Father Sues Assemblies of God for Alleged Abuse of Teen

Texas lawsuit claims that the minor was a victim of a serial predator as well as student leaders in the campus ministry Chi Alpha.

A church in a Texas college town, a chapter of the campus ministry Chi Alpha, and its sponsoring denomination, the Assemblies of God, are being sued by a father who alleges that the leaders he entrusted to disciple his teenage son instead got him naked in ministry settings and used their positions of authority to sexually abuse him.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, follows a tumultuous several months for Chi Alpha. Since last spring, a serial predator has gone to jail for child sex abuse, chapter leaders across a half-dozen Texas universities have been dismissed, and the organization’s national director resigned.

The majority of the departing leaders had ties to Daniel Savala, a registered sex offender who groomed and abused Chi Alpha students for decades at his home in Houston. He was indicted last year on child sexual abuse and trafficking charges.

Though Savala wasn’t officially a part of Chi Alpha or the Assemblies of God, the list of leaders who have left reflect the reach of his informal network across Chi Alpha in Texas.

The recent lawsuit alleges that Savala molested a 13-year-old in 2021 and that four Chi Alpha students continued to sexually violate the youth group member through naked and inappropriate games in ministry settings.

The teenage victim attended Mountain Valley Fellowship in College Station. The Assemblies of God church had been led by Eli Stewart, a longtime Chi Alpha leader who launched the chapter at nearby Texas A&M University.

The victim’s father, Stephen Holt, is suing the church and the local Chi Alpha chapter as well as the General Council and North Texas District Council of the Assemblies of God for “malice” and “gross negligence” for failing to warn parents ...

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Why Young Men Are Failing to Launch

For Gen Z men who feel purposeless and lost, the way off the couch is the way of the Cross.

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

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a group of men—some atheists, some Christians, some Jews; some conservatives, some progressives, some centrists—from completely different geographical, cultural, and vocational backgrounds.

They all wanted to talk about one thing: the number of young men they know who seem purposeless and lost. For some of them, the problem was pressing because it was about their own sons. For most, it was about their nephews or godsons or the sons of their friends and neighbors.

In most cases, they weren’t talking about the sort of things people used to worry about with boys and young men. They weren’t concerned about gang violence or drug addiction or drag racing or street fights. They weren’t even talking about sexual promiscuity or binge drinking. They were talking about something quite different: a kind of hopelessness, a lack of ambition, in some cases even to leave the house at all, much less to go out into the world and start families of their own.

One way to identify this problem is to follow the old tried-and-true path of blaming the next generation for laziness and being coddled. You know you are getting old not when you see the first gray hairs or when your muscles ache from picking up a sock on the floor, but when you see Instagram memes for your generation showing streetlights at dusk with the words Hey Gen Z, this was the app that told us when to come home.

Usually this kind of You kids get off my lawn (or Get on your own lawn instead of gaming on the couch) mentality is vapid—a mixture of self-deceiving nostalgia with We’re better than you generational narcissism.

Plus, those ...

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Above Reproach? Fewer Americans See Pastors as Ethical

The biblical call to maintain “a good reputation with outsiders” is becoming a bigger challenge in the US as public perception of clergy falls to a record low.

Americans are having a harder time trusting anyone these days—including pastors.

The country’s perception of clergy hit a new low in recent Gallup polling, with fewer than a third of Americans rating clergy as highly honest and ethical.

People are more likely to believe in the moral standards held by nurses, police officers, and chiropractors than their religious leaders. Clergy are still more trusted than politicians, lawyers, and journalists.

The continued drop in pastors’ reputation—down from 40 percent to 32 percent over the past four years—corresponds with more skepticism toward professions (and institutions) across the board.

Americans are also less likely than ever to know a pastor, with fewer than half belonging to a church and a growing cohort who don’t identify with a faith at all.

“As American culture becomes increasingly pluralistic and post-Christian, we can’t assume that Americans in general default to a positive view of clergy,” said Nathan Finn, executive director of the Institute for Transformational Leadership at North Greenville University. “Ministers must work harder to gain public trust than was the case even a generation ago.”

Finn also pointed out how scandals like clergy sex abuse, growing political polarization, and evangelicals’ countercultural moral positions can contribute to the decline in credibility among clergy, “especially among those who have either had bad church experiences or whose worldview assumptions are already at odds with historic Christian beliefs.”

The most dramatic decline in clergy trust came around the crisis of sex abuse by Catholic priests in the early 2000s, when positive ...

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Euthanasia: Why Some Despair Unto Death

As a Christian physician, opposing medically assisted suicide wasn’t enough. I needed to understand why people decide to die.

When I began research for my book on physician-assisted death, I set out to answer the question Why not?—which, at the time, was not a theoretical one. As a doctor specializing in intensive care medicine, I would regularly receive requests from patients for help to end their lives.

In 2014, not long after I had finished my training, serious conversations began about the possibility of legalizing physician-assisted death, and I realized that “where causing death was once a vice, it was soon to be a virtue”—as I shared in a previous piece for CT.

But ever since my country, Canada, legalized MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) in 2016, I have tried to demonstrate to my colleagues and fellow citizens—beginning with, but going well beyond, my faith convictions as a Christian.

Intentionally causing someone’s death contravenes and violates their incalculable worth. So long as we are committed to upholding the intrinsic value of persons—so long as we insist that their value does not merely derive from their usefulness to others or to themselves—it is inappropriate and unethical for us to seek or to offer physician-assisted death.

More than that, relying on our own sense-experience and human faculties, we cannot confidently claim to know what it is like to be dead. Therefore, it is unwise and imprudent to seek and (especially) to offer physician-assisted death. Both these reasons, I think, count quite strongly, and seem to provide a very good answer to the Why not? question.

Is the case then closed? Not quite, I think.

For to respond effectively to this issue, we must not only address the Why not? question. We must also respond to the Why? question. We must address ...

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Five Indian Christians Who Fought for India’s Freedom

Following Jesus’ example, many lived simply, humbly, and selflessly to uplift the poor and marginalized, and their faith in God nurtured their hopes for liberation.

This year, India celebrates the 75th anniversary of Republic Day, a holiday commemorating the nation’s constitution coming into effect in 1950. While the efforts of towering figures like reformers Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru are widely celebrated, the courageous participation of Indian Christians in the freedom struggle often goes unrecognized.

Following Jesus’ example, many lived simply, humbly, and selflessly to uplift the poor and marginalized of India, and their faith in God nurtured their hopes for Swaraj, or self-rule. From sheltering dissidents to mobilizing women, educating youth to building institutions, these Christian stalwarts contributed in diverse ways. Their work dispels the myth that the Indian independence struggle was solely a Hindu-Muslim endeavor.

Below are five Christian leaders who dedicated themselves to the cause of Indian nationalism and of overcoming British colonial rule. From Kerala in the south to the Punjab in the north, these men and women of faith were driven by a deep patriotism and a desire to see their motherland free.

1. Sushil Kumar Rudra (1861–1925)

When Kasturba “Ba” Gandhi, otherwise known as the wife of Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, returned to India from South Africa in 1915, she and her children were welcomed by Sushil Kumar Rudra, a second-generation Bengali Christian and the first Indian principal of the prestigious St. Stephen’s College in Delhi.

Rudra had traveled to Bombay (now known as Mumbai) specifically to receive the Gandhi family, and he hosted them in Delhi while they awaited Mahatma Gandhi’s arrival from London. He had also been the man largely responsible for convincing Gandhi to return to India.

As principal, Rudra ...

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Iranians Gain 12 New Ways to Read the Bible

Translation agency aims to bring “glory” back to marginalized minority ethnic groups via the New Testament.

Home to the world’s fastest-growing church, with up to an estimated 1 million Christians, Iran has many underground fellowships that had previously worshiped in the Farsi language. But according to a 1991 survey of new mothers in Iran, only 46 percent reported Farsi as their mother tongue.

Minority Gilaki, Mazandarani, and other citizens can now read the New Testament in their own language, thanks to the publication of 12 new Bible translations. Far from a Persian monolith, Iran has 62 distinct languages, according to the Korpu translating agency, 9 of which number more than 1 million speakers.

And God’s concern for Iran goes beyond their individual souls.

“Translating the Bible is God’s way not simply to save people,” said Yashgin, a Korpu exegete-in-training, “but to return glory to humiliated minority peoples.”

Now living in Turkey and a Christian since 2007, Yashgin requested anonymity to protect her believing family back in Shiraz, 525 miles south of Tehran. A member of the Qashqai Turkic minority of Iran, she fled the country after two brief detentions in jail for her faith, connecting with Korpu in 2017.

Seven years later, she helped birth the first Qashqai New Testament.

Yashgin said she was mocked as a child over her accent and Turkish name. (Minority Rights Group (MRG) states that Iran represses its minority languages, mandating Farsi alone in education and civil affairs.) But studying the Bible, she learned that God called Israel as a minority people (Deut. 7:7), and translation, she said, proves the truth of John 3:16.

God loves the world, not just the majority.

“No one cares for us more than our mother,” Yashgin said. “God showed us he cares also, by speaking ...

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One Underrated Way to Enrich Your Christian Political Witness: Be a Better Christian

Personal discipleship and spiritual formation are hardly irrelevant to the rough-and-tumble of public debate.

As another election year begins and Americans brace for what will undoubtedly be another contentious presidential race, Michael Wear’s new book, The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life, has an important message for us: If politics is causing you to stumble, care less about it.

It’s an intriguing message from a political consultant who now runs The Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing more robust Christian presence and resources to political life in America. After all, politics has defined Wear’s career, beginning when he somehow managed to finish his undergraduate degree while working for President Barack Obama (first as an intern on his presidential campaign, then in the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships).

You might expect, in an election year, to hear calls to whip ourselves into a greater fervor because the stakes are so high. But Wear has written a book that urges the exact opposite. If there’s ever a conflict between political victory and moral faithfulness, he argues, we ought to choose faithfulness every time.

Rejecting silence and subservience

Indeed, the central contention of The Spirit of Our Politics is that undisciplined political fervor and a desire to defeat our political enemies is poisonous for our spiritual health. We must first seek the kingdom of God before aspiring to participate in political action.

Wear is deeply concerned that the toxicity and rancor of American politics are seeping into American churches, leading to the use and abuse of Christianity as a blunt instrument in political discourse and furthering a mass epidemic of shallow faith defined less by trust in God and ...

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After New Hampshire, Evangelicals Brace for Another Trump Nomination

Is the church ready for a repeat?

After former president Donald Trump bested former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in New Hampshire on Tuesday, the GOP primary outcome that many have expected all along may soon be here.

“This race consolidated faster than any race I can remember,” Dan Darling, director of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Land Center for Cultural Engagement, told Christianity Today. “It’s feeling a little bit like an incumbent candidacy.”

Haley outlasted a large field of presidential hopefuls, but after a second-place finish in the Granite State, her underdog campaign may soon run out of road, political analysts say.

“New Hampshire has a much more moderate and much less religious electorate than South Carolina, and she still could not win,” said Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst with the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “The bottom line is that I think she needed to do better in New Hampshire to demonstrate wider appeal among the base Republican electorate.”

In New Hampshire, she also performed well with college graduates and self-identifying moderate and independent voters. But nearly 9 in 10 of New Hampshire voters who considered themselves “very conservative” supported Trump, The Washington Post’s exit polling found. And white evangelical Christians—about 20 percent of voters in the contest—went for Trump by 70 percent.

Trump won support from a strong majority of white evangelical voters in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, but his popularity also heightened ideological divisions within churches.

“Christians should be preparing now for a really divisive and contentious campaign season,” ...

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‘Past Lives’ Is the Anti-‘Notebook’

We’ve romanticized stories of destiny-driven love—even at the expense of fidelity. This Oscar-nominated drama shows the beauty of limits.

Last year, I watched The Notebook for the first time. For nearly 25 years, it has epitomized Hollywood romance, with stills of Allie (Rachel McAdams) cupping Noah’s (Ryan Gosling) face as they passionately kiss in the rain serving as a pop culture shorthand for love and destiny.

The Notebook is also a story of infidelity. The story toggles between the present, where an elderly Noah comforts an Alzheimer’s-afflicted Allie, and the 1940s, where Allie cheats on and ultimately leaves her fiancé to reunite with Noah after years apart. In the modern scenes, Noah models faithfulness despite its difficulty, but in the earlier part of their timeline, Allie’s unfaithfulness is presented as the peak of romance.

The 2023 film Past Lives, which was nominated for five Golden Globes and Academy Awards including best picture, subversively shows the extent to which that impermanent perspective has permeated our thinking about life and love. Nora (Greta Lee) lies in bed with her husband Arthur (John Magaro), who is processing his feelings about an upcoming visit from his wife’s former love interest, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo):

Arthur: I was just thinking a lot about what a good story this is.

Nora: The story of Hae Sung and me?

Arthur: Yeah, I just can’t compete.

Nora: What do you mean?

Arthur: Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later only to realize they were meant for each other.

Nora: We’re not meant for each other.

Arthur: In the story I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny.

“I’m the guy you’re leaving,” Arthur reiterates later, “when your ex-lover comes to take you away.”

Arthur’s confession surely echoes the inner narrative ...

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Evil Is as Evil Does

The Zone of Interest, nominated for Oscars including Best Picture, is a Holocaust horror movie about the corruption of the human heart.

The verdant and blooming garden outside the family home in The Zone of Interest, nominated for 2024 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, could appear in some celebrity’s home tour on YouTube. In the yard, the mother swoops her baby down close to sniff various flowers. “This one is phlox,” she says.

But all is not lovely here. Audiences might have a hint from the two minutes of complete darkness that begin this razor-sharp film that something is wrong in this Eden. The family dog sprints anxiously through most of the immaculate shots, grabbing food off the sumptuously set tables and knocking things over. Just over the garden hedge, you can see the puffs of smoke from a train going by. At night, there is a strange red glow on the bedroom walls, and no one seems to be able to sleep.

This is 1944, and the Höss family live in their beautiful home next to the gate of Auschwitz concentration camp, of which Rudolf Höss is the commandant. This part of the story is historical fact: Höss was the real commandant of Auschwitz, responsible for creating an efficient machine for destroying human lives. He later confessed he’d overseen the killing of 3 million people.

But The Zone of Interest, an antiseptic term Nazis used to describe the area around Auschwitz, doesn’t include that kind of historical detail about World War II or the Holocaust. Director Jonathan Glazer, who spent ten years on this project and shot it on location at Auschwitz, knows audiences have seen many such movies and may, by now, be numb to their presentation of those horrors. Instead, he drops the audience straight into the Höss family life as they swim and eat birthday cake. Only slowly do we absorb ...

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Nicaragua’s Relentless Crackdown on the Church Continues

Even with the recent release of imprisoned priests, Ortega’s regime continues to target Christian organizations with an “absolute intolerance for dissent.”

Bad news has been the norm for Catholics in Nicaragua, where clergy and church groups have been frequent targets of a wide-ranging crackdown for years. But on January 14, 2024, they received a happy surprise: The government unexpectedly released two bishops, 15 priests and two seminary students from prison and expelled them to the Vatican.

Those released included Bishop Rolando Álvarez, a high-profile political prisoner who was detained in 2022 for criticizing the government and then sentenced to 26 years in prison for alleged treason.

They also included priests detained by President Daniel Ortega’s government in late December 2023 for expressing solidarity with Álvarez and other political prisoners. Days later, Pope Francis criticized the regime in his New Year’s message and then called for “respectful diplomatic dialogue.”

Nearly six years after mass protests erupted against Ortega and then were brutally repressed, these prisoner releases offer some hope to Nicaragua’s opposition. As my research has shown, however, the Ortega regime is unrelenting in trying to retain power, which suggests this is not necessarily a turning point. In fact, the government reportedly took yet another priest into custody on January 16.

Why target the church?

Ortega first led Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, after his left-wing revolutionary organization, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN, spearheaded the overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. In the 1980s, the FSLN clashed with the Vatican and church hierarchy over the group’s socialist politics, even as many poorer Nicaraguan Catholics embraced them.

When Ortega took office again in 2007, however, he did so with the blessing of ...

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Wrestling with Awkward Stories in the Old Testament

Cringeworthy passages can derail our yearly Bible reading plans. How do we interpret them?

On a recent trip to Egypt, the chefs at our hotel put out a remarkable buffet of culinary delights presented with both excellent taste and exquisite aesthetics.

One of our group members served onto his plate a beautiful spread: a cucumber disc topped with a triangle of cheese, a baby tomato, and a swirl of what looked like a dessert mousse. Sitting back at our table, he took a bite, and his eyes went wide as he grimaced. “What is this?!” he cried. That sweet mousse turned out to be liver pâté—not at all what he was expecting!

It’s the time of the year when many Christians embark on a new Bible reading plan. Reading through the Bible from cover to cover is a wonderful practice that exposes us to its less-familiar passages. We may discover new treasures along the way, tucked between the stories we know.

But we may also encounter passages we’d rather spit out of our mouths, like my friend’s liver pâté. Expecting inspiration, we may instead find hard words, troubling scenes, or confusing episodes. Especially if we hoped for an endorphin-generating Bible study—a “feel-good” devotional to carry us through our day—we can often find ourselves disillusioned.

As a Bible scholar, I’ve devoted my life to reading and understanding the Scriptures. I’ve watched the pages of the Bible come alive over and over again. Even so, I still encounter passages that trouble me. But I keep in mind something another Bible scholar and friend of mine, Esau McCaulley, once said—which is that we should engage with such difficult passages in the same way Jacob interacted with the angel in Genesis 32:

After a lengthy absence, Jacob was heading home to Canaan. ...

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Grace in the Age of Guilt

Rules and moral codes won’t save us in an era of judgment, hate, and superego. What will save us is mercy.

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

Years ago, I talked with someone who told me how hard it was to keep a moral grounding in the sex-fueled drinking atmosphere of his college. That’s not unusual, but then he told me more about his college.

Turns out it wasn’t a party school but a fundamentalist separatist Christian college, where holding the hand of a date would get a student suspended and dancing would get a student a ticket back home. It’s the kind of place where the student conduct manual is longer than the federal code for maintaining nuclear reactors.

I said, “So in spite of all that strictness, the people there were wild?” He said, “The people there were wild because of all the strictness.”

He went on to talk about getting in trouble for listening to a contemporary Christian music artist (the beat is too worldly) or for his hair being too long or for breaking some other regulation.

“After a while, you start to lose the sense of what’s really bad and what’s not,” he said. “Your conscience gets broken when you know you’re going to be a rule breaker no matter what you do. Once that happens, it’s—well, it’s party time.”

I thought of that man as I read Mark Edmundson’s book The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World. Like in that conversation, my first thought when seeing this book was, What age of guilt? This is an age of shamelessness. His argument, though, was different than what I expected, and it’s one that those of us who are Christians should take seriously.

Politico’s Michael Schaffer sums up the fractured nature of American life right now this way: ...

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Why 100,000 Pro-Lifers Still March in DC

Even after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, evangelical activists see a bigger fight to change Americans’ minds on abortion.

Catholic activist Nellie Gray organized the first March for Life in 1974 to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. Fifty years later, even after the 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, pro-life activists don’t feel like their work is done.

After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the organizers of the national march, which is considered the largest annual pro-life gathering in the world, “thought that it was possible last year that we’d have a little bit less of a crowd,” Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, told Christianity Today.

“And much to my delight, that was wrong. We had a really big crowd last year, a very energized crowd, and we anticipate nothing less this year.”

Days before the 2024 event, an arctic blast sweeping much of the US blanketed Washington, DC, closing area schools and delaying flights for the thousands of participants traveling to the capital. Friday’s forecast projects another dusting of snow.

But pro-life organizers don’t expect the inclement weather to deter turnout: They estimate the crowd could be 100,000 people. The crowd will draw from student campus activists, worshipers from evangelical and Catholic churches, staff from pro-life nonprofits, and volunteers from all over the country.

“We’re proud to be there every year en masse, you know, showing the nation that this generation rejects abortion and that we’re moving forward in our mission in this post-Roe world,” Kristan Hawkins, founder and president of Students for Life of America, told CT.

Hawkins anticipates more conversations this year about the pro-life movement’s goals moving forward, particularly ...

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He Fact-Checks Christians Who Have Experienced the Worst

He’s an East African researcher for Open Doors. The work has counterintuitively affected his faith.

Nearly two decades ago, Fikiru joined a prayer and Bible study group in his hometown in East Africa, an experience that led him to accept Christ as his personal savior. But Fikiru soon found that other Christians in the area vehemently opposed his and the rest of his community’s conversions. Over a period of months, these Christians accused the others of blasphemy, forced their spouses to divorce them and their families to cut them off, and in some cases beat and killed them.

One Sunday, in the aftermath of this persecution, several staff members of the global Christian persecution advocacy group Open Doors stopped by.

“We’d never met them,” said Fikiru. “We’d never heard of them.”

But Open Doors had heard of his church and how it was suffering. They had a simple message for Fikiru: You are not alone.

Within a couple of years, Fikiru (CT is using his pseudonym for security reasons) took a job at Open Doors.

“I’m trying to pay back for the love and concern that was shown to me while I was a persecuted believer,” said the research analyst for East Africa, an area that runs from Eritrea to Mozambique. “I do this role with passion and spirit.”

Fikiru recently spoke with global managing editor Morgan Lee about how he fact-checks persecution claims, the surprising impact this work has had on his faith, and how he cares for staff members who are worn down from this work.

How do you help staff who get burned out or secondarily traumatized hearing so many stories of devastation, destruction, and violence?

Prayer. One of our core values emphasizes that we are people of prayer. We know that we are serving the Lord, and these people are suffering for their faith. They are ...

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Tim Alberta Is More Sad Than Angry at His American Evangelical Family

The Atlantic journalist’s portrait of a fractured movement chooses lament over axe-grinding.

Donald Trump might pose problems for established political norms, but he has been a godsend for book publishers. In the years encompassing Trump’s first campaign, election, inauguration, tumultuous term as president, second campaign, and unprecedented response to defeat in 2020, dozens of books have been written about the relationship between white evangelical Christians and Donald Trump’s populist politics.

The latest of these is Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. A journalist for The Atlantic, Alberta combines memoir and research, drawing on his upbringing in and familiarity with the evangelical tradition to interrogate what historian Thomas Kidd describes as “a movement in crisis.”

This crisis is both political and personal. It is political in that white evangelicals have been the steadiest base of support for the least outwardly faithful president in half a century, at the alleged expense of their prior platitudes about morality and ethics being central to public service. But, as Alberta explains, it is also deeply personal, leading to rifts in families, communities, and congregations.

As the title hints, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory is organized into three sections, each focusing on a different element of the evangelical movement and its evolution over the last decade in response to changing political tides. Alberta crisscrosses the country visiting churches and political rallies, interviewing pastors and activists, and trying to make sense of what he sees as too many evangelicals sacrificing a Christian approach to the political world at the altar of power. The result is a book that is well resourced and eminently readable, ...

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Why Singaporean Churches Don’t Talk About Abortion

As young people become more accepting of abortion, pro-life ministries encourage pastors to talk about sex and unplanned pregnancies.

When Eliora found out she was pregnant in 2021, she didn’t tell her church community as she felt ashamed about getting pregnant outside of marriage. Instead, she started researching abortion on the internet. When she told her partner, whom she was not in a committed relationship with, he gave her a list of abortion clinics in the area.

Eliora, 29, was also unsure about her church’s stance on abortion, as she had never heard the topic talked about from the pulpit or in small group. Two weeks later, she terminated the pregnancy, thinking it was the most logical choice. (CT agreed to use only her first name due to the sensitivity around abortion in Singapore.)

However, what she thought was a one-off decision soon plunged her into overwhelming guilt. “Deep down, I just had this sense that if it is a life, then I have killed something. It just felt wrong,” Eliora said. “I wish that my [church] community was a space [where] I felt safe to reach out for help.”

Stories like Eliora’s are not uncommon in Singapore, where abortion is a largely taboo topic in the church. At the same time, Singapore has one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world due to the country’s former family planning policies in the ’70s. Abortion is legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy and not restricted by age. Minors do not need to obtain parental consent to get an abortion.

While the number of abortions in Singapore has halved in the past decade—likely due to the increased use of contraceptives and the growing acceptance of single mothers—approval of abortion has increased in the younger generations, including among Christians. A third of Christians between the ages of 18 to 35 believe abortion ...

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Adoption Was Beautiful, Precious, and God-Ordained. Then I Adopted.

Facile expectations hurt everyone in the process, including my new son.

A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, after putting my three kids to bed one night, I streamed a National Theatre production of Jane Eyre while squeezing in some exercise on our stationary bike. A chill crept through me as I found myself identifying not with Jane but with her vindictive aunt, who unwillingly becomes Jane’s adoptive mother.

I was horrified to share Mrs. Reed’s resentment toward Jane for being an outsider, an intruder, a bringer-of-problems. This was the same sentiment I found myself fighting daily toward our five-year-old adopted son, whom we’d welcomed into our family over a year prior. Watching my own feelings manifested on screen in Mrs. Reed—a villain—brought home to me how defective my moral compass had become.

As a child who always wanted to make the world a better place, I’d taken to heart the value that Christians, from the early church to modern American evangelicals, have placed on care for orphans. And the way adoption was portrayed in sermons and the Christian books I read was universally positive: Adoption was a metaphor for God grafting us into God’s family (Rom. 8:14–17, Eph. 1:5); adoption met a crucial need; adoption was a beautiful act of love. Being a gregarious evangelist or an on-my-knees prayer warrior might not be my strength, but welcoming a child I could do.

When I started dating my future husband, I had just returned from a summer volunteering with disabled children in a Chinese orphanage. Adoption was always part of how we envisioned we would build our family and extend God’s capacious love to kids in need.

After getting married and having two biological children, with my medical training finally complete and our lives relatively ...

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How Colombia Became South America’s Hardest Country to Be a Christian

Officially, the country protects religious liberties better than most in the region. On the ground, it's more complicated.

Rodrigo is a Christian fisherman who lives with his wife in the department of Chocó, a jungle region near the border Colombia shares with Panama and one of the wettest places on earth.

Due to its remoteness, the town does not have paved streets, and the presence of police and other Colombian authorities is scarce. Residents primarily travel the mighty Atrato, Baudó, and San Juan Rivers by motor boat, and Rodrigo supports his family by selling gas, as reported by Open Doors, which first told his story.

Despite the seeming necessity of his business, Rodrigo and his family are isolated. The majority indigenous community in the area where the family lives has rejected them because of their faith and have socially and economically excluded them due to their refusal to participate in the animistic rituals that are common among the natives. This isolation has also made Rodrigo vulnerable to the regionally dominant guerrilla and paramilitary groups, who periodically threaten to shut down his business if he doesn’t pay extortion fees—a crime that affects the whole country but is even worse for Christians.

Rodrigo’s story encapsulates two of the biggest reasons Colombia has been the most dangerous country in South America in which to be a Christian over the last five years, according to Open Doors’ World Watch List (WWL). On this year’s list of the most difficult places to be a Christian, the country ranks No. 34 globally. So how did a nation with a long democratic tradition and a Catholic majority become one of the most precarious places for believers in the Western Hemisphere?

Much of Colombia’s notorious violence dates back to 1948, when the liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer ...

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Xi Jinping Is Not Trying to Make Christianity More Chinese

The primary goal of Zhongguo hua is not cultural assimilation but political domestication. Yet I'm more confident than ever that house churches will survive.

December was the most challenging yet most hopeful month for Christians in China.

Before Christmas, the 11th National Chinese Christian Congress (NCCC) was held in Beijing. The quinquennial congress elected new leaders of the officially sanctioned National Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the nominal China Christian Council. Top political advisor and politburo member Wang Huning charged these groups with strict oversight of churches and with maintaining an unwavering allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Under the party’s instruction, the NCCC passed a new five-year plan to “continue to promote the Chinanization of Christianity and run Chinese churches well in accordance with the socialist society.” Meanwhile, the new and sweeping Patriotic Education Law, which took effect on January 1, requires religious leaders to conduct patriotic education and guide their religion by the socialist principles of the CCP.

Persecution continues to be real

Throughout December, the authorities once again tried hard to contain and curb Christmas celebrations inside and outside churches, prohibited students and others from participating in Christmas activities, and detained some house church leaders to prevent them from organizing congregational gatherings.

Yet most churches, both the officially sanctioned churches and unregistered house churches, held Christmas Eve and Christmas Day worship services. The online evangelistic galas by Beijing Zion Church and other house churches on Zoom and other platforms are of high artistic quality. Christians shared discreetly on social media that church leaders baptized a number of new believers despite the current “bitter winter” for churches in China. ...

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Haley and DeSantis Set Their Sights on Surviving

On the heels of a disappointing showing in Iowa, Trump’s rivals are in the make-or-break weeks of their campaigns.

Donald Trump’s blowout win in Iowa left both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who declared they’d continue their race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, to do their best to spin the outcomes in a positive direction.

“We got our ticket punched out of Iowa,” DeSantis told supporters. “I am not going to make any excuses and I guarantee you this: I will not let you down!”

DeSantis, who spent big in the state and traveled to all 99 counties, outperformed his polls, but the Florida governor only bested Haley by a middling two points and fell far shy of Trump at 21 percent of the votes.

“Given where DeSantis started the campaign last spring, and the time and money he spent in Iowa, his performance was devastating,” said Mark Caleb Smith, a Cedarville University political science professor.

DeSantis didn’t perform as well with white evangelicals as he had hoped, with Trump holding on to half of all votes and taking a majority of the evangelical Christian bloc.

“It is fascinating how they’ve come to put such trust and hope into Trump,” said Smith. “They’ve rationalized—justified—that Trump is the one that is kind of this instrument of God. He’s the King Cyrus, right, that’s going to ‘look out for us, even though we don’t necessarily embrace his own personal piety or lack thereof.’”

Trump’s 30-point margin was enough for two candidates to drop out. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who garnered 7.7 percent of the vote, read the political winds and, just a few hours into the night, suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump instead. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson also rolled up his campaign after ...

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The Philippines’ Top 10 Bible Verses

Leaders reflect on what YouVersion’s list of the most-shared Scriptures in their nation includes—and misses.

Below are the Philippines’ top verses of 2023 as determined by YouVersion. With the help of Langham Partnership, Christianity Today reached out to three local Bible scholars for their thoughts and analysis on what to make of the state of Christianity in the Philippines as seen through these findings.

Federico Villanueva, regional commissioning editor, Langham Partnership

What is your overall reaction to this list?

I wasn’t surprised. First, these verses reflect the situation of many Filipinos. In the midst of uncertainties, poverty, and political instability, it is understandable that many FIlipinos are drawn to Bible passages which remind them that God is in control.

He has been there from the very beginning (John 1:1). All things work together for good (Rom. 8:28). And he has a good plan for us (Jer. 29:11). So they do not need to worry (Matt. 6:33) but come to him (Matt. 11:28) and cast their cares on the Lord (1 Pet. 5:7).

Second, these verses reflect the influence of Protestant (particularly American) Christianity with its emphasis on personal spirituality and the concern for holiness in an evil and wicked world (Rom. 12:2).

Given the events of this past year, is there a verse you wish were on this list instead?

I wish Psalm 10:15 was included among the top 10 list of verses in my country, given the presence of wicked men in our country and in the world. But Christians tend not to involve themselves in politics and are more focused on the spiritual and inner needs. One of the reasons why our country is like this is there is a huge gap between what we do inside the church and what is happening in the society and the world.

Psalm 10 is part of a lament. The psalmist is complaining against God ...

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T. D. Jakes Keeps Preaching Revival After Shooting Down Rumors

Followers continue to flock to the prosperity gospel minister even after his A-list connections spawned recent scrutiny.

On the stage of First Baptist Church of Glenarden International, Bishop T. D. Jakes didn’t spend much time preaching from the lectern at center stage of the megachurch.

Instead, the televangelist walked back and forth in his dark suit and striped tie, switching a handheld microphone from his left to his right hand, sometimes facing the predominantly Black congregation of thousands gathered for an annual revival at the start of the year, other times turned toward the clergy and the choir members sitting on the large stage.

“The Holy Spirit sent me all the way to the DMV to tell you this is your year to pivot,” the Dallas-based Pentecostal minister said to cheers and applause from the Washington, DC-area crowd, many on their feet on January 5. “You have to surround yourself with people who can pivot because they’re following who you used to be. Now they’ve got to follow who you have become.”

As he expounded on the biblical story of Joshua succeeding Moses, it was not readily apparent that two weeks before, rumors of the kind that might have led to his own succession had gone viral on social media. While some of his many ministries and businesses issued statements in response, Jakes appeared to be treating the rumors as a bit of turbulence rather than lasting turmoil.

The prosperity gospel preacher, entertainment executive, and ministry entrepreneur has grown exponentially since his early days as a storefront pastor in West Virginia. Jakes moved to the Dallas area in 1996 and founded The Potter’s House, now a nondenominational megachurch with multiple locations and more than 30,000 members, according to the Dallas Morning News.

In 2001, Time magazine featured the traveling evangelist ...

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Soong Mei-Ling: A Christian First Lady

Throughout political turmoil, Soong Mei-ling remained steadfast in her Christian nationalist beliefs and supported spreading the gospel in China and Taiwan.

Soong Mei-ling (1898–2003), a pivotal figure in 20th-century Chinese history, holds a distinct place as the First Lady of the Republic of China. Known by various names such as Soong Mei-ling in mainland China, Chiang Soong Mei-ling in Taiwan, and Madame Chiang in the English-speaking world, she played a critical role as the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Republic of China through its fifth presidency, and as the stepmother to the sixth and seventh presidents. While her political role is well recognized, her Christian faith is a lesser known yet equally vital aspect of her life.

Early life

Soong was born in 1898 to a deeply Christian family in Shanghai. Her father, Charlie Soong, studied theology at Vanderbilt University in the United States and became a Methodist pastor. He was also an influential publisher and a key leader of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in China. Soong’s mother, Ni Guizhen, a pastor’s daughter, further instilled Christian values in their home.

Soong was the youngest of three influential sisters, each marrying prominent figures in China’s political history. Her eldest sister married H. H. Kung, a leader in the Republic of China’s government, and her second sister married Sun Yat-sen, a pivotal figure in modern China’s formation.

Educated in the United States, where she attended Piedmont College, Wesleyan College, and Wellesley College, Soong embraced Western culture alongside her Chinese heritage. She returned to China in 1917, dedicating herself to social work and education, often in collaboration with Western missionaries.

First Lady of the Republic

On December 1, 1927, Soong married Chiang, then commander in chief of the National Revolutionary ...

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Iowa Voters Still Have Faith in Trump

In the GOP’s first primary race, evangelicals didn’t take much convincing to stay in his fold.

Donald Trump—the far and away GOP frontrunner—has secured a quick win in Iowa, where his campaign’s Christian rhetoric stoked his fan base but disturbed some evangelical leaders.

National outlets barely waited for the ink on the ballots to dry before calling the race for Trump only 30 minutes after caucus sites closed. Some sites were still voting.

Trump won with 51 percent of the vote, more than the other candidates combined, which tracked with the final Iowa poll Saturday. The former president consistently led in the polls by around 30 points, thanks largely to support from evangelical Christians. Around half told pollsters he was their first choice.

That’s a shift from the last time Trump ran in Iowa. The state’s evangelicals weren’t excited about the foul-mouthed real estate mogul in 2016 and favored Ted Cruz, viewing Trump as “the lesser of two evils” when paired against Hillary Clinton in the election, said Jeff VanDerWerff, a political science professor at Northwestern College, a Christian college in Orange City, Iowa.

“The thing that's just been really fascinating to me over the last eight years,” VanDerWerff told Christianity Today, “has been this slow migration and now this real embrace, it seems, of Trump. That he’s become or is seen as this instrument of God.”

Early entrance polls from CNN found that 55 percent of white evangelical Christians said they were supporting Trump.

Despite subzero temperatures, supporters heeded Trump’s call to turn out: “You can’t sit home. If you’re sick as a dog, you say, ‘Darling, I gotta make it,’ ...

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How Brazilian Megachurches Became Global Church Planters

Satellite congregations are popping up wherever a critical mass can be found, from Florida to Portugal to Kazakhstan.

The Florida Center neighborhood is the place to go in Orlando if you are a Brazilian immigrant missing home. From Guaraná sodas to brigadeiro candies, all kinds of merchandise from the South American country are available in stores and restaurants. Today you can also find there Alcance Orlando, a satellite church of a congregation in Curitiba, a city of nearly 2 million in southern Brazil.

The main pastor, Paulo Subirá, moved to Florida with his wife and three school-age children in 2017.

“When I came to Orlando, we met in small groups with family and some friends, as we previously had in Brazil,” he says. After a while, the gathering grew to include friends of friends.

The group became too large to meet at a home and then outgrew meeting at a hotel. “We then understood we should start a church from that group,” Subirá said.

Alcance Orlando now has two Sunday services that meet in a 300-seat auditorium. On weekdays, members gather in 31 small groups spread across the Greater Orlando area. Subirá, whose brother Luciano leads Comunidade Alcance in Curitiba, is currently preparing a young pastor to start a new community in South Carolina with some Brazilian families that left Florida.

Brazilian immigrant church plants in Europe and North America—usually started by well-known local ministries that exist apart from denominational bodies or missionary agencies—are new for Brazilian Christianity. These church plants are the result of the confluence of two phenomena: the growth of the evangelical population and emigration.

The rise of the evangelical faith in Brazil is well-documented. In a 1980 census, 6.6 percent of Brazilians self-identified as ...

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Africa’s Top 10 Bible Verses

Leaders reflect on what YouVersion’s list of the most-shared Scriptures in their region includes—and misses.

Below are Africa’s top verses of 2023 as determined by YouVersion. With the help of Langham Partnership, Christianity Today asked three local Bible scholars for their analyses on what the findings suggest about the state of Christianity on the continent.

Elizabeth Mburu, Langham Literature regional coordinator for Anglophone Africa, Langham Partnership, Kenya:

What is your overall reaction to this list?

The top ten in Africa did not surprise me. Some of them are my go-to verses!

What might the verses more unique to Africa convey about Africa’s spiritual needs or level of biblical literacy/engagement?

It is likely that these verses feature prominently in Africa because of the challenging socioeconomic and sociopolitical circumstances in many African countries.

Many Christians are enduring hardships and they resort to God’s promises to provide security, provision, prosperity and protection. We struggle against many societal ills, such as corruption, as well as other issues, including spiritual oppression and false teachings. We generally have a transactional relationship with God, and most of these verses would be taken as promises—rewards for good religious conduct.

Most do not know how to interpret the Bible for themselves and so rely on what they hear from pastors. Given the rise of neo-Pentecostalism in Africa and the reality that approximately 85 percent of pastors do not have formal training, the popular verses would include those on this list. Unfortunately, this means that biblical literacy tends to be shallow in many contexts, and the “harder” truths that lead to spiritual maturity tend to be ignored since they are not meeting a felt need.

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The Funny, Confusing Sincerity of ‘The Book of Clarence’

Jeymes Samuel’s anachronistic biblical epic nods to classics like “Ben-Hur” and “Life of Brian”—and ends with a surprisingly earnest view of Christ.

Out with the superhero movies, in with the biblical epic? From Journey to Bethlehem to The Chosen’s fourth season and Martin Scorsese’s recent announcement that he’ll start shooting a movie based on Shūsaku Endō’s A Life of Jesus later this year, Jesus movies are multiplying. Maybe, just maybe, 2024 will even be the year that Terrence Malick finally finishes editing his long-gestating Jesus project, The Way of the Wind.

In the middle of all this is The Book of Clarence, which—it seems safe to say—offers a perspective on the New Testament you won’t get from more devotional or high-concept films. Inspired by movies as different as Ben-Hur and Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and featuring a majority-Black cast, Clarence tells a sometimes epic, sometimes humorous story that is not quite about Jesus himself.

Focused on a fictitious character who lives just to the side of the greatest story ever told, the film is written and directed by Jeymes Samuel, also known as The Bullitts, the rapper turned filmmaker who made waves a few years ago with the Black Western The Harder They Fall. That film, as stylized as it was, was widely touted as a “corrective” to the Western genre and to popular perceptions of the past, drawing attention to real-life outlaws and lawmen who had largely been neglected by previous filmmakers.

The Book of Clarence, in American theaters Friday, has a somewhat different agenda. Here, Samuel is indulging his love of classic Bible epics while filtering the genre through his own experiences as someone who grew up in “the hood” (i.e., a mostly Black public housing development in London).

“Clarence is your everyman,” Samuel told Esquire. ...

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Died: Chungthang Thiek, Who Started Prayer Movement in the Hills of Manipur

The Indian evangelical leader sought a space where people “could commune with God without interruption.”

H. Chungthang Thiek, a revivalist and preacher who launched a prayer movement in the hills of Manipur, a northeastern state in India, died on January 4. He was 75 and had been battling vocal cord cancer for months.

Thiek obeyed the vision he received on July 11, 1986, the last day of a youth camp he was leading, instructing him to “Arise and rebuild,” words that first led him to build a discipleship and evangelistic ministry that soon evolved into something more specific.

Following a trip to South Korea, Thiek returned with a vision to provide a place for people to pray and started to pray for the same. In 1990, he established “Prayer Mountain” right outside Manipur’s second largest city of Churachandpur, which has welcomed hundreds of thousands of Christians from across the country since.

A former math teacher turned evangelist, Thiek had a heart for Manipur and learned all of the state’s languages and dialects. His life’s work became defined by that vision at youth camp. There, he later recalled, God spoke to him from the book of Nehemiah 2:17:

Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.”

“The situation in Manipur and especially in Churachandpur at that time (1986) was very bad. Alcoholism had gripped most of our young people, as well as drug abuse,” said Thiek’s former ministry partner Lalmanlien Mana, who at that time was one of the campers. “Their spiritual lives were way down in the pit.”

But the vision Thiek shared with these young people in his characteristic bluntness and passion ...

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Singapore’s Top 10 Bible Verses

Leaders reflect on what YouVersion’s list of the most-shared Scriptures in their nation includes—and misses.

Below are Singapore’s top verses of 2023 as determined by YouVersion. With the help of Langham Partnership, Christianity Today reached out to three local Bible scholars for their thoughts and analyses on what to make of the state of Christianity in Singapore as seen through these findings.

Samuel Law, dean of advanced studies and associate professor of intercultural studies, Singapore Bible College

What is your overall reaction to this list?

No surprises. In general, the verses are reflective responses to the worldview and issues of our context and subscribe to the theological frameworks of the megachurches/denominations representative of Singapore.

What might the verses more unique to the list convey about Singapore's spiritual needs?

I’m actually more surprised that Proverbs 3:5–6 is unique to Singapore and would have thought that it would be mentioned in the other countries. I remember a Sunday School song based on those verses that we used to sing as I was growing up in the US. Perhaps the verses are a favorite in Singapore as they parallel the Asian/Confucian attitude in life’s journey and align with a Daoist worldview.

Given the events of this past year, is there a verse you wish were on this list instead?

Isaiah 55. The chapter reminds us that God’s ways are not our ways and, despite circumstances, he is still at work. Despite our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) 21st-century context, nothing impedes his power to transform situations in accordance to his mission of redeeming all creation.

Peter C. W. Ho, academic dean, School of Theology (English), Singapore Bible College

What is your overall reaction to this list?

We are unsurprised ...

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How Churches Can Build Trust Among Gen Z Filipinos In An Age of Scandal

As police arrest a pastor for an alleged murder in a lurid crime of passion, young people question how they can trust the church.

When 19-year-old Giona Melo heard that police had arrested the pastor of the largest Baptist church in the Philippine island of Mindanao for allegedly murdering his romantic rival, a male beauty pageant contestant, all she could do was laugh.

“I used to get really angry, but now I laugh because it’s just absurd,” said Melo, who grew up in Cagayan de Oro, a city in northern Mindanao, and is now a student at North Park University in Chicago. “I have peace because I trust in God more than the church.”

Dimver Andales, the 51-year-old head pastor of Lapasan Baptist Church in Cagayan de Oro, was accused of masterminding the murder of 24-year-old Adriane Rovic Fornillos, a candidate for Mister Cagayan de Oro. The police have called the case a crime of passion because Andales, a married man, was allegedly in a romantic relationship with Fornillos’s girlfriend. He was arrested along with his associate pastor, who is said to be an accomplice of the crime.

Around the time the news broke, another pastor, Jennifer Cobarrubias of Dream Life Church in Quezon City, went viral for a TikTok video in which she and her church members mocked former congregants who had left her church. She quickly faced backlash on social media: “This is why I stopped going [to church],” read one tweet. “Religious people are the most judgmental ones.” Another read: “These types of people are using religion to control people’s lives. … Shouldn’t you be praying for them instead of mocking them [on] TikTok?”

“It is sad to see Christian leaders fail to be good representatives of Christ,” said Micah Bacani, a recent graduate of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, ...

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The Iowa Evangelical Betting Against Trump

Bob Vander Plaats wants Christian voters to move on from Trump. Are they still listening?

In the lead-up to the first caucus in the presidential race, GOP hopefuls barnstorm Iowa, turning up at town halls, cornfields, schools, the state fair, and Bob Vander Plaats’s house.

He and wife Darla have welcomed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, and entrepreneur and political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy. DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and Sen. Tim Scott (who has since suspended his presidential campaign) also visited his church, Soteria Des Moines, a Baptist congregation in the state’s capital.

Vander Plaats is head of The Family Leader, an Iowa-based conservative Christian nonprofit with ties to Focus on the Family. He has built up a winning streak picking out the past three GOP caucus winners in his state—Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016—and holds one of the most-coveted Republican endorsements.

“Bob Vander Plaats is a kingmaker,” said Jim Tillotson, president of Faith Baptist Bible College in nearby Ankeny. “I would think his endorsement carries a lot of weight.”

Vander Plaats, though, tends to downplay his influence. “It’s not my endorsement,” the 60-year-old told Christianity Today. “It’s more that I’ve had a front-row seat to this entire process.”

In the lead-up to the caucuses, when he wasn’t brushing shoulders with candidates or hosting them during The Family Leader events, Vander Plaats was working from a nondescript office park in Urbandale, Iowa, where the ministry is headquartered.

His office is crowded with traces of his Iowa roots: a card with “I heart basketball” recalls his days on Northwestern College’s Red Raiders team, and a flip calendar ...

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Don’t Let Yourself Be ‘Cured of Churchgoing’

Church homelessness is lonely and exhausting. And the only antidote is Christian community.

When my family moved from Washington State to California, my parents braced my brother and me for a church search that could take some time. But after just one Sunday, we fell in love with a congregation, and my family still attends there more than 15 years later.

In leaving home for college, I hoped for the same narrative. Instead, I found it to be the complete opposite. In fact, up until about six months ago, I had been going on six years without a home church—which is a familiar reality among many Gen Z Christians.

Roughly one-third of young people are attending church less often today than they did before the pandemic. A 2022 study from the Survey Center on American Life found that the pandemic appears to have caused those who already had the weakest commitments to regular religious attendance—including young people, single folks, and self-identified liberals—to stop attending church altogether at a much higher rate than other Americans.

Throughout my church search, I struggled with thoughts of self-doubt, wondering if I was the problem: Was I just being too picky in my expectations? Was I discounting churches for superficial reasons? In my mind at the time, the reason I had not yet found a church home was a mix of equally valid contributing factors over the course of my college career.

In my first year, I visited what felt like hundreds of churches by bus, since I didn’t have a car. And when the pandemic hit during my sophomore and junior years, I began tuning into my beloved church from back home. By senior year, I was determined to find a community and released any expectation of finding a one-to-one comparison with my home church.

I began commuting 40 minutes into the city in search of a rich community ...

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Christian Colleges Try Eliminating Tuition to Draw Students

A number of schools are trying various methods of not charging tuition, born out of their convictions about debt and hopes for students to choose a Christian education.

As Christian schools adapt their education models to an unfriendly market, several are experimenting with offering free tuition to some or all of their students.

Starting this semester, Sattler College, a small Anabaptist college in Boston, announced that it will not be charging any of its students tuition. The president, Zack Johnson, said some students came to his office in tears of happiness after the announcement.

Uriah O’Terry is a student at Sattler, and the first in his family to go to college. He said in past years finding the money for tuition was “a point of stress,” and he had to take out a loan. He’s happy for the change.

“I am being prepared for a life of effective Christian living without the burden of debt,” he said in an email. “So the way I pay for my ‘free’ college education is by serving Jesus and the people around me with the skills and knowledge that I have gained at Sattler.”

Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, also announced that in fall 2024 it would not charge tuition for Pennsylvania students whose families make under $70,000 a year. In fall 2023, Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana, began offering free tuition to Indiana students whose families make less than $65,000. That program will continue next school year, now for families making less than $60,000.

Hope College in Holland, Michigan, is in its third year of a pilot program to offer free tuition. It is currently covering tuition for a small group of students who go through a character-based application as it tries to raise funds to cover more and more of its students.

“The reception has been a wide range of things from people who are inspired by it to people who think we’re ...

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How IVF Made Its Way into Evangelical Pro-Life Debates

And what I wish I had considered before reproductive assistance.

When evangelicals speak of the unborn, they’re often thinking of babies growing inside pregnant moms. Even the pro-life mantra of “from womb to tomb” presupposes a womb to carry them.

So as record numbers of Americans grow their families through in vitro fertilization (IVF), Christians who believe that life begins at conception—even if that’s in a petri dish—face new questions and challenges. In response to expanding reproductive technology, pro-life evangelicals are reexamining the theological and ethical concerns around creating and caring for life at its earliest stages.

I wish I had thought more deeply about this in 2015, when I began IVF in a desperate move to become a mother after several years of infertility. But even as a pro-life Christian, I thought primarily of the lives I would carry, not the ethical ramifications of potential leftover embryos. In fact, I wasn’t even aware one could make so many embryos at once, and the doctors at my IVF clinic didn’t inform me of it.

Other Christians whose beliefs about life did come to bear on their journeys through fertility assistance have experienced the tension firsthand. I talked with Jamie Skipper, who began to consider treatments to help get pregnant around 15 years ago. Her staunch pro-life convictions immediately made things harder.

The Skippers were committed to limiting the number of embryos. If each one created was a new life, they didn’t want any “extras” to sit in a freezer or get destroyed in the process. But IVF is a physically demanding and expensive process, so doctors often recommend fertilizing multiple eggs for a higher chance that one will develop into a healthy baby.

Jamie Skipper said finding ...

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Brazil’s Top 10 Bible Verses

Leaders reflect on what YouVersion list of the most-shared Scriptures in their nation includes—and misses.

The most popular verses for Brazilians in 2023 focused on the provision of God.

Those digitally cracking open their Bibles were most likely to search Joshua 1:9, followed by Jeremiah 29:11 and Isaiah 41:10, according to YouVersion.

Valdemar Kroker, who pastors Igreja Irmãos Menonitas in Curitiba, a city of nearly two million in southern Brazil, found the results unsurprising.

“It’s not surprise to me that Joshua 1:9 is the top verse,” he said. “I’ve heard my father sing this passage countless times.”

Nearly all the verses that made Brazil’s Top 10 are Old Testament texts that ring with a sense of “promise,” according to Paulo Won, a Presbyterian pastor, theology professor, and content creator.

“The focus is on what God can do in us, in the sense of granting us victories in life, more than on how we can be molded to God’s will, and thus live the discipleship that presupposes eventual difficulties and tribulations,” he said. “It’s a clear diagnosis that our way of living the gospel is largely triumphalist.”

The appearance of these verses suggest that Christians aren’t learning the Bible as a “grand narrative” or always being given the larger context of where these words come from, says Cynthia Muniz, a biologist and theologian.

“The Brazilian evangelical scene itself has been strongly influenced by triumphalist theologies, so that some of these texts can be understood as personal promises of prosperity and victory, including material ones,” she said.

YouVersion’s apps include tools designed to help people read the Bible more frequently and pray more regularly. These were downloaded ...

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The Bible Dictates What the Church Teaches. Should Church Teaching Dictate How We Read the Bible?

A Protestant considers a Catholic theologian’s call for an “ecclesial” reading of Scripture.

On November 10, 1942, following a British victory in Egypt during World War II, Winston Churchill famously quipped, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

I thought about those words as I opened The End of Interpretation: Reclaiming the Priority of Ecclesial Exegesis, a recent book from Catholic theologian and First Things editor R. R. Reno. Just as Churchill saw that victory as a decisive turning point in the war in North Africa, Reno sees a renewed synthesis between Scripture and doctrine as a path forward through the crisis of our cultural moment.

The book hovers around an essential question: “How,” Reno asks, “do we square doctrine with Scripture?” On the surface, this might sound like an odd question to pose. Aren’t Scripture and doctrine the clearest of allies? Aren’t they two parts of the harmonious whole of Christian witness? For most believers, surely, there is no obvious tension between them. But in seminary classrooms, the topic tends to launch impassioned debates.

In advocating a new synthesis between Scripture and doctrine, Reno is responding to a gradual division during the 20th century among those who engage in serious study of the Bible and theology—a rupture he considers harmful and unnatural. In broad outline, the task of biblical exegesis (understanding the objective meaning of Scripture in its literary, historical, and canonical contexts) has come unglued from the task of theology (constructing authoritative doctrine that distills the Bible’s teachings on God and man).

As Reno makes clear, this state of affairs has an important institutional component. For too long, the traditional ...

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Word Perfect: Christian Proofreaders Celebrate a Billion Bibles Checked

Peachtree Publishing Services reviews 80 percent of Protestant Bibles in the US, looking at 300,000 details in each project.

When Jan Gibbs began proofreading Bibles 14 years ago for Peachtree Publishing Services, which celebrated in December the distribution of a billion copies of its works, she first had to learn to draw lines.

In the Bible’s poetry books in particular, primary, secondary and tertiary vertical lines designate the indentation for each horizontal line of text. Line placement must match the translators’ desires to a tee.

Mastering poetry alignment, she moved to proofreading running heads to conform to each publisher’s order. Then footnotes. Then word breaks.

Cumbersome to many, to Gibbs it’s mother’s milk.

“I find it fascinating,” said Gibbs, who today is Peachtree’s vice president of Bible proofreading. “My husband said that this would absolutely drive him insane.”

When proofreading God’s inerrant Word, there’s no room for error.

Peachtree proofreads 80 percent of the English Protestant Bibles in the US, proofreads many Catholic Bibles and serves publishers worldwide, Peachtree president Chris Hudson told Baptist Press.

“We are making sure everything is as perfect as can be,” he said. “We want people to find God when they read the Bible, not find a mistake.”

But surely, with so many details in play, someone must have made an error somewhere in Peachtree’s history, one could presume.

“We don’t get a lot of feedback of mistakes. Mostly we’re catching lots of mistakes before it’s printed,” Hudson said. “Every step along the way gets looked at at least twice by different people. Through our electronic and our people checks we’re catching most things. But we are human, so occasionally we’ll get ...

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