Liberty Appoints Retired General, Air Force Chaplain as New President

Alumnus Dondi E. Costin steps in to lead years after Jerry Falwell Jr.’s scandal.

Two and a half years after Jerry Falwell Jr. stepped down in scandal, Liberty University named its new president on Friday: Dondi E. Costin, the outgoing president at Charleston Southern University and a retired US Air Force major general and chaplain who earned a pair of master’s degrees from Liberty.

Costin is the school’s first president to not be named Jerry, succeeding interim president and longtime board chair Jerry Prevo and the two Jerry Falwells before him. Liberty’s founding family is still represented in leadership; pastor Jonathan Falwell—son of the late Jerry Falwell Sr. and brother to Jerry Falwell Jr.—has been appointed chancellor.

Costin, an Air Force Academy graduate who concluded a 32-year military career as chief of chaplains at the Pentagon, spent the past five years leading Charleston Southern, a Christian college of around 3,500 students in South Carolina.

“There are fewer differences than one might imagine between the processes and procedure of the military and higher education,” Costin told CT’s Creative Studio in 2019. “If you can survive and thrive in a complex bureaucracy like the Pentagon, then you can do it in a complex bureaucracy like higher education.”

At the Lynchburg, Virginia, campus, some high-profile challenges linger. Last year, Department of Education officials launched an investigation into the school’s handling of sexual assault claims, following a lawsuit from Jane Doe survivors and a campus movement calling for an audit of the school’s Title IX office. Former president Jerry Falwell Jr. continues to challenge the terms of his departure, suing earlier this month over millions in retirement benefits.

But Liberty remains ...

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Is Karma a 'Relaxing Thought'? For Many Buddhists, It’s Not.

The real-life impact of believing the law of cause and effect.

This is the second article in the Engaging Buddhism series which explores different facets of Buddhism and how Christians can engage with and minister to Buddhists.

What is karma?

Ask Taylor Swift and she’ll tell you, “Karma is my boyfriend / Karma is a god / Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend / Karma’s a relaxing thought.” It’s all the good things she gets for keeping “my side of the street clean.”

Justin Timberlake would respond that for his heartless ex, “What goes around, goes around, goes around / Comes all the way back around.”

Even Maria, the nun turned nanny from The Sound of Music, would argue that “somewhere in my youth or childhood / I must have done something good” to deserve the love of Captain Georg von Trapp.

Clearly, the idea of karma is part of the American consciousness. The idea of reaping what you sow is found in everyday life as well as passages in Scripture, such as Proverbs 22:8, “Whoever sows injustice reaps calamity, and the rod they wield in fury will be broken.”

Yet the worldview implications of the Buddhist belief in karma result in something far from a “relaxing thought.” For Theravada Buddhists, for instance, “karma means you get what you deserve, and we all know that we don’t want to get what we deserve,” said Kelly Hilderbrand, a missionary and Buddhism expert at Bangkok Bible Seminary.

In this installment of Engaging Buddhism, we will look at how the same concept of karma shapes two Buddhist worldviews—those of Thai Theravada Buddhists and Taiwanese Humanistic Buddhists—in very different ways. We will also see how Christians can speak into this Buddhist belief by providing ...

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Why My Church Partners With ‘He Gets Us’

As a Black pastor, I appreciate how the diverse campaign helps my congregation reach our neighbors.

If you’re on Twitter, you’re used to seeing hot topics trend for a few days and eventually fade into Twittersphere history. But there’s one recent cultural moment that continues to elicit discussion and opinions from across the board—the He Gets Us commercials about Jesus that aired during the Super Bowl.

The campaign’s 30-second ad called “Be Childlike” and a 60-second ad called “Love Your Enemies” were not preachy or heavy-handed—they simply conveyed the message that Jesus knows what it’s like to be human. And yet these ads have sparked a national conversation and have spurred strong reactions from every point on the political and theological spectrum.

Some people felt the ads were too liberal, or they were upset that the ads did not overtly share the gospel. Others objected to the conservative nonprofit organization behind the commercials and questioned their motives. Still more criticized the campaign’s spending, wondering why these millions of dollars were spent on these commercials rather than going toward helping the poor. However, many have pushed back against these criticisms and pointed out the positives.

All these debates may be worth having—but regardless of these objections, the campaign’s reach is undeniable.

About 189 million people saw the ads, and McQueen Analytics—an independent polling firm conducting research on the campaign—shows that they resonated with a wide range of people. This includes those who are not believers but want to know more about Jesus.

In spring of 2022, nearly a third (32%) of “spiritually open” people strongly agreed that the ads remind us that “Jesus ...

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Thailand Arrests 63 Chinese Christians Seeking Asylum

The “Mayflower church” members, who first sought refuge in South Korea, fear repatriation to China after finding sponsors in Texas.

Thai immigration officials detained members of a Chinese house church Thursday that had been seeking resettlement in the United States since August. Human rights groups fear the 28 adults and 35 children could be repatriated to China, where they would likely face prison time.

Members of Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church, known as the “Mayflower church,” left China in 2019 due to religious restrictions and tried unsuccessfully to gain asylum in South Korea before coming to Thailand and applying for refugee status at Bangkok’s UN refugee office.

Bob Fu, head of ChinaAid, said that the raid didn’t come as a surprise: Last week, the congregation noticed one member had been acting strangely. When confronted, he admitted to working with China’s state security and had been coerced into revealing the group’s location. Fu said church members last saw the man being escorted away by Chinese operatives, leaving behind his wife and daughter, and he hasn’t been seen since.

Pastor Pan Yongguang and the group went into hiding for a few days, then returned to their hotel. At about 11 a.m. on Thursday, about 20 Thai immigration police showed up and asked to see their passports and visas, which had expired in October.

Deanna Brown of Freedom Seekers International, an NGO that helps persecuted Christians, had just arrived that morning to help the Mayflower church members when the police arrived, some taking photos and videos. Around 2 p.m., they transported the entire group to an immigration center 30 minutes away.

Officials interrogated Pastor Pan Yongguang and other church members. As night fell, Brown said the officials debated bringing the group to Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Center, notorious ...

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Martin Luther King Jr. Looks to God in New Statue

Supporters pray new monument depicting the civil rights leader as a preacher will be part of a bigger revival for peace and unity.

On Monday, Kathy Fincher looked into Martin Luther King Jr.’s eyes and knew something wasn’t quite right.

The statue of King that she had been working on for years is said to be the first to portray the civil rights leader as a pastor, wearing robes and holding a Bible. For Fincher, the design relies on King’s heavenward gaze, on the eyes that “have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” as he said in his 1968 “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.

Days before the statue’s April 1 unveiling in Atlanta, she removed a piece of clay and made some last-minute adjustments during the patina process so his eyes reflected the light.

“My idea was he would be on a mountaintop, with a Moses-type look, and he would be talking to God,” said the Georgia artist, who listened on repeat to the famous speech from the eve of King’s assassination. “I designed it so his hands would be face up, so he’d be catching the light that was given to him, not sideways like he was preaching, and his eyes and head were raised up.”

The eight-foot, two-inch King monument takes its place on Saturday among what will eventually be 18 statues of Georgia peacemakers at the Rodney Cook Sr. Peace Park in the Vine City neighborhood. The Peace Park opened two years ago—a reconstruction of Mims Park, the first integrated park in Atlanta.

In remembrance of the 55th anniversary of King’s death, community leaders, politicians, and clergy will join together for a peace walk and a first view of the statue. The lineup for the event includes Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King and CEO of the King Center, as well as Andrew Young, civil rights leader and former Atlanta ...

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This Palm Sunday, Ponder Donkeys, Not Branches

For his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus picked a symbol of lowliness rather than military might.

Christian churches throughout the world will begin our holiest week of the year on what is popularly known as Palm Sunday. It commemorates one of the few events in the life of Jesus recorded in all four gospel stories: his entry into Jerusalem, followed by a raucous and warm welcome and a lot of waving branches. (Only John 12:13 mentions they were palms.) In Israel today, churches still reenact the journey from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem—the route supposedly taken by Jesus all those centuries ago.

As a kid, even in the nonliturgical world of the Black Baptist tradition, I recall receiving my palm branch and dutifully marching into the sanctuary with a palm in one hand and my unintelligible King James Bible in the other. This year on Palm Sunday, I will be the adult trying to make sure my children don’t use the palms as weapons to tickle and annoy their siblings.

As I study this story in Scripture, I’m struck by the fact that the primary symbol for this day—a palm—was not chosen by Jesus.

John writes, “They took palm branches and went out to meet him” (John 12:13). Why did the crowd choose palm branches? It could simply have been that palms were nearby. But history tells us there might have been a deeper reason: Those plants were symbolically linked to military victories and Messiahship.

A generation before Jesus, when Simon Maccabee drove Israel’s enemies out Jerusalem, people celebrated by waving palm branches:

On the twenty-third day of the second month, in the one hundred seventy-first year, the Jews entered it with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments, and with hymns and songs, because a great enemy had been crushed and removed ...

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After Nashville, Moral Numbness Is Our Enemy

Shootings have become normal to the American public. But as Christians, we know better.

Over the past few days, my city, Nashville, has been grieving and suffering after a terroristic murderer attacked a Christian school and slaughtered six people—including three children.

Whenever a school shooting happens in America, our country is shocked and pays attention for a time. But within a matter of weeks, most people add these events to other names on a list of horrors—Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, and so on. But as others can attest, it’s different when such a tragedy happens in your backyard.

Some of the boys and girls fleeing for their lives were children of dear friends, and almost everyone I know is connected—closely or loosely—with the victims. We all know the church, the school, our neighbors in the Green Hills neighborhood. Things will not be the same here for a very long time.

And yet Americans—especially Christians—should ask just how much we have adjusted ourselves to this kind of horror. How numb to it all have we become?

While I was still in the haze of this awful news, a friend who is an expert in domestic terrorism texted me to warn about people calling for the release of the murderer’s reported “manifesto.” My friend pointed to research showing that publishing these sorts of documents can fuel more incidents like it—as seen by the way that past mass murderers have cited those who came before. I trust this leader that such best practices are right.

Yet I wonder about all the “manifestoes” we have seen. I’m referring not to the deranged screeds of mass murderers but to the hate and rage that have become so commonplace in our society that we barely even notice them anymore. How long can we live like this and pretend ...

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Resisting the Impulse of Self-Optimization

In Lent, we realign our identity in Christ and recover our sense of being loved into existence by our Creator.

As a Singaporean, I grew up immersed in a national culture defined by stress.

These instincts were arguably more learned than anything else—my Malaysian father and South Korean mother moved to the country from the United States in the 1990s. So much of how I grew up was shaped by the intensity of Singapore’s academic culture, shuttling between exam-heavy course loads, afterschool tutoring, and reams of practice papers to complete.

Different phases of my life would come to mirror this rhythm: spending hectic days in high school between writing long essays and serving in church, balancing responsibilities during military service while leading a small group and trying to keep up with reading, managing the busyness of my undergraduate life and subsequent tenure as a graduate student, and, even now, trying to uphold different commitments to ministry, creative writing, editing, friends, and family amid a full-time job.

The last time I felt thoroughly burnt out was about five years ago, as an undergraduate in England. Between reading and writing essays for class, keeping active in Christian fellowships, participating in theater productions, and rowing by dawn, I found myself gradually compromising my sleep schedule. Seven hours a night got slashed to six or even four and a half. I’m not entirely sure what drove me back then. Perhaps it was a feeling of duty and responsibility I felt I owed the people I had made promises to or a desire to not let any part of my university life slip by. Lurking beneath all this, perhaps, was an impulse toward optimization.

Optimization can be described in two ways, opines writer Jia Tolentino. First, it is a means of achieving profitability by “satisfy[ing] ...

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Go Ahead. Get Mad at God for the Nashville Shooting.

In the face of tragedy, Christ welcomes our confusion and anger.

Just a few days ago, parents were dropping their children off at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, anticipating a day of love, friendship, and learning for their sons and daughters. No one could fathom what would happen soon after, when a 28-year-old shooter entered the building and opened fire, resulting in the deaths of three nine-year-old kids, three adults on staff, and the assailant.

Part of a pastor’s calling is to enter into life’s disorienting, gut-punching, heart-ripping spaces and offer perspective on questions that cannot be answered. This is especially true in situations where the main question is “Why?”

Why would a good and loving God who is sovereign over every square inch of the universe, who knows the number of hairs on our heads, who said, “Let the little children come to me,” and who promised again and again to be our shield, our protector, and our defender allow for this senseless loss of life?

Why would the same God let faithful, loving, godly educators be gutted from their families and communities? Why would he allow young survivors to experience the trauma of hearing gunfire and then being rushed frantically to safety?

Why would he not foil and fail the shooter’s plans before a single shot was fired? Why would the One who holds even the hearts of kings in his hands not redirect the assailant’s heart as well? Why would God allow for one of his own image-bearers to go to such an inexplicable and horrific place and then follow through with those intentions?

We already know the answer to these questions, which is that we’ll never know the answer to these questions.

Nashville musician and producer Charles Ashworth, also ...

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European Evangelicals Organize Against Abuse

From curriculum to call lines, churches focus on safety and prevention.

When Fabian Beck volunteered to help with the children’s ministry at his small evangelical church on the outskirts of Hanover, Germany, he imagined he’d be singing songs, telling Bible stories, and performing puppet shows.

He had no idea what he could do to protect Sunday school children from the possibility of sexual abuse. As he prepared to join the team, however, he came across resources provided by the Federation of Free Evangelical Churches (FeG) on the subject of violence against children and adolescents in the context of Christian communities like his own.

“Believers have to face the fact that our congregations are not safe just because they are full of Christians,” Beck said. “Safe places for kids don’t come naturally, and too often, we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Andreas Schlüter, the FeG’s federal secretary for the young generation, said the program Beck is using, “Protect and Accompany,” is part a much larger trend among free churches organizing against abuse. Evangelical churches are developing programs to face the reality of sexual abuse and seeking to prevent it from happening in the future.

“I know that in Germany, every free church is actively tackling the issue,” he said. “Free evangelical congregations should be, or become, safe places for children and young people.”

In recent years, child sex abuse cases have been extensively reported across multiple Roman Catholic dioceses in Europe. Spurred by these revelations, Catholics have takensteps in France, Portugal, Germany, and Italy to prevent abuse. Pope Francis, for example, removed the option for pontifical secrecy from cases involving the mistreatment of ...

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It’s Good When Bad Pastors Make Us Mad

I’d rather media and literature portray Christian leaders who stir up anger instead of apathy.

A couple weeks ago, actor Rainn Wilson tweeted, “I do think there is an anti-Christian bias in Hollywood. As soon as the David character in The Last of Us started reading from the Bible I knew that he was going to be a horrific villain.” He then added rhetorically, “Could there be a Bible-reading preacher on a show who is actually loving and kind?”

Bad clergy make frequent debuts in today’s television shows and movies. I still remember the evil Archbishop Rushman from Primal Fear in the mid-’90s and Eli Sunday, the odd cult evangelist and radio preacher in There Will Be Blood. Then there’s the recent Netflix horror mini-series Midnight Mass portraying Father Paul and his dark miracles that use Communion elements mixed with real blood.

The same goes for literature. Consider Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, a preacher of the Church Without Christ—or the drowning baptism in her later novel The Violent Bear It Away. A hundred years ago, there was Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, and a thousand years before that, there was Archbishop Ruggieri, a traitor tormented in the ninth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno.

Whether on the page or on the screen, Christian characters and symbols—from church leaders and Communion elements to Bibles and baptisms—are often charged with negative connotations in such a way that they make for predictable foreshadowing.

Exceptions to these bad pastors certainly exist, like the admirable and introspective Pastor John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Gilead. Or Father Paul Lantom from the Marvel series Daredevil—who doesn’t just invite ...

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Why Nepali Christians Can’t Bury Their Dead

Inside evangelicals’ ongoing challenge of securing a public cemetery.

Death in a Christian home in Kathmandu Valley brings more than just sorrow. It commences a family’s search for a way to bid a dignified goodbye to their loved one.

The biggest obstacle for mourners is finding a place to bury the dead in Kathmandu Valley, a region in central Nepal that is home to its three largest cities and hundreds of smaller towns and villages. But despite its size, the area has no public cemetery for its Christian population, which numbers just over 100,000 according to the National Christian Community Survey report released in December 2022. (Kathmandu’s British cemetery includes only the remains of expatriates, and its Jesuit cemetery is no longer in use.)

“We can cremate our dead, but we cannot bury them,” said Suman Dongol, who manages Koinonia Patan church in Kathmandu.

Hindus, who make up around 81 percent of the population, cremate their dead. Nepali Muslims have access to two graveyards attached to their mosques in Kathmandu. (Among those who follow indigenous faiths are the Kirat, who comprise 3 percent of Nepal’s population and are said to be the earliest inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley. They typically bury their dead but face a similar plight as the Christians.)

No known Christian existed in the country in 1951, when modern-day Nepal was founded and its young government prohibited proselytizing and conversion. A year later, however, Nepali Christians from India established the first Protestant church.

By the early 1970s, there were about 500 baptized Christians in the country. Evangelism carried a possible criminal sentence of three years in prison—successful evangelism, six—but Christians continued to tell people about Jesus. By 1990, when a democratic ...

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Presbyterian School Mourns 6 Dead in Nashville Shooting

Victims include the head of school and the 9-year-old daughter of the church’s lead pastor.

Parents were invited into the chapel at The Covenant School in Nashville on Monday morning, like they are every school-day morning. They sung and prayed with the roughly 200 elementary students and 40 or 50 staff at the Presbyterian Church in America school and listened as pastor Matthew Sullivan “raises it to another level,” as one student put it, with his kid-friendly Bible lesson.

A few hours later, though, parents crowded into the sanctuary of Woodmont Baptist Church, two miles down the road, waiting to hear the worst. In the interval, the private Christian school became the site of the 130th mass shooting of 2023, leaving three children and three staff members dead.

“I know this is probably the worst day of everyone’s lives,” a police officer told the crowd. “I can’t tell you how sympathetic we are.”

The three students killed were each 9 years old. Police identified them as Evelyn Dieckhaus, and William Kinney, and Hallie Scruggs, who was the senior pastor’s daughter. The adult victims were head of school Katherine Koonce, 60; substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61; and custodian Mike Hill, 61.

Metro Nashville Police Department spokesman Don Aaron said that a 28-year-old former student slipped through a side door carrying two assault rifles and a handgun. Police were called at 10:13 a.m. They arrived less than 15 minutes later and followed the sounds of gunfire to the second floor of the conservative Christian elementary school. They shot and killed the suspect.

Five of the victims were transported to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital, about 4 miles away, but pronounced dead on arrival.

“The children … started their morning in their cute little uniforms,” ...

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Easter and the Tomb Sweeping Festival Share a Nerdy Connection

The Jesuits reformed the Western calendar. Then they attempted to do the same in China.

Ask most Christians the date of the next Easter and they’re likely to Google it. Though highly associated with springtime—at least for those in the Northern Hemisphere—the date for Christianity’s most important holiday changes from year to year.

Chinese people can empathize with an unpredictable spring holiday date. Often landing within a few days or even on the same day as Easter, qing ming jie(清明节), or the Qingming Festival, invites families to remember their deceased parents and ancestors through a series of rituals and activities. The celebration became an official national holiday in mainland China in 2008, partially resulting from the government’s desire to promote traditional Chinese culture.

This year, Qingming falls on April 5 and Easter on April 9. The regular proximity of the two holidays has led even secular commentators, like an op-ed writer for the Chinese-government-owned website CGTN, to look for parallels between them.

“Both a spring festival contemplating the reverent themes of life and death, Qingming Festival focuses on remembrance, while Easter celebrates rebirth,” said the writer.

While one holiday has strong theological significance and the other mostly secular, the calendars for both traditions share a common origin. An order known for astronomy and mathematics, the Jesuits drove the reforms in both the Western world and China that dictate how we plan our days, months, and holidays.

Easter’s celestial date formula

Determining the date of Easter necessitates a combination of solar, lunar, and religious calendars.

For years after Jesus’ resurrection, the early church debated which day Christians should celebrate the resurrection of Christ, or “the ...

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I Met God on the Mountaintop of Ritual

How liturgy can lead to an encounter with the Lord.

As someone who came from outside the liturgical expressions of Christianity, I had a certain suspicion of the whole enterprise. I thought the liturgical tradition, with its vestments, rituals, rules, and customs, was the very thing Jesus had come to destroy. I intuited that what God wanted was a broken and contrite heart. He owned the cattle on a thousand hills; he didn’t need our formalized prayers and spiritual sacrifices.

The heroes in my mind were characters like David, who danced informally before God (2 Sam. 6:14), and the prophets, whose ministry was led from start to finish by the Spirit (1 Kings 18:12). The liturgical life seemed, from the outside, to stifle the Spirit.

In my developing religious sensibilities, inherited from the Free Church Protestantism of my youth, the legalists Paul battled in Galatia had morphed into modern ritualistic Christians. Jesus wanted prayers from my heart that revealed my own wrestling with God, not the repeated words of those long dead. God was, of course, on the side of the informalists and against the formalists. In the language that became omnipresent during my college years, it wasn’t about religion but relationship. Religion was shorthand for any ritual activity I was uncomfortable with.

Here, I want to approach the liturgy from a different perspective. I do not wish to engage in debates about particular texts of the Bible. I want instead to zoom out and look at the nature of the Old and New Testaments themselves. I want to press in on the method by which God forms a people. When God revealed himself to a spiritually malnourished group who needed to be taught the things required for holiness, what did he do? How did God do it?

He gave his people rituals. He gave them ...

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Where Drugs Often Merit Death, Singapore Ministries Offer New Life

More than 70 percent of the country’s inmates are jailed for drug-related offenses. Christian groups seek to help them reenter society.

Freddy Wee, the deputy director of a Christian halfway house for drug addicts in Singapore, understands what the men coming to Breakthrough Missions Singapore are going through. That’s because the 69-year-old has lived through it too.

Wee started smoking marijuana as a teen before graduating to painkillers, heroin, and eventually morphine. “I was always begging for money for drugs, threatening people,” Wee said. “It was a shameful life. It owned me for many years till I was caught.”

Even when Wee was arrested and sent to the government-run Drug Rehabilitation Center (DRC) for six months in his 20s, nothing changed. He returned to his old ways only to be arrested again.

His second stint lasted 15 months, and this time, members of a Christian group shared the gospel with Wee and other inmates. Years earlier, Wee had heard the good news from friends and even attended church with them. But he didn’t consider his conversion genuine as his lifestyle didn’t change.

At this point, Wee was desperate to be free from drugs and realized that only God could give him the power to overcome his addiction. He became a Christian, started studying the Bible, and led a Bible study group made up of fellow inmates. When he got out, he admitted himself to a Christian halfway house, House of Hope, realizing that without support, he would likely relapse. He promised God, “This time around, I am serious about my life. I want to follow the Lord.”

After two years at the halfway house, Wee was able to find a job and get married. Eventually, he started his job at Breakthrough Missions in 2002. Reintegrating into society hasn’t always been easy as he has faced rejection based on his past. Often, it’s ...

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These 3 Japanese Christian Women Changed Their Country

Meet an early evangelist, an education reformer, and a preacher who held Bible studies with the royal family.

Christianity arrived in Japan in 1549 through Jesuit missionaries and challenged the dominant Confucian view on the hierarchical position of women in society.

The Confucian instructional book Onna Daigaku (School of Women) instructed parents to raise their daughters to be submissive in order to marry into other families, where exercising too much independence would be impertinent. The most desirable qualities for women were obedience, chastity, compassion, and emotional balance. Wives were expected to revere their husbands as if they were deities and to never become jealous, as that would risk alienating their husbands.

The Christian faith that the Jesuits shared offered unprecedented opportunities for women to discover and embody new social roles and positions. The Protestants also represented this newfound reality as women comprised about two-thirds of the missionaries sent to Japan from 1859 to 1882, according to Japanese historian Rui Kohiyama.

“Christianity required women to make a personal decision about their religious choices and confess it publicly in a society where women’s opinions mattered little,” writes Haruko Nawata Ward, a church history professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, in her book Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650.

“It required them to maintain a stronger loyalty to Christ than to their feudal lords, fathers, elder brothers, husbands and sons. It empowered women to take vows of celibacy, or choose their marriage partners from among Kirishitan men.”

In the early 17th century, Christianity was banned. Believers were persecuted for just over two and a half centuries, with many practicing their faith in secret as Kakure Kirishitans, ...

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Gen Z Christians Want Leaders to Keep It Real

That means dropping the façade and admitting their own struggles.

As Generation Z teens grow up, many are moving further away from Christian faith and challenging church leaders to adapt to new expectations from the youngest in their flocks.

Last month, Barna Research reported that young adults aged 18 to 22 are half as likely to identify as Christian and follow Jesus than teenagers aged 13 to 17. A slight majority of today’s young adults—52 percent—don’t identify as Christians.

The young people of Gen Z are diverse, educated, and social media savvy. When it comes to faith, they’re open to Jesus and his teachings but skeptical about institutions and leaders putting on a façade.

Kendall Johnson, 20, became a believer in college and established her faith through campus ministry, but it was the “real and raw” women of her local church in Raleigh, North Carolina, that helped her grow spiritually. Though older than she, they reached out to talk and share struggles from their own lives.

Their openness, Johnson said, “allows me to see how much faith and trust they have in Jesus. It showed me Christianity is relational with one another [and] relational with God.”

Young Christians like Johnson expect the same kind of transparency, honesty, and authenticity from their leaders.

“For some generations, the more mythical their spiritual leaders, the more they trusted them,” said Darrell Hall, author of Speaking Across Generations: Messages That Satisfy Boomers, Xers, Millennials, Gen Z, and Beyond. “Gen Zers want there to be no gap between Darrell and Dr. Hall. No gap in persona. No gap in who I am and who I present myself to be.”

To cultivate genuine relationships, Hall said leaders need be accessible to students, meeting ...

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Christians, Stop ‘Giving Up God’ for Lent

In an age of functional atheism, ‘tis the season for traditional fasting and prayer.

“I’m giving up God for Lent,” said the post on my social media feed.

I had to reread the line again while my brain did a bit of reorienting. Wasn’t the person who posted this a Christian?

For some believers, the argument goes like this: By intentionally “giving up” God for a season, we give ourselves the chance to put to death any inaccurate idols we may have unintentionally created out of him.

Engaging in this practice, they argue, allows us the chance to see what life would be like without God—and that, in turn, should make us want to draw closer to Him. The principle goes that by choosing to lean away from God and depriving ourselves of his presence, we can learn His true value in our lives.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this practice is also promoted by atheist philosopher Peter Rollins, who is offering an online course called ‘Atheism For Lent’—aiming to critique theism and set aside “questions regarding life after death to explore the possibility of life before death.”

As a native and resident of the Bay Area in California, none of this is shocking to me. But what’s intriguing to me after searching online is that so many Christians, and even some churches, are intentionally engaging in this practice as a form of spiritual formation.

My question is this: Aren’t we already “giving up God”? Many of us are living out our daily lives without reference to the Lord instead of involving him in the day-to-day choices and decisions we make. Some have called this “functional atheism,” a fitting phrase. Parker Palmer defines this concept as “the unexamined conviction within us that if anything decent ...

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Criminal Or Not, Trump’s Case is a Moral Test for Christians

The former president’s potential arrest shows that character does matter.

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

As I write this, I have no idea if or when we will see something no generation of Americans has ever witnessed: a mug shot of a former president of the United States. What I do know is that the entire country is waiting with a sense of unease about just that possibility and about what happens next.

Last weekend, former president Donald Trump posted on his social media platforms that he expected to be arrested this week, on charges by a New York grand jury of illegally reporting the hush money cover-up of an alleged affair with “porn star” Stormy Daniels.

Part of the confusion is that this potential indictment is almost universally considered the weakest of the (at least) four criminal investigations now ongoing regarding the former president.

The biggest difficulty related to this potential prosecution is the fact that we are dealing with probably the single most polarizing figure in American life in at least a century.

Not many families were divided into seething groups who refused to speak to one another over the relative merits of Hubert Humphrey or Bob Dole. I can’t imagine that very many pastors agonized over whether they would lose their pulpits over inadequate enthusiasm for Adlai Stevenson or Gerald Ford.

Imagine trying to find a jury of 12 people without already-fixed views on Donald Trump, even if the entire country were the pool for the search. That’s amplified for us as evangelical Christians because there’s an assumption in American life that “evangelical Christian” and “Donald Trump enthusiast” are synonyms.

Not all of us are, by any means. But it is fair to say that, in some ways, the ...

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Hillsong Says It Is Moving Forward

New revelations will require increased accountability, but pastor wants to look to the future.

Phil Dooley, the new global senior pastor of Hillsong Church, has promised he will clean house.

“I can’t change the past, but I can play a significant role in changing the future,” he said during a Sunday service in Sydney, shortly after the board chair announced a forensic audit of church spending under Dooley’s predecessors, founders Brian and Bobbie Houston. “Our structure and culture is changing and needs to change more to ensure we are held to a higher level of accountability, and I welcome that.”

The opportunity to declare a new beginning came, unexpectedly, when an Australian member of parliament representing Tasmania made a speech charging the global megachurch with misuse of funds.

“Hillsong followers believe that the money they put in the poor box goes to the poor,” said MP Andrew Wilkie, surrounded by piles of binders he said contained financial records leaked by a whistleblower. “But these documents show how that money is actually used to do the kind of shopping that would embarrass a Kardashian.”

According to Wilkie, internal Hillsong documents show the church paid for extravagant lifestyles for church leaders. He alleges, for example, that Bobbie Houston received a $6,500 Cartier watch and $2,500 of Louis Vuitton luggage, and the Houston family spent $150,000 of church funds for a three-day luxury retreat in Cancun.

“These other documents show former leader Brian Houston treating private jets like Ubers—again, all with church money,” Wilkie told parliament. “For example, in one three-month period, Brian Houston’s trips cost $55,000, $52,000, $30,000, $22,000 and $20,000.”

It is unclear whether the amounts are calculated ...

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Christianity Is Not Necessary For Democracy

The basic freedoms and human rights we enjoy as Americans do not require a cultural Christian majority.

A recent Pew Research report suggested that American Christians could become a minority of the population in less than 50 years. And for some, this has led to a fear that the decline of cultural Christianity in America could spell bad news for the prospects for democracy here.

Because, while many people today are talking about how Christianity (especially when combined with nationalism) might be a threat to democracy, it is still more common to think that Christianity is overall good for democracy. In fact, many conservative evangelicals believe Christianity is necessary for a free society.

After recently publishing a book on Christian nationalism, I’ve given numerous talks, interviews, and podcasts and have had countless conversations with friends and colleagues in evangelical circles on the subject. And I have found that there is a possessive, proprietary attitude toward America and democracy—along with an insistence that a Christian culture is practically a prerequisite for democracy to survive.

The conversation goes something like this: Whenever I argue that it’s a mistake to look to the government to sustain a Christian culture, they counter that the government should have an interest in promoting Christianity because it is essential to sustain our democratic society.

For example, Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said at the National Conservatism Conference in September, “I am thankful to live in a society that is the inheritance of a Judeo-Christian civilization because it has established the very freedoms that we know.” So far, so good. Mohler is right that Christianity played an important role in shaping America and inspiring some of our founding principles. ...

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Dante Bowe Navigates Worship in the Spotlight

After leaving Maverick City Music, the singer is launching his own label focused on authenticity in a field increasingly crowded by celebrity.

Grammy Award–winning worship artist Dante Bowe is starting a new chapter.

After years with some of today’s most influential worship music collectives, Bethel Music and Maverick City Music, Bowe has launched TRUE Music, a label and management company that he hopes will become a hub for creativity and spiritual growth for emerging artists.

Bowe has shared a worship stage with the biggest and hippest names in the industry: Chandler Moore, Upperroom, Housefires, We The Kingdom, Crowder, Pat Barrett, and Brandon Lake. He’s known for his soulful, raspy voice and powerful performances on “Old Church Basement,” “Take Me Back,” and “Yes and Amen.” His energetic stage presence and emphasis on spontaneity in worship make him a dynamic and sought-after performer.

Bowe left Maverick City Music in September 2022; a social media post by Maverick City announced the departure, citing “behavior that was inconsistent with [its] core values and beliefs.”

The 29-year-old singer has reemerged after a social media hiatus with a new song “Hide Me” and a clear vision and a desire to foreground authenticity in his new project. His prominence has put him in the realm of Christian celebrity, though his heart is still to put Jesus at the center.

“I think there is a misconception that a lot of us want fame. It’s not that we want fame. We just release songs that we really sit at home, that we live with—it’s our real stories and our real life,” he said. “The general public makes it famous because they’ve encountered God through it, or they feel healed or like they can fight in their marriage or whatever the case may be. It’s the inspiration. ...

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Former SBC Pastor Johnny Hunt Sues Denomination He Once Led

Hunt admits to “kissing and some awkward fondling” but alleges defamation after the account was reported in last year’s Guidepost abuse investigation.

A disgraced former Southern Baptist president is suing the denomination he once led, saying he was defamed by allegations he assaulted another pastor’s wife.

In a complaint filed in the federal court for the Middle District of Tennessee, lawyers for the Rev. Johnny Hunt, a longtime Georgia megachurch pastor, admit Hunt “had a brief, inappropriate, extramarital encounter with a married woman” in 2012, but claims the incident was consensual and that it was a private matter that should not have been made public in a major 2022 report.

“Some of the precise details are disputed, but at most, the encounter lasted only a few minutes, and it involved only kissing and some awkward fondling,” according to the complaint.

The complaint said Hunt sought counseling and forgiveness for the incident, which the complaint said was “a sin.” However, Hunt never disclosed the incident to the First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Georgia, where he was the pastor for three decades, or to the SBC’s North American Mission Board, where he was a vice president until resigning in 2022.

But the incident became public in May 2022, after it was discovered by investigators at Guidepost Solutions, a consulting firm that had been hired to investigate how SBC leaders had dealt with the issue of abuse.

Guidepost’s investigators included the incident as part of their report and described it as a sexual assault. Those investigators said they found the allegations against Hunt credible. The former SBC president at first denied the allegations, then claimed the incident was consensual.

The complaint alleges the SBC and Guidepost engaged in defamation and libel, that they invaded Hunt’s privacy, and intentionally ...

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Company that Trademarked ‘Worship Leader’ Makes Others Drop the Term

Popular meme accounts lose social media pages after being reported by Authentic Media, which says it coined the phrase.

Worship Leader Probs was a meme account and podcast dedicated to the challenges of music ministry, but last week its creators revealed that they’ve lost social media pages and had to censor their brand due to a company claiming ownership to “two out of the three words” in their original name.

That company is Authentic Media, which runs a church resource called Worship Leader, once a print magazine and now available online. Authentic Media holds the trademark for “worship leader” and last year publicly stated that it planned “to continue to defend our trademark, as we have for decades.”

The dispute between Worship Leader and Worship Leader Probs dates back to October 2022, when Authentic Media explained its concerns about the name during a phone call with the creators of the meme account.

According to Joshua Swanson, editor in chief of Worship Leader and managing partner at Authentic Media, the company “woke up to the fact that people were using our brand,” and in 2022, he and others at Authentic Media became particularly concerned about brand confusion with Worship Leader Probs.

“It became a material issue for us. Our mission and their mission do not align,” Swanson told CT. “It became a major conflict. We would be at events, and people thought we were them and they were us.”

The phone call last fall did not resolve things, and after months at an impasse, Authentic Media began reporting Worship Leader Probs’ social media accounts for trademark infringement in February 2023.

Before losing its accounts, Worship Leader Probs had 15,000 followers on Facebook and 45,000 followers on TikTok. ...

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Should Evangelicals Observe Lent? What 6 Brazilian Theologians Say

How the church can serve and worship in the period between Carnival and Easter.

In the majority-Catholic country of Brazil, the biggest cultural festival is Carnival, a spectacle of eye-popping costumes, samba dancing, and raucous parades in the week leading up to Ash Wednesday. Due to its popularity, everyone in the country is aware of when Lent begins.

Established in 325 at the First Council of Nicaea, Lent had long been observed by the time the Portuguese landed on what is now Brazil in 1500. But despite its long history, the recent exponential growth of evangelicals—especially Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals—in Brazil has led to a decline in the observance of Lent. Unlike Easter, Lent receives little attention from many Protestants, either because they assign less importance to liturgical rituals or because they want to distance themselves from Catholic traditions.

CT asked six Brazilian leaders and pastors from different denominations: Should Brazilian evangelicals leave Lent to Catholics? Answers are arranged from yes to no.

Esequias Soares, pastor of the Assembleia de Deus (Assembly of God) in Jundiaí, São Paulo, and a leader with the Sociedade Bíblica Brasileira (Brazilian Bible Society)

The Brazilian Assemblies of God do not celebrate Lent because they do not follow the Christian liturgical calendar like the Catholic and Reformed traditions. However, we celebrate traditional Christian feasts such as Christmas and Easter, and in some places, we have begun to make room for Pentecost.

Also, the founders of Pentecostalism wanted to draw a clear distinction between Roman Catholicism and the churches that came from the Protestant Reformation. For example, the 1937 general assembly of the Assemblies of God discussed the use of the cross on the façade of churches. ...

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Tim Keller and Beth Moore, On and Off the Stage

Both leaders have huge followings. But how well do we really know them?

It is an awesome burden which the biographer takes up,” writes Elisabeth Elliot in her 1968 biography of missionary R. Kenneth Strachan. Any such project is “a judgment—upon the subject most obviously, upon the biographer himself, and upon any who were associated with the subject.” To read such a work is at some level to become involved in the judgment. The reader is invited to grapple with the questions raised by the subject’s life.

And yet, we are endlessly fascinated with biographies, not to mention autobiographies, memoirs, interviews, published diaries, collected letters—everything falling under the umbrella of “life-writing.” In reading them, we hope, perhaps, to glimpse the inner workings of the human heart and mind, to tease some meaning out of what Elliot calls the “careless—apparently, at times, haphazard” events of a human life. Perhaps the light shed by these other lives can help us more clearly see the shapes of our own.

Two recent releases offer this opportunity. The first, Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation, is a biography of the author and retired pastor, now in his 70s and undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer. A teacher since 1975, Keller became nationally known after 9/11 for his role in the growth of New York City’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

Author Collin Hansen, editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, lightly sketches what could be called the personal side of his subject’s life. Keller’s mother was involved and demanding; his father, emotionally absent. Keller left for college disenchanted with the gracelessness he saw in the churches of his youth. Despite majoring in religion in order to ...

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Can Westerners Atone for Their Sins Without Breeding Resentment and Ingratitude?

An imaginary soirée with Douglas Murray, the Christian-friendly agnostic author of "The War on the West".

Run this thought experiment: If you could split a bottle of fine wine and converse at leisure with a contemporary author that you respect, who would it be—and why? My own short list would include Douglas Murray, associate editor of The Spectator and best-selling British author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam and The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity. Watching videos and listening to podcasts that feature Murray, my hunch is that a tête-à-tête with this man would prove fascinating.

Associated with the so-called “intellectual dark web,” which Jonah Goldberg describes as “a coalition of thinkers and journalists who happen to share a disdain for the keepers of the liberal orthodoxy” (e.g., Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Shermer, Christina Hoff Sommers), Murray intrigues me as a sagacious conservative (à la public intellectual Roger Scruton), a nonconformist gay (à la commentator Andrew Sullivan), and a Christian skeptic (à la Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy). The last two epithets need further elaboration: As a “nonconformist gay,” Murray eschews the narcissism of sexual identity and the tribalism of identity politics; as a “Christian skeptic,” his questioning has a decidedly Christian coloration, owing to his upbringing and sympathies, even though he is not currently a practitioner. It seems God is so near to Murray that he does not yet feel him at his shoulder.

Watch the video of Justin Brierley, host of the podcast Unbelievable, moderate a conversation between New Testament scholar N. T. Wright and Murray on how we live in a post-Christian world. Murray confesses his discomfort ...

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Russian Christians Make Theological Case for Peace

Anonymous Christmas condemnation of invasion offers insight into antiwar movement as it seeks reconciliation with Ukrainian believers—who want names.

On an Advent Sunday in a small Protestant church in St. Petersburg, a Russian pastor nervously approached the pulpit. While his senior leadership was publicly neutral about the war, he was about to preach from the Sermon on the Mount against the invasion of Ukraine.

And in the pews before him was another potential land mine.

A congregant had been bringing along a childhood friend, who happened to be a Wagner Group mercenary. Wounded during combat for Russia’s private paramilitary company, the man was not there to spy. Yet while the pastor knew his close-knit congregation well, he could not predict the fallout from his message.

Relations remained good with the pastor’s mentor afterward, while the mercenary recovered and returned to the front lines. For now, the pastor has been left free to continue in ministry and—whether known to the intelligence services or not—in clandestine theological work against the war.

“Of course, we could go out and protest, but this would get you in jail,” he said, requesting anonymity. “For us, the most effective means are to work within your spheres of influence—and ours are very small.”

Over the course of the yearlong conflict, only a tiny minority of Russian Christian leaders have voiced complaint publicly. The response from authorities has been uneven: Minor church figures have been fined or jailed, while others continue to use their names on social media.

But no major denomination in Russia has condemned the war outright.

The St. Petersburg pastor, along with about 25 of his scattered multifaith colleagues, desired to confront their silence at the biblical source. Christianity Today spoke with three of them, on condition of anonymity, for insight ...

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Buddhism Went Mainstream Decades Ago. US Churches Still Aren’t Ready.

Why Christians need to learn about the religion Asian immigrants brought to the US.

This is the first article in the Engaging Buddhism series, which will explore different facets of Buddhism and how Christians can engage and minister to Buddhists.

Churches dot Linwood, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. Yet drive down a quiet road past Holy Spirit Church of Columbus and Christ Centered Apostolic Church and you’ll find an unexpected sight: a brightly colored Buddhist shrine with ornate gold accents and a pointed roof typical of Laotian architecture.

Twin red dragons guard the pathway to the shine, surrounded by reflections ponds. In the same compound is the Watlao Buddhamamakaram Buddhist temple, built in 2009 by Laotian immigrants. Inside, monks in saffron robes pray in front of golden statues of Buddha.

This Buddhist temple is a visible marker of the changing landscape of the United States. Since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended national origin quotas, the number of immigrants from Buddhist-background countries has grown drastically.

Today, Asians are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, making up 7 percent of the US population, or 22 million people. Arriving to pursue higher education or job opportunities or to escape wars and turmoil, Asians will continue moving to the US, and demographers project the community will grow to 46 million by 2060.

This trajectory means US churches and Christians will more likely encounter neighbors who are Buddhist or from a Buddhist-influenced culture, as the religion significantly influences more than a billion people worldwide. Around 500 million people practice Buddhism, most of whom live on the Asian continent. China has the largest number of Buddhists (with about 245 million adherents), while seven countries have ...

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Rick Warren: The Great Commission’s ‘Go and Teach’ Applies to Women

The former pastor of ex-SBC Saddleback shares why his views on women changed.

Last week, Russell Moore interviewed the recently retired pastor Rick Warren—author of The Purpose Driven Life—on his show.

They discussed his pastoral transition and plans for the future, as well as the disfellowshipping of Saddleback Church from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for hiring a female teaching pastor on its staff.

As the planter and former pastor of the well-known congregation, Warren shared how his views on women in church leadership changed when he re-encountered certain scriptures he had overlooked, such as the Great Commission.

The following excerpt is adapted from the original audio, which can be listened to here.

Rick: I’m ready here to join in the former Southern Baptist support group with Beth Moore, with Russell Moore, and a few others. This last week I got kicked out. It’s not a surprise to me actually. Because when I started Saddleback Church 43 years ago—although I am a fourth-generation Southern Baptist, and my grandfather Chester Armstrong was related to Annie Armstrong …

My great-great-grandfather was led to Christ by Charles Spurgeon and sent to America to plant churches in the 1860s. So, I have a long Baptist background. But you know what? We’ve done so many things not by the book. [Back] in 1980 when I started the church, we didn’t put Baptist in the name—now that was unheard of 40 years ago. … It’s a different Convention than it was when we’re missing those great statesmen that used to be here….

Russell: You said you weren’t surprised. I was bowled over. Just because I would think—with all of the crises involving the treatment of women and sexual abuse within the SBC—that saying a church is ...

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We Lose Culture Wars by Putting Them On Trial

Instead of prosecutors trying to win arguments, we’re supposed to be defending what actually matters.

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

“Why are we on defense,” one frustrated culture warrior asked me, referring to some religious freedom issue, “when we should be on offense?” As I’ve written elsewhere, I find this metaphor telling. It assumes that what really matters is the church’s state rather than its mission.

The more I’ve thought of it, though, the more I’ve come to believe that—in one sense—“defense” is exactly what we’re called to do.

Metaphors matter. They shape the way we see who we are, where we are, and what we do. Even though we use the metaphor “culture war” for what some would call “worldview conflicts,” underneath all the military imagery is an unspoken legal metaphor that might be even more controlling. We lose ourselves in culture wars when we think we are prosecutors. But we’re not—we’re attorneys for the defense.

The image of culture war as prosecution makes sense. After all, we are often dealing with principles of righteousness and unrighteousness, of morality or immorality. We make the case for who’s wrong and who’s right, and having won the argument, we thus win the case. This sense of purpose has the additional benefit of being fully in step with the times.

From the social-justice advocate on TikTok policing pronouns and cultural appropriation to the “own the libs” right-winger showing how “wokeness” will make everywhere like Portland, almost everyone can find people or movements to prosecute their cases. And we cheer our favorites on from the courtroom benches.

The problem is that the Bible tells us the role ...

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Basketball Is a Beautiful Game, but Not a Blueprint for Society

Treating the sport as a comprehensive social and political model misunderstands the vision of its Christian founder.

There is no sport whose origins are as deeply entwined with Christianity as basketball. Created in 1891 by James Naismith while he was studying at the YMCA’s International Training School, the game is a product of the “muscular Christianity” movement that sought to connect church and sports at the turn of the 20th century.

As a sports historian, I know there’s supposed to be no cheering in the archives. Yet, as a Christian and a lifelong basketball fan, I’ll admit to at least a small sense of pride when I talk about the origins of the game. My favorite sport, I like to point out, doesn’t exist without Christian ideas and institutions.

Given this background, I was immediately intrigued when I heard about David Hollander’s new book, How Basketball Can Save the World: Thirteen Guiding Principles for Reimagining What’s Possible. A professor with the Tisch Institute for Global Sport at New York University, Hollander’s premise is simple: The principles embedded within basketball by James Naismith can help us solve the problems of our world today.

A new ‘ism’

Hollander is not writing from a Christian perspective, but he does believe basketball has a deeper meaning that can shape the way we live. Amid profound disruption and fragmentation, with the failure of various “isms”—Hollander names capitalism, socialism, theism, and nationalism, among others—he suggests that basketball can offer a new “ism,” a system for making sense of the world.

“No more of the same old mistakes, from the same old thinking, by the same old leaders,” he writes. “Those systems have demonstrably failed. Basketball has given us a nearly century-and-a-half ...

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Evangelicals Are the Most Beloved US Faith Group Among Evangelicals

And among the worst-rated by everybody else.

When asked about their views of the country’s biggest religious groups, most Americans don’t have strong feelings either way—except when it comes to evangelical Christians.

In a Pew Research Center report released Wednesday, 27 percent of Americans expressed an unfavorable view of evangelicals, compared to 10 percent who have a negative view of mainline Protestants or 18 percent who have a negative view of Catholics.

About as many have a favorable approach to evangelicals—28 percent—but that’s mostly due to positive sentiment from American evangelicals themselves, about a quarter of the population.

The findings follow a trend from Pew. Six years ago, researchers reported that Americans were warming up to each major religious group in the US, from Mormons to Muslims, except for evangelicals.

Other surveys over the past year have pointed to American’s negative perceptions of certain evangelical denominations and traditions.

When asked about 35 specific “religious groups, organizations, and belief systems” in a 2022 YouGov poll, Americans gave the best ratings to Christianity and Protestantism, the biggest religious affiliations in the US.

YouGov respondents weren’t asked about evangelicalism as a category, but traditions with mainline denominations—Presbyterianism, Methodism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and the Episcopal Church—were ranked favorable, while those that fall more squarely in evangelicalism—Pentecostalism and the Southern Baptist Convention—skewed negative. (The worst ratings, though, went to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology, and Satanism.)

Additionally, just over half of Americans are turned off by Pentecostal churches, more than ...

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John Stott: ‘Evangelical Traditions Are Not Infallible’

The late theologian’s sermons are going digital, thanks to one of his family friends.

The public will soon have access to a digital collection of hundreds of John Stott’s recorded sermons and transcripts spanning five decades.

The influential theologian in the modern evangelical movement adhered to the principle of what he called (23:53) the “double obligation” of Bible expositors: “to open up the text of Scripture with faithfulness to the ancient word and sensitivity to the modern world.”

“John was very involved with what he called double listening—listening to Scripture and listening to the world. And [he taught] that when you preach, you need to have both,” Mark Hunt, an executor of Stott’s literary estate, told CT.

Hunt was the main coordinator of a small team tasked with the yearslong project of organizing Stott’s sermons. His main job was listening to and editing nearly 650 recordings made over the decades Stott served as a preaching pastor at All Souls Church in London and traveled the world speaking.

Stott was influential in Hunt’s life and career as a family friend turned mentor, inviting him to serve on the boards of his nonprofits and accompany him on global trips.

Faithlife, the company known for its Logos Bible study software, first approached the literary executors of John R. W. Stott about the sermon project in 2016. But it wasn’t until 2020 that Hunt began the process of refining the late evangelical leader’s audio recordings. That included cutting out coughs, long pauses, and paper rustling. He also increased the audio speed.

“John was very deliberate in his preaching, which was great, giving people a chance to reflect. But it didn’t make for the greatest audio listening experience,” Hunt explained.

He ...

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Speaking for Evangelicals at the UN, Gaetan Roy Seeks to Serve

The new representative starts each conversation with an unusual question.

Gaetan Roy goes to the United Nations building in Geneva with an unusual question: “How can I serve you?”

Roy is not a waiter or a salesperson but the new representative from the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) to the UN. Ever since he first got involved in politics, this is the question he’s led with. Back in 2015, when he went to the German parliament to lobby on behalf of evangelical organizations, he couldn’t get the words of Mark 10:45 out of his mind: I have come to serve, not to be served.

So Roy asked the first politician he met on his first day, “How can I serve you?” He’s continued asking it ever since.

“I thought this was really simple, but I felt God was unrelenting in this regard,” Roy told CT. “If Jesus came to serve and not to be served, then I will do the same by asking diplomats and politicians we engage with how we can serve them.”

With this question, Roy has become one of the primary evangelical voices at the world’s largest intergovernmental organization, speaking on behalf of 600 million believers in more than 120 countries. He takes over from Michael Mutzner, who helped establish the WEA’s office at the UN in 2012, and joins Wissam al-Saliby, director of the WEA’s Geneva office. Al-Saliby focuses on public statements about human rights violations while Roy works behind the scenes, brokering deals and developing official proposals for the UN representatives to consider.

Whether he’s promoting peace in Nigeria or working with the Coalition for Minority Rights in India, Roy said he hopes service will lead the way as he represents evangelical concerns and advances the cause of religious freedom for all.

If Roy’s approach ...

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Why Does Creation Groan?

Scripture and science suggest that animal suffering fits into a divine artistic story.

My Labrador retriever Buffy had a big heart. Our veterinarian, Beth, told us that Buffy had the largest, slowest “athlete’s heart” of any dog she had seen in 20 years of practice.

Buffy inherited her athletic heart from her grandmother, a dog that won numerous national field trial championships. In field trials, dogs must be eager, fast, and acutely alert to hand signals. They must also be able to keep going at full speed when most dogs begin to flag. That was Buffy. I never trained her for field trials, but we did retrieving drills almost every day with a bright orange “dummy.” Unlike Blue, her sister from another litter, Buffy never showed even the slightest sign that she was ready to stop retrieving. She just kept going.

The day before Buffy died at the age of 16, she was lying half awake on the living room floor and needed to go outside. Out of habit, I picked up the dummy. I was surprised when she abruptly perked up, struggled to her feet, shook once, and looked up at me expectantly. I could not believe that Buffy still wanted to retrieve.

Outside on the front lawn, I tossed the dummy a short distance. Buffy ambled after it, picked it up, and brought it back. Her eyes and ears said, Throw it again! So I did. She brought the dummy back, but this time she dropped it and, with a heavy breath, lay down. Buffy finally stopped retrieving.

Despite Buffy’s suffering in her old age, she lived a long and full life compared to many dogs. From the time they are born, dogs face dangers that can cut their lives short. They must be vaccinated for rabies and are besieged by hordes of micropredators, such as ticks, fleas, biting flies, mosquitoes—and the horrifying heartworm.

When a mosquito takes ...

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Boarding School Alumni Push for a New Kind of Abuse Investigation

Uncovering decades of allegations out of the Christian Academy of Japan, investigators tried new tactics to facilitate repentance and healing.

Decades after dozens of missionary kids suffered physical and sexual abuse at the Christian Academy of Japan (CAJ), mission agency leaders associated with the Tokyo school fell prostrate on the ground to perform dogeza, Japan’s deepest form of apology.

The 13 leaders met with victims at a private retreat in Colorado last fall to hear their stories and offer a formal apology.

“On their knees, heads on their hands, sobbing,” recalled Janet Oates, a 1963 alum of the academy, which was founded in 1950 as a boarding school for missionary children. “Alumni were sobbing too … one moment of justice.”

The moment of repentance followed an unconventional abuse investigation process that involved CAJ alumni acting as consultants and advocates. Alumni like Oates pushed the school and its founding mission agencies to investigate historic abuse in the first place.

The results of the investigation were devastating—turning up 72 cases of alleged abuse from 1957 to 2001. But the recent response has brought a degree of healing for some victims and could demonstrate a new approach for other organizations facing historic abuse allegations.

A number of boarding schools for missionary children have faced records of abuse. Investigations have uncovered mistreatment and mismanagement at a New Tribes Mission school in Senegal, the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s school in Guinea, and Hillcrest School in Nigeria. Few of the 150 schools serving missionary children around the world still offer boarding.

Four years ago, CAJ alumni and survivors said they wanted accountability and an apology from the school and the six mission agencies that founded it.

At the retreat last fall where leaders apologized, “the ...

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Tim Keller Calls on God’s ‘Providential Oversight’ Amid Treatment for New Tumors

Three years into his pancreatic cancer diagnosis, the New York pastor will undergo immunotherapy again.

Tim Keller shared on Sunday that he will once again go through a “brutal” treatment for his pancreatic cancer and asked for prayers.

Last June, Keller participated in an inpatient immunotherapy trial at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, which he said had “shown great promise in potentially curing cancer.” The 72-year-old is returning to the Bethesda, Maryland, facility next month to do another variation of that immunotherapy on new tumors.

The tumors “are unfortunately in some fairly inconvenient places,” Keller said, “so the doctors encouraged us to go through the treatment again, this time targeting a different genetic marker of the cancer.”

“It was brutal last June, so we approach this with an awareness of how much prayer we need,” Keller wrote on Twitter. “Please pray for our trust and dependence on God, for his providential oversight of the medical preparations now in process, and for our desire to glorify God in whatever comes our way. Thank You.”

The longtime pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, Keller was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in May 2020. He went through 14 rounds of chemotherapy, followed by a surgery to remove nodules the following year.

In June 2022, he first went through the month-long immunotherapy treatment at the National Cancer Institute. At the time, his son Michael Keller posted an update saying, “Things were scary for a bit but God was gracious, working through your prayers and the skill of the doctors, and now he is doing much better.”

Last July, Keller reported that the initial signs from the immunotherapy were encouraging. Eight months later, he said it ...

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What ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Showed Me About the Paradox of Achieving “Nothing”

Did Evelyn have anything to show for after a life in the laundromat? Did I as a homeschool mom?

Evelyn Wang feels like she has achieved nothing.

Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is the main character in award-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once (spoilers ahead). In her current life, she experiences the tedium of running a laundromat business. As she visits other parallel universes in which she is a successful actress or a skilled teppanyaki chef, she begins to see her current life as the result of a series of bad decisions.

Evelyn soon comes to the devastating realization that she has not accomplished anything significant. Her marriage to Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is on the rocks. Her relationship with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is, well, hardly joyful. Overall, her life seems to be a complete failure.

Where I identify most with Evelyn's identity struggle is in her role as a parent.

My husband and I are from Taiwan. We met and married while studying in Germany. After graduation, I left my career to support my husband's work, moving from country to country and city to city.

When I became a mother, I received a call from God to become a home-schooling mother. I enjoyed living with my husband around the world and savored every moment I spent with my children in homeschool.

I am thankful for God's blessings in my family and marriage. But occasionally, in the quiet of the night, I have wondered what my life would have been like if I was not married and if I had not become a mother. There are times when I miss experiencing the passion for the political ideals I held as a student.

Yet, I stand by my choice to give up my career and homeschool my children. As Evelyn’s life reminds me, choosing to serve others by achieving “nothing” in a world that pursues upward mobility requires a deep love and a ...

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