Gen X Dropouts Widen the Generational Divide among Singapore Christians

Interviews with 63 churches reveal an urgent need for greater mutuality in relationships.

When I (Wei-Hao) met with Matthew in a café in eastern Singapore to talk about generational divides in the church, he was very relaxed, jovial, and candid until the issue of church leadership came up. I knew I had touched a raw nerve when he leaned back, folded his arms, and sighed, saying, “This is a conversation that I often have with some friends. A lot of us are struggling to convince our leaders that the church needs to stop being so old-school and inward-looking.”

Matthew and a few friends had approached their church leaders to talk about creation care a few years ago. A big conference had just been held at their church, and they were appalled by the amount of plastic waste generated from the meals and refreshments.

“We suggested that this issue should be addressed over the pulpit and those who feel the same way could organize activities or, you know, maybe start some recycling initiatives in the church,” Matthew, a millennial, said.

“But you know what was my pastor’s reply? He said that the pulpit was meant to address spiritual stuff and most of the congregation probably wouldn’t be interested anyway,” Matthew said with a shrug of his shoulders and an even deeper sigh than before. “To his credit, he said he agreed with us that this is an issue, but it was definitely not going to be a focus for the church.”

Matthew’s experience of attempting to initiate positive change in his church and receiving pushback from his baby-boomer pastor is not an isolated one. There is a serious lack of understanding and empathy among different generations in Singapore churches. Each generation does not understand the other’s actions, as ...

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As Mongolia Catholics Welcome Francis, Evangelicals Wrestle with Growing Pains

Recent revival has brought Protestant churches more members. But what Mongolian Christian leaders want most is more disciples.

When Mongolia opened up in 1990 after seven decades of Communist rule, the country had only four known Christians.

Heavy religious suppression under the Mongolian People’s Republic had all but wiped out Christianity in the country, where the population was then about 2.1 million. But even before that, the faith had failed to secure a lasting foothold among the nomadic people.

Today, while most Mongolians are either Buddhist or nonreligious, the Protestant church has grown to 63,600, making up two percent of the population, according to the World Christian Database. Catholics, on the other hand, have seen more meager growth with a community of less than 1,500 people.

Yet on Thursday, Pope Francis arrived in the capital of Ulaanbaatar—the first time a pontiff has ever stepped foot on Mongolian soil—to visit “a Church that is small in numbers but vivacious in faith.” Last year, Francis named Archbishop Giorgio Marengo as the first cardinal based in Mongolia. The country only has two native Mongolian priests.

Mongolia is in a strategic position as it maintains close ties to China, with whom the Vatican has a tense relationship: Recently, the Communist government transferred bishops without consulting the Holy See, violating bilateral accords. To Mongolia’s north, the Vatican is walking a delicate tightrope in responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both countries will be watching his visit closely.

But beyond geopolitics, Mongolians are excited for the historic visit as the Vatican first made contact with leaders of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, said Bolortuya Damdinjav, head of the research department of Mongolia Evangelical Alliance.

“Finally, 800 years later the pope ...

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Pastors with ADHD Can Burn Out or Shine

A swath of energetic, charismatic ministry leaders fight for focus.

For years, Americans had an easy default when they thought of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): It was the stereotype of a distracted kid goofing off at a game or a fidgety student losing interest in class.

No one imagined a middle-aged pastor trying to finish his sermon draft late Saturday night.

But as rates of ADHD continue to rise—with an uptick in diagnoses among women and adults—the picture of the disorder has become nuanced, and more people are coming to terms with their ADHD, including in ministry.

The symptoms of ADHD can be particularly challenging for pastors, whose all-encompassing vocation often comes without the administrative help that they need.

When Chad Brooks sees a pastor with ADHD, he sees someone who will either burn out in ministry or become the future of the church.

Brooks is a pastor and coach who works with United Methodist Church (UMC) pastors through the UMC ministry Passion in Partnership. The UMC requires a midcareer strengths assessment for all pastors, and Brooks has noticed that when pastors come to him for coaching and have scored poorly in their preaching skills, they often have a clinical ADHD diagnosis.

He developed a course called “Preaching Through Distraction” to help pastors learn to work more efficiently during the week rather than using the adrenaline of procrastination to crank out a Saturday night sermon.

A growing number of pastors reach out to Brooks for one-on-one coaching because their ADHD makes paying attention in a classroom setting too difficult.

“These people are deeply passionate about people and ministry, and if we cannot figure out how to be alongside each other, we are going to miss out on things we desperately need right now,” ...

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Why the World Seems So Resentful

The German philosopher Hartmut Rosa’s concept of ‘resonance’ offers a way through the current malaise.

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

A friend told me about a mutual acquaintance who was always a happy, kind person, but who now—at least in some contexts—seems filled with anger and fear. “It’s like I’m hearing the same voice,” my friend said, “but now he seems so resentful that I sometimes wonder if I’m talking to the same person I always knew.” Almost everyone I know has experienced something like this—in churches, in workplaces, even at family dining room tables. The whole world seems to be seething with resentment.

Anyone who’s encountered someone in a fit of rage knows that one thing that usually doesn’t work is to say, “Calm down.” That’s like saying to an insomniac, “Go to sleep.” The more the person tries to fall asleep, the more likely he or she is to stay awake. That reality, though, might give us insight into why our culture seems driven with resentment, and how we can counter it.

Falling asleep is, as German philosopher Hartmut Rosa puts it, “non-engineerable.” The more you try to master it, the further away it becomes. Sleep requires a kind of surrender—a letting go of the frenetic whirl of the mind. Rosa compares the situation to the way a child feels when looking out the window at the first snow of winter. You can engineer that, Rosa concedes, in his book The Uncontrollability of the World. The child’s mom and dad could buy snow cannons and blast icy flakes outside the window of a house in Pasadena in July. But that’s not the same experience.

The experiences of looking out into a snowy field, standing on a mountain range or at the foot of ...

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Covenant Families Frustrated by Tennessee’s Failure to Pass New Gun Laws

Special legislative session ends without measures to prevent mass shootings at schools.

They hoped the Tennessee legislature would listen to them. They hoped the elected representatives would do something—something—to make their kids safer.

But at the end of the special session in Nashville on Tuesday, The Covenant School parents’ hopes were dashed. The legislature didn’t even vote on the bills that the families of children who survived a Nashville school shooting in March wanted to see made into law.

Wearing matching black T-shirts with the words “Get Used to Seeing These Faces,” the cofounders of Covenant Families for Better Tomorrows wept at the Capitol. And at a press conference after, some of them spoke of how hard it was going to be to explain all this to their children.

“We will go home and we’ll look at our children in the eyes,” said Mary Joyce, whose daughter was best friends with one of the girls murdered at the Presbyterian Church in America school. “They will ask what our leaders have done over the past week and a half to protect them. ,

The parents vowed this defeat would not be the end of their activism. Melissa Alexander, whose fourth-grade son stood silently against a wall while a shooter killed three of his classmates, addressed elected officials directly.

“The shooter confronted our children with guns,” she said. “Now you are stabbing our families and all Tennesseans in the back.”

There have been 477 mass shootings in America so far in 2023. Gun violence is the leading cause of deaths for children over the age of one, surpassing automobile accidents and cancer. Tennessee has had 17 mass shootings this year, leaving 32 people dead and 59 wounded.

One of those shootings happened in March, when a person identified as ...

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In This House We Believe Creeds Are for Church, Not Politics

Vivek Ramaswamy’s right-wing satire of the popular progressive yard sign has the same flaws as its target.

Vivek Ramaswamy emails me, as does half the Republican presidential primary field, because I am on the mailing list of a GOP fundraising outfit that does not honor unsubscribe requests.

Ramaswamy’s latest email stood out from the daily deluge, though, for the simplicity of its conceit.

“I am not afraid to say these truths,” ran the subject line. Inside, the fundraising pitch was short and blunt: “TRUTH. There’s only one. Not yours, not mine. Just pure TRUTH,” read the brief note festooned with links to donate.

In the middle were the 10 affirmations Ramaswamy has increasingly placed at the center of his campaign messaging, rattling them off every chance he gets:

Set aside, for a minute, the question of whether the list is as true as Ramaswamy claims, and look instead at the form. It’s familiar—or it should be, for Christians. This is undeniably a creed, and that’s precisely the problem.

Ramaswamy isn’t unique in taking a creedal approach to politics. The best-known contemporary example is the “In this house we believe” sign, which has become ubiquitous in many progressive neighborhoods in recent years.

As creeds go, In this house is remarkably efficient, dogmatic, and magisterial. Each line requires substantial knowledge of the faith: “Science is real,” for instance, invokes a whole host of beliefs about evolution, vaccination, climate change, masking, and more.

There are a few variants on the text—some later manuscripts, which I suspect are more common in states where oil pipelines ...

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I Skipped Church for Three Years

My spiritual loneliness brought me back.

Faith and church have been tough for a lot of people coming out of the pandemic. I’m one of them. The last three years ushered my wife and I through two job changes, a cross-country move, and months spent hunkered inside, trying to keep our young children healthy and ourselves sane. By the time the world began to reopen, so much felt different.

Until recently, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d physically attended a church service since March 2020. I could give many reasons for our absence—a toddler and a newborn, disillusionment with a church tradition that was once home, enjoying a second weekend morning, sheer exhaustion, and more.

But if I’m really honest, one reason stands out: The further I get from church, the less Christian faith makes sense to me. The physical drift begets an intellectual one.

Although I might sound like a Christian upstart, I’m something of a thoroughbred. I was born and raised in what is now an evangelical megachurch. I graduated with a degree in religion and philosophy from a prominent Christian college, and I finished a seminary degree at another. I got chops.

But when it comes to believing my faith, it’s always been the same. During any season of life when I’ve been separated from like-minded Christians, my faith starts to feel as alien to me as it does to my non-Christian friends. Wait, you believe a man was God? That he actually rose from the dead? Like, his blood and guts cooled and then his heart just started beating again? It’s ludicrous, isn’t it?

Part of my experience of faith—and part of my constitution—is that I’ve always sought out the best arguments against my own positions. ...

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Have China’s Christians Peaked? Pew Researches the Data Debate

New report examines the challenges of measuring religion among Chinese Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists, Muslims, and other beliefs.

Christianity’s growth in China has stalled since 2010.

That’s according to a new Pew Research Center report measuring religion in China published today. In 2010, approximately 23.2 million adults in China self-identified as Christian. In 2018, 19.9 million adults did so, which Pew researchers say is not a “statistically significant gap.”

Among Chinese Christians, the percentages of zongjiao (Mandarin for “organized religion”) activity have also stagnated. Nearly 40 percent (38%) of Christians said they engaged in such activities once a week in 2010, but that figure dipped slightly to 35 percent in 2018.

“Some scholars have relied on a mix of fieldwork studies, claims by religious organizations, journalists’ observations and government statistics to suggest that China is experiencing a surge of religion and is perhaps even on a path to having a Christian majority by 2050,” the Pew report stated.

But more than a decade’s worth of data from surveys conducted in China provide “no clear confirmation of rising levels of religious identity in China, at least not as embodied by formal zongjiao (宗教) affiliation and worship attendance.”

Pew published its previous report on religion in China in May 2008 ahead of the Beijing Olympics. While that study did not touch on the rate of growth of the Christian faith in the country, it acknowledged the presence of “indirect survey evidence” that suggested a “potentially large number of unaffiliated, independent Christians.”

Its latest report highlighted statistics from the Chinese government that appeared promising at first glance as the number of Protestants in the country jumped from 700,000 to 38 million ...

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Pastor in Trump Indictment Released After Supporters Cover His Bail

Illinois pastor Stephen Lee was back in church on Sunday, thanks in part to fundraising help from a Christian advocacy group.

Living Word Lutheran Church in suburban Chicago had expected to be without its pastor on Sunday since he surrendered to authorities in Georgia days before.

Chaplain Stephen Lee bought a one-way ticket to Atlanta and turned himself in Friday on charges related to election interference, the last of 18 people indicted along with former president Donald Trump. He wore a clerical collar in his booking photo.

Prosecutors allege that Lee went to the home of a Georgia election worker in an attempt to sway her testimony.

Lee ended up being released on bail, backed by the prayers of his congregation and financial support from a Christian advocacy group.

“I just have to say this. I am just so proud of you folks. … We were planning on possibly my absence today, but you didn’t skip a beat,” Lee told the congregation in Orland Park, Illinois, where he has been serving for three and a half years amid a pastoral vacancy.

Last Sunday morning, he preached from Isaiah and Romans, and the church lifted up his family with “prayers of guidance and blessings as they work through their current struggles, and a prayer of thanksgiving for support.”

Part of that support came from the Illinois Family Institute, which set up a legal defense fund to help cover 10 percent of his $75,000 bond for release. The Christian group has partnered with a company called Make Honey Great Again, which agreed to donate a portion of sales. Its honey comes in bottles shaped like Trump’s head.

“You may like or dislike the bottle design, but it’s filled with healthy, pure, raw honey and we hope the uniqueness of the packaging will generate awareness, prayers, and donations for Chaplain Lee,” the Illinois Family Institute ...

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Brazilian Young People Love Jesus and Are Hungry for a Deeper Faith

According to a recent Barna report, nearly 75 percent of Brazilian teenagers say they want to learn more about Christ.

At just 14 years old, Lavínia Fernandes competes with the other young people in her church, located in Recife, Pernambuco, northeast Brazil, to see who can bring the most friends from school to the Saturday services. There are now more than 10 people from her class at school who started attending church through her.

“My friends comment that I became kinder and happier after I became a Christian and that they can see God in my life,” said the teenager.

Like Fernandes, millions of other Christian teenagers throughout Brazil and other Latin American countries are experiencing something special in their journeys of faith. Recent research by the Barna Group reveals that Latin America is home to a “connected, digitally enabled generation” that is committed to their faith, engaged with the Bible, and hungry to learn more about Jesus.

Barna surveyed 3,320 young people, ages 13 to 17, from July 21 to August 24, 2021, in Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, and Colombia. Young people in all four countries revealed an enthusiasm and passion for their faith consistently higher than the global average. (Barna polled 26 countries around the world for this survey.) Brazilian teens, in particular, showed an especially heightened awareness of Christ and the Bible.

When asked what they really think about Jesus, 74 percent of Christian Brazilian teenagers said they believe he offers people hope, and 60 percent said Christ makes a real difference in today’s world.

Just over half (55%) of Brazilian teenagers, however, believe that Jesus was God in human form.

Brazilian teenagers are more likely to believe in Jesus’ miracles and his return.

Barna classifies ...

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Put Off Your Old Self-Making

An interview with author Tara Isabella Burton on the history of self-creation—and how the habit usurps our need for God.

One of my most recent posts on Instagram is a picture of a loaf of bread I baked. I baked it because I like bread, especially fresh bread, hot out of a 450-degree oven and covered in far too much butter. But why, exactly, did I post the picture on Instagram?

It’s a nice-enough loaf, but I’ve no great baking talent. Part of my motive was simple enthusiasm for work I enjoyed. But some of it, if I’m honest, was about my image—as a writer, as a keeper of my household newly back to full-time work after maternity leave, and as the sort of person you might find interesting at a cocktail party.

There, look, I remember briefly thinking as I hit “Share,” no one can say I’m slacking on the homemaking front. I made bread!

This is ridiculous and vain and embarrassing, of course. But I come by it honestly in an era of self-creation, in which social media has given each of us the opportunity to craft a public image that is objectively artificial yet imagined as a display of authenticity.

That very dynamic is the subject of Tara Isabella Burton’s Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, published earlier this year. I reached out to Burton to ask about the theological underpinnings of her book and how the modern urge to self-create comports with Christian faith.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Let’s start with the trio of elevator questions I’m sure you’ve answered on a thousand podcasts by now: What is the book about? Why did you write it? And what readers did you have in mind?

Self-Made is an intellectual history of self-creation, the wider story of secular modernity’s idea that human beings not only can ...

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After Keller’s Death, Church Members Carry on His Small Church Vision

The New York pastor never wanted to build a megachurch.

Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s building on West 83rd Street in Manhattan does not call attention to itself. The Crunch gym next door has a bigger, louder sign and doors plastered with offers for memberships. Redeemer’s building of glass and neutral brick blends into the buildings around it, except that if you look up, a cross shoots up above the fifth story. The church’s founding pastor, Tim Keller, was reluctant to even buy it.

“For years Tim didn’t want to be a megachurch,” said Andrea Mungo, Redeemer’s first staffer for its diaconate in the 1990s. “He wasn’t interested in purchasing a building. For years it was, ‘We want to rent so we can focus our money and energy into local ministry.’”

Keller, who died in May, was a globally known preacher, bestselling writer, leader of a 5,000-member church before before stepping down, and founder big organizations like The Gospel Coalition in 2007. He spoke before the UK parliament and at Google’s headquarters. But for most of his adult life, he built small. His fame was derivative of his local church work.

People like Mungo—as well as Yvonne Sawyer, Justin Adour, Sobeyda Valle-Ellis, Peter Ong, and Mark Reynolds—aren’t globally recognized names but were the faces of the local church in New York and then beyond. They built an ecosystem of local institutions that are carrying on Keller’s vision of evangelicalism away from the spotlight. They planted churches and started community development organizations and counseling centers that are spreading the gospel and serving the disenfranchised.

Keller did not follow the American evangelical tradition of networking with the powerful, like Billy ...

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Is HGTV Harming Our Hospitality?

A trendy, perfectly furnished home is not required to be useful for the kingdom.

Our first home was my in-laws’ tiny cottage, where we stayed for free. There were unfinished walls, the floors were painted chipboard, and all our furniture was dated and used. When our first guests came by, I remember looking around, my stomach twisting with anxiety. What must they be thinking of us? I wondered if I could ever host company again—at least, not until we moved.

But our next home, a small fixer-upper with shag carpets, was not much better. Meanwhile, it seemed every other house I walked into—whether my peers’, friends’, or family members’—was HGTV worthy. Mine could never compare. Once we moved into a “real home,” I believed, I would be much more hospitable.

Similarly, Trillia Newbell wrote about experiencing this same fear when she moved into an apartment. “Our new home felt like it was too small to truly be welcoming,” she said. HGTV even has an article listing 35 ways to hide the ugly parts of our homes so guests don’t see them.

Apparently, this feeling is more universal than I realized. A recent article from Insider says shows on HGTV might be contributing to this very sense of insecurity—creating a world where people are fearful of being assessed by the aesthetic state of their home:

Homeowners are “seeing everything that’s wrong with their home and imagining when people come into their home [that] they’re also criticizing and scrutinizing and judging” their living spaces, said Annett Grant, an assistant professor of markets, innovation, and design at Bucknell University.

The article set out to show how homeowners’ philosophies have changed over time.

“Traditionally, people ...

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A Christian Vocabulary for an Exhausted Age

Reclaiming the culture wars requires reclaiming wonder.

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

Last week I was talking with a new believer in Christ—one who came from a thoroughly secular background—and she mentioned that some family members were really worried about her. “I can’t believe you’ve become an evangelical Christian,” one of them said. “How can you be for guns?”

Guns?

The family member assumed that her becoming an evangelical Christian meant she had joined a political tribe, complete with gun-culture views of assault weapons. But this new Christian happened to have the same political view on this issue as her family. Of all the things that changed in her conversion, her view on guns wasn’t one of them.

My shoulders slumped when I heard this—and it wasn’t because I agreed or didn’t agree with this family’s views on gun policy. My disappointment was because I had heard some version of this many times before—people who, when hearing about evangelical Christianity, think not of the gospel but of some extreme political identity.

It would be easy to blame that on the media portrayal of evangelical Christians in America (“All they pay attention to is the politics!”) or on this woman’s family members (“How religiously illiterate has America become that all these people see are caricatures?”).

There are ways that the outside world does unthinkingly caricature evangelical Christianity. That’s hardly a new development with secularization—note the many jokes about George Whitefield’s preaching in early American newspapers or the writings of H. L. Mencken, who didn’t mean “Bible Belt” as a compliment. ...

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Evangelicals’ Theology of the Church Must Be Born Again

The ‘Great Dechurching’ is an opportunity for our tradition to rediscover a more enduring ecclesiology.

Most people who stopped attending evangelical churches in recent years are not “nones” or exvangelicals.

In fact, many still self-identify as born-again Christians with perfectly orthodox Christian beliefs, according to Jim Davis and Michael Graham’s newly released The Great Dechurching. These Christians believe in the Trinity, the atonement, and the reality of Jesus as their personal Savior.

They just don’t go to church.

It might be easy to imagine that the millions of dechurched individuals are an aberration whose evangelical identities are somehow suspect. Surely, they don’t really understand what the Christian faith is all about, we might think.

But what if evangelicalism itself is partly to blame? What if the problem with dechurched evangelicals is not their faulty understanding of faith, but rather evangelical theology’s own lack of emphasis on the church?

Relative to other forms of Christianity, evangelicals have historically maintained a rather low view of the church, compared to their high view of a believer’s individual relationship with God.

While Catholics for centuries insisted on “no salvation outside the church,” evangelicals have traditionally insisted that a person’s salvation has nothing to do with church affiliation or church sacrament. While some Protestants, such as Lutherans and Anglicans, have reserved a role for the sacrament of baptism in salvation, many evangelicals have eschewed this sacramental theology.

American evangelicalism was born in eighteenth-century outdoor revivals, which denounced unconverted ministers and called people to experience the Holy Spirit and the gift of salvation outside of church walls. The Anglican ...

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Don't Waste Your Life: How One Family Stopped Being Trashy Christians

These Tennesseans are finding ways to live without adding to the landfill. But they aren’t finding a lot of “zero waste” company.

Zach and Sadie McElrath’s six-year-old daughter saw something at a store that caught her eye: a slingshot. But they didn’t buy it for her because it would have ultimately produced landfill waste. Instead, their daughter is figuring out how to make a slingshot with a stick and rubber bands from around the house.

The McElraths, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, live a “zero waste” life. What they do throw away is compostable, except for the rare cases when they end up with items that have to go to the landfill, such as an Amazon envelope or a bag from frozen berries. They take their trash to the curb once or twice a year, even as a family of five with children ages 9, 6, and 2.

Both parents work—Sadie as a nurse practitioner, and Zach as a software engineer at a start-up. Even with their full life, they find the zero-waste life doable and even freeing, not having to think about buying things like slingshots.

“Other people might not be as extreme as we are,” said Sadie. “But everybody can do something.”

The McElraths have been living this way since 2017, and they haven’t found many other Christians interested in zero waste over the years. They find more zero-waste efforts coming from faith groups like the Unitarian Universalists. But they have been seeing more interest among Christians in their circles in doing things like composting.

This tracks with national data on evangelical attitudes about the environment compared to other faith groups. Evangelicals are the religious group least likely to see climate change as a serious problem, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. And a University of Florida study found a generational divide among evangelicals over that ...

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White Evangelicals Aren’t Sure About Ramaswamy. But for Indian American Christians, He’s a No-Go.

The former like the young billionaire’s conservative politics. The latter worry about his connections to radical Hinduism.

At 38 years old, Vivek Ramaswamy stands out among his fellow Republican presidential candidates for his age alone. The self-made billionaire has further set himself apart by saying he would ban social media for children, proposing to raise the voting age to 25, and espousing controversial views on 9/11. But when running in a party with a strong evangelical Christian wing, perhaps his most unique characteristic is his Hindu faith, which Ramaswamy has proudly discussed.

“Am I religious? Yes, I am. I am Hindu. I am not Christian. And we are a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values,” he said in an interview with NewsNation that aired last week. “But here is what I can say with confidence: I share those same values in common. I believe I live by those values more so than many self-proclaimed Christian politicians.”

White evangelical leaders who are considering other GOP candidates than former President Donald Trump are divided on whether a leader whose faith doesn’t stem from Judeo-Christian traditions can effectively lead a nation they believe is rooted in these principles. But in interviews with CT, Indian American Christians expressed apprehension about a leader in the White House who admired Narendra Modi and would further give radical Hinduism a foothold in the United States.

“God is real”

In March, Ramaswamy appeared on CBN where he compared the current state of America to the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. David Brody, who conducted the interview, told The New York Times last month, “The lazy narrative that he’s Hindu so he can’t appeal to evangelicals, I don’t buy it at all.”

Ramaswamy, who grew up in Cincinnati, frequently points out that ...

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2024 Sets the Stage for a New Kind of Abortion Debate

Four issues on evangelicals’ minds as the Republican presidential race moves forward.

Americans will get their best look yet at the slate of candidates vying for the GOP nomination in 2024 during the first Republican presidential debate and a pre-recorded interview with former president Donald Trump, both airing Wednesday night.

Evangelicals remain a key constituency for the Republican Party and for Trump in particular, who leads in most polls. But the political landscape has changed in significant ways in the four years since the last campaign, so when it comes to the big issues, evangelical voters have some new questions for the Republican field. This is the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade was overturned, since Russia invaded Ukraine, and since Trump’s indictments.

Eight GOP contenders will take the stage for the debate in Milwaukee, among them Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; former vice president Mike Pence; former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, both from South Carolina; and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and newcomer to the political scene. (Trump is skipping the debate in favor of a pre-recorded interview with the erstwhile Fox News host Tucker Carlson.)

Here are four things evangelicals will likely be watching for on Wednesday night:

Abortion

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last year was celebrated as a historic victory for the pro-life cause. But the aftermath has shown that both Republicans and the pro-life community were unprepared for what came next.

The issue of abortion is now in the hands of state governments, and the response has varied. Some, like Florida under the leadership of DeSantis, have enacted strict abortion limits, while others have expanded access to the procedure. In several states, abortion has ended on the ballot, leaving the matter ...

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America’s Church Authority Crisis Didn’t Start with Trump

A recent poll suggests evangelical voters trust the former president more than religious leaders. But this problem isn’t new.

The four-bar graph of the CBS/YouGov poll results, which made the rounds on social media this week, was undoubtedly crafted to go viral, and go viral it did.

The chart showed that Republican primary voters who plan to back former president Donald Trump in 2024 find him to be the most trustworthy—ahead of conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own families and friends. Fully seven in ten said they feel that what Trump tells them is true, but only four in ten felt religious leaders merit the same trust.

Zoom in on white evangelicals who support Trump, and the numbers are even more dramatic. These figures weren’t included in the main CBS report, but Kabir Khanna, deputy director of elections and data analytics at CBS, posted them on his own account.

Here, the percent who trust religious leaders moved up a bit, to 50 percent. But the percent trusting Trump moved up by a larger margin to 81 percent, the same number as the widely cited (if not wholly accurate) count of white evangelical votes for Trump in 2016.

This is not great poll data, as I’ll explain in a moment. And as journalist Josh Barro observed, there’s “a bit of drawing the bullseyes around the gunshots here—the finding is that people who trust Trump trust Trump.” But there is some substance in this graph. It’s another chapter in the story of an American crisis of church authority, and that’s a tale which predates Donald Trump and will require our attention long after he leaves the political scene.

There are several problems with the data, and ...

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Christian Standard Bible Finds Its Place in ‘Crowded’ Evangelical Market

The six-year-old CSB translation has recently climbed to the No. 2 spot on monthly bestseller list.

One of the newest major Bible translations on the market may be securing its place among the most popular.

The Christian Standard Bible (CSB) was the second most-sold Bible translation for three out of the past four months, according to data compiled by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA), coming in behind the New International Version (NIV) and ahead of the English Standard Version (ESV).

The CSB came out in 2017, published by Lifeway’s B&H Publishing Group as a revision of the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB). It was designed to offer a happy medium between readability and biblical accuracy, a translation philosophy referred to as “optimal equivalence.”

“The CSB has that undefinable sense of buzz,” said Mark Ward, editor of Bible Study Magazine and a popular Bible YouTuber. “The consensus seems to be that it managed to nail the balance of English readability and word-for-word accuracy that American Christians are looking for.”

With more churches switching to the CSB—in some cases, buying Bibles in bulk for their pews—and the release of popular editions such as a Tony Evans Study Bible and an award-winning kids Bible, it’s among the fastest-growing translations, climbing from fifth or sixth place on the monthly bestseller lists in prior years to second in May, June, and August of 2023.

It reached 10 percent of the market share within the first five years, and now has reached around 13 percent, said Andy McLean, publisher for Bibles and reference at B&H, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

“We’re seeing more churches adopt it, more individuals use it for personal Bible study,” ...

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Stay the Course: How to Keep Your Faith in College

A Bible professor’s advice for staying close to Christ on campus.

Higher education has a hard road ahead. Christian colleges, in particular, are in crisis over lower enrollments, the financial constraints that come with fewer students, and larger ideological conflicts that reflect our increasingly fractured society. Data indicates that young people are the demographic most likely to leave organized religion behind.

Arguably now more than ever, college is a coming-of-age time when many young adults figure out who they are and what they believe.

For Christian students, going to college means figuring out how to “keep faith” and deepen it. This retention depends in part on learning how to flourish in mind, heart, body, and soul; how to love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself; and how to do college right, not by avoiding mistakes (which isn’t possible) but by making wise decisions early to avoid the more common and ruinous obstacles.

Drawing on my experience as a theology professor at a Christian university, here are the habits and choices I’ve seen work well, along with a few to resist.

1. Go to church—but not online.

The first and most important thing to do is find a local church, place membership there, and attend worship every Sunday you’re in town. Try the college ministry, go on the retreats, join a Bible study. These are non-negotiables for being a believer in college. If you’re at a Christian school, you might be tempted to let campus activities be a substitute for church. Don’t—they’re not. Nothing can replace the people of God, the word of God, the Lord’s Supper, or worship in the Spirit with fellow disciples.

If you’re not at a Christian school, you might feel tempted to sleep ...

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Stay the Course: How to Keep Your Faith in College

A Bible professor’s advice for staying close to Christ on campus.

Higher education has a hard road ahead. Christian colleges, in particular, are in crisis over lower enrollments, the financial constraints that come with fewer students, and larger ideological conflicts that reflect our increasingly fractured society. Data indicates that young people are the demographic most likely to leave organized religion behind.

Arguably now more than ever, college is a coming-of-age time when many young adults figure out who they are and what they believe.

For Christian students, going to college means figuring out how to “keep faith” and deepen it. This retention depends in part on learning how to flourish in mind, heart, body, and soul; how to love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself; and how to do college right, not by avoiding mistakes (which isn’t possible) but by making wise decisions early to avoid the more common and ruinous obstacles.

Drawing on my experience as a theology professor at a Christian university, here are the habits and choices I’ve seen work well, along with a few to resist.

1. Go to church—but not online.

The first and most important thing to do is find a local church, place membership there, and attend worship every Sunday you’re in town. Try the college ministry, go on the retreats, join a Bible study. These are non-negotiables for being a believer in college. If you’re at a Christian school, you might be tempted to let campus activities be a substitute for church. Don’t—they’re not. Nothing can replace the people of God, the word of God, the Lord’s Supper, or worship in the Spirit with fellow disciples.

If you’re not at a Christian school, you might feel tempted to sleep ...

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Take Me Out to the Faith Night

More than half of MLB teams offer an annual post-game program with worship and testimony from Christian players.

At 8:15 p.m. on a recent Saturday, Texas Rangers catcher Mitch Garver swung and missed at an 86-mph slider from San Diego Padres closer Josh Hader.

Garver’s strikeout secured a 4-0 victory for the home team in front of 42,677 fans at Petco Park. Three minutes later, an electric guitarist and keyboardist from The Rock Church—an evangelical megachurch in San Diego—stirred on the Gallagher Square stage behind center field.

The church’s pastor, Miles McPherson, sported a pinstriped Padres jersey as he grabbed a microphone.

“What’s up? What’s up? Y’all ready to worship the Lord?” said McPherson, a 1980s-era San Diego Chargers football player who developed a cocaine habit before dedicating his life to Jesus Christ during his NFL days.

About 3,000 men, women and children—almost all clad in Padres hats and attire—bought special tickets for the team’s annual Faith and Family Night.

On a 74-degree evening, in the shadow of statues honoring Padres greats Tony Gwynn and Trevor Hoffman, attendees listened to praise music, heard testimonials from Padres and Rangers players and lifted their hands toward heaven in prayer.

“It’s very nice to be able to celebrate our faith in public without criticism,” said one of the fans, Nicole Soto, who is not related to Padres star Juan Soto.

Roughly 19 hours later—and 125 miles to the north—a similar scene played out at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Except that the Dodgers lost their Sunday afternoon home game, 9-0, to the Cincinnati Reds before a disappointed crowd of 45,936.

Still, thousands of fans stuck around for a special postgame program on Christian Faith and Family Day, highlighted by a performance ...

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What a Twitter Spat Reveals about Public Religion in America

A Republican lawmaker called a Christian tweet “bigoted.” Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar came to religious liberty’s defense.

It started with a post on X (formerly Twitter)—an expression of Christianity with the brevity the site’s format demands: “There’s no hope for any of us outside of having faith in Jesus Christ alone.” The poster in question was Lizzie Marbach, whose X bio describes her as a Republican political activist who lives in Ohio.

Marbach’s post easily could have gone unnoticed outside her own following. But then a member of Congress decided to share it—and not just to share it but to dunk on it, hard, to an audience nearly the size of Marbach’s own.

“This is one of the most bigoted tweets I have ever seen,” the congressman wrote. “Delete it, Lizzie. Religious freedom in the United States applies to every religion. You have gone too far.”

As angry replies accumulated under both posts, another, better-known member of Congress came to Marbach’s defense.

“No! Stating the core beliefs or principles of your faith isn’t bigoted,” the congresswoman tweeted, rebuking her colleague. It’s “religious freedom and no one should be scolded for that. It’s also wrong to speak about religious freedom while simultaneously harassing people who freely express their beliefs.”

If you’re already imagining these latter two characters, my guess is you’re imagining incorrectly—just as I probably would if I didn’t know the details here. The representative who dunked on Marbach is a fellow Ohio Republican, Rep. Max Miller. He’s a Marine veteran who served as a special assistant to former President Donald Trump—and he told 50,000 people that Marbach was a bigot for believing Jesus is the only hope of the world.

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Southern Baptist EC President Resigns Over Falsified Resume

Willie McLaurin is the third Executive Committee head in a row to step down amid controversy.

Willie McLaurin, the acting president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, resigned suddenly on Thursday after admitting he had falsified his resume.

“While considering McLaurin as a candidate for Floyd’s permanent replacement, the SBC Executive Committee’s Presidential Search Team discovered disqualifying information during their process of vetting and due diligence,” said Philip Robertson, chairman of the SBC Executive Committee, in a statement. “McLaurin’s education credentials that he presented in his resume are false.”

The statement quoted from McLaurin’s resignation letter, saying he admitted falsifying his resume.

“In a recent resume that I submitted, it included schools that I did not attend or complete the course of study,” McLaurin reportedly said in resigning.

According to Baptist Press, an official SBC publication, McLaurin claimed that he had degrees from North Carolina Central University, Duke University Divinity School, and Hood Theological Seminary on his resume. When presidential search committee members attempted to confirm those degrees, they learned he did not hold those degrees.

McLaurin had been interim president and CEO of the Executive Committee since February 2022 and had worked for the Executive Committee since 2020. The committee oversees the business of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination between the SBC’s annual meetings.

McLaurin had been in the running for the permanent role as Executive Committee president after the committee rejected a different candidate. If he had been named to that post, McLaurin would have been the first Black leader to head a major Southern Baptist entity.

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Christian Colleges Level Up Video Game Degrees

Popular new programs focus on the power of storytelling and the potential for evangelism.

Across the years—and gaming systems—Christians have engaged the realm of video games. They’ve played, discussed, and developed games, but they haven’t always had formal training in the theology of video games.

Now, more than a dozen Christian colleges offer video game majors, minors, and concentrations, giving students called to game design the chance to learn in settings that integrate their faith.

Messiah University students in the mobile application and game design concentration are “bringing a Christian perspective to bear on the digital world they will be helping to create.” Abilene Christian University students learn from Christian instructors in the field of digital entertainment technology and are challenged to “change the game” as they dream and create.

At Oklahoma Christian University, class enrollment in the gaming and animation program has tripled over the past seven years. Biola University’s degree in game design and interactive media began as a concentration in its cinema program in 2019 but quickly became its own major the following year.

The program equips students to see the growing medium as a mission field and a platform for compelling storytelling.

“Anywhere where there’s a powerful means of communication, it makes sense for Christians to be in that space,” said Michael Steffen, who heads the Biola program and owns Lantern Tower Games.

While Biola teaches video game majors about programming, the primary focus is gameplay: storyline, characters, world-building, and the themes and messages embedded within. A video game allows its audience to interact with the work and be impacted by it in an experiential way, rather than exclusively through ...

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Oliver Anthony’s Viral Hit Doesn’t Love Its Neighbors

“Rich Men North of Richmond” is disdainful towards people on welfare. Christians shouldn’t be.

As a native of Appalachia, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the plight of blue-collar Americans. Mine is a region shaped by the struggle for fair pay and safe working conditions. To this day, “coal country” for many is synonymous with hard living and generational poverty.

So when I heard about Oliver Anthony’s viral hit, “Rich Men North of Richmond” (a reference to powerful elites in Washington, DC), I was excited for a song in the tradition of Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie—music that names the inherent dignity of the poor, lodges a protest against establishment excess, and echoes Old Testament calls for justice, like God’s condemnation in Jeremiah 5:28 of those who “have grown fat and sleek” yet “do not promote the case of the fatherless” or “defend the just cause of the poor.”

Then I heard these lyrics:

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

Immediately, I was transported back in time.

I’m a 30-year-old mother of three again, standing in the checkout line of our local grocery store. Rhonda, the organist from the church my husband pastors, has cued up directly behind me. She says hello, and I nod back.

Normally, I would ask about her grandbabies or garden, but instead, I mumble an excuse about having forgotten bread and navigate my cart out of line toward the aisles stocked with food. But I haven’t forgotten anything. It’s a charade, a charade brought about by the shame I feel because my family is on welfare, ...

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Hillsong Founder Not Guilty of Sexual Abuse Cover-Up

An Australian court found Brian Houston may have had a reasonable excuse not to call police about his father’s crimes.

Hillsong founder Brian Houston has been found not guilty of concealing his father’s sexual abuse of a young boy.

An Australian court ruled Thursday that while Houston did not report his father’s crimes to the police when he learned about them in the 1990s, the evidence does not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did not have a reasonable excuse.

“I am not my father,” Houston said, leaving the courthouse in Sydney. “I did not commit this offense, and I feel a sense of relief that at least the truth has come out.”

Houston and his father’s abuse victim, Brett Sengstock, sat yards apart in a tiny courtroom in Sydney’s Downing Centre as magistrate Gareth Christofi delivered his judgment. It took almost two hours to read, as Christofi reviewed the facts and legal arguments.

In the crowded room, Houston’s supporters appeared confident the judgment would be in his favor, but they visibly relaxed as Christofi spoke.

“I am not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that in not reporting to police, the accused did not take the victim Brett Sengstock’s wishes into account,” Christofi said. “Therefore, I am not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused did not have a reasonable excuse.”

Houston’s father, Frank, sexually abused Sengstock in the 1970s, starting when Sengstock was just seven years old. The elder Houston, who died in 2004, was a prominent and respected Assemblies of God pastor who was jokingly called “the bishop.” Sengstock told 60 Minutes Australia that the abuse continued for five years and destroyed his childhood.

Houston learned about the abuse in the late 1990s and, as the Assemblies of God’s national president, ...

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Violence Against Indian Christians Is Becoming a Problem for American Politicians

As the US pursues a closer relationship with India, activists are concerned some are overlooking the persecution of religious minorities in the world’s largest country.

For nine days, Pieter Friedrich starved himself to get his congressman’s attention.

Drawing from his own Christian tradition of prayer and fasting and the Indian political tactic of satyagraha, the activist and journalist fasted from July 27 until August 5, aiming to convince US Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, to speak on the House floor about violence against Christians.

“He has not just a political responsibility, but a human responsibility to raise these issues,” said Friedrich, after he had abandoned his strike at the request of two Indian organizations. “I believe the only way he continues to refuse doing so is because he’s continuing to straddle the fence.”

The Christians whose plight Friedrich was demanding Khanna take responsibility for, however, were not Californians, but Indians living more than 7,000 miles away in Manipur. The fence he was accusing an American congressman of straddling was US policy toward Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and his troubling history of Hindu nationalism.

From President Joe Biden to Indian American congressmembers like Khanna, American politicians are under increasing pressure to account for their courtship of Modi, the leader of a strategically important ally and the world’s largest democracy, while ignoring the Indian regime’s oppression of religious minorities.

Modi’s recent visit to Washington—where he met with President Biden, attended a state dinner, and addressed Congress—fully rehabilitated a figure who was refused a visa by the US State Department in 2015. At the time, Modi, then chief minister of the state of Gujarat, held a precarious position on the international stage after more than 900 of his constituents, ...

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At Indigenous Seminary, Students Learn the Power of Faith Embedded in Identity

The newly accredited school promotes a theological education that’s not at odds with culture.

Much of Terry LeBlanc’s adult life has been driven by one question: Can you be fully Indigenous and fully a follower of Jesus?

His answer has been a resounding yes.

Over the past three decades, he and others have built a seminary to offer theological education to Indigenous people in the United States, Canada, and the world, so that they can answer yes too.

NAIITS, previously known as the North American Institute of Indigenous Theological Studies, was founded in 2000 with a vision of seeing “men and women journey down the road of a living heart relationship with Jesus in a transformative way which does not require the rejection of their Creator-given social and cultural identity.” In 2021, it became the first Indigenous school to receive full accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools. NAIITS can now offer accredited master of arts, master of theological studies, and master of divinity degrees, as well as doctorates in Indigenous Christian theology.

Last year, NAIITS received two grants worth $6 million from Lilly Endowment to do just that. The school will use $1 million to develop a master’s program in trauma-informed spiritual care. The other $5 million will go toward creating the Canadian Learning Community for Decolonization and Innovation, a collaborative project with four other universities.

LeBlanc, who is Mi’kmaq-Acadian and holds a PhD from Asbury Theological Seminary, said NAIITS teaches people how to reimagine the relationship between faith and culture. The academic term is decolonization, which LeBlanc said doesn’t mean diminishing the power of Jesus or the gospel, but making space for Indigenous perspectives and learning to see Indigenous identity and culture as ...

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Trump’s Georgia Election Meddling Didn’t Just Look Wrong. It Was Wrong.

The ex-president’s new indictment isn’t about appearances. Some things are just as evil as they seem.

The Georgia grand jury’s decision to indict former president Donald Trump on Monday night was surprising only for its speed.

Grand juries are famously—or infamously, if you prefer—willing to indict. That’s because they’re presented with only the prosecutor’s case (there is no defense at a grand jury hearing) and not required to reach a unanimous decision (here, 12 of 23 jurors had to agree) or to settle the actual question of guilt (all the grand jury must determine is if there’s enough evidence to bring charges). Fulton County district attorney Fani T. Willis may not manage to convict Trump and the 18 lawyers and other allies charged along with him. But the Georgia indictment has long since struck me as a sure thing.

I can’t say the same of Trump’s three other indictments: the arcane tax and campaign finance case in New York, the federal documents retention case, and the federal case concerning Trump’s behavior in the run-up to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. All three have some moral or legal ambiguity. Reasonable Christians might disagree over whether these prosecutions are politically motivated, punishing behaviors that may look bad but aren’t, in fact, illegal or wrong.

In the case of the Georgia indictment, though, I don’t see the same ambiguity—at least where Trump himself is concerned.

To borrow a phrase from an often misunderstood and misquoted Bible verse, I see a clear “appearance of evil” (1 Thess. 5:22, KJV). Legally, we don’t know yet if he’s guilty. But from what I can tell, this isn’t a case of underserved ill repute. Trump’s election meddling in Georgia didn’t ...

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Tim Keller Taught Us How to Live—and How to Die

The late pastor sought to glorify God in his devotional life, his marriage, and his ministry. How he did so in his illness was no different.

It was June 3, 2020. The subject line of the email from Kathy Keller made my heart sink: “Tim’s got pancreatic cancer.” The diagnosis was stage IV. With current therapy, life expectancy is less than a year. There is no stage V. Thus began a three-year journey that explored the cutting edge of experimental cancer therapeutics—but more significantly, the courageous approach to terminal illness by a man of deep faith.

Tim had been my friend for a decade. In the early years of BioLogos, he agreed to cohost intensely interesting and productive meetings in New York, where deep discussions about the complementarity of science and Christian faith took place. Though we didn’t completely agree on everything, Tim became my most significant spiritual mentor.

But now I was in a different role. As a physician-scientist and the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), I reached out to help him and Kathy sort through the options for interventions. Chemotherapy can sometimes help pancreatic cancer, but only for a time. On the horizon, however, are new approaches called “precision oncology”—characterizing the unique DNA mutations in the patient’s cancer in exquisite detail and then teaching the body’s immune system to recognize the masked intruders.

Tim and Kathy, his partner in life, love, and faith, weighed the pros and cons and elected to sign up for an NIH clinical trial that had shown some initial promise for advanced breast and gall bladder cancers but for which there was so far very limited experience with pancreatic cancer. Tim was clear-eyed about the likelihood of benefit, but he wanted assurance that whatever happened, the medical research team would learn from ...

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Should I Offer My Pronouns?

Gendered language is increasingly controversial in public life. Christians are grappling with how to engage.

Shua Wilmot and Raegan Zelaya worked in residence life at Houghton University, a Christian school in upstate New York. Even though it conflicted with university policy, they listed their pronouns in their email signatures to help students identify their genders, they said, given their atypical names. When the university requested they remove their pronouns earlier this year, Wilmot and Zelaya refused. They were fired.

“My name is Shua. It’s an unusual name. And it ends with a vowel, a, that is traditionally feminine in many languages,” Wilmot, whose full first name is Joshua, said in a YouTube interview. “If you get an email from me and you don’t know who I am, you might not know how to gender me.”

Zelaya added in the same interview that she felt removing her pronouns from her email signature would imply that “the students who felt safe by me doing that, the students that felt seen by me doing that” weren’t worth “taking this risk and this stance.”

Furthermore, as Wilmot told ABC News, his views regarding gender and identity do not fully align with the theology of the Wesleyan Church, the sponsoring denomination of Houghton University.

The university denied in statements to the press that anyone was fired solely over pronoun usage, adding that its policy required any “extraneous items” be removed from email signatures, including Scripture references.

Houghton president Wayne D. Lewis Jr. told CT, “The ideas that one’s pronouns are preferred, subject to change, and may be inconsistent with one’s biological sex are inconsistent with the beliefs of Houghton University. … We believe the assignment of one’s sex and gender is ...

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Worship Music Nostalgia Brings New Profit to Old Songs

Gen X and millennials’ favorite Christian throwbacks are also easy moneymakers.

In April of this year, worship leader Krista Treadway planned a “throwback” worship service with nostalgic favorites from the ’90s and early 2000s, songs like “The Heart of Worship,” “Shout to the Lord,” and “In the Secret.”

“They’re special songs,” said Treadway, who grew up with the music as a pastor’s kid. “They hold such a dear place for us because they were our firsts.”

As songs like “The Heart of Worship” (Matt Redman, 1999) and “Here I Am to Worship” (Tim Hughes, 1999) come back around as throwbacks for Christian millennials and Gen Xers, the music industry is in the midst of a financial sea-change focused on previous recordings.

Back catalogs across the music industry are more profitable than ever, and it makes fiscal sense for entertainment companies to market the music they control with the musicians they have already signed. So if you see a popular artist release a new recording of an old hit—it’s not just to tap into our nostalgia.

In recent years, industry giants like Capitol Christian Music Group (CCMG), which, as of 2021, claims over half the market share of the Christian music industry, have invested more in catalog acquisitions and are seeing profits from publishing catalogs increase. In 2020, Universal Music Group (UMG), which owns CCMG, spent over $1 billion on catalog acquisitions.

In an investor meeting earlier this year, UMG described its catalog as “strategic assets that we can control and [that] improve monetization within our portfolio.” While catalog acquisitions have slowed since last year, the investments UMG has made in the previous few years have given the group ...

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United Methodist Pastors Less Healthy, More Depressed Than a Decade Ago

A new survey finds clergy well-being has become a more serious problem as the denomination splits.

United Methodist clergy have been through the wringer in recent years, with a worldwide pandemic, a church schism, and the ongoing decline of one of the nation’s largest Protestant denominations.

Those stresses have likely taken a toll on their health, a new report shows.

A survey of 1,200 United Methodist clergy found that half have trouble sleeping, a third feel depressed and isolated, half are obese, and three-quarters are worried about money.

Almost all of those measures have worsened in the past decade, according to the study from Wespath, which administers benefits for pastors and employees at United Methodist institutions.

Overall, United Methodist pastors feel worse and worry more than they did a decade ago.

“Even though we saw some areas of well-being improve in 2023 after very dismal results in 2021, the overall 10-year lookback tells us that clergy well-being, which was a problem a decade ago, is an even bigger problem today,” said Kelly Wittich, director of health and well-being at Wespath, in announcing the survey’s findings.

“We see that clergy struggle with well-being compared to their secular counterparts, in no small part due to the often unrealistic demands placed on clergy from multiple directions.”

The study found that 11 percent of pastors said they are in excellent health, down from 17 percent in 2013, while 1 in 10 (9%) said they are in fair health, double the number from a decade ago.

The report did not indicate whether clergy age might be a factor affecting health outcomes.

More than half said the pandemic negatively affected their emotional (54%) and social health (52%). Fewer said their spiritual (26%) or financial health (23%) got worse.

Pastors ...

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Two US Church Plants Leave Anglican Diocese for the Episcopal Church

Resurrection South Austin is the latest to go, citing issues around race, women, sexual minorities, and abuse response.

In the past year, two Anglican congregations in the US have left their more theologically conservative denomination for the mainline Episcopal Church.

Formed in 2009, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is known for taking in breakaway Episcopal congregations and clergy, though these two departing churches—Resurrection South Austin in Texas and The Table in Indianapolis—didn’t have previous ties to the Episcopal Church.

Both were church plants belonging to the Church for the Sake of Others (C4SO), an Anglican church-planting movement that predates ACNA and, for the past decade, has functioned as a diocese in the denomination. Its parishes span across California, Texas, the Midwest, and the South. Very few of its clergy or churches were Episcopalian before, and many of its members come from evangelical backgrounds.

Some Anglicans see C4SO as less conservative than others in the denomination due to its focus on justice and since it’s among the dioceses that ordain female priests.

Clergy at the departing churches attributed their decision to a range of issues where they felt out of alignment with the ACNA as a whole and for which they faced backlash from fellow Anglicans online.

They cited their convictions around the inclusion of women in leadership, hospitality toward sexual minorities, opposition to white supremacy, treatment of people of color, and response to abuse victims in the church (including a contentious investigation in the Upper Midwest Diocese).

Though LGBT inclusion was not named as the primary impetus for either church’s withdrawal, it became the impasse for the more theologically conservative minority who decided not to stay during the transition to local Episcopal dioceses.

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Interview: ‘We Are Not in Heaven’: Niger Analyst Explains Christians’ Concern After Coup

Wary of West African war and Western sanctions, Christian minority in the jihadist-plagued Sahel region nervously prays for peace.

The military coup in Niger has now entered its third week. Four days after the July 26 putsch, the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) threatened military action if democratic rule was not restored within seven days.

That deadline has passed, and leaders are still mulling their options while imposing sanctions against the junta, the group of military officials that seized power. But worried by the seventh coup in the Sahel region since 2020, the remaining democratic nations in West Africa believe they must draw a line in the sand.

Neighboring countries Mali and Burkina Faso, both with military governments after their own recent coups, have warned that any foreign intervention in Niger will be considered an act of war against them as well.

Niger suffered its last coup attempt in 2021, right before the elected president—now deposed—was sworn in. The former French colony had been the last bastion of Western military cooperation against jihadist militants in the Sahel, amid the expanded regional influence of Russia through its Wagner mercenary unit.

Niger, meanwhile, is the world’s seventh-largest producer of uranium.

CT interviewed Illia Djadi, Open Doors’ senior analyst for freedom of religion and belief in sub-Saharan Africa. Though he resides in London, he is a citizen of Niger, a nation which ranks No. 28 on the World Watch List of the top 50 nations where it is most difficult to be a Christian.

Djadi provided the regional context, described the difficult but improving situation of Christians, and issued a strong appeal against military intervention:

How serious is the situation in Niger right now?

I am very sad. As a Nigerien, I find the situation difficult to watch.

But as an analyst, ...

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For Some Christians, Ohio’s Issue 1 Wasn’t All About Abortion

Not all Christians in Ohio agreed on how to approach the referendum, which aimed to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments.

Ohio went to the polls on Tuesday to vote on whether to make it harder to amend the state constitution by ballot, just months before a significant abortion measure goes before voters. But the measure failed.

The headlines around the referendum, called “Issue 1,” framed it as another hot-button issue splitting Americans into the same factions—Democrats versus Republicans, abortion opponents versus abortion rights advocates.

For some Christians, Issue 1 wasn’t so black and white. Many supported it, believing the higher threshold would hurt the chances of the upcoming abortion amendment. Some opposed it, and others struggled to reconcile their views against abortion with their concerns over how it would affect other rights in the state.

Issue 1 would have raised the passing threshold for constitutional amendments to a 60 percent supermajority, up from the current 50 percent plus one vote needed to do so. It also would have required signatures from all 88 counties in the state, instead of the current 44 needed, to initiate a ballot petition.

The subtext of the referendum, however, was abortion. In November, voters in Ohio will be considering a constitutional amendment that aims to enshrine the right to abortion in the state—a measure that already has been adopted by several states and is supported by 58 percent of Ohio voters, according to a July poll by Suffolk University and USA Today. Opponents of Issue 1 saw it as an effort to hamstring that amendment before it came to a vote, as well as a threat to voting rights in the state.

But on Tuesday this week, about three million voters in Ohio participated in the referendum, and a majority (57%) said “no” to Issue 1, setting up a showdown in ...

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Evangelical Alliance Accepted Iran Invite. Critics Claim Broken Engagement.

Wise as serpents or naïve as doves? WEA defends why it co-sponsored a UN human rights forum organized by the Islamic Republic, after accusations of legitimizing a persecutor.

Last June, the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) received a peculiar invitation. On the sidelines of the 53rd meeting of the United Nation’s Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva, the government of Iran organized a forum entitled “The Role of Religions in Promoting Human Rights.”

The WEA was the only Christian group invited.

Upon its acceptance, the alliance—representing 600 million evangelicals—under UN protocol became an official forum co-sponsor with the Islamic Republic, designated by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984.

Ranked No. 8 on Open Doors’ World Watch List (WWL) of the 50 nations where Christians experience the most persecution, Iran also partnered on the event with Pakistan, ranked No. 7 (both are considered “severe” offenders). Another co-sponsor was the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; 35 of its 57 members rank on the watchlist.

The intersection of topics, however, secured the participation of the HRC itself, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Geneva School of Diplomacy. The official title of the WEA presentation was diplomatically bland: “Harnessing the immense potential of religions in cultivating pluralistic societal cohesion and global peace.”

But behind the scenes, Iran wanted something different.

“They asked us to explain: What can evangelicals contribute to the good of society?” said Thomas Schirrmacher, WEA secretary general. “I would have a bad conscience if we did not use such opportunities to testify in the court of the world.”

American critics of the UN, however, believe “kangaroo” is this court’s most suitable adjective. One month after President ...

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