What Churches Lose When They Fight like the World Fights

A journalist counts the cost of prolonged cultural conflict in the life of one fractured congregation.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

By now, you’ve seen the statistics. In the United States, churches are shrinking. Christian belief is waning. “Nones” comprise a greater share of the population than Protestants or Catholics. And the trendlines don’t look good.

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

Eliza Griswold (Author)

352 pages

$22.18

By now, you’ve also seen the explanations—many of them published in the pages of Christianity Today. Leadership crises, denominational tussles, and sexual-abuse scandals have depleted the trust congregants have in their pastors. Congregations have split over political candidates and masks and vaccines and critical race theory and LGBTQ inclusion and women in leadership.

These explanations are right. But to me at least, they increasingly feel like a set of abstractions. They’ve been repeated so many times over the past several years as to have lost their meaning—so rote, by now, as to obscure particularities.

In her new book Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Eliza Griswold offers no such obfuscation. Through painstaking observation of one church over many years—Circle of Hope, a progressive evangelical community with “cells” across New Jersey and Pennsylvania—she reveals how the histories, gifts, and besetting sins of particular Christians in specific circumstances react to monolithic cultural pressures. Through her reporting—rigorous, expertly paced, never polemical—she also reveals what’s at stake.

Utter estrangement

Circle of Hope was founded in 1996 by former Jesus Freaks Rod and Gwen White. From the very beginning, the Anabaptist congregation ran counter to the predominant political and cultural conservatism of the Religious Right. Rod wore jeans and used a music stand as a lectern; congregants interrupted and asked him questions. An alternative music scene thrummed. In the years to come, the pacifist Christians at Circle would protest drone strikes and illegal gun sales; the church made reparations to its Black members, raised money for a bail fund, and lobbied for affordable housing.

These activities notwithstanding, Circle wasn’t meant to be a political project. Rod “considered himself an activist,” as Griswold reports, “but he also taught the risks of not keeping Jesus at the center of one’s life.” Circle read Scripture together, marked Easter with a sunrise service and cross-marked cookies, and baptized people in the filthy Delaware River. “Battling the forces of evil didn’t mean simply backing progressive political causes,” writes Griswold. “Jesus was calling for a far more radical transformation of society”—not just new policies but new creation.

But what’s the difference between a stance and a Spirit-led truth? Where can the church “agree to disagree,” and where must it dig in its heels? What’s woke—and what’s the gospel?

Over time, disagreement on the answers to these questions caused Circle of Hope to shut down. (No spoilers there; Griswold makes clear from the introduction where the 2020s are headed.) She documents the dissolution through the stories of four pastors: Ben, Julie, Rachel, and Jonny, as well as Bethany, a prominent Black member of the congregation.

The five of them disagree about plenty. In particular, they fight over race and racism, power and authority. Eventually, factions form. Members start leaving. Members stop giving. The church leaves its denomination over the decision to become LGBTQ affirming. The pastors disentangle themselves. “Both sides cast the other as the reason people were fleeing from Circle,” writes Griswold. “Jonny explained the emptying out as a result of the legacy of whiteness and abuse.” Those aligned with the founding family, the Whites, “saw people fed up with fighting, and with Jonny.”

In the hands of a lesser writer, the breakup’s bureaucracy—statements, Zooms, masked meetings, emails, a consultant—would be tedious. But Griswold sustains a lively narrative. This is a story not of hijacked agendas and out-of-line reply-alls but of utter estrangement. It’s riveting, and it’s painful.

It’s also actually inclusive. In Circle of Hope, Griswold manages to enact what her observed church could not, allowing different points of view to coexist in its pages. She brings equal parts scrutiny and grace to her flawed characters, offering their backstories not as an excuse for their often troublesome behavior but as context for understanding them as whole people. Ben, one of the White sons, yells at his colleagues in meetings. He’s also a hospital chaplain, a father taking his sons to look at the stars. Jonny sends bitter tweets and draws hard lines. He’s also a skilled chef, the child of evangelicals who fled persecution in Egypt.

But all the context in the world isn’t enough for the pastors and their congregants to find common ground. What’s wrong with church, it seems, is what’s wrong with the rest of American life: We’re angry. We’re stressed out. We’re lonely. Our polarization mirrors the divides elsewhere, across politics and geography and socioeconomic class. We’re no better, it seems. If this is how Christian brothers and sisters treat each other—with skepticism and rage and sneering—well, then … what’s the loss when a church closes down?

The work persists

Of course, there’s the loss of communal worship, which at Circle is admittedly hard to pin down. In the years since its founding, in ways obvious and subtle, it seems to have strayed from historic orthodoxy. It’s often hard to tell where “creative” ends and woo-woo begins. Griswold doesn’t try to make the distinction, merely describing the scriptural exegesis, “Creative Play,” and meditation practices she observes.

Ultimately, those splintering questions listed above boil down to spiritual ones. Is Jonny’s conviction just crass opportunism? Is Julie an ally out of cowardice or conviction? Is Ben really trying his best? Does “love your neighbor” mean calling them out, flipping the temple tables? Though Griswold can observe the fruit of the Spirit—who’s humble, who’s kind—it’s impossible for even the sharpest journalist to know the depths of a human heart. She can’t assess the sincerity of a prayer or the closeness of an individual’s relationship with Christ.

Easier to document is the loss of hands and feet, the absence of the body of Christ working together to make the kingdom come. Even where the Circle’s theology or polity is flawed, this loss is evident.

For years, members watched each other’s children and paid down each other’s debt. They ran community thrift stores and donated the proceeds. They served spaghetti to people on the street, inviting them into the warmth.

“There was an absolute kindness in this community, a living example of being ‘in the world but not of it.’ The depth of their devotion was inspiring,” writes Griswold. “And then the world banged its fist against the glass door.”

Even when Circle ends, its individual Christians persist. As the church comes apart, Rachel picks up a relapsed addict and delivers him to an emergency room. Once he’s no longer a pastor, Ben, in his capacity as a hospital chaplain, holds a dying baby and tells him to “Go into the arms of the Lord.”

The church, after all, isn’t a collection of buildings, a sheaf of paperwork, a name. As long as its people persist, its work goes on.

Kate Lucky is senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

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Theology

You Cannot Lie Your Way to the Truth

Russell Moore

Falsehoods are easy to tell in politics, and they can even creep into the church. But nothing takes us farther from the Truth himself.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

When Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate this week, some people took to social media to contrast him with his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance. Lots of those contrasts were fair game—that of a former high school coach versus a Yale venture capitalist, for instance. Some people framed the contrast this way, though—Walz is a normal guy, while Vance is a weirdo who has sex with couches.

The past several years have required sentences I never imagined I would write. Here’s another: J. D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. I believe the proposition I just wrote to be true, and my opinion of the politics or personality of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has nothing whatsoever to do with that belief.

Some might stop me at this point to note that everybody knows that J. D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. It’s a joke; a social media meme, started when someone posted a parody, allegedly from Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. These people know, however, that most people don’t follow the genealogy of memes back to their origins. Many people just start to think, “J. D. Vance is sort of a freak; people say he did something with a couch one time.”

The Vance couch meme-posters can have it both ways. They can kind of do what the Bible describes as deceiving one’s neighbor and then say, “I was only joking!” (Prov. 26:19). Beyond that, they can say, “Well, of course, Vance did not literally have sex with a couch. The point is that Vance is kind of weird; the couch just makes the point.”

If this were just this momentary meme, it could be passed over and forgotten. But it happens all the time. Sarah Palin never actually said, “I can see Russia from my house.” Barack Obama never advocated for death panels for grandma. That’s what happens in politics, especially in a social media era. And, after all, most people don’t really believe the Vance couch memes; it just helps with morale. It won’t actually hurt Vance.

The problem for those who belong to Christ, though, is when the fallenness of a fallen world starts to feel normal. The problem is when you start to think your lies can serve the truth as long as the vibes feel right and the outcome is what you want.

In her new book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum discusses the tactics employed by authoritarian regimes such as that of the Chinese Communist Party. These regimes have learned, Applebaum argues, the power of pro-freedom dissidents of the past, such as Václav Havel, who refused to symbolically lie (think of his famous example of the greengrocer who refuses to put the “Workers of the world, unite!” sign up in his store). To undermine such truth-telling, they employ social media “to spread false rumors and conspiracy theories” so as to “turn the language of human rights, freedom and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal.”

Applebaum cites Freedom House’s description of this kind of propaganda pressure as “civil death,” meant to sever those who do not lie the way the party commands from their communities, to inundate them with lies so that even their friends and families start to think, “Well, there must be something to some of this, since these controversies are always there.”

This does not have to happen in matters of big life-and-death political dissent and repression. I’ve seen it happen to countless pastors—especially those who dare to preach what the Bible has to say about racial hatred. It doesn’t matter that “He’s a Marxist” or “He’s a liberal” are absurd charges. The game is just to say them long enough that the people who know they are lies get tired of the truth—so that they will, if not embrace the lie, at least fear the liars enough to get quiet.

On the geopolitical level, the metaphor of “civil death” is appropriate—even when it doesn’t work—because the Bible ties lying so closely to murder. Of the devil, Jesus said: “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44, ESV throughout).

The first lie recorded in Scripture is that of the Serpent saying to the woman, “You will not surely die,” telling her the forbidden tree would grant her godlike powers (Gen. 3:4–5). This deception severed her first from the Word of God and thus from the Tree of Life (v. 24).

I suppose a (literal) devil’s advocate could try to say that the Serpent’s lie was for a good goal. After all, does not God, ultimately, want human beings to be able to discern good from evil (Heb. 5:14)? Even those too scared to give such justifications to the Devil’s lies are often able to make similar arguments for their own. This is why the apostle Paul denounces the one who might say, “But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?” (Rom. 3:7–8).

Jesus is not just the one telling us the truth; he is the truth (John 14:6). To distort the truth into a half-truth or a quarter-truth to advance a lie is a personal assault not just on the person you are lying about, or the issue you claim to support, but on Jesus Christ himself.

The problem, then, is not just what that does to whoever you’re lying about; the problem is what the lying does to you. Outside the gates of the kingdom, John tells us, are “everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Rev. 22:15). The grace of God is amazing, and can redeem into truth those who lie, but it doesn’t do so by leaving liars to their lies. Those who would tell us that evil can be overcome by evil are not just lying to you but to themselves (Rom. 12:21; 1 John 1:8).

In a politically idolatrous age, simply refusing to lie about one’s opponents will be viewed as an act of betrayal. It will make you vulnerable to suspicion that you are not really “one of us,” whoever “us” is defined to be. Lying, then, is easy. It fits with the pattern of the world, and it will protect you from the mob. Sometimes, the pressure is even stronger where the church takes a welcoming and affirming posture toward liars, as long as they lie about the right people.

But what if God is telling us the truth that there’s a judgment seat? In that case, it becomes far more consequential to stand on the other side of it and ask, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). After all, we already know the answer from the voice—once on the dock, now on the throne. His answer is what it always was: “I Am.”

Theology

The Evangelical Diploma Divide

Daniel K. Williams

How a new class division burst into American evangelicalism—and what it means for church unity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Pexels

The United States is now in the throes of the politics of class division, and American evangelicalism is no exception.

College-educated evangelical Christians may be the least prepared for this new class-based polarization, because it doesn’t break along old class fault lines. As recently as two decades ago, social class in the US was primarily determined by income or wealth, “haves” pitted against “have-nots.”

But today’s most intractable class divide is about education, and educated evangelicals are having a hard time navigating this split. After all, the college-educated are a minority among white evangelicals, only 29 percent of whom have four-year college degrees.

I say this—as an evangelical with not only a four-year degree but a PhD—not to seek pity for the new educational elite. We don’t need commiseration. But we do need unity in the body of Christ. So what should we do when our education divides us from our Christian brothers and sisters? What do we do when the values we’ve acquired from our schooling lead us down a political path that many non-college-educated evangelicals view as dangerously wrong?

It’s only in recent years that education has become such an important political predictor. “Among white voters, in particular, individuals with at least a college degree are now a much more Democratic constituency than people with less schooling,” The New York Times reports. Meanwhile, whites without a college degree are moving rapidly into the Republican Party.

This is a reversal of traditional patterns, because, for many decades, the GOP was the party of the affluent and upper middle class, while Democrats relied heavily on the support of working-class voters. That began to shift as divisions over the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and debates over affirmative action in the 1980s put the Republican Party in conflict with many liberal Protestant clergy and college professors.

For a long time, this dissent among PhDs seemed to have little effect on the rest of the college-educated population, evangelicals included. Ronald Reagan received strong support from white college graduates during his reelection campaign of 1984, and a majority of white college grads continued to support the Republican Party until the 21st century.

This meant that most college-educated evangelicals who voted for Reagan in the 1980s or supported the Christian Right in the 1990s didn’t have to worry about alienating their secular friends. Those friends might not have shared evangelicals’ views on abortion or sexuality, but they probably didn’t view voting Republican as immoral.

That began to change in this century, starting with the defection of many college-educated Americans from the Republican coalition during George W. Bush’s presidency. Some left because of opposition to the Iraq War. Others were fed up with Bush’s stance on cultural issues including embryonic stem cell research and same-sex marriage. One way or another, by the end of Bush’s presidency, the Republican Party was moribund in educated areas of the Northeast and West Coast, places where it had been reasonably strong a decade prior.

But that didn’t hurt the GOP very much, because it offset those losses with a rising appeal to non-college-educated Americans. As the Republican Party became more rural, Southern, and working-class, the party’s policy positions began to shift to reflect the interests of this new constituency. Its positions on immigration and gun control became more hard-line, and its commitment to free trade and entitlement reform started to soften.

At first, those differences received little attention, but the nation’s polarization over former president Donald Trump exacerbated this divide and brought it into the open, including in the evangelical church. Today, the core of Trump’s constituency is united by a strong opposition to the establishment, whether in government, the media, or education—or maybe even their own denominations. As Trump Republicans have taken over their party, this anti-establishment ethos has become part of the whole GOP’s identity.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is increasingly a pro-establishment party supported by college-educated Americans. Its agenda includes things that “establishment” evangelicals (such as the National Associations of Evangelicals) have also historically cared about, like efforts to fight climate change or honor the human dignity of undocumented immigrants. Both of those causes, which the NAE has endorsed in the past, incur strong opposition from anti-establishment Republicans, evangelicals included.

But the modern Democratic agenda also includes things that “establishment” evangelicals have historically opposed, especially abortion and an ever more progressive ethic on sex and gender.

Here’s where the position of college-educated evangelicals gets complicated. Most voters who share our educational class are uninterested in or actively hostile to biblical values on life and sexuality. It’s easy for them to wholly embrace the contemporary Democratic Party’s pro-establishment agenda, abortion and LGBTQ activism as much as immigration reform and environmental care.

On the other hand, most voters who share our faith are non-college-educated, anti-establishment Republicans. They find it similarly easy to reject that whole Democratic agenda, and perhaps also to dismiss anyone with any sympathy for any part of it as “woke,” “weak,” or “leftist.”

So what do we do? College-educated evangelicals could stay in the awkward middle forever, remaining aligned with fellow evangelicals on abortion and sexual ethics while continuing to partner with fellow college grads on immigration and climate policy. But recent polling data I’ve reviewed suggests that isn’t what’s happening. Instead, many college-educated evangelicals are reacting to this dissonance by turning their backs on the GOP and, in some cases, on non-college-educated evangelicals.

We’ve seen this at the individual level, of course. More than a few who made this choice have ended up leaving evangelicalism altogether and/or spending a significant amount of time battling evangelical Republicans online. But we can see it at the national scale too.

As late as 2016, there was no statistical difference between the voting choices of college-educated and non-college-educated evangelicals. That year, 81 percent of college-educated white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Trump, as did 80 percent of white evangelical voters without a college degree.

This changed by 2020. Then, 84 percent of non-college-educated white evangelical voters voted for Trump. But among college-educated white evangelicals, support for Trump markedly decreased to just 63 percent. That means a remarkable 21-point educational gap developed among white evangelicals over the course of a single presidential election cycle.

This class-based division in evangelical opinion continued after the 2020 election. An American Enterprise Institute study from March 2022 showed that only 51 percent of white evangelicals with a bachelor’s degree had a favorable view of Trump, compared to 77 percent of white evangelicals who had not attended college. The evangelical groups that historically have been the most suspicious of ecclesiastical and political establishments and the least likely to be college-educated—such as Pentecostals, for instance—have also been Trump’s strongest supporters.

And there’s every indication that divide will widen this year. A poll in early June 2024 showed that President Joe Biden’s support among voters (of all faiths) without a college degree had dropped by 10 percentage points since 2020, while his support during that same period had slipped by only 1 percentage point among college-educated voters. I expect we’ll see similar—perhaps even accelerated—dynamics with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Consequently, this November, college-educated evangelicals will face a choice. Like many of our educational peers, we could vote for the establishment, a choice that may well alienate us from fellow church members and the broader evangelical movement. Or we could vote for the anti-establishment party, burning bridges with our college-educated friends and colleagues.

Neither one of those choices strikes me as a particularly good one, and I want to suggest an alternative.

To begin, college-educated evangelicals must recognize that we’re a minority in our faith tradition. Most fellow evangelicals will make political choices that don’t line up with ours. This reality can be easy to miss if all our friends are college-educated and the only Christian books we’re reading are those written for us.

By the time of pastor Timothy Keller’s death last year, for example, all of his books combined had sold just over 2 million copies. That’s a lot, but Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series sold 80 million copies. Far more American Christians have encountered the apocalyptic good-versus-evil scenarios presented in those books than have ever read Keller’s apologetics.

Similarly, if we’re part of a congregation or denomination that disproportionately attracts college-educated members, we may greatly exaggerate the importance of trends among people in our own circles—like a move toward more liturgical worship or a rediscovery of the Reformed heritage or the early church fathers. Denominations well-represented among the evangelical elite, like the Presbyterian Church in America (where Keller pastored), the Christian Reformed Church (home of James K. A. Smith and Nicholas Wolterstorff), and the Anglican Church in North America (which includes Esau McCaulley, Tish Harrison Warren, and now Beth Moore) are smaller than many realize.

Those churches have national memberships of just 400,000, 200,000, and 125,000, respectively. Even put together, they’re far outnumbered by the Assemblies of God’s 3 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention’s 13 million members, or the 16 million who attend nondenominational churches. The educated evangelical bubble is very small.

If we exist in that bubble, we may come to find it incomprehensible that other evangelicals do things like flying Trump 2024 flags on their trucks. We need to learn to comprehend it. We need to acknowledge that our circles are politically unusual, and that’s okay. And when we see reports this November (as we surely will) that most evangelicals voted for Trump, we shouldn’t be shocked. In our current political climate, that’s exactly what we’d expect from such anti-establishment voters.

As for how we vote, this election—and each one after it—may be a moment of reckoning for college-educated evangelicals like me. We’ll feel forced to choose one major party or the other. But what if we’re convinced neither side sufficiently represents the values of Christ’s kingdom?

That should mean we won’t fully align ourselves with either, which will also mean continuing dissonance among our educated friends and fellow evangelicals alike. That might never feel comfortable, but discomfort doesn’t excuse us from maintaining a charitable disposition toward Christians who disagree with us, knowing that we’re all fallible. This new class difference may prove durable, but it needn’t divide the body of Christ.

If our education becomes a path to understanding rather than a component of our tribal identity, it can be a valuable gift in the kingdom of God instead of a marker of political division.

Daniel K. Williams teaches American history at Ashland University and is the author of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.

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Church Life

Why Changes to India’s Colonial Criminal Code Concern Christians

Interview by Surinder Kaur

A Supreme Court lawyer on how recent legal reforms could affect the country’s minorities.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

On June 23, authorities arrested Sarju Prasad, a pastor in Uttar Pradesh, for conducting Sunday worship in his house. Earlier that day, two Hindu men, one claiming to be a journalist, had entered his house during the morning service and taken photographs.

That evening, two policemen detained Prasad on charges of plans to commit cognizable offenses. However, their explanations only came out later; at the time, they did not notify him of the grounds of arrest, a violation of India’s Code of Criminal Procedure. They also ignored the procedure’s requirement that the offender be brought before a judge within 24 hours of being taken into custody.

Instead, Prasad was only presented before a magistrate two days later and was released on bail on June 25. Shortly after, on July 2, while collecting his cell phone at the police station, authorities re-arrested him, saying that he had violated the state’s anti-conversion law. This time, he was denied bail and is now in prison.

Prasad’s case is just one of many where the local police have allegedly colluded with Hindu extremists and arrested Christians conducting peaceful prayers, tyrannizing their rights. Indian Christians are apprehensive about what might happen under the new criminal laws that have replaced their three British-era counterparts. Described as “draconian” by some legal experts, the legislation has elicited criticism and protests, and Christian, Muslim, and other vulnerable communities fear possible abuses of the new laws.

The Parliament of India approved the three new laws last December without following due process, according to the opposition. They replaced the Indian Penal Code with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), the Code of Criminal Procedure with the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), and the Indian Evidence Act with the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), all of which came into effect on July 1.

Proponents argue that these long-overdue reforms aim to modernize the justice system, leveraging technology to improve efficiency and accessibility, such as allowing police complaints to be registered remotely or permitting the use of videos as court evidence.

Further, India needs legislation “not based on colonial prejudices and practices but on the principles of access of justice to all,” said Rajiv Mani, secretary of the Legislative Department. “The three laws have hence been enacted to overhaul the criminal justice system in the country to make it citizen-centric.”

However, critics contend that the new laws grant the government excessive authority through the police to restrict free speech and to crack down on those who express dissent or criticism of the government, potentially infringing on civil liberties and disproportionately affecting minority communities.

For instance, Father Stan Swamy, an advocate for the tribals and the Dalits, was arrested under the terrorist act. Father Swamy believed this was a deliberate effort “to put me out of the way, and one easy way was to implicate me in some serious cases.” Despite his deteriorating health conditions and being 84, Swamy was ultimately denied bail and died while incarcerated in 2021.

Christians in India, who in recent years have been subject to violence and other persecution at the hands of Hindu nationalists and the police, now worry that speaking out about their plight could lead to prosecution. They have witnessed several cases where the police have been mere spectators while Hindu extremists barged into churches, disrupting services, vandalizing church property, and assaulting the pastor.

Christians have also been falsely implicated in the past for desecrating Hindu idols, such as when Hindu extremists planted broken idols near the property of a Christian man. Ironically, the same law is not applicable to Hindu extremists who desecrate Christian religious symbols.

In a more recent instance, on July 27, Hindu extremists entered a Catholic school in Madhya Pradesh and objected to the Christian religious symbols on the school premises and in the classrooms. In the presence of the police, they removed Christian images and symbols from the classrooms and installed pictures of Hindu idols. Yet no action has been taken against the mob—instead, against the school. These stories of police officers acting sympathetically to Hindu extremists means that minority groups fear nearly any legislation giving law enforcement officers more power.

Many already believe that the criminal justice system has been stacked against minorities: 76 percent of prisoners sentenced to death in India between 2000 and 2015 were from “backward classes and religious minorities,” according to a 2016 study.

As India grapples with these significant changes to its legal landscape, CT spoke with Robin Ratnakar David, a Christian and a lawyer practicing at the Supreme Court of India, to understand the implications of these new laws, particularly for India’s minority communities.

Were these new criminal laws necessary?

The new criminal laws largely repurpose and consolidate existing ones. While there are some new provisions, the essence remains unchanged, raising questions about the necessity of such an extensive overhaul when amendments could have sufficed.

For laws to be effective and just, they must be shaped by inclusive dialogue with various stakeholders, including legal experts, civil society organizations, and the affected communities. On the contrary, when these bills were passed in Parliament, no proper debate was conducted, as many ministers had been suspended.

If the goal was to modernize and improve the legal framework, overhauling the Police Act of 1861 would have been more impactful. Viewed widely as unprofessional, insensitive, brutal, and corrupt, this measure was designed for colonial control rather than public service. The British instated it after the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, a rebellion against the British East India Company’s rule led primarily by Indian soldiers (sepoys).

The Indian government has previously recommended police reforms, and, in 2006, a Model Police Act was suggested, which was not fully implemented.

What aspects of the new criminal laws could pose problems for Christians and other vulnerable groups?

Previously, the laws concerning terrorism were only found in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA), which is not related to the recently enacted three laws and is still in effect. Under this legislation, the police require prior written permission from the designated authority before seizing the property of the accused. Terrorism now also falls under the new BNS law and gives the police a free hand in seizing any property associated with the crime. The BNS’s definition of terrorism is also broader. The UAPA requires an intention to strike terror, while the BNS includes acts intended “to intimidate the general public or disturb public order.”

This overlap creates legal ambiguity, allowing the police free rein to decide whether to book a case under the UAPA or BNS. If the goal was to expand terrorism laws, amending the UAPA might have been more appropriate than introducing parallel but contradictory definitions in the BNS. There is speculation that including these provisions under the BNS could lead to its use disproportionately against minorities, as has been the case with the UAPA.

What other sections would you call out?

The BNS has another section that states that anyone who “excites or attempts to excite secession or armed rebellion or subversive activities” has broken the law. The broad and potentially vague definitions raise concerns about potential misuses against dissenters, activists, and minority groups.

This section (305d of the BNS) punishes the theft of vehicles, government property, religious idols, and icons with up to seven years’ imprisonment. There’s already concerns that this may be subjectively applied and used to target the Christian community.

What should Christians know about the BSA’s new provisions regarding admission of electronic evidence in court?

In 2014, India’s Supreme Court warned that electronic evidence can be easily altered, potentially leading to unfair trials if not properly protected. The new BSA allows electronic records as evidence in court, such as website content, text messages, server logs, computer/laptop/smartphone data, emails, location data, etc. However, it fails to include measures to ensure the authenticity and integrity of digital evidence. This lack of safeguards raises concerns about the potential misuse or manipulation of electronic proof in legal proceedings.

Christians who are in the habit of streaming their Sunday church services live and uploading their sermons and messages, prayers and prayer meetings, should keep all of this in mind. Christians should monitor and moderate content responsibly, as failure to manage content can lead to liability.

Christians should take extra care while posting content, ensuring it is respectful and appropriate. They must share only accurate and verified information. They must obtain permission before they share someone else’s content. And they must not post any defamatory or illegal material.

How do you respond to claims that these laws give police broader powers that could be misused against vulnerable communities?

Since this act has been recently enacted, it may be too early to comment definitively on the potential abuse of police powers.

An area of concern is that BNSS Section 187 allows the police to detain and question an accused person for a total of 15 days. That was the case earlier as well, but that was 15 days in a row, unlike in this new law, where the 15 days can be spread over 40 to 60 days of the total detention period of 60 to 90 days. This means that instead of being questioned for a continuous 15-day period, the police can repeatedly detain, release, and re-arrest the accused.

This approach could prolong the accused’s anxiety and uncertainty for up to three months, potentially being used as a means of harassment. It could also lead to the denial of bail for the entire period until the police exhaust the 15-day custody allowance.

There is a legitimate concern that this provision could be misused by the police as a means of undue harassment without corresponding provisions to address police misconduct. Petitions challenging the implementation of these laws have been filed in high courts and the Supreme Court.

Are some critics exaggerating the dangers while overlooking the real issue of legal awareness among minorities?

While some critics may emphasize the dangers, it is also crucial to address the real issue of legal awareness among minorities. Ensuring that all citizens are informed about their rights and the laws can help mitigate potential misuse and promote fair enforcement. Increasing legal literacy and awareness can empower minorities and reduce the risk of discriminatory practices at the enforcement level.

Thus, while vigilance against potential misuse is essential, fostering legal awareness and education within vulnerable communities is equally critical to ensuring justice and equality for all.

- More from Interview by Surinder Kaur

Books

How to Read the Bible in Color

Esau McCaulley

Why a group of multi-ethnic editors began working on a new commentary of the New Testament.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

I was sitting in a coffee shop, books taking up too much space on the tiny table in front of me, bemoaning the lack of attention the academy paid to the Black church and the distinctive interpretative habits of African American church leaders and scholars. My time in religious higher education had signaled, in ways large and small, its belief that the tradition that shaped me had little to say to the rest of the world.

The important ideas and trends arose in Europe or white North American spaces—Black Christians, on the other hand, were historically deemed theologically simplistic or dangerous. But I longed for people to know the tradition as I experienced it: life-giving, spiritually robust, and intellectually stimulating. We had wrestled with God and found our way toward faith in the context of anti-Black racism often perpetuated by other Christians. I wanted to make that story and the fruits of our labor known. I still do.

While I sipped my coffee, I was struck by an idea that served as the genesis for The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Commentary on the New Testament. I often complained about white scholars neglecting African American voices, but I knew little about Asian American biblical interpretation, its theological and historical developments, and the gifts it offered to the body of Christ. The same was true regarding Latino interpretation and the Bible-reading habits of First Nations and Indigenous peoples.

In some ways, I was a hypocrite. I wanted people to attend to the contributions of my community without being similarly invested in others. I needed to spend less time complaining and more time listening. The New Testament in Color thus began with that insight. It was a hope that we might come together across ethnic differences and create something beautiful.

I wondered, What fruit might come from the various ethnic groups sharing space in North America working together to produce a commentary? What did I need to learn from my brothers and sisters in Christ beyond the Black-white binary that shaped my imagination in the American South?

It was natural that my lament was directed to where the power resides in the academy. In 2019, the Society of Biblical Literature, the largest body of biblical scholars in the world, did a study of its membership. That study showed that 86 percent (2,732 of 3,159) of its members who described themselves as college or university faculty were of European or Caucasian descent.

Given the demographics of the United States (and the world), it is more than fair to say that we experience a disproportionate white or European dominance of biblical studies. If God gives his Spirit without measure and equips the entire body of Christ to read and interpret the Bible, then it is a tragedy when the whole body of Christ is not engaged in the process of reading, interpreting, and applying these texts. No one part of the body has the right to speak for the whole. We need each other.

Does a lack of ethnic diversity matter? Isn’t biblical interpretation simply a matter of translating verbs and nouns, linking together ideas as they come together into sentences, paragraphs, narratives, or letters? I was told that the only thing we needed to be good interpreters was proper understanding of the historical context alongside requisite grammatical, text-critical, and linguistic expertise.

I do not want to push any of those important and vital skills aside. All the contributors to The New Testament in Color labored hard to gain the aforementioned tools of the scholarly trade. It is precisely because I believe that biblical texts are God’s Word to his people that we must do our very best to read them well and carefully.

But here is the rub. It matters that we have diverse representation in the process of biblical interpretation because it is always ourselves as persons with our experiences, biases, gifts, and liabilities that we bring to the text. We are not disembodied spirits without histories or cultures. We are not exegetical machines; we are interpreting persons.

We come from somewhere, and that somewhere has left its mark, whether we acknowledge it or not. When one culture dominates the discourse, we are closing ourselves off from what the Holy Spirit is saying among other cultures. Socially located interpretation, when rooted in a trust in God’s Word, is a gift from particular cultures to the whole church. Socially located interpretation reflects a trust that none of our experiences are wasted, that all of who we are is useful to God.

Our cultures are not something we are called to set aside in the Bible reading process, because our cultures and ethnicities have their origins in God (Eph. 3:14–15). Every culture and ethnicity, because it was created by people made in the image of God, contains within it both evidence of its divine origins (Gen. 1:28) and elements of the Fall (Gen. 3).

Stated differently, there are no perfect cultures. Every culture and people is challenged and made into the best version of itself through an encounter with the living God. Our cultures are restless until they find their rest in their Creator. None of them are left unchanged. God’s word to persons and cultures is always yes and no. He offers us all repentance for things that have gone astray and lauds our struggles toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Socially located biblical interpretation is nothing less than the record of the Spirit’s work through scriptural engagement among the different ethnicities and cultures of the world. Unfortunately, too often, the sanctification of culture has been confused with the Westernization of culture. That lie has done tremendous damage to the church. God’s transfiguring work is not done in comparison with the West. Ethnicities do not become more holy as they approach likeness to Europe but to God.

That attempt of each culture and group to find themselves as they struggle to examine their lives and culture in light of the Word of God is instructive not just for them; it is instructive to the whole body of Christ. We can, through listening to the voices of others, see the ways in which our own location has at times hindered our ability to read the text well. What we are aiming for, then, is mutual edification.

Due to the varied ways in which Scripture has been used to justify indefensible things such as colonialization, slavery, and the studied disdain for non-Western cultures, much socially located biblical interpretation has been rooted in a hermeneutics of suspicion in the effort to resist those evils.

We believe that it is right to push back on the misuse of Scripture to justify evil, but we also believe that socially located biblical interpretation can engage in a hermeneutics of trust, wherein we recognize that the God we encounter in biblical texts is in the end a friend, not an enemy. We want to honor the fact that the ecclesial communities from which we come found liberation and spiritual transformation through reading with the text, not against it. Some might consider this naiveté. I disagree. I consider it hard-won wisdom.

We agree that Scripture is God’s word to us that functions as the final guide for Christian faith and practice. Evoking Nicaea does not mean that we are privileging Western culture as defining Christianity for the world. Instead, it is an affirmation that God was at work among Christians of the past to tell us things that are true and good. We hope, in the generations to come, that despite our compromises and failures, Christians will find some lasting value in our theological contributions. There are no pristine histories.

In other words, we do not assume that our cultures stand over the texts, but through the interaction of person, text, history, and culture, truths that others might miss shine out all the more brilliantly. The chorus can create a beauty the soloist cannot.

In the end, the fruit will be seen in the ways we help churchgoers and Bible study leaders and students read the text more faithfully. Like any group of writers committed to serving the body of Christ, we welcome pushback given in good faith. Our goal is not to replace one form of hegemony with another or to close the conversation around these texts across cultures. We desire a shared pursuit to discover the mind of Christ and his purposes for his people.

Nonetheless, we do believe that these entries will indeed do what all good commentaries endeavor to accomplish: send the reader back to the text with fresh questions, answers, and a sense of wonder at the ways in which the ancient word remains ever new, challenging and inspiring us to follow our King and Lord more faithfully.

Taken from New Testament in Color edited by Esau McCaulley, Janette H. Ok, Osvaldo Padilla, and Amy Peeler. Copyright (c) 2024 by Esau McCaulley, Amy L. Peeler, Janette H. Ok, and Osvaldo Padilla. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

Esau McCaulley is the author of How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South and the children’s book Andy Johnson and the March for Justice. He is an associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College.

- More from Esau McCaulley

News

Gordon College Loses Religious Liberty Argument for Loan Forgiveness

Daniel Silliman

Evangelical school sees discrimination in COVID-19 relief fund’s employee-counting rules.

Elizabeth Thomsen / Flickr

Gordon College could be on the hook to repay $7 million of COVID-19 relief funds. A federal court rejected eight of the evangelical school’s arguments that it should be eligible for loan forgiveness.

Gordon’s lawyers made the case that the religious liberty protections in the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act should allow the institution to count employees in a different way than the US Small Business Administration (SBA) said they had to be counted. The US district court in Washington, DC, rejected the argument, citing a lack of evidence.

“Plaintiff alleges no facts connecting its number of employees to any religious practice,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote in a ruling handed down in July. “Plaintiff fails to identify any ‘exercise of religion’ that has been burdened, and thus plaintiff’s claims can be dismissed on this basis alone.”

According to the government, Gordon has 639 employees on its wooded campus on the North Shore of Boston. Some of those people only work part time, however. So the school calculated the full-time equivalent, which is a common way to track enrollment in higher education. If you don’t tally individual people working at the school, but instead count units of time worked, Gordon only has 495.67 employees.

Organizations with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for loan forgiveness.

The government gave out nearly $800 billion as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2020. The vast majority of recipients have since had their debt waived. Gordon is an exception.

“Gordon College followed the procedures given at the time of the loan application,” the school said in a statement, “and most importantly, used these funds completely in the manner in which they were presented by the SBA: to avoid layoffs of employees and continue to provide them with a paycheck even though the College was forced to shut down operations for months.”

In court filings, the law firm Gammon and Grange said the SBA’s decision not to forgive the school’s $7 million loan was “legally erroneous and arbitrary and capricious on the merits.” It was also, the attorneys claim, religious discrimination.

Gordon, which has about 1,300 students enrolled in undergraduate programs, requested a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan in April 2020. The application form asked for a count of employees, and Gordon gave the number: 495.67. The school’s lawyers say the method of counting the full-time equivalent was clearly indicated.

According to Gordon, more than 25 other colleges and universities also used the full-time equivalent to calculate loan eligibility. Most applicants, however, just counted people.

No one was sure if there was a “right” way, at the time.

“There was widespread confusion,” Gordon’s lawsuit says, “about what method to determine the number of employees should be used.”

At the end of April, the SBA put out a statement on its FAQ page about full-time equivalent counts. The government agency said the number of employees should be determined by a simple head count, treating full- and part-time employees equally. The SBA also clarified that the 500-employee cap only applied to loan forgiveness. Organizations with more employees than that would still be considered eligible for funding but would be required to pay the money back.

By that time, though, Gordon had already gotten its loan from Citizens Bank, a PPP partner, and was using the money to keep the 639 people who worked at the school employed.

Court records indicate that the school didn’t learn of the issue with its eligibility for loan forgiveness until November 2021, when Citizens Bank said in an email that the SBA needed an “employee count per location.” The school responded within a few days, giving the government a new number, based on a head count: 639.

In April 2022, the SBA notified Gordon that its application for loan forgiveness was denied.

Gordon appealed and then appealed again, taking the SBA to court.

The lawyers claimed that the “SBA Court refused to even consider an exemption or other relief from a cramped and unconstitutional interpretation of the ‘500 employee’ threshold.” Even worse, the SBA “discriminated against Plaintiff-Petitioner, an evangelical Christian college with religiously and socially conservative views, by treating other, similarly situated religious colleges better than it has Plaintiff-Petitioner.”

Gordon alleges that 25 other schools that counted employees the same way were forgiven loans of $5 to $10 million each.

Judge Howell ruled, however, that Gordon did not back up that claim with sufficient evidence. Many of the other schools that Gordon pointed to were, in fact, also Christian institutions. The lawyers mentioned Wheaton College, Trevecca Nazarene University, Drew University, and St. Mary’s College Notre Dame.

Gordon, Howell wrote, “offers no facts to support its conclusory allegation that these 25 other colleges are similarly situated—much less similarly situated in all respects except religious affiliation.”

Howell also found there wasn’t evidence to show that counting employees was connected to religion at all.

“No allegation is made that the 500-employee cap or SBA’s methods for counting employees were enacted to target or single out any religious conduct or institutions,” the judge wrote, “nor that the cap or employee-counting methodology employed have an adverse impact on religion.”

And according to Howell, there isn’t even evidence that SBA officials knew Gordon was a Christian school.

The Massachusetts college is not the only PPP loan recipient that has been told it will have to pay the money back. The SBA has manually audited about 2 percent of all PPP loans and denied forgiveness to about 0.2 percent. That works out to around 21,000 organizations that will have to pay back relief money.

According to some experts, the approval process was rushed in response to the fear of financial crisis brought on by the pandemic. That allowed for a lot of fraud—as well as many honest mistakes.

“A lot of the details were very unclear to businesses and banks,” Eric Lichatin, a commercial loan officer who handled PPP applications for a bank in Rhode Island, told NPR.

Steven Mnuchin, who was treasury secretary under Donald Trump and oversaw the program design, had said that the needs of small businesses were too urgent to set up a lengthy loan review process in 2020. But he assured a House oversight committee in 2020 that there would be more careful scrutiny when it came time to forgive loans.

“We are going to have a very robust process,” he said. “People will be required to provide much more data.”

One lawyer who advises PPP borrowers for a New Jersey law firm said that has happened, and now the SBA is “playing hardball” on loan forgiveness.

Some borrowers—including a car dealership in New Jersey and a fitness club in Missouri—are fighting back in court. Gordon appears to be the only one, however, making religious liberty claims for loan forgiveness.

Those arguments were rejected. The school’s other arguments will go forward, with lawyers arguing the decision to deny the loan was a legal error, “made in excess of SBA’s statutory authority, and constituted an abuse of discretion (to the extent it had discretion),” and that it was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.

“We believe those do provide sufficient grounds for the Court to reverse the SBA’s denial of forgiveness,” Gordon said in a statement, “and hope to see a favorable resolution of this issue in the future. “

This story was updated with quotes from a statement from Gordon that was unavailable at time of publicaiton.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Church Life

Yes, Fiji Olympians Are Singing Hymns

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Viral videos show athletes singing in four-part harmony, a practice with deep Christian and indigenous roots in the Pacific island nation.

The Fijian rugby team singing a hymn prior to a game.

Jan Kruger / Stringer / Getty

Viral videos of the Fijian Olympic team singing in Paris show a congregation of athletes raising their voices in four-part harmony, as if they had been rehearsing in addition to training for the games. In several videos, the group is shown singing the Fijian hymn “Mo Ravi Vei Jisu” (“Draw Close to Jesus”). One video on TikTok has over 3 million views and 660,000 likes.

The Fijian men’s rugby team won gold in both the 2016 and 2020 Olympic games; this year, the team earned silver. Videos of Fijian rugby teams singing have gone viral before, like this one from 2022 showing the team Fiji Bati huddled on the field, singing a hymn in full-throated harmony before a match against Papua New Guinea.

“There is an understanding that singing, harmony, is a way of expressing our connection to the world and to each other,” said Tui Nuku Smith, a Fijian Methodist minister. “And in Fiji, community singing is related both to indigenous culture and to the Methodist tradition.”

For many Fijians, especially Fijian Christians, community singing is built into the rhythm of everyday life. In videos taken during the Paris Olympics, the Fijian delegation sings in the Fijian language (also called iTaukei), sometimes a cappella and sometimes accompanied by a guitar. (The three primary languages spoken in the country are English, Fijian, and Hindi. English was Fiji’s official language until 1997, and Hindi is still spoken by the descendants of Indian laborers brought by British colonialists to work in the sugar cane fields. Most indigenous Fijians, who make up 54 percent of the population, speak the Fijian language.)

Many of the athletes in the Fijian coalition have likely been singing in four-part harmony since they were very young, said Smith. Starting with family devotions in the home, Fijian children in Christian families grow up hearing harmony and learn to participate.

“When I would walk through the village in the mornings or evenings, I would hear singing coming from the homes,” recalled Jerusha Matsen Neal, who spent three years at Davuilevu Theological College on the island of Viti Levu with the United Methodist Church’s Global Ministries. “You’d hear singing in four-part harmony, with children.”

This tradition, said Neal, is one that Fijian Christians carefully cultivate and preserve. The four-part harmony we hear in those viral videos is the result of generations of teaching and practice.

“You can imagine that when you have three- and four-year-olds learning, it can sound like a mess,” said Neal, now an assistant professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School. “But children get to sit and sing with their families, in a circle of love, twice a day. So by the time they’re seven or eight, they have a remarkable musical ear.”

The indigenous music of Fiji and Papua New Guinea is primarily vocal and unaccompanied. Similarly, much of the traditional music across Polynesia is vocal though noticeably more “word-oriented,” incorporating a blend of chanting and heightened speaking tones. Despite the significant regional differences in indigenous musical practices throughout Oceania, the prominence of choral music is nearly everywhere.

In addition to practicing singing during family devotions and in church services each week, congregations periodically host visiting choir directors for a week of workshops and rehearsals with different vocal groupings: children, women, men, youth. In this way, even small, remote churches take seriously the task of learning to sing as a community. The country’s annual hymn-singing competition draws thousands of Fijian Methodists each year, a gathering that occasionally heightens political tension in the country.

Although Fijian hymnody grew out of Methodist songs brought by 19th-century missionaries, it has become a deeply rooted tradition that makes space for indigenous practices across the diverse country. Christianity’s connection to the legacy of colonialism in Fiji (which was a British colony from 1847 to 1970) is undeniable, but Fijian vocal music stands as an example of the ways Fijians have been contextualizing Christian worship and integrating it into their communities for nearly two centuries.

When missionaries William Cross and David Cargill, sent by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, arrived in Fiji in 1835, they realized that the region’s hundreds of islands (Fiji has over 100 permanently inhabited islands) would make a centralized approach to evangelism impossible. As ethnomusicologist Helen Black has observed, early missionaries recognized that they needed to enlist Fijian converts in spreading the gospel from island to island, and that embracing the fusion of indigenous musical practices with Methodist hymnody would allow the gospel to spread more organically.

“Indigenous Fijian music, with its central role in Fijian culture, was a perfect vehicle for communication,” Black wrote. “Christians utilizing music of their secular meke [the generic term for Fijian music with poetic text] inserted Christian text in their particular poetic style, creating their own repertoire of religious music. Thus, this music became not only part of the liturgy of the Fijian Methodist Church, but also a vehicle for evangelization.”

Fijian Christians adapted their traditional call-and-response chants to teach and recite the catechism. A leader would call out a question, and the congregation would chant the answer. They also adapted chants to recite the Psalms communally. These practices are still widespread in Fiji’s Methodist churches. Western missionaries brought Methodist hymnals with them, but the hymnals in many Fijian churches today don’t include musical notation, only words. The music is an oral tradition.

The infusion of meke with Christian content and the local adaptation and alteration of Methodist hymns formed a uniquely Fijian body of sung music, tailored to the singing style and cultural practices of the region. In some cases, missionaries found that the hymnody they brought became almost unrecognizable as Fijian Christians took charge of the music and reshaped its rhythms and harmonies.

William Woon, a Wesleyan missionary, wrote in his journal in 1830, “Several of our excellent tunes are spoilt by the natives from singing them in a minor key; others are so completely metamorphosed that we scarcely know sometimes what tunes they sing.”

Some missionaries, like Woon, worried that the hymns they prized for both teaching and stirring the emotions were being stretched too far. But most seemed content, even eager, to allow Fijians to take ownership of their musical worship and forge something new.

“There’s a kind of contextualization that happens just by claiming that a song belongs to you,” said Deborah Wong, a worship leader and ThD candidate in liturgical studies at Duke Divinity School. “God’s family includes all people. These songs belong to the global church. They may have originated in one part of the church, but they still belong to all of us.”

In the centuries since Methodism’s arrival in Fiji, it has remained the dominant Christian denomination, constituting around 34 percent of the country’s Christian population. Methodism’s emphasis on hymn singing made it compatible with Fijian culture, in which singing functioned as a way of participating in and literally harmonizing with the natural world.

Indigenous religious practices in Fiji consisted of ancestor worship and animism, but today just over 60 percent of the population is Christian, 27 percent Hindu, and 9 percent Muslim. However, the connection between community singing, even in Christian worship, and the natural world remains strong.

“If there is a hurricane, we see that as a sign that we have angered God. We have awareness that we shouldn’t violate nature but should care for it. We acknowledge that interconnectedness,” said Smith. “Singing is an expression of harmony with God, with the community, and with nature itself.”

Neal noted that the sense of connection with the natural world was taken very seriously, calling to mind biblical images of nature participating in worship.

“Singing is an embodiment of interconnection with the world, with each other, and with God,” said Neal. “In Scripture, we see these images of trees clapping their hands, of rocks crying out. In some ways, we in the West have written off those images as hyperbole and metaphor.”

The physicality of singing and its effects on a congregation are sometimes lost in worship settings where the sound of a band drowns out the voices in the room. In the US, less than 20 percent of the population regularly sings in a choir, so many American Christians have lost touch with what it feels like to be in a vibrant singing community. Neal recalled that her first encounter with the sonic power of four-part harmony in a Fijian Methodist church moved her to tears.

“I began to weep. The sound filled the space,” Neal said. “I had a hymnal to follow along with the Fijian words, and it was vibrating in my hands. That’s how powerful the sound was. There was a profound sense of communal affirmation of faith through song.”

Although choral singing has become an important part of Fijian Christian identity, the practice is increasingly precarious in a globalized world. Churches in urban centers are more frequently using instruments and incorporating popular worship music from Western groups like Hillsong, which is influential in part because of its geographic proximity.

Church leaders are aware that new music and the use of instruments can help draw younger people to a church, especially those who did not grow up in Christian communities.

“Those who have access to instruments now might use them, probably not all of the time,” said Smith. But he added, “There is a suspicion about the use of instruments, even though the Bible is filled with references to them. There is such a strong tradition here, people have almost demonized musical instruments.”

Neal commented, “Some Fijians are concerned about unthoughtfully adopting musical traditions from the West that create a more individualist definition of what music is and what the human is.”

Navigating the growing influence of Western worship music is challenging Fijian Christians to find ways to preserve the singing tradition that they highly value and practice with pride. The Fijian Olympic team’s singing in Paris demonstrates the centrality of singing to Fijian cultural identity. Smith said that the Fijian rugby team often sings before or after a match, not because they want to make an evangelistic demonstration but because it’s just part of who they are.

“When there is singing in rugby, for example, whether for a loss or a win,” he stated, “they sing because it involves their whole life, their whole community, their whole being.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Theology

Persecuted Chinese Christians Still Need Prayer After Prison

CJ Wu

Police continue to harass and monitor believers long after their release.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

In late May, Christian journalist Zhang Zhan attended a daily Zoom prayer meeting organized by members of Early Rain Covenant Church (ERCC). The former lawyer and activist had spent four years in prison for reporting about the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

“To be honest, I am truly afraid,” she told the prominent Reformed house church in Chengdu, China, through tears. “I am actually not tough, but a person who cries often. … It is painful because it is inconvenient for me to attend a church since I am being surveilled. But I long to see my brothers and sisters [in Christ], yet I dare not visit anybody.”

A week and a half later, she shared on WeChat that she was being questioned and threatened by local police, who warned that if she crossed the “red line” again, they would send her back to prison. Zhang wrote: “Whose red line are you all protecting? Is the life of the people the red line? Or is it ‘the opinion of superiors’? I don’t want to go [to jail], and I’m not the one who should go in.”

A few days later, a scheduled interview with Zhang with Christianity Today was canceled after her encrypted messaging app account suddenly disappeared.

“She is still in the eye of the storm, bearing a lot of pressure, [including] endless interrogation or police visits to her residence,” Wang Jianhong, the UK-based founder of the Zhang Zhan Concern Group, told CT. “She has to be discreet when she circumvents [China’s Great Firewall]. Being connected to overseas [people] poses great risks for her.”

Zhang’s post-jail sustained surveillance is not unique among Chinese Christians who have served their sentence and are released. Missionary John Cao, ERCC elder Li Yingqiang, and Guizhou pastor Yang Hua also continue to live under scrutiny as authorities monitor their whereabouts, their social media posts, and who they meet. Once officers spot “suspicious” activities—such as speaking out about their time in prison or connecting with fellow believers—they threaten to return them to prison.

Speaking out for the voiceless

Zhang started to get involved with human rights and political activism after becoming a Christian in 2015. Before that, she had worked as a financial advisor at a securities firm in Shanghai, until the firm fired her for refusing to falsify financial data. Her conversion further changed her life trajectory.

“As a Christian, I do things based on the gospel,” Zhang told Radio Free Asia in 2019. “I hope Christians can push for this country’s peaceful reform or change in politics. I hope to push for some breakthrough.”

Authorities suspended her lawyer license in 2016 in retaliation for signing a petition against new rules that would prevent Chinese lawyers from forming groups, gathering signatures, or issuing open letters. In 2019, she was detained for 65 days after she held up an umbrella in downtown Shanghai in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests and called for an end to the Communist Party’s rule.

When Zhang read an online post in early 2020 about the government’s silence on the newly discovered coronavirus, she took a train to Wuhan, arriving on February 1, 2020, before the city went into lockdown. Initially, she tried to pass out gospel tracts. But she quickly realized she needed to let the rest of the world know how dire the situation had become. As a citizen journalist, she walked around Wuhan with her smartphone capturing the city’s empty streets and crowded hospitals, exposing the Chinese government’s inadequate response to COVID-19.

In May 2020, authorities detained and accused Zhang of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” making her the first of four citizen journalists jailed for reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak.

A month after Zhang’s imprisonment, she started a hunger strike to protest her detention. In December 2020, the image of her frail body in a wheelchair during her trial worried international human rights groups. Zhang pleaded not guilty, rejecting an offer for more lenient punishment if she admitted her “offense.”

“She barely spoke except for saying citizens’ speech should not be censored, to protest against the ‘illegal trial,’” her lawyer, Zhang Keke, told CBS News. The Shanghai court sentenced her to four years in prison that day.

To avoid punishment and force-feeding, Zhang decided to go on intermittent hunger strikes in the following months. In July 2023, her weight reportedly dropped to 82 pounds, almost half her normal weight. Zhang’s deteriorating health sent her to the hospital for digestive diseases linked to malnutrition.

With months left until her expected release in May 2024, supporters worried that Zhang would die in prison and called on the Chinese government to release her. Their fears were only abated on May 13, when fellow activist Peng Yonghe filmed a video of the newly freed Zhang clad in pajamas at her brother’s house, thanking everyone for their support.

Two weeks later, she showed up on Early Rain’s “5 p.m. in China” Zoom prayer meeting. In an oft-rambling monologue, she spoke of how she prayed for a fellow prisoner’s runny nose and another’s toothache and saw God heal them both. She also revealed that she felt God calling her to persist in her hunger strike, even if her loved ones didn’t support her actions.

“I really struggled to see my family members under tremendous pressure,” she said on the Zoom call. “They do not believe in Christ. I cannot bear to see them constantly frightened as I continue to share statements that would upset them as well as the police. But I feel like this is what God wants me to do: to offer my body as a living sacrifice.”

For now, Zhang is still able to post on the social platform X. On July 6, she uploaded a video of herself walking in a Shanghai park, asking if anyone would like to come meet her and have a Bible study together. “This city is beautiful, the park is pretty, but the freedom of religion is not allowed,” she lamented.

“These people are absolutely lawless”

Meanwhile, in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, another recently released Christian, John Cao, is also being monitored. Cao served a seven-year sentence for “organizing illegal border crossings”—a fabricated charge targeting his Christian ministry—and was finally freed this March. Though he is back in his hometown, he is unable to freely move around or apply for a passport, as authorities refuse to give him a Chinese ID. His wife and two adult sons live in the United States.

Cao wrote on a Christian blog that on June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, police detained him for more than 20 hours without reason. (Often, people regarded as “sensitive” in China are rounded up on that day.) Two days later, he saw “two worker-like individuals installing a high-definition camera” pointed at his mother’s house, where Cao is temporarily staying. Authorities also installed two more cameras at the entrance of the apartment complex.

He noted that the cameras not only track his movements but also monitor who comes to visit. “The police have let it be known that they will not go after people who only visit me once, but people who come to visit me a second time must enter the public security’s records.” He believes the goal is to completely isolate him.

Cao told CT that police detained him for more than 10 hours a second time in June. When he asked if he had committed any crime, the public security officer said no, but that it was a directive from their superiors. “These people are absolutely lawless,” he said. “The reason I stopped writing [on a blog] is because they hinted at me that if I continue to write, they will ban me from leaving [the country] and not grant me my personal identification. I told them, ‘Fine.’ Hence, I will stop writing for now.”

Pastors “fakely released”

The harassment that released prisoners face don’t have an expiration date. Li Yingqiang, an elder at ERCC, is still experiencing surveillance and repeat detentions after officials released him in 2020. Authorities first arrested Li in December 2018 during a crackdown on the church and its outspoken pastor, Wang Yi. Because the church broached sensitive topics like speaking out against President Xi Jinping’s persecution of churches, it found itself in the government’s crosshairs. In 2019, a Chengdu court sentenced Wang to nine years in prison for “inciting to subvert state power.”

Li spent eight months in prison before authorities released him, sending him back to his hometown in Hubei Province, where he was on bail pending trial for a year. Since then, he has returned to Chengdu, where he continues to lead the church as it meets in smaller groups and online.

Because Li continued his ministry, authorities would often summon him to the police station for questioning and monitor him and his family, at one point following him every time he went out and preventing visitors from coming to their home. Education officials threatened to take his children away because he refused to send his children to public school, choosing instead to send them to the church’s unregistered Christian school. In November, authorities detained Li for 10 days after he conducted a baptism and led Communion at ERCC’s church plant in Dazhou, Sichuan Province.

Police in Sichuan warned him in 2020 that, because Chengdu authorities have officially disbanded ERCC, they will not allow the church to continue gathering and worshiping. As long as Li remains in Chengdu, they vowed to stop him from doing ministry.

“From an eternal point of view, is there any other threshing floor that is more worthy for you to invest your whole life in than China?” Li asked his congregation in a recent sermon to encourage them to persevere. “From a secular standpoint, ‘the garbage time of history’ may be the time for the church to excavate hard soil, ready hearts, and experience trials, preparing for the great spiritual harvest ahead.”

Over in Guizhou Province, authorities are also tracking Yang Hua, pastor of Guiyang Livingstone Church, whom authorities released from prison in 2019 after he spent two years behind bars for “divulging state secrets.” Authorities cracked down on his house church because it had grown rapidly and purchased a larger gathering space in an office building, all the while refusing to join the government-sanctioned Three-Self church.

Yet even after his release, Yang “remained imprisoned as police kept him under their relentless scrutiny,” China Aid reported. During major political events, sensitive anniversaries, or official visits to Guizhou by foreign diplomats, authorities either placed him under house arrest or forced him to travel outside of the province.

In 2021, Yang was planning to travel to Qingdao to meet with Christian friends when police took him into the station to prevent him from leaving. An officer interrogated him and began beating him, slapping his cheek “with such force that I could hardly hear any sounds afterward,” the pastor told China Aid. “He then started cursing and said that it is now the world of the Chinese Communist Party.” Once they released Yang, he was rushed to the hospital.

A friend of Yang, who asked not to be named for security reasons, noted that although Yang is no longer behind bars, he was “fakely released.”

“[Yang] has been monitored 24/7,” the friend said. “While he is relatively free in his town, if he goes to other cities, they will dispatch police to watch him closely. From the time he’s on the road to checking into his hotel, they escort him all the way.”

- More from CJ Wu

News

Churches Find a Homelessness Solution in Their Own Backyards

Anna Broadway

Zoning regulations give congregations more leeway to provide permanent or temporary housing.

Settled / Facebook

Jamal Love was trying to fix his wife’s bike fender so she could keep riding it to work. For most of their marriage, he would have tried to figure it out on his own. But this time, he realized he could turn to a neighbor for help: a fellow tiny house resident on the property of a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Love, 50, and his wife had recently moved into the six-house settlement, alongside five people coming out of long-term homelessness. Unlike some such communities, theirs looks like a modern housing development—but with much smaller buildings. The couple initially saw themselves as coming in as “intentional neighbors,” there to give, serve, and be generous.

But their shared life in the church’s tiny houses soon began to change their perspective. “We were wrong about all those things. We received community, and we were the ones who needed it in the first place,” Love said. “We received something greater.”

A unique protection

Sacred Settlement Mosaic is one of a growing number of tiny house communities launched to help address homelessness. It’s a partnership between the church that owns the land—Mosaic Christian Community in St. Paul—and Settled, a nonprofit that works to develop “sacred settlements.”

Churches have a unique opportunity to help with both homelessness and housing, given their combination of frequent land wealth and strong legal protection.

“The number one reason more affordable housing doesn’t get built in our nation is because of ‘not in my backyard’ sentiment,” said Gabrielle Clowdus, the founder of Settled. “NIMBY opposition is very strong.”

But churches have something even stronger, though many don’t know it: the 2000 Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The federal law offers religious freedom protection by limiting regulations on how churches use their property.

“That is like a divine golden ticket from heaven saying, ‘Your land is set apart. It is holy and sacred, and it is intended to invite the poor in,’” Clowdus said.

Claiming those rights can still take a fight in some cases. The Rock church in Castle Rock, Colorado, has sued the city over its repeated interference with them letting people stay in two RVs parked on church property. On July 19, a federal judge ruled that the church can continue its housing until the lawsuit has concluded.

In Minnesota, Settled went through a three-year process to pass a state law that lays out terms for churches to build permanent affordable tiny homes on their land.

The recent Supreme Court ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allows cities to criminalize camping on public land, could increase the urgency of providing additional shelter for people without housing.

Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California San Francisco, thinks tiny homes work better for temporary shelter. Her concerns include the size, frequent lack of indoor plumbing, compliance with building codes, and ability to withstand natural disasters.

The Minnesota law that Settled helped pass requires many of the same building standards as a single-family home, but for structures less than 400 square feet. According to Clowdus, their tiny homes have dehydrating toilets and water tanks, but not indoor plumbing as such. Other tiny home communities involve more basic structures and much shorter stays.

Size and building standards aside, however, Kushel agrees that churches could help provide permanent housing and have a unique ability to intervene. “Churches can move faster,” she said. “They have this separate status, which allows them to get through some of these things that hold things up.”

Jim Dean, executive director of Interfaith Family Shelter in Washington State, saw this firsthand with their newest shelter, Faith Family Village.

Launching the eight-structure shelter on the grounds of Faith Lutheran Church greatly simplified the process. They worked with a hearing examiner on health and safety issues, he said, and operate under a conditional use permit. Almost anywhere else, the shelter would have required a zoning change.

Churches also tend to have different relationships with their neighbors, Dean said. Since they launched Faith Family Village in Everett, two other organizations have tried similar projects on city land. But those groups struggled, he said. “All it takes is one or two neighbors to push back.”

Different models, but emerging leaders

As more churches have opened their land to tiny homes, they’ve taken a range of approaches. Interfaith Family Shelter partners with a number of community and government entities and limits stays to 90 days, per requirements from its license and some grant funding. It also works only with families.

In most of the partnerships, churches provide the land, Dean’s team manages the shelters—including providing case management for all families—and other entities help with things like food or the structures themselves. (Not all of their shelters involve tiny homes. They’ve also turned a former convent into a shelter and have helped a church with a large unused parking lot provide a safe place for people to stay in their cars.)

Green Street Church in Nashville provides a longer timeframe. It has hosted a tiny home community for almost a decade, prior to which it hosted a camp. The Sanctuary is currently comprised of 15 tiny homes and a handful of tents. “Ours are pretty primitive,” pastor Caleb Pickering said, but “for the most part, them staying here is better than where they were.”

Most people stay close to a year. Homes have a locking door and solar panels for charging things like a phone but don’t include power. Residents use shared bathrooms and showers with church-issued key fobs that limit their access within the main church building.

“It’s not a comfortable situation,” Pickering said. “It’s just stable—more stable than trying to pitch a tent on public land.” The church does not have a property manager or provide case management, but they partner with other groups that offer this.

Though many in the community offer informal support for the Sanctuary—especially in the form of frequent food donations—Green Street has remained fairly small, Pickering said.

Several years ago, its organizers discussed a merger with another church, but it ultimately fell through. “There’s that weird little liability thing all the time,” Pickering said. The other church had several young families. The two congregations couldn’t figure out how to balance safety for the children with welcome for Sanctuary residents.

Green Street has few requirements for the Sanctuary: “No drinking, no drugs, no drama”—and an agreement to stay only temporarily. It doesn’t issue leases and has allowed people with prison records to move in, provided they’ll agree to those conditions.

“We do give up things in order to do this,” Pickering said, citing his own kids’ lack of a youth group experience at Green Street. “That’s just an agreement my wife and I made.”

For Love and his wife in St. Paul, their sacrifice involved moving out of the three-bedroom house where they’d raised their son. They still own it but let a family in need stay there.

Under the Settled model, tiny homes provide permanent homes for as long as people want to stay. Clowdus said that’s critical. The PhD work that led her to start Settled showed “a profound loss of family” as one of the root causes of chronic homelessness.

To restore a sense of family, Settled includes five elements in its communities: permanent homes; “intentional neighbors” like Love and his wife; church land, which fosters regular connection; work; and friendship.

“Part of a thriving ecosystem is stability and deep, strong roots,” Clowdus said. “We would never want to rip them out of that dense ecosystem.”

With Settled, residents sign leases and pay rent. Homes are built to withstand Minnesota’s cold winters but don’t have indoor plumbing. Residents share a communal kitchen, shower, and laundry within the main church building. (Building a new settlement requires upgrades to the church building that benefit both residents and the congregation.)

Valerie Roy has lived at a second Settled community in Roseville, Minnesota, since summer 2022.

“It’s really given me my quality of life back,” she said. After more than a decade in chronic homelessness after she lost her New Jersey housing to Hurricane Sandy, she’s started gardening again and applied to a master’s program.

Though not a Christian herself, she welcomes the connections she’s gained by living on church land. “I’m not isolated anymore. I have three different communities.”

Clowdus hopes Settled will provide a model for other churches. She said they have several other communities in various stages of consideration and discernment, plus one in the planning stage. “We believe that any church—regardless of denomination, political affiliation, racial makeup—regardless of any of that, any faith community that has a strong identity of who they are, and because of that strong identity have a radical invitation to hospitality, can have a sacred settlement on their land.”

As cities adjust to their new latitude to break up homeless camps under the latest Supreme Court ruling, churches may have more opportunity than ever.

Clowdus cites their first two host congregations as evidence that Settled’s model can work in many settings. A Nazarene church hosts one settlement, an Evangelical Lutheran church the other. The two congregations have different convictions on some matters, and different ethnic and economic demographics.

Leaders from both churches said they have seen growth in their congregations since they started hosting the settlement. Michael Stetzler was president of the congregation when Prince of Peace Lutheran Church decided to host a settlement. He said at least three new members have cited the settlement as a factor in their decision to join.

In St. Paul, Meredith Campbell, who co-leads Sacred Settlement Mosaic with her husband, has seen similar signs of life.

“We’ve also seen our neighbors on the east side of St. Paul become very interested in the work of Mosaic,” she said, citing both the settlement and an immigrant program that launched around the same time. “Our neighbors are really interested in seeing a church love its neighbors in a tangible way and that has attracted them to Mosaic and, I hope, to Jesus himself.”

Roy said moving into the settlement has started to change long-held negative views of Christians.

“Everybody’s been so kind, even though I’m not Christian and all of them are. It’s really redefined my definition of what Christianity means.”

For Love, an empty nester married for three decades, it’s been a means of refinement during a season when many people might start to coast a bit and focus more on enjoyment. “It’s caused me to put the things I believe into practice in ways I didn’t have to before,” he said.

- More from Anna Broadway

Theology

Why Worship Leaders Need Theologians

Matt Redman

Matt Redman’s call to worship God for all he is.

Matt Redman (centered)

Courtesy of Integrity Music

In Acts 17, the apostle Paul arrives in Athens and discovers something strange—an altar with an inscription to an “unknown god.”

Of course, he expertly turns this moment into a chance to tell the story of the one true God. But it’s always struck me just how unhelpful this inscription must have been for any unfortunate worshipers of this supposed deity—who was both unknown and unknowable.

We know nothing of the nature, character and attributes of this god. We don’t know if this god has performed any mighty deeds, worked any miracles, or won any victories. Nor do we know anything about their appearance. We’re not even given their name. What exactly is required or desired from worshipers? We’re literally given nothing to go on.

For worshipers of Jesus, it’s a completely different story. We worship a God of self-revelation, who wants to be seen and known. Every page of his book reveals him— and not just hints, clues and whispers—but full-on descriptions of who he is, what he’s done, and why he’s so utterly worthy of our worship.

We’re left in no doubt that he is both majestic and merciful, powerful and peaceful, holy and humble, glorious and gracious. The Bible also tells us how best to approach God and what kind of offerings will find favor in his sight.

When it comes to worship, it’s always been clear that we don’t get to make this stuff up.

A worship service might never contain every aspect of God’s truth, but, as the late Marva J. Dawn once reminded us, “worship must never give us untruth.” We also must do our best to not miss key elements of who it is we are encountering.

Twenty years ago, I wrote to key pastors, preachers, and theologians asking them a simple question: “What are some essential themes of Scripture that are lacking in our current worship expressions?”

Many of the replies referenced God as creator, God as judge, and God as Trinity. While they offered positive comments about contemporary worship music, there was a sense of challenge: For the good of the church and the glory of God, we must do better.

A couple of decades later, I wonder how much progress we have made. Worship music has evolved and progressed creatively, showing up across more musical genres than ever before. The production aspects of our expressions have moved forward too. But can we say the same about the lyrical, theological content?

Some modern hymn-style songs hold up well in this area: Hillsong’s “King of Kings,” for example, tells so much of the story of God and mentions 15 of the 25 themes found in the Apostles’ Creed. Phil Wickham’s “Living Hope” covers 11 of those themes. These are singable, beautiful, weighty songs. But looking at the general landscape, we still have much work to do.

One thing I’ve noticed is how much we tend to prefer singing about the helpfulness of God rather than his holiness. We gravitate to the aspects of God that are directly and very obviously beneficial to us—God as shepherd, comforter, refuge, or rescuer.

These are, if you like, songs of helpfulness. But it’s essential that we also have many anthems of his holiness—songs that acclaim God for his worth, whether we’re in the story or not. Songs that lean into themes like grandeur, righteousness, and majesty. Just as the Book of Psalms exemplifies a balance of holiness and helpfulness, we must do likewise.

Much of the responsibility for what we sing in church falls on the worship leaders and songwriters of our day. Worship leaders and worship movements with a public profile must carry their entrustment with a sense of holy awe. It’s not enough to put out a musically captivating new record or to fill an arena. Those things can be wonderful—but they actually become woeful if we’re not handling our sacred subject material with care.

The same call goes out to every local church worship leader. Are we choosing songs that honor God as fully as we can? Or do we sometimes give songs a free pass, not running them through any kind of theological filter, because the musical vibe is simply too compelling to ignore? I love a fresh, innovative, creative expression as much as anyone, but we can have, and must have, both.

Pastors, you also carry authority in this area. You are the gatekeepers of our services. Call us out—urge worship leaders to do better. Ban songs that you think carry too little substance or even contradict Scripture. Point out themes that are missing and that you want us to find songs for (or even write songs for). Don’t let us get away with lackluster theology at the expense of a pleasing musical experience.

Not every song needs to have the lyrical punch of “Crown Him with Many Crowns”—but if too many of our songs are falling so far below the standard required, then please help us to realize that, and to grow. You might not need to give us too much musical advice—but please don’t give us the sole responsibility for all our sung theology.

Many of us, myself included, admit we need assistance in that area. We likely didn’t come into this via seminary or intense theological training; we came in through the avenue of loving music and being able to play or sing.

We humbly recognize we cannot do this on our own. We need help from thinkers, theologians, and pastors. We need to be sharpened by fellow songwriters and worship leaders too.

It’s no accident that the King James Version of the Bible tells us over 1,200 times to behold. We worship a God who wants to be recognized for who he is. My prayer is that the church will grow in this area—seeing ever deeper and truer songs—and leading worship services that help us to behold Jesus like never before.

Matt Redman is a worship leader and songwriter whose songs include “The Heart of Worship,” “Blessed Be Your Name,” and the double-Grammy winning “10,000 Reasons.”

He is the creator of WOR/TH (standing for worship and theology), a series of seminars to equip songwriters, worship leaders, and musicians, with two upcoming events in the US.

- More from Matt Redman

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Utter estrangement

The work persists

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Speaking out for the voiceless

“These people are absolutely lawless”

Pastors “fakely released”

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