as we love ourselves than to work towards the much-needed change in this country, from governance to the grassroots—a cultural change that will lead to a ‘system change,’” said Nadishani Perera, head of the Sri Lanka chapter of Transparency International. “To speak for those who cannot speak, to share our resources with those who have none, as God loves them ...

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Does Jesus Wear Undies?

My kids ask the darndest theological questions—putting my seminary degree to the test.

I was six months pregnant when I walked across Fuller Seminary’s commencement stage in 2012. Underneath the cap and gown, my mind and body felt full: the former with all the theology I’d read to complete my master’s degree, and the latter with anticipation for my forthcoming life as a mother.

After graduation and before my first daughter was born, I had a dream of propping her up on my lap to look at an ABC board book that began with Augustine and ended with Zizioulas. This was, I think, my psyche’s way of creating some continuity from one chapter of life to the next. But as all new parents can attest, babies don’t work like that.

Arriving a little past her due date at just past 3 a.m., my firstborn was a healthy, pink tornado that ripped through my orderly and cerebral life. Then three years later, my second daughter, Olivia, was born.

For an exhausting decade, my husband and I have juggled two kids and two full-time jobs with little time between sending emails and changing diapers (and then Pull-Ups and big-girl britches) to read theological texts.

I’ve got what many call the “mommy brain”—I’m a whiz at detangling bedhead hair, getting slime out of the carpet, and making Razzle Dazzle Berry Smoothies, but I’d be hard pressed to describe the variety of atonement theories I learned about in Systematic Theology II.

Yet even if I had remained in tiptop intellectual shape, explaining the Christian faith to my daughters would likely be just as mind-bending as it is now.

Why? Because children make for a unique audience, quite unlike what you’d find in most seminary classrooms—they are simultaneously “religious” and “secular.” ...

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Why Theologians Aren’t as Excited About Chinese Christianity’s Growth as Sociologists

Success for the church looks different depending on your discipline.

On March 1, the Chinese government enacted wide-ranging restrictions on religious communication, teaching, and evangelistic efforts conducted online. Now, only religious groups with government approval can carry out such activities.

Various media outlets around the world shared this news, which is unsurprising. When we think or talk about Christianity in China, its social impact and implications for issues such as human rights and China’s international relations—rather than its pastoral and theological developments and challenges—have received disproportionately large attention in the Western press in the recent decades.

There are many methods and approaches we can apply in observing and interpreting Christianity in China. But this leads to a larger question: How do we read Christianity in general? Religion is a complex social phenomenon, and different disciplines can draw varying—even opposite—conclusions about it. More issues arise when scholars in one discipline begin to cross the boundaries of other fields of study and claim universal applicability for their conclusions.

Church and state relations in the West

A good example of this is how differently theologians and sociologists approach and evaluate the establishment of classical Christendom in the West.

Traditionally, theologians have viewed the church’s transition from a persecuted minority to the state religion as a great triumph. However, in recent decades, they are increasingly considering it a tragedy and betrayal of the vision of the early church.

On the other hand, certain sociologists’ growing interest in early Christianity has led to assessments of the church’s transition from minority to ...

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