Nearly Half of the World’s Migrants Are Christian

Chloë-Arizona Fodor - Religion News Service

With few nones entering the US, religious immigrants are stalling secularization.

The world’s 280 million immigrants have greater shares of Christians, Muslims, and Jews than the general population, according to a new Pew Research Center study released Monday.

“You see migrants coming to places like the US, Canada, different places through Western Europe, and being more religious—and sometimes more Christian in particular—than the native-born people in those countries,” said Stephanie Kramer, the study’s lead researcher.

While Christians make up about 30 percent of the world’s population, the world’s migrants are 47 percent Christian, according to the latest data collected in 2020.

The study found that Muslims make up 29 percent of the migrant population but 25 percent of the world’s population.

Jews, only 0.2 percent of the world’s population but 1 percent of migrants, are by far the most likely religious group to have migrated, with 20 percent of Jews worldwide living outside their country of birth compared to just 6 percent of Christians and 4 percent of Muslims.

Four percent of migrants are Buddhist, matching the general population, and 5 percent are Hindu, compared to 15 percent of the world population.

Over the past 30 years, migration has outpaced global population growth by 83 percent, according to Pew.

Though people immigrate for many reasons, including economic opportunity, to reunite with family, and to flee violence or persecution, religion and migration are often closely connected, the report finds. US migrants are much more likely to have a religious identity than the American-born population in general.

The influx of religious migrants can have a significant impact on the religious composition of their destination countries. In the case of the US, “immigrants are kind of putting the brakes on secularization,” Kramer said.

While about 30 percent of individuals in the US overall identify as atheist, agnostic, or religiously unaffiliated, only 10 percent of migrants to the US identify with those categories.

Pew studied data from 270 censuses and surveys, estimating the religious composition of migrants from 95,696 combinations of 232 origin and destination countries and territories.

Their analysis focused on the “stock,” the total number of people residing as international migrants, rather than “flows,” numbers measured over a specific time. This methodology allowed them to study all adults and children who live outside their countries of birth, regardless of when they immigrated.

“We’re not only interested in the religious composition of people who arrived in a destination country in the last year or in the last five years,” explained Kramer. According to the report, measuring the total “stock” of migrants reflects slower changes, “patterns that have accumulated over time.”

The study found that migrants frequently move to countries where their religious identity is already represented and prevalent. For example, Israel is the top destination for Jews, with 51 percent of Jewish migrants (1.5 million) residing there, while Saudi Arabia is the top destination for Muslims, with 13 percent (10.8 million) residing in the area.

Christians and religiously unaffiliated migrants share the US, Germany, and Russia as their top three destinations.

The majority of the world’s Christian migrants originate from Mexico and settle in the US, Pew found. They are typically looking for jobs, improved safety, or to reunite with family members. Meanwhile, 10 percent of the world’s Muslim migrants (8.1 million) were born in Syria, fleeing regional conflict after a war broke out in 2011.

The report attributes high rates of Jewish migration partly to Israel’s Law of Return, which grants Jews the right to receive automatic citizenship and make aliyah, a move to Israel.

As of 2020, about 1.5 million Jews born outside of Israel now live within the country’s borders. Jewish migrants to Israel often come from former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine (170,000) and Russia (150,000). The United States has the second highest population of Jewish migrants (400,000), with a quarter moving from Israel.

Across the board, however, Kramer said that immigration levels across religious groups have remained fairly stable over time. Despite consistent numbers, she advocated for doing this study because of the popularity of a 2012 Pew report, Faith on the Move. The two studies used different methodologies, and Kramer described Faith on the Move as a “snapshot” of religion and immigration in 2010.

“A lot of people have asked for an update to it, and we get a lot of questions related to religion and migration,” she said. Despite demand for the data, “Faith on the Move was really the last report we put out that focused on this.”

Many of the findings in the new report are similar to the 2012 study, and Kramer found the results relatively unsurprising.

“Even in that older data, you can see that religious minorities were so much more likely to leave their country of origin and migrate to a country where their religious identity was more prevalent,” she said.

- More from Chloë-Arizona Fodor

News

In Our Anger Era: Too Many Americans Stay Enraged Rather than Seeking Help

Emily Belz

Christian counselors wish more people would acknowledge their rage in a boiling cultural moment.

Protestors from different parties clash outside the Republican National Convention in July.

Jim Vondruska / Getty Images

More Americans than ever are seeking help for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. But they seem to be avoiding help for another emotion, even though it comes up across life stages and can be destructive: anger.

Current events have fanned the flame of wrath even more. Like many Americans, Nycole DeLaVara has seen angry conversations about the news invade her church life—especially over politics, race, and gender.

But in her work as a biblical counselor in Southern California, DeLaVara says that anger often remains unaddressed and unresolved.

“I kind of wish people were coming and saying, ‘I am having a hard time processing what I’m seeing,’” said DeLaVara. “That would be a humble way of approaching things. I find people don’t know what they’re feeling.”

CT spoke with Christian counselors across the country who agreed. Not enough people, they say, have been able to recognize the uncertainty they’re feeling as anger, and they may be missing out on the guidance that could help them during a heated and divisive climate.

“The Facebook warrior usually doesn’t come into counseling and say, ‘I really struggled to manage my dialogue on Facebook,’” said Brad Hambrick, who oversees the counseling ministries at Summit Church, in North Carolina, which has 14 campuses and about 13,000 in attendance.

The flood of information people experience now—being able at every moment to know anything frustrating going on in the entire world—contributes to a “background sense of irritation,” said Hambrick, which “contributes to impulse control being harder these days.”

Last year, the Los Angeles Police Department recorded the most road rage incidents in seven years, and nationally, the number of road rage shootings has risen 400 percent over the last decade.

Service sector workers have endured more enraged vitriol from customers since the pandemic. Flight attendants have noticed an increase in outbursts on airplanes. Anger appears to be sitting right under the surface of life in the United States.

But what’s going on beneath the outbursts?

Anger is a “smoke detector—what is it telling me?” said DeLaVara. Anger in personal relationships is often someone not knowing how to communicate the feelings they are having, she said, feelings like fear, uncertainty, a sense of injustice, or not being understood or respected.

Christian counselor Anna Mondal in San Diego compares good and bad anger to how a child responds after being hit by another kid.

“It’s okay for a kid to be angry, but it’s not okay for them to harm another child in their anger,” Mondal said. “It’s okay to feel it, but how they express it matters. … That is such an important thing to know how to do: feel the anger but not express it destructively.”

Braden Benson, a Christian counselor at The Owen Center in Auburn, Alabama, said the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump stirred people’s anger. For people who watch Trump every day, it was as if a friend had been shot. With current events, a lot of anger that comes out is from people having “parasocial” relationships with politicians and online figures, he said.

“I think the deeper you go into the parasocial world, the more likely it is that you’re opening yourself up to that anger, that sense of vulnerability,” he said. “Because this thing, this person, this podcast, this TV show, whatever this character that you have seen as your friend, is now getting attacked.”

Anger at social media or a news article might require some deep breaths or a long run, Mondal said.

“Western culture emphasizes thinking and logic and intellectualism—like, Let me think about my right response,” said Mondal. “Often, we can’t. We have to wait for our body to calm down.”

But she added that with longer-standing issues that cause anger, a deep breath probably won’t do much.

People seeing seismic change around them will still feel a certain level of threat and sense of vulnerability. They don’t recognize what’s happening in the world, and they don’t know what’s coming next.

“You either respond to the vulnerability as God, which means you’re in charge, you have to fix it, you have to cope, you have to control it,” said Benson. “Or you respond to the vulnerability with God—understand that you can’t fix it.”

When Christians find themselves overwhelmed by the world, they have to work to recognize what they can and can’t influence, counselors said. Christians can use their anger to take action without letting their anger become hurtful to others.

“The tendency is when we see people overreacting, we try to balance it out, almost by an encouragement to underreact,” said Hambrick at Summit.

Churches could be addressing problems with anger and related issues through peer support groups—something Summit has. Like 12-step recovery groups, these groups are lay-led and can naturally fit in the ecosystem of a church, Hambrick said.

“It’s one of the greatest untapped modes or ways of creating change,” he said. “It’s just humble honesty … with people you respect.”

Others who have worked through anger found circles of others outside their family who were willing to hear their anger very helpful.

Mondal, a counselor, experienced trauma-induced anger 15 years ago after sexual assault when she was teaching overseas.

“I had no tools for how to express the anger that I felt at being dropped, left alone, not being taken care of,” she said.

She had to learn first that she was angry—beneath the shame she felt initially—then learn how to express that anger to others and to God. Once she was able to express it in a constructive way, she said she could feel joy more deeply.

A support group for deep anger is typically a small circle of people, she said, and usually not those the person is closest to.

“It’s a different kind of people who come out of the woodwork, who are not afraid of that [pain],” she said.

Support groups have been helpful for people struggling with more everyday forms of anger too.

Tim Schultz, a lobbyist in Washington, DC, felt comfortable confessing his struggles with anger toward his family to a small prayer group at his church.

“People would not see me as an angry person,” he said. But a few years into his marriage, after having children, he was having angry outbursts at home. “I was both aghast and ashamed of that.”

He had been in a men’s prayer group at his church for over a decade, and first shared his problem with them.

“If you’re known by people outside your immediate family, you don’t have any problem confessing stuff like this that might feel really shameful,” he said. “Shame is paralyzing. It makes you not want people to know this about you.”

He talked to his pastor, read books from Christian psychologists, and went to therapy.

“The biggest technique was to find a vocabulary for each stage of anger and verbalize it,” he said. If he asks his kids to go to bed three times and they don’t, telling them he feels disrespected lets some air out of the balloon. People “hold level 4 anger in, and then they get to 7 and blow up. You weren’t honest with yourself and the people around you.”

He thinks part of the reason people around him in DC are struggling with unhealthy anger is that they are overscheduled. When they have no time to pause and be aware of what emotions are happening, anger has more opportunity to boil over, he said.

Schultz and his family have a big Christmas party every year with about 100 people. Every year, he shares something short about how Christmas and the gospel connects to the cultural moment.

Last year, he told the gathering: “Look around you, look online, people behaving badly on flights—there is so much anger in our world. … We need a certain dose of anger, otherwise it will be runaway injustice. But oftentimes, anger is destroying people.”

He talked about God seeing the things we are angry about, and how God is also angry about injustice and death. He also said God didn’t pour “brimstone” on the world in response, but instead came in a manger.

Once he started talking about his efforts to address his anger, other men started asking for the number of the counseling service he went to. He’s now referred at least seven of them to counseling for anger.

“God is taking something bad and using it for his kingdom,” he said. “If I can be open about my struggles in this area, others can get help too.”

- More from Emily Belz

News

Angry Enough to Turn Tables? It Might Not Be Righteous Zeal.

Interview by Emily Belz

Christian counselor Brad Hambrick talks about how we deal with our own fury in heated times.

Brad Hambrick oversees counseling ministries at Summit Church, a North Carolina church with 14 campuses and about 13,000 in attendance. He also teaches biblical counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of books like Angry with God.

How do you distinguish between good and bad anger?

All anger says two things: “This is wrong, and it matters.” In the interpersonal space, sinful anger says a third thing: “This is wrong, and it matters more than you.” I can be right about the first two: “You shouldn’t have done that, and it’s important.” But when I’m willing to sin against you, then just because my prompt is theologically and morally accurate, that doesn’t mean my expression of anger is righteous. When you move toward social media and politics, in many ways, the “you” either becomes very far off or very ambiguous. People feel a lot more freedom to vent or to rage because they don’t really see a person. They just feel a cause.

Where do you see destructive anger?

Anger shows up most in private settings. If somebody is blowing up at Walmart, their regulation and social filters have deteriorated significantly.

We want to use an oversimplified test for righteous anger. “If I’m right, and it matters, this is okay. Tell me where I’m wrong.” Usually when we’re in that righteous anger spot, we love Jesus turning over tables in the temple. That’s what we feel like we’re doing.

And if you look in Matthew 21, after Jesus is finished turning over the tables, it says, “The blind and the lame came to him.” In my mind’s eye, when I think about Jesus in the temple, he’s just gone full on Incredible Hulk. He’s turned green. He’s staring through people’s souls and everybody’s backing away from Jesus because we messed up. But in Jesus’ most expressive moment of anger, the most vulnerable felt protected and attracted. Not scared.

Am I doing Christlike anger? It’s not that Jesus didn’t get mad. Anger is one of God’s attributes, that means it can be done well. It can be done beautifully. It’s not inherently off limits to the Christian as if we’re stoics. But if we’re going to do it in a Christlike manner, then those who are in need of care—there should be a clear sense of attraction and protection around what we’re doing.

What are the tools for this angry moment we are in?

A category that I think is helpful is responsibility allocation—realizing what you can influence. When I get most intense about where I have the least influence, my anger is going nowhere good. As we start to feel more powerless, we start to rely on anger, to try to get back some of what we felt like we’ve lost.

In the cultural discourse, everybody’s saying, “We need to calm down and chill out the rhetoric.” But nobody’s doing it. Even if it’s not from the top down, it ought to be from the bottom up, and culture ought to demand it of its leaders, if leaders will not lead the culture.

Do different principles apply for anger over current events versus, say, anger over betrayal in personal relationships?

There is selfish anger. There’s also suffering anger. If you look at Psalm 44, in the first few verses, life is going great. And then you hit a selah. You don’t know what happened. But it was a train wreck. In the next 12 or so verses, the psalmist gives God every bit as much blame for the bad things as the psalmist did giving God credit for the good things in the first part.

It’s this angry mic drop. There’s heresy in there. The psalmist is calling on God to wake up, when we know God doesn’t sleep. But there’s no sense that the psalmist needs to repent. The psalmist is going through a season of suffering in life that doesn’t make sense, and the moral equation isn’t balancing. I do think there is innocent grief-anger, in response to suffering.

So the Psalms are a good place to go with anger?

One of the common features of anger is we don’t feel heard, and we don’t feel understood. And so we increase our volume to make sure we’re heard and we increase the sharpness of our words trying to be understood. And the angrier we get, the more people pull away from us.

It’s not as if we necessarily come to the Psalms and we get some deep penetrating insight that explains away our situation, and we go, “Oh, I have no reason to be angry.” What we do often find is where we have felt like, “This is off limits,” and everybody’s pushed us away—we can bring those kinds of things to God and know that he cares and that he’s not deaf to that.

On this theme, you’ve got Moses at the burning bush. Moses had an anger problem. He killed a man in a moment of rage. When the golden calf was made, he ground it up and made them drink it. He threw a temper tantrum in Numbers 20 and started beating on the rock and scolding it.

One of the first things that God says to Moses at the burning bush after “Take off your shoes” is “I heard the cries of my people. I’ve seen their suffering.” If you’re thinking about what it would have been like to have been Moses—“Okay, I shouldn’t have killed the man. That was a flash of anger. That was bad. But at least I did something. God, you do nothing.” And God says, “I’ve heard, I’ve seen, I’m paying attention.” We don’t get our own burning bush, usually—that’s not a common human experience—but the Psalms are a place where we get that from God.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Church Life

Christians Are Peculiar, and That’s Okay

Sho Baraka

I joined Christianity Today not as a trite multicultural experiment but to contribute to the wonderful weirdness of building the kingdom.

Courtesy of Sho Baraka

The word weird is weirdly being thrown around by politicians as if it’s an official political critique. Once that label is hurled at someone, they return to middle school ethics and recite the gospel of rubber and glue. Most people don’t want to be weird.

However, I can’t help but think of the strange predicaments that Yahweh has put his people in: Noah building an uncanny boat, Ezekiel’s dramatized prophecy, John the Baptist as a pre-modern hipster wandering the desert, and many more. It’s very peculiar for enslaved people to sing of God’s goodness and provision on plantations that attempted to designate them as worse than weird—inhuman.

Maybe to be set apart is to be weird and peculiar. However, many people have auctioned off their weirdness to cultural lobbyists for relevance and power.

Then I think of myself and the reasons I’m joining Christianity Today as the editorial director of the Big Tent Initiative. They sometimes feel peculiar. I feel weird that I still carry hope. I feel docile when I speak of reconciliation. I feel lonely still having a tremendous amount of love for the bride of Christ. But then I feel content that I’m bringing my peculiar self and many other descriptives to CT.

I bring complexity. I am a Canadian-born man with a Swahili name, who was raised by a Black Panther in the suburbs of Southern California. I’ve known privilege and poverty. I have bobo tendencies with a militant’s temperament, but I’m a pacifist on paper. I’d rather discuss the implications of rap beefs than political beefs because at least there is poetry involved. I’m a theological nomad who tries his best to allow Jesus to take precedence over all my wonderful distinctions. I am the divergent tenets of Ecclesiastes in a soaked paper bag.

I bring impartiality. When I mention that I accepted this position with CT to friends and associates, I’ve received both congratulations and concerns. I’ve had friends call CT “too white” and others call it “too woke.” Both these terms serve as coded language that express some concern or critique of my character for the work I’ve engaged in.

I’ve been called a pawn for my views on biblical and social orthodoxy. I’ve also been called a Marxist and a “woke preacher” for my views on racism and social injustice. Be assured, I do not sit in some compromised middle, but I am centered in a gospel that is actively revolutionary and traditional.

I bring the focus of Toni Morrison. This literary giant gave a solution to the grievances of complacent critics. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” she once told a newspaper columnist. I will write these essays and find others to write them.

My objective isn’t to bring “soul” to Christianity Today like some magical Negro teaching a well-intentioned white man how to cha-cha slide across the difficult social issues of our culture. My objective isn’t to “do evangelicalism” in blackface so that more Black and brown folks will smash that subscribe button.

I’ve joined Christianity Today to cultivate an all-too-forgotten garden. A garden far from Eden but aspiring to the New Jerusalem. This is a place where anger, suspicion, and betrayal threaten to trample on the seeds of hope, love, and endurance. This is not a trite multicultural experiment, but it is an ambitious work to shine light on the brilliant voices of our manifold family who have been marginalized despite the rich history of their faith tradition. I’ve joined CT to be an additional hand in the dirt that prays for heavenly waters to fertilize a new social imaginary.

I bring the unbothered constitution of Zora Neale Hurston, who said, “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.” Often, Black writers are expected to only write from their pain and trauma. I will not be here for crisis writing. I write at the speed of wisdom and not anxiety. I will write when compelled. I will exercise the tenth fruit of the Spirit, which is to “shut yo’ mouth” when I have nothing helpful to add.

I am also no valet for Black essentialism. Too often in the Black community, we champion the maxim “We are not a monolith!” while snatching the Black card from those who question the doctrines that are sometimes established by academics and elitists in institutions far removed from the people they claim to serve. If I speak of plights and joys, I speak as someone who knows the benefits of living in the castle and the attic. However, I can’t distinguish with certainty which resident is advocating for his own self-interest if and when they conflict; therefore I don’t presume to carry the soapbox for all of Black society.

Let us be peculiar.

It seems as if the price for reconciliation and redemption has been inflated along with gas and groceries, but not many desire those luxury purchases. Let us be the strange ones who spend the cosmic currency to be heavenly ambassadors.

The church is weird and messy. However, most importantly, the church is sanctified and essential. Therefore, join me in seeking the kingdom and putting Jesus’ beautiful bride on display.

Sho Baraka is editorial director of Big Tent for Christianity Today.

- More from Sho Baraka

Christianity Today Welcomes Sho Baraka as Big Tent Editorial Director

Baraka will shape stories and strategies to help the historic publication reach and impact new audiences.

Photography by Sophia Denard

Christianity Today has hired author, artist, and innovator Amisho “Sho” Baraka to serve as the editorial director of its Big Tent Initiative.

“I cannot tell you how excited we are to have Sho on the team. His creativity and entrepreneurialism are exactly what we need to catalyze the important work of advancing the Big Tent Initiative,” said Christianity Today’s chief impact officer, Dr. Nicole Martin.

“You must have a unique calling from God to navigate between differences and elevate voices we might only hear on the margins. Sho has spent his life doing just that; bridging between cultures and ideas to frame the redemptive story of Christ in the world. We couldn’t have asked for a better person to fill this role at this critical time in our history.”

Christianity Today was founded in 1956 by the late Billy Graham to “express evangelical Christianity to the present generation.” The evangelical church in the United States has grown increasingly diverse, and the Big Tent Initiative aims to help the ministry represent that diversity. It also aims to build bridges of conversation and common cause across political and racial divides.

“Historically, Christianity Today has not represented minority and immigrant churches as well as it might have,” said president and CEO Dr. Timothy Dalrymple. “We’ve been working to change that. Sho is a transcendent talent who has earned enormous respect for his thoughtfulness and faithfulness. He has our full blessing to bring new kinds of stories and storytelling to Christianity Today that go beyond what we’ve typically done.”

Baraka has spent the last 17 years traveling the world as a Christian recording artist, writer, speaker, and consultant. He brings a wealth of media experience, with four solo albums, three feature film appearances, and a book, He Saw That It Was Good.

He was a founding member of Reach Records, the internationally known hip-hop consortium known as 116 Clique, and the AND Campaign, which focuses on weaving together biblical conviction and compassion. Baraka has also served as visiting professor at Wake Forest University and Warner Pacific University and has worked alongside his brother Dhati Lewis to coach leaders in minority-majority contexts.

Baraka will build on initiatives started by Ed Gilbreath, who paved the way with Big Tent partnerships and events that embodied the rich diversity of the kingdom.

“As the Big Tent director,” said Baraka, “I’m passionate about the ambitious work to expand CT’s voice and audience. We have an opportunity to spotlight a more accurate and beautiful mosaic of the North American church. I’m even more excited about creating the space for God-glorifying hospitality that will turn estranged neighbors into family.”

Baraka lives in Atlanta with his wife of 21 years, Patreece, and their three children, Zoë, Zaccai, and Zimri. They have two boys on the autism spectrum and have become ambassadors and advocates in the autism community.

For media inquiries pertaining to this story, please contact media@christianitytoday.com.

Christianity Today was founded by Billy Graham in 1956. In the nearly 70 years since, it has served as a flagship publication for the American evangelical movement, equipping the church with news, commentary, and resources. An acclaimed and award-winning media ministry, CT advances the stories and ideas of the global church. Each month, across a variety of digital and print media, the ministry carries the most important stories and ideas of the kingdom of God to over 4.5 million people around the planet.

Ideas

The World Says Accelerate. The Church Says Abide.

Aryana Petrosky

Prayer, fasting, and reading Scripture in community make our days more spacious.

solidcolours / Getty

If Moses took out his phone to take a video of the burning bush instead of lending his full attention, would he have missed the words of the Lord? If Mary had been scrolling on her phone on a break from her daily responsibilities, would she have been too distracted to notice the arrival of an angel?

Moses and Mary were witnesses to the eternal breaking into the temporal, the miraculous interrupting the mundane. They were fully present in time.

Can we say the same? We worry time is scarce and crave an escape from the inputs that “waste” it: TV and news, text and emails. Paradoxically, we turn to the same technology to speed time up when we feel bored or want distraction. Videos and pictures captured on a phone pull us away from a full experience of the moment.

Trying to hoard or waste time only makes the days go faster and faster. Like an hourglass with a hole in the bottom, time leaks out so steadily that we are surprised when we notice that the bulb is nearly empty. How do we patch the hourglass and start to recover, one by one, the grains of time?

For the six years I lived in Washington, DC, time was a constant tension. I wanted it to speed up, wanted it to slow down. I obsessively counted minutes when I was in transit on foot, bike, or metro. If I found myself frozen—waiting in line at the grocery store or on the public bus—I would immediately pull out my phone and scroll and scroll and scroll, attempting to escape time, wishing there were fewer minutes. I would have walked right past the burning bush or looked back down at my phone at the disruption of an angel.

My conflict with time led me to experiment. I fervently tried Sabbath practices, solitude retreats, long walks without my phone, the Book of Common Prayer, and social media fasts. It was never enough. These practices often felt like just another demand to squeeze out more minutes from an over-full schedule. They were mostly solitary. Life was a one-woman wrestling match with a culture that always wanted to consume more time , more of me, whether it was pressure to work, watch Netflix, scroll social media, or read the news. I struggled to not fall behind, to keep pace, while also leaving time for friends, family, church, and rest—all of which also began to feel like obligations.

I’d read enough to know that a disordered relationship with time wasn’t a personal problem but a cultural one, and especially anxiety-inducing for young people. But I hadn’t thought much about how a faith community could help. Turns out, transforming time by myself wasn’t sustainable, or even possible. It required the church.

The Anglican church I attended in DC had started a new program called the Christian Formation Cohort. When I first read the commitment form, I immediately thought, No way. The requirements appeared impossibly demanding for a city like DC. But I couldn’t silence the nagging feeling that I needed to participate.

The six-week program included a long list of spiritual practices designed for “detachment” and “attachment,” gradually incorporated. The detachment practices included no social media, no visual streaming alone (three hours a week with other people was permitted), no audio streaming other than the Bible and Christ-centered music, and no reading except for Scripture and material that fit Philippians 4:8.

The attachment practices included attendance at a weekly group session, 30 minutes of prayer a day in a posture of surrender, daily Bible immersion, weekly volunteer service, weekly fasting, weekly hospitality and “spiritual friendship,” weekly Sabbath, one 10-hour retreat, and attendance at one meal a month for four months after the completion of the six-week program.

I was immediately struck by how much these practices had to do with time. The practices of detachment encouraged less time (or no time) spent on absent-minded distraction. The practices of attachment encouraged more time spent communing with other people, God’s Word, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The anxious question for many of us that first week was simple: What am I going to do when I get home after a long day at work? Stare at the wall? We were asked to prepare by making lists of alternative activities and of people or situations we would pray for during our allocated minutes.

In The Congregation in a Secular Age, Andrew Root makes the case that our modern experience of time is a type of famine—an unsatiated desire for not just more hours in the day, but for a fuller and more meaningful experience of each passing moment. Silicon Valley asks us to innovate, accelerate, and maximize, making it possible to endlessly multitask, to do more and more quickly. Ironically, devices that purport to save us time make us feel like we never have enough. We can’t slow down long enough to hear ourselves think, let alone hear the whispers of the Holy Spirit.

This freneticism makes it especially difficult for the church to guide congregations into sacred time. Instead, “time is emptied for the sake of speed”; the church’s purpose becomes change, compulsive growth, rather than “transformation in the Spirit.” We need the church to go against the cultural tide of acceleration and to be a place where we learn to inhabit the holy, mysterious, and eternal.

As I settled into the program, time altered. The metro ride grew longer, evenings at home felt more spacious, and 30 minutes of prayer every morning became a comfort rather than a task. A few of the detachment practices came easily to me. But attachment practices like Scripture memorization, volunteer service, and fasting felt overwhelmingly difficult to fit into my full schedule. Some weeks, I completely failed to incorporate them, and hunger from skipped meals heightened my nerves.

The practice that surprised me most was listening to the Bible on audio. I listened while I made dinner; I listened while I washed the dishes. Gradually, the sounds in my mind changed. Instead of chaos and noise, I experienced life-giving quiet and peace.

The cumulative effect of consuming less, only “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable,” was liberating. Instead of cramming in more content on my metro rides or during my evenings home, I was given a moment to be still with my thoughts, and when prompted, to pray—a provocation I might have missed if I was tapping on my phone or watching Netflix.

But it was the community that made the real difference. On the days we met as a group, time lost its structure entirely as we became absorbed in each other’s stories. We empathized with just how difficult these practices were to incorporate and encouraged each other in our shared earnestness to inhabit time in a new way.

Sharing our experiences with other people—with free-flowing tears, laughter, and words of wisdom—create moments that Root describes as “resonance,” the solution for our time famine. Resonance, according to Root, is time gathered-up, filled with meaning and purpose. To create resonance, we have to get outside of ourselves and off of our phones. In an encounter with God or another person, in a moment of extension, we leave ourselves open, vulnerable to receive a divinely appointed moment of grace. Resonance fills the hourglass, replenishing us rather than leaving us depleted.

When I spoke with one of the pastors who co-led my group, he said that what made the cohort effective was its simplicity—a return to “the basics” of the Christian faith. Rhythms of detachment and attachment, focused on commitment rather than outcomes, feels novel in an era where we’re told to optimize our time. Fasting and prayer aren’t “productive” in a way we can immediately see.

But in reality, meeting together and reading Scripture and sitting in silence are simple and historic practices, fresh in every age across all of time. In DC, ranked the loneliest city in America, my pastor said we also ought to think of community as a spiritual discipline. We can’t reclaim sacred time as solitary individuals—especially not with technology that’s so powerful and addictive. It’s a task that is too difficult to do alone.

The countercultural cohort was transformational for my relationship with time—time as plentiful rather than scarce; time as opportunity rather than burden; time as something to inhabit with others rather than spend on ourselves. As Psalm 90 reminds us, we must be taught to number our days and be fully attentive to how we spend our time in light of eternity; for “a thousand years in [God’s] sight are like a day that has just gone by” (v. 4).

In the months since the cohort finished, rather than trying to go against the grain of our culture alone, I’ve cofacilitated silent weekend retreats and participated in weekly dinners. I’ve committed to daily morning prayer and Scripture reading, this time with a friend. Time spent together in praise and petition seems to multiply and slow down. Time fills up but doesn’t overwhelm; time is resonant. The burning bush flickers, and the Lord speaks.

A church known for its ability to transport people into transcendent, sacred time is a true respite from an insatiable culture of consumption and acceleration. It’s a compelling place to abide—past, present, and future.

Aryana Petrosky is a graduate student at The University of Edinburgh where she studies the intersection of ecumenical monasticism, spiritual disciplines, and faith in the public square. She helped launch The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics and formerly worked for the American Enterprise Institute's Initiative on Faith & Public Life.

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Church Life

For Missionaries, Mental Health Feels Like a Burden and a Liability

Annie Meldrum

How sending agencies are trying to bring overseas workers off the perfect Christian “pedestal” and into a counseling chair.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

The long-standing stigma around mental health care has faded from many American churches, but has the shift made its way to the ends of the earth?

When you’re an overseas missionary, a season of deep depression, panic attacks, or chronic anxiety can seem to put your ministry in jeopardy, keeping you from the work you are being called and paid to do.

Yet missions workers are extra susceptible to such conditions. They experience culture shock. They witness trauma and fear persecution. And they often live in places where access to mental health professions is difficult to impossible.

For years, supporters have been trying to open up more conversations about mental health and to get workers on the field the help they need, but missionaries still fear the repercussions of coming forward with their struggles or their family members’.

Just over half of missionaries say they have an issue they worry could jeopardize their work in the field, according to a survey conducted this year by Global Trellis, an organization that supports cross-cultural workers. Emotional and mental health struggles were among their top concerns.

The ministry asked nearly 400 missionaries, many of whom had spent 20-plus years in the field, “How do we keep senders from putting missionaries on the pedestal, and keep missionaries from feeling like they have to stay on the pedestal?”

“We help people have language to talk about things. So, normalizing rest, normalizing growth, and just normalizing change,” said Amy Young, the founder of Global Trellis and a former missionary to China.

Other research has shown that missionaries’ stress levels are double to triple those of the average American, reaching levels that can lead to major health issues.

Sending organizations have seen missionaries leaving the field in crisis. From their view, improving mental health care is a way to better support those sent out to fulfill the Great Commission and to ensure their work is sustainable.

Some agencies are advising missionaries to include a budget for mental health care when they’re fundraising. They are also hiring and deploying more trained counselors who can be available—online and in person—to help work through the specific complications that come with missionary life.

“There used to be a strong belief that if you are really right with the Lord, you shouldn’t need counseling; you have the Holy Spirit,” said Penny Phillips, who served with Wycliffe Bible Translators. “There was some degree of shame associated with seeing a counselor, and that has changed.”

Over decades as a missionary counselor with Wycliffe, based at its Orlando headquarters, she saw missionaries grow more open to seeking counseling. Phillips and fellow professional counselors were available to travel to remote locations to minister to missionaries in many different countries.

“We were willing to see missionaries from any missionary organization,” said Phillips. Wycliffe’s goal, she said, was to serve all missionaries before, during, and after their time on the field. The main idea is for counseling to always be an open option to people serving all over the world.

While Phillips experienced and recognized the convenience of virtual counseling sessions, she still placed a high value on traveling to visit families in person. It is “easier to develop a trust relationship in a face-to-face situation,” she said.

John Leverington, also a longtime Wycliffe staff counselor, echoed Young in the importance of releasing missionaries from the pedestal on which they have stood for so many years.

“Those expectations are impossible to live up to and can lead to isolation, presenting a false self of competence while emotionally questioning one’s own faith, and, at some point, coming to a crisis that can’t be resolved on your own without support.”

With the particular dynamics of missionary work, mental health has proven to be a tough issue to navigate. In some cases, even when provided with mental health support, missionaries would rather suffer in silence than risk their sending organization declaring them unfit for their role.

“When missionaries are expected to go straight to their employers with health concerns, and when the help received is coming primarily from the ones in charge, a culture of distrust, fear, and secrecy can ensue,” Catherine Allison, who previously served in Malawi, wrote last year for The Gospel Coalition.

“Even when set with the best intentions, the structures to protect missionaries might inadvertently cause harm when mental illness comes knocking, especially if missionaries fear the potential loss of their careers, homes, and ministry dreams.”

In the Global Trellis survey, respondents described a range of self-reported mental health struggles and clinical issues: anxiety, depression and loneliness, PTSD from exposure to violence, and even suicidal ideation. One missions worker saw health issues as “the main way the Enemy attacks” families on the field.

Some said pastoral counseling and member care helped but wasn’t enough. One said they are transparent with their organization so they can get the care they need, but they couldn’t be as open with supporters. Another said being open about her mental health has been a connecting point with supporters.

“This fear that a missionary would be removed from the field due to emotional health can exacerbate the disconnect between many missionaries and the ones who send them,” the Global Trellis report read. “This can lead to hiding how their emotional health is really going.”

Sending organizations are trying to anticipate the potential for mental health needs and better incorporate trusting and supportive relationships throughout their ministries, so that missionaries and their families feel less isolated and leaders can be better positioned to help along the way.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board (IMB), with 3,590 overseas personnel, takes a team approach. Its five-member care teams—one in the US and four abroad—include around 80 employees, a combination of clinically trained professionals and pastoral care staff. They serve as relational connections and support partners for those on mission fields.

“We focus on supporting individuals, families—and we care for people, not only regarding what might be typically associated with counseling or psychological needs. Our focus is more holistic in terms of what people need spiritually, emotionally, and relationally, to be well and to be able to thrive in their places of assignment,” said Chris Martin, IMB’s director of member care.

As the agency continues to improve the ways that they serve their missionaries, Martin says he appreciates the cohesion among the different pieces of member care.

“Ideally, we would have routine contact with our personnel. Not only through our member care consultants but through team leaders and other leadership in our organization—and also team members who see and know enough about what’s going on with one another to be mutually caring and supportive,” he said.

As a past missionary himself, Martin understands the high stress of overseas living as well as the fact that no matter where someone is, life is not perfect. With that in mind, he talked about the idea that one of the most important goals for IMB member care is to promote well-being within each individual and between their teams across the globe.

Connie Dunn went through her own mental health struggles when serving as a missionary with Antioch Missions International. She brings that perspective and understanding into her work as a kids advocate for Antioch’s missionaries.

Antioch assigns its adult missionaries a pastoral overseer who is not necessarily licensed in counseling but is committed to encouraging and caring for each person. Additionally, it also encourages all their missionaries to include a budget for professional mental health care as they raise support for their time on the field.

Dunn’s job is to check in with families and children to make sure that they are receiving the mental health care that they need.

“It’s not just a kid counselor, but it’s also a kid counselor that understands the hardships that third culture kids and missionary kids face,” she said.

When parents see their kids suffering or in crisis, it’s difficult and can be hard to get them help. But the mission field context adds another layer of difficulty. Young at Global Trellis noted:

The missionary may wonder, “If it gets bad enough, are we going to have to leave the field? Could we lose our home and community? How will this affect our other kids’ schooling, education, and friends? How will this impact our children’s relationship with God? How will it impact our livelihood?”

Phillips at Wycliffe also expressed a need for more counselors for young people. She herself had spent 17 years as a teacher to missionary kids before deciding to become a licensed mental health counselor specifically for kids on the mission field.

Phillips said it’s important to be able to intervene early when kids are facing trauma, anxiety, and depression so they can learn tools for navigating mental health challenges before entering adulthood.

IMB recently implemented a program for kids and teenagers on the field called TCK (third-culture kid) focused member care. IMB’s goal is to be available both to the kids as well as to their families for advice and consultation.

As missions groups seek to bring the good news of Christ to the nations, they are also learning how best to care for the people they have sent out.

Counseling, said Phillips, “is for courageous people—who have the courage to come and ask for help—and for [people who] are willing to say, ‘I don’t have it all together.’ None of us do.”

- More from Annie Meldrum

News

Bangladesh’s Religious Minorities Want Peace Amid Country’s Turmoil

Surinder Kaur

While Hindus publicly confront mob violence against their community, Christians are apprehensive about speaking out.

A rally in Bangladesh.

Syed Mahamudur Rahman / AP Images

Bangladesh’s religious minorities have reported looting, arson, and vandalization following Sheikh Hasina’s abrupt resignation as prime minister last month.

Thousands of young people first took to the streets in June to protest a court ruling that reinstated a civil service quota system many found discriminatory and exclusive. But after Hasina insulted protesters, demonstrations escalated into violence.

Since then, rioters have attacked the parliamentary building, the residences of the prime minister and other political leaders, and numerous other establishments, including ones belonging to certain religious minorities. The Catholic charity Caritas Bangladesh stated:

According to different local, national, and international news media, as well as reports from local communities, more than one hundred houses, religious institutions, and commercial centers belonging to Awami League leaders and religious minorities have been attacked. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council [BHBCUC] reported that hundreds of families have been attacked, faced sabotage activities, and received death threats from miscreants.

Caritas also stated its own regional office in southwestern Bangladesh was attacked by more than 100 rioters on August 4, noting that one of the mob’s leaders told the group after about 15 minutes that this was not the intended target.

On social media, many unverified reports went viral of mobs destroying a church in the Nilphamari district in northern Bangladesh and some Christian homes in Khulna, the country’s third-largest city.

BHBCUC president Neem Chandra Bhowmik said that his organization had received reports over the phone of “vandalism, intimidation and threats from 52 of the 64 districts.”

In response, the BHBCUC has organized efforts to demand peace, justice, and the arrests of those initiating violence against the minority communities in Bangladesh.

While Christian organizations in Bangladesh affirm that they have recorded data on the churches and Christian establishments targeted, they have refused to publish it, fearing backlash, one leader told CT.

Few Christian groups have officially expressed their solidarity for peace, said Asa Kain, general superintendent of the Bangladesh Assemblies of God (AG), who added that the AG had “conducted peace rallies and prayed for the nation in public” and that some Christian nonprofits, such as HEED, are providing medical help to those wounded in the attacks. When asked whether Christian students also participated in the protests, Kain explained that many might have joined with their own groups but that he did not know whether they were on the streets or active only on social media.

Christians make up less than 0.5 percent (under a million) of Bangladesh’s 174 million people, according to the 2022 census. Hindus, which comprise 8 percent, have suffered even greater losses. One leader said that up to 300 Hindu homes and 20 temples had been vandalized. Another said that attacks on his community had killed five people.

Minority communities across the country suffered after the police went on strike following a mob attack against them that left nearly four dozen officers dead and 500 injured.

Acknowledging “stray incidents” against the Christian community, though clarifying that no AG churches have been affected, Kain said, “These incidents were expected because there was no police force at work [to protect the minority community] for six days.”

An August 5 statement from the Church of Bangladesh did not mention any violence against Christians but asked for the “safety and protection of all citizens, especially those who are most vulnerable” and for prayer for those who had “lost loved ones.” It also noted the challenges of limited internet access and said that “the curfew and limited access to resources have made daily life extremely difficult for many.”

The president of the Bangladesh Baptist Church Sangha, Christopher Adhikari also expressed concerns about the effects of the “long-term blockades and curfews” on the country’s day laborers.

John Karmakar, general secretary of the Bangladesh Baptist Church Sangha, urged people to “continue praying for peace and justice” in the country.

In a statement, the National Council of Churches in Bangladesh pointed to instances of vandalism targeting churches and minority offices and called for continued prayers for the protection of minority groups.

Muhammad Yunus, who was sworn in as head of Bangladesh’s interim government after Hasina fled to India, met with distressed Hindu community members on August 13. He subsequently promised to set up a hotline for Bangladeshi minorities to report any attack and receive swift action. On Friday, Yunus assured India’s prime minister Narendra Modi that the government would ensure the protection and safety of Hindus and other minority groups.

Martha Das, the general secretary of the National Christian Fellowship of Bangladesh, asked the church to pray for those who had lost loved ones and for a return to “law-and-order.”

“Pray that this interim government will govern with integrity and equality,” she said. “All the advisers in the government should stay healthy and work to build a real new Bangladesh.”

Despite being a small minority, Christians in Bangladesh have been an active community, with missionary activities dating back to the late 18th century that established churches, schools, and hospitals. While generally coexisting peacefully with the Muslim majority and the Hindu minority, Christians have faced periods of tension and occasional violence, including church bombings in the early 2000s.

The community has experienced significant growth at times, particularly among tribal and Hindu groups. Christian organizations have also been heavily involved in relief and development work, contributing to Bangladesh’s social services and national development. Although their relationship with the government has varied, Christians have often been welcomed for their contributions in health care, education, and agriculture. Christian leaders have worked to integrate more fully into Bangladeshi society while maintaining their religious identity.

Despite this, Bangladesh is ranked number 26 on Open Doors’ 2024 World Watch List, largely due to backlash that Christian converts face from their former Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or tribal communities. In April 2023, insurgents killed eight tribal Christians in Chittagong.

The protests in Bangladesh stem from the economic discontent of many of the country’s young people. (Nearly 50 million Bangladeshis are between the ages of 10 and 24.) Despite the country’s economic growth, many young Bangladeshis have found it challenging to find work, and university graduates face higher unemployment rates than their less-educated peers.

On July 1, the High Court reinstated a quota (abolished in 2018) that guaranteed 30 percent of civil service jobs would go to descendants of those who had fought for the country’s independence. The students demanded an end to the quota that favored the allies of the ruling Awami League party, a group originally composed of those who had led the independence movement.

Despite having led the government that had overturned the quota, Hasina defended its existence.

“Why is there so much resentment towards freedom fighters? If the grandchildren of freedom fighters don’t get quota benefits, should the grandchildren of Razakars?” Hasina said.

(Razakar is a slur for those who colluded with the East Pakistani volunteer force during the war for independence and participated in its atrocities, including murder, rape, and property destruction, and are thus seen as traitors.)

Following the prime minister’s remarks, the protesters took to the streets, and soon security forces and members of the Chhatra League (the student wing of Hasina’s Awami League) opened fire, killing hundreds of students. The government harshly cracked down, shutting down internet and phone access and authorizing the military to shoot on sight. As of August 10, a total of 300 people had died and thousands had been injured since the protests began.

- More from Surinder Kaur

News

New Zealand Uncovers Historic Abuse in Church-Run Institutions

Isabel Ong

Survivors, advocates, and pastors call for “true repentance” among religious groups that ran schools and homes between 1950 and 1999.

The public taking part in a hikoi prior to the release of the Abuse in Care report at Parliament on in New Zealand.

Hagen Hopkins / Stringer / Getty

Not long after Frances Tagaloa accepted Christ at 16, she started experiencing flashbacks.

Over the next few years, Tagaloa began piecing together long-buried memories and came to recognize that she had been sexually abused between the ages of five and seven by a Catholic Marist Brother who taught at a school in the Auckland suburb of Ponsonby.

Tagaloa only told her parents about the abuse years later, after getting married and having children, because talking about the issue was taboo in her father’s Samoan culture, and she didn’t want her parents to blame themselves.

Her mother approached the Catholic Church in New Zealand around 1999, but Tagaloa, 56, decided not to speak with them —until three years later, when she heard the Marist Brothers were going to name a classroom after the perpetrator, Bede Fitton.

When Tagaloa met with a Catholic counselor, she wanted an apology and for Fitton’s honors to be removed. Instead, the Catholic church offered her financial compensation. Tagaloa suggested that they donate the money to the evangelical ministry where she worked.

“I was really disappointed in the process,” she said. “I remember thinking that was just a big waste of time.”

Two decades later, another opportunity arose for Tagaloa to hold the Catholic Church accountable.

The ministry leader became the first witness in the Catholic hearing with New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry, an independent body established in 2018 to investigate abuse and neglect that children and adults faced while in the care of state and faith-based institutions between 1950 and 1999.

On July 24, the Royal Commission released its final report, which found that an estimated 256,000 out of 655,000—or nearly 1 in 3—children, young people, and adults were “exposed to pervasive abuse and neglect” in state and faith-based care across the country.

Survivors included those from Pākehā (European), Māori, and Pacific Islander backgrounds as well as people who lived with mental and physical disabilities. Māori or Pacific Islanders made up the majority of those in care and were disproportionately subject to racial and cultural discrimination, as well as higher levels of physical abuse compared to other ethnicities.

Christians comprise New Zealand’s largest religious group, making up 37 percent of the population, according to the 2018 census. But believers’ responses to the Royal Commission’s 3,000-page report have been largely muted, say the survivors, advocates, and pastors that CT interviewed.

Evangelical reactions to the report range from those who are “deeply aware” to others who “barely notice and say, This is not us,” said Stuart Lange, national director of the New Zealand Christian Network.

“Personally, I have been very disappointed at the responses from the faith-based sector,” said Baptist pastor Alan Vink. “I have kept a close eye on the media, and to date, there has not been even a statement acknowledging wrongdoing, let alone any comments about redress.”

The report’s publication evoked a “mixed bag of feelings,” said Hera Clarke, who was part of the Māori advisory group during the inquiry and serves as the commissary for reconciliation and restoration in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia.

“There are 200,000 survivors, and we’ve only been able to touch the tip of the iceberg.”

Safeguarding and listening

The Royal Commission investigated eight religious groups in its six-year-long probe: the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Methodist Church of New Zealand, the Presbyterian Church of Aoetearoa New Zealand, the Salvation Army, Gloriavale Christian Community, Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The inquiry team wrote that “at the beginning of the Inquiry period, faith-based institutions were among the largest providers of residential care for children in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

Many of these churches ran children’s homes, unmarried mother’s homes, adoption and foster services, schools, and residential institutions. The Royal Commission also included situations where a person with authority in a religious institution provided pastoral care to an individual as a part of faith-based care.

Education was “the most common pathway” into faith-based institutions where people suffered physical, emotional, mental, and sexual abuse. Investigators also found that sexual abuse was more prevalent in faith-based settings than in state care. The report added: “Many survivors died while they were in care or by suicide following care.”

In October 2022, faith-based groups issued responses and statements during a public hearing held by the Royal Commission. Since the final report’s release this July, some churches included in the inquiry published statements that acknowledged and apologized for the harm caused.

“We acknowledge and take full responsibility for our failures to provide the safe, caring, and nurturing environment those who have been in our care had a right to expect and to receive,” wrote Anglican archbishops Don Tamihere, Justin Duckworth, and Sione Ulu’ilakepa.

“We are profoundly sorry for the suffering experienced by those in our care,” said the Salvation Army’s chief secretary Gerry Walker.

The Presbyterians convened a task force on July 31 to identify and recommend necessary steps to take based on the report’s findings. The Methodists, meanwhile, created a liturgy of lament ahead of the report’s release.

Lange, the New Zealand Christian Network national director, noted that evangelical churches have grown to recognize the need to implement more robust systems to protect children and youth in recent years. “A key response of every church must now be to be extremely vigilant, and do everything we possibly can to prevent abuse ever happening in our own spaces,” he wrote in an email newsletter to members.

Two months ago, Vink, who pastors Te Whānau Pūtahi, a congregation in the North Island city of Hamilton, reached out to the heads of many of these denominations, circulating a draft statement he wrote in hopes of issuing a joint response. Although he initially received positive feedback, Vink later heard that the churches would not be proceeding with this initiative.

“To be honest, the government has done a better job [than the church],” he said.

The Sunday after the report’s release, Vink gave a sermon at his church where he highlighted updates to safeguarding policies, including making their complaints policy more visible and introducing a new whistleblowing procedure. He closed with a reflection on Matthew 18:15–17, which focuses on dealing with sin in the church.

That same Sunday, Gracecity—a multiethnic charismatic church in Auckland—included a time of prayer and confession in their services. The church also published a YouTube video in which senior pastor Jonathan Dove outlined ways Christians can respond when the topic of abuse in faith-based care arises.

“Some Christians, in a desire to protect the church, come across [as] defensive,” Dove shared with CT in an email. “When hearing about the stories of horrid abuse in faith-based care, I wanted to ensure our church members responded with care, prayer, aroha (love), and a non-defensive posture.”

In the past year, Gracecity has introduced greater oversight over its preschool, children, and youth ministries, such as providing a complaints process with the option for an external review, updating their safeguarding policies, and training ministry staff and volunteers to identify signs of abuse.

Other Christians are carving out safe spaces for survivors within their churches.

Clarke, the Māori Anglican leader, listened to 317 survivor accounts in her role as commissary. For her, the work of encouraging, supporting, and providing room for survivors to share their experiences is ongoing.

With the report’s release, Clarke is now planning to hold workshops in various dioceses for Māori Anglican believers on what the recommendations from the report, such as establishing an independent “Care Safe Agency,” would look like.

“I, alongside our bishops and archbishops, take responsibility for what’s happened in the church,” she said. “How the [abuse] has impacted survivors and their families is unacceptable.”

Rising advocacy efforts

In its investigation of religious groups that employ high control—such as the Gloriavale Christian Community and Plymouth Brethren Christian Church—the Royal Commission found that authoritarian leadership and the ostracism and punishment meted out to those who leave the groups often perpetuated psychological and spiritual abuse.

Some Christians are helping people leave these religious communities. Liz Gregory, manager of Gloriavale Leavers’ Support Trust, founded the charity in 2019 to help former Gloriavale members reintegrate into society after they started showing up at her Reformed Baptist church in Timaru, four-and-a-half hours away from the commune.

Australian preacher Neville Cooper founded the Gloriavale Christian Community, a reclusive religious sect of about 700 that settled on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Islands, in 1969. In 1994, a New Zealand court found Cooper guilty of three counts of sexual assault, while Gloriavale’s current leader, Howard Temple, is facing 27 counts of sexual offending against girls between 9 and 20 years old.

At least 270 people have left Gloriavale in the last decade, and Gregory’s church is one of the places they often turn to for help in rebuilding their lives.

When the Royal Commission’s inquiry first launched in 2018, it only pledged to look into state care. As Gregory mowed her lawn, she felt powerless and began praying: Lord, I don’t understand. Why is no one doing anything? This is horrific. Who else cares about the people in Gloriavale?

The answer came quickly to her: Her church cared. So did survivors who still had family members in the group. Together, they could do something.

Gregory and other believers gathered Gloriavale survivors together and asked if they wanted the religious group to be brought to account. The survivors agreed, and Gregory invited the Royal Commission’s inquiry team to Timaru, where survivors shared witness statements and testimonies on the abuse they had endured.

The survivors are also currently seeking a declaration that Gloriavale is guilty of modern-day slavery due to labor exploitation on the commune and that the New Zealand government failed in its obligations to humanity in an upcoming court case, Gregory said.

The secretive group says on its website that it seeks to live out a practical Christian life with perfect obedience to God. It emphasizes living in community—like the early church in Acts—and uniformity, where everyone must think, act, and speak the same, said Gregory.

“[Gloriavale leadership] think they’re Moses … but really, they’re like Pharaoh,” she said. “They’re actually those people binding people into slavery. … And our message to them is: Let these people go.”

Another high-control group included in the inquiry is the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, which has 50,000 members across New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the Americas, and the UK. Its members believe that current leader Bruce Hales is “a manifestation of the Holy Spirit or the Paul of our day,” said Lindy Jacomb, who left the group 15 years ago at the age of 20.

Thirty-two survivors shared accounts of abuse or neglect within the group to the inquiry team. The Plymouth Brethren acknowledged only five allegations of abuse and “does not necessarily accept that these incidents occurred within its care,” the report stated.

When the Brethren excommunicated Jacomb for not accepting their doctrines and theology, she stayed with a Baptist couple. “They showed me everything that church was supposed to be,” she said. “They became a new family in Christ for me.”

Last November, she launched the Olive Leaf Network, a charity that aims to provide support and networking opportunities for people who leave high-control religious groups.

Many faith-based care survivors felt like they had to fight to be included in the Royal Commission’s inquiry, Jacomb said.

“Even after being included, many people have felt there was still a bias toward minimizing their harm … [and the government] having far too much faith and trust in the institutions that abused them,” said Jacomb. Many of these religious groups have also hired legal advisors and spent considerable funds to get legal advice, she added.

Seeking redress

For Jacomb, the report’s “forced exposure does not bring about true repentance” among religious groups. In her view, genuine repentance would include a public apology by faith-based leaders.

“I’m still waiting for my apology,” said Tagaloa, the abuse survivor. She has not received an in-person apology from the Catholic Church to date, only apologies communicated through the media or via email.

The New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference issued an apology to victims and survivors in 2021. After the release of the final report, the Catholic Church thanked the Royal Commission for their work and committed to reviewing the report and taking steps to make their communities safe.

Another important aspect of repentance in the survivors’ view is an independent redress system, one of 138 recommendations outlined by the Royal Commission.

Redress encompasses financial compensation as well as physical, emotional, and psychological rehabilitation. It also includes holding the perpetrators or enablers responsible, preventing further abuse, and apologizing for the abuse.

In Canada, where more than 150,000 Indigenous children attended residential schools and suffered physical, verbal, sexual, and spiritual abuse, the government and 325 First Nations settled a class-action lawsuit in 2023 that sought about $2 billion in reparations for losing their culture and language through the school system. In July, they also reached an agreement to reform the country’s First Nations Child and Family Services Program.

New Zealand’s proposed independent redress scheme, known as puretumu torowhānui in Māori, was first recommended by the Royal Commission in 2021 to “help ensure there is consistency and equity in the outcomes for survivors.”

At present, most survivors have to return to the institution that abused them to receive compensation, which may retraumatize them. It also incorporates a “huge imbalance of power,” said Tagaloa.

During the inquiry, the team uncovered evidence of attempts to hide or cover up abuse within faith-based groups like the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, Presbyterian Support Otago, and the Gloriavale Christian Community. Leaders destroyed records, moved perpetrators between institutions, or prevented survivors from reporting their abuse.

“I would strongly question whether these groups can be trusted at all to manage their own redress processes,” Jacomb said. “How can the survivor have any sense of confidence or trust that this institution is going to have their best [interest] at heart?”

Among its latest list of recommendations for faith-based entities, the Royal Commission’s report also called for the groups to work closely with the proposed establishment of a Care Safe Agency, to ensure care standards are up to par, and create a national registry of people in ministry who may pose a risk to vulnerable children and adults.

“I believe that the Christian church should acknowledge wrongdoing and express deep sadness to all the survivors,” Vink said. “We should be quick to offer full and comprehensive redress arrangements. In biblical language, this would be known as ‘restitution.’”

To other survivors of faith-based abuse, Tagaloa has one encouragement to share: Look to Christ.

“Jesus is probably the only God I know who was also abused,” she said. “He understands the experiences we’ve gone through because he’s experienced abuse.”

“That kind of God [who] loves us unconditionally, forgives, and also wants to know us personally, is the type of God I want to know—a God [who] will give us the opportunity to experience freedom and hope.”

- More from Isabel Ong

Church Life

The UK Race Riots Need the Voices of Returned Missionaries

Harvey Kwiyani

I’m a missiologist and a migrant who lives in Liverpool. Can Christians who have served overseas stand up for my community?

Far-right activists hold a riot in England targeting mosques after misinformation spread about the murder of three girls in Southport.

Drik / Contributor / Getty

Though born in Malawi, for the past eight years, I have made Liverpool my home. In this UK port city where, for centuries, millions of immigrants have passed through and at times settled, the vibrant migrant community is small but connected. Each June, for instance, we celebrate the Africa Oyé festival, a live music event that draws tens of thousands to the city annually.

At the same time, many of us who recently arrived or whose families are relative newcomers know the fragility of our feelings of belonging. Three years ago, for example, three Black players on the English team missed their penalty kicks during the European Championship match shootout and were subject to a torrent of racist insults.

In recent weeks, Liverpool has been the epicenter of the anti-migrant riots that have rocked the nation following the horrific stabbing of three young white British girls by a Black British teenager of Rwandan heritage in a nearby suburb. Since then, furor over these devastating murders has turned into nationwide riots targeting Black and brown communities (including both those born and raised in the country and those newly arrived) and their properties.

As a leader in a multicultural Liverpool church, I have found the past weeks to be strenuous. We have contended with the logistical nightmare of making sure that migrant communities (my own family included) are safe, including temporarily relocating children and the elderly to calmer neighborhoods and making sure their houses and cars are safe. We have also been trying to provide immediate and future psychological support for those traumatized. Among other violent actions, far-right protesters have attacked migrants, burned their cars, and smashed their windows as well as vandalized organizations and hotels providing support and housing to asylum seekers.

Serving my community in this way is, of course, not only draining but also isolating. I attend one of only a few congregations that have intentionally established a place where white, Black, and brown Christians, native-born and migrant, come together to worship. But many UK churches are segregated, and I know many Black and brown Christians who have experienced racism while attending majority-white congregations.

However, as a missiologist who is a migrant and is currently ministering to migrants, I believe that the white UK church may already have what it needs to initiate hard conversations within their churches and to defend migrants to the country at large. For more than two centuries, this country has sent numerous prolific missionaries around the world. And if there is one community outside the diplomatic circles in the West that knows a thing or two about the migrants and where they are coming from, it is missions organizations that have trained and sent thousands of British people to serve in mission around the world for many decades.

Returning missionaries arrive back home in the UK having learned new languages, made new friends, found new families, and developed acute awareness of the challenges of acclimating to foreign cultures. Of course, not all missionaries who are on furlough in the UK have the same capacity for ministry while at home as they do on the mission field. Yet returned and retired missionaries—and especially those leading missions agencies—should recognize the same opportunities for missional presence in their own neighborhoods.

What if these missionaries and missions agencies used this knowledge to identify with the migrants in their neighborhoods? What if they used these lived experiences to support communities like mine as we navigate the anxiety of national unrest? What if these Christian groups were the first Brits to publicly condemn the racism that too often inundates this country?

Of course, engaging in mission among migrants requires a different posture, skill set, and relational abilities. But it can generate catalytic fruit. Migrants who come to Christ or reaffirm their faith have the credibility to reach people from their home countries that might take missionaries decades to achieve. Standing up for migrants also rebukes the false narrative that missionaries have only a self-interested relationship with those they seek to convert and instead reminds the world of the love for people themselves that propels these believers to mission.

I propose three ways the missions community can embody this during this fraught time in the UK.

Advocacy

For many missionaries, returning home can mean easily slipping back into familiar cultural comfort zones. Yet their experiences of living as migrants in foreign cultures, their understanding of both the migrants’ and their own cultures, and their connections with churches among their own communities are treasures that give them a unique vantage point to help. These missionaries not only can follow the lead of those who have already organized counterprotests but also can protect asylum centers and mosques and offer food, water, and shelter to those in need of either substance or comfort. They can raise their voices to speak against racism, Christian nationalism, and the antimigrant rhetoric of the far right.

When far-right antimigrant groups stoke fear and hatred to the point that, as I wrote earlier, some of us have to temporarily leave our homes, what if missions agencies organized efforts with local churches to create safe places for migrants? What if a missions agency offered a hotline to talk to distressed migrants during a riot? Or to help migrants seeking shelter when their homes are unsafe? Or what if missions organizations offered counseling and psychotherapy support to those affected?

Reimagining missions theology

During the 1910 World Missionary Conference, out of the 1,215 delegates in attendance, 509 were from the UK—18 more than the United States and Canada together. In parts of Africa and Asia, many missionaries took advantage of British colonial rule to successfully spread Christianity. Their ministry was reinforced by the millions of European Christians in the 1800s who immigrated for economic purposes.

In the end, several former British colonies such as Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa embraced Christianity en masse. Nigeria alone, for example, has more than 102 million Christians, about one-and-a-half times the entire population of Britain today. Now, for decades, many people from these countries have arrived in the UK, along with their faith.

God has often used events we may not appreciate or may even fear to carry the gospel around the world. He who dispersed the Jerusalem church through persecution in Acts 11 now sends Africans and Asians—many of them believers—to parts of the world where Christianity has all but evaporated.

Every day we are bombarded with pundits that ask us to view mass migration from a political and economic perspective. But part of the mission community’s duty is to educate the church that this very migration will continue the spread of the gospel and to see the newcomers among us as people whom God wants to use.

Bridge building

Returned missionaries and their missions agencies must play an important role in creating better understanding and respect between British Christians and the wider UK community and newcomers. Missionaries’ command of multiple languages and grasp of the intricacies of different cultures can play a critical role in helping white Brits understand the reasons and motivations of those living among them.

In fact, during the colonial era many missionaries did this kind of work. Some, like William Carey, provided language training to foreigners while translating the Bible and other books to local languages. Today, though not missionary-sending ministries as such, organizations like Welcome Churches, Sanctuary Foundation, and the International Association for Refugees help Westerners learn how to work with the migrants.

During the recent riots, the best antidote has been white British people confronting racism in their own communities and defending migrants to fellow white Brits. Missionaries’ lived experience could allow them to go one step deeper and explain from a personal perspective what it is like to live in a new environment as someone far away from home. Their knowledge of straddling multiple cultures can offer a much more nuanced perspective of the migrant experience and a more detailed look at the alienation, loneliness, and fear that can accompany building an identity and way of life from scratch.

Returning the favor

Sadly, though I have met many missionaries who have challenged and grown my faith, I have also observed many missions agencies and churches ignore African migrants in their neighborhoods while sending their people to Africa to serve. Ironically, few seem interested in engaging Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans once they have migrated to Britain.

I remember attending a multi-agency mission conference in Manchester discussing the unfinished task of evangelizing my home country, Malawi. To my shock, the organizers of this wonderful conference did not think to invite some of the many Malawian pastors leading their (Malawian) congregations in Manchester.

When I lived in Minneapolis, our church sent nurses to Ghana for mission service but never cared to connect with the Ghanaian congregation that was next door to us. Sometimes I cynically wondered whether it was the exotic nature of working in Ghana and not necessarily working with and among Ghanaian people that drove most of that effort.

These oversights pain me because they seem to disregard hospitality—that is, the opportunity to honor and welcome newcomers. Most missionaries know that this is a fundamental part of mission work around the world and that much of their work hinges on the generosity and kindness of local people. Even Jesus told his disciples to move on to other homes and cities if such hospitality was lacking. “But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you” (Luke 10:10–11).

As someone who grew up around missionaries in Malawi, I saw how our communities went out of their way to be hospitable to visiting Western Christians. Once, members of a church I knew sold all their goats and cows to pay for a missionary’s housing repair. My experience is far from the minority; long before they migrated to the UK, many people warmly received Westerners, even at personal cost, risking their own livelihoods to help missionaries’ ministries thrive. Could those who were once welcomed now do the same for these migrants?

Harvey Kwiyani is a Malawian theologian and leads the Centre for Global Witness and Human Migration (Acts 11 Project) at Church Mission Society in Oxford, England.

- More from Harvey Kwiyani

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Safeguarding and listening

Rising advocacy efforts

Seeking redress

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Advocacy

Reimagining missions theology

Bridge building

Returning the favor

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