Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Asian Girl Name

How did a name the Puritans made popular take off in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese immigrant circles?

As a freshman at Biola University, Grace Brannon (née Kim), 28, encountered many Korean and Korean American women with the same first name. When several of them became part of the same friend group, they started to call themselves Grace 1, Grace 2, and Grace 3.

“This was like an inside joke among our friend group. It was funny,” Brannon said. “They knew a lot of other Graces too.”

The ubiquity of the name Grace among predominantly East Asian and East Asian American women has been both anecdotally remarked upon and at times given larger cultural attention. When I shared social media posts asking to connect with Asian women named Grace for this story, one person tweeted, “I know fifty.” Another said that CT would need “3 issues and a podcast” to adequately represent the plethora of Graces in Asian American communities.

In 2005, filmmaker Grace Lee even made a documentary as a way to uncover the stereotypes and social expectations people had for women bearing, in this case, both her first and last name.

“In the US, most of the Graces I know are Chinese or Korean,” said Grace Chan McKibben, 50, the executive director of Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community in Chicago. She moved to America from Hong Kong in high school.

“My grandma, aunt, and sister-in-law are all named Grace,” she added.

What’s so amazing about the name Grace? Why do so many Asian Christian women in North America have this name? Perhaps the name represents a believer’s cry while living in a foreign land, and a proclamation of thanksgiving for receiving undeserved kindness from God.

Divine intervention

Grace comes from the Latin word gratia and was not particularly ...

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Vengeance Was Theirs: Armenia Honors Christian Assassins, Complicates Path to Peace

Pastors and professors reflect on the ethical dilemma of extrajudicial justice against Ottoman officials responsible for genocide and commemorating their killers today.

Surveying the scene on a rainy day in Berlin, the Protestant gunman recognized his target. Living hidden under an assumed name in the Weimar Republic, the once-famous official exited his apartment, was shot in the neck, and fell in a pool of blood.

For many, the 1921 killing vindicated the blood of thousands.

Neither were Germans. Both would eventually be immortalized.

But the cloak-and-dagger story took another twist when a Berlin court ruled the assassin “not guilty.” The trial captivated the local press, brought a nation’s tragedy to the public eye, and set off a philosophical chain of events that eventually coined a new term and established an international convention meant to render unnecessary any similar future acts.

It was already too late.

Two decades after the trial, the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Hitler, preparing the Holocaust, is said to have justified it in reference to the already forgotten history of 1.5 million people killed by Germany’s then-ally in the fallout from World War I.

The gunman, Soghomon Tehlirian, was an Armenian. The official, Mehmed Talaat, was an Ottoman Turk. And the term created by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin—genocide—continues to haunt the world today.

But the chain of events has not concluded.

Nazi Germany, seeking Axis partners in World War II, repatriated Talaat’s remains to Turkey in 1943, where dozens of memorials and streets are named in his honor. Once the grand vizier of the Ottoman sultan, he is celebrated today as one of the leading “Young Turks” who forged the creation of the modern-day secular nationalist republic.

The descendants of his victims, scattered around the world, consider Talaat—known commonly as Talaat Pasha ...

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How to Stay Hitched When Your Wife Ditches You

Harrison Scott Key’s latest book gives a tragi-comic take on the Christian humility required to stay married.

“What happened was, my wife for a billion years—the mother of our three daughters, a woman who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in church—snuck off and found herself a boyfriend. … He has a decorative seashell collection and can’t even grow a beard. I am not making this up.”

So begins Harrison Scott Key’s third memoir How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told. If you’ve read his first two books The World’s Largest Man, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and Congratulations, Who Are You Again? you may not be able to imagine one of the nation’s funniest writers exploring such a serious issue. Who writes a comedic memoir about their failed marriage?

But here’s the surprise: His book is about a failure that was redeemed—a marriage resurrected.

In many ways, How to Stay Married is Key’s most Christian memoir. He talks explicitly about his faith and makes clear that his story makes sense only if the Christian God is real. Just as Hosea fought for Gomer, Harrison fights for Lauren, his wife of 14 years.

As I was reading, I thought of all the times I had been blindsided by dissolved relationships. Before I was married, I was a bridesmaid ten times, and four of those ended in divorce before I had celebrated my tenth anniversary. At the start of the book, Key, too, admits that he would hear of other people’s divorces and say, “Wait. What?” But this time, he faces his wife’s request to end the relationship and has to say a very personal version of “Wait. What?”

He writes of these and other moments in their marriage with an authenticity, vulnerability, and ...

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A Tale of Two New York City Pastors

One formed me. The other entertained me.

On a sunny March afternoon in 2014, I found myself jumping on the L train from Manhattan to Williamsburg to interview a young, urban pastor named Carl Lentz in his luxury waterfront apartment. A trendy evangelical magazine wanted me to profile him. With its nightclub venues and award-winning worship music, his Hillsong church was attracting thousands of diverse young people from around New York City.

Lentz is now featured in an FX documentary, The Secrets of Hillsong, which examines his string of affairs and the embattled church he left behind. The four-episode exposé features a solemn and emotional Lentz sharing that he was sexually abused as a child, admitting to moral failings (from sexual indiscretions to drug abuse), and describing the conflict among Hillsong leadership and staff.

The documentary dropped the same day that another New York City pastor made headlines: Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s founder, Tim Keller, died of cancer on May 19.

In the mid-2000s, both Redeemer and Hillsong drew flocks of spiritually curious New Yorkers, and both brought in around 5,000 attendees weekly across several services. For two years during college, I attended both churches simultaneously. After growing up as a home-schooled pastor’s kid in New England, I moved to New York City for undergrad. But it wasn’t just the star-studded Manhattan sidewalks that grabbed my attention; it was also the churches led by rapidly rising evangelical stars, including Keller and Lentz.

Since then, the evangelical church has been waking up to the pitfalls of platforming and creating celebrity pastors. We’ve watched many of them fall hard into sin after they were groomed for leadership at a young age and given too much power ...

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Christians Are Asking ChatGPT About God. Is This Different From Googling?

Experts from around the world explain the consequences of the AI revolution for believers on and off the internet.

Hundreds of millions of people have used ChatGPT since its arrival last November to plan vacation itineraries, help them code better, create pop-culture sonnet mashups, and learn the finer details of their beliefs.

For years, Christians have Googled their theological questions to find articles written by humans answering questions about God and God's Word. Now, people can take these questions to AI chatbots. How will natural language-processing tools like ChatGPT change how we interpret the Bible?

Eight AI experts from around the world— and Chat GPT itself— weighed in.

Pablo A. Ruz Salmones, CEO, X eleva Group, Mexico City, Mexico

As John 17:17 says, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (ESV). Thus, interpreting the Bible is, to a great extent, the search for Truth. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT don’t have, by definition, a source of truth; it’s simply not in the model—hence why sometimes they make things up and extrapolate. They are incapable of finding truth, so that even when they do stumble across it, they are unable to recognize it as such.

Thus, when reading an output of an LLM regarding the Bible, we must understand that said output does not come from its search for truth within His Word but rather from a mixed “regurgitation” and extrapolation—a.k.a. algorithms—of what others have said. As a result, ChatGPT cannot offer a new interpretation of the Bible by itself; rather, a person querying ChatGPT may find in the chatbot’s answer a new way to interpret the Bible, just as they may find it in an answer offered by a parrot. Because it copies others, the parrot ends up speaking truth, even if it has no idea it has done so. ...

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Sola Scripturas: Can Evangelicals Befriend the ‘Protestant Reformers of Islam’?

Interview with scholar of American Salafism finds commonalities—and potential for engagement—between the austere Islamic interpretive movement and the Christian community most wary of them.

If one pictures “radical Islam,” chances are the image resembles Osama bin Laden, Boko Haram in Nigeria, or the ISIS fighters of Iraq and Syria. And the connotation is that they are out to kill—or at least to turn the world into an Islamic caliphate.

They are known as Salafis: Muslims who bypass accrued tradition to imitate meticulously the example of Muhammad, his companions, and the first generation to follow them. After the death of the prophet in 632 A.D., the nascent faith’s collective zeal established a sharia-based global empire that did not end until the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Muslims who look like these jihadist images are found in every major American community.

Matthew Taylor counterintuitively argues that, at least in the United States, Salafis actually compare better with evangelicals—the religious group with the most unfavorable perception of Muslims in general.

Author of the forthcoming Scripture People: Salafi Muslims in Evangelical Christians’ America, Taylor argues that the Salafi impulse to return to the origins of Islam parallels the evangelical desire to imitate the early church. And both communities, as the title implies, center their approach on sacred text.

The question is: Do the two scriptures take them in radically different directions?

CT asked the Fuller Seminary graduate, now a mainline Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, to address the common concern about Salafi extremism and to advise evangelicals on how to pursue a path of possible friendship:

What makes a Muslim a Salafi?

Salafism has very deep roots in the Muslim tradition, and the term Salaf refers to the first generations of Muslims. The idea is ...

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US Slavic Churches Booming with Ukrainian War Refugees

One generation of Soviet refugees is welcoming another.

Sergei Karpenko’s Chicago church is now almost entirely made up of refugees from the Russian war against Ukraine.

Many of them aren’t from a church background, so the pastor of Bible Church of Ukraine-Chicago spends his mornings eating breakfast with the new arrivals and evenings hosting Bible studies in his apartment.

“It happens by the providence of God that I am here, and God sent new people from Ukraine,” Karpenko, who is Ukrainian himself, told CT. “I never prepared myself for such a ministry. We’re making mistakes and learning. Pray for us.”

Refugees come to his church by word of mouth or through refugee resettlement agencies like World Relief. Some Telegram channels for new Ukrainian arrivals advise them to find a local church for support. Karpenko’s church—which worships in Ukrainian, Russian, and English—tells freshly arrived Ukrainians that they can contact them if they need help, conversation, or friendship.

The US has welcomed about 300,000 Ukrainians since Russia invaded Ukraine. Millions more are refugees in Europe.

Slavic churches are key to helping the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals to the US. Many of these refugees are coming in through a special program (Uniting for Ukraine) that doesn’t go through the traditional refugee resettlement agencies, instead assigning arrivals to individual sponsors.

But in some cases, sponsors disappeared when Ukrainians arrived. Churches are trying to provide a steadier foundation for the new arrivals. For Ukrainian Christians already living in the US, it’s a helpful way to process the war.

“You can’t cry all the time and sit and watch the news 24/7,” said Chicago pastor Russ Drumi, ...

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Russell Moore: I Already Miss Tim Keller’s Wise Voice

The late pastor theologian gave strong counsel to me and so many others in ministry.

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

“Gandalf isn’t supposed to die.”

That text appeared on my phone yesterday from a New York City pastor who worked closely with Tim Keller. It made me smile and cry at the same time. So many of us called Tim “Gandalf,” in part as a tribute to his frequent J. R. R. Tolkien references, but also because he fit the image of the sage wizard guiding us hapless hobbits out of harm’s way.

In the opening chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien writes that Gandalf’s “fame in the Shire was due mainly to his skill with fires, smokes, and lights. His real business was far more difficult and dangerous, but the Shire-folk knew nothing about it.”

By any measure, Tim was an impressive figure—the most significant American evangelical apologist and evangelist since Billy Graham. Most people think immediately of his skill in the areas of preaching, cultural analysis, church-planting strategy, and apologetics. All of that is true. But Tim’s real business went beyond his skills and gifts. He was smart, yes, but what made him unique wasn’t intellect but wisdom.

“Well, wait, let’s think about this for a minute, Russell.”

Those words from Tim kept me from more dumb decisions than I can recount. They prefaced the counsel from Tim that kept me in my position as president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention. In the wake of my refusal to support Donald Trump as president, I was facing significant backlash.

“Let’s list all the people trying to drive me out that are under the age of forty,” I ...

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Tim Keller Changed Church Planting, from City to City

From Beirut to Barcelona, pastors reflect on his influence.

“Christians are called to be an alternate city within every earthly city,” Tim Keller wrote for CT in 2006. “We must live in the city to serve all the peoples in it, not just our own tribe. We must lose our power to find our (true) power.”

Keller, who died on Friday, May 19, at age 72, launched nonprofit organization Redeemer City to City to train and develop leaders for gospel-led movements in urban settings. His decades-long experience in this field stemmed from establishing Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, a so-called “spiritual desert” in New York City. When the church was founded in 1989, there were only a handful of evangelical churches in the area. Twenty years later, the number of evangelical churches there had swelled to 197.

Among Keller’s many teachings on urban church planting is the notion of a “whole city tipping point,” which occurs when 10 to 20 percent of the population become Jesus-followers and start making visible, tangible impact on the city’s culture. Such a “city-wide gospel movement” is organic, energetic, and Spirit-led, he emphasized.

“Tim Keller taught us that to be a church that is in, for, and with the city, we need to be a present church, a church that serves its neighbors and neighborhood, and a church that’s willing to dialogue with the city and be attentive to its faults, illnesses, needs, and demands. Only then can we be Light for the city,” said Brazilian pastor Digo Karagulian, whose church ministers daily to people living in the Pilar favela (Portuguese for “slum”) next door.

CT interviewed church planters in Barcelona, Beirut, Chennai, Hanoi, Melbourne, ...

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Tim Keller Wanted to Learn from the Global Church. Even Secularizing Europe.

What the Reformed pastor saw in the continent's Christians—and why it earned him the respect of its church planters.

When Timothy Keller visited Rome in 2014, he addressed city pastors, gave an apologetic talk at the Italian Senate, and answered questions from students at Sapienza University of Rome, the largest university in Europe.

As a pastor who had planted a church next to Sapienza, I was struck by seeing Keller minister in my own context. On that campus, my wife and I had distributed flyers, held picnics, engaged students, and helped some of them pray for the first time. Two years before, a crowd of students gathered in the university’s central lawn for a debate on the existence of God, in which I tried my best to interact with an atheist professor and commend the Christian faith.

As Keller held an extensive Q and A session, responding to the toughest questions posed by the students, I admired the thoughtfulness of his answers. Then I was struck by his servant posture. Keller had rolled up his sleeves, served alongside local workers, and happily accepted questions from young, secular Italians.

That moment encapsulated the capacious, humble spirit that had gained the respect of many European Christian leaders. In Keller, they found theological robustness in an age of pragmatism and technique, a reconciling spirit in an age of division, and a rediscovery of the gospel in a time when preachers are tempted to reduce it to inspiring stories and practical advice.

“He was the premier North American evangelical statesman of his generation,” said Lindsay Brown, the former secretary-general of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. Keller’s death brought to his mind words spoken at John Stott’s funeral: In 2011, the theologian Chris Wright paid tribute to Stott by describing Stott “as the greatest ...

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Yes, You Can End an Abusive Marriage

How Christians can differentiate suffering in a destructive relationship from acting self-sacrificially in a godly partnership.

About a decade ago, I attended the funeral of a woman of faith that my family and I had known for decades. This longtime friend had passed away after battling cancer, and the farewell was painful. She was the kind of person whose departure meant the world had lost some of its tenderness.

At her funeral in our midwestern Brazil hometown, I heard people remark that “she got sick because of her sorrow” and that “now she would finally rest,” and I finally put together what I was too young to comprehend before: She had endured an abusive relationship until the day she died.

What made our friend stay in such a cold relationship and toxic situation? Her faith that her husband would one day change and her conviction that divorce could cause her to lose her salvation.

Devastatingly, she believed that it was God’s wish that she remain faithfully married, regardless of her husband’s abuse, and this stance was only reinforced by her pastors. They advised her to keep fasting, praying, and putting her all into her marriage—practices she kept until the day she passed away.

Requiring someone to submit to a violent marital burden is a slow, sadistic death sentence whose origins can be traced back to years of sinful abuse of power. Surely, our calling to die to ourselves every day extends into our personal relationships, because all of them entail a measure of self-sacrifice. But it’s a completely different thing to distort Scripture to the point of equating spiritual sacrifice with enduring spousal violence. There’s a crucial difference between these types of death: one is rooted in perfect love, while the other is rooted in destructive sin.

The marital burden

When justifying maintaining such ...

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They Sang ‘a Heavenly Song’ in a Dark Chinese Jail

Two Chinese Christian women ministered to their cellmates and prison guards with stories, prayers, and hymns.

“About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were all listening to them” (Acts 16:25). This happened in a jail cell in Macedonia about 2,000 years ago.

Many years later in a jail cell in northern China, two Christian friends, Yang Xiaohui and Chen Shang (both are pseudonyms for security reasons) sang their own worship songs from prison. In a place of despair, their words to heaven rang out in the darkness.

“We started singing. Then everyone was singing,” said Xiaohui. “They said, ‘Such a good song with such beautiful music and lyrics. Sing for us again!’”

Xiaohui first learned about Jesus by singing. At home, her husband taught her Christian songs. At church, she sang with the kids.

Late in the summer of 2022, police seized Xiaohui from her home. Only eight months after her husband went to jail for his faith, authorities apprehended Xiaohui while she cooked dinner for her family in the kitchen. She was accused of “illegal gathering for religious activities.”

Several hours after she was first detained, the police threw Xiaohui into a cell with eight or nine others in the middle of the night. Xiaohui was nervous. But she believed God put her in this place to share his light.

“I forced myself to preach the gospel and to exalt God,” she said.

Xiaohui and the others in her cell swapped stories of how they ended up in jail. People from all walks of life end up in Chinese prison. Xiaohui met women in jail for fighting, prostitution, theft, gambling, protesting a broken contract, and violating immigration laws.

Xiaohui tried to explain to these women that she had been put in jail for gathering with other Christians. Though ...

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She Was Born into Slavery. She Became a Missionary to Africa at 56.

How an American school teacher spread God's love in King Leopold's Congo.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Congo Free State was one of the hardest places to be a human. For several decades, Belgian soldiers and business owners brutalized thousands of Congolese locals. They pursued rubber profits at whatever cost, taking the lives of men, women, and children who were forced to serve the whims of King Leopold.

During this time, an American missionary, Maria Fearing, ran Pantops Home for Girls, one of the region’s few places of sanctuary. Using her own salary and donations from her supporters, Fearing created a place in Luebo, Congo, where several dozen girls received a comprehensive education and heard about Christianity for the first time. Fearing’s students nicknamed her Mama wa Mputu (“mother from far away”) to show their love and appreciation.

As a young child growing up enslaved on an Alabama plantation, Fearing had no idea that the God who created her would liberate her from physical and spiritual slavery, or that she would one day travel across seas to the shores of Africa, carrying that message of freedom and new life to those who lived on the same continent as her ancestors.

The “homeland”

In 1836, Mary Fearing gave birth to a baby girl that she and her husband Jesse named Maria (Ma-rye-ah). The Fearing’s lived outside of Gainesville, Alabama and their daughter arrived just shy of thirty years before legal emancipation and the obliteration of the chattel slave system. Historians know little of Maria’s childhood and her family life while she was enslaved, but it’s believed that she had faith in Christ at an early age, as Four Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo and Maria Fearing, A Mother to African Girls both note.

Her family shared Scripture, ...

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Our Beloved Ones Don’t Become Angels When They Die

Despite what Chinese religions and pop culture might suggest, they stay human—and that’s a good thing.

On May 14, 2023, Taiwanese media reported on the first TV appearance of the famous singer couple Yu Tian and Li Yaping since their daughter died of cancer. In the TV program, the couple talked about their mourning and love for their daughter, and the audience was much moved when Li said, “My daughter has gone to heaven. … She has finally become an angel.”

It is not uncommon for people in Taiwan to believe their loved ones become angels (or some other forms of beings higher than humans) when they die. Personally, I have not only heard children say that about their grandparents who passed away but have also seen many internet discussions about “Do we become angels when we die?” Every year during the Qingming tomb sweepings, many people—including Christians—stand in front of the tombstones, telling their deceased loved ones about their life events and praying for blessings. The idea is even taught or implied by some pastors in Taiwan, especially at Christian memorial services.

Influence from pop culture and Chinese religions

But is the belief in our becoming angels after dying consistent with the Bible and orthodox Christian beliefs?

To people in Taiwan, Christianity is a foreign religion. According to a survey published in 2019 by the Academia Sinica of Taiwan’s Institute of Sociology, only 5.5% of the Taiwanese population are Protestant and 1.3 percent are Catholic, with the majority of the population following traditional folk religions (49.3%), Buddhism (14%), Taoism (12.4%), or no religion (13.2%). The majority of Taiwanese still understand Christianity through the popular culture of European and American films, television programs, plays, novels, and picture books. Thus, many ...

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The Birds and the Bees: How Over-Spiritualizing Sex Dismisses Creation

The current debates about sexuality are missing an ecological perspective.

I first learned about sex in the barnyard. Milking goats taught me the hows and whys of reproductive hormones; flocks of chickens offered lessons in fertilized eggs; and when the cat gave birth under my grandmother’s bed, I learned how to identify the sex of kittens when I was just five years old.

Given the shape of modern life, my experience is increasingly uncommon. And it shows in our conversations about sex. We don’t lack knowledge of our own urges so much as we lack an ecology in which to place them. As a result, we keep getting sex wrong. In evangelical circles, this increasingly means getting the relationship between material and immaterial realms wrong as well.

For example, much of the ongoing debate around Josh Butler’s A Beautiful Union stems from his often misguided attempt to “creationize sex.” While some argue his errors come from theology that inappropriately centers male sexuality, his first mistake might be centering human sexuality in the first place.

An ecological perspective puts things back in balance. It invites us to be quiet long enough to “hear the voice of the earth,” as theologian Katharine Dell puts it. It requires us to shift our focus away from ourselves, reframing our questions about sex within a set of larger questions about God’s work in the world. And it forces us to accept that our dialogue often stalls because we’re starting in the wrong place. To riff off Chesterton, how much larger would the world be if our sex lives could become smaller in it? An ecological perspective also helps us avoid over-spiritualizing sex in order to make sense of it—a move that Butler makes in rather unfortunate ways. After all, if we lack understanding ...

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Fewer Christians Know Families Who Foster or Adopt

While churches offer more support and encouragement, attendees say they’re less likely to see personal involvement.

More pastors are encouraging members to adopt and provide foster care at a time when adoptions have declined in the US.

A Lifeway Research study found more than 2 in 5 US Protestant churchgoers (44%) say their congregation and its leaders are proactively involved with adoption and foster care in at least one of seven ways.

A similar percentage (45%) say they haven’t seen other churchgoers or leaders provide any of the specific types of care or support, while 11 percent aren’t sure.

“Caring for the fatherless is repeatedly prioritized throughout Scripture,” said Scott McConnell, executive director Lifeway Research.

“But the Bible does not pretend caring for another like your own child is convenient or easy.”

Personally involved

More than 1 in 10 churchgoers say someone in their congregation has provided foster care (16%), adopted a child from the US (13%) or adopted a child from another country (11%) within the last year.

Compared to five years ago, fewer churchgoers say they’ve seen members of their church actively participate in adoption and foster care. In a 2017 Lifeway Research study, 25 percent of US Protestant churchgoers said a church member provided foster care, 17 percent said someone adopted domestically and 15 percent said a member adopted internationally in the past year.

Adoptions and the prevalence of foster care have fallen among all Americans in recent years. The number of US children in foster care dropped from 436,556 with 124,004 waiting to be adopted in 2017 to 391,098 with 113,589 waiting to be adopted in 2021, according to a report from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System. Adoptions, both domestically and internationally, have declined as well. ...

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Died: Superstar Billy Graham, Teenage Evangelist Who Became a Wrestling Legend

In the ring and life, he was a “heel” who wanted to be a “babyface.”

Wayne Coleman, a teenage Pentecostal preacher who became a professional wrestler and took the name of the world’s most famous evangelist to perform as Superstar Billy Graham, died on Wednesday at age 79.

Coleman was a charming, flamboyant, and braggadocious performer who brought bodybuilding into wrestling and influenced some of the biggest stars, including Jesse “The Body” Ventura, the Iron Sheik, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Ric Flair, and Hulk Hogan, who borrowed Superstar Billy Graham’s speech and style.

“This is the most copied guy in the business,” the wrestler Triple H once said. “He was the guy who broke the wall in terms of where you could go with entertainment. He paved the road for Hulkamania. He paved the road for all of us.”

For most of Coleman’s career, he played a heel, as professional wrestlers call the villain. Crowds across the country would boo and hiss as he flexed, posed, and boasted that he was “the reflection of perfection,” “the sensation of the nation” and “the number one creation.” But Coleman desperately wanted to become the babyface, or hero. He struggled to get World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF) chairman Vince McMahon to script him the redemptive, transformational narrative arc he longed for. He rose to the top of the WWWF, defeating champion Bruno Sammartino in 1977, only to learn the coming storyline would treat him as a transitional figure to be defeated by the next babyface, Bob Backlund. He was defeated in Madison Square Garden in 1978.

Coleman disappeared from wrestling, mounted an ill-fated comeback, and then quit for good. He suffered extensive physical pain from decades of steroids abuse. ...

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Tim Keller Practiced the Grace He Preached

In an increasingly divisive world, the pastor theologian’s legacy was walking the higher road—the one less traveled.

Hardly anyone could be more qualified than Timothy Keller to receive the Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness. It should have been the culmination of a remarkable career.

Keller applied Reformed theology to the heart of American culture while preaching at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, which he planted in 1989 with his wife, Kathy. Keller’s writing introduced Kuyper’s theology of vocation—his vision of God who claims “every square inch” of creation for his glory—to new generations of Christians around the world.

But the reaction from many Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) students and alumni revealed just how much American culture had shifted since 1989 when Keller stepped down from the pulpit in 2017. Keller’s views on women’s ordination and homosexuality countered the prevailing norms at PTS and other mainline seminaries, not to mention the broader culture.

By this evolving standard, Abraham Kuyper wouldn’t have been eligible for his own award. Under pressure from various advocacy groups, PTS leaders rescinded their decision to grant Keller the 2017 Kuyper Prize (which has since been hosted by Calvin College). The renowned pastor seemed poised to become yet another casualty in the ever-expanding culture wars.

Or not.

Keller did not receive the prize, but he agreed to give the lectures anyway. PTS did not want to reward him, but he still tolerated them. And for all the preceding protest, enthusiastic applause greeted Keller when he stepped to the podium on April 6, 2017. PTS president Craig Barnes got the message once again when he returned to dismiss the crowd.

I didn’t attend the PTS lectures, but I understand the surprising ...

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Tim Keller: From the CT Archives

A collection of articles by and about the late pastor theologian.

Timothy Keller’s influence can be seen and felt across evangelicalism today. He inspired many Christians to reengage with cities, put energy and resources into church planting, and find ways to communicate the gospel clearly and kindly.

Keller was a model of winsome apologetics. He addressed the needs people felt in their lives, explaining sin and salvation in ways that connected with their experiences. He wasn’t afraid to engage big ideas thoughtfully and carefully, and he didn’t lose sight of the fact that his aim was not intellectual victory but helping people reject their own idolatry and reconcile with Christ.

He authored multiple best-selling books, launched a church-planting network, and cofounded The Gospel Coalition. Even as he became a sought-after Christian celebrity, Keller remained grounded in his work as a pastor of a New York City congregation, setting an example of faithful ministry.

Click here for more from the CT archives.

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Died: Tim Keller, New York City Pastor Who Modeled Winsome Witness

A model of “winsome” Christian witness, he told the nation’s cultural elites they worshiped false gods.

Tim Keller, a New York City pastor who ministered to young urban professionals and in the process became a leading example for how a winsome Christian witness could win a hearing for the gospel even in unlikely places, died on Friday at age 72—three years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Keller planted and grew a Reformed evangelical congregation in Manhattan; launched a church planting network; cofounded The Gospel Coalition; and wrote multiple best-selling books about God, the gospel, and the Christian life.

Everywhere he went, he preached sin and grace.

“The gospel is this,” Keller said time and again: “We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

Keller was frequently accused—especially in later years—of cultural accommodation. He rejected culture-war antagonism and the “own the libs” approach to evangelism, and people accused him of putting too much emphasis on relevance and watering down or even betraying the truth of Christianity out of a misplaced desire for social acceptance.

But a frequent theme throughout his preaching and teaching was idolatry. Keller maintained that people are broken and they know that. But they haven’t grasped that only Jesus can really fix them. Only God’s grace can satisfy their deepest longings.

At his church in Manhattan, Keller told the nation’s cultural elites that they worshiped false gods.

“We want to feel beautiful. We want to feel loved. We want to feel significant,” he preached in 2009, “and that’s why we’re working so hard and that’s the source ...

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My Sister’s Sudden Death Prepared Me for COVID-19’s Slow Grief

As much as we might want to, none of us can outsource the burden of bereavement.

On May 4, I woke up early and began preparing for the busy day ahead. I made my bed, brewed a strong cup of coffee, and cracked eggs in a pan to fry for my children’s breakfast. I went to my closet and picked out a black outfit to wear for the day—an annual ritual on the four-year anniversary of the death of someone I loved very much: my sister, Rachel Held Evans.

Wearing black as an expression of mourning is a tradition that has largely been lost in modern-day America, but it’s a simple act that has helped me name and honor my sorrow these last four years.

Four years. Some may say that my loss is in the past, that four years is an adequate amount of time to move on, to find closure. But those who have experienced the death of someone they deeply loved know that grief is not something from which you graduate.

You don’t ever lay down the burden of bereavement. Rather, you develop the muscles to carry it for the rest of your life. Grief changes you. It is like a hurricane that forever alters your mental, emotional, and spiritual landscape. It can take a lifetime to find your bearings again.

We live in a world that is collectively attempting to find its bearings. On May 5, the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency, signaling what many may say is an end to the pandemic. But for most of us, the outbreak will never really be in the past—we will carry the imprint of its “unprecedented times” forever. COVID-19 is a disease that is, in so many ways, chronic.

As we move forward in this lingering aftermath, it is important to remember that we all experienced this pandemic differently. Some lost their livelihoods and financial ...

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For Years, This Christian NGO Worked with Muslims in Myanmar. Then Came Cyclone Mocha.

Long-term relationships helped the group aid the Rohingya while the UN and others were shut out.

When Hlaing heard that the “extremely severe" Cyclone Mocha was barreling toward Sittwe township on the western coast of Myanmar, she worried about her family and the 105,000 other displaced Rohingyas living in camps on the low-lying floodplains. Where could they go to shelter from the storm?

From the Thailand office of the Partners Relief and Development, Hlaing (who asked to only be identified by one name for her security) started sending updates about the cyclone’s strength and location to the group’s local contacts so they could alert the rest of the Rohingya community in the area. Team members on the ground urged people to evacuate to schools or temples that could withstand the wind. Hlaing’s family was able to shelter at a school across the street from their home.

Through the organization’s local network, Partners sent money to secure 200 bags of rice and provide for other needs ahead of the storm. “We expected the worst,” said Brad Hazlett, president of Partners. “There didn’t seem to be any way for the people to escape, and we’ve had other experiences where people were restricted from escaping the path of the cyclone.”

As the storm lashed out with 150-mph winds on Rakhine state Sunday, Hlaing continually checked Facebook for updates but saw no news about the camps.

Then on Monday night, she finally heard from Partners’ local contact: “Everything in the camp is destroyed,” he said. He sent pictures of piles of bamboo where homes used to stand, broken bridges, downed trees. He also visited her family to check up on them: They were unhurt, but the roof of their house had blown off.

The full extent of the damage caused by the storm—which ...

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How Comfort Women Beget Today’s Sex Trafficking Reality

Why we’re still dealing with a deadly and tragic problem that never went away.

There are an estimated 29 million women in modern slavery, including some form of sex trafficking and forced marriage, today. To understand why so many girls and women have suffered as victims of sex trafficking in Asia, Sylvia Yu Friedman wants more people to look back at history.

“Experts estimate that the Japanese Imperial military took up to 400,000 girls and women from nations they had occupied to more than 1,000 rape stations in China and hundreds of other military brothels across the Asia Pacific wherever soldiers were stationed,” she says. “UN experts have called this the largest human rights abuse against girls and women in the 20th century. However, the Japanese government has been unwilling to bear full legal and moral responsibility for conceiving and implementing this form of wartime sex slavery and has not issued a truly sincere apology that has satisfied the demands of the surviving victims and their families.”

Though the government has not fully taken responsibility, separately Japanese Christians have personally apologized to elderly survivors of Japanese wartime sex slavery in China.

“Their sincere apologies to these survivors and other Chinese and Koreans have brought a level of healing to generational pain that arose from the wounds of war that were never closed,” says Friedman.

An author, filmmaker, and philanthropy professional, Friedman has interviewed women across Asia who have survived both historical forced prostitution during World War II and current-day sex trafficking.

“I realized that a cycle of sex trafficking continues across Asia and that the enslavement that began with the Japanese Imperial military never went away due to gender discrimination and a ...

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Australian Gamblers Could Lose Less Money, Thanks to These Christians

How church leaders are trying to help those addicted from squandering it all.

The former CEO of World Vision Australia, Tim Costello, often says that no one gambles away money like Australians.

He’s not wrong.

Aussies lose more than $25 billion a year to gambling, the largest per capita in the world, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies. Most is lost on poker machines (pokies) easily available in suburban pubs and service club restaurants, far beyond the destination gambling of casinos. Pokies alone netted a loss of over $11.4 billion in 2021. Add online sports betting and other means of legal gambling, and that’s about $1,277 lost every year per person—more than double that of the United States, The New York Times reported in 2018, and around 50 percent higher than second-placed Singapore.

More than one in 10 (11 percent) Australians report they’ve gone online to gamble at least once in the past six months, an increase from 8 percent in 2020, according to 2022 research from the Australian Communications and Media Authority. And because local governments benefit to the tune of $6.6 billion in taxation revenue across all gambling sectors, legislators find it nearly impossible to ward off lobbying efforts from either side of the gambling industry.

“Whenever I tell people that New South Wales has 40 percent of the world’s pokies, people are shocked,” Costello told CT. “More so when I tell them over 70 percent of the world’s pokies are in Australia’s pubs and clubs. I’ve said for years that gambling is to Australia as guns are to America, especially with the NRA’s lobbying influence.”

There’s a reason for that. Many pokies are located in Returned and Services League (RSL) and surf clubs, community gathering ...

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Malaysia's Death Penalty Is No Longer Mandatory. Advocate Wishes Christian Conversation Was.

Christian lawyer explains why loving your neighbor in the Muslim-majority country entails speaking up.

On April 3, Malaysia’s parliament voted to abolish the mandatory death penalty. In its place, the courts may mete out alternative sentences such as life imprisonment or whipping.

“[For] people who get involved in criminal activity due to economic hardships or exigent circumstances, there is now a way to proportionately punish them without the need to impose the ultimate penalty, which is death,” said Malaysian human rights lawyer Andrew Khoo, who lives in Kuala Lumpur and has campaigned to quash the death penalty in his country for the past 20 years.

The Southeast Asian country imposed a moratorium on executions in 2018 when it first pledged to abolish the death penalty completely. Now, capital punishment will no longer be compulsory for 11 crimes like murder, drug trafficking, and terrorism. The new law will also be applied retrospectively to reviewing the sentences of more than a thousand prisoners on death row, including those who have exhausted their appeals.

CT spoke with Khoo on the impacts of this new law and what a robust Christian engagement in politics amid a majority-Muslim setting might look like.

What is the significance of abolishing the mandatory death penalty in Malaysia?

We return the decision about sentencing back to the hands of judges, rather than judges being forced by law to impose a sentence without their ability to include any mitigation. It’s a return to justice and to proportionate sentencing.

Justice is about receiving an appropriate punishment for criminal activity, committing a crime, or going against the norms of society. But from a biblical perspective, justice needs to be tempered with mercy in the sense that we hate the crime but we don’t hate the person who committed ...

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US Rates Religious Freedom of China, Iran, Russia Among 199 Nations

State Department cites evidence of immigration at release of annual IRF report, first authorized 25 years ago.

For the last 25 years, the United States has promoted global fidelity to its First Amendment.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) into law, mandating yearly reports to detail the respect given to this fundamental right in every nation of the world.

Not every nation is pleased.

“We are sometimes asked,” stated Rashad Hussain, US ambassador at large for international religious freedom, “‘Who are you as the United States to speak to other countries about their human rights conditions?’”

Hussain, whose State Department position was also created by IRFA, replied to the rhetorical question during this week’s launch of the 2022 IRF report. Covering 199 countries—US allies and enemies alike—it prepares the ground for year-end designation of the worst offenders as Countries of Particular Concern (CPC), with second-tier violators placed on a Special Watch List (SWL).

His two-fold answer began with US leadership grounded in its unique and foundational Bill of Rights. But he continued with immigration, evidencing preference for American rights in so many of the same 199 nations studied.

“People come to the United States from all around the world and demand that their elected representatives and government official promote our values in their homelands,” said Hussain. “In many ways we are representatives of the rest of the world, gathered here in the United States.”

The report’s Appendix G provides an overview of refugee policy, stating 25,465 individuals were resettled permanently in the US in fiscal 2022. Priority is given to CPC and SWL nationals suffering from religious persecution.

The highlighted litany ...

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More Evangelicals Oppose School Vaccine Requirements

While most still inoculate against MMR, they’re less likely to agree that kids must get the shots to enroll.

In what could be a sign of COVID-19’s influence, some sectors of US society—specifically white evangelicals and Republicans—are showing a growing aversion to the requirement that schoolchildren be vaccinated for illnesses like mumps and measles.

Overall, about 70 percent of Americans say healthy children should be mandated to be vaccinated so they can attend public schools, according to a new Pew Research Center survey released Tuesday.

That is a distinctly smaller percentage from findings in 2019 and 2016, when 82 percent were in favor of such requirements. The share of the US public who say parents should get to determine not to vaccinate their children is 28 percent, an increase of 12 points from 2019.

“We are seeing a kind of marked drop in support for school-based childhood vaccine requirements,” said Cary Funk, Pew’s director of science and society research, in an interview. “That drop is particularly coming among Republicans as well as among white evangelical Protestants, many of whom are Republicans.”

The new survey shows that 58 percent of white evangelicals say there should be a requirement for children attending public schools to be vaccinated, while 40 percent say parents should be able to choose not to have their children vaccinated, even if that could cause health risks for others. Comparatively, in 2019, white evangelicals favored mandated vaccines for public schoolchildren by a margin of 77 percent to 20 percent.

Even though white evangelicals have a growing opposition to such requirements, they remain supportive of measles, mumps and rubella vaccines, Funk said. The report notes that 82% of white evangelicals who are parents of minors say their child has received ...

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Americans Read the Bible More After Switching Denominations

In a recent survey, those who left their childhood traditions for a church of their own reported higher engagement with their faith.

Enid Almanzar was shocked the first time she walked into an evangelical church. She had been raised Catholic and was used to stained-glass windows, ornate crosses, portraits of saints, and statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary.

But the nondenominational church she visited had no such things. On the contrary, it seemed quite lax on religious decor or decorum; the pastor, she remembers, had tattoos and rode a motorcycle. “I thought it was sacrilege.”

But looking back, Almanzar believes that visit was the beginning of a process that led her back to faith after wandering away in college. She received her first Bible, joined a study group, and got baptized.

“I felt like I was walking in my mother's faith and my family's faith, and when I took that step into evangelicalism, now it became my faith; it became my Jesus,” said Almanzar, who now works at the American Bible Society (ABS).

She is one of millions of Americans who have switched faiths. While most who switch today are leaving church behind as agnostics, atheists, or nones (those who claim no religious affiliation), many Christians are switching denominations, and ABS research suggests that doing so may strengthen their faith.

People who switch religious traditions are more likely to read Scripture, according to a recent ABS poll in partnership with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Those leaving mainline Protestant traditions reported the highest boost in engagement.

“We easily assume that rejecting the faith of one’s youth is a bad thing, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, the State of the Bible data suggest otherwise,” the ABS report said. “Christians ...

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How Should We Then Live Among Muslims? Four Arab Christian Views

Theological advice on how Middle East believers in Jesus can best witness to their faith, keep social peace, and maintain unity.

Two Middle East nations share a city named Tripoli.

They share little else, apart from a Phoenician heritage and mutually near-unintelligible dialects of Arabic. One of their starkest contrasts concerns freedom of religion.

Libya sentenced six Christians to death earlier this month for converting from Islam. Lebanon, despite its sectarianism enshrined in politics, allows free movement between religions.

Libya’s Tripoli was commemorated in the official hymn of the US Marines in homage to American intervention on the shores of North Africa. Lebanon’s was an outpost of an eastern Mediterranean–focused American missionary movement that transformed society through gender-inclusive education.

The Italians colonized Libya; the French, Lebanon. And elsewhere the Middle East is marked by British influence, Ottoman traditions, petrodollar economies, democratic structures, multicultural kingdoms, autocratic republics, and everything in between.

What unites them all is the preponderance of Islam.

But among the followers of Muhammad there is also difference. Some nations are secular, others enforce sharia. Some protect Christian minorities, others discriminate against them. It is difficult to offer a sweeping synopsis—or uniform lessons learned by local Christians.

Yet CT asked four Arab Christian leaders with deep roots in the region to make an attempt. Two currently live abroad; two in their nation of origin. Yet each represents a space on the spectrum of strategies on how to best live as a Christian in a Muslim society.

One articulation of the spectrum, crafted by theologian Martin Accad, arranges common Christian responses into five categories: syncretistic (the blurring of faiths), existential (the dialogue of diversity), ...

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Saddleback Asks Southern Baptists to Overturn Disfellowship Decision

Vote will take place at the SBC annual meeting in June.

Saddleback Church wants to keep its place in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

The California megachurch—once one of the biggest in the denomination—plans to appeal the SBC’s move to disfellowship Saddleback for appointing women as pastors.

Saddleback is among three churches that will make their case before Southern Baptists at their annual meeting in New Orleans next month. The body can vote on whether to overturn the previous decision and allow Saddleback back into “friendly cooperation” with the SBC or to let the decision to remove the church stand.

The SBC Executive Committee, which is in charge of denominational business outside of the annual meeting, disfellowshipped Saddleback and five other churches with women pastors in February—the first time churches have been forced out for that reason. The congregations had until Monday to state their intention to appeal at the June 11–14 gathering.

“SBC bylaws plainly outline the process for churches determined to be not in cooperation with the Convention to appeal their cases before messengers cast their votes,” said David Sons, the chairman of the SBC Executive Committee and a pastor in South Carolina. “Since this is the first time in SBC history for this particular item of business to come before the Convention, it’s important for everyone coming to New Orleans to be prepared and informed about the process.”

A representative from each appealing church will be given three minutes to make their case. The credentials committee, which makes recommendations for churches that are out of alignment with the SBC, will be given three minutes to respond before the vote. The other appealing churches are Fern Creek ...

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Can You Be Born Again Without ‘Feeling’ It?

Like Francis Wayland, some of us may doubt our religious conversion experience.

Evangelicalism has always emphasized the necessity of personal conversion through a born-again experience in which the Holy Spirit supernaturally changes a person’s heart.

From the 18th century to the present, many evangelical churches have required a personal testimony of conversion as a prerequisite for church membership. And most of the time, this involves a personal experience of divine transformation.

But what happens if someone doesn’t have this kind of transformative experience? What if a person believes not because of any perceived religious encounter but simply because of a reasoned conviction about the truth of God’s declarations? Are such individuals really saved? And even if so, can they still consider themselves evangelical Christians?

This was the dilemma faced by Francis Wayland (1796–1865), an ordained Baptist minister and early 19th-century president of Brown University. He never had what he considered to be a born-again experience—and for the president of a leading Baptist college in the 1800s, that was a problem.

I briefly encountered Wayland in my study of early 19th-century American antislavery activism, but I only recently realized that this opponent of slavery and professor of “Christian evidences” also struggled with assurance of his salvation because of lacking what he considered an authentic born-again experience.

For much of his early life, Wayland believed such an experience was required to become a Christian. After all, he had grown up steeped in the evangelical theology of Jonathan Edwards in a Calvinist Baptist home. He believed true conversion required a supernaturally wrought change of one’s affections and will. And like ...

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When Police Arrive at Your Church’s Door

As persecution worsens in China, an urban house church leader offers guide for perseverance and preparation.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

One morning when you arrive at your church, you might be surprised to discover many uniformed people in the building. Some might be angry and speak viciously. Others might address you nicely, almost beseechingly. Others may be expressionless but carry themselves with a businesslike attitude. Regardless of their demeanor, you know that something has happened. Your church is being persecuted.

Not every instance of persecution may be so dramatic. The trouble could happen between the landlord and the street administration office. It could occur after the pastor was summoned to the police station. However it might happen, it may shock you to the point of not knowing how you can help your church’s leaders face this crisis or how you yourself might respond.

Perseverance in persecution

That the church experiences persecution in this world is nothing new. Our Lord has continually reminded us that because the world hates Christ, it will persecute those who follow Christ. Though the crime of “disrupting societal order by holding illegal religious gatherings” listed on the police’s summons may be fabricated, as Christians we ought to know that the true gospel will inevitably cause trouble all over the world (Acts 17:6).

In John 15:19–21, our Lord tells us:

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: “A servant is not greater than his master.” If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do ...

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Christians Worry About Getting Trampled Like Grass in Sudan Conflict

The African country has seen conflict and coup over and over, but this time, says historian Christopher Tounsel, believers are right in the middle of it.

Shells rocked the Sudanese capital of Khartoum on Sunday, with no signs of abating even after a full month of fighting. Across the Nile, gunmen attacked a church in Omdurman, injuring a Coptic priest and four others. Each side of the conflict blamed the other, according to Reuters, and the fighting continued.

Representatives of the warring factions have been brought to the negotiating table in Saudi Arabia to discuss a ceasefire. So far, neither side seems willing to accept concessions.

According to Christopher Tounsel, a historian who writes about Christianity in Sudan, the churches in the capital are praying fervently for an end to the violence. Even for believers used to living in political peril, navigating the current conflict will be no easy task.

Are Christians taking sides in this conflict in Sudan?

There’s an African proverb that says when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. This is one of those situations.

Throughout Sudan’s modern history, Christians have been faced with governments that have tried to impose Islam as the state religion and not allow them the freedom to worship. So the Christians there have thought a lot about what it means to be good citizens and faithful citizens in tough situations, what Christian duty to an oppressive state looks like.

But now they’re faced with this problem, what does it mean to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s when it’s not clear if there is a Caesar, if there are two Caesars, or none that have any legitimacy? What is the Christian obligation? To wait it out? To leave? To fight for a third option? It’s a classic question that has been posed in a range of contexts in church history, but it’s urgent in the Sudan right now.

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As Churches Offer Refuge, Sudanese Christians Refine Theology of War

“Already but not yet” takes on new meaning as violence scatters believers from Khartoum to corners of Sudan where biblical application has long been lived.

Hajj Atiya, an elderly Sudanese woman living in Khartoum, was already ill.

And then the war started.

“The planes bombed from above, the bullets were flying below,” she said. “We stayed in our house, afraid, while all outside was boom, boom, boom.”

All she had in the house was flour, to bake bread. At least she had that.

Mariam, who came to Khartoum from the Nuba Mountains to get medicine, went several days without water. And then a bomb hit the neighboring building, which collapsed upon her own.

“Whenever the airplanes disappeared overhead, we ran outside in search of food,” she said. “But we had to hide behind buildings to avoid the gunfire, with corpses strewn on our right and left.”

An unnamed doorman had it still worse.

“For ten days we couldn’t leave our home,” he said. “The shops are closed, and soldiers are in the streets.”

Every Sudanese of means in his Kafouri neighborhood of Khartoum had left town at the first sign of violence, which began April 15. He and the other guards were left behind to protect the properties. But the building owner, when the doorman called to ask for money or help, hung up on him.

Mariam found someone willing to provide transport out of the capital. But she couldn’t afford the 50-cent fare. All she had was oil and soap.

Atiya had only one option left.

“I prayed to God: Save us,” she said. “God answered, and someone came to take us away.”

Somehow, each escaped with their families 85 miles southeast to Wad Madani. Atiya found a place to rest under a tree. Mariam spent the night on the street. But each now numbers among the 122 families staying in two local evangelical schools, with dozens more sleeping ...

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Methodist Bishop Wants to ‘Stop Talking About Disaffiliations’ After 2,800 Churches Leave

Council of Bishops sets out to refocus on the UMC congregations that stay after 2023.

United Methodist bishops have proposed a five-day meeting of the denomination’s global decision-making body, the General Conference, in May 2026.

The announcement comes at the end of the Council of Bishops’ spring meeting last week in Chicago and a weekend that saw hundreds of United Methodist churches in the United States leave the denomination.

The 2026 General Conference would focus on re-establishing connection within the United Methodist Church, lamenting, healing and recasting the mission and vision for the mainline denomination after years of strife over the ordination and marriage of its LGBT members, according to a press release published Monday (May 8) on the Council of Bishops’ website.

Delegates to the General Conference also would consider a more regional governance structure to better support the remaining denomination, which currently numbers about 30,000 U.S. churches.

“I admit to you I’m eager to get past all this. I want us to stop talking about disaffiliations,” Bishop Thomas Bickerton, president of the Council of Bishops, said during the bishops’ meeting, which ran April 30 to May 5.

“I’m worried genuinely that we’ve spent more time on those that are leaving than focusing our energy on those who are staying.”

Delegates to the 2020 General Conference meeting had been expected to consider a proposal to split the denomination over its disagreement on sexuality and help create a new, theologically conservative denomination called the Global Methodist Church. That would allow the United Methodist Church to change language in its Book of Discipline that bars same-sex marriages and LGBT clergy.

When the 2020 meeting was postponed a third time for pandemic-related ...

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Darwin’s Dirty Secret Lives On

A recent book on evolutionary theory fails to reckon with the social side of natural selection.

In 1904, thousands of indigenous people were brought to the St. Louis World’s Fair to be put on public display. Scientists offered them as examples of lower stages of human evolution. Some were even presented to the public as “missing links” between humans and apes.

Two years later, an African named Ota Benga was exhibited in a cage next to an orangutan in the Bronx Zoo primate house. The display attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. It also drew protests from Black and white clergy. Black minister James Gordon attacked the presentation for propagandizing on behalf of Darwinian evolution, which he regarded as “absolutely opposed to Christianity.”

“Neither the Negro nor the white man is related to the monkey, and such an exhibition only degrades a human being’s manhood,” he declared.

Scientific and cultural elites, meanwhile, saw nothing wrong.

Leading evolutionary biologist Henry Fairfield Osborn of Columbia University praised the zoo exhibit, while The New York Times complained it was “absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation” of Benga. The Times took special umbrage at Gordon’s skepticism of evolution: “The reverend colored brother should be told that evolution, in one form or other, is now taught in the text books of all the schools, and that it is no more debatable than the multiplication table.”

Only recently have many members of the scientific community begun to grapple with evolutionary biology’s disturbing past. Last year, the science journal The American Naturalist published an article acknowledging that “the roots of evolutionary biology are steeped in histories of white ...

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Evangelicals Are Delaying Having Children. Are We Missing Out?

Motherhood has been a boon to my work, not a drain.

So, let’s get this straight. You two were the mistakes?” My twin sons looked quizzically at their high school teacher, who was joking good-naturedly. He explained that he, too, was a caboose child, born years after his older siblings. “Did your parents give you the talk yet, about how a surprise is different from a mistake?”

Sixteen years ago, our three children were all nearly school-age, and I was planning a return to graduate school. We gave away the crib, the car seat, and the baby gear. But plans are malleable in the hands of God, and it wasn’t six months that I was pregnant again—with twins.

There are no “mistakes” in God’s kingdom economy. Still, the “surprise” took some getting used to. Five children were a spectacle, especially in the aisles of Costco. Yet now the long days have become short years. Our “surprises” have grown into leg hair, survived braces, and attended their first high school homecoming dance. To say that my heart grows heavy counting the time remaining with them is to understate the grief entirely.

For the last 22 years, motherhood has been so many things for me. A limit. A lasting vulnerability. But also, a gift. I’d like to argue for choosing motherhood—as it’s possible.

A Wall Street Journal-NORC poll published this spring showed an alarmingly precipitous decline in certain “traditional” American values. According to the research, over the span of four short years, Americans cherish patriotism, having children, religion, and community involvement less than they once did. (Professional pollster Patrick Ruffini noted it was likely the 2019 numbers had been inflated by “social desirability ...

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Registered Sex Offender Continued to Minister to Chi Alpha Students

Some Texas pastors supported and involved a man they knew was convicted of child sex abuse. Now more victims are coming forward.

Over the past 30 years, well over a hundred men involved in Texas chapters of the campus ministry Chi Alpha have seen Daniel Savala naked.

At Savala’s house in Houston, he invited them to strip down and talk about spiritual issues in his sauna. He offered his bed to overnight guests while sleeping in the buff. And at least 13 men reported that Savala molested or raped them while they sought his spiritual advice as college students, according to a new online forum collecting victims’ stories.

Savala, 67, doesn’t hold an official title with Chi Alpha, isn’t employed by the organization, and isn’t credentialed by its denomination, the Assemblies of God.

But former members of Chi Alpha say a network of pastors leading chapters at several Texas colleges viewed Savala as a mentor and spiritual guru, supporting him and sending their students to his house—even after Savala was convicted of child sexual abuse and registered as a sex offender a decade ago.

Victims are speaking up to call out those who continued endorsing Savala and put students at risk. Officials with Chi Alpha and the Assemblies of God had previously been warned about Savala’s status and activity, but because he didn’t have an official role, they couldn’t—or didn’t—stop it.

A website for victims who were groomed and abused by Savala launched in April, and last week, the Texas A&M student newspaper The Battalion broke the story and covered the claims that some Chi Alpha leaders knew Savala’s background but still involved him in their ministry.

The decades of allegations against Savala extend into the present day. One parent reported that last year his minor son was invited into Savala’s ...

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How an Oklahoma Death Penalty Case Shook Up Evangelical Views on Execution

Richard Glossip was set to be lethally injected this month. His case is sowing doubt in the system.

For the ninth time, Richard Glossip had an execution date in Oklahoma—this one is set for May 18. He’s been up for execution enough times that conservative Christians in the state have learned about the mishandling of his case, and some are starting to question the death penalty itself.

Last Friday, the US Supreme Court halted Glossip’s execution while it considers whether to hear procedural challenges. In what appears to be an unprecedented move, the state attorney general—whose office ordered the execution—joined Glossip in asking the court for a stay of his execution.

If the court declines to take up his case, the pause immediately goes away, and the state can move forward with the execution.

The case concerns the 1997 murder of motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Justin Sneed admitted to the murder, but in a plea deal to avoid the death penalty he testified that motel employee Richard Glossip hired him to carry out the attack. Sneed received a sentence of life in prison, while Glossip was convicted and sentenced to death.

Van Treese’s family has said in previous statements that Glossip’s execution would provide them with “a sense that justice has been served.”

For decades the case has ping-ponged through appeals courts and before parole boards. Glossip has had three last meals—fish and chips, pizza, a burger and a strawberry milkshake. One of his executions was called off minutes before he was scheduled to be injected.

The case has Christians in the state wrestling with the death penalty, mostly because they perceive a corrupt system that can’t render justice.

“I would still like to believe in capital punishment,” ...

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No School Left Behind: Why All Education Is Public

Private, state, and charter schools all contribute to the common good. Our debates should reflect that.

Ever since COVID-19 gave parents a direct Zoom feed into the challenges faced by the public education system in North America, there’s been growing momentum for policy change. Even The Economist, often skeptical of school choice, recently reported on the “new wave” of education reform. The movement has intensified, with debates about critical race theory increasingly becoming the focus of legislation and litigation.

Oklahoma recently pushed the debate into new territory with a proposal for a Catholic charter school primarily funded by taxpayers.

“The key question in this case is not whether a charter would help or harm local education,” writes Charles Russo for The Conversation, “but whether explicitly religious instruction at charter schools is constitutional.”

As debates continue, those in favor of school choice argue that enabling parents to select the best school and curricula for their children is a logical expression of the ancient principle in loco parentis. In the context of schooling, the Latin phrase means teachers act on behalf of parents and answer to them.

An alternate, more practical argument is that competition between schools produces better accountability, greater innovation, and more options that a public education monopoly is hard pressed to match.

Those opposed to school choice typically argue that a single public education system provides greater equality for all students and helps overcome class, religious, and other social distinctions. In their view, a uniform education ensures no child is left behind.

While this side of the debate avoids any suggestion of “indoctrination,” the National Education Association tweeted last November ...

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