The Internet’s Sins Are Our Sins. But It Shouldn’t Escape All Blame.

A critic of tech panic forgets that our tools shape us just as we shape them.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek

Americans tend to be optimists about technology. We see it as a means of progress, comfort, wealth, and discovery. And why not? Technology has treated us well, and very few among us would pooh-pooh the engine, the hot water heater, the refrigerator, the word processor, the text message.

In technology—it might be a mild blasphemy to say—we live and move and have our being. Technology shapes how we work, travel, and eat—even how we think and write and speak to one another. And technology is increasingly digital: The mass of hardware and software we commonly sweep together as “the internet” reaches into ever more parts of our lives, if only invisibly.

But in the last decade, the internet has rather lost its sheen for select segments of the American public. This change should not be overstated; though a Jonathan Haidt–style tech skepticism generally prevails within elite media, Americans still use the internet, oppose smartphone bans in schools, and, on average, give children their first smartphones at the tender age of 11.

Yet we do have a growing sense of unease. Certainly, the kind of excitement that existed in 2008—fueled by hopefulness about social media’s role in politics—is long gone. We have become the internet’s accusers, as long-time journalist Jeff Jarvis argues in The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic. We allege misdeeds, he writes, ranging from polarizing “society into echo chambers” to “robbing us of our attention, altering our brains, making us stupid, and electing Donald Trump.”

Are these accusations unfair? I wanted to read Jarvis’s book because I’ve leveled a version of several myself and could fairly be called a tech skeptic. (My kids won’t have smartphones at 11.) But maybe I’ve been swept along too far toward pessimism. Maybe I’m beholden to an overblown moral panic. Maybe I’ve made the internet a scapegoat for sins not its own.

So I came to The Web We Weave to encounter a more considered tech optimism than the basic American instinct and to give that optimism a fair shake. Jarvis does make vital, if occasionally inconsistent, points about individual responsibility and state regulation. But his defense of the internet also wrongly presumes that technologies are neutral tools, uncritically embraces online living, blurs the line between journalism and advocacy, and misunderstands the biblical idea of covenant.

Responsibility and regulation

The most important takeaway of The Web We Weave is this: The internet’s sins are our sins, and we can repent of them. We are responsible for the digital landscape we’ve created, but we can also change it. We aren’t fated to the futures of sci-fi doom or glory.

“What the internet is, good and bad, is made of human accomplishment and human failure,” Jarvis writes. “All the ills the internet is accused of fostering—racism, divisiveness, injustice, inequity, ignorance—are not the fault of the technology. The technology did not cause them—we did.”

In one of several dips into religious language, Jarvis examines “the internet’s seven deadly sins,” It stands accused, in his telling, of encouraging hate, lies, greed, the corruption of youth, addiction, excess, and hubris. In every case, Jarvis concludes, the internet “is blamed as the cause of [these] ills when often it is merely a conduit for them.”

Generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT is especially adept at channeling human vice, for it uses scads of human-made content as its raw materials. The Web We Weave describes this AI as a sort of structural sin detector, able to observe and sketch contemporary human evil on a grand scale.

Jarvis is careful to clarify that his call for responsibility here is not a call for state regulation. He understands the problem of regulatory capture and supports Section 230, a widely misunderstood law that functions as the “Internet’s First Amendment” by protecting online platforms from legal liability for what their users post. He’s an ardent advocate of free speech, attuned to the danger of drawing a “legal line between good and bad speech,” the risk of panic-induced legislation, and the foolishness of imagining we can eradicate disinformation. He even rejects secondhand censorship, noting that laws forcing platforms to take down “legal but harmful” speech aren’t meaningfully different from direct suppression.

Tech as tool

Jarvis is at his most sensible on those themes. He recognizes that the underlying issue is human behavior and that laws are “ineffective at regulating” behavior “except in the extreme.”

In consequence, The Web We Weave proposes “different strategies” to reform our online conduct: “education, moral suasion, social pressure, and the public negotiation of norms.” In its efforts in these directions, however, the book falls short.

Undergirding many of Jarvis’s recommendations is an understanding of digital technologies as morally neutral tools. Much “like the printing press and steam, the transmitter and the automobile,” he argues, the internet and AI are tools “which we may use to good ends and bad.”

In a bare sense that’s true—yet thinking of technology only or even primarily as a “tool we use to mold our culture” can blind us to how the tool molds us in turn. We do have agency. We do wield the hammer. But day in and day out, it works on us while we work with it. Our hands grow calloused. Our backs habitually bend, then strain to straighten. Our minds, as the old saying goes, begin to see everything as a nail.

The insufficiency of Jarvis’s take on how technology affects us is particularly evident when he engages with Haidt (along with fellow travelers Jean Twenge and Nicholas Carr). He accuses these thinkers of being self-interested “moral entrepreneurs” and “paternalistic prigs” chasing money, fame, and book deals. Brushing away Haidt’s reams of research documenting the ill effects of letting children online too much and too young, Jarvis subscribes instead to the Taylor Lorenz Theory of Why the Kids Are Not Okay, which he summarizes—not in so many words—as the existence of adult Republicans.

That concern set aside, Jarvis blithely welcomes AI into the classroom, inviting educational institutions to stop asking students to absorb facts and learn to write. They can “concentrate less on memorization and content creation,” he says, because these are “things machines can now do.” So eager is Jarvis to defend generative AI as a neutral tool that he pins all responsibility for problems on its makers, letting users off the hook.

And he either misses or misunderstands the Haidt-style case for getting children off social media, contending that this would leave them “no better off” because they’d be “more isolated.” They wouldn’t, because, as Haidt has explained, this is “a collective action problem: it’s hard for anyone to quit as long as everyone else is on a platform.” But if we all quit together, quitting isn’t isolating. Kids would relearn other ways to hang out.

A life online

Perhaps that relearning is difficult for Jarvis to imagine because, as he frankly admits, he is extremely online. In one passage, while conceding that real-life connections matter, he describes living a very internet-mediated existence. “I care more,” Jarvis says, “about the communities I interact with online” than about local relationships in his “suburban town where some of my neighbors are Trump voters.”

Thus, describing research in which algorithm changes on Facebook and Instagram led to users spending “dramatically less time on both platforms,” Jarvis doesn’t seem to see that result as especially welcome.

Or, when he describes Black women being “harassed, abused, surveilled, and doxed” on Twitter (now X), he never considers that they should log off, apparently accepting that Twitter is a big enough part of their lives to warrant enduring abuse. Ideally, of course, Black women (and everyone else) would be able to use social media without being harassed. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and suffering through digital attacks is not our best or only option.

Jarvis concedes that the “internet’s business model” involves “seducing and tricking people into diverting their attention from more important matters.” But his solution is not spending more of our lives offline. Instead, he foresees “develop[ing] new models to support creativity, reporting, education, and civic involvement online”—that is, moving those important matters outside the arena of embodied life.

What happened to our power to decide our own future? If humans can change the direction of the whole internet, surely we can also sometimes turn off our screens and engage out here in meatspace.

Activist journalism and ‘AI boys’

Much of that online education, if Jarvis had his way, would be conducted by an increasingly activist press.

Like Margaret Sullivan, another journalist of his generation, Jarvis is tired of “the old journalistic trope that newspapers just deliver the facts.” He wants journalists to “be advocates and activists for truth and understanding, equity and justice,” to “play the role of educator to place facts in the context of history, economics, and ethics.” It’s not enough for reporters to report on problems, Jarvis says. They must also “seek solutions,” “understand needs,” “see opportunities,” and “provid[e] leadership.”

Of course, we already have a kind of journalism to do all these things. It’s called opinion. For decades—and for good reason—opinion has been distinguished from straight reporting, but that distinction has become a point of contention in recent years.

Like many who want to blur the line between reporting and opining, Jarvis does so in pursuit of social justice, and he never ceases reminding the reader just how progressive he is. Jarvis is a white man, and he has even dared to become an old white man. But he makes sure we know he’s what left-wing writer Freddie deBoer has dubbed a “Good White Man,” the kind of progressive white man who shoulders “a special burden of helping to end injustice and to ‘center’ women, people of color, and other minority groups, to step back and let others speak.”

This is difficult to do when one is a white man writing a book. Jarvis coins the phrase “AI boys” and uses it throughout to reiterate his contempt for the predominantly male developers and entrepreneurs who create the technology he embraces—technology he says should be wrested from their control once they’ve launched it.

He suggests that the real motivation of those who raise concerns about “the internet, social media, and algorithms … might well be fear or bigotry directed at people who exploit a moment of technologically driven change to demand a seat at the table of power.”

And he has that increasingly common tic of invoking “women and people of color” as a magical monolith whose wisdom is perpetually neglected by a dastardly press. This might be a strong narrative were the mainstream press not so obviously interested in demographic diversity. The very day I wrote this review, a reporter asked me for an interview, casually mentioning her interest in including “other sources in my story than just white men.”

A strange covenant

For all that, The Web We Weave won me back a bit at the end. There, Jarvis returns to his theme of individual responsibility and even virtue, urging readers to hold themselves to a higher standard of behavior online and so make a small but realistic contribution to a more humane and truthful internet culture.

Curiously, he couches this proposal in the language of covenant, explicitly invoking the word’s biblical history to say “that we—users, companies, technologists, governments, researchers—need to take on a sense of responsibility and obligation to one another”:

As my [Presbyterian minister] sister points out, a covenant—such as the one made in marriage—is open-ended and can change as life and circumstances evolve and unexpected challenges arise. More than statutory community standards imposed from on high and more than actual statutes legislated by governments, covenants should be living documents, open, collective, and collaborative, able to change in new situations but still hearkening and hewing to sets of principles that should govern us all with mutual consent.

These covenants would be created voluntarily, Jarvis writes, but companies that didn’t volunteer to make a meaningful covenant with users “might end up with rules imposed on them by legislators. A first step in regulation could be for government to expect companies to negotiate covenants in public.” So, maybe not so voluntary after all, for what is a governmental expectation if not regulation backed by force?

That question of compulsion aside, Jarvis’s understanding of covenant doesn’t square with the biblical context to which he appeals. God’s covenants with his creation are many things, but “open-ended,” “collaborative,” and responsive to unexpected challenges are not descriptors that come to mind.

A biblical covenant, as J. I. Packer wrote for CT in 1962, “is a defined relationship of promise and commitment which binds the parties concerned to perform whatever duties towards each other their relationship may involve.” Or, to borrow the words of Paul Eddy, a pastor and scholar of covenant at Bethel University, a covenant is a “committed, community-based, kinship creating, agape-love relationship.” It is “love formalized.”

Jarvis is right to distinguish covenant from contract and law, but he’s mistaken to imagine it can define the relationship between me and Mark Zuckerberg—or me and Jeff Jarvis. His closing line asks readers to hold him accountable to his self-set standards for his online behavior. But how? Some tweets?

A covenant for virtue is a good idea, but the accountability it entails can only happen in a real relationship. And real relationships can grow online, but their more natural habitat is the offline world, the flesh-and-blood world, the world beyond the internet.

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

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Books

Review

We Have Never Been Deplorable

Carrie McKean

A new book critiques elites’ incurious accounts of the American right and illuminates their complicity in our social breakdown.

Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo / Getty

By the time Hilary Clinton “put half of Trump’s supporters” into “the basket of deplorables” in 2016, I confess I was frustrated enough to largely agree with her—even though she was talking about people I cared about in communities like mine. It seemed simple to me at the time: If you don’t want to be called “deplorable,” maybe don’t behave so deplorably.

Eight years later, I don’t need to rehash all the reasons I’d come to feel that way. The excesses of Trump and his loyalists are widely recognized, even among many Trump voters. My experience through those years is also familiar to many moderate evangelicals, who, like me, grew increasingly baffled as our faith leaders, friends, and family wholeheartedly endorsed a man who reflected none of our shared values, values that for so long we’d loudly insisted were bedrock and nonnegotiable. How could this be happening?

Though I’m ashamed to say it now, my confusion hardened into cynicism as I consumed a steady diet of commentary about the danger posed by MAGA voters. I grew arrogant, sure of my intellectual and moral superiority over people I’d come dangerously close to dismissing as backwater boors, and less and less aware of my own hubris (Prov. 16:18).

Then came the pandemic. By August of 2020, I was astonished at my own quick pivot—taken aback by how quickly I’d grown thankful to live in a deep red town. I wrote dispatches from West Texas for The New York Times and The Atlantic describing how good it was to live in an area that didn’t kill small businesses out of “an abundance of caution” or sacrifice our children’s educations on the altar of safety.

The responses I got from readers of legacy media in more progressive enclaves (some hate-filled death wishes, some longing for the normalcy I enjoyed) were eye-opening. In the more negative exchanges, I was baffled time and again by my correspondents’ inability to see how they’d become the very thing they hate: bigoted, closed-minded, arrogant, and incurious about the lives of people who are different from them. I ate a slice of humble pie and saw how I’d become enamored with the polished speech and polite niceties of the ruling class, so enchanted that I’d missed both the failures of those I’d grown to admire and the complexity of those I was tempted to deplore.

I still live in a politically conservative community, and I haven’t stopped wrestling with the apparent mismatch between values and votes in the years since. But I’m leaving my impatience and cynicism behind. Though I still share many of the core concerns of the anti-MAGA crowd, I’m wary of the broad, flat brush with which sophisticated politicos paint conservative, religious parts of the country like mine. By the time Trump left office, I’d grown to understand that it isn’t fair—let alone permissible for Christians (Matt. 5:44)—to deplore those who voted (or will vote) for him.

But finding critical yet nuanced writing about my neighbors has been a challenge. Much of what comes from the progressive left—usually some version of the claim that all evangelical Republicans are white Christian nationalists who pose a dangerous threat to democracy—is reductive and one-dimensional. It doesn’t match the reality I see in my everyday life, where, for example, a Trump-voting Hispanic pastor provides shelter and resources to countless migrants.

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, a new book from sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, is an illuminating exception to that rule. For anyone genuinely curious about why working-class, culturally conservative Americans, many of them evangelical Christians, remain so loyal to Trump, We Have Never Been Woke is required reading.

In a book that’s both granular in its detail and panoramic in its perspective, al-Gharbi builds a tightly argued case for how the “Great Awokening” is neither particularly novel nor particularly helpful to the marginalized and disenfranchised of American society. Drawing on both his working-class background and the experiences and expertise afforded by his access to some of the most hallowed halls of American academia, al-Gharbi understands that we can’t reduce the current political moment to a battle of blue heroes and red villains.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer a road map out of our political predicament. Yet for Christian readers, Never Been Woke’s conclusions suggest the church is uniquely positioned to help repair our divided society—if we can return to our first love (Rev. 2:4) and the love Jesus commands of us (Matt. 22:34–40).

Core to grasping al-Gharbi’s argument is his concept of “symbolic capitalists.” This is a group he defines as the academics, bureaucrats, consultants, journalists, and other “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis.” That is, they are our culture’s elites, often (but not always) wealthy, well educated, and enormously influential, with insatiable appetites for the one sort of capital that might be more useful than cold, hard cash when it comes to getting ahead these days: social currency.

One way symbolic capitalists amass more social currency is to champion social justice and the oppressed. But the main effect of their activism, al-Gharbi charges, is the advancement of their own agendas and personal success.

That’s not an accusation of deception or even cynicism. These elites sincerely (and loudly) believe in ideals like equality and justice, Never Been Woke contends. Yet there’s a “profound gulf between symbolic capitalists’ rhetoric about various social ills and their lifestyles and behaviors ‘in the world.’” To put it plainly, in the parlance of evangelicals: They don’t practice what they preach.

From this premise, al-Gharbi ranges widely. In some ways, the book reads as a “theory of everything,” arguing that underneath the discord so often pinned on the bad behavior of working-class Republicans—people who don’t use the “right” words or put their pronouns in their bios—is a simmering pot of resentment stoked by cultural elites.

Those most skilled at playing the rhetorical “virtue game” are at the top of the societal heap, and their displays of virtue do far less to help the underclass than to protect their own comfort and power. The “Great Awokening” is all fervor and no self-sacrificing love. It turns even well-meaning adherents into hardened ideologues serving a small and capricious god in their own image. It’s legalism, secular-style.

In practice, this looks like calls to defund the police coming mostly from people who live in low-crime neighborhoods. It looks like spending big money to hire DEI experts instead of materially—maybe even self-sacrificially—improving the lives of the poor. It looks like self-identifying into marginalized groups (Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s history as a “Native American” is a prime example) that just so happen to give you a leg up on elite college and work applications.

It looks like calling for pandemic-era lockdowns while ordering DoorDash; or renaming a school named for a confederate general while doing little to ensure the minority students within are learning to read; or thrilling with enthusiasm at a Black Lives Matter march while being irritated by the homeless Black man on your block.

Or, to borrow the apostle Paul’s words, it looks like speaking in the tongues of men or of angels without having love (1 Cor. 13:1).

So we live in a society ruled by symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi writes, but significantly populated by people they deplore. The result is polarization and mutual disdain, with each side unwilling to give the other a fair hearing or take responsibility for its own sins and errors.

It reminds me of nothing so much as my daughters’ sisterly conflicts. Though I will not name names, one of my children is fiery and hot-tempered, while the other is into covert ops. Though they’re each guilty of instigating arguments, over the years I’ve learned that some of the trickiest situations to navigate start with the quiet provocateur deliberately pushing her less-restrained sister over the edge. When I intervene, she’s all innocence: “What did I do? She should have better self-control.”

It’s easy to exclusively blame the child with the explosive reaction. It’s also, often, a mistake. And the same is true on a much larger scale. Yes, MAGA fanaticism is a problem. Racism and storming the Capitol are wrong. But the “deplorables” have real concerns that deserve to be heard, not manipulated and inflamed by opportunistic politicians. To refuse to listen to the story beneath the noise of outrage—even when the outrage is offensive and crass—only drives us further apart.

As Christians, we should know this. Jesus’ answer to the problem al-Gharbi describes is for us to take seriously his command to love the least of these and to lay down our lives for our friends, including the ones in the red hats. It’s to meet with Nicodemus and to dine with Zacchaeus.

Al-Gharbi is not a Christian. After a crisis of faith resulted in his “abandoning a calling” to become a Catholic priest, he entered a season of atheism before converting to Islam. Some Christians, to their peril, will dismiss We Have Never Been Woke on this ground alone. Others will read with misplaced glee, touting it as a masterful book that “owns the libs.” Either response would miss an opportunity to grow in wisdom and love.

I had a recurring thought as I read this book: I cannot believe he’s writing this. I cannot believe it’s getting published.This book doesn’t reflect well on the gatekeepers of all the institutions al-Gharbi needs on his side to succeed in his field. For that reason alone, many people would not have written this book or at least would have picked a different, softer angle.

After all, al-Gharbi isn’t a right-wing pundit lobbing bombs at the left from a safe perch at Breitbart. As he repeatedly acknowledges, he’s a symbolic capitalist, too. He’s asking his peers to be honest with themselves about their complicity in America’s social breakdown. He doesn’t question their motives or principles, but he does reveal the tension produced when those principles are paired with a very human desire to maintain one’s advantages and to pass them on to one’s children.

That gentle example deserves imitation. What might it look like if more of us—Democrats and Republicans, elite and working class—took the time in the lead-up to the election to admit how our own behavior has failed the test of 1 Corinthians 13? What if we confessed that we also have conflicting desires and betrayed principles? How can we better listen for God calling us to honesty about ourselves, repentance where we have ignored or maligned our neighbors, and real service to others?

Christians are also uniquely positioned to respond to al-Gharbi’s warnings about modern identity politics, in which some groups are encouraged to take great pride in their identities while others are strongly discouraged from doing the same. As al-Gharbi explored in a conversation with political scientist Yascha Mounk, this “asymmetric multiculturalism” is celebrated on the left, but it’s socially unstable. We should lean into what unites us, he advises, instead of emphasizing differences and valuing some while denigrating others.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that actually it’s a lot easier for people to [get along] if you start by foregrounding things that people have in common—like ‘we’re all Americans’ or ‘we’re all Christians,’” al-Gharbi said in his conversation with Mounk. “One important path forward is to find ways of appealing and justifying and affirming superordinate values, superordinate identities, common goals, shared interests,” he continued. “If you can’t build things up—if you’re only focused on criticizing and deconstructing and problematizing and tearing things down—it’s really impossible to meaningfully sustain [shared] identities and shared goals and shared values.”

This is where the church can shine if we turn away from our political idols and self-aggrandizement and turn toward Jesus. We can remind one another that what we have in common in Christ is far more profound and significant than what separates us. We can move from that common ground to be agents of social repair in our communities. With God’s help, we can live and serve and even engage in politics in humble, practical, other-oriented love.

Despite his deconversion, al-Gharbi concludes We Have Never Been Woke by quoting Jesus in Matthew 6 and warning against “performative displays” of righteousness. That’s a problem on the left, the book’s main subject for critique, but it’s also a problem on the right and in every group of fallen, sinful humans. It’s a problem in my own heart. “Ultimately, Jesus argued, people have to choose what’s really important to them,” al-Gharbi writes, “and it’s a choice they make with their actions, not their words. You know the tree by its fruit.”

As I came to better understand in the years between 2016 and 2020, conservatives can rightfully dislike the rotten fruit of our cultural elites. But if we’re to fully benefit from al-Gharbi’s message, we must turn this scrutiny on ourselves as much as our political rivals: What fruit are we bearing? Is it carefully arranged to make us look righteous? Or is it good and abundant and beautiful and life-giving fruit, bringing glory to God and nourishment to all?

Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.

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Culture

Heaven Is A Homeplace

Amanda Held Opelt

Hurricane Helene devastated the land I love. My pain points me toward what’s to come.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels, Unsplash, Wikimedia Commons

On the morning of Friday, September 27, I sent a frantic text message to my cousin Paul:

“Been thinking of Granny’s house and hoping it survives this storm! Let us know!”

It wasn’t long after I sent the text that the lights went out, along with the internet. And cell signal, already spotty in the mountains, seemed to drop altogether. There we were: me and my husband and our two small children, alone with the wind, the rain, and our worry.

I live in the mountains of Western North Carolina in a little community called Meat Camp just north of Boone. My husband and I are grateful to be raising our girls here, in a region where my roots grow deep. My six-times great-grandfather came to this area around the time of the American Revolution and set up a homestead on the banks of Little Rock Creek in Bakersville, an hour or two south of where I live now.

A farmhouse dating back to the mid-1800s still sits along that creek, inherited and recently renovated by my cousin Paul. “Granny’s House,” as we’ve always called it, is home to so many memories for me: Christmas mornings, summers splashing in the creek, bountiful tables of fried trout, biscuits and gravy, soup beans, and fresh tomatoes. Just across the road is a small graveyard where Granny (my great-grandmother) along with countless other relatives (great-great grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins) are buried.

That house and that land are the center of kinship and ancestry for me, a physical space reminding me of who I am and whom I came from. Appalachians call this a “homeplace.”

Though I spent my growing-up years in Alabama and East Tennessee, I think I was always meant to come back to Western North Carolina. We’ve now lived here for 13 years, longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life. It was here where I discovered the meaning of the word home, where my husband and I created our own “homeplace” of sorts.

People say that home is where the heart is. But I like to think that home is where the body is. What I mean is that to “be home” is to know a place, a people, and a personal shelter in an embodied way. Home is something you feel in the ground beneath your feet, the roof over your head, and the other human bodies encircling you with unconditional love. It is both concept and substance, an incarnation of belonging.

For Appalachians especially, home is more than a house. Home is the land that sustains you. It is the rich soil of the bottomland where you plant your garden and grow your apple trees. It is the fields and forests where your ancestors grazed cattle, hunted game, and foraged for food.

Home is a terrain veined by countless rivers and creeks, the lifeblood of our population. Our waterways carve out the hollers we call communities, churn the wheels that traditionally grind our grains, give us water to drink and fish to eat, and offer our children endless hours of play along the banks and mossy creek rocks. We navigate our lives by these waterways. They create the undulating grids of our townships, chart the course for our roads and infrastructure. They name our communities: Little Rock Creek, Laurel Fork, the New River, Cane Creek, Pine Run, Boone Fork, the Toe River, Meat Camp Creek.

Home is a culture, the generational practices born of hardscrabble living and ingenuity. It is the art, the music, the foodways, and the storied mythologies that are imparted to you by grandparents and great-grandparents. Home is an economy of creativity and provisions: familiar coffee shops, favorite eateries, concert venues, farmers’ markets, and theaters.

Home is the vast network of kinship that supports you. It is the friends who show up with food when you are sick, the neighbors who mow your grass when you are out of town, the family who comes around you to mourn when you mourn and celebrate when you celebrate. Home is the church that communally practices the habits of a holy life: worshiping, praying, learning from Scripture, and serving those in need.

And yes, home is a house—a literal “homeplace” that holds in its holy walls all those instances of safety and rest. It is the floorboards your children learn to walk on, the walls and roofs that keep the rain and cold out, the tables on which you break bread with family and neighbors, the kitchens and laundry rooms in which you conduct life’s labors in all their mundanity and joy. Ordinary havens, extraordinary vessels of love. Home is a sacred space.

Home is sight, smell, sound, and taste: the vista from a hilltop, the wet earth of a creek bank, the plucked string of a mandolin, the sweetness of fresh-baked apple pie. Home is the topography you are always eager to return to. Home is the place where the road rises up to meet you.

But sometimes the road falls out from under you.

When Hurricane Helene tore through Southern Appalachia, every stream, every tributary, and every underground spring in the mountains became a raging torrent. Our beloved waters that made this place home suddenly took so many homes away.

The waters engulfed roads, pulling pavement into the water and washing out bridges. It poured into our downtown businesses, scattering merchandise and spoiling food. Our hillsides rushed down upon houses in waves of mud. Trees smashed into roofs and cars.

Suddenly, everything that makes a home a home was interrupted. Power was lost, well pumps could no longer draw water into houses, and all communication was down. Restaurants, stores, and schools across the region shut down indefinitely. The winding roads that used to take us to town, to church, and to our friends were suddenly inaccessible, washed away and making many neighborhoods and communities devastated islands, cut off from the rest of the world.

There is a feeling of betrayal when a land you love so much seems to turn on you. I felt this acutely even though my own house remained undamaged by wind or water. We had no power and no water, and we quickly ran through our shelf-stable food. Limited cell coverage meant painfully scarce communication with friends and family. When we saw that the only two bridges leading in and out of our neighborhood were dangerously close to collapsing, we made the hard decision to relocate to my parents’ house.

Our house was standing, but we’d lost our home.

Now we are left wondering: When can we “go home”? What we are really wondering is—when will our friends be safe, when can we hike again, when can we rebuild our gardens, when can we have coffee together, when can we break bread at our table, and when can we worship in our sacred sanctuaries?

When home is disrupted by a broken creation, when we suffer as inhabitants of a world that has been groaning since the Fall, we are wont to think of our heavenly home. Popular belief among many evangelicals is that when we die, we go to heaven and leave this physical earth and these corporeal bodies behind forever. We picture heaven as a disembodied, ethereal place, no longer spoiled by the hardships of materiality.

But Romans 8:21 tells us that God’s plan is for a new heaven and a new earth. Revelation 21 and 22 speak of an embodied experience of God’s perfect presence, where a crystal-clear river flows from the throne of God and there is a tree of life bearing fruit every month (22:1–2). The Holy City where we will reside rests on a mountain, and its walls and gates are beautiful (21:10–19). Isaiah speaks of feasting and drinking an abundance of food and wine in this new heaven and earth (25:6), a place where all people will be safe and secure.

And just as Jesus’s body was resurrected, so too our bodies will be resurrected, free from the pain of hunger, thirst, and loneliness. Our heavenly home is resurrected life with Christ. It will be a physical, material reality, just as our own homes are now. Finally enfolded in the communion of all the saints, we will know no wants and experience the joy of true, deep rest. It will be the ultimate “homeplace.”

This feeling of the absence of home in the wake of a disaster is perhaps a gift, a way of knowing that deep in our hearts we long for sacred belonging, and what we long for will be given to us someday. What’s ours to do now is to endure—to celebrate the comforts of home (when we have them) as a foretaste of what’s to come, to rebuild when homes are broken, and to pray for the eventual restoration of all things.

Late Saturday night, I received a text from my cousin. He’d heard from a neighbor that the storm was indeed bad at Little Rock Creek, that the waters had risen, and that the trees had come down. But Granny’s house was undamaged, standing strong as it had for 150 years: a homeplace just waiting to shelter someone.

A picture of our future home and shelter from all harm.

Amanda Held Opelt is an author, speaker, and songwriter. She has published two books.

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Ideas

You Are the Light of the Public Square

Justin Giboney

Contributor

American Christians can illuminate our country’s politics—if we engage with moral imagination, neighborliness, boldness, and humility.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

The Christian public witness has raised a voice of emancipation in American history. Our faith has provided the civic muscle to build schools for the poor and hospitals for the sick. Christians have visited the lonely and comforted the dying. The church has confronted sex trade pimps and run off neighborhood dope peddlers. It’s no exaggeration to say that no other institution in America has a comparable record of service. At our best, Christians have illuminated the way toward justice and moral order in US society.

Conversely, at our worst, American Christians have misused the church’s social and political capital. We’ve demeaned the outcast and condoned the worst elements of secular society for the sake of our own power or validation. Too often, our hymns and public action have been in conflict. We’ve lent moral authority to amoral leaders and allowed ourselves to become the prop of devious political interests.

When wielded with selflessness and sobriety, the Christian public witness can be the conscience and Good Samaritan of this nation. When driven by pride, conformity, or domination, it can trample the best American ideals and even tread over the principles of our own divine exemplar, Jesus Christ.

Our public engagement has been a powerful—and regrettably mercurial—force in the American experiment. And in this polarized moment, we must decide which side of this dual legacy we’ll continue. Will we reflect the tenacity and grace of Fannie Lou Hamer and Dorothy Day? Or will we embrace the hubris of the Christian nationalist and the opportunism of the jackleg preacher?

If the issues our nation faces today were small and superficial, believers could just play nice and mind our own business. But it’s far more complicated than that. Americans’ disagreements concern our fundamental values and the well-being of our neighbors. Debates about economics, the scope of parental rights, and life-or-death issues like health care and abortion can’t be shrugged off.

We share this democracy, and many of our positions impact other people and groups—America is truly a union. We should be respectful across political differences, but not every political perspective is as good as the next one. There are ideas and movements that deserve a very public and democratic death, which means political conflict is unavoidable and necessary. We can’t silently watch from the sidelines as Wall Street steals from the widow or social media sexually corrupts the orphan.

The question is not “Should Christians engage in public life?” but “How can Christians imitate Christ as we engage constructively in the conflicts of democracy?”

First, we must engage with moral imagination, which is a product of faith. Moral imagination gives us a redemptive perspective by reminding us that today’s issues are significant but not ultimate. Therefore, our social and political action is significant, but this world’s direction is determined by God—not us, our allies, or our opponents.

Moral imagination gives us the vision to transcend the contempt, skepticism, and desperation that mark the spirit of our day because we know that whatever happens, it’s not the end of the story. Christians must have the capacity to see and pursue what ought to be rather than being arrested by what is or what is most probable. We can acknowledge a bleak reality without becoming its slave.

Christians politicking with moral imagination will see beyond the nasty behavior of our opponents to the brokenness behind those actions. We’ll tenaciously confront the unjust and immoral without denying their human dignity or reciprocating their hatred. We will not be profane to get our points across or pretend the other side is pure evil to articulate why they’re wrong. Even when integrity is not rewarded in culture or politics, moral imagination will remind us that it’s still our duty as followers of Christ.

Moral imagination makes us aspirational and innovative. During the 2024 election cycle, many American Christians’ political commentary has depended on fearmongering. Our public witness is lazy and pedestrian, so everything the left does is called “Marxism,” and the right’s efforts are dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0.”

We settle for those tired allegations because articulating an artful, fair critique of our opposition takes more time and vision. Christians must demand better of our would-be leaders (James 3:1). Anyone who wants to lead us must have a positive vision and a critique that addresses the best arguments on the other side. We cannot be satisfied with caricatures and misrepresentations.

Next, to be a neighbor in public life is to be an advocate: to identify an issue that’s tormenting a community and passionately seek a solution. Sacrificing your time, resources, and social capital to aid others is the 1 John 3:16 definition of love. It’s the imitation of Jesus in the public square.

Loving, neighborly advocacy can’t be mean-spirited. But sadly, some of the most passionate advocates in our democracy seem to be the most bitter. This is an occupational hazard of frontline advocacy: The setbacks, heartbreaks, and dreams deferred can distort a person. Our passion can become poisonous, a toxin that drains the spirit of compassion. Our social actions can become counterproductive, and our ugly posture can end up doing a disservice to both our cause and the people we’ve set out to protect.

For Christians, advocacy must always be an act of love, not a source of contempt and rage. It must be a means of worship, a service to our neighbors done in obedience to God. We should campaign and reform like Thomas A. Dorsey, the godfather of gospel music, composed, with a joyous spiritual in our hearts and a mind resolved to “never turn back.”

A good cause isn’t enough in and of itself; the spirit of our efforts must also be redemptive. We should advocate because it glorifies God, not because we’re assured of personal exaltation or temporal victories. As C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend, “It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that), but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God.”

Lastly, we must lead with boldness and humility. The Christian in conservative circles must speak without equivocation against racism and for civic pluralism. The Christian in progressive spaces—the academy and the Democratic caucus—must stand firm in professing that the value of autonomy ends where sin begins. Those who worship at the altar of scientism or self-perception must lovingly be confronted with moral knowledge and wisdom.

Yet we can’t allow our boldness to become self-righteousness. We must reckon with our tendency to overestimate our own rightness and goodness. If we’re to lead well in a diverse democracy, we must first acknowledge our own failures and humbly accept correction for our errors, including correction from Americans with views very different from our own.

The American abolition and Civil Rights movements are proof that Christian witness can light the public square. Our faithfulness is needed now amid the fog of polarization.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the coauthor of Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

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News

UK Regulators Investigate Barnabas Aid over Reports of Misused Funds

Kate Shellnutt

The charity is under an “unprecedented level of scrutiny on our financial processes” after founders and top leaders were suspended.

Charity Commission

One of the biggest Christian charities in the United Kingdom is being investigated by regulators following reports of financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and escalating internal tensions.

After opening a statutory inquiry into Barnabas Aid—a nonprofit that brings in £21.6 million ($28.3 million) a year to assist persecuted Christians—the UK’s Charity Commission announced last week that it had issued financial sanctions against the group.

“Due to concerns that the charity’s funds may have been misused in the past, and questions as to the trustees’ oversight, the Commission has used its powers to temporarily restrict any transactions the charity intends to make which are over £4,000,” said the regulators, who oversee charities in England and Wales.

Barnabas Aid, also called Barnabas Fund, was founded in England in 1993 by Patrick Sookhdeo, a convert who researched Christian-Muslim relations and advocated against the persecution of Christian minorities abroad. The group now operates internationally, with both a UK board of trustees and a global board overseeing various national offices.

Barnabas Aid suspended Sookhedo and other senior leaders earlier this year when it launched an independent investigation to look into whistleblower claims against them. In August, Premier Christian News reported on the internal “chaos” at Barnabas Aid.

A statement posted on the Barnabas Aid site says its investigation has already found evidence of theft and misuse of funds, and the ministry plans to comply with the Charity Commission inquiry. The organization says it will be able to continue to fund projects, only with the additional administrative hurdle of getting the commission’s approval.

We welcome the Charity Commission's inquiry.
Read our statement here 👇 https://t.co/5TUFOB6yjH https://t.co/WTuaYVAjIU
— Barnabas Aid (@BarnabasAid) October 3, 2024

Financial concerns led Barnabas Aid to dismiss international CEO Noel Frost back in the spring. The Telegraph UK wrote that Barnabas Aid’s initial investigation found Frost used charity funds for personal expenses and transferred more than £130,000 to personal accounts. He denied the allegations of financial wrongdoing.

The chairs of Barnabas Aid in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and the UK went on to ask for the resignations of four additional senior leaders: Patrick and Rosemary Sookhdeo (international director and international director emeritus), Caroline Kerslake (international director of projects), and Prasad Phillips (deputy international director). They have been suspended while the investigation takes place.

Based on an interim report from the firm, Barnabas Aid said it has identified “serious and repeated” violations of its own financial safeguards as well as “significant payments made to the founders (and to others close to them—including some Board Members/Trustees), which cannot be readily explained.”

Barnabas Aid apologized to supporters in August, reported the issues to regulators, and commissioned a London law firm to investigate, but members of the UK board said they did not approve of the independent investigation.

The Charity Commission is currently looking into those claims.

“The Commission is investigating issues, including allegations of unauthorised payments to some of the current and former trustees and related parties, allegations that the charity’s founders have inappropriate control or influence over how the charity operates, and possible unmanaged conflicts of interest,” it said.

Kerslake said the suspended leaders are willing to cooperate with any impartial investigation. She told The Telegraph that the money transferred to the Sookhdeos came from donations made specifically for them “in lieu of salaries.”

The Charity Commission is also examining Barnabas Aid’s relationship with Nexcus International, formerly Christian Relief International (CRI).

Nexcus serves as an international office for Barnabas Aid and coordinates with the national offices in the UK, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. The Barnabas Aid website says going through CRI—which is registered in the US but operates in England—allows the charity to keep lower overheads and helps ensure its compliance with legal and financial requirements.

The chair of Barnabas Aid UK, Philip Richards, claimed in a letter to supporters that Nexcus “seized control of the operations of Barnabas Aid,” appointed its new CEO, Colin Bloom, and has been surreptitiously using its donor database.

Barnabas Aid countered to say Nexcus is “a Barnabas entity” since it was created by Sookhdeo, who served as its chair until April 2024, and since its board is made up of Barnabas Aid’s national leaders.

US watchdog site MinistryWatch reported on Barnabas Aid in 2022, interviewing Jeremy Frith, the CEO leading the US office.

“Frith admits the ministry’s websites and regular communication do a poor job of communicating its international structure. The Barnabas Aid, USA redirects to the Barnabas Fund in the UK,” the story said. “US gifts sent to Barnabas Aid go to CRI, which then distributes funds to partners around the world.”

According to MinistryWatch, Barnabas Aid finances projects in dozens of countries by awarding grants to ministries—mostly churches they’ve partnered with for decades—to conduct the work.

The suspended founder, Sookhdeo, was previously convicted in a sexual assault case in 2015 and found not guilty in another case in 2016. He denied the allegations and temporarily resigned before being reinstated into leadership as international director of Barnabas Aid.

The charity defended Sookhdeo and accused fellow evangelical organizations of excluding Barnabas Aid from cooperative international religious freedom efforts.

Full results of the current investigation, being conducted by the law firm Crowell & Moring, are expected later this fall. When the Charity Commission inquiry concludes, it will also publish a report detailing its findings and any disciplinary action.

Following the Charity Commission inquiry, Barnabas Aid has reiterated its commitment to transparency and cooperate repentance.

“There is now an unprecedented level of scrutiny on our financial processes to ensure transparency and accountability and you can trust that any money donated to us will be used to help persecuted Christians,” it said in a FAQ for supporters.

“While team members at Barnabas Aid did not know or participate in financial misconduct, we must collectively repent of any evil that has happened, placing our faith in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

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News

Gaza War Strains Bible Scholars’ Model of Christian Conversation

Jayson Casper

How Hamas’ October 7 terror attack and Israel’s response exhausted a group of evangelical Bible professors pursuing unity on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mlenny / Getty

When Jesus told the 12 disciples to shake the dust off their feet in protest of any town that did not receive them, it is easy to forget their mission was among fellow believers in Yahweh. Jews were speaking to Jews, and the message was simple: The kingdom of God is near.

But Jesus foresaw even greater opposition than rejection, according to Matthew 10. His disciples would be dragged before councils, flogged in the synagogues, and betrayed to death by their own brothers, he warned. “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.”

Christian discourse on the Holy Land conflict is often similarly contentious.

“A conversation is needed,” said Darrell Bock, senior research professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS). “People talk at each other, not to each other. But with the emotion and distance between the two positions, is it even possible to try?”

Not from what another Bible scholar witnessed when each camp gathers alone.

“Their conferences only preach to the choir,” said Rob Dalrymple, course instructor of New Testament and biblical interpretation at the Flourish Institute, the seminary for evangelical Presbyterians in the ECO denomination. “Nothing changes; it only reinforces how bad the other side is.”

Each academic belongs to a community traditionally associated with one or the other side of the Israel-Palestine conflict. DTS teaches dispensationalism, which anticipates the restoration of Jews to the Promised Land before the return of Christ. Presbyterians adhere to covenant theology, which interprets the promises given to Israel—including the land—as fulfilled in Christ.

The Jews of Jesus’ day also had factions. But while “shake the dust off” was the instruction given to disciples in the face of opposition to the gospel, to all who believed in him he gave a very different message in the Sermon on the Mount:

Take the log out of your own eye first.

One group of Bible scholars, Christians in Conversation on the Middle East (CCME), has “emphasized self-critique from the very beginning,” said Alicia Jackson, associate professor of Old Testament at Vanguard University, which is affiliated with a Pentecostal movement that is often pro-Israel. “And the heart of the group is to love each other despite our differences.”

But the challenge is immense—and sensitive in their communities. CCME had originally pledged to be private.

“I heartily agree on the need for introspection,” said Bruce Fisk, who is a former professor of New Testament at Westmont College and is married to a Palestinian with origins from Bethlehem. “But why would anyone advertise doubts, lingering questions, and ‘logs’ when they feel under siege? Trust is lacking; fear abounds.”

And thus CCME members strove to get to know one another first.

Discussions began between Dalrymple and Fisk in 2018, with Bock joining a year later. They recruited others with the same desire for healthy conversations and met for the first time at the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) convention in San Diego, discussing how to expand the initiative. Candidates wrote a statement on how they viewed the conflict, but more importantly they told personal stories about how they came to care. Zoom meetings ensued, and each prospective participant endured the “hot seat” as they introduced themselves.

Eventually they discussed the issues in the Middle East.

COVID-19 caused the emerging group to cancel its planned in-person gathering in 2020. But the evangelical Institute for Biblical Research (IBR) approved their formation of a specialty research group the following year, called Scripture, Hermeneutics, and the Middle East. Seeking to connect biblical interpretation with Holy Land realities, CCME members made a three-year commitment to host a seminar at each annual SBL gathering, starting with Denver in 2022.

Once there, they first had lunch together to move budding online relationships toward face-to-face friendships. The session then proceeded in typical academic fashion, with interested colleagues listening to papers presented on the theme—“Israel Then and Now”—and the formal responses.

And they forged a Christian bond—until October 7 put everything to the test.

Theology: A Contact Sport

Forty days later in San Antonio, CCME’s 2023 SBL session packed out the room.

The theme was “Israel and the Church,” which included hermeneutical topics such as whether the now mostly Gentile body of Christ completes, fulfills, or supersedes the promises for Jews in God’s plan. But the theme was also political, asking if New Testament authors envisioned possession of land for ethnic Israel and whether the modern nation-state either implements or benefits from the Old Testament promises.

It was still an academic gathering—but one preceded by extensive email anguish.

The Hamas terrorist attack and subsequent Israel Defense Forces response had sent CCME communication into overdrive. Ordinary seminar planning gave way to multipage missives that took hours to write and read. Zoom meetings stopped as members became too involved with responses within their own networks, each trying to make sense of what happened, why, and what followed.

Fisk believed the Israeli response, strengthened by American evangelical support, was “wildly disproportionate and indiscriminate.” Bock spoke of urban warfare within an underground tunnel network and Iran’s role in provoking “masses of people who want to wipe Israel from the face of the earth.”

The conversation was heated, but participants’ commitments held. They offered apologies when language went too far and graciously thanked each other for their honesty. No one proposed canceling the seminar.

“This was the test,” Dalrymple said. “In light of what we were trying to do, we had to continue to love and respect each other.”

God was their glue.

“Prayer is so important when emotions are running high,” Jackson said. “We don’t reduce people to positions but sit together and validate each other’s pain.”

But after the conference, the pain continued. As the world debated casualty counts, cease-fires, and settler-colonialism, some CCME scholars confessed to being exhausted and depressed. Despite maintaining mutual esteem, they could not bridge the issues—as children perished in the rubble of Gaza and antisemitism seeped into popular discourse.

“Theology,” one said, “is apparently a contact sport.”

And it wore them out. Since January, apart from basic academic business to plan for the 2024 conference, communication has waned. Some lamented that everyone went back to their rhetorical corners. Others sensed progress and felt the discussion was more important than ever. They did not pretend they could solve the conflict, nor change each other.

But after once hoping to model a difficult conversation, they paused.

Wise by Human Standards

Jesus’ disciples often quarreled. Each time, he countered by emphasizing the importance of service—even to demonstrate by washing their feet.

But bickering is not these scholars’ problem, as they have honored each other consistently. Bock facilitated an article by Fisk in the DTS academic journal. Dalrymple invited Bock onto his Determinetruth website’s livestream, where he encourages the church to live up to its gospel calling. And Jackson commended her male colleagues for the warm welcome they gave her, which some women fail to experience in some evangelical academic contexts.

But prior to taking up the towel, Jesus stated in John 12 that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it cannot produce much fruit. In reference primarily to his crucifixion, the comment was prompted—appropriately enough—by a Gentile request for an audience with the Jewish Messiah.

The CCME kernel of hope has not died, but conversation has hit an impasse. Shifting metaphors to the parable of the sower, has their seemingly buried seed of initiative found rocky soil, a scorching sun, or a dormant harvest yet to come?

Yet as first-century controversies swirled and believers feared being ostracized by their communities—the original reason for CCME’s privacy—Jesus told them to keep walking in the light, lest the darkness overtake them. And while he assured his listeners that he did not come to judge those who did not keep his word, failure to do so would condemn them on the Last Day (John 12:48).

These words include the Matthew 7 command to find the log in one’s own eye first.

A different spirit animated the church in Corinth, as members touted their favored theologians. Not much is known about the factions that backed Apollos or Peter, but Paul rebuked them by calling attention to their past: “Not many of you were wise by human standards” (1 Cor. 1:26). Similarly, CCME scholars remember that they were once far less informed about the issues than they are today.

Bock did not even know about his own Jewish heritage until age 13.

His parents had left Judaism, but his uncle would take him to synagogue when he visited his cousins in Oklahoma. Bock became a Christian in college and thereafter dedicated himself to studying the Jewish background of the Bible and the Second Temple Judaism of Jesus’ day.

During his doctoral studies in Scotland, he forged a friendship with Gary Burge, a leading US evangelical voice for the Palestinians. For the 40 years since then, they have discussed the conflict, and Bock—despite criticism—has spoken at the Christ at the Checkpoint conference, led by Palestinian evangelicals at Bethlehem Bible College (BBC). Yet his Zionist convictions are clear, and in 2018, Bock wrote Israel, the Church, and the Middle East: A Biblical Response to the Current Conflict.

Jackson, meanwhile, “can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t care about Israel.” Her father taught her about the Holocaust as she imbibed A Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. His message was never political, but growing up in a Jewish community in Portland, Oregon, the family showed solidarity with the local synagogue to commemorate together the genocide against Jews.

Her heart was broken further by a visit to Israel in 2010 led by BBC’s Jack Sara, where she met Palestinian Christians who described their experience of Israeli occupation. Some of the evangelical leaders and their Messianic Jewish counterparts working for reconciliation remain her heroes today. Jackson, nonetheless, is a committed Zionist, believing the Jews’ covenantal connection to the land is eternal, with the prophecies foretelling a permanent restoration. But within this, she clarified that “God’s heart is never for violence.”

Such violence drove her colleagues from their original support of Israel.

Dalrymple grew up Southern Baptist, memorized dispensational end-times charts, and attended graduate school at the conservative Liberty University. Like many, he viewed the 1948 establishment of Israel as fulfillment of prophecy and its victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as a miracle. Academic study moved him away from Christian Zionist theology, but it was not until a 2003 trip to Israel that he even discovered Christians existed in Palestine.

A second trip to Israel in 2008 introduced him to evangelicals at BBC, and their testimony of the realities of occupation brought him to tears. He witnessed firsthand how checkpoints constricted local movement, how the separation wall cut through family farms, and how Jewish settlements steadily confiscated West Bank territory—and he felt terribly guilty.

“This is because of people like me, who say God will bless those who bless Israel,” Dalrymple said of his thoughts at the time. “We are contributing to the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

There was no exact aha moment for Fisk, who also grew up dispensationalist. But his repeated travels to Israel since the early 2000s introduced him to the diversity of the people, though he went there simply to strengthen his lectures in New Testament geography. And as he developed concern for Jews and Gentiles alike, he aligned primarily with Palestinians in describing the conflict as “asymmetric and unjust.”

With Dalrymple and other founding members, in 2018 Fisk launched the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East to help Americans discover the “best voices on both sides.” Under its auspices, he is near completion of an eight-volume curriculum for an irenic introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Dividing Wall

Background matters. “Wounds from a friend can be trusted,” states Proverbs 27:6, so only those with a known history of advocacy might dare to find the logs in the eyes of their own communities. And the scholars were cautious: No one wanted to speak on behalf of those in the land.

“Self-criticism is difficult because it is seen as a defection, and with stakes as high as they are, this is dangerous,” said Bock. “But as Christians, we are almost compelled to do it.”

The almost is purposeful. Since issues are complex, the word compelled may risk mobilization without the requisite humility. But with these caveats in place, “iron sharpens iron” as the Proverbs chapter continues.

Hearing other voices is critical, said Dalrymple, as feedback helped him discover a flawed attitude in his book These Brothers of Mine: A Biblical Theology of Land and Family and a Response to Christian Zionism, published in 2015. His critique at the time was that those of a dispensationalist perspective who view the land separately from other promises fulfilled in Christ betray a not-high-enough view of Jesus.

“I didn’t mean it quite like that, but I wrote it,” Dalrymple said. “It was not fair.”

Jackson said that the Book of Ephesians anchors her in these difficult self-reflective conversations. Paul, unlike in his other letters, is not addressing a particular conflict but is calling believers into a deeper Christian life. Applied to the discourse on Israel and Palestine, Jackson cited the apostle’s emphasis on unity, the dividing wall of hostility, and the reality of a spiritual battle.

“My prayer is for the Holy Spirit to convict me of any attitude not in line with the love of Christ,” she said. “We have to be aware of the enemy at work while anchoring ourselves in Jesus’ victory on the cross.”

Both sides are reluctant to identify fault in their allies, said Fisk. But in Christ, both sides are still part of his spiritual family. His grand vision is to help everyone become less absolute in their assessment of the conflict, even as he struggles when his original side remains in staunch support of Israel. Rather than identifying logs in eyes, however, he said an easier task might simply be to forge common ground upon what each has learned from the other.

Conversation has helped Fisk recognize how much the specter of antisemitism haunts both Messianic Jews and Christian Zionists. Descriptions of the multiethnic nature of the body of Christ can risk downplaying the ethnically distinct role of the Jews. And while he maintains his position that Old Testament promises of land are fulfilled in Jesus, he has come to see a “handful of texts” in the New Testament that hint at territorial restoration.

But another problem with “logs” is the necessity of specifics.

“Many insist that they are willing to criticize Israel,” said Fisk, continuing with deliberate emphasis, “But. Never. Do.”

Legitimate Questions

For his own part, Fisk said that he is not studied enough in Islamic theology to comment specifically on the compatibility of Jewish and Muslim perspectives on the land. And he defended Christian Palestinians who, despite their long-standing commitment to nonviolence and denunciations of terrorism, grow frustrated when asked afresh to condemn—with specifics—each new atrocity.

But detailed critiques without firsthand experience—even from those who are highly invested—are difficult amid contested media narratives, Jackson said. She recognizes the desire for precision is legitimate and is not trying to evade it. But with settler violence, for example, the facts of what truly happened in any given reported event are sometimes hard to determine.

Yet the settlement issue helps identify logs in eyes, she said. Some Christian Zionists can label any criticism of Israeli government policies as lack of support for the Jews. Settlement expansion may not be a good idea, an attitude not uncommon among Israelis. And many who are pro-Israel tend to ignore or minimize Palestinian suffering. Though Jackson was previously aware of the disputed politics, dialogue with CCME colleagues increased her already deep compassion for both Jews and Palestinians and her burden to encourage Christians to love them equally.

Jackson’s biblical interpretation leads her to a unique position on the founding of Israel. In her view, God’s promised restoration of Jews to the land was not envisioned by the prophets as a conquest like the one in the time of Joshua, where inhabitants were removed from the land. But the horrors of war led to Palestinian displacement, and perhaps relations today would be much improved if Israel—or the surrounding Arab states—had facilitated their resettlement with citizenship rights.

Yet she reads the “dry bones” passage of Ezekiel 36–39 with consideration of how God often works in stages. The physical restoration of God’s people to the promised land precedes their spiritual restoration in the Messiah—land first, reform second. To Jackson, what is happening may be the beginning of a revival, for while Israel in 1948 included only a handful of Messianic Jews, today an estimated 30,000 live there. God regathered Jews and is now drawing more to faith in Yeshua.

“God’s heart is for Israel to dwell with the nations, for the blessing of the nations,” Jackson said. “What we see now is not the full expression of that vision, though it may be an initial phase.”

Bock also recognized how God’s shalom will eventually fulfill the Isaiah 19 prophecy of peace with a highway connecting Israel with Egypt and Assyria (modern-day Iraq) as joint peoples of God. In the interim, Israel’s existential fear is real and legitimate; while in a region that lives by “eye for an eye,” it is hard to ask for restraint. And the Bible does give clear examples of how God worked to remove entirely a source of antisemitic evil—see the commanded extermination of Amalek.

Nonetheless, Bock said Israel has not done enough to care for noncombatants, limiting food and humanitarian aid. The extent of destruction has been excessive, with not enough protection for civilian life. He said the overall policy of disproportionate deterrence, while understandable, contributes to a cycle of perpetual violence and deepens mutual animosity.

Such logs in eyes will not help Israel in the long run.

“The Christian contribution must be to pursue peace while balancing different biblical themes,” Bock said. “Our group tries to do so, for without understanding where people are in their perspectives, all moral appeals will fall on deaf ears.”

Dalrymple has seen such failures and sought to adjust. Like Fisk, he has come to appreciate how Jews experience antisemitism and Christian Zionists fear its spread. Advocating forcefully against systemic injustice can unwittingly trigger such feelings. He acknowledges some antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian camp.

And the argument that Israel has no right to exist remains, as a minority voice, believes Dalrymple. Though not a scholar on the subject, he said that settler-colonialist discourse painting Israel as the political or theological project of Europe is incorrect. It is “problematic” to deny Judaism’s historic sense of the land, as it is to overlook that Jews lived in Palestine before the Israeli state—others came subsequently as refugees, not resource-seekers.

“Too often we debate issues by setting up straw men,” Dalrymple said. “But with real people you learn to nuance and discover where something is heard as offensive. It sparks a response of ‘Ah, I see.’”

Does this mean that settler-colonialism language is a log in the Palestinian eye? Like the accusation of genocide, Fisk said, this is a question for lawyers—not biblical scholars. But after years of Palestinian believers exerting “heroic energy” to invite theologically like-minded evangelicals to hear their perspective—and largely failing—they have grown closer to politically like-minded allies among liberation theologians and in the anticolonial Global South.

“Time will tell if they come to regret these alliances,” said Fisk. “But they ask, ‘How can they see what the followers of Jesus cannot?’”

Soils of Response

It is a question both sides can ask—and repeatedly do. During Passion Week, in the John 12 passage Jesus quoted Isaiah 6 to say that God had blinded the eyes of his people. But while discussing the soils of response to his early ministry, in Matthew 13 Jesus referred to the Septuagint rendering of the same prophetic passage to say that from a calloused heart, the people had closed their own eyes.

Willful or otherwise, the popular gap on Israel and Palestine remains.

But most damning is Jesus’ warning to the Pharisees in John 9:41—“If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.” One would think a log would be obvious; human nature reveals it is not.

Isaiah’s commission, in fact, was to preach in such a manner that this guilt was laid bare—“otherwise, they might see with their eyes” (6:10). Understandably frustrated, the prophet asked, “How long, Lord?” (v. 11).

God’s response evokes images from Gaza and the border communities of Galilee and Lebanon, now including parts of Beirut:

“Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken” (vv. 11–12).

And the scholars of CCME—from different perspectives—continue their lament.

They have resumed planning for the 2024 SBL conference in San Diego, with participants including a Palestinian Christian and a Messianic Jewish rabbi. Jackson’s heart is for reconciliation. Fisk is confident his colleagues will defend him if he is mischaracterized, and he would do the same for them. Bock says that discussion is a success in itself. And Dalrymple finds hope that despite their distress, CCME extended its fellowship for an additional three years.

“The war in Gaza may end,” he said. “But the issues will not go away.”

- More from Jayson Casper

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Gordon Students Count Cells, Hoping to Unlock Cancer Mysteries

Adam MacInnis

Cutting-edge microscopy research could explain why some get sick while others don’t.

Two Gordon College research assistants work on immunofluorescence microscopy.

Courtesy of Craig Story

A lab at a small evangelical college in New England might not be the most obvious place for advanced cancer research, but Craig Story isn’t letting that stop him.

This fall, Story is teaching research students how to conduct immunofluorescence microscopy. Using stains, pieces of tumors taken from lab mice, and an extremely powerful (and pricey) microscope, Story and a team of undergraduate students at Gordon College are working to unravel the mysteries of why some people get cancer when others don’t, and why some respond better to treatment.

“Immunofluorescence microscopy is when you are studying a particular protein and you want to literally see where it is,” Story said. “Is it found in the tumor? Is it found around the tumor? What could it be doing?”

As with all scientific research, there’s a real possibility that they won’t find the answers they’re looking for. If they do, their breakthroughs could help an untold number of people. But if they don’t, the work will still serve the Gordon College students working with Story, giving them invaluable experience and preparing them for careers in science and medicine.

Story says that alone would be a worthwhile accomplishment.

He believes that medicine, by its very nature of addressing human suffering, is a pursuit that glorifies God. And the scientific method, with its commitment to truth and deep assumptions about the order of the universe, aligns with the Christian faith.

“Christians definitely should be involved in medical research,” he said.

Story, who has a doctorate in molecular biology, has been working at Gordon since 2002. He has been involved in cancer research since his last sabbatical in 2016, when he was granted a break from the classroom and got to spend some time learning the latest research techniques in a lab. He went to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and collaborated with Stephanie Dougan on her research studying enzymes and cancer cells.

He returned to Dana-Farber in 2023 with the goal of finding a project on the cutting edge of current cancer research that would also be suitable for students learning their way around the lab. He settled on immunofluorescence microscopy.

Microscopy—using a microscope to examine biological samples—traces its roots to the scientific revolution, coming out of the Reformation and Renaissance in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, Story said. A Dutch Calvinist draper named Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek—who used a magnifying glass to examine threads—and a British “curator of experiments” named Robert Hooke began unlocking the secrets of cells using microscopes in the 1600s.

One technique van Leeuwenhoek experimented with was putting a dye made from saffron on a sample to see if different parts of the cell looked different when stained. It didn’t yield much interesting information at the time, but that’s the same idea that Story and his students are using to do their research today.

Microscopes, of course, have vastly improved in the last 400 years, and the techniques used to stain cells have gotten a lot better too. Now, when the Gordon College professor and students peer through their microscopes, they can see a nuclear protein associated with cell proliferation and ribosomal RNA transcription, known as antigen Ki-67.

“What we’ve been doing is sectioning tumors from mice from the Dana-Farber lab, and then staining them for Ki-67, and then enumerating the number of cells that are positive for this particular antigen,” Story said.

Ki-67 can be used to identify cancer growth. Seeing how it spreads and comparing different tumors from different mice, Story and other researchers hope to better understand different immune responses. Someday, that could help develop more and better cancer treatments.

Today, however, they’re mostly counting cells.

Yayi Zhang, one of Story’s students, says the work can be a bit tedious. But it’s also really exciting. She doesn’t know what they will find—or what the techniques she is learning with Story will help her discover in the future.

“I can apply these techniques and skills in future work,” Zhang said, “so it’s wonderful.”

Pavinee Chaimanont, another student working with Story, called the opportunity to do the research “a blessing.”

“I feel like the techniques that I’ll learn from this research and the knowledge that I’ll also get is definitely going to be helpful in future cancer research that I’m going to be part of,” she said.

The students work together and have become good friends in the lab. They also appreciate the chance to be mentored by Story.

Naomi Montgomery said she took a class on cancer biology with Story and was excited to find out there was an opportunity not just to learn about what others had discovered but also to participate in the discovery process herself and help people. She was inspired, too, by how Story connected the work to faith.

“He taught the research on cancer in the light of how we look at this as Christians,” she said. “It was really cool. I think that it is a big blessing to have not only classes like that but experiences like this here at Gordon.”

The equipment necessary for the research does not come cheap. Gordon has received two Mass Life Science Center grants—one about seven years ago, and one about two years ago. Gordon has also designated funding to keep the equipment up to date.

“One thing about scientific equipment is that it can become obsolete or outdated pretty quickly,” Story said. “For example, the $10,000 camera on our fluorescent microscope needed to be replaced recently after only about five years.”

While his students are using the microscope to count cells, Story is also thinking up new research projects and other questions they could tackle. He’d like to work more on pancreatic cancer in particular since it is historically one of the hardest cancers to treat.

“They’re the worst tumors, which in and of itself is interesting,” Story said. “Why are different tumors different? Why aren’t they all the same?”

The Gordon College lab could play a critical role in figuring it out.

“To be able to contribute even a small part,” Story said, “is super exciting.”

- More from Adam MacInnis

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Chinese Christians Want the Church to Adopt Children with Disabilities

Eva Chou and Angela Lu Fulton

After China banned international adoptions, some believers want the Chinese church to step up.

A boy living in an orphanage for disabled children in China.

China Photos / Stringer / Getty

Xiaofei Wang, a pastor’s wife at a house church in the Chinese port city of Xiamen, had long heard of families overseas who would adopt children with special needs from China. Some of these adoptive parents had limited finances and other children to care for, yet they were eager to bring another child into their home. She began to wonder, “Why aren’t there families in China willing to adopt these children?”

In 2014, Wang began volunteering with a Christian nonprofit that cares for children with disabilities inside a state-run orphanage. She was moved by how the nonprofit’s staff lovingly comforted and played with the children—some of whom had Down syndrome, hydrocephalus (a buildup of fluid in the brain), or imperforate anus (a birth defect where the anus is missing)—while also spending countless hours researching treatments for them.

“I once thought these children would be better off in heaven, but these volunteers believed that as long as a child is in God’s hands, they must care for him or her every single day,” she said.

From then on, Wang and her husband began to sense a desire to adopt a child with special needs, even though both adoption and disabilities are stigmatized in traditional Chinese culture. In 2020, the couple, who had no children of their own, decided to adopt a boy with Down syndrome, whom they named Zhuci (meaning “gift”).

Since then, they’ve seen Zhuci not only bring joy into their lives but also change their church’s view of the value of all people, including those with disabilities.

Wang and other Christians in China believe the church can play a unique role in adopting children with special needs, especially after the Chinese government banned international adoptions in late August. The news came four years after China stopped processing adoptions—most of which involved children with disabilities—due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Without this pathway for children with medical needs, thousands of children may face a lifetime of institutionalization.

Some Chinese pro-life groups and foster-care homes are working to mobilize the church to step into that gap. Others, like Wang, lead by example, adopting children like Zhuci and sharing their adoption stories. Yet Wang believes the Chinese church has a long way to go in championing these children.

“Our faith hasn’t yet been deeply touched by God’s love; we tend to value life based on societal norms,” Wang said. “We often want only healthy, typical children. Very few consider adopting a child with special needs.”

China’s history of international adoption is closely tied to the government’s one-child policy, which was in effect from 1979 to 2015. At the time, many mothers who gave birth to daughters or children with disabilities would abandon their babies for a chance to have a healthy son, as a preference for male children is common in Chinese culture. Having more than one child would lead to harsh fines, job loss, or forced abortions and sterilizations.

The large number of abandoned children led the Chinese government to open up international adoptions in 1992. Since then, families around the world have adopted 160,000 Chinese children.

In the past decade, things have changed drastically. The Chinese government has ended the one-child policy and is instead encouraging couples to have more children, as the country’s population is aging at one of the fastest rates in the world.

The number of abandoned children has also dropped as fewer people are having babies. In addition, more remote villages have access to ultrasounds, leading parents to abort babies with genetic abnormalities, as a doctor who brought orphans with disabilities to Beijing for treatment told The Economist. Young couples are also less superstition about disabilities and less likely to abandon a child with medical needs, the doctor added.

The ban on international adoptions—except for foreigners adopting stepchildren or blood relatives—is in line with these demographic changes and the government’s desire to grow its population.

However, domestic adoptions face their own roadblocks. Before 2021, only childless couples could adopt, and even they could receive only one child. Today, beyond the typical requirements that adoptive parents must have the financial and mental capacity to care for a child, they must also be at least 30 years old and have no more than one child.

Jonny Fan, founder of the Chinese pro-life group Children’s Day for Life, stated that beyond regulatory difficulties, there are also persistent cultural ideas about adoption to overcome.

“Traditionally, adoption has been seen negatively, often associated with a family’s inability to bear children,” Fan said. “Adopted individuals are frequently viewed as laborers within the home, lacking inheritance rights and even the ability to be recorded in the family registry.”

Fan noted that adoptions typically happen quietly. Relationships that lack blood ties are considered less secure, as some fear that adopted children will eventually leave the family to seek their biological parents. “Blood relations hold a sacred status in Eastern culture,” Fan explained.

This mindset extends to the church as well. In fact, Fan said, the strong negative connotation around adoption even impacted how the Chinese Bible was translated. In English, verses like Ephesians 1:5 use the term “adoption” to refer to believers’ new status in God’s family, but Chinese translations say, “being given the status of sons.” When Fan mentioned to one Chinese Christian that believers are adopted by God, the man replied, “How can we be adopted? We are children of God.”

Adoption plays an important role in Children’s Day for Life. The organization, which started in 2012 as a ministry within Fan’s church, sets up banners and passes out flyers each June 1 (China’s Children’s Day) to encourage women to keep their babies. Christians with friends or families with crisis pregnancies began referring mothers to the group. Members met with the mothers, discussed the life growing inside of them, and offered support to help them carry their babies to term. At times, this meant connecting them with couples willing to adopt the babies.

In total, Children’s Day for Life has helped more than 500 mothers, saved more than 200 babies from abortion, and consulted 30 families seeking to adopt these babies informally, Fan said. (Informal adoption, or taking in a child without going through the official process, is a common practice in China.)

For the past five years, the group has held a weekly “Life Open Course” online, which attracts about three dozen participants to discuss issues of life, procreation, ethics, adoption, and marriage. Last year, they read Adopted for Life by Christianity Today editor in chief Russell Moore. For many, the book was “their first time hearing biblical teachings on adoption,” Fan said. “Some indicated that their perspectives on adoption have been transformed.”

After the study, one woman pledged to adopt the baby of another Christian couple, who had found out through genetic testing that their baby likely had Down syndrome. The couple was facing overwhelming pressure from family members and their doctor to abort the baby. Despite the woman’s offer, they yielded to the pressure and chose abortion.

“Defending life and opposing abortion have always been a marginalized ministry within the church, and adoption is even more so,” Fan said. “Even my mother struggles to understand why I would ‘interfere’ in others’ family matters.”

When Fan heard that China was banning international adoption, he began developing new courses around the theme of adopting children with special needs. He hopes that Chinese Christians can begin to accept a biblical view of adoption and step up to care for these children. “The work we’ve been doing over the past decade may have been a preparation for this moment,” he said.

Owen Wong has seen the needs surrounding orphan care in China change over the past few decades. He’s a board member of Shanghai’s Love Home, a Christian nonprofit that cares for abandoned children, many of whom have severe disabilities that government orphanages are ill-equipped to care for. Started in 2000, the home has taken in nearly 100 children.

Yet in the past few years, the government has invested in its orphanages, upgrading facilities and adding rehabilitation centers, Wong said. It asked groups like Love Home to send the children back to state-run orphanages. At the same time, the government made it easier for Chinese couples to adopt by allowing informally adopted children to register for identity cards.

In response, Love Home began to shift its focus toward providing vocational training for orphans who have left their care setting, along with financial, psychological, and medical support for families adopting children with special needs.

Wong is the father of three, including two adopted children with special needs. At the Christian school where he is the principal, several families have fostered or adopted children. Yet they often face grave challenges. Families are overwhelmed by the realities of caring for children with medical needs, lack community support, experience financial strain from the medical expenses, and don’t know how to deal with the trauma that the children bring with them from their time in the orphanage.

Wong found that about half of families who foster children with disabilities end up returning the children to the orphanage.

Yet Love Home has also seen success stories, such as Hannah Shi, a 19-year-old with severe spinal disabilities who graduated from Wong’s school, Wisdom Academy, and is now studying at Columbia International University in South Carolina. Shi aspires to become a special education teacher.

Wisdom Academy holds a Bible study group for adoptive families where they can share their struggles and joys. One family, on the brink of giving up efforts to adopt, found renewed strength to persevere as they took part in a year-long study of the Gospel of John with the group.

“For every orphan, having a home is the best outcome,” Wong said. “But for families preparing to adopt, the journey requires the support of the church, fellow believers, and society at large.”

The Wangs in Xiamen also faced various challenges on their adoption journey. In 2014, Wang cared for a six-month-old with a kidney cyst and an imperforate anus at the orphanage where she volunteered. Doctors didn’t think the baby would make it to his first birthday. Moved by compassion, Wang and her husband decided to foster the boy and give him a loving home for the remainder of his life.

The Wangs secured permission from the orphanage to take the baby home. They named him Benen, meaning “son of grace.” Despite the daily challenges of changing the colostomy bag attached to his abdomen, they found joy in caring for him. Yet after three months, the orphanage informed Wang that an overseas couple had decided to adopt Benen. Tearfully, they said goodbye to him.

In 2020, Wang and her husband sought to adopt a child with physical disabilities from the same orphanage. But at the time, all the children with normal cognitive abilities had been adopted, leaving only children with Down syndrome and cerebral palsy.

As they prayed and wrestled with this decision, the couple confronted their motivations. If we adopt a child with special needs, I must set aside all my ministry work to focus on this child, Wang thought. Am I doing this because I want to be seen as a pastor’s wife who does good things? Am I seeking praise from others? Or is it a genuine calling to love? Her husband grappled with concerns over other people’s reactions: What will people say? Will they think we wanted a baby so badly that we’d even adopt a baby with Down syndrome?

After more than six months of prayer and discussion, they decided to accept the first child recommended by the orphanage. It took four months to finalize the adoption, and they joyfully brought Zhuci home. At their church, many people were initially surprised that they would adopt a child with special needs. Yet getting to know Zhuci led church members to think differently when facing medical challenges in their own families.

For instance, in 2021, Ruth Wu finally became pregnant after she and her husband struggled with infertility for three years. Through prenatal tests, doctors suspected that the baby had trisomy 18, a chromosomal condition.

Despite their shock and sadness, the couple was inspired by Wang’s adoption of Zhuci and by John 9:3: “‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.’” To the doctors’ surprise, they decided to carry the child to term.

When their son was born, they found that the grim prognosis was accurate. The boy, named YoYo, had multiple deformities and was immediately admitted to the NICU. When the doctors deemed him beyond help, the parents brought him home and cared for him until he passed away after three months. “YoYo’s life was a miracle, a manifestation of God’s grace,” the couple wrote in a testimony posted on WeChat. “While many live long but burdened lives, YoYo fulfilled his beautiful mission in just a short time, shepherding God’s people and displaying His works.”

Today, Zhuci is ten years old. Although he speaks only simple words, Wang said her son fills their home with joy. He joins his parents in prayers and ends with a hearty “amen.” Wang has found that her pace of life has slowed down as she accompanies her son to the park or the beach, and she’s learned to rest in God’s presence. When frustrated or tired, she increasingly recognizes God’s compassion toward her.

In caring for Zhuci, Wang often remembers the Bible verses that she treasured while processing his adoption, such as Galatians 4:4–6, which reminds her that all Christian have been adopted into the family of God. “None of us were originally children of God, yet through faith in Christ Jesus, we are adopted as his children,” Wang said. “This divine love inspired us to make this extraordinary decision.”

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

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Global Methodist Bishops to Dance

Daniel Silliman in San José, Costa Rica

The new denomination tussles over its authority structure—but also finds surprising points of unity.

Global Methodist bishops sing at the first General Conference, where delegates debated the shape of episcopal authority.

Global Methodist bishops at the convening General Conference.

Questions of bishops stirred controversy in Costa Rica. Amid the joy of the convening General Conference of the Global Methodist Church as the new denomination ratified and modified the provisional decisions of its transitional leadership, the episcopacy emerged as the one issue that could rouse serious disagreement.

Who would be in charge of the new church? How many bishops would there be? How would they be elected, and how long would they serve? What would they do, specifically? How would the power and authority of the position be limited?

“There is a very collaborative spirit, but people have disagreements,” Asbury University professor Suzanne Nicholson told CT. “It’s always messy when you start something new.”

The Global Methodists debated the shape of the authority structure they would erect over themselves while they were in the process of figuring out and applying the lessons they learned from decades spent fighting in the United Methodist Church. There were, of course, theological and ideological reasons for their split. But for many of the people who left, the real problem, the deeper problem—the intractable, unresolvable, deeply frustrating, and hurtful problem—was the bishops.

The bishops didn’t defend orthodoxy, Global Methodist ministers told Christianity Today. They didn’t maintain order or unity. They didn’t seem to be in touch with the concerns of congregations or to care about small, struggling churches, and they used their power to punish ministers they saw as troublesome (or just conservative).

Many ministers have stories about being exiled. And far-flung rural churches with 20, 30, 50 people attending regularly recount with pain their realization that they were the places of exile—assigned only ministers who were being punished by the appointment.

United Methodist leaders see all this very differently, of course. And those who stayed in the denomination can offer alternative accounts of what happened.

But among those who left, there is a consensus: It was bad. And it was bad because of the bishops.

The new denomination, meeting for the first time, desperately wanted to avoid any possibility of repeating those mistakes. They debated the way to shape and structure the episcopacy to ensure better leadership.

The goal—everyone who spoke to CT agreed—was to set up an episcopal structure where the bishops are not bureaucrats responsible for administration of an institution, but shepherds fending off wolves and leading the church into green pastures.

“The main thing was an episcopacy that focused on teaching and preserving the faith,” said David Watson, New Testament professor at United Theological Seminary and lead editor at Firebrand. “We wanted to reshape the office for theology. If we don’t do that and there’s not something specific in Methodism we want to preserve, we’ve all wasted a lot of time and money.”

The Global Methodists built on other broad agreements as well. There was no debate about whether bishops ought to belong to a separate order of clergy, the way they do in the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican communion. The Methodists see bishops and other ministers filling distinct roles but sharing the same ordination.

The General Conference legislation stating the episcopacy is not a separate order passed 315 to 3.

There was also broad consensus that the role should be temporary. The Global Methodists don’t want people to be bishops for life. The delegates in Costa Rica decided instead that bishops would serve six-year terms and would be limited to two terms.

“The fail-safe is term limits,” Watson said. “That’s very popular.”

But delegates did disagree about other things. One group proposed that each region of Global Methodists, which is called an annual conference, should have its own bishop. Others objected that would give the bishops too many day-to-day administrative responsibilities and they’d end up running the denomination in their region. They suggested that job be given to a general superintendent hired by the region, while bishops took responsibility for preaching and teaching in four, five, or even six regions at once.

Responsibility for a broader area would also promote more connections between Global Methodists, advocates for that plan said.

One person proposed an itineracy system as another alternative: assigning bishops to one region at a time but then rotating assignments annually.

Matthew Sichel, a deacon from Maryland, pointed to the Methodist history of circuit riding. He said the new denomination should bring that model back in its episcopal structure.

“Itinerancy is a gift to Methodists,” he told the delegates during the debate. “It gives you a chance to see God work through leaders you would never have known.”

The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by delegates. The General Conference ultimately decided to support what they called the General Episcopacy Plan. Bishops will not be responsible for administration but will be tasked with spiritual leadership. They will be over the whole church but divvy up regions between themselves, each taking about five annual conferences.

Sichel said he didn’t like that plan, but losing the vote didn’t bother him at all.

“These are not essential issues,” he told CT. “I’m willing to trust the General Conference.”

Rob Renfroe, president and publisher of Good News, the leading evangelical Methodist magazine, said he heard that sentiment a lot at the Global Methodist gathering. People would articulate their preferences but acknowledge disagreements and submit the issue to the discernment of the delegates.

“This is holy conferencing,” he said. “We agree on the bedrock theological issues. Jesus is Lord, Scripture is authoritative, and we want to reclaim our Wesleyan heritage. So we can trust the General Conference.”

Delegates also said they knew that they would have the opportunity to tinker with the authority structure in the future. They worried about the unintended consequences of the decisions they were making in Costa Rica but took comfort in the wisdom of delegates to come.

“The bishop thing is a work in progress,” said Jeff Kelley, pastor of a church in Nebraska. “I don’t think that this conference will settle it. We have to wade in the water.”

Since it is still a work in progress, the General Conference decided not to elect bishops to six-year terms just yet. They started instead with interim bishops who will work part-time and serve for two years.

The delegates spent a lot of time debating the details of the interim episcopacy, wrestling over how those candidates would be nominated and whether or not someone elected to a two-year term could be reelected in 2026. Some expressed concern that if more groups join the Global Methodists in the next two years when all the bishop’s seats are filled, it will be harder for those people to elect a bishop who represented them. The delegates decided that 50 percent of the interim bishops could be reelected but each would have to receive a three-quarters majority vote.

The delegates then nominated more than 20 candidates, all present among the nearly 1,000 delegates and observers in Costa Rica, and started voting.

Delegates elected three candidates on the first ballot: Kimba Evariste from the Democratic Republic of Congo; Carolyn Moore from North Georgia, who preached about Acts 19 the first night of the General Conference; and Leah Hidde-Gregory from the Mid-Texas region. Then a fourth person won an episcopal position: John Pena Auta of Nigeria.

Balloting went on for multiple rounds after that without any names garnering enough votes to win. Ryan Barnett, pastor of First Methodist Church in Waco, Texas, went to a microphone and withdrew his name with praise for Hidde-Greggory, calling her the best Texas had to offer.

Then other candidates—mostly white men—started streaming forward to withdraw their names too.

“I thank God for the move of the Spirit,” said Stephen Martyn, professor of Christian spirituality at Asbury Theological Seminary, after seeing the vote totals for his name drop in three successive rounds of balloting. “It has been obvious. And it is a joy to withdraw my name.”

Other people in the room said they were pleased to not even be nominated. Some of the ministers at the convening General Conference had been accused of joining the Global Methodists just to grab power.

Johnwesley Yohanna, for example, has served as a bishop in Nigeria for 12 years. He had heard rumors that he was maneuvering for a leadership spot in the new denomination and joined not because he was trying to be faithful but because he wanted more authority and thought the new denomination would give him whatever he asked for. He said electing someone else as bishop allowed him to prove his integrity.

“It’s done. I’m done. I kept my word,” Yohanna told CT. “We praise God in everything.”

Delegates elected Jeff Greenway, who served as president pro tempore of the Global Methodist Church during its transition period, as their fifth interim bishop. Finally, Kenneth Livingston, a Black pastor in Houston, was chosen.

The six newly elected bishops joined two men already serving in the episcopal role: Scott Jones, a former United Methodist bishop from East Texas, and Mark Webb, a former United Methodist bishop from Upstate New York.

The final results were greeted by jubilant pandemonium in Costa Rica. The bishops-elect embraced family, friends, and each other, while the nearly 1,000 people in the room sang “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.”

Whatever disagreements they had about the authority structure seemed to melt with the joy as the six men and women filed onto the conference room stage with their spouses for a group photo.

A number of delegates said they were specifically encouraged by the diversity. They said the election showed that the “global” part of Global Methodism was not just a mask for conservative white Americans but a reality. And the new denomination also demonstrated its commitment to egalitarianism and the Wesleyan belief that the Spirit is poured out on “both men and women” (Acts 2:18).

“I’m proud of how that went today,” said Asbury seminary student Emily Allen. “Electing women—that meant a lot to me. And two Africans and a Black American—that sets us on a good path.”

As the Global Methodists rejoiced and praised their newly elected leaders, however, the delegates also found a surprising way to reassert the ultimate authority of the General Conference. Two pastors, Natalie Kay Faust from Nebraska and D. A. Bennett from Oklahoma, came forward with a motion that had not been discussed in any of the debates on episcopal authority, nor in any legislative committee.

“We would like to propose a Bennett-Faust motion, in the spirit of historicity of this celebration,” Bennett said. “Schedule time in the 2026 General Conference of the Global Methodist Church for bishops … to perform a liturgical dance to all 17 verses of ‘O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.’”

More than dozen delegates shouted, “Second.”

“Can we call them ‘out of order’?” Mark Webb asked Scott Jones.

But Faust pushed on, calling the motion a fitting recognition of the “spirit of honor for one another” among the Global Methodists.

“We have seen how the Spirit can move when we set our own personal pride and barriers aside and open ourselves up to new expressions of his leading,” Faust said. “This motion is encouraging our episcopal leaders to lead by example of Christian submission and connection to the movement of the Spirit.”

Webb said it was out of order, but everyone in the room just laughed at him. Jones said it should be referred to committee, but no one agreed. Delegates, instead, called for a vote.

“Do I have any friends to oppose?” Jones said.

He did not.

The delegates voted by show of hands and the motion passed by an overwhelming majority.

The new denomination will meet again in 2026 and hold its first full episcopal election, picking bishops for six-year terms that will focus on preaching, teaching, and spiritual leadership. And the first bishops of the Global Methodist Church will perform a dance to all 17 verses of the beloved Wesleyan hymn “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

- More from Daniel Silliman

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Evangelicals Struggle to Preach Life in the Top Country for Assisted Death

Meagan Gillmore in Ontario

Canadian pastors are lagging behind a national push to expand MAID to those with disabilities and mental health conditions.

Stockbusters / Getty

Canadian Christians increasingly find their pro-life values in conflict with their nation’s rapid acceptance of medical assistance in dying (MAID). Many say churches could be a refuge in Canada’s pro-MAID culture, reminding people of human dignity and providing community supports that can help them resist the lure of MAID.

But chances are, most Canadian Christians haven’t heard their pastors discuss MAID—and clergy, despite their pro-life convictions, are likely still learning about the laws that legalize the ending of life.

The few evangelical pastors who have addressed the issue directly have seen an almost immediate impact in their congregations. But most haven’t kept up with the legal landscape for MAID or have waited to speak out.

“I think one of the strongest reasons why MAID has a lot of traction generally in our society is that nobody wants to talk about death,” said Jeff Gullacher, a pastor in Alberta who began addressing the issue in his church earlier this year. “Everyone just wants to kind of sweep it under the rug and keep it as sterile and as short as possible.”

MAID was legalized in Canada in 2016. Amendments that passed in 2021 removed the criterion that a person’s death be “reasonably foreseeable” and allowed for the eventual legalization of MAID for individuals whose only medical condition is a mental illness.

The current law allows people who have “grievous and irremediable” illnesses, diseases, or disabilities and are experiencing what they consider to be unbearable physical or psychological suffering to be eligible for MAID—even if their death is not, in the law’s words, “reasonably foreseeable.” By the end of the month, Quebec will authorize patients to approve their own MAID requests in advance.

Heidi Janz, a specialist in disability ethics, has spent years lobbying against MAID laws because of the way they devalue people with disabilities. She is waiting for evangelical Canadians to join the fight.

“The silence has been deafening,” said Janz, who has multiple disabilities and uses a voice synthesizer to deliver public statements, including testimony before parliamentary committees.

Earlier this year, she spoke at a Christian conference in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, urging Christians to do more to support people with disabilities so they do not die by MAID.

Janz was hoping churches would call her afterward, inviting her to speak to their congregations. They haven’t. And she rarely sees churches publicly opposing MAID or being concerned about how it endangers already-vulnerable people.

“We’re just collectively shrugging our shoulders,” she told CT. “I think we’re going to have a lot to answer for.”

The use of MAID, sometimes called euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in other jurisdictions, has surged in Canada, where 44,958 people have died through the provision. The number increases each year. In 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 13,241 people died by MAID in Canada, accounting for 4 percent of the country’s deaths that year. Final numbers for 2023 will be released later this month, but projections put last year’s total around 17,000.

Canada is widely regarded as having some of the most permissive MAID laws in the world. For example, in American jurisdictions that have legalized the practice, patients cannot be prescribed lethal drugs to end their lives unless they have a terminal illness and a prognosis of six months or less. They also must take the drugs themselves.

Canada, however, has never required a time-based prognosis to determine someone’s eligibility for MAID. The drugs used in MAID are most often administered intravenously—in 2022, fewer than seven Canadians who died by MAID took the drugs themselves. In 2027, Canada plans to extend eligibility to people whose sole medical condition is a mental illness.

As MAID becomes more common, pastors are often at a loss to know how to address it with their congregations—whether during sermons or with individuals who are considering it or are grieving the loss of someone to MAID.

“The numbers are just now getting to the point where pastors are noticing that people in their flock are choosing this, and they’re really unsure how to deal with it,” said Larry Worthen, the executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Association (CMDA) of Canada. But he’s received more invitations to speak to pastors across the country recently.

Many denominations do not have clear guidance about how clergy should respond when their congregants are considering or opting for MAID, said Gloria Woodland, director of the chaplaincy program at ACTS Seminaries of Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia.

Woodland teaches an eight-week seminary course about MAID that is being offered to churches throughout Canada. She also speaks to pastors. She begins by reviewing the law and how it’s changed since it was first enacted.

She said pastors may not know, for example, that people who are approved for MAID in cases where their deaths are seen as reasonably foreseeable no longer have to wait ten days between when their requests are approved and when MAID is administered. This means it is legally possible for someone to die by MAID on the same day they are approved for it.

“What I’m finding is the majority have not gone any deeper than what they’re hearing on the news,” she said.

When pastor Deric Bartlett decided to preach two sermons about MAID last year, he readied himself for criticism. Between 800 and 1,000 people typically attend his Baptist church—City Centre Church in Mississauga, Ontario—and not all visitors are friendly to the church’s teachings, he said.

Instead, he received more positive feedback than usual, including from one attendee who said the teaching had convinced them not to pursue MAID.

Other pastors reported similar experiences. Last February, Trinity Baptist Church in Sherwood Park, a suburb east of Edmonton, Alberta, hosted a seminar by Margaret Cottle, a palliative care physician and pro-life advocate.

The seminar was originally intended for the congregation and anyone they wanted to invite, said the church’s lead pastor, Jeff Gullacher. But when leaders of the church’s denomination, Canadian Baptists of Western Canada, heard about it, they offered to help the church livestream the event and make it available to people outside the congregation.

Gullacher received positive feedback across the denomination, he said. He has also heard of people who no longer support MAID after hearing the presentation.

Gullacher has not preached a sermon directly on MAID, he said, but the church has offered a series of classes on topics related to death and dying, including wills, estate planning, and decluttering. They’re also planning to use the curriculum Dying with Christ – Living with Hope, which was developed by CMDA Canada to help churches discuss MAID in small groups.

But while pastors say they’ve received positive feedback on corporate teaching about MAID, knowing how to respond to people considering MAID or grieving a death caused by MAID can be more challenging.

Cottle, who speaks to churches regularly, has no doubt that MAID contradicts Scripture’s teaching. “There isn’t any nuance about whether or not we should be doing medical killing,” she told CT. “The nuance comes in, How do you live as a faithful Christian in a society that thinks that medical killing is a good idea?”

In her courses, Woodland has Christian chaplains and pastors consider how they would respond if one of their congregants chooses MAID or whether they would agree to be present if someone asks them to be there when MAID drugs are administered.

Regardless of what they decide about those situations, Woodland said they need to be available to families who are grieving after a MAID death. She encourages pastors and chaplains to seriously consider what it means to value the inherent, God-given dignity of people in the face of MAID.

“If you believe in the sanctity of life, then you believe in the sanctity of life regardless of the situation,” Woodland said. “As a pastoral worker, our role would be to hold the hope for that individual, to hold the hope for them while they can’t hold hope themselves.”

Evangelical leaders say faithful Christian witness in a society that celebrates MAID means being prepared to take care of people in vulnerable situations—and admitting where the church needs to improve.

According to Health Canada, the number one cause of suffering cited by people who died by MAID in 2022 was “the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities.” Eighty-six percent of people who died by MAID cited this as one of their underlying causes of suffering. Over one-third (35%) of people who died by MAID reported feeling that they were a burden to their friends, caregivers, or family; another 17 percent cited loneliness.

Churches and other Christian organizations are well equipped to offer answers and hope in the face of these existential concerns, said Julia Beazley, director of public policy for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, an organization that has publicly opposed MAID for years. Many pastors and churches have reached out to the group for information.

“We believe the proper response to the suffering of our neighbors is to respond with care and compassion, to journey alongside those who are struggling or who are nearing death with tangible support, relational support,” she said. “As Christians and as a society, we should do what we can to alleviate the suffering, not eliminate the one who suffers.”

But Beazley acknowledged churches still have a long way to go, particularly in responding to the needs of people with disabilities and in countering the ableist assumptions in MAID law, which says life with disability is not worth living. Many churches are grieving the fact that for people with disabilities, it’s often easier to find support to end their lives than the support they need to live their lives.

“We need to be teaching loudly and clearly that every person’s life has meaning, value, and dignity,” Beazley said.

At St. Hilda’s Anglican Church in Oakville, Ontario, Paul Charbonneau and his congregation are trying to practice valuing human life from conception to death. Members have sat with people who are dying at home, giving relief to their caregivers. They pray about MAID during worship services, and the church has hosted several seminars about the topic.

The church is part of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), which is itself part of the Anglican Church in North America. Along with being the rector of St. Hilda’s and a chaplain at a local hospital, Charbonneau is the executive archdeacon of ANiC. The denomination has told clergy that they cannot be present while MAID is being administered—even to pray for the dying person or their family.

Charbonneau agrees with this approach and also practices it in his capacity as a hospital chaplain. “I don’t want to be seen as complicit in any way,” he said.

What he does want to do is encourage Christians to speak out against MAID and to show people in vulnerable situations that lasting hope is found only through a relationship with Jesus.

He doesn’t see Canada’s acceptance of MAID waning any time soon. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle once this thing is let out,” he said. The speed at which MAID deaths have increased and laws have changed has left many pastors feeling ill-equipped about how to respond, he said.

But the more he watches acceptance of MAID grow in Canada and elsewhere, he said, “The more I’m convinced that Jesus is the only way that we’re going to be saved, and it’s the only way our culture can be saved.”

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