Pastors and Public Servants: Lead Your Neighbor as Yourself

Lessons from the prophet Ezekiel during exile on guiding our people through times of crisis.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

As a pastor, I’ve found one of the main difficulties in leading faithfully and living as good neighbors is that we can’t always choose our neighbors or the context and circumstances in which we lead and live. And in a time of tense divisiveness, global conflicts, natural disasters, and other complex crises, this sense of helplessness is nearly universal.

We have all experienced the reality of a world beyond our control—not least during the COVID-19 pandemic, when life changed for all of us. Many of us were shuttering in place and scrambling to find masks, sanitizers, and so forth, grappling with a staggering amount of uncertainty about what we could and could not do. For me personally, the pandemic was a crucible for my leadership, and one I find instructive for ministry to this day.

As a multigenerational, multisite African American congregation in Charlotte, North Carolina—one of the earliest cities to issue stay-in-place mandates—we faced multiple challenges and points of tension during the initial years of the pandemic. Our staff wrestled with the same questions many Christians did as we sought to balance our individual and congregational freedom with community responsibility.

How do we honor the value of embodied, collective public worship while simultaneously protecting our congregation, especially those most vulnerable with comorbidities? How do I negotiate concerns about the budget and potential loss of income considering my responsibility to protect the livelihood of my staff and their families? How does a congregation of our size and influence set a good example in how we operate during a public health emergency, including in our rhetoric?

Above all, I believe the pandemic—as any major crisis facing our community can—created a unique opportunity for us to demonstrate our confidence in God when every aspect of life as we know it seems threatened and compromised. And as I’ve reflected on this truth since then, I’ve gleaned insights from the life and ministry of Ezekiel about what it means to lead faithfully and live as good neighbors in a world beyond our control.

In the first verse of the book, the 30-year-old prophet Ezekiel identifies himself as being among the Israelite exiles by the Kebar River in the land of Babylon for seven days, “deeply distressed” (1:1; 3:14–15).

The first step for us as leaders guiding our people through times of turmoil is to absorb the reality in which we find ourselves. Rather than being in denial, withdrawing from the world, or detaching from our emotions, we are called to stay present in moments of crisis and experience life alongside those we lead. Ezekiel himself was among the people of Israel who were being exiled, and he remained in their midst.

This kind of presence cultivates the necessary empathy to know where our people are and what they need. Part of leadership in general and pastoral leadership in particular is the work of giving language to whatever our churches are facing and feeling. Leaders must name the tension in those they lead, just as Ezekiel named the emotion of the exiles, who were “deeply distressed.” Identifying a traumatic event and the feelings it causes can help people come to terms with their reality—which in turn helps them understand and transcend it.

One way our staff tried to absorb the reality of the pandemic was by reading surveys provided by Gloo, which helped us identify trends and gave us snapshots of how people were doing in real time. We tried to name the disruption, dislocation, displacement, and disappointment people were facing, along with their losses, grief, frustration, and fear.

In the book’s opening, Ezekiel also described the experience of receiving a vision of God (1:4–28). It is here that we get the next aspect of leadership during crises, which is reframing—that is, placing people’s experience and feelings within a larger framework.

Providing your people with the bigger picture often involves seeing and showing how God is at work in any given situation. Ezekiel’s vision of God’s glory did not take him away from where he was but happened while he was seated among his fellow exiles. This vision broadened his frame of reference and showed him God was at work in their midst. Likewise, it is crucial for faith leaders to identify God’s presence in situations that are out of our control.

With the pandemic, reframing moved me from asking why it happened to seeing how God was at work. It prompted our church to look for God sightings in the lives of our fellow congregants, in our neighborhoods, and in our own families. Some might call this attunement—the practice of attuning ourselves to the personal presence of God. Reframing can move a person from a posture of frustration or blame into one of curiosity and empowered expectation.

The next aspect of biblical leadership is discerning purpose.In the book’s second chapter, Ezekiel received God’s call to be a prophet. Having absorbed his people’s reality, identified their tension, and seen God at work in their midst, he learned of God’s purpose. Part of living faithfully is discerning the purpose to which we are called. How is God calling us to live, and what is God calling us to do? Whom has he placed near us, and how can we serve them?

In the case of our church not being able to meet during the pandemic, we found ways to volunteer in our community and distribute food to people in need. We chose to see our virtual worship as honoring our city and assisting our health-care system by avoiding super-spreading events. And while our gathering function was removed from the equation, we leaned heavily into our serving function.

This leads to another aspect of leadership in crisis, which is embracing opportunity. While there were restrictions during the pandemic, there were also a host of opportunities. Seeing them required a liberated imagination, intensified curiosity, and out-of-the-box creativity. It necessitated us letting go of how things used to be and embracing what might be—asking questions like “What could we do and what would it look like if … ?” and “Where might we meet people if … ?”

In the process, we came up with an idea to help our unhoused neighbors by developing a mobile unit that provides showers, washers, and dryers—named M25:40 after the famous passage Matthew 25:40 (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”). We also developed our virtual presence and resources, which broke down barriers in terms of who we could reach, where we could interact with them, and how we could reach and engage them. As a result, our numbers did not shrink after the pandemic but grew.

The next aspect is clinging to hope. What we initially thought would last two weeks or even couple months ended up persisting for far longer than we anticipated. In the meantime, our church suffered tragic and unexpected losses. The length of displacement—when our services stayed online only—tempted many in our congregation to despair. Those who grew fatigued with virtual services began attending churches that opened earlier, producing another point of tension.

The encouragement of Psalm 27:13–14 comes to mind: “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”

The final aspect is encouraging our people to look toward the future. In the case of the pandemic, after having gone completely virtual for so long, we could not assume our congregation’s attending habits would immediately return to what they were before the pandemic. That change caused us to ask how our future might look.

With some people remaining virtual, some showing up primarily in person, and others opting for hybrid attendance, did we really need to keep our three campuses? After praying about whether having three campuses was the highest and best use of our resources, we discerned that it wasn’t and eventually sold one of our buildings to another ministry.

We continued gathering Sunday mornings at the main campus location, and we are redeveloping our second campus into a 30-acre hybrid site with residential, office, retail, hotel, and conference spaces. We also opened an affordable senior living project and are in the process of developing another 30 acres to build a combination of market-rate homes and independent living. All these ventures meet critical needs in our community.

While many see the pandemic as a net loss, the decisions our church made in that time allowed us to pursue other opportunities which ultimately redefined our vision for the future. As a people of faith, we are called to be forward-thinking. Whatever the present may bring, there is a future reality which we can anticipate and pursue. Chasing that future assumes a degree of risk and ambiguity, which calls for faith, discernment, and courage.

Bishop Claude R. Alexander Jr. is the lead pastor of The Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and author of Becoming the Church and Necessary Christianity. He also serves on the board of Christianity Today.

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Ideas

Mind the Power Gap in Missions

Josh Irby

Western missionaries can make good partners if they avoid trampling on their majority world friends.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

In the past 50 years, the center of Christianity has shifted from the West to the Majority World. As Zambian mission leader Lazarus Phiri told me during a recent interview, “Those who were once a mission field are now looking like a mission force.”

Yet all too often, well-meaning mission partners in the West operate as if this shift has not occurred. The reason, in part, is that the centers of power (including money, education, institution, passport privileges, etc.) remains in the West.

This power gap in mission partnerships between Western and Majority World members, if it is not acknowledged, can result in wasted resources, discouraged missionaries, decreased engagement, and broken relationships.

Author and missiologist Miriam Adeney relates a story she once heard from an African Christian leader:

Elephant and Mouse were best friends. One day Elephant said, “Mouse, let’s have a party!” Animals gathered from far and near. They ate, and drank, and sang, and danced. And nobody celebrated more exuberantly than Elephant.

After it was over, Elephant exclaimed, “Mouse, did you ever go to a better party? What a blast!” But Mouse didn’t answer. “Where are you?” Elephant called. Then he shrank back in horror. There at his feet lay the Mouse, his body ground into the dirt—smashed by the exuberance of his friend, Elephant.

“Sometimes that is what it is like to do mission with you Americans,” the African storyteller concluded. “It’s like dancing with an elephant.”

When I first read this story, it felt like a gut punch. I mentally scrolled through my 25 years of cross-cultural mission engagement and wondered if anyone would say this of me. Have I been an elephant? In my exuberance for the mission, have I ever crushed my friends and partners?

Of course, no one enters global missions with a plan to stomp on their partners. But if you speak with missions leaders from around the world, as my colleagues and I have in researching for the Mission Shift podcast, you will discover many unwitting elephants dancing across mission fields.

Considering the power differential in missions, how can we Westerners work with others in a way that lifts our partners rather than grinding them into the dirt?

First, we need to recognize the power of money. Mary Lederleitner, author of Cross-Cultural Partnerships: Navigating the Complexities of Money and Mission, writes of the distorting power of wealth, “The person coming from the more affluent or developed country assumes he or she knows what is best.” She adds, “It is very counterintuitive to learn from people that have less wealth and less education than you.” But a failure to do so can lead to a sense of superiority that, when played out in partnership, becomes a patriarchal relationship.

As Layo Leiva, who has developed partnerships between Latin America and the United States through his regional role with Cru, said succinctly in an interview for our podcast, “The role of money is the role of power—who has the money has the power.” This is not to say that money should not be involved in missions. The sharing of resources within the body of Christ is central to gospel transformation. But we need to recognize the challenges to partnership it creates.

We also need to recognize the power of choice. Brian Virtue, who researched hundreds of cross-cultural partnerships for his PhD work, describes a scenario he saw multiple times:

People [on the lower side of the power difference] were granted access to the initial conversations, but when it came time for the decision-making and the implementation, they were no longer part of the process. It’s almost like they heard, “We’re going to go to the adult’s table and talk about it. And we’ll get back to you.”

Who is at the adult table in a partnership? If the table is populated exclusively by those from the West, or with the highest degrees, or with the biggest budgets, then your partnership is probably affected by power disparities.

There are many more powers in a mission partnership we need to recognize: education, nationality, organizational size, language, and history, to name a few. If we have eyes to see them, then we have a chance to use them for the benefit of the mission. You have money? Great! Invest it in God’s mission. You have education? Great! Use it to uplift your brothers and sisters. “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them” (Rom. 12:6, ESV throughout).

But also, if we recognize the effect power has on partnerships, we can heed Paul’s warning: “I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment” (v. 3). Elephant could have done so much good with his size if only he had recognized the potential dangers it presented.

Once we recognize the presence of power, we need to learn to walk softly in our partnerships. Slavko Hadžić, an evangelist in Bosnia and Herzegovina and associate regional director with Langham Preaching, advises, “If you come for the first time to a country or region, don’t come with an agenda. Come to observe. Don’t rush with promises. Wait, learn, be open to hear. Let the Lord lead the steps.”

Part of walking softly is recognizing that God is already at work on every continent and in every corner of the earth. What if we entered every cross-cultural situation looking for the signs of God’s work rather than a place to plant our flag or insert our own agendas? Too often we use the urgency of the mission as an excuse for injuring our partners in the mission. To walk softly, we must walk slowly.

Milan Michalko, a local pastor in the Czech Republic, also encourages a slow pace. “Partnership without relationship? I have no time for that,” he says. Relationships take time to build. Michalko has a theory as to why this is often hard for American organizations: “Because they have money, they have no time.” The abundance of money demands an abundance of quick results, but healthy partnerships demand more than a 30-minute lunch and a shared Google spreadsheet. “If you want a quality partner, that’s time consuming. You have to be here. You have to invest time. You have to build trust,” Michalko says. To walk softly, we must walk in relationship.

Forrest Inslee, coauthor of the book Re-Imagining Short-Term Missions, shared of a moment in Haiti when a team learned how to walk more softly in partnership. On the island of Haiti, the history of colonialism and inequality have embedded the idea that, because of their superior resources, the West always knows best. The actions of Western teams have only confirmed this conclusion.

Once, when a team was participating in some community performances, the American visitors took center stage, as if they were compensating for a program that was deficient or incomplete. Once, when a team was participating in some community performances with the organization Konbit Haiti, the American visitors took center stage, as if they were compensating for a program that was deficient or incomplete. But this time, the Haitian leaders spoke up. “Would you please stand in the back of the room instead of on stage?” they asked.

By speaking up, these leaders risked offending their guests and jeopardizing the flow of resources from their American partners. And some were offended. But the majority learned from the challenge. They stood in the back. Over time, the partnership grew in mutuality, trust, and health. To walk softly, we must sometimes stand in the back.

Leiva shares one nonintuitive way of walking slowly. In mission partnerships, the higher-power partner often shares the products of their system (money, books, programs) but rarely lets the lower-power partner behind the curtain to see how the products are made.

Money is sent, but no one shares how to raise money. Books are translated, but no one shares how to write a book. One partner maintains control, and the other becomes dependent.

Layo now asks his partners to not only send the product but also “transfer the technology” that produced it. This way, instead of creating endless dependency, we contribute our strength to grow our partners’ strength. As we walk softly, our power lifts our partners rather than crushing them.

When we recognize our power and learn to walk slowly, we have an opportunity to make the most important discovery in partnerships. The principle is found in another story of a mouse, this one from Aesop:

A Lion lay asleep in the forest, his great head resting on his paws. A timid little Mouse came upon him unexpectedly, and in her fright and haste to get away, ran across the Lion’s nose. Roused from his nap, the Lion laid his huge paw angrily on the tiny creature to kill her.

“Spare me!” begged the poor Mouse. “Please let me go and some day I will surely repay you.”

The Lion was much amused to think that a Mouse could ever help him. But he was generous and finally let the Mouse go.

Some days later, while stalking his prey in the forest, the Lion was caught in the toils of a hunter’s net. Unable to free himself, he filled the forest with his angry roaring. The Mouse knew the voice and quickly found the Lion struggling in the net. Running to one of the great ropes that bound him, she gnawed it until it parted, and soon the Lion was free.

“You laughed when I said I would repay you,” said the Mouse. “Now you see that even a Mouse can help a Lion.”

Too often, we in the West define power by the ways we are powerful: money, education, passport privileges, and other resources. Like the Lion, we laugh at the idea of being helped by a Mouse. But other powers are at play than those that can be measured: cross-cultural flexibility and understanding, dependence on God, willingness to suffer, and missional ingenuity.

Every follower of Christ—even the one who appears small—is powerful. Every believer is filled with the Spirit. Every believer is a part of the body with a crucial role to play. Every believer is formed by God for his mission. And as Paul reminds us, those who seem the weakest are indispensable (1 Cor. 12:22–27).

Even lions and elephants have needs. In fact, sometimes our strengths are the sources of our needs. Because of our abundant resources, we can be slow to pray. Because of our efficient systems, we can be slow to improvise. Because of our set plans, we can often miss what God is doing in the margins. More than ever, the West needs the many strengths of the Majority World.

Even Jesus, whom Lederleitner calls “the ultimate high-power partner,” positioned himself to rely on the strengths of others. He made himself nothing, taking the form of a man. He walked softly among us. He invited the disciples “behind the curtain” of his life and shared everything with them. He entrusted them with the mission.

The Lion of Judah did not laugh at the contribution of common men and women from the villages of Galilee. He called them friends and gave them the keys of his kingdom. Likewise, our Lord has commissioned and empowered us with his Spirit. And whenever we follow his example, our mission partnerships will give us all a reason to truly celebrate.

Josh Irby is Cru City Global’s partnership director for Europe and a cohost of the Mission Shift podcast. He is a former missionary and coauthor of Cross on a Hill: A Personal, Historical, and Biblical Search for the True Meaning of a Controversial Symbol.

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News

Died: Bill Pannell, Black Evangelical Who Raised the Issue of Racism

Daniel Silliman

He wanted white believers to reckon with “cultural captivity,” but saw them become “more and more American and less and less Christian.”

Courtesy of InterVarsity Press / Edits by Christianity Today

Bill Pannell, a Black evangelical who pushed white evangelicals to recognize their captivity to the culture of American racism, died on October 11 at age 95.

The evangelist and seminary professor argued that the Good News is all about reconciliation—between God and humanity, but also horizontally, between people—and Christians are called to the ministry of reconciliation. But white Christians who claimed the name evangel, he said, could only seem to muster occasional interest in racism, even though it was the most acute division in American society, the area in the greatest need of reconciliation.

And then they mostly asked Black people to do the reconciling.

“It’s like inviting someone to comment on the quality of the dinner when you haven’t [invited them] to the table,” Pannell said in the 2024 documentary The Gospel According to Bill Pannell. “Most of the evangelical movement could only go so far. They could only go so far.”

Pannell wrote about his experience of racism in My Friend, The Enemy, published in 1968. He described how pervasive assumptions of white supremacy impacted him and his sense of dignity and worth, growing up. He found his dignity restored by the gospel, but then discovered, to his dismay, that the people who preached it to him were not interested in addressing the social problems caused by that sort of sin.

Twenty-five years later, he wrote about racism again. Watching the city of Los Angeles consumed by six days of riots following the acquittal of four police officers who severely beat a Black man named Rodney King, Pannell warned white evangelicals about the possibility of a coming race war. Americans could not afford to keep ignoring the problems caused by racism, he argued, and Christians are uniquely called to reconciliation.

The book was republished 28 years after that, in 2021, as four more officers in another city appeared in another court to face more charges of “unreasonable force” following the death of a Black man named George Floyd. Pannell couldn’t help but notice that while the names and dates had changed, the problem persisted. And white evangelicals still seemed captive to a culture deeply invested in ignoring the issue.

“Somehow or other in my lifetime,” Pannell said, “the evangelical movement became more and more American and less and less Christian.”

Pannell was born on June 25, 1929, to William and Olive Davison Pannell. He was the eldest of eight children and was raised as part of a tiny Black minority in Sturgis, Michigan. The census counted fewer than 200 Black people in Sturgis in 1930, which was less than half a percent of the population of St. Joseph County. Some of the Black people, like Pannell’s stepfather, Joseph Perkins, wouldn’t have lived there at all, but they had jobs just across the border in Indiana in towns where they weren’t allowed to stay after dark.

Pannell recalled later he never heard the word racism as a child, and yet the sense of it pervaded everything.

“I was aware that I was different and that the difference made a difference in a white world,” he said. “You belong and yet you don’t. You are embraced—but not really.”

Pannell excelled in sports and was a high-scoring shooting guard for the basketball team. And yet off the court, he was not accepted as an equal by his peers or their parents. He was not made to feel welcome.

The one significant exception was Eunice Randall. A pastor’s daughter, she invited Pannell to a party for young people at Sturgis Missionary Church. He went and found a community of people eager to embrace him. Pannell started attending the church, went forward during an altar call, and accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior.

The church gave Pannell a Bible and told him to read it. He did—and discovered a sense of worth and dignity he’d never known before. He was peeling potatoes at a segregated country club and reading Ephesians 1:4–14 when it hit him.

“To think that God has chosen me before the foundations of the world—had his eye on me, chose me, picked me out, plucked me out of the tribe as it were, made me his own. If that’s true, whew! Lord have mercy,” Pannell later said. “I really am somebody, no matter what anybody else says.”

After high school, Pannell went to Fort Wayne Bible College with the encouragement and financial support of a Black housekeeper, or “domestic,” named Mildred Bedford. She had somehow saved $500 and gave it to him, he recalled in the 2024 documentary, telling him he needed to “strike while the iron’s hot.”

In Fort Wayne, he learned he needed to go out into “all the world” to preach the gospel, but received very little education about that world, Pannell later recalled.

“I didn’t know from beans,” he said.

Nevertheless, the young Black man became an evangelist, traveling around the country with white classmates to lead revivals and crusades, calling people to come forward, confess their sins, and accept Jesus. It gave Pannell another perspective on American racism. Christians across the country were happy to have him lead the singing as people got saved, he noticed, but they wouldn’t want him to live in their communities.

“A singing Negro has always been welcome,” he wrote in My Friend, The Enemy, “as long as he is a vagabond.”

Pannell said evangelicals in the north were not fighting to maintain segregation—but he noticed they wouldn’t speak out against it either. Their silence seemed to handcuff him to his suitcase, he wrote, making sure he never unpacked, never made himself at home.

Pannell decided he needed to learn more from Black Christians. At 25, he moved to Detroit to work under B. M. Nottage, a Plymouth Brethren minister from the Bahamas who evangelized in Black communities across the US. Nottage and his two older brothers started gospel halls and Brethren assemblies in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. In the Detroit alone, they founded Gospel Chapel, Grace Gospel Chapel, Berean Bible Chapel, River Rouge Bible Chapel, the Open Door Rescue Mission, and Bethany Tabernacle, where Pannell joined Nottage as an associate pastor in 1954.

The young evangelist considered Nottage a mentor and a father figure. Pannell lived with him in a back room and in 1955 married his secretary, Hazel Scott, who was from Memphis.

After a decade, Pannell went back to working with white evangelicals. In 1964, he joined Youth For Christ, the evangelistic ministry that launched Billy Graham’s career.

He quickly found himself unsettled, however, by the way white evangelicals cared about Black people’s souls but not their civil rights, economic conditions, educational opportunities, or housing. When practical issues impacting the well being of Black people came up, Pannell said, the white evangelicals objected that they didn’t want to get distracted by politics. Other issues, however, did not seem like a distraction: prayer in schools, liberals on the Supreme Court, and communism around the globe.

Some problems seemed to merit social and political action, “but mention the inhumanity of a society which with unbelievable indifference imprisons ‘the souls of black folks,’” Pannell wrote, “and these crusaders begin mumbling about sin.” He tried to argue the impact of racism couldn’t just be waved away like that but was mostly unsuccessful.

Much of white evangelicalism seemed to be captured by the culture of the suburbs, Pannell said. As white people fled cities following desegregation, white evangelicals went with them. Born-again Christians came to identify so strongly with their white, middle-class, family-focused, conservative communities, Pannell said, that they found it impossible to understand or even consider the concerns of their minority brothers and sisters.

In the 1990s he pointed to Christianity Today as an example.

“It ought to be called Suburban Christianity Today,” he wrote in The Coming Race Wars. “Its board of directors comes from suburbia, as do most of its writers, most of its editors, and all of its management elite. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in the values espoused in the magazine.”

There were some white evangelicals, of course, who did want to address the problem of American racism. Pannell said they expressed hope for racial reconciliation and encouraged him and other Black evangelicals to work on the issue. But their focus would quickly wander, their interest fade. Few seemed committed to anything that would require change.

“Long after all the coffee was drunk and the little sandwiches eaten, the uneasy smiles were retracted and it became clear that reconciliation with most of these saints was still a ways off,” Pannell said. “In fact, it was a long ways off.”

He came to believe that, in the meantime, white evangelicals didn’t have the moral authority to evangelize Black people. Ignoring the reality of racism undermined their ability to proclaim the gospel.

“Don’t preach love to me. Especially if you intend I do all the loving,” Pannell wrote. “What right has the oppressor to demand that his victim be saved from sin? You may be scripturally and evangelistically correct, but you are ethically wrong. You have the right message, but your timing is off.”

Pannell wrote his book on racism, and it came out in 1968, the same year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and it seemed like hope for peaceful change vanished in America. Pannell left Youth For Christ and joined a group of Black evangelists led by Tom Skinner. Pannell thought he was done with white evangelicals.

A few years later, however, he was approached by David Allan Hubbard, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and asked to join the board of trustees. Pannell wasn’t interested. But Hubbard argued the evangelical school was not interested in affirmative action of symbolic representations of diversity. Fuller believed Black leadership was essential to its mission.

“Almost everybody needed one of us,” Pannell said. “He didn’t seem to be playing that game. He said, ‘We don’t think we can model the kingdom of God well monoculturally.’ Whoa!”

Pannell joined the board in 1971, becoming the first Black board member. He left the board to join the faculty in ’74, becoming the first Black professor. He ran an innovative program for the theological education of Black pastors, which later became the African American Church Studies Program and in 2015 was renamed the William E. Pannell Center for Black Church Studies.

Pannell spent the rest of his career teaching and mentoring Black ministers. He was, on occasion, drawn back to the task of challenging white evangelicals to take racism seriously but noted that despite “some paroxysms of curiosity” about the theology of racial reconciliation, little seemed to change.

And yet he continued to believe that white evangelicals could change.

“The evangelical movement could be born again,” Pannell said. “I would issue a call back to the cross, back to repentance, and I would ask that God would, somehow or other, save us from our cultural captivity.”

Pannell’s eldest son, Philip, died in 2015; his wife, Hazel, died in 2021. He is survived by his son Peter.

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News

How Messianic Jews Are Serving Israelis Displaced by Hamas and Hezbollah

Heather M. Surls

In Israel’s only communal village of believers in Jesus, three women reflect on loving their neighbors—and their enemies—in the midst of war.

School principal Chani Kalni surveys damaged classrooms at Shalhavot Chabad elementary school in Gedera, Israel.

Leon Neal / Staff / Getty

As the sirens wailed on October 1, Nirit Bar-David took refuge in her familiar safe room. Iran had just launched another 180 missiles at Israel, and she had about a minute to take cover. So did the other 350 residents of Israel’s only Messianic Jewish moshav.

Sitting on a pine-covered ridge about ten miles west of Jerusalem, the Yad HaShmona community has lived in steady tension over the past year of war with Hamas in Gaza—now extended against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Thirty members of the community have served with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on both fronts, severely disrupting their families’ lives.

Yad HaShmona’s sirens did not sound on April 14, when Iran first launched drones and missiles at Israel, because the projectiles did not come within range of the village. But Bar-David, a financial manager who has lived at Yad HaShmona since she was seven years old, took cover in her bomb shelter anyway. Intelligence reports indicated that the unprecedented Iranian attack would arrive at night, so she decided to play it safe. She slept in the shelter attached to her home—an enclave with thick cement walls and a heavy metal door—and all the while, surrendering herself to God’s sovereign care.

“A bomb can ruin my whole house—not only this room,” she said. “I really believe that God is here and will protect me—and if not, it will be his decision, not a mistake.”

Since October 7, members of the moshav—a community resembling a kibbutz but with more individual autonomy—have had to make similar decisions over and over again: how to act quickly while trusting God.

At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Ayelet Ronen, chair of Yad HaShmona’s management committee, turned on the radio and heard the initial reports of a security breach on the border with Gaza. One of her sons, a member of IDF, wanted to ride her husband’s motorcycle south to help. Ronen and her husband convinced him to stay, but two hours later, he and around two dozen others from the community were officially called up to serve.

That was a Saturday, the morning after the moshav celebrated the end of Sukkot, the Jewish Festival of Booths. As a leader in the village, Ronen worked to soothe shock and panic in those who remained. While older men patrolled the village’s perimeter, she and the staff of the moshav’s Logos Hotel started to receive calls from Israelis fleeing the towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip.

“By Tuesday we were fully booked,” Ronen recalled. “To all of them, we just said, ‘Come, we’ll figure out the funds later.’”

Yad HaShmona—which in Hebrew means “memory of the eight”—was founded in 1971 by a group of Finnish Christians who wanted to atone for the sins of their country in a tangible way; during World War II, Finland had surrendered to the Nazis eight Jews, seven of whom died in Auschwitz. Miraculously, Israel granted land to this group of Gentiles, who envisioned building up the Jewish state alongside Jewish believers in Jesus, known in Hebrew as Yeshua.

Fifty years later, Yad HaShmona is home to around 60 families. A member of the moshav must be a believer in Jesus, an Israeli citizen for at least 10 years, and willing to serve beyond his or her immediate family for the collective success of the village.

“Yad HaShmona has played an essential role in the formation of the Messianic community’s identity in Israel,” said Danny Kopp, general secretary of Evangelical Alliance Israel. Not only does the moshav host national gatherings for believers, he elaborated, but also it models communal life while remaining integrated with the broader society.

Within a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Yad HaShmona had welcomed around 200 evacuees—a fraction of the 200,000 Israelis displaced in the conflict’s early months. Since evacuees were housed in small hotel rooms without kitchens, the moshav’s management decided to convert a large hall into a common area for them. Between piles of donated clothes and toys, observant Jews gathered to pray. Sometimes men of the moshav would join them to make a minyan—the quorum of ten Jewish men needed for prayer.

“The religious people didn’t want to talk about [faith],” Ronen says, “but whenever we had an opportunity, we would tell them.”

Evacuees learned about the Christian organizations that helped pay for their room and board before Israeli government aid kicked in, a month and a half after the start of the conflict. And as they were able, moshav residents testified to their belief in Yeshua as Messiah.

Ronen recounted the story of an ultra-Orthodox woman who was driving to stay at Yad HaShmona when she received a phone call.

“Don’t go there,” her caller warned. “Those people are dangerous; they will change your faith.”

She immediately purposed to reverse her course. But Highway 1, a major road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, had no place for a U-Turn. She ended up at the moshav, and sometime during her stay, expressed her appreciation for the community’s welcoming members.

“You’re nothing like what people told me,” Ronen said the woman concluded.

Historically, Israel’s Messianic community has been maligned, especially by ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are estimated at 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population. But with conservative estimates of 30,000 believers in Israel worshiping in at least 75 congregations, Ronen thinks secular Israelis increasingly consider Messianic Jews an acceptable stream of society.

When the first group of evacuees was able to return to their homes after a three-month stay at Yad HaShmona, the moshav received a new group of 25 families, who stayed in temporary housing until the end of August. And since Israel’s offensive in Lebanon began in late September, in response to near-daily rocket exchanges with Hezbollah, more than a dozen families from northern towns have taken refuge at Yad HaShmona.

Mona Pelled, a guide with the Messianic Jewish travel agency Sar-El Tours, has lived at Yad HaShmona since 2017. Last fall, she interacted with her displaced neighbors at a sandwich bar opened in the moshav parking lot by the Christian Broadcasting Network. When anyone asked questions about Jesus, she shared the gospel in ways appropriate to each person’s background.

“We need to respect everyone,” Pelled said, “and if they see Yeshua in you, they will discover the truth.”

Pelled’s friendships extend beyond her Jewish circles as well. For 12 years, she has regularly met with Arab Israeli Christian women for fellowship and prayer. Most of these women are pacifists, she said, and she wishes she could be one too. But her parents and grandparents were Libyan Jews sent to a work camp in Italy at the end of World War II. As a Jew living in a state facing hostile extremist groups, her instinct for self-protection runs high.

Hamas’s massacre was a mini-Holocaust, she said. Though Israel must maintain a strong military because of its many outspoken enemies, she lamented the isolation Jews feel now that international opinion has turned against them.

“People in the world do not understand that this is the only land we have,” Pelled said.

Ronen’s background also informs her position on politics; in 1948, her grandfather came to Palestine during the British Mandate with an Auschwitz ID tattooed on his arm. Within a month, he enlisted with the Haganah—the early Jewish paramilitary organization—to fight for Israel’s independence.

Since October 7, Ronen said the people of Yad HaShmona have spent many hours studying the Bible and considering the meaning, in light of their new reality, of the Messiah’s command to love one’s enemies—a complex discussion, she admits. Distinguishing between armed militants and Palestinian civilians who are suffering the consequences of war, her community agrees that Hamas is not the enemy Jesus meant for them to love.

Believers are called to love enemies in close proximity to them, Ronen said, individuals who spitefully use and hate them. Jesus commanded love and prayer for these because he knows it is human nature to despise people who wrong them. To these people, she said, Jesus’ followers are called to “turn to them the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39), to do good (Rom. 12:20), and to share God’s transforming message of salvation.

But as an evil organization that opposes God’s plan for the Jewish people in their covenant land, Ronen said, Hamas differs from these individual, personal enemies. Citing Psalm 83:1–4, she said that any group set on Israel’s annihilation is in fact an enemy of God. As such, war can be waged against these groups without transgressing Jesus’ command.

“You can actually fight an enemy—fight a just war—and not develop hatred in your heart for the individual person before you,” Ronen said.

In agreement, Pelled added that Jesus does not intend for believers to love the “demonic,” which is how she characterizes Hamas.

“If the enemy comes against you, you have to protect yourself,” Pelled said. “It doesn’t mean I don’t love them or that I don’t pray for them. We do pray for them … we pray for the Gazan people, for those that are innocent. We pray for the children. We pray for a future for them.”

Nirit Bar-David also mentioned wicked spiritual forces at work, calling Hamas’s animosity toward Israelis “the work of the devil.” But even in the face of attacks against her people, she said she turns to God and prays that everyone—including her nation’s enemies—will find salvation in Jesus. Their repentance is necessary, she said, to halt the evil Hamas perpetuates.

“We need this change,” Bar-David said. “And having this attitude which Hamas has toward Israel, I think it comes from a very deep, wrong place that really needs healing—if they would choose that.”

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Theology

My Friend, Bill Pannell

Edward Gilbreath

A reflection on the trailblazing Black theologian and his influence on American evangelicalism.

Photo courtesy of Fuller Seminary

I first met the late William Pannell in 1993 in a hallway of Christianity Today. I was in my early 20s, just a year removed from graduating college. Dr. Pannell was visiting his old friend, former CT president Paul Robbins, and the pair was on a leisurely tour around the office.

I remember being enthralled by this dashing Black man in a tailored suit, his throaty laugh echoing around the building. Excited to see a young Black editor on CT’s payroll, Pannell greeted me with that winsome smile that had launched a thousand provocative sermons.

We were both slightly taken aback to see another African American in an office that was then so thoroughly white. At the time, I was one of only two or three people of color employed by CT and the lone Black person on the editorial team. What I didn’t know then was that I was shaking hands with one of the people who had helped create the conditions for me to hold that very role.

Pannell was a trailblazer whose leadership at organizations such as Youth for Christ, Tom Skinner Associates, and Fuller Theological Seminary had unlocked doors for later generations of Black evangelicals to enter through. Long after that first meeting, he would tell me, “When we [pioneering Black leaders] were taking our lumps in the ’50s and ’60s at evangelical ministries, colleges, and publishers, we were imagining a future where leaders like you could be possible.”

Over the years, I had the privilege of interviewing Pannell for various articles, books, videos, and other projects, both public and personal. In each interaction, he was brilliant and exceedingly generous with his time. Although he was a walking embodiment of “speaking truth to power,” he always led with humor and humility.

I quickly learned that I was not alone in my fandom; he was a mentor to scores of women and men—pastors and preachers, scholars and activists, folks who had passed through his classrooms at Fuller, as well as scraggly strays like me whom he happened to find along the way. When I wrote my 2006 book, Reconciliation Blues, about being a Black evangelical in mostly white settings, I was taking cues from what he did in his groundbreaking 1968 tome, My Friend, The Enemy, a passionate corrective to a white evangelical community that he both loved and distrusted.

Pannell loved Jesus and his church. As a preacher, his heart beat for the gospel and its biblically rooted values of evangelism, discipleship, and justice. His teaching was grounded in a strikingly honest understanding of how Christianity and the church really operate in the world. He was frank about how they are often accessories to the sins of racism and social injustice rather than proponents of reconciliation.

A lack of real discipleship was at the core of our troubles, Pannell believed. “Christ’s parting command was that we go and make disciples of the nations,” he wrote in his last book, an expanded edition of his 1993 release, The Coming Race Wars? “It wasn’t build more churches; it was make disciples. It seems fairly clear today that we have far more churches and Christians than we have disciples.”

Before going into hospice care earlier this month, Pannell more or less worked until his 95-year-old frame could go no further. He preached via Zoom, finished a memoir, and conducted interviews for two documentaries, including one about his life and ministry. Throughout our three decades of acquaintance, he and I would periodically call or send a text to check in on one another. I never took the gift of his friendship for granted, but now that he’s gone, I’m appreciating those exchanges even more.

My final text from him came early Sunday, September 22. I had sent him a message the day before to congratulate him on The Gospel According to Bill Pannell, a documentary that had its premiere that weekend. “Beautiful film about an amazing man of God! That Bill Pannell is a remarkable fella,” I wrote.

His reply: “Thanks be to JESUS! And to his friends like you.”

Edward Gilbreath is the author of Reconciliation Blues and Birmingham Revolution.

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News

When the Elder Calls—From Outer Space

Emily Belz

Two sick church members in their 90s got a pastoral “visit” from a friend—an astronaut stuck on the International Space Station.

Astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Suni Williams were the first humans to fly a Boeing Starliner to the International Space Station.

Courtesy of NASA / Robert Markowitz

Billy Adkison, 91, spent his life farming in East Texas; he never wanted to go to outer space.

“I don’t want to be higher than pulling corn and lower than digging taters,” he told CT.

All the same, he has watched the skies from his yard to catch a glimpse of the International Space Station passing by—“like a big old star,” he said.

Adkison wanted to keep an eye on one of his church elders, astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore, whose weeklong trip to space has been extended to eight months.

Wilmore and his fellow astronaut Suni Williams left Earth in June as the first humans to ride a Boeing Starliner spacecraft, but the craft had helium leaks and thruster problems during the launch. NASA decided to return Starliner to Earth without its human passengers for safety, leaving the two astronauts for a much longer mission than they anticipated.

NASA recently launched a SpaceX Dragon capsule to the International Space Station with two empty seats. It will bring Wilmore and Williams home in February.

This is Wilmore’s third expedition to space. Adkison has tracked him in space on his iPad since that became possible, knowing where Wilmore was any time of the day or night.

What Adkison didn’t know was that Wilmore, who is one of his elders at Providence Baptist Church in Pasadena, Texas, was keeping an eye on him too.

While Wilmore was in space this summer, Adkison was admitted to the hospital with a serious heart problem. Wilmore heard the news from his wife, Deanna Wilmore, and called Adkison to check on him from the space station.

“It surprised me, but it made me feel very good,” said Adkison, who is now out of the hospital and back at his assisted living facility, although he has struggled with other ailments lately.

In the 17 years that Adkison has known him through church, Wilmore has never acted “high class” as an astronaut, he said. “He’d find people like us that were having trouble.” Adkison said. He’s not sure why, but Wilmore always calls him “Mr. Billy.”

Over the years, the Wilmores have visited Adkison regularly and made him birthday cakes. Adkison said Wilmore would drive him home from visits, knowing Adkison didn’t like to drive at night. When Adkison’s wife of 64 years died in 2020, Wilmore gave a sermon at her funeral.

“I plan on him doing mine,” Adkison said, but since Wilmore is stuck on the space station, “I’m going to have to hold off for a bit.”

That wasn’t the only pastoral call Wilmore made from space. Providence Baptist pastor Tommy Dahn’s mother-in-law, Suda Smith, lives with him and his wife. Smith turned 93 this summer, and Wilmore called her on her birthday. Wilmore called her again at the end of August. She is blind and had just gotten out of the hospital.

“Her countenance of course lifted, her eyes sparkled, and that’s all I can say,” said Dahn. “She was just thrilled.”

She tells everyone she meets, “I got a call on my birthday from space,”he said.

NASA astronauts have access to the internet to make calls when they’re off duty. Dahn said other than calling the older invalids, Wilmore mostly stays in touch with his wife.

“That’s the epitome of Barry’s personal ministry—he looks for those who are down and outers,” said Dahn. “He could not have loved my mother-in-law and Billy any more than a simple phone call. … It’s more almost than him coming to see them in one sense, when he’s here.”

Other NASA employees go to Providence Baptist, a church of about 250 attendees. Astronaut Tracy Dyson, who just returned from the space station on a Soyuz capsule after six months in outer space, is a member there.

Wilmore and his family have been at Providence for 17 years, Dahn said.

“He’s really put his life into the church. … For us as a church, we miss him,” added Dahn. “All the glory goes to God. He does not take the glory to himself.”

The church had considered cutting the livestream of its services since the pandemic ended because leadership didn’t want people to stay home instead of coming to church. But they decided to keep it for the people like Adkison who were homebound and couldn’t attend. And now Wilmore is streaming the services from space.

Dahn said NASA allowed the church to be linked into the space station at one point for Wilmore to do a devotional, and the congregation on Earth sang songs like “Amazing Grace” with the astronauts at the station.

When Wilmore was last on the space station in 2014, he sent Adkison’s wife a video of him praying for her from the station’s cupola. Adkison said he accidentally erased the video from the iPad at some point.

“I thought I would send Barry back up there to get another ,” Adkison quipped.

In a NASA press conference after the announcement that the astronauts would be stranded for additional months, Wilmore and Williams remained upbeat about their extended stay. Wilmore, 60, said the gravity-free environment would give him relief from his aches and pains.

Retired astronaut Terry Virts, who commanded the space station in 2014–2015, was stranded on the station in 2015 for an extra month after a cargo capsule blew up. He saw that as “bonus space time.” But he said an eight-month extension was a long trip.

“There’s been astronauts that got stuck or delayed—never as dramatically as the two Boeing astronauts,” he said in an interview with broadcaster Pablo Torre. He added that the families of stranded astronauts are the ones who bear the brunt of the extension, often with spouses having to care for children on their own.

On a personal level, Wilmore is missing the bulk of his youngest daughter’s senior year of high school. In his press conference from the space station, Wilmore said astronauts train for the unexpected.

“It’s a very risky business,” he said. A reporter asked him about his faith sustaining him, and he said he didn’t want to speak outside of his role as an astronaut but said anyone interested could look at 2 Corinthians 12:9–10.

Those verses say in part, “‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ … for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

He added: “You’ve got to be resilient and go with whatever the good Lord gives.”

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Ideas

What Are Parents For?

Nadya Williams

Contributor

Scripture has a clear vision for parents as stewards of our children. It’s not an instruction manual for modern parenting spats.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Wikimedia Commons

In his 1990 essay collection, Wendell Berry considered the question “What are people for?” The answer, in true Berry fashion, is a beautifully intricate web of answers that add up to human flourishing.

That flourishing is connected to the flourishing of the environment around us, and this answer also has deep theological roots. God’s promises in the Old Testament repeatedly revolved around blessing the land and the people together, not separately. We flourish when planted, rooted, and nurtured together, with others around us. Most of all, we flourish when rooted not only in human community but also in a covenant with God.

From the premise that people are made for flourishing, we can ask the same question about specific human roles, like that of a parent: “What are parents for?” What guidelines does the Bible offer in answering this question?

The timing of my exploration is not accidental. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen vicious attacks within Christian circles against Christian parents who embrace public schooling and those who choose homeschooling.

And there’s no shortage of other parenting wars, both within the church and outside of it. Parenting Facebook groups have become legendary for all the wrong reasons. They’re the place to berate and be berated for every parenting choice imaginable: breastfeeding or bottle, Tylenol or no, travel sports or local only. Outspoken anti-vaxxers meet weekend-warrior dewormers meet all-natural-raw-foodists and many, many more—each convinced that their answer alone will save not only their children but also the world.

It would be funny, except the anxiety is far too real for anyone to be laughing. There’s no essential oil blend to help with this.

I contend that, like so many other problems we face, this one is theological at its root. We’ve lost track of any real theological imagination for understanding the purpose of parents. That’s true of the church and our broader society today, and we are the worse for it.

True, the Bible isn’t an encyclopedically precise instruction manual—you can’t just go to the index, look up “public schools” or “vaccinations” or “diapering options,” and find out exactly what the Lord has ordained on each particular issue. And if that’s what we are hoping to find, even subconsciously, that’s another problem that lies with us. It means we’re viewing parenting as a set of instrumentalized tasks—to feed, to wash, to chauffeur to activities—and losing track of the larger vision, a true calling for a purpose much larger than any list of tasks.

As it happens, the Bible does offer such a vision: Parents are called to be stewards of our children. Whether we’ve given birth to these children ourselves or have adopted or fostered them, we receive them as a gift for just a short time. During this time, we are but stewards appointed by God to hold in trust the treasure we have been given: image-bearers with immortal souls! At the end of their growing-up years, in most cases, off they go, on to adulthood.

But—and this is key—while the Bible’s teaching on this overall vision is clear, we also see repeatedly that there is more than one way to be a faithful steward.

In one of the most poignant passages, the opening section of the Shema prayer and the instructions that follow it in Deuteronomy 6:4–25, we learn of parents’ obligation to teach our children constantly about God, at home and outside, sitting and lying down and walking about during the day. Children raised in such households will ask earnest spiritual questions:

In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?”tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.Before our eyes the Lord sent signs and wonders—great and terrible—on Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household.But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land he promised on oath to our ancestors.The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.” (Deut. 6:20–25)

We see here that it is our duty as parents to keep teaching our children about God at every chance we get. It is also our duty to be prepared to answer deep theological questions from our children when they inevitably arise.

Without parental teaching, the passage implies, how would the next generation even know anything about God? This makes the task of theological education and spiritual formation that is entrusted to parents all the more urgent and necessary. The loss of key theological truths is always just one generation away.

This process of telling children about God through every activity imaginable adds up to what we today call discipleship. Though direct teaching is commanded, too, this modeling of the Christian life is primarily caught, not taught. It’s through everyday life in family, in other words, that children learn to follow Jesus. Designated times set apart for explicitly spiritual things are not enough.

Of course, another way to see it is that all of family life itself is a designated time set apart for discipleship. Every moment of life is God’s, and we as parents should model this truth. Such discipleship is how we live out our call to be faithful stewards of our children.

God expects much from those to whom he has given a trust, 1 Corinthians 4:2 reminds us. The parable in Matthew 25:14–30 elaborates further. In this story, Jesus tells of a master who entrusted various amounts of gold to three different stewards—to each “according to his ability.” Two of them invested the funds and made a profit, earning praise and further rewards. But the third simply hid the gold in the ground and returned it to the master exactly as he had received it, without any profit. He earned a harsh rebuke for his laziness.

Presented in a series of stories illuminating God’s kingdom, this parable is not about the virtues of wise financial investment. The real investment, rather, is in people. The stewards are—or should be—sharing and growing their knowledge of God. That includes parents teaching our children in word and example, preparing them to become thoughtful believers themselves.

Other passages also describe the high expectations God has for stewards to whom he entrusts serious responsibilities. And yet, Matthew 25 also makes it clear that there’s more than one way to be a good steward. Not every praiseworthy steward made the same decision, yet as long as they each wisely invested the treasure given to them, the master was happy.

Of course, we could also note the many unfortunate stories of parents and children throughout the Bible. These are examples of what happens when parents do not steward our children well.

This is a major theme of 1 and 2 Kings, where the kings of ancient Israel repeatedly appear to be terrible fathers who neglect their children’s spiritual education, largely ignoring their sons except when considering their potential as heirs. The result is one disastrous king after another, failures not only in spiritual terms but also by any earthly metric. And in each of those cases, Scripture describes spiritual and relational failures within the family. The problem is never the sort of parenting choices we bicker about: education styles, sports teams, or diet.

I’ve written before about the strong preferences that I have for my children, the image-bearers I have personally been called to steward and disciple together with my husband. But my investment choices are not what every other good and faithful steward will select, and Christian parents have the right and responsibility—spiritually as well as legally—to make those investment choices for themselves, informed by prayer, Scripture, and sound counsel as needed.

This knowledge of God’s praise for stewards with varying investment strategies should reconcile us to differences in parental and educational decisions among Bible-believing Christians. We need not all steward identically to be faithful servants.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).

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News

Died: Jack Iker, Anglican Who Drew the Line at Women’s Ordination

Daniel Silliman

The Texas bishop fought a bitter legal battle with the Episcopal Church and won.

Courtesy of Jack Iker / Edits by Christianity Today

Jack Iker, a Texas bishop who took 48 congregations and 15,000 parishioners out of the Episcopal Church USA and helped start the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), died on October 5. He was 75.

Iker was a conservative Anglo-Catholic who made common cause with evangelicals—whom he called “strange bedfellows”—in order to fight against liberal theological revisionism. He was especially opposed to the ordination of women. He would not accept women as priests in his diocese nor submit to the leadership of a woman elected as presiding bishop over the Episcopal Church in 2006.

“It puts me in a compromising position,” Iker told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the time. “It’s not against women. It’s a theological position. We believe the ordination of women … is a fundamental break with apostolic tradition and biblical teaching.”

The Texas bishop became one of four bishops to found ACNA in 2009. He continued to quarrel with the more conservative ACNA over the issue of women in ministry, however. The Anglicans ordain women as priests in some dioceses, but not others. For Iker, this was a line in the sand.

“It would be a bad legacy to be remembered as the bishop who didn’t ordain women,” he said. And yet he believed he had to fight to protect Episcopalians and then Anglicans in America from becoming “a church that acts more and more like a rebellious Protestant sect and less and less like an integral part of the one holy catholic and apostolic church.”

Iker was a polarizing figure, especially in Texas, where his followers were sometimes derisively called “Ikerpalians.”

“He didn’t back down from what we’ve received in terms of Biblical faith,” said Ryan Reed, the ACNA bishop who succeeded Iker in Fort Worth after Iker’s retirement. “His stance for the biblical Christian faith made him either a hero … or it made him despised.”

Many of the men who served under Iker in Texas praised him for his faithfulness in the face of sustained opposition. The word they used most often was steadfast.

Iker was “an incredible example of a Godly man faithfully living the gospel of Jesus Christ,” according to Mark Polley, an Anglican priest in Bedford, Texas. “God only knows how many people he positively influenced with his faith, courage, steadfastness.”

Iker was born in Cincinnati on August 31, 1949. He said little publicly over the years about his childhood, early faith, or call to ministry. He got married in a Methodist Church in 1968 as a freshman at the University of Cincinnati and pursued ordination in the Episcopal Church after graduation. He was ordained at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Dayton, Ohio, in 1974 and went on to serve quietly as a priest at Church of the Redeemer in Sarasota, Florida, for 15 years.

Iker didn’t become a public figure—or a lightning rod—until he was nominated to become a bishop in 1992.

The Episcopal Church had allowed women in ministry for 16 years at that point, but church canons could not force a bishop to ordain anyone. A bishop’s authority over his diocese was considered inviolate. And Iker said he wouldn’t ordain women, nor allow them to serve in any parish under his care.

One female critic said Iker’s nomination was “appalling” and predicted he would hold the Episcopal Church “hostage” to misogyny.

Iker was narrowly elected, however, with the support of John Shelby Spong, the liberal Episcopal bishop who rejected traditional Christian doctrines including Jesus’ resurrection and even theism itself. Spong said that though he wanted to force the church to evolve and believed it had to change or die, he thought Episcopalians should also tolerate traditionalists.

Spong later complained that “the act of gracious inclusion has never been reciprocated.”

Episcopal leaders may have also been reticent to oppose Iker because the church had a century-long tradition of electing those who were nominated. Episcopal elections were seen as polite and deferential, with the good manners necessary to maintain unity.

Some critics also said they admired Iker’s character even though they disagreed with his views.

“He was forthright in his opinions … and showed considerable integrity in remaining steadfast,” said one minister who supported him despite their disagreement. “He was patient and thoughtful in answering my questions.”

Five years later, however, the Episcopal Church decided bishops would have to accept women’s ordinations, setting Iker on a collision course with his church. He said at the time that radical feminists were trying to get revenge, seeking to oppress conservatives like him.

“In the heart of radical feminism, there is a lot of internal anger,” the bishop told the Associated Press. “I think we saw that here.”

Iker pointed out that Jesus’ 12 disciples were all male. He also argued that any hope of unity with Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox would require a return to an all-male priesthood. He could not seem to persuade other church leaders, however.

Despite the new rule, Iker managed to keep women almost entirely out of the pulpits and away from the altars in his diocese. He couldn’t stop women from guest preaching, though, and couldn’t stop the denomination from appointing a woman over him as presiding bishop.

Katharine Jefferts Schori was made head of the Episcopal Church in 2006. Iker and other conservatives were dismayed. In addition to differences over gender roles, Anglo-Catholics and evangelical Episcopalians were upset by Schori’s support for the consecration of Gene Robinson, the church’s first openly gay bishop, and by statements that seemed to suggest that Jesus was just one way among many that people could be reconciled with God.

“I think that we may well be at that point where there are irreconcilable differences in theology and church discipline and so on,” Iker said. “Perhaps the best thing to do is say, ‘How can we have an amicable divorce?’”

It was not amicable.

Iker left the Episcopal Church on November 24, 2008. He took the majority of the Fort Worth diocese with him: 48 out of 56 congregations decided to leave.

But leaving, for them, didn’t mean going anywhere.

The conservative majority said they would keep using the name “The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth” and maintain ownership of their church buildings, bank accounts, and other property, which was estimated to be worth about $100 million.

Texas Monthly called this “a startling assertion of temporal power,” but Iker maintained that the churches followed proper procedure, adhered to canon law, and had a right to the real estate. The breakaway group was, after all, the majority. The Episcopal Church decided to test that in court.

They sued. And then sued again.

Iker ended up defending himself in three different cases, in three courts, in two Texas counties. He called himself “the most sued Anglican bishop in all of North America.” His supporters gave him the admiring nickname “the lion of Fort Worth.”

Iker, who continued his oversight of about 80 clergy and dozens of churches and ministries, complained his time was too often dominated by legal matters.

“I seem to spend more time now with groups of lawyers than groups of priests,” he said in 2010. “Almost every day I am in conversation with one of our attorneys. We have engaged six different law firms to respond to the litigations brought against us.”

The legal battles dragged on for 12 years before Iker and the Anglicans ultimately won. Finally, a Texas Supreme Court judge ruled that “under the governing documents, the withdrawing faction is the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.” The national church appealed, but the US Supreme Court declined to take the case, letting the ruling stand.

Throughout the long legal battle, Iker maintained there really was only one thing at stake: whether or not the church was going to remain committed to the faith handed down by the apostles.

“The real issue is the faith. We are taking a stand for the historic faith and practice of the Bible, as we have received them,” Iker said.

For the Texas bishop, that was also the only real issue at stake in the new Anglican denomination. And there, again, he was deeply troubled by women in ministry.

A few years before he retired, Iker addressed the official gathering of ACNA leaders and told them that the compromise the church had worked out in its constitution, where some dioceses would ordain women while others would not, was no longer tolerable. Women in the pulpit and at the altar is a recent innovation, according to Iker, breaking from apostolic tradition and catholic order, and should not be acceptable among orthodox Christians.

As long as women were allowed to be ordained in parts of ACNA, “we are in a state of impaired communion,” Iker said.

The debate was not resolved in 2017. It still divides Anglicans today.

Iker predicted the tension would be a problem for the ACNA going forward, just as it had been the cause of so much conflict and the ultimate breaking point for the Episcopal Church.

“We see the ordination of women … as a departure from the witness of Holy Scripture and the apostolic practice of the ancient Church,” Iker said. “Pray for God’s guidance as we seek to resolve this deeply divisive issue, in the interest of deepening our unity in Christ.”

Iker retired in 2019 after receiving a cancer diagnosis. He is survived by his wife, Donna Bowling Iker, and their three daughters. A requiem mass for the bishop was offered on October 11 at St. Vincent’s Cathedral Church in Bedford, Texas.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

Church Disappointment Is Multilayered

Interview by Harvest Prude

Jude 3 Project founder Lisa Fields speaks about navigating frustrations with God and fellow believers.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

Why are people leaving the church or their faith behind? Some answers boil down to platitudes, like a supposed desire to pursue a sinful lifestyle. But apologist Lisa Fields has found the reasons to be much more complex.

Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, which equips Black Christians to know what they believe and why, has sat across from many people leaving the church. During these “exit interviews,” she’s discovered that somewhere in nearly every story lurks the specter of personal disappointment with God or Christianity. She addresses this thorny issue in a new book, When Faith Disappoints: The Gap Between What We Believe and What We Experience.

CT national political correspondent Harvest Prude spoke with Fields about walking with God in the midst of a broken world and our own disappointments.

Something from your book that really struck me is when you talk about unanswered prayers. How do we navigate times in our faith when we’ve sought out God for something and we feel overlooked because he doesn’t seem to answer?

For me, when God doesn’t answer my prayers, I have to have a real conversation with him about what he has not answered. My relationship with God is very open. There are times where I’m angry, and I have to get those feelings out of my mouth and out of my heart—because when I don’t voice my frustrations, I end up filled with bitterness and resentment.

There’s a quote from Tim Keller where he says—and I’m paraphrasing—that if we knew what God knows, we would want our prayers answered the way he answers them. I’ve had this experience in my own life. I remember a time when I wanted to connect with a particular person, a major donor who could help my ministry. But I didn’t have enough extra income to get to New York City, where he was based. I remember being frustrated, feeling like there were all these obstacles to networking and getting ahead. Only later did I learn that this person had just gotten arrested for embezzlement.

Sometimes, in your disappointment, you realize that God is letting you see things that you wouldn’t see otherwise or protecting you from dangers that you didn’t know about. In the book, I talk about a man I had been dating for almost four years. In the middle of our relationship, he got married to a woman he had been involved with behind the scenes for most of the time. This other woman had been married herself during most of the affair.

That whole time, I had been praying that God would make this man my husband. But I didn’t realize that he was actually protecting me from someone who had poor character, despite being a preacher. In the middle of my disappointment, I voiced my frustration. Then I gave myself time to ask what God might be trying to protect me from. What different direction was he trying to push me in?

In the book you talk about doing exit interviews with people who are leaving the church. As a reporter, I cover the intersection of faith and politics. How do you think political conversations have impacted people’s relationship with faith?

I think the political climate in America has really impacted how people there think about faith. Christians often go to rhetorical and ideological extremes in the name of faith. Recently, I noticed a group of faith leaders on social media saying that if you’re voting for Kamala Harris, you can’t be a Christian. Rhetoric like that, I think, creates this confusion gap for many in our culture, where they don’t understand what we’re talking about. Because the Bible doesn’t tell you which political candidates to vote for. In fact, it doesn’t even speak about voting in any conventional way, because the world of the biblical writers was a world ruled by kings and emperors.

When there’s a gap between what the Bible says and what some believers claim it says, for political reasons, it makes a lot of people want nothing to do with the church, especially when political leaders hijack the church for their own gain. And it makes believers look like hypocrites, which creates a problem for those who want to be part of something genuine.

In your conversations, how often do you find that people leaving the church are struggling with its failures and flaws? And how often, by contrast, do they seem motivated more by a desire to live without moral restrictions or guilt?

I think both answers can be correct, sometimes at the same time. Church disappointment can have so many layers. Perhaps we’re disappointed with God. Or we’re disappointed with God’s people, or people in general. And then there are certain things we just desire and want to do in our flesh.

There’s always a multiplicity of factors. When I’ve done exit interviews with people leaving the church, I’ve seen that it’s never just one thing. It’s layers of things that rock them.

If you could design a toolkit of practices for being a faithful witness to those who are struggling with the church or their faith, what would you include?

The first thing I’d encourage is to live out what you believe as best you can. And that doesn’t mean perfection, but it does mean progression. If I hold to the Bible being the Word of God, then I obey the Word to the best of my ability.

Because we all fall short, though, we have to be honest about when this happens. If I portray myself as living a sinless life, I’m actually undermining the authority of Scripture, because Scripture tells us we’re born and shaped in iniquity. Living out our faith means acknowledging our sins and committing to repent of them.

Another essential habit is loving people well. In The Message Bible paraphrase, there’s a passage in Philippians that I post every Valentine’s Day, where Paul is saying, don’t just “love much” but “[love] well” (1:9–11). That really struck me when I read it years ago, because there’s a difference between loving somebody much and loving somebody well. I want to be someone who tries to love people well. That means listening attentively and holding space for their doubts and frustrations.

Third, I think we need to practice being merciful. Like Jude says, “Be merciful to those who doubt” (v. 22). Remember what it’s like to have doubts of your own, and treat others who doubt accordingly.

And finally, remember to pray with people. With my own friends, I’ve been enjoying a beautiful season of us praying together. I can’t give any prescription on how to do it right. It’s not like we’re doing anything grand. We simply share our frustrations; I pray, they pray, and healing has taken place. And it’s not like my friends are well-known spiritual leaders. But that’s just a reminder that you don’t need somebody to be a spiritual leader for their prayers to make a difference in your life.

You write about the importance of forgiveness to any process of healing from faith disappointment. How do we respond well when a fellow believer has hurt us or broken our trust?

In my own life, I was having trouble trusting someone who had sinned against me and claimed to have repented. My therapist said, “I’m not asking you to trust them. I’m asking you to trust God.” And that has helped me a lot.

I enter into relationships that have been broken, knowing that the person, being human, could break that trust again. But I’m aware that I’ve probably caused hurts myself and I could do it again. And because I want grace, I know I need to give it as well.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. I spoke earlier about the man who cheated on me during our relationship. It took me years to get to this point, but by now I’ve seen him many times since he got married. By the time he apologized, I was able to accept his apology. I was able to trust that it was sincere because I had done a work in my heart to forgive him.

Sometimes, you have to give yourself time. Years ago, I read a book on forgiveness. It said there are occasions when we tell people we’ve forgiven them too abruptly because we don’t know the full impact of their actions. If we announce forgiveness too soon, we’re only forgiving the initial impact when we don’t yet know all the layers. How will these actions affect me a year from now? I might have to forgive again, but at least I’m choosing forgiveness. I’m choosing not to treat you like you owe me because you hurt me.

When Christians face disappointment, you argue, a sort of syncretism can creep in. They might seek out New Age practices, for instance, if they feel that God has failed them. How should we approach apologetics in a culture marked by intense interest in alternative modes of spirituality?

Before criticizing the what in these alternative approaches, try to find out the why. Perhaps you know someone who uses crystals or consults horoscopes. Well, what’s behind that? Figuring out the why will help you get to the root of the issue.

Maybe this person was going through a difficult time and heard from a friend about something that could help manage the stress. And so, okay, so that’s how you got into that. Maybe this person had tried prayer and Christian faith but, for whatever reason, didn’t find them adequate. You can help someone walk through these deeper issues. For me, this is a far better approach than simply saying, “Don’t use crystals—they’re demonic.”

Love is a better draw than fear. As a pastor’s kid, I used to go to youth conferences around the country, and there was always an element of fear in the way we were encouraged to give our lives to Christ. And so everybody gave their life to Christ at every event—the same people every year. I “became” a Christian probably a million times as a teenager because I was scared.

But when life disappointed me, that fear wasn’t what was holding me. It was God’s love. I believe in a real hell, and I believe that Jesus is the only way to eternal life, but we can communicate that with love, rather than fear, as the motivator. Because the fear will always wear off. Fear will never be your keeper.

- More from Harvest Prude

Church Life

How Priscilla Shirer Surrenders All

Rachel Pfeiffer

The best-selling Bible teacher writes about putting God first in her life and how healthy Christian discipleship requires sacrifice

Photography by Andrew James Abajian / Courtesy of Lifeway Resources / Edits by Christianity Today

Priscilla Shirer remembers the advice she got earlier in her ministry career: You cannot do a thousand things to the glory of God, but you can do one or two.

“I’ve never forgotten that,” she said. Each season of life, she prays and discerns what priorities she believes God has laid out for her. Whatever doesn’t align with those is a “no for now.”

“This is not always easy,” she said. “No, it’s a constantly saying, ‘Lord, please help us to have a little bit of discernment and wisdom. … give us enough courage to be willing to say the nos so that we can say our best yeses to where you want us to be.’”

The best-selling Bible study author, teacher, and speaker recently said yes to another movie by the Kendrick Brothers—the evangelical producers Shirer previously worked with on War Room and Overcomer—and an accompanying devotional book.

The Forge, released in August, was a project that made sense for her as a 49-year-old mom of three boys in their teens and early 20s. Shirer’s character works to get her 19-year-old son on track and prays for him to know Jesus.

“I felt really compelled to be a part of telling a story of a young man whose life is completely shifted because someone older and wiser affirms him, challenges him, and encourages him to rise up in manhood,” she said.

Shirer—who comes from a ministry family as the daughter of pastor Tony Evans—was inspired by the movie to write about discipleship and surrender. She and her husband live in Dallas, where they run Going Beyond Ministries.

Her Going Beyond Live events feature Bible teaching, prayer, and worship led by her brother, singer Anthony Evans. Over the summer, she held the largest live event Lifeway has hosted since the pandemic, with 5,600 women in person in Athens, Georgia, and around 50,000 watching the simulcast online.

This weekend, she’ll host the final Going Beyond Live event of the year in Cincinnati.

Recently, Shirer sat down with CT to discuss her latest projects, what it looks like to turn over our lives to God in the day-to-day, and why she sees surrender as the key to finding peace and hope.

How did the movie The Forge inspire your new book?

The Kendrick Brothers asked if I would be interested in writing a companion book geared specifically toward women that might see the movie and then be thinking about discipleship and surrendering to the Lord fully in their lives. How could they actually take whatever the Holy Spirit may have done in their heart while they were watching it and put feet on it?

Sometimes we have a sense of what we would like to do, but we’re actually not sure how, so this book gives a little bit more detail on what it looks like to live a life that is fully surrendered to Jesus. Not just at church on Sundays, and not just sort of doing the dutiful thing that we are supposed to do as Christians, but actually living a life where your heart is yielded to the Lord.

In I Surrender All, you wrote, “If you and I are struggling to surrender our all to Jesus, it most likely has something to do with our estimation of His identity.” Many in the church have heard time and again who Jesus is, so how do we keep from getting complacent about Jesus’ identity?

I think one of the main ways is that we remember what he has delivered us from. We remember what we would have been, had it not been for the grace and the mercy and goodness of God.

Every one of us has a testimony. Some of us have a more stark, striking testimony than others, but all of us were in sin, and all of us would have had an eternal destination that was separated from God. If it weren’t for the grace of God, none of us would be able to experience freedom or victory and a life that is filled with peace and stability of heart and mind.

So the first thing that keeps us calibrated to make sure our heart is turned toward him sincerely is remembering what could be all of our lot if it weren’t for his grace and mercy. That makes you continually grateful.

What other barriers do you think that Christians, especially Americans, encounter when it comes to surrendering their lives to God?

There’s a constant competition in the culture we live in about what our priorities should be. We want to be comfortable; that is the Western view of what happiness is, that your life is comfortable and easy and everything’s going like you would like for it to go. That has been misunderstood and misconstrued as the favor of God on you, but that’s not the way Jesus described discipleship. In fact, in many ways, it’s the opposite.

Jesus said, If anyone will be my disciple, they’ll deny themself and take up a cross. We don’t live in a culture that values self-denial and restraint. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we have to remember that he’s the priority, being willing to lay down our lives for him and surrender sometimes our ambitions and our goals, the way we thought our life would be, the family dynamic we thought we’d have, the way it would look. Laying down those sorts of things becomes a way that we’re able to begin to recalibrate again.

How has your understanding of surrender has changed over the years?

One of the things that occurred to me is that surrender looks different in every season but that we’re always being asked to surrender something. At every season of life, there is another level of surrender, and on the other side of that surrender, there’s a new facet of abundant life and an experience with God. Surrender looked different in my 20s, and what I sensed the Lord asking me to release in my 30s is different than it is now in my 40s.

As I move into the next decade and season of life with my children now growing up, flying the coop, and the house getting a little emptier and quieter, I’m asking, “Okay, Lord, now what would it look like for my life to be surrendered to you here, and am I willing to lay down my thoughts of what this season should be, or what I want it to be, if you ask me for something different? Will I be willing to walk with you in this season in the new ways that you call me to?”

What does it look like practically for someone to be truly surrendered to God in their everyday life?

Well, one of the main things is starting the day with a perspective of, “Lord, this is your day. There are things you already have planned for me in this day that I don’t even know yet. There are strangers that I’m going to meet. There are frustrating circumstances that are going to happen. So, Lord, would you help me to hold my hands loosely on the 24 hours that you have ahead of me and to be tender of heart enough that I can be aware that every derailment, every potential frustration, every encounter that I have, any of those things can be shimmering with divine possibility.” To me, that’s what it is. It’s not always easy, by the way.

Both in the movie and in your book, there’s this connection between surrender and discipleship. What is the key element of needing to surrender in order to be a disciple?

The entire disciple’s life is one of surrender. When you look in the Scriptures, you see Jesus basically saying to those 12 disciples, “Follow me.” They had to actually leave behind physical comforts, physical realities, like when Peter was fishing.

It’s a requirement for discipleship, because in order to fully honor Jesus and to keep him first, we can’t be allowing that priority to bump heads with the things we treasure, whether it’s an ambition, or whether it’s a comfort in unforgiveness, or whether it’s a story of success that we’ve written in our minds as to what our success is supposed to look like. Being able to release that and let it go is a requirement for us to fully follow Jesus.

How can the church better step into this space of mentorship? What are some things the church body can do better to disciple young people?

I think one of the main ways is by highlighting to younger people in the church the need that they have for the more seasoned, more mature believers. Let those young believers know, The resources you need to be successful in your marriage are sitting right around you if you would be receptive, teachable, and humble enough to hear wisdom. Same thing for business builders, young entrepreneurs. There are businesspeople that have been doing this longer than you. They are your resources for how to honor God, have integrity in your business but also do it with success.

The very reason why online church is fantastic but can’t be a replacement for a local gathering is because community was the whole point to begin with. It was supposed to be iron sharpening iron.

It has to be something that [we talk about] just as clearly as we speak about salvation and just as clearly as we talk about the Holy Spirit or the fruit of the Spirit—we talk about some things very didactically and clearly from the pulpit—this should be one of them as well. Discipleship is available to us in this body, if we’ll just take advantage of it.

- More from Rachel Pfeiffer

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