Brother Andrew Changed Me. His Approach Can Change India.

Gandhi wanted Christians to live more like Jesus. ‘God’s smuggler’ showed me how.

“You must change your thinking,” Brother Andrew told me when we first met.

He was responding to my “rockstar” reaction as I finally encountered one of my heroes, at a lunch buffet in South Asia in 2000. Like a super-fan, I had blurted out, “I never thought I would meet you.” His response was swift, on point, and left me pondering.

That was the man: simple, straight-forward, and leaving a large impression. Dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, Brother Andrew listened intently as I recounted my story of how his life had inspired my own journey into Christian ministry.

It was the first of many meetings I was privileged to have with him over the following 15 years. Each committed to my journal and fresh in my memory, even as I process the news that this mighty man of God has gone to be with his maker whom he loved and served, never wavering from the call to “strengthen what remains and is about to die” (Rev. 3:2).

Brother Andrew was called by God as a young man to go into closed countries and to minister to the church where it was oppressed and lacked resources—especially Bibles. I remember hearing from him that anyone could do what he did, because the power of God was the same. He often said that God has called us to go with his gospel, and that all doors are open to the good news of Jesus Christ. He enshrined this in the name of the organization he founded: Open Doors.

What began as a Scripture distribution agency has now transformed into a massive international organization also involved in training, socioeconomic development, research, and advocacy across 60 nations. But its focus continues to be the persecuted Church.

I remember Brother Andrew asking us if there was any region ...

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Don't Leave Migrant Ministry to the Border

Q&A with Sami DiPasquale, head of an El Paso nonprofit, on what the surge of asylum seekers is like on the ground and how the church all over the country can help.

Sami DiPasquale runs Abara, a ministry that works on both sides of the border in El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico. The ministry has served the surge of asylum seekers, a fraction of whom are now being bused and flown to New York; Washington, DC; Chicago; and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Some migrants are glad for the free ticket; others allege they were deceived about their destination. About 11,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since May, with the mayor saying that the city’s shelter system is reaching a “breaking point.” But for ministries at the border, this is business as usual.

Thousands of migrants cross the southwestern border each day, and the surge in crossings has led to a record number of arrests this year. About half of migrants arriving are allowed to stay in the United States and pursue asylum claims. The surges in crossings go up and down. Most of those seeking asylum now are Venezuelans, among the millions fleeing a socialist regime. Christian immigration experts and lawmakers from both parties have said that the border shows a need for more judicial resources to process migrants’ cases.

How should Christians think about the thousands of migrants at the border?

Through media and social media, it gets painted like most people are at one crazy extreme or another on immigration, when I think most people are trying to grapple with what they feel is ethically right and compassionate.

What’s our posture? It’s easy for us in the US, at least for those that have been in a stable environment for a few generations, to be thinking about it as “How does God tell us what we do for people that are arriving?” But in so much of the Bible, especially ...

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From the Archives: When Disaster Strikes

Five articles about control and God’s providence amidst natural disasters.

With a hurricane hitting the coast of Florida as well as the aftermath of a hurricane in Puerto Rico, a typhoon in Alaska, and a 6.4 earthquake in Taiwan, September has been a busy month of natural disasters around the world.

It can be overwhelming to think about the inevitability of earthquakes and storms. There is possibly nothing more unsettling than natural disasters to remind us of our smallness compared to nature’s great power.

These five articles remind us to put creation into the perspective of God’s providence. As Douglas Estes’s 2018 article states, “We grieve over the devastation wrought by storms … we do [what] we all can to help storm victims in Christ’s name, yet we still acknowledge even in our grief that ‘his way is in the whirlwind and the storm’ (Nahum 1:3).”

Click here for more from the CT archives.

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Even in States with Bans, Christian Clinics Continue Post-Abortion Care

Some women who travel out of state for the procedure still rely on local pro-life pregnancy centers for support in the aftermath.

A young woman, pregnant and scared, entered the Women’s Resource Center in Mobile, Alabama, on a Tuesday. The pro-life clinic confirmed her pregnancy, diagnosed her with a sexually transmitted infection (STI) and scheduled her for an ultrasound.

But by Thursday she was in Atlanta for a chemical abortion. (Abortion is banned in Alabama except when the life or health of the mother is endangered.) By the following Monday, however, she was back in Mobile, bleeding from her abortion and asking the Women’s Resource Center for help. She said an Atlanta abortionist had told her the STI didn’t matter; she just needed to make sure the abortion medication worked.

The situation filled Women’s Resource Center clinic director Deanna Montieth with both anger and compassion: “I just want the absolute best care and for these girls to make an informed decision—their own decision—knowing the long-term consequences.”

Research shows that for women who have abortions with untreated STIs, “the infection can rapidly spread,” Montieth said, “and 30 percent of them can develop pelvic inflammatory disease within a year.”

Montieth’s story isn’t an isolated incident. As abortion restrictions tighten in some conservative states following the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, crisis pregnancy centers in those states report an increase of women who went out of state for abortions and were given inadequate post-abortion care. Many of those women are turning to the pro-life movement for medical and emotional support.

“We’ve seen an increase in women coming back with a lot of needs–physical, emotional, and spiritual,” ...

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The Light Force of God's Smuggler: Arab Christians Mourn Brother Andrew

Leaders gathered at Middle East evangelical meeting recall his conversations and books that shaped their ministries.

When “God’s smuggler” came to the Middle East, he went through the front door. Once known for hiding Bibles in the back of his Volkswagen when crossing behind the Iron Curtain, Brother Andrew instead simply handed them to terrorists. Coupled with his devotion to the Palestinian church, the founder of Open Doors shook the Western Christian status quo.

Arab evangelicals loved him for it.

“He had a soft heart for those in pain, the persecuted, and those usually considered on the other side, the enemy,” said Jack Sara, general coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Evangelical Alliance. “He was willing to step into a difficult place and talk with difficult people, but never compromise the message of the gospel.”

The news of Anne van der Bijl’s death Tuesday at age 94 shook participants during the second general assembly of the World Evangelical Alliance’s (WEA) Arab world region. David Rihani, president of the Jordan Evangelical Council, recalled the words of his father who received the Dutch evangelical frequently.

“This man is an example of a real Christian leader,” the first Jordanian evangelical pastor told his son. “He writes books, he shares knowledge, and he cares about everyone without discrimination.”

Rihani praised Brother Andrew’s ecumenical cooperation. Developing relationships with traditional Catholic and Orthodox leaders in the region, for decades Open Doors has chronicled persecution against all Christian denominations. And as the group’s advocacy across 60 countries grew to include the plight of believers in other religious traditions, the Bible smuggler won respect in the wider human rights community as well.

“He ...

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Died: Dan Busby, Accountant Who Set Standards for Ministry Finances

He believed “Christians should set an example of the utmost integrity.”

Dan Busby fixed his father’s tax returns when he was a junior in college. In the process of correcting some mistakes and figuring out the proper deductions for the Wesleyan pastor and evangelist, he discovered his life’s calling.

“The Lord planted a seed in my heart,” Busby said in a 2018 interview, “that someday I should help fill the void.”

Busby, a certified public accountant who helped professionalize the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), died Wednesday at age 81.

Busby served as senior vice president of the accreditation agency from 1999 to 2008 and as president from 2008 to 2020. During his presidency, the number of ministries maintaining a membership with the EFCA nearly doubled, reaching a total of more than 2,400, including 50 of the 100 largest churches in the United States.

The NonProfit Times named Busby one of the top 50 nonprofit leaders six times between 2010 and 2015. When his retirement was announced in 2019, ECFA board chair Danny de Armas described him as loved, admired, and respected.

“Dan is an incredible leader who has grown ECFA’s membership and influence,” de Armas said. “Dan’s legacy will linger in the valuable resources he developed that serve ministry leaders and pastors in their efforts to operate above reproach.”

Busby was born to Howard and Bertha Orr Busby in 1941. The family lived in Lamont, Kansas, a farming community of about 30 people, located halfway between Topeka and Wichita. Bertha taught public school, and Howard pastored a small Wesleyan church when he wasn’t traveling the country holding camp meetings.

The young Busby went forward at one of those camp meetings when he was 14. The aisle wasn’t ...

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Blessed Are Those Who Mourn Suicide

Caring for people in pain requires a rich theology of suffering.

According to the World Health Organization, 703,000 people commit suicide each year.

In 2020, “suicide was the twelfth leading cause of death overall in the United States. … [In addition, suicide] was the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10–14 and 25–34, … and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 44.”

Although churches are becoming more sensitive to suicide issues, the topic has at times been limited to concerns over salvation and damnation. If a person takes his or her own life, will that person go to heaven?

We’re not equipped to fully answer that question, of course. Jesus is the only one who has the power of divine judgment. And more importantly, debating someone’s eternal fate misses a larger opportunity. Suicide is the heartbreaking cry of “My Father, why have you forsaken me?” As believers, we have a chance to meet those who feel forsaken and be Christ to them.

Put another way: Our theology of salvation matters. But at least initially, our theology of suffering matters more, in terms of caring for those in our congregations who are thinking about ending their own lives.

As an aspiring sociology scholar, I spent four months of undergrad studying this issue for a research project at the University of Oxford. One of the key questions I wanted to ask was “How should theodicy—or making sense of suffering from a Christian perspective—inform our approach to suicide?”

“When analyzing the preponderance of cases of suicide beyond physician-assisted death, one is faced with the formidable role of mental illness, a factor that Christian theologians have often downplayed,” ...

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Do Chinese Worship Songs Sound Too Much Like Pop Hits?

Five praise music songwriters on how they handle criticism, work together, and seek to reach Gen Z through their work.

When Chinese Christians around the world worship God through music, chances are they’re singing a translated Western hymn or a hit by established worship music creators Stream of Praise (赞美之泉), Heavenly Melody (天韵合唱团), or Clay Music (泥土音乐). One group of collaborators is interested in adding something that better reflects the tastes of young people.

Jiang Shaolong, Cui Yu, Jane Hao, Chen Ming, and Luan Xin all grew up in China before moving to the United States for college or graduate work and share a passion for Chinese worship songwriting and ministering to the next generation. They are enthusiastic about using their songwriting talents to help deepen the faith of the Chinese students and young professionals they pastor or mentor. With the exception of Chen, who studied music at a conservatory, all of them are self-taught musicians.

Jiang pastors the Chinese-speaking congregation of New Life Community Church Bridgeport, in Chicago, and is head of the band Jing Ji Huo (The Burning Bush), which also includes members Yu and Hao. Chen Ming and Luan Xin are both campus ministers. (Ming works with the diaspora Chinese ministry Ambassadors for Christ.)

These young Chinese praise songwriters—all of whom are in their 30s and 40s, years below the average Chinese church leader—recently spoke with CT about why they felt compelled to write new Chinese worship songs and how they handle commentary that their music is too inspired by pop.

Why did you want to create new Chinese praise songs?

Jiang: I was called by God to serve a Chinese church made up mostly of young Chinese students and young professionals. We worship with songs translated from English as well as songs written by other Chinese songwriting teams, and we’re ...

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Orphan Forced from Christian Home Highlights Islamic Ban on Adoption

Egypt sees surge in foster care applications, though still insufficient, while Christians denied custody due to sharia law.

Four years ago, Shenouda was an infant found at the door of a Coptic church. Today, renamed Yusuf, the boy is found in a state-run orphanage. In between lies the care of a priest, the devastation of a Christian family, and a sectarian bureaucracy undergoing partial reform.

Egypt is home to a Dickens-like tragedy.

“Adoption is not legal in Egypt,” said Nermien Riad, executive director of Coptic Orphans. “There is no possibility it will happen as known in the Western world.”

The boy’s family name and location have been kept anonymous as a cautionary measure, as reported by the Coptic publication Watani. Likely left by an unwed mother, the child was found by a Coptic priest who presented him to the couple, infertile for 29 years.

They took him into their home, obtained a birth certificate as if he was their own, and raised him with love and devotion. They gave him a Christian-signifying first name, honoring the prior Coptic Orthodox pope, and per Egyptian naming custom the four-generation quadrilateral was completed with the names of the doting father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

All was idyllic, until a jealous niece realized the impact on her inheritance.

Egypt’s Islamic-based law, seeking to preserve lineage, prohibits taking another’s child as one’s own. The niece reported the couple to the police, who investigated. The prosecution determined there was no blood relation, but also no ill will.

The father signed a paper stating he found the child “on the street,” likely to shield the priest’s involvement. But though the case was dropped last February, the boy was taken to an orphanage. With no papers to prove his ancestry, he was assumed to be a Muslim—and ...

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Survey: Today’s Evangelicals More Likely to Welcome the Stranger

New research shows a marked shift in attitudes about refugees and immigration reform compared to 2015, and experts have a few ideas why.

Carla Flores was nervous to stand in front of a suburban evangelical congregation and share her experience as the child of undocumented immigrants.

Born in Mexico and raised since she was a toddler in Kansas City, Kansas, the 26-year-old children’s ministry leader is one of over 3 million “Dreamers” in the US, meaning her status is legal but uncertain. During her recent presentation at this church on the other side of town from her own, some churchgoers drilled her for details about her life, while others responded warmly and volunteered for ministry in her immigrant community.

Flores’s experience reflects a bigger shift in US evangelical views on immigration.

Some polls in the past have shown white evangelicals in particular were opposed to pathways to citizenship and accepting refugees. But the latest survey from Lifeway Research—coming as an unprecedented wave of Afghan refugees settle in the US and Dreamers remain in limbo—indicates that evangelicals’ support for immigrants and immigration reform has grown significantly.

Evangelicals are more open to welcoming refugees and offering paths to citizenship for undocumented immigrants than they were in 2015, the last time Lifeway polled on the issue. Now 77 percent of self-identified evangelicals are “strongly” or “somewhat” in favor of a path to citizenship, up from 61 percent who said “yes” seven years before. Among those who attend worship at least weekly, 82 percent were in favor.

Evangelicals by a wide majority and across all ethnicities said they would support bipartisan immigration reform, defined as increasing border security and establishing a process for undocumented immigrants to apply for ...

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Rebuilding Church Community: What’s Actually Working?

Pastors respond.

One ongoing impact of the pandemic is that, today, pastors find themselves shepherding congregations that are more divided and more relationally distant. How can ministers cultivate deep, authentic fellowship in congregations struggling with superficial or polarized relationships? Pastors are trying out both new and time-tested ways to rebuild authentic community in their churches. Here, pastors from across North America share what’s actually working in their congregations.

Mix Things Up

I transitioned to a new church during the pandemic and quickly observed three groups of people: those who were already in a deep community (with no room for others to join), those who attended church but were not part of a community, and those who were church-shopping and looking for a community. A word God gave me was gather, so we started an event called Gather Together where we created space for people from these three different groups to build community organically over a shared activity. Volunteers hosted dinners in their homes. It was a beautiful event where people of all ages and ethnicities gathered together and quickly dove into deep conversations. Many met people they would’ve been unlikely to have dinner with and decided to continue to gather regularly.

—Lydia Choi, associate pastor, Bethany Community Church in Seattle, Washington.

Emphasize Love of Neighbor

I have single-mindedly repeated to my congregation that although we each come to Jesus in a personal way, our faith is not just about the individual. I put it this way: The Christian faith is not just about you; it’s about us. From the time of Micah, who called his people to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with God, to Jesus who commands us to ...

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Southwestern Seminary President Resigns

The successor to Paige Patterson cites “reputational, legal, and financial realities” as he moves on to an IMB role.

Adam Greenway has resigned as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary three and a half years after he succeeded fired president Paige Patterson.

Greenway stepped down during a trustee meeting on Thursday and will take a role at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)’s International Mission Board, according to a statement from the seminary.

O. S. Hawkins, retired president of the SBC financial services entity Guidestone, will lead the school as acting president the interim.

Greenway said in a statement:

These days are incredibly challenging in the life of our denomination. They are also challenging times for academic institutions, particularly theological seminaries. In February 2019, Carla and I accepted the call to come back “home” to Southwestern Seminary with an understanding of these challenges, but also with the strong desire to be part of the solution.

What we failed to appreciate was the enormity of the reputational, legal, and financial realities that would welcome us to the Dome—only to be compounded by a global pandemic unlike anything we have ever experienced before.

We have done our best to serve Southern Baptists by helping position our seminary for the future, but much, much work remains to be done. Nevertheless, in the Providence of God we sense a release from our duties here.

Since assuming the presidency at Southwestern, Greenway worked to establish a new era at the Fort Worth, Texas, school, removing stained glass windows commemorating Patterson and other Conservative Resurgence leaders from the school’s chapel and initially making cuts to “recalibrate.”

It hasn’t been a quiet tenure. On top of ongoing litigation around Patterson’s response to ...

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COVID-19 Church Restrictions Justified, New Zealand Court Rules

Twenty-four pastors and one imam lose argument that the rules designating worship “high risk” violated their religious rights.

New Zealand’s High Court has ruled that government officials were not acting unlawfully when they restricted and regulated religious services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The court acknowledged that rules curtailed the protected right to “manifest religious beliefs” but deemed that allowable in a health emergency.

Starting in December 2021, the New Zealand government limited religious gatherings to 100 vaccinated people or 25 unvaccinated people. Face masks were also required if the house of worship shared the site with any other groups. The government’s director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, deemed religious gatherings “high risk” because of the presence of elderly and immune-compromised people.

Some religious leaders complained the restrictions were reminiscent of Nazi Germany, and one was briefly jailed for refusing to comply.

Twenty-four Christian pastors and one Muslim imam sued Chris Hipkins, the minister for COVID-19 response, and Bloomfield, claiming the regulations violated their religious freedom. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (BORA) says that "every person has the right to manifest that person’s religion or belief in worship, observance, practice, or teaching, either individually or in community with others, and either in public or in private.”

Justice Cheryl Gwyn ruled, however, that though the COVID-19 rules did restrict religious freedom, that was justified by the need to reduce the risk to public health during a pandemic. The right to manifest religious belief is protected, but not absolute. According to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, also signed by the United States, religious freedom can be limited in the interests ...

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We Still Need the Nuclear Family

Married parents and their kids have a calling that needs to be expanded, not obliterated.

In pockets of Western Protestant culture, the image of a happy, put-together family unit has become an idol. Many of our church programming budgets are directed toward attracting young families, and those members who aren’t inside a traditional family unit are keenly aware of their status.

Singles become a problem to fix or fix up. Lone parents are pitied, and older unmarried adults get relegated to seniors’ clubs, widow support groups, or some other socially palliative program.

Christian authors are taking notice and rightly challenging how we think about marriage, family, and singleness in the church. For example, an excerpt from author Sam Allberry’s book 7 Myths about Singleness recently appeared in Plough magazine, detailing how singles and families with children benefit when they integrate their lives.

Allberry argues that nuclear families are too privatized and insulated from those around them. Other public figures like David Brooks have recently made similar claims.

Although Allberry’s insights are spot-on, editors at Plough added a subtitle that seems to move beyond his position. Their choice of phrasing reflects a sentiment I’ve observed among fellow Christians: “The concept of the nuclear family does a disservice to singles and families, and it’s not consistent with New Testament teachings.”

Nuclear family is increasingly wielded as a pejorative term and almost always used without a clear definition. Sometimes the term encapsulates gender roles with a breadwinner father and a homemaker mother. Other times it’s meant to describe the middle-class, suburban lifestyle. Allberry uses the phrase in reference to self-sufficient, sequestered families who are isolated from ...

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The Rise of the Evangelical Heretic

Even among the faithful, Christian orthodoxy has taken a backseat to cultural and political tribalism.

As my colleague Stefani McDade reported earlier this week, Lifeway Research released a survey conducted for Ligonier Ministries. It concludes that a shockingly high percentage of American evangelicals hold beliefs about Jesus and salvation that every wing of the Christian church would define as heresy.

If these results are accurate, what does that mean for where American evangelical Christianity is headed?

To recap, the survey showed that evangelical respondents expressed a confusing and sometimes incoherent mix of beliefs. Most affirmed the Trinity, but 73 percent at least partially agreed with the statement that “Jesus was the first and greatest being created by God the Father,” which is, of course, the teaching of the heretic Arius.

I’m generally a little skeptical of these sorts of surveys, since they often seem to filter out those who believe but can’t articulate their beliefs in abstract terms. I’m not sure that any of my childhood Sunday school teachers would have agreed with a survey statement that “justification is by faith alone,” even though they all believed that. That said, Lifeway seems to have accounted for and filtered through many of those research problems.

I suspect most of us, though, are not surprised by the results. Today’s American evangelical Christianity seems to be more focused on hunting heretics internally than perhaps in any other generation. The difference, however, is that excommunications are happening not over theological views but over partisan politics or the latest social media debates.

I’ve always found it a bit disconcerting to see fellow evangelicals embrace Christian leaders who teach heretical views of the ...

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At Gracepoint Ministries, ‘Whole-Life Discipleship’ Took Its Toll

As the predominantly Asian American church network expands to dozens of college towns, former members come forward with claims of spiritual abuse.

Gracepoint Church checks all the boxes of a college ministry success story.

Founded in 1981 around the concept of whole-life discipleship, the church—then known as Berkland Baptist—established itself as a home for Asian American students attending the University of California, Berkeley. With the mission to plant “an Acts 2 church in every college town,” Gracepoint stands out among the loose network of predominantly Asian American college churches that pepper campuses across the West Coast and beyond.

Located on over 60 campuses, it has launched church plants in 35 cities nationwide, as well as one in Taiwan, with 15 new churches planted in 2021 alone.

At campus clubs like Klesis and Acts2Fellowship, Gracepoint pushes college students to wrestle with tough questions and pursue church mentorship. At graduation, it encourages young Christians to live life on mission by joining staff at one of its campuses or helping launch a new one. Staying at Gracepoint has a strong appeal, echoing the coming-of-age films that ask, Why can’t college last forever?

“I guess you could say we were just a bunch of people who enjoyed college life so much that we never left it,” the church quips in a promotional video.

“I think people experience a spiritual vibrancy and potency and just a warmth and depth of relationship with God that they haven’t experienced elsewhere,” said Michael Kim, a member at the church’s Santa Barbara campus who was raised at Gracepoint. “For serving members, it’s high pressure, high labor, high toil, but high gratification.”

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Black Church to National Park Service: Give Us Stones of Remembrance

Black denominational leaders have formally asked for a national monument to the 1908 Springfield race riot, and a new national survey reveals more public lands Black clergy want memorialized.

In Lower Manhattan, people in suits pass by a green space with a modest stone monument on their way to the city’s big courthouses. They rarely stop to notice the African Burial Ground National Monument, marking the historic site where more than 15,000 Africans were buried when the city banned slave burials in church cemeteries.

The burial ground was discovered during a construction project in 1991 and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993. Yet it took more than a decade of political pushing and preservation work before the National Park Service (NPS) opened the site as a national monument.

Now Black church leaders are pressing the federal agency to develop more memorials like this one. They want to mark Black history on public land, and they have specific spots in mind like the site of the 2015 church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina.

This month, leaders of some of the largest Black Protestant denominations and several state Baptist conventions made formal overtures to the park service to memorialize a site connected with the 1908 Springfield race riots in Illinois. The NPS—which oversees historical markers and memorials on public land, such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC—currently has no sites documenting lynchings or mass killings of African Americans.

Separately, in a new survey from the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), 700 Black church leaders listed their suggestions for possible memorial sites, noting that they felt their past input on public lands had been “politely ignored.”

Among the most popular responses were sites honoring Black leaders such as Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, and Frederick Douglass as well as ...

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Beyond Bolsonaro and Lula: How Brazil’s Evangelicals Should Vote

Five Christian leaders weigh the factors they hope are guiding the church as it prepares for the October presidential election.

Since the start of Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, national and international electoral news has focused on the role that faith will play in next month’s race—and for good reason: Religious concerns have dominated the talking points of both Jair Bolsonaro’s and Luiz Inácio (“Lula”) da Silva’s campaigns. Whether it’s discussing COVID-19 church closures or the spiritual fight between good and evil, the candidates have seemingly preferred to prioritize these issues at the expense of others such as unemployment, inflation, climate change, or foreign policy.

According to political analysts, the candidates are betting, especially Bolsonaro, that the most-responsive electorate are evangelicals. The data backs him up. Nearly half of evangelicals (48%) say they’ll vote for Bolsonaro, compared to only a quarter (26%) for Lula, according to a late-August poll from the Inteligência em Pesquisa e Consultoria (IPEC). A Datafolha poll from mid-September shows similar numbers: 49 percent of evangelicals say they’ll vote for Bolsonaro compared to 32 percent for Lula. Evangelicals make up about 25–30 percent of the country’s total electorate.

While the evangelical universe in Brazil is multifaceted, evangelical pastors hold significant sway over their congregations. Roughly speaking, it is possible to say that a group of pastors who have no problem offering political opinions from the pulpit have strongly influenced a significant portion of evangelical voters. The media has picked up on this as well, to the point of modifying the catch phrase voto de cabresto (“voting by halter”), where leaders guide people’s political decisions, to voto ...

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Black Church to National Park Service: Give Us Stones of Remembrance

Black denominational leaders have formally asked for a national monument to the 1908 Springfield race riot, and a new national survey reveals more public lands Black clergy want memorialized.

In Lower Manhattan, people in suits pass by a green space with a modest stone monument on their way to the city’s big courthouses. They rarely stop to notice the African Burial Ground National Monument, marking the historic site where more than 15,000 Africans were buried when the city banned slave funerals and burials from church cemeteries.

The burial ground was discovered during a construction project in 1991 and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993. Yet it took more than a decade of political pushing and preservation work before the National Park Service (NPS) opened the site as a national monument.

Now Black church leaders are pressing the federal agency to develop more memorials like this one. They want to mark Black history on public land, and they have specific spots in mind like the site of the 2015 church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina.

This month, leaders of the some of the largest Black Protestant denominations and several state Baptist conventions made formal overtures to the park service to memorialize a site connected with the 1908 Springfield race riots in Illinois. The NPS—which oversees historical markers and memorials on public land, such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC—currently has no sites documenting lynchings or mass killings of African Americans.

Separately, in a new survey from the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), 700 Black church leaders listed their suggestions for possible memorial sites, noting that they felt their past input on public lands had been “politely ignored.”

Among the most popular responses were sites honoring Black leaders such as Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, and Frederick ...

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Amid Myanmar’s Civil War, Unity Emerges

Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims—all from different ethnic backgrounds—are coming together to resist the violent military junta.

For the first time since anyone can remember, members of Myanmar’s majority Bamar people are seeking long-term solidarity with the country’s ethnic minorities. Since a coup in February 2021 stunned the world, the military, known as the Tatmadaw, has violently cracked down on both the Bamar and ethnic minority citizens protesting its takeover. Its tactics have included burning down entire villages and firing heavy artillery against its own people. So far, more than 2,000 people have been killed in its countrywide civil war with the poorly armed People’s Defense Force (PDF).

Christian NGO Free Burma Rangers (FBR), which has trained 6,000 ethnic minorities as first responders in the past two decades, has observed this growing unity up close. Increasingly, young Bamar people from cities like Yangon and Mandalay have left their college studies and careers to help the growing popular resistance. Some have gone to the jungles to learn from ethnic armed groups how to fight the Tatmadaw. Others have joined FBR trainings, where trainees alternate between intense physical training and learning how to dress a gun wound or navigate dense jungle terrain.

Even as Myanmar faces its worst fighting in its 70 years as a free nation, many point to the unprecedented unity across ethnic and religious divides. While the country’s Buddhist nationalist leaders previously declared that Myanmar belonged solely to the Buddhist Bamar, now people of all backgrounds have banded together against the common enemy of the military junta.

“This has never happened in Burma, never in my 29 years here,” said Dave Eubank of FBR. “What you have is hope.”

“You are not authentic Burmese”

Religion and ethnicity ...

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Mine Eyes Have Seen the Thrill of Victory, and the Agony of Defeat

Randall Balmer seeks the religious roots of America’s passion for sports.

In the early 1990s Randall Balmer ascended to rarified air: He became an academic whose name resonated beyond the ivory tower.

The impetus was Balmer’s 1989 book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, perfectly summarized by its subtitle as “a journey into the evangelical subculture in America.”

The power of Balmer’s book (and subsequent PBS series) came from the strength and clarity of his writing along with his willingness to dwell in paradox. He was both an insider (at least in his past) and an outsider, an academic expert and a curious journalist, an empathetic listener and a critical interpreter. He was willing to bring himself into the project, to identify with the people and the cultural spaces he visited and studied even as he kept himself at a scholarly distance.

Balmer’s book won the respect of academics and intellectuals as well as some evangelical insiders. “He has us pegged pretty well,” a reviewer in Christianity Today admitted.

Soon after Mine Eyes was published, a new popular subculture caught Balmer’s ear. Living in New York City, he came across the city’s growing sports talk radio scene. Here, grown men spent hours each day engaged in feverish debates over arcane details related to the local sports teams, like whether the manager of the New York Yankees should have called for a pinch hitter in the sixth inning.

“It left me speechless,” Balmer writes in the opening paragraph of his new book, Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America. And it also left him curious. He wanted to know more. Why were so many men—and it was primarily men, Balmer notes—drawn into this world? Why was he interested?

“The longer I listened,” ...

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What Christian Colleges Can Glean from the Supreme Court’s ‘Yeshiva’ Case

The latest ruling looks like bad news for evangelical higher education, but it’s not.

The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Yeshiva University v. YU Pride Alliance may seem like it spells trouble for Christian colleges that hold conservative positions on sexuality and gender identity.

After all, the court held that the orthodox Jewish university must formally recognize an LGBT student group. But a more complete reading of the decision forebodes a favorable outcome for Christian higher education in the future.

The case was decided on what observers refer to as the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” where the justices make substantive rulings without oral arguments and competing legal briefs. Here, the justices ruled that Yeshiva University did not actually qualify for the court’s review, denying the university’s claim that a trial court order to recognize the student group violated its religious mission.

It would be easy to read this decision as a blow to the religious freedom of colleges with codes of conduct speaking to sexual orientation. But the ruling is a textbook example of the Supreme Court relying on process and requiring aggrieved parties to exercise all possible legal options before asking the highest court to weigh in.

Simply put, it’s a mistake to read too much into what the court would do if it were to decide this case in a holistic manner.

In Yeshiva, the 5–4 majority—including two conservatives, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh—held that the university had not yet exhausted its options in seeking to overturn a state trial court’s decision. Importantly, the justices reached no conclusion on the merits of the case, or what the outcome would be if they were evaluating the constitutional arguments in play. ...

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Top 5 Heresies Among American Evangelicals

It’s 2022, but Arianism and Pelagianism are steadily making a comeback, according to the State of Theology report.

American evangelicals’ grasp on theology is slipping, and more than half affirmed heretical views of God in this year’s State of Theology survey, released Monday by Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research.

The report references Ligonier founder R. C. Sproul’s teaching that everyone’s a theologian. “However, Dr. Sproul would be quick to add that not everyone is a good theologian,” it read. That caveat applies to Americans in general and evangelicals too.

Overall, adults in the US are moving away from orthodox understandings of God and his Word year after year. More than half of the country (53%) now believes Scripture “is not literally true,” up from 41 percent when the biannual survey began in 2014.

Researchers called the rejection of the divine authorship of the Bible the “clearest and most consistent trend” over the eight years of data.

“This view makes it easy for individuals to accept biblical teaching that they resonate with while simultaneously rejecting any biblical teaching that is out of step with their own personal views or broader cultural values,” the researchers wrote.

It’s clear that US evangelicals (defined by belief and church affiliation) share some core faith convictions. Well over 90 percent agree that God is perfect, God exists in three persons, Jesus’ bodily resurrection is real, and people are made righteous not through works but through faith in him.

But in some areas, even evangelicals responded with significant misunderstandings and were not far off from the trends in society overall.

In the 2022 survey, around a quarter of evangelicals (26%) said the Bible is not literally true, up from 15 percent in 2020. They also became more likely to consider religious belief “a matter ...

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Wanted: Creation Care Coordinator for Major British Evangelical Church

A new position at Holy Trinity Brompton reflects growing concern about climate change among some Christians.

The job ad was a little different than the ones normally posted by London’s largest churches. It wasn’t for a pastor, priest, choir director, or organist. Instead, the large evangelical Anglican congregation wanted an environmental project manager.

Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), perhaps best known as the birthplace of the evangelistic Alpha course, has advertised a position for someone who will help “oversee the strategy, planning and execution of HTB’s approach to Creation Care.” The individual will work closely with other lead team members to put an “environmental response at the heart of church life.”

Jobs like this at places like HTB are notable, said Jo Chamberlain, national environment policy officer for the Church of England. Such roles, she said, signal a sea change. Evangelical churches in the UK—and perhaps elsewhere—are embracing the critical importance of creation care and environmental stewardship at the congregational level.

“People are recognizing that we have to get our house in order,” Chamberlain said. “We can’t just talk about taking care of creation without doing the work and changing the way we do things.”

HTB has six sites in London with around 3,500–4,500 worshiping every Sunday. It has planted 130 churches in England and Wales and become influential enough that some have called it the “centre of British evangelicalism.” The new staff member will help the six sites develop plans to be recognized as “eco churches” in five to seven years.

The “eco church” designation is awarded by A Rocha UK, part of an international network of environmental organizations with a Christian ethos, for ...

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Strategy Questions Divide Pro-Life Politics After ‘Dobbs’

What’s the best way to oppose abortion? Some pursue a national ban while others object that “plays into liberals’ hands.”

What comes next?

The pro-life movement has focused on the fight in the Supreme Court for so long that when the Dobbs v. Jackson decision finally came—overturning Roe v. Wade and ruling that abortion can be regulated—it wasn’t clear what the plan was after that. The hoped-for, prayed-for, and worked-for victory didn’t end abortion, after all. Ending Roe was just one political battle in the process, even if took 50 years.

“When the decision first came out and shortly after that, there was a lot of jubilation in the pro-life community,” Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told CT. “But there wasn’t a second clause to that sentence, ‘Roe has been overturned, ______.’”

After a bit of a scramble over the summer, the largest pro-life groups have emerged to embrace a national plan, calling for a federal ban on abortion. They don’t see it as state’s rights issue. They want to deal with abortion at the level of national politics.

They were ready to support Republican Senator Lindsey Graham when he came out on September 13 with a proposal for a ban on abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, a few weeks after the first trimester. While top pro-life leaders may disagree with some details of the draft legislation, they focused on using it to frame the choice voters will face in the upcoming midterm elections.

“The Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act would prevent cruel and painful abortions from being performed on innocent children,” Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, said in a statement. “The only thing the Democrats are offering the American people ...

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British Illustrator Is Drawing All 300 Churches in Her Diocese

The “arty pilgrimage” through Leicestershire has given her a chance to share and deepen her faith.

As England loses a number of its churches and rethinks the role of church buildings, one artist is finding a new appreciation for the over 300 churches in her hometown by drawing each and every one.

Art teacher Hayley Fern pulled out a new sketchbook during a visit to Leicester Cathedral and drew the 900-year-old Gothic-style church, with its pointed arch windows and 220-foot spire.

She enjoyed it so much that she decided to draw the church she attends, St. John the Baptist Church, and then the church she was christened at.

“Somebody actually said, ‘Oh, are you doing all Leicestershire churches?’” Fern said. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea. I might just do that.’”

And that’s how her “arty pilgrimage” began.

In her county in central England, there are over 300 Anglican churches, quite a lot but still an obtainable goal, she decided. With each church she adds to her sketchbook—and her social media feeds—she’s learned about nearby places she’d never been or only passed through.

“When you’re visiting a church, you go to the absolute heart of the place. You’re going to the original center of the village or town, the highest point, and it’s often the oldest part,” Fern said. “I’m now really discovering that even the villages and towns that I wasn’t necessarily drawn to actually have these beautiful centers, and the community is really evident there as well.”

A former freelance illustrator, she uses a fine waterproof pen to draw the details: porches and porticos, stained glass windows, neat bricks and cobblestone. Then she fills in with watercolor. Each drawing gets labeled with the church ...

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Under Franklin Graham, Samaritan’s Purse Grows to a $1 Billion Powerhouse

The humanitarian aid organization works on the frontlines around the world and ranks among the largest charities in the US.

Each week, in a hulking warehouse in this small, western mountain town, Samaritan’s Purse employees load semi trailers full of supplies for the people of Ukraine: medicines, food, tarps, blankets, hygiene kits and school bags for kids.

The trucks are then driven 80 miles east to the Piedmont Triad International Airport where they are loaded onto the nonprofit’s DC-8 aircraft specially configured to carry up to 84,000 pounds of cargo. From there the goods are airlifted to Poland and then trucked across the border into Ukraine.

This week, Samaritan’s Purse, headed by evangelical leader Franklin Graham, made its 30th airlift since Russia began its offensive against Ukraine in February.

The Christian relief organization estimates it has helped 5.5 million Ukrainians with medicine, food and water. Earlier in the conflict, it also operated an emergency field hospital in Lviv, and outpatient clinics across the country treating an estimated 17,758 patients. It now supports 30 medical facilities across the war-ravaged country.

The organization’s 160,000-square-foot warehouse and offices in North Wilkesboro employ 385 people who buy, repair, maintain and retrofit millions of dollars’ worth of medical equipment, generators and water filtration systems, much of them donated. The warehouse has six emergency field hospitals ready to ship, four with tents, hospital beds, anesthesiology equipment, X-ray machines, and surgical suites—all engineered to fold into a plane’s fuselage. There are also miles of plastic tarps, mountains of clothing and boxes full of small brown teddy bears with the Samaritan’s Purse logo—a cross inside a circle.

Samaritan’s Purse, now in its 52nd year, has become ...

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Belarus Proposes Legislation to Stop Christians From Appealing to the UN

Pentecostals targeted for Bible studies, baptisms, and outdoor worship amid increasing efforts to “repress civil society.”

Six months after a Pentecostal pastor won a religious liberty case before the United Nations, Belarusian politicians are trying to strip citizens of the right to appeal to the intergovernmental organization.

Human rights organizations warn the legislation under consideration this fall “will close one of the last remaining opportunities to seek justice for human rights violations” in the Eastern European country, according to Forum 18, which tracks human rights violations in the region.

The UN was the last court of appeal for Valentine Borovik.

Police raided the Pentecostal pastor’s Bible study in the western town of Mosty in June 2008 and charged him with illegally starting a religious organization. Prosecutors argued that the group did not meet the requirements to register as a church, since there were only 13 adults. But the Christians also could not meet without registering, since they “had all characteristics of a religious community.”

Borovik, objecting to this Catch-22 and claiming he had the right to meet with other believers without registering with the state, was convicted and fined. He appealed and lost, and appealed and lost again.

The case went to the Supreme Court. He lost there too, despite constitutional protections for “the performance of acts of worship and religious rituals and rites.”

“This case exemplifies the difficulties faced by Christians in Belarus,” Mervyn Thomas, founder of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said at the time. “The Belarusian government must be pushed to respect its own laws and international commitments and to allow Belarusians to meet together and practice their faith freely.”

In 2021, Borovik pushed again. He took his case ...

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Don’t Quiet Quit the Church

We should continue to let ourselves be amazed by God’s good work whenever and wherever we find it.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

The concept of “quiet quitting”—refusing to do anything but the minimal effort—is all over media these days. Commentators are debating whether or not today’s workers, most notably Gen Z employees, are quiet quitting their jobs.

Count me among the skeptical. Some of the quiet-quitting talk is just another generational caricature (one I’ve not seen any evidence for). And it may well be that workers are getting just as much or more done but are putting healthy boundaries between themselves and their jobs.

Perhaps quiet quitting is happening in some workplaces, although I suspect it’s no more than always. Yet even if mythical, the idea points to something real in many people’s lives: a sense that what they do will make no difference, that things will never change.

I’ve found this mentality to be a genuine temptation in the context of the church.

Those of us who see what’s happening in church life might easily come to the same conclusion that nothing will change, no matter what we do. We might keep attending, keep praying, keep teaching, keep serving—but never really anticipate anything different than the same crises.

I noticed this tendency in myself within the past week.

Recently, I was preaching in a city far from home, and an impressive Baptist Christian in his early 20s picked me up from the airport. As we talked about ministry and what he was doing in the church, he reflected on something I had written here—about how so many leaders I know are demoralized by the craziness of the present moment, both inside and outside the church.

Since he came of age over ...

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I Was an 18-Year-Old Addict Carrying a Drug Dealer’s Baby

Abortion seemed like the obvious answer—until I met the Lord of life.

I was born in 1989 into a dysfunctional home in Glendale, Arizona. Alcohol and drug abuse had plagued our family for generations. My late father’s addictions earned him a revolving door in and out of prison. My mother got pregnant at 19 after running away from her own father’s abusive behavior. She raised me as a single parent, alongside live-in boyfriends. We moved frequently.

Having witnessed the horrors of drug and alcohol abuse firsthand, I entered junior high school vowing never to take drugs—at least until a fellow eighth-grader kept badgering me to try a marijuana joint at the school bus stop. I gave in, enjoying the thrill. But I told myself I would just smoke pot. Nothing else.

Whispering abortion

Desperate for love, I became sexually active at 13 and contracted a nasty STD two years later. I got hooked on alcohol from one drink at a high school party. Doing cocaine and methamphetamines followed. By age 15, I had quit high school and left home for a friend’s trailer, crawling with cockroaches and hungry mice, where I lived with a 19-year-old boyfriend.

Around that time, one of my mother’s boyfriends moved in with her. (They would later marry and have two sons.) Weary of wasting their lives with drugs and alcohol, they sought help. My mother gradually sobered up through Alcoholics Anonymous. Looking to escape the junk and craziness in Arizona, she decided to move us to New York state during the summer of 2007, when I was 17.

During our road trip north, I gobbled pills from a stash I had hidden. Upon reaching Tennessee when the pills were gone, I went crazy at rest stops searching for refills.

We ended up in Clinton, New York, a small village upstate. Again, I fell in with the wrong crowd after ...

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ERLC Names New President

Brent Leatherwood stays on to lead the Southern Baptist entity after the “Dobbs” ruling and a major denominational abuse report.

The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s interim leader, Brent Leatherwood, will become its next president.

Leatherwood spent the past year as acting president, leading the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm during a historic span that included the reversal of Roe v. Wade and landmark denominational moves on abuse reform. The ERLC board of trustees unanimously approved his appointment on Tuesday.

A five-year staff member at the ERLC, Leatherwood was chief of staff under the previous interim leader, Daniel Patterson, and vice president of external affairs under former president Russell Moore, who left his position and the SBC in 2021. (Moore is now editor in chief of CT.)

Like during Moore’s leadership, the ERLC has continued to be a topic of debate in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), whose 48,000 churches operate independently but cooperatively. For some Southern Baptists, the ERLC’s lobbying and training efforts around issues like religious liberty and sanctity of life represent an important form of witness and engagement. Critics, though, believe the ERLC and its leaders have taken stances that do not represent the denomination overall.

At the annual meeting in June, as in previous years, a proposal to defund the ERLC was voted down. Former ERLC president Richard Land told the convention, “I cannot imagine a more damaging moment for the Southern Baptist Convention to defund the ERLC.”

Leatherwood also ran into pushback when he presented a vision for pro-life campaigns in the “post-Roe” era but didn’t agree with an abolitionist minority who wanted to criminalize abortion. “You are not going to get me to say I want to throw mothers behind bars,” ...

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Small Evangelical College Stands Out for Diversity

Houston’s College of Biblical Studies, where three-quarters of students are Black or Hispanic, finds ministry partners in DTS and Tony Evans.

In an era when conservative evangelicalism and multiethnic urban ministry increasingly find themselves in tension, the College of Biblical Studies (CBS) is combining them.

The school averages 500 undergraduate students per semester online and across three campuses: Houston, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. As its bylaws require, the student body is strikingly diverse.

In Houston—a majority-minority city—about half of the students are Black, a quarter Hispanic, and a quarter other ethnicities. The Indianapolis campus also has 50 percent Black students and 25 percent of other ethnicities, but the remaining quarter of its students are Burmese.

The church is “not one single group of people,” said Chanelle Coleman, a 2021 CBS graduate and current student resource advocate at the college. CBS “does a great job of embodying what the kingdom of God and the body of Christ should look like.”

Self-described by the college’s doctrinal statement as inerrantist, noncharismatic, and premillennial, CBS’s commitment to ethnic diversity and training urban students has yielded ministry collaboration with Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) and author Tony Evans.

CBS offers bachelor’s degrees in biblical counseling, biblical studies, organizational leadership, and women’s ministry. A partnership with DTS, whose Houston extension shares a campus with CBS, allows students to earn a master of arts with one additional year of study. A program launching this spring will let students earn a DTS master of theology degree with two additional years of study.

The academic program is supplemented with discipleship. Juniors and seniors participate in a spiritual formation program utilizing materials ...

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Decline of Christianity Shows No Signs of Stopping

New study projects that the religious identity in the US will drop below 50 percent by 2070.

Pew Research Center isn’t ruling out a future religious revival in America.

But given the country’s steady trends away from faith affiliation, experts don’t know what it would look like to see a return.

Analyzing surveys about religious identity and religious “switching” going back to 1972, and trying to project the American religious landscape out to the year 2070, they can’t say what demographic signs might indicate a coming swell of conversions.

“We’ve never seen it, and we don’t have the data to model a religious reversal,” Pew senior researcher Stephanie Kramer told CT. “There are some who say that revival never happens in an advanced economy. After secularization, you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. But we don’t know that. We just don’t have the data.”

The data they do have, from 50 years of research by the General Social Survey and Pew’s own survey of 15,000 adults in 2019, indicates the current trend is inexorable. People are giving up on Christianity. They will continue to do so. And if you’re trying to predict the future religious landscape in America, according to Pew, the question is not whether Christianity will decline. It’s how fast and how far.

In a new study out today, Pew projects that in 2070, Christians will likely make up less than half the US population.

Currently, 64 percent of people say they are Christian, but nearly a third of those raised Christian eventually switch to “none” or “nothing in particular,” while only about 20 percent of those raised without religion become Christian. If that ratio of switching continues at a steady pace, then in roughly half a century, ...

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Fuller Theological Seminary Names New President

The seminary’s sixth leader, David Emmanuel Goatley is an academic, pastor, and missions agency leader rooted in the Black church.

Fuller Theological Seminary, the largest Protestant interdenominational seminary in the country, named Black church theologian and missions leader David Emmanuel Goatley its next president.

Goatley, who leaves a post at Duke Divinity School to begin in January, says he wants to counter the “partisan poison” he sees in American evangelicalism, and turn students’ eyes to the testimonies of the global church. And like presidents in higher education everywhere, he also faces the problem of declining enrollment.

He will be the first Black president at the 75-year-old institution. Outgoing president Mark Labberton said when he announced his departure last year that he hoped his replacement would be a woman or person of color.

Goatley has a Baptist background but centered in the Black church. Ordained in the National Baptist Convention-USA, he pastored a Black Baptist church in Kentucky for nine years, then spent the next 20 years as CEO of a historic Black missions agency, Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society.

“There’s a certain representation that is important … The journey of which I am part matters,” Goatley told CT. “I am a Black person in the United States, which means some of my story has to do with discrimination and segregation and slavery, and all of that helps to give insight to how I handle myself and how I seek to handle creation and engage with other people.”

He added: “It also means something significant that Fuller Theological Seminary was able to take seriously the candidacy of a Black man. They did not explicitly or implicitly rule me out. I’ve had that happen to me before.”

As it has expanded programs for online and nontraditional students, ...

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What Happens When You Ask Thousands of Evangelical Women About Sex

Sheila Gregoire’s research has Christians across the spectrum correcting harmful assumptions and bringing new attention to women’s pleasure in marriage.

When it was published last year, Sheila Gregoire’s marriage book, The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended, came as a stark contrast to what many Christians learned from the church about sex and marriage.

Drawing from her own research, including a survey of 22,000 Christian women, the Canadian author affirms that sexual pleasure is for women too—and chronicles the damage done to women, men, and their relationships when people operate on distorted views of sex in marriage.

Gregoire’s critique of earlier iterations of Christian resources has put some on the defensive, but for many, it’s a refreshing change in approach. Women from Reformed believers to progressive stalwarts have found solace and healing in her teachings—and some pastors, professors, and counselors are also beginning to shift their approach as a result of her findings.

“I think Sheila’s work brings a much-needed balance to conservative church circles,” said Craig Flack, a pastor from Findlay, Ohio, who has used The Great Sex Rescue in his pre- and post-marital counseling. “So many works largely ignore female pleasure, and then people wonder why women may not enjoy intimacy.”

Gregoire targets the idea that men “need” sex and their wives are there to provide it—a premise she sees in books like Love and Respect, The Act of Marriage, and Every Man’s Battle.

Her survey showed that Christian women were taught that boys would push their boundaries and they were responsible for keeping them from going too far. In marriage, they believed their role was to never deprive their husbands of sex and that doing so kept their husbands from using ...

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Christian Celebrity Isn’t a Problem to Fix, But an Eye to Gouge Out

Katelyn Beaty’s critique of evangelical fame-worship is wise but overly tame.

There’s a scene in The Fellowship of the Ring in which Bilbo Baggins, the hero of the earlier book The Hobbit, has just received a small bit of counsel from his friend Gandalf the wizard. Gandalf tells Bilbo he needn’t attempt a task that would be challenging and quite likely deadly. And it makes Bilbo suspicious: “I have never known you to give me pleasant advice before,” he says. “As all your unpleasant advice has been good, I wonder if this advice is not bad.”

Though Bilbo turned out to be mistaken in this case, there is still a lesson in his words: There is such a thing as making a problem too easy. And there are times where that error can yield devastating consequences.

This thought came to mind while reading Katelyn Beaty’s book Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church. The book has much to admire. Beaty, a writer and former CT editor, is a keen observer of power dynamics within institutions and movements, for starters. She also is a good student of contemporary technological trends, with a well-developed understanding of how digital technology has transformed and exacerbated the problems of fame and celebrity both in the church and outside.

What’s more, I found her prudent counsel for how we might curb the worst excesses of celebrity to be wise and admirable. Her conversation partners in the final chapter are, if predictable, also wise: Henri Nouwen, Eugene Peterson, Andy Crouch, Dallas Willard.

Pulling punches

Yet for all its merits, I found the book to be ultimately too moderate in its critique. While Celebrities for Jesus is a wise book, it is also, for a certain type of evangelical, a relatively pleasant book, if I can borrow ...

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China’s ‘Mayflower’ Church Wants to Come to America: ‘This Isn’t Fleeing. This Is Leaving Egypt’

After more than two years in diplomatic limbo in South Korea, Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church is now in Thailand, trying to seek refugee status.

Pastor Pan Yongguang and nearly all of the 61 members of his Chinese house church have arrived in Thailand. The congregation left the southeastern city of Shenzhen for South Korea between 2019 and 2020, trying unsuccessfully for months to gain refugee status.

Last month, the group left Jeju Island for Bangkok, hoping to appeal to the UN refugee office. Their search for a home continues as they hope to make one more move in the near future, this time to the United States.

It’s a search that has come at a significant cost.

The congregants of Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church (SHRC) left their professional jobs, their homes in Shenzhen, and elderly parents—just before the start of the pandemic. Pan has shouldered the responsibility of not just the spiritual care of his congregants, but the logistics of everyday life—including work, housing, medical care, safety, and travel—in foreign countries. He’s also faced pushback from some Chinese churches who believe he should stay and face persecution rather than run away.

But he believes he’s following God’s call to lead his church to greater freedom, like the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower: “For the flock’s spiritual blessing I’ve invested more and paid a higher price,” Pan said. “Nobody flees like this with kids and women from one county to another. This isn’t fleeing. This is leaving Egypt.”

After quietly leaving the South Korean island of Jeju in late August, Pan announced his congregation’s latest whereabouts to the world through a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on Monday. That same day, congregants applied for refugee status at Bangkok’s UN refugee office. Their hope to resettle in the United ...

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Is the Future of Christian Music on TikTok?

Independent artists like Montell Fish have found success on social media platforms rather than traditional labels.

Montell Fish is a Christian musician whose songs took off with tens of millions of streams. But unlike artists who have risen through the ranks of CCM, his main platform isn't a worship stage.

The 24-year-old artist went viral on TikTok from his bedroom, where he recorded himself, wearing a T-shirt and black bandana, playing the guitar, and singing in falsetto, “Why don’t you talk to me like you used to?”

His calming, “lo-fi” (low-fidelity) music stands in stark contrast with the high production value of today’s top worship bands. In a world that increasingly defies labels and genre, Fish represents a slew of indie faith-based artists who are finding success on platforms like TikTok and skipping the format and industry contemporary Christian music CCM was long built upon.

For these artists, independence from the traditional constraints of the music industry means greater freedom to explore—and redefine—what it means to be a successful “Christian” artist. With this freedom, though, comes greater responsibility for artists over their career direction and renders other essential parts like financial sustainability more unstable.

Previously known as one of the artists behind the music project Lord’s Child and a YouTuber who uploaded videos like “3 Ways to keep your focus on Christ,” Fish began uploading TikToks in October 2019.

On September 7, 2021, he uploaded a clip of himself sitting in his bedroom, with a sound titled “fall in love with you” playing in the background. The song snippet stands out for its tranquility; it seems content to takes its time, a contrast to TikTok’s fast pace. The video accrued over 3.3 million views, ...

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More than One Good Samaritan

Q&A with Jewish scholar Steven Fine on the history of a biblical minority.

The Good Samaritan shows up in the Gospels as an apparent exception to his people, since he’s the “good” one. Then he exits the stage, presumably to go back to life with the rest of the Samaritans, with little explanation of what a “Samaritan” is or why that might have mattered to Jesus and his first followers.

A new exhibit at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, opening on September 15, promises to expand our understanding of these biblical people. CT spoke to Steven Fine, a Jewish scholar at Yeshiva University, about the history of the Samaritans, their relationship to Jews and Christians, and how they can help us better understand the Bible.

If a regular churchgoer knows one thing about Samaritans, they know there was one good one. When Jesus tells that story, why does it matter that the Samaritan is a Samaritan?

What Jesus does in the story is miscast the part. The Samaritan should have been stereotypical bad guy in the first century, and here he is, he stops to help.

The story takes place in a horrible dry place in the Judean desert. It’s very uninviting. The priest has a reason for not stopping. Then the Levite, who helps in the temple, walks by and doesn’t help. You would expect the next stage of the story to be an Israelite. But it doesn’t go that way. It’s the Samaritan.

He’s the guy who is least likely to do the right thing, in the popular imagination. But he stops to help! That’s completely unexpected. That breaks the story. That’s why it’s such an interesting story.

Now I got to tell you, in Jewish literature not too long after, there is a rapprochement between Jews and Samaritans.

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5 Reasons for Progressive Christians to Join the Pro-Life Cause

Our historic, global faith tradition connects sanctity of life with social justice.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when opposition to abortion united evangelical Christians across the political spectrum. Along with political conservatives, left-leaning advocates for the poor like Ron Sider spoke out against abortion.

In 1987, he published Completely Pro-Life as an explanation for why Christians should support a consistent life ethic. Sojourners magazine, the leading periodical of the evangelical Left, published several pieces against abortion in the 1980s.

But that moment is gone. This summer, when the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade ignited a political firestorm, the abortion debate became even more partisan than it already was, and some progressive evangelicals found it difficult to harmonize their social justice commitments and defense of women’s rights with antiabortion advocacy.

Though still claiming to be “consistently pro-life,” Sojourners reacted to the SCOTUS decision by publishing an editorial titled “Women’s Needs Are Holy. Overturning Roe Ignores That.” Another one of their editorials called for churches to help women find safe spaces for abortion.

If this is true of some Christian magazines and organizations, it’s probably even more true of Christians in the pews. Evangelical pastors who believe in the sanctity of unborn life know this better than anyone.

Those with urban congregations in blue states (or blue cities) have progressive-leaning attendees who now associate the pro-life label only with red-state Republicans, whom they sometimes view as Trump-supporting misogynists. Those church leaders may wonder if it’s even possible to talk about unborn life in a way that won’t drive their churches’ social ...

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