The United Nations Is a Mission Field

Contributor

What I have learned representing my Christian organization to diplomats from 193 countries.

I flash my United Nations (UN) access badge to the police officer, and he waves me through the security barrier. As I approach the plaza, I see snipers with rifles on the roof and hear a dozen different languages. Black limousines are everywhere as presidents and prime ministers converge in New York City, preparing their speeches for the UN General Assembly, which kicked off earlier this month.

It’s been five years since I became Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) representative to the UN and first gained access to this community of politicians, humanitarians, and activists from around the world. I’ve observed the inefficiencies of this bureaucracy—its challenges in acting decisively and emphatically. I’ve seen many inside push for policies I fundamentally oppose because of my Christian convictions.

But through my role with MCC, I’ve also realized that my workplace is a mission field where I have daily opportunities to bear witness as Christ’s disciple to the world of political power. For instance, I know a UN ambassador on the Security Council who told a small group of Christian agencies that we inspired her to be true to her own Christian faith as she navigated the challenges of violence in Israel and Palestine.

I’ve watched the UN ambassador from Albania, who while serving on the Security Council, tell a group of 40 Christian college students that his calling was to keep exposing Russia’s lies to the world about their military invasion of Ukraine and that documenting the truth will matter one day. I’ve stopped at the statue in the UN building dedicated to Michael “MJ” Sharp, a former MCC worker who later served with the UN. After years of working with local Congolese mentors, MJ and his UN colleague Zaida Catalán of Sweden were ambushed and executed by an armed group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), with their interpreter and three motorbike drivers still missing.

Over 6,000 nongovernmental agencies have applied for and been granted UN consultative status, permitting them to officially engage UN diplomats and staff, enter the complex, and participate in UN activities. Through Caritas, the Catholic church has a presence here, as well as the Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. But of the most prominent US evangelical international agencies, including Compassion International, Hope International, International Justice Mission, Samaritan’s Purse, and World Relief, only World Vision has a dedicated UN office and everyday presence in New York like MCC does.

But what if followers of Christ saw this community of 5,000 diplomatic staff and 8,000 UN employees as an unreached people group? What if they realized that influencing the political power in these halls had an outsize impact of compassion and justice on the people whom so many Christians serve in international ministries? What if we befriended and were inspired here by the public servants with moral courage from many faiths and nations?

A Rare Voice to Political Power

In a number of the 45 countries where MCC has relief, development, and peacemaking ministries, it has become crystal clear that political power often stands in the way of our mission.

The 2021 military coup in Myanmar sent many of our local Christian partners on the run, fleeing for their lives and continuing to help others while internally displaced themselves. When gangs in Haiti took control after the government’s collapse, it became nearly impossible to carry health and agricultural programs forward. Thirteen years of war in Syria have razed the country, created millions of refugees, and dramatically harmed the lives and work of our church partners.

For Christian ministries working across the world, it is local partners, living in such places of suffering and hope, who know what is happening in real time on the ground and who carry the expertise for solutions. That incarnational knowledge can become precious and persuasive at the UN.

After Myanmar’s military coup, we, working with a UN body, provided a secure UN channel for a partner to document a firsthand report of a chemical weapons attack on civilians. In meetings with US diplomats, we testified how the 2017 US travel ban to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) for people from the US in humanitarian agencies stopped our 25 years of work there. Working with other agencies, we persuaded the US to grant travel waivers that allowed teams to enter North Korea and ensure that food and clean-water kits made their way to children’s hospitals.

In a meeting with an ambassador from an influential European nation, my 26-year-old colleague Victoria Alexander shared how our on-the-ground partners in Gaza faced significant obstacles getting food and household supplies to families even as our partners were fleeing bombs and suffering the loss of loved ones. Victoria also shared how our US staff in Jerusalem was forced to leave when the Israeli government stopped visa renewals for humanitarian workers.

“Information is the currency of the UN,” a Christian diplomat from a Western nation told me. “Christian groups have a connection to and trust with the community and local church level that even a lot of elite diplomats from those countries don’t have. It gives [these] organizations credibility.”

Learning Healthy Political Engagement

In Christianity in the Twentieth Century, historian Brian Stanley argues that the failures of churches to publicly speak out in Germany during the rise of Nazism and in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide reminds us that “effective prophetic speech depends on a paradoxical balance between maintaining access to the sources of political power and preserving sufficient distance from those sources to enable moral independence to be safeguarded.”

Sadly, this temptation to either control or retreat from political power is something Christians still struggle with. Yet because Christian groups don’t have political representatives at the UN and because UN diplomats have no obligation to listen to us, being at the UN helps Christians learn to be a minority whose moral power is in persuasion and building relationships. We engage not to seize power but to bear witness to the values of the kingdom of God. Further, an audience of all nations presses us to think and speak beyond any single nation’s interests, grounded in our relationships with the powerless and the overlooked throughout the world.

In a time when politics is often loud and angry, one avenue for healthy engagement is the way of quiet persuasion. When a group of ministry colleagues visited our UN office in New York this spring, we met with a US diplomat. Over lunch, I told him about challenges MCC was facing in Gaza and the Korean Peninsula and the harm we believed certain US policies were causing those on the ground. He listened patiently. After the diplomat left, Clair Good, a development worker who served with MCC in DR Congo and Kenya, said, “Chris, you brought up some tough things with him, but over a very nice lunch, and by showing interest in him as a person. That helped us see how relationships of respect matter in our work engaging the political world.”

Other moments call for speaking up publicly in unexpected ways. Last spring, MCC and other groups carried signs saying, “a pilgrimage of mourning all trauma, loss of life, and suffering in Palestine-Israel,” and silently walked 25 circles in the blocks around the UN to represent the 25 miles of the Gaza strip. Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, 50 UN diplomats attended our service for remembrance and peace. If not for that event, organized by MCC and other faith-based groups, no UN event would have marked 70 years of a still-divided Korean people.

That same Christian diplomat from a Western nation told me that negotiations at the UN are long and frustrating, and progress is slow. “But I bring a Christian view of everyone being welcome at the table and listening to those who are in the worst situation. As well as people I deeply disagree with.”

Every year we hold a UN seminar for Christian college students from Canada and the US. Despite our best attempts to be honest about the UN’s limits and failures, the students leave testifying to greater hope, talking about ambassadors and diplomats they met who elevate the political vocation.

Growing in Biblical Peacemaking

As popularized by the Left Behind book series, many US evangelicals have historically expressed a deep suspicion of a “one world government” that is a secular threat to national independence, religious freedom, and the rule of Christ. At times, the UN is depicted as the center of that threat.

But rest assured that most days, highlighted by bitter Security Council battles between the US and China, the UN is more the “Divided Nations.” MCC’s partners in DR Congo and Myanmar have often reminded me that in their countries the UN is known as “United for Nothing.” And as the Christian diplomat from the Western nation told me, “The UN is a huge institution. There’s a tendency for this huge bureaucracy to think that money can solve issues. There’s not enough soul-searching here about UN failures, from Haiti to Afghanistan.”

It shouldn’t be surprising to find that the good, bad, and ugly of our world is fully represented in New York or that the UN is limited in its power—for all of humanity is here, both created in the image of God and estranged from God, fallen and fragile. Yes, there is moral courage and excellence here. Also waste, timidity, and powerful officials who stall, lie, obstruct, and abuse.

Yet this moral turbulence is more reason for disciples of Christ to be present.

“It’s the only room in the world where you see Ukrainians speaking with Russians, Israelis with Palestinians, Americans with Iranians,” said the New York diplomat, who can’t be named because of sensitivities related to her job. The headlines are about the issues where nations disagree. “But we can’t avoid each other here,” she said. “We have to sit and listen to each other and put our differences aside to find areas where we do agree, from clean water to artificial intelligence. I’ve got the WhatsApp for diplomats from other countries we don’t get along with. Even when we disagree, we text.”

In a time when we increasingly avoid those we disagree with, moving into church and neighborhood silos of “people like us,” being daily face to face with both friends and foes on these UN streets and hallways can create frustration and anger. But this context can become ground to grow in the virtues of biblical peacemaking.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas believes the UN is a necessary community of conversation Christians shouldn’t want to do without.

“The UN is not going to prevent war, but it provides a place to delay wars, and that’s not to be discounted,” he told me. “It’s good to have diplomats who are committed to making war less likely and then are frustrated when it doesn’t work. But that frustration is a source of energy that hopefully would have results after some time. Because peace takes time, and you have to learn patience. Because you have to listen to people you despise.”

To the Ends of the Earth

When I leave the UN General Assembly and pass the 193 flags outside, I approach the Church Center building where I work and see the piece of art on the chapel, which hosts weekly Christian worship services, open to all. The artwork, built into the wall of the building, is part sculpture, part stained glass. Called Man’s Search for Peace, it features human shapes around a large eye-like form, gazing both inside the sanctuary and outside across the street at the UN. I see this eye as representing the Lord’s.

Every time I pass work, this art reminds me that our living God, the Lord of all nations, keeps an eye both on the powers speaking across the street and on the church, urging us to bear witness among the powers to the Lord who “secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy” (Ps. 140:12).

In Acts, Jesus sent his disciples to the “ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). In our time, every day, members of all those parts gather at the UN. One day they return home, scattering back to all the nations. Inside those blocks in New York City, Christian witness can touch the whole world.

Chris Rice is director of the Mennonite Central Committee United Nations Office in New York City, and was previously co-founding director of the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation. His latest book is From Pandemic to Renewal: Practices for a World Shaken by Crisis (InterVarsity Press).

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Ideas

Give Gen Z Students Some Credit

Tom Lin

As president of a college ministry, I see young Christians on secular campuses modeling what it means to be good neighbors.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

If you tried to design an ideal setting for learning how to be a good neighbor, it would look a lot like a college campus.

As the president of a campus ministry, I might be a little biased in that assessment. But imagine the reality that a brand-new college student faces when they come to campus for the first time. Thousands are already there from every walk of life: athletes, musicians, activists, artists, people of different cultures and ethnicities, introverts and extroverts, people who like to party and stay out late, people who like to stay in and get up early.

All of them chose this school, but none of them chose each other. All at once, they’re thrust into a community, stuck together in dorms and classes and social clubs.

These college students have no choice but to learn to coexist. To share space and navigate conflict. To be neighbors.

There’s a durable public stereotype that members of Gen Z can’t live in neighborly ways—that they’re too anxious and fearful, too conflict avoidant and entitled. Frankly, I see something different. What I see on campus, in the students that InterVarsity and our fellow campus ministries serve, is a generation for whom neighborliness is the essence of day-to-day life, vital to navigating the tensions we’ve seen at universities in the past year.

Today’s college students have important lessons for the broader church about how to live alongside neighbors who may misunderstand them, disagree with them, or disdain them. Here are three.

First, neighborliness requires creativity of witness. Each day, Christian students at secular universities interact with countless complicated people and circumstances in which God calls them to be Christlike, seeking not “their own good, but the good of others” (1 Cor. 10:24). And, in the power of the Spirit, I see time and again how students respond with creative acts of gospel witness—fresh outreach ideas, innovative responses to injustice, bold prayers for physical healing, exciting calls to faith, authentic acts of relational generosity, and on and on.

One example comes from the College of William & Mary. For many years, the college had a problem with excessive drinking and partying on the last day of classes. To serve their classmates, InterVarsity students set up griddles in the center of campus and made pancakes for students who wanted a free meal and a safe alternative place to hang out. Today, “Pancake House” is a bi-annual event that creatively blesses over 2,000 people every semester, easily making it the largest student event on campus.

Much of the polarization we experience in today’s culture comes down to a lack of creative witness—a dull defaulting to the same staid talking points, stale arguments, and predictable reactions. But Christian students, like those at William & Mary, are learning something different. In their dynamic and diverse campus environment, they’re learning to follow the Spirit into fresh forms of neighborliness that the rest of the American church can learn from.

Second, being a good neighbor requires authenticity of witness. It’s a well-established truism that Gen Z values authenticity. They see how a holistically virtuous life can bring beauty out of the world’s ugliness, and how hypocrisy can corrupt people and institutions. This clarity of vision is one of the things I most admire about the students I meet.

Authenticity of witness is fundamentally a neighborly way of life. It is how we ensure that our interior life with Christ stays congruent with our public personas, resulting in lives that overflow with faithful obedience to our friends and communities. “Let love be sincere,” Paul says in Romans 12:9–10. “Honor one another above yourselves” (italics mine).

Today’s prevailing culture (even on campus, and sometimes in Christian circles) places a special premium on winning and on looking out for number one, honoring oneself above others. Practicing genuine love and authentic witness that sees the beauty of serving others, even those who disagree with you, is deeply countercultural.

Several years ago, the InterVarsity chapter at Sonoma State University was temporarily forced to move off-campus because they required their student leaders to be Christians. They were unable to advertise for events, hold meetings, or organize public outreaches. But rather than growing bitter or compromising their convictions, the chapter stood firm and responded with authentic witness. They reinvented how they did campus ministry, gathering unofficially and carrying portable backpack banners to advertise their chapter. During that year, that chapter saw a record number of conversions!

This is the kind of witness that Gen Z longs for, and that campus ministries are helping students grow into. It is a sensitivity to authentic discipleship that is a powerful example for the rest of the American church.

And finally, being a good neighbor requires humility of witness—serving and loving each other in small, common ways. It’s what the apostle Paul seems to call for in Philippians 2:3–4 when he says, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”

When I was a student in my InterVarsity undergraduate chapter, one of the ways we served our campus was going door-to-door offering to clean people’s dorm rooms. There was no grand strategic purpose. We didn’t run a focus group and discover that people were 61 percent more likely to come to Bible study if their rooms were clean. We just knew that it was a small part of our fellow students’ lives where they might need help, and where we could serve. It was a humble, ordinary act of love to the people in our community, regardless of how much or little we had in common with them—which typifies neighborliness.

Today’s students are just as eager to care for and serve one another in the common and the ordinary. At Trinity University in San Antonio, the InterVarsity chapter has a unique way of making meaningful connections with new students who may feel lost and lonely on campus. The chapter offers to sit with those who have no one to eat with in the cafeteria—sometimes even holding a sign reading “Dine with us!” They show Jesus’ love through the ordinary gifts of invitation and friendship.

In these dimensions of neighborly witness—creativity, authenticity, and humility—today’s college students are an example of a redemptive path forward for the church in our culture. My prayer is that the church will take note of all that God is doing in them, welcome their gifts with neighborly love, and learn from them.

Tom Lin is the president and CEO of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

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Church Life

Brenna Blain: ‘Suffering Clarified My Theology’

Ericka Andersen

Gnarly and honest, the rising author and teacher ditches small talk and Christian platitudes to share from Scripture and her own suffering.

Courtesy of Brenna Blain

The first thing you notice about Brenna Blain is probably her tattoos, a patchwork of ink stretching from her shoulders to her hands. A death’s-head hawkmoth spreads its wings around her neck, with a marking at its center that resembles a human skull.

For this 28-year-old Christian speaker and teacher in the Pacific Northwest, her brazen ink isn’t a liability—it’s an invitation. The neck tattoo opens unlikely conversations with those she says “would never choose to talk to a Christian willingly.”

“It’s one of the best outreach tools I’ve ever had,” Blain told CT. “I’ve been invited into spaces I wouldn’t typically expect to be invited into because people have been more willing to hear me out just simply based on my physical appearance.”

Her look is bold and trendy: combat boots with shorts, soft knit hats, oversized glasses. But her voice and daring message are what have grabbed the attention of young millennial and Gen Z Christians, as she shares hard and beautiful stories of trusting in God.

On her podcast and Instagram feed, Blain’s discussions of issues like eating disorders, sexuality, and mental illness have shaken up a polished evangelical online space. She describes herself as “gnarly” and admits to hating things like “overly mushy and emotional moments at women’s conferences,” so her style draws a certain kind of seeker—those tired of Christian platitudes and ripe for honest wrestling.

This raw vulnerability evolved out of a traumatic childhood that led Blain to question God’s love. After her parents separated when she was 12, Blain was molested, discovered she was same-sex attracted, developed an eating disorder, began self-harming, and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Unlike Christian teachers who share lessons from difficult seasons long ago, Blain is young enough that these struggles are still with her—she was hospitalized just last year for suicidal ideation—and yet she continues to open up and point to God amid them.

Blain began her podcast in 2019, the start of a modest public career as a self-proclaimed contemporary theologian. Blain’s reach has grown steadily with speaking engagements, podcast invitations (she recently appeared on With the Perrys with Preston and Jackie Hill Perry), and conference keynotes (she was a featured speaker at Preston Sprinkle’s 2024 Exiles in Babylon conference). Her debut book, Can I Say That?, released last month.

Blain has become an unofficial spokeswoman for Christian women who have struggled with same-sex attraction and want to remain obedient to the biblical call for sexual morality. She didn’t want to be pigeonholed or make that her whole persona.

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As she gained a following, she felt led to share how God was moving during the painful parts of her life. Instead of waiting for healing from depression or peace about her childhood sexual abuse, she wondered if she could simply share her brokenness and utter dependence on God right now with her audience. She felt God affirm that conviction, and her witness grew.

Jackie Hill Perry called her “the kind of theologian this generation has been asking for,” saying that through her stories and spiritual insights, “we may not find every question answered but at the very least, we will have important truths to carry us when everything is confusing.”

Gen Z suffers from distinctively poor rates of mental health, and Blain speaks to those circumstances. She has over 44,000 Instagram followers—many say they see her authenticity and honesty as a refreshing reprieve from polished leaders who seem to have it all together.

Blain embraces a tough theology that doesn’t always, or often, have closure here on earth. Complete healing is possible, but for many people, it comes only in the New Jerusalem. “If you are wrestling or trying to decide if you will wrestle or walk away, my encouragement is that you wrestle and that you wrestle well,” she wrote in an Instagram post.

She goes where God calls, despite the imperfect circumstances of mental illness, a lingering eating disorder, and occasional suicidal ideation. In the past five years, he’s called her to the microphone, the stage, the altar, the delivery room, and the book publishing house.

None of this was the plan back when she was a closeted 14-year-old reeling from the pain of abuse.

Even though Blain attended a conservative church and was homeschooled by a mom who made dinner every night, her upbringing wasn’t strict. Her parents gave her autonomy, like when they allowed her to dye her hair blue.

As a teen, though, Blain felt rudderless. She began sharing her attractions in secret online. She was terrified of others knowing, thinking of the hateful signs and slogans from Westboro Baptist Church, whose protests were in the news. The anxiety and depression pushed her toward despair.

When she opened up to her youth pastor, he thanked her for sharing and told her many people struggle with same-sex attraction. Despite her church’s biblically orthodox stance on sexuality, the condemnation she expected never came. This compassionate response was deeply formative.

After high school, Blain signed up for a trip with Youth with a Mission (YWAM), mostly as a way to get to Hawaii, where the team would be training for six months. She knew how to “play a Christian,” and the trip was merely a ticket out of her hometown.

She started off “so bored out of my gourd from listening to typical church kids’ stories that I might as well have been on Ambien.” But halfway through that trip, Blain had what she said was an undeniable encounter with God after witnessing a supernatural moment with a friend. After that, she felt called to become a wholehearted servant on a mission for the kingdom.

The transition was “rough.” As she continued to struggle with an eating disorder that nearly toppled her ability to finish the trip, Blain learned to trust God in uncertainty. “I told myself, even if I do get sent home … he has been faithful in all these things,” she said. “Even in this brokenness, he’s still here.”

Her struggle with same-sex attraction remained as well. She thought she’d remain celibate for life.

While on mission, she received a six-page letter from Austin Blain, a friend she barely knew from back home. She saw the connection as God’s perfect timing, changing her heart, drawing Austin near, and ultimately setting her up for what would come next—which was marriage, ministry, and motherhood.

The two remained platonic friends, exchanging long letters and phone calls for more than a year as they each completed their missions with YWAM (Austin went on his own trip just as Brenna returned). “By the time I got back, I think we already knew we wanted to get married before we even started dating,” Austin said in an interview with CT.

Despite still feeling same-sex attraction, Brenna believed God had orchestrated their relationship. Her sexual orientation was a “non-issue” for Austin.

“I felt like, if the Lord was who the Lord was, that he could do anything,” Austin told CT. “From my point of view, it was like, this is not bigger than the Lord.”

The two were soon married and now have two little boys, with whom Blain stays home while managing her ministry responsibilities in early mornings, naptimes, stolen moments, and evenings when Austin is home. Blain said staying “wildly scheduled” (she wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to run, sans headphones) keeps her mental health in check, but her days can range from writing sermons to “washing my 3-year-old’s poop off the back patio.”

Even among evangelicals who uphold a traditional view of marriage, there’s a range of approaches to same-sex attraction and identity, and Blain doesn’t fall neatly into one particular camp. She said she resonates with aspects of both Side B (which says same-sex orientation is not a sin but acting on it is) and Side Y (which says people shouldn’t identify themselves by their sexual orientation), but doesn’t label herself as either.

Blain believes she’ll always be same-sex attracted, which clashes with some Christian viewpoints that say such attraction is itself sinful. Blain sees same-sex attraction as a result of the Fall and, therefore, unwanted.

“While I do not believe it is sinful to have the temptation, I am not comfortable with the idea of ‘being okay with the temptation’ either,” she said. “James 1:14–15 is very clear on the implications of being apathetic towards our currently existing temptations.”

Abiding by Scripture, Blain said she works to put temptation “to death” through confession and accountability. Same-sex attraction, she said, should not disqualify believers from leadership or Christian commitment, even if it never subsides.

Blain leads a small group for high school girls at her church and stays in touch with her mentor from when she was around that age. The two women text daily, meet monthly, and practice confession regularly; her mentor even comes along on speaking trips when her husband can’t.

Blain counts veteran theologian and pastor Gerry Breshears as a mentor, calling him a “pastor to pastors”; she meets with him quarterly for prayer and consultation. Beyond that, Blain sees a Christian counselor monthly and names female teachers Phylicia Masonheimer, Lisa Bevere, and Jackie Hill Perry as role models and mentors of wisdom and encouragement over the past four years of her public ministry.

Blain also calls out churches that expect people to “live by the standards of Christ before getting to know the person of Christ” as homophobic. Blain referenced 1 Corinthians 2:14, which says those without the Spirit “cannot understand” or “discern” the truth.

She might use someone’s preferred pronouns as a modicum of respect since others aren’t yet in a relationship with God as she is—a controversial take for a theologically conservative believer.

On an episode of the Theology in the Raw podcast, Blain said she’s often been told that she’s “the reason LGBTQ teens commit suicide” and that her mixed-orientation marriage is destined for divorce. She takes it in stride, saying she’s confident in the truth of the Bible and convictions of her heart.

“When I get comments like that, I remember that most people are just responding out of fear and that is a very real thing, especially if they don’t know the peace of Jesus,” she said.

And not everyone loves her image. Blain said, for example, that some Christians find her skull tattoos “demonic” or “evil.” But she said they help others feel more comfortable opening up and sharing their stories with her.

“God created a moth out of nature that has a design that looks like a skull on it. Witches didn’t create it; God did,” Blain said in response to her critics. “The skull is a reminder that all face death, and what will it serve as a doorway for?”

This kind of sobering question is regular fodder for Blain’s platform. Small talk isn’t really in her wheelhouse. She’s here for the real thing, nobly serious about ideas that lead people in her community to say they “feel seen”—maybe for the first time—by her work.

“I feel everything [Blain] was saying as someone who has too attempted suicide many times,” said one commenter after seeing her story online.

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A post shared by Brenna Blain (@bunonmyhead)

She has also shared some of her darkest moments with her audience. In 2023, Blain posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and monitors, huddled beneath a blanket in the aftermath of an earlier suicide attempt.

“Suffering has clarified my theology,” she wrote in her new book. Blain claims saving grace in Jesus while living through sometimes debilitating mental illness, and she thinks Christians should be open and honest about that.

“People are starving to see real testimonies of what it means to live in the ‘now and not yet’ of this broken world,” she said.

“As someone struggling with an incurable disease and a history of mental illness, I feel seen and encouraged,” said one commentor on Instagram.

Nearly two years out from her last hospitalization, Blain is publicly discussing the harsh realities of mental illness, bucking stereotypical Christian talking points that advocate assured healing. “God is here with us, but He doesn’t always heal, He doesn’t always intervene, and He doesn’t always promise earthly rescue,” she wrote. “For most of us we live life by managing it. Remission isn’t a term used in regards to mental health.”

When well-known pastor John MacArthur recently claimed there is “no such thing” as mental illnesses like PTSD, OCD, or ADHD, calling them “noble lies” that “give the excuse to … medicate people,” Blain had harsh words in response.

“It’s as harmful as telling someone that their brain cancer does not exist,” Blain said. “Approximately 8 million deaths each year are attributable to mental disorders, whereas 17,200 people die from a malignant brain tumor.”

Blain knows some will be wary of her ministry considering her publicly known suicide attempt, but she doesn’t believe a mental illness should disqualify one from ministry. Such a condition, she said, shows others how to live out a process of surrender, suffering, and doubt while still clinging to God.

“The Bible is not a list of rules,” she wrote in Can I Say That? “It is a shovel that uncovers the sinful condition of our hearts, uproots us from our sinful selves, and replants us within God’s will and safety.”

- More from Ericka Andersen

News

With Drug Abuse Raging, Zimbabwe’s Churches Turn from Punishment to Mercy

Deogracias Kalima in Zimbabwe

Christian leaders can no longer defer the widespread addiction crisis to schools and prisons.

A poster warning of the dangers of crystal meth goes up in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Jekesai Njikizana / AFP via Getty Images

A drug abuse crisis is raging in Zimbabwe, with experts and medics warning that a staggering 57 percent of Zimbabwe’s youth are involved with illicit drugs, from cocaine and ecstasy to tainted cough syrup and illegally brewed beers.

The church hasn’t been spared, and many leaders say they’re unsure how to respond.

“At first, ten years ago, we would suspend church youths dabbling in cocaine or ecstasy pills or illicit whiskies, intimidating them with Bible verses,” said Benny Guyo, a pastor with the United Baptist Church of Zimbabwe in Harare. “Now, we try to dialogue with them and get them help. If not, we will lose half the congregation.”

There’s a sense of hopelessness among Zimbabwe’s young people. They struggle to see prospects in a country with the highest inflation in the world and staggering unemployment.

Most of the population is under 25, and 41 percent of them are looking for a job, according to an Afrobarometer survey released in late 2023. Trade unionists say this is a conservative figure; real unemployment could be double that.

In this cultural climate, drugs have taken off. Transnational networks, shipping contraband from Asia or South America, are supplying Zimbabwe’s streets, taking with them lucrative profits but leaving behind public health issues and societal devastation.

“It’s mayhem: illicit powders, drinks, pills, or cigarettes,” said Tynos Magombedze, a retired Adventist pastor and now an anti-corruption activist in Bulawayo, the country’s second-largest city.

When the illicit drugs problem began around 2013, schools and prisons tried to suppress it. “Headmasters were empowered to beat errant youths as some sort of discipline,” said Magombedze. “Prison officers would round up street dealers and users of cannabis or ecstasy.”

Churches in Zimbabwe tend to be quite conservative, so they watched from the sidelines, deferring the drug abuse issue to other institutions. In a few circumstances when drug users were identified in churches, the default option was to rebuke, suspend, or expel worshipers who were battling addictions.

“We were acting holier-than-thou, closing our eyes, pretending drugs don’t exist in churches,” said Guyo.

But over the past decade, the crisis has overpowered police, prisons, and schools and has overflowed into churches.

“The drug menace has landed at our pulpits,” said church elder Josini Moyo.

It may have been there all along. Churches had largely failed to see that their youth, and in some instances their pastors too, had been battling addictions.

In townships and affluent suburbs, churches from large denominations, such as Anglican and Catholic churches, typically displayed inspirational Christian verses or Sunday service times. Now, they have signs on or near their churches with messages like “Drugs Kill All Dreams,” “Resist the Scourge of Drugs,” and even “Drugs Are the Antichrist.”

“A new urgency has arrived,” said Moyo, who serves at Zion Christian Church (ZCC) in Zimbabwe. The biggest African-initiated church in the country, ZCC doesn’t belong to the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe or the Zimbabwe Council of Churches.

Across traditions and denominations, Zimbabwe’s churches have been thrust into unfamiliar territory by the drug crisis.

In addition to erecting antidrug billboards on church gates, they’re tweaking some youth worship meetings and repurposing them as drug counseling workshops, introducing drug messaging in Sunday services, and welcoming back suspended members who are battling addictions or have undergone recovery.

“I thank the church for making a U-turn,” said Ashlee Gutu, 33, pastor of the Jekenisheni Church in Zimbabwe.

Five years ago, Gutu lost his marriage, finances, and job as a pastor when his addiction to ecstasy pills and crystal methamphetamine (called mutoriro in Zimbabwe) threw him off course. The church suspended him for one year.

Jekenisheni Church began informally in the 1920s and is one of the oldest indigenous Apostolic churches across the country and in neighboring Mozambique. It has been largely detached from older Western denominations as well as Zimbabwe’s urban, post-colonial evangelicals.

But while battling addiction on the sidelines, Gutu says he met several elders of his church and other denominations who secretly confided in him that they too were fighting addictions to cannabis or alcohol.

“They were Anglicans, Adventists, Pentecostals, Methodists, everyone you can think of,” he added.

When Gutu agreed to go to a trial rehab program that the Jekenisheni Church had established in alliance with private medical counselors and therapists, Gutu’s life improved.

His church started refer congregants and pastors who were battling addictions to therapy, with the church paying the participating counselors and doctors. The in-house therapy program has worked with 40 congregants battling addictions in the past two years, and 25 of them have beat their problems, he said.

Other Christian networks are also active against the country’s drug abuse epidemic. For example, in May in Chitungwiza (the most populous township of the capital), the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabw e (EFZ), together with Teen Rescue Mission (TRM), hosted community outreach meetings and anti-drug prayer weeks as a way of confronting the pandemic.

“We have instructed pastors in our networks to visit schools and public markets and teach teenagers about the linked troubles of drug abuse, teen pregnancies, and school dropout. We are meeting troubled youths who want to be directed to accessible rehabilitation programs. In a few years, our efforts should bear fruit in the antidrug fight,” said Dino Matsika, a youth outreach coordinator with the EFZ.

Despite the surge in illicit drug abuse, the country’s struggling public health care system simply has no money for therapy. Compared to urgent issues of infectious diseases (tuberculosis, HIV, malaria), the illicit drug abuse menace is seen as a lesser priority. It doesn’t help that, according to a Lancet medical survey, Zimbabwe only has 17 registered psychiatrists in a country with a population of 15 million.

“A realistic way to beat this is for churches to stand loud on the pulpit and band together with police, schools, NGOs, government, and parents, and steer youths from drugs,” said Guyo. “We must not work in silos.”

- More from Deogracias Kalima

News

Berlin Church Plant Embraces All That Jazz

Ken Chitwood in Berlin

Music in the German capital opens up evangelical opportunities and “spiritual connection.”

Ali Maegraith performs Jazz during a church service in Berlin.

Courtesy of Felix Ziebarth | Edits by Christianity Today.

It’s Saturday night, and you’re looking for jazz in Germany’s capital. You could catch an after-midnight jam session at A-Trane in Charlottenburg, get cozy in the stylish, intimate ambience of the Zig Zag Club in Friedenau, or catch a solo saxophonist serenading the crowd at Berlin’s oldest jazz club, Quasimodo.

And there’s one more option: You could wait until morning and go to church in the Wedding district.

One part church plant, one part jazz project, Kiez Church (Neighborhood Church), in the multiethnic district of Wedding is led by Ali and Rich Maegraith, Australian missionaries who say they want to bring the gospel to the cosmopolitan city’s art scene.

Berlin is a magnet for musicians—a place to connect and prove your chops. The German capital is a hub for many different European music scenes, from electronic dance to Afropop, classical to klezmer, and attracts creative people from all over.

The Maegraiths, who moved to Berlin in 2015, say that’s their in. The city’s music scene provides them with evangelistic opportunities. Rich, a professional jazz musician, and Ali, a vocalist and songwriter, moved to the city to serve with the European Christian Mission agency.

“We’ve met many people through jam sessions, performances, or just busking on the streets,” Ali told CT.

When they first arrived, Rich would go to jam sessions every night, all over the city.

“In Berlin, the jazz scene is already a community, where people will play and hang out together until the early hours of the morning,” he said. “They even call it ‘jazz church.’”

Berlin’s nightlife is more readily associated with techno and punk, but it also has a long historical relationship with jazz. The improvisational, syncopated music first came to the German capital at the end of World War I, when it was warmly received by the post-war population of the Weimar Republic.

When the American-born French singer and dancer Josephine Baker visited Berlin in 1925, she found the city dazzling with a vibrant jazz scene. Her performances were received with warm adulation. And popular performers like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington took the city by storm at a time when it was the third largest metropolitan area in the world by population.

Nazis put an end to jazz when they took control, but it came back with the Allied victory in World War II. Soldiers stationed in the city brought the music of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Miles Davis with them. This time, jazz stuck.

Today, Berlin is one of the best places in Europe to hear a live jazz show. And one of the places you can do that is at Kiez Church Wedding.

The Sunday morning set-up is laid back, with a homey feel: There’s a Turkish rug on the floor, a map of Berlin’s neighborhoods on the wall, a smattering of musical equipment on stage, and a bunch of house plants. The music is a mix of contemporary Christian worship songs and a worship-themed jazz jam session with Ali, Rich, and other musicians they have met along the way.

The Maegraiths call it “dual thing.” They want to offer a biblically grounded community for young people living in Wedding and use their musical gifts to create improvisational forms of church music.

Celebrating its fourth anniversary in September 2024, the church offers bilingual German and English worship. Leadership is shared between Germans and Australians, and the staff includes international interns, students, and immigrants.

About 30 people regularly attend Kiez Church. A lot of them are artists, musicians, and students, or young professions.

Rich, who preaches most Sundays, shared his own experience of being a professional musician.

“Anyone coming to visit can hear how their pastor knows what it’s like to be living in the world,” he said. “He’s not in some Christian bubble, doing churchy stuff, he’s part of the city’s day-to-day experience.”

The church plant has been pretty successful—which is hard to do in Europe. Rich and Ali, however, said they didn’t start with much of a plan. They are, by their account, “accidental church planters.”

“We weren’t well-versed with the models when we started; it just kind of happened,” said Ali.

Ever the jazz musicians, they have improvised their way through church planting. At their fourth anniversary service, for example, Ali and Rich put together the set list the night before, without the chance to rehearse before going “live” in worship the next day. It worked.

“We are just doing our thing,” Ali said. “We pray, wait on the lord, see what happens, what he does.

“I still have moments wondering, ‘Is this really a church?’” Ali said.

Now, after four years, the “dual thing” jazz church has turned into an LP to share with the city and others who are interested in a record of jazz grounded in the life of a church.

The album the Berlin Psalm Project released with a special concert in March 2024 is a collection of psalms set to modern jazz, written and performed by Ali and a group of international, Berlin-based performers. Ali said the album reflects the way the Psalms “speak to the deepest inner longings of all human beings” and give “a modern voice to ancient conversations with the Creator.”

Some songs emphasize lament and others joy and adoration, including renditions of Psalm 8 (“Oh Lord our God”), Psalm 46 (“Gott ist unsere Zuflucht und Stärke”), and Psalm 27 (“Der Herr ist mein Licht”), preformed on trumpet, trombone, tenor sax, bass, piano, and drums, with Rich on tenor sax and bass clarinet.

Above all else, Ali believes, Berliners just want you to be honest.

“They want to hear authentic expressions, to know what you really feel and where you’re coming from,” she said, “and that’s what the Psalms are all about—they are some of the most honest parts of the Bible.”

And jazz, Ali has found, shares that deep commitment to authenticity, pairing well with biblical texts. Improvisation captures the emotion and essence of a moment and provides “the perfect setting to explore deeply into what it means to pour out our hearts in vulnerability before God,” she said.

Katya Sourikova, a pianist and composer who has worked with the Maegraiths on other recordings, said the project impressed her with its breadth of bold, dramatic, and theatrical musical expressions. The spectrum of modern jazz on the album is “not what one would immediately associate with the setting of religious texts,” she said, but it “sets this project apart from many others working in this genre.”

The project has also impressed church leaders who appreciate the crossover between the arts and faith. In a rave review, Mark Lau, director of worship arts at Redeemer Downtown in New York City, called the project “a sublime work of art, vision, and energy.”

Lau said the Berlin Psalm Project is “a beautifully nuanced combination of uplifting lyrics, majestic ensemble writing, telepathic improvisation, bubbling textures and infectious groove. Instantly accessible yet driven by a subtle complexity that keeps the listener engaged throughout.”

Franz Weidauer, a mathematician and electric guitarist in Leipzig, a city in Germany’s east known for its connection to Johann Sebastian Bach, also loves the album. He said it’s a fresh expression of art and faith in Europe.

“People might see the Psalms as ‘old-fashioned,’” Weidauer said, “but they are, in many ways, a modern songbook, a voice for what we are feeling today.”

Weidauer works with Crescendo, a network of Christian artists and musicians founded in Basel, Switzerland, which now has locations across Europe. He has played in various praise bands, jazz combos, and indie groups over the years. When he listens to the Maegraiths’ album, he said he is reminded of how jazz music has the power to speak to people on a deep level.

“There’s a sense of transcendence through jazz,” Weidauer said, “the power to connect us to a creative force—even those who are hesitant to talk about ‘God.’”

That’s the kind of innovation and improvisation that creates evangelical opportunities in urban centers like Berlin. Weidauer said he hopes others embrace the idea of jazz in church. Kiez Church could be a model for other “accidental” church planters to follow.

“What the Maegraiths have done is provide people a broader perspective on what ‘church music’ can be,” Weidauer said. “Urban people, who might not otherwise be interested in classical church settings, are open to spiritual connection. … Jazz music can open that connection.”

- More from Ken Chitwood

Theology

Reading Scripture through Embodied Eyes

Jeannine Hanger

Engaging our senses can help us connect with the Bible in a more holistic way.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

We all lead diverse sensory lives—in the form of memories, reflections, emotions, and events that become embedded into our embodied lives.

It is through our five senses that we encounter the world, and these experiences get encoded into the fabric of our beings to be later recalled, from compassion and peace to trauma and violence. In other words, our physical senses matter to how we walk through this life. But more than that, they reflect the creativity and beauty of God himself.

We are all gifted with varying abilities to sense the world—to see, feel, hear, smell, taste, speak, and move. And I am convinced that if we pay attention, we can harness these abilities to experience more of God’s goodness. Just as “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen. 1:31a), we can participate in the beauty and magnificence of God’s created order through our bodily senses.

Part of how we experience and understand the good world God made is by touching the soft fur of a kitten, by tasting the sweetness of a luscious berry, or by hearing the melodic song of a bird. If God has created us to be in relationship with him—and if we are invited to love him with our hearts, souls, minds, and strength—then we should relate to him with our entire embodied selves.

But do our physical senses matter in how we read the Bible? As you might guess, the short answer is yes. I believe we can engage God through his Word in a more embodied way—to live out more fully the psalmist’s invitation to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8).

Yet here is the problem: We often limit ourselves to engaging with God through a text. Surely, the revelation of God as expressed in the Word is critical. But this revelation is much more than collections of letters on a page, accessed only by reading through sight or sound.

The words on a page in a biblical text articulate a world that mirrors our own—they contain a series of narratives about sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Which means our sensory lives can access the sensory aspects of Scripture. But where in the Word can we begin?

Perhaps we could start with the Word himself, described in John 1 as the person of Jesus—to bring our sensory lives into conversation with a good God as revealed through the Word made flesh.

All four gospel narratives animate the works and words of Jesus using multisensory language, each contributing to a vivid portrait of believers’ relationship with him. This approach will take what is tangible in our worlds—our own sensory experiences—and harness them toward two goals.

First, our sensory knowledge provides an entry into exploring the sensory world of the gospel narratives as understood by ancient readers. Second, these sensory findings resonate back onto our own sensory worlds and can give us a more embodied understanding of the text.

In the Gospels, we hear Jesus compare the kingdom of God to an extravagant dinner party where all are welcome. God is the compassionate, generous host, and he serves the finest food and drink, that all might enjoy this joyous union together (Matt. 22). Jesus plays host when he embodies this generosity in remote places, feeding people who need hope and a filling meal. And ultimately, Jesus claims to be the very bread of life (John 6:35) that we consume to find true and lasting nourishment.

As we continue to “chew” on Jesus’ invitation to the banquet table, can these metaphors teach us something about the quality of our interaction with Jesus?

Have you ever eaten a memorable meal and talked about it for weeks afterward? Do certain foods carry so much significance that they are served only on important occasions? What kinds of routines do you have in your life involving certain foods?

Coffee is for first thing in the morning, vegetable stew is for dreary winter days, garlic mashed potatoes are only at grandma’s dinner table, and baked-from-scratch red velvet birthday cake is so decadent that we eat it only once a year. We have habits and rote practices around foods that nourish us and that call to mind certain seasons, people, joys, and sorrows in our lives.

Or let’s reflect on the physical acts of eating and drinking—we interact with food and drink daily and continually to stay alive. Our relationship to sustenance is not a one-and-done, all-you-can-eat buffet that sustains us for a lifetime. Instead, we eat and drink routinely, habitually, waking up each day with new caloric needs. This is a dynamic existence, one that manifests a continual dependence on nutrients for survival.

Have you ever been hungry? Sure, every day. We wake up with the need to eat and drink, and our hunger goes away with each meal, but then it returns. In other words, we will never outgrow our dependence on nutrients.

This might go against our instincts—to say that we will be forever dependent. In the modern, well-fed, individualistic waters in which we swim, the tide flows in the direction of independence. We raise our up-and-coming generations to develop into self-sufficient, autonomous human beings who can take care of themselves.

It can be easy for our hearts to default toward searching for the kind of peace fueled by our own internal reserves. We find comfort when we can control the fortifications we have constructed around us. We are accustomed to an “I can do it myself because I’m capable” approach to life. We never want to put others out. Or maybe we don’t want to appear weak.

It’s only when we are confronted with threats to our independence—whether through sickness, economic challenge, physical or relational loss, or mental-emotional-psychological pain—that our equilibrium gets thrown off. Such challenges force us into a dependence that feels unnatural and is mostly countercultural.

We often respond by fighting against our dependency—we seek relief from it; we want it to end; we don’t find “peace” until our internal reserves of self-sufficiency are restored. These are the times when we let others into our need—when we are desperate, when our resources are depleted. But we always hope that it’s temporary.

But this sense of dependence is very key to our hunger for Christ—when we are most in touch with our dependence, vulnerability, and need, we are in the ideal posture for finding Jesus. Those who recognize their hunger are the ones who tend to clamor for the next meal, to gather the manna from the ground, and to hang on Jesus’ every word and follow him no matter what.

I worry about living such a life where I endlessly and unthinkingly invest my energies into my own self-sufficiency and autonomy. How might this inhibit me from knowing my hunger and my need for Jesus, the living bread?

My independence could easily lull me into this notion that I have control and set my heart into a posture that keeps Jesus at arm’s length: I’m good. I’ve got this! It’s the same message we tell our friends and neighbors: Don’t worry about me, Jesus. I’ll let you know when I really need you. We end up saving Jesus for times of emergency. But we need food every day.

As we consider Jesus—the living bread whose once-for-all sacrifice of flesh and blood sustains us into eternity—can we also consider how this union with him is continuous and ongoing?

This is exactly how we see this play out in Scripture. Day after day, God rained down manna from heaven to feed his people in the wilderness. Jesus similarly provided a feast for a crowd, and he did so with compassion and welcome. And he also offers himself as the meal: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them” (John 6:56 NRSVue).

This sounds to me like a constant interaction, one that never ends. It’s marked by welcome, ongoing presence, sustenance, and meeting continual need. We need never be without him.

- More from Jeannine Hanger

Culture

Houston Ballet Debuts New Work Based on … C.S. Lewis

Emily Belz in Houston

One of the largest ballet companies in the US has commissioned a piece about “The Four Loves.”

Houston Ballet first soloists Harper Watters, Julian Lacey, and Gian Carlo Perez perform in Silas Farley’s Four Loves.

Photo by Amitava Sarkar / Courtesy of Houston Ballet

C. S. Lewis wrote at the end of his book The Four Loves that he didn’t feel like he could fully express the nature of love on the page. “I dare not proceed,” he concluded.

Now one of the largest ballet companies in the United States is trying to fill in where words fall short, commissioning Four Loves by choreographer Silas Farley with a full orchestral score by composer Kyle Werner. The one-act ballet premiered at Houston Ballet over the weekend.

At a dress rehearsal before the premiere in the Houston Ballet’s lush performance space of burgundy walls, soaring ceilings, and red velvet seats, Farley sat at the tech booth watching dancers bring his vision to life, from a romantic pas de deux to a climactic final movement that features about 30 dancers.

Farley, a retired dancer with the New York City Ballet, is close friends with composer Werner. They met at church in New York City. Though the collaborators want everyone to be able to connect with Four Loves no matter their background, the ballet does depict their Christian artistic vision. As the curtain rises, three dancers are already spinning in a circle, representing the Trinitarian love of God that was active before time began.

“As Christians, we believe that the centerpiece and the starting point and the through line of all of history is the mysterious community of persons who are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” said Farley, who is the type of person who can delve into the theology of the Trinity about half a minute into conversation. “The community of love that they are from before time is what overflowed and made everything. I think we’re able to show it even more clearly than we can speak it.”

Farley was in church in Houston the Sunday before his ballet premiered. As the congregation recited the Nicene Creed, the words struck him: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.”

“You see this in the choreography,” he said.

The Houston Ballet survived significant damage from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and then closures during the pandemic, but it has the reputation and budget to regularly commission new works from renowned contemporary choreographers like Justin Peck.

The ballet’s artistic directors, Stanton Welch and Julie Kent (a longtime principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre), gave Farley full freedom to do whatever he wanted—which was a ballet based on C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.

The text examines four classically Greek categories: storge (familial love), philia (friendship), eros (romantic love), and agape (divine love). Werner and Farley thought the four loves mapped well onto a traditional four-movement symphony, so that’s what Werner composed in the space of a few months.

In Farley’s ballet, the storge movement depicts a mother-daughter relationship, the philia movement depicts two male friends, the eros movement depicts a male and female couple, and the agape movement depicts the Trinity, bringing the loves from the other movements together. (The different persons of the Trinity also appear throughout the other movements.)

As Four Loves progresses, sky-blue and flesh-toned costumes fully transform into shades of white or brown, fabric dyed to match the dancers’ individual skin colors. Farley is in the minority in ballet as a Black dancer, and highlighting a diverse group of dancers swirling around the three figures of the Trinity was important to him.

The storge movement depicts a mother-daughter relationship. Houston Ballet principal Jessica Collado and first soloist Tyler Donatelli with artists of Houston Ballet. Photo by Amitava Sarkar / Courtesy of Houston Ballet

At the Houston Ballet two days before the premiere, dancers were in the studio practicing, doing lifts and sweating through their T-shirts. Farley observed and made notes, at times demonstrating particular movements. With his background as a longtime dancer at the New York City Ballet (NYCB), Farley considers himself to be following the neoclassical tradition of NYCB founder George Balanchine, the leading choreographer of 20th-century ballet. Balanchine created a piece called The Four Temperaments.

When Farley was a dancer at NYCB a decade ago, he met Werner at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. Werner had just finished a PhD at Manhattan School of Music. An early meal together stretched to three hours; the two couldn’t stop talking. They became fast friends.

“It was funny because in The Four Loves, Lewis talks about in philia, in friendship, the kind of spark of realizing a kind of common passion, of looking at someone else and being like, ‘You too?’” said Werner. “We really experienced that. … then that eventually led to this piece.”

Farley retired from the ballet in 2020 at the ripe old age of 26. Ballet is like being a professional athlete; Farley’s brother plays in the NFL, and they’ve compared notes on their vocations’ toll on their bodies. Farley now teaches ballet at Southern Methodist University and choreographs for organizations like NYCB, American Ballet Theatre, the Washington Ballet, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met commission was another piece with Christian roots: titled Songs from the Spirit, it incorporated traditional Black spirituals and new songs written by incarcerated musicians.

The philia movement depicts friendship. Houston Ballet soloists Eric Best and Naazir Muhammad. Photo by Amitava Sarkar / Courtesy of Houston Ballet

In Houston, as studio time wrapped up before a full dress rehearsal that evening, Farley called his dancers in close, pulling up a slideshow. He showed an image of the Pillars of Creation from the Webb telescope, one of his inspirations for the agape section, and paraphrased the Bible: “All the morning stars sing together.”

He clicked over to Rodin’s sculpture Burghers of Calais, which depicts men who are willing to die to save their village. He showed images from Henri Matisse, Hieronymus Bosch, and photographer George Platt Lynes and an altarpiece, The Trinity Adored by All Saints, which he said was crucial for the piece’s depiction of the Trinity.

“Whether you connect with the image or not … I want you to know where I was coming from and put yourselves into it,” he said. “We’re all going to dance to our very best—but it’s beyond that.”

The dancers gave him extended applause when he finished sharing.

Farley sees ballet as a way for people to glimpse the resurrected and redeemed body. It’s ordinary humans who are doing things—throwing someone in the air, standing en pointe—which most people can’t do.

“It’s like the Olympics,” he said. With a reference to another Lewis work, The Great Divorce, Farley said, “We see a body that has been trained to be more real.”

“It’s not unnatural; it’s supernatural,” he said. “The body has been cultivated to the full manifestation of its capacity.”

People should go see ballets for more ordinary reasons, Werner piped in: Enjoy ballet like a good meal. Don’t feel like you must “understand” it. Both composer and choreographer want their work to be approachable to anyone, not didactic. Farley may have shown a slideshow for the dancers in order to make his choreography more accessible—but he wouldn’t do that for an audience.

“It’s a ballet, not a lecture,” he said. “Not a sermon.”

Werner said the creators want Four Loves to make sense artistically without someone having read C. S. Lewis.

“People show up late, people come from work, they sit down, they haven’t opened the program,” Werner said. “I would like if somebody tunes in the middle of it on the radio, that they can hear it and just be moved even if they don’t know anything about this.”

Four Loves runs until September 29 at the Houston Ballet.

- More from Emily Belz

Church Life

The ‘Antioch of Asia’?

Isabel Ong

Christian leaders in Singapore wrestle with a prophetic charge and diminishing cross-cultural evangelism.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In 1983, Ed Pousson picked up Patrick Johnstone’s Operation World prayer guide and read an entry on Singapore. In it, the Southeast Asian country was described as the ‘Antioch of Asia.’

The American missionary and his Malaysian wife, Lai Kheng, had previously lived and served in Malaysia and were planning to make their home there after leaving the mission field.

Reading about Singapore changed the course of their lives.

“It was a defining moment for both of us,” Pousson said. “We prayed and decided on the spot that when we returned to Asia, Singapore would be our home.”

Singapore is the world’s most religiously diverse nation, says the Lausanne Movement’s State of the Great Commission report. Christians make up 17 percent of the population, while 26 percent are Buddhist, 18 percent are Muslim, 8 percent are Hindu, and 6 percent follow a Chinese traditional religion like Daoism (Taoism) or Confucianism, according to the Pew Research Center.

“Christians in Asia are most likely to be familiar with witnessing to their faith in contexts of religious difference,” the Lausanne report also noted.

The nation’s multicultural makeup and its location along major shipping routes are often cited as some of its strengths. It’s easy to draw parallels between Singapore and the biblical Antioch, capital of the Roman province of Syria—a cosmopolitan, multiracial, and multireligious society that served as a major trading hub and commercial center that connected various cultures, said Pousson.

The blend of cultural influences from both the East and West has helped Singaporeans to be globally connected and culturally sensitive, said Manik Corea, national director of the Singapore Center for Global Missions.

These cultural and geographical qualities have also primed Singapore to become a popular missions base for the region. Mission agencies like OMF, OM, and Wycliffe are based there, and believers from surrounding countries go there to study at seminary or attend conferences.

As the Christian population in the country grew in the 20th century, the number of missionaries sent out also increased. Since 2010, however, missionary-sending activity has plateaued, according to the World Christian Database.

Singapore’s mission force is slowing down as fewer people take up full-time missions and as missionaries grow older, data from a 2019 National Missions Study of 158 churches shows.

The prophetic call for the country to be an Antioch of Asia has helped and also hindered mission efforts, said the Singaporean Christian leaders CT interviewed. Many also emphasized an urgent need to boost young believers’ missional mindsets.

Mythic roots

Regarding Singapore as “the Antioch of Asia” or one of its other iterations—an Antioch of Asia or an Antioch for Asia—has permeated Christian consciousness in the country for decades.

The prophetic saying is often attributed to Billy Graham, who visited the country for an evangelistic crusade in 1978. Others claim that this was prophesied by David Yonggi Cho, the founder of the world’s largest megachurch in South Korea.

But no concrete evidence of the phrase’s origins exists.

“As far as I am concern[ed], I did not hear from Dr. Billy Graham in 1978, between [the] last week of November and mid-December, while he was in Singapore, that Singapore will be ‘the Antioch of Asia,’” said Alfred Yeo, then general secretary of the Singapore Billy Graham Crusade. There were no papers or reports from the event that shared this either, Yeo added.

Other leaders of the 1978 evangelistic gathering, like then vice chairman of the organizing committee, James Wong, said otherwise, noting that Billy Graham “prophesied that Singapore would be like Antioch in the New Testament, sending missionaries to all of Asia.”

A Singaporean friend of the Poussons who attended the evangelistic meeting at the National Stadium in 1978 “would swear on a Bible” that he heard Billy Graham utter that prophecy, said Pousson. “That’s the only thing he remembers hearing Billy Graham say.”

The phrase has been referred to at Christian conferences, written about by renowned local pastor Edmund Chan, and featured in magazine articles (including one published at CT in 2020).

This idea has become embedded in the psyche of the Singapore church, whether valid or not, said Mark Syn, author of the book On Being the Antioch of Asia: Global Missions and Missions Partnership Through Asian Lenses.

“Many Singapore Christians and mission leaders I know believe passionately that Singapore carries a divine mandate as God’s ‘Antioch of Asia,’” said Corea, the missions center director.

“They believe God has called the Church in Singapore to be like the original in the book of Acts: the launchpad of Paul’s many missionary journeys and his original sending base.”

Corea himself is “not bothered” about who gave Singapore this prophecy but says it matters whether this title has divine sanction and, if so, how Singapore ought to live it out in a way that’s faithful, appropriate, and realistic.

While Antioch served as a base for Paul’s three missionary journeys, the city was slowly eclipsed by other major cities like Nisibis, Edessa, and Alexandria, which became important missionary-sending places, explained Andrew Peh, lecturer in mission and world religions at Singapore’s Trinity Theological College.

“This accolade is a little bit self-aggrandizing,” he said.

A modern marvel

Apart from being seen as an Antioch of Asia, Singapore has received other accolades over time, ostensibly giving the country an edge when it comes to spreading the Good News and equipping people to do so.

As “Asia’s wealthiest nation,” Singapore has the second highest per-capita GDP in the world. Christian churches reflect this wealth as well. A survey of more than 2,500 attendees of 24 churches conducted between 2009 and 2011 affirmed another article’s claim that “mainstream church-goers typically come from privileged backgrounds, while mega-church-goers tend to belong to the emerging/new middle class.”

“Singapore churches are affluent,” Syn agreed. “That certainly has helped with funding missions.”

The nation’s multicultural society has often been seen as another advantage for mission work. Chinese people make up three quarters of the country’s population of about 5.92 million, while Malays are the next largest and Indians the third.

Growing up in Singapore with an awareness of the need to respect and live harmoniously with people of different cultures and religions was helpful in his cross-cultural mission endeavors, says Corea.

While serving at a church plant in England’s East Anglia, Corea pioneered an international student ministry at a university. “Personally, I found it easy to befriend international people and to get along with people, despite their different mannerisms, customs, religions and perspectives,” he said.

He was also able to adapt well to a different culture when he served with his wife in Thailand for 13 years.

Yet Corea doesn’t think Singapore’s multiculturalism is always beneficial, because there is a propensity to create ethnic enclaves, especially as the majority of people—and Christians—are ethnically Chinese.

“It is possible—and I have witnessed it—for people to live within almost wholly Chinese communities, go to Chinese schools or churches, and not have friends outside their own ethnic grouping,” he said.

In Corea’s view, Singaporean Chinese Christians do well as missionaries in nontraditional roles like community development, business as missions, or tentmaking. “Singaporean Chinese are typically pragmatic, goal- and crisis-oriented, good at business in general, and [good] at organizing things in a focused way,” he said.

And while the country is as multicultural as it is global, its current approach to missions is “fairly parochial,” as many Singaporean believers tend to focus on serving within Asia, says Syn.

“They say, ‘Oh, we can fly anywhere in Asia within seven or eight hours,’” Syn shared. “I would love it to grow up in that respect. … I would love to see Singaporean missionaries going to Europe and Africa in larger numbers than they are.”

Singapore has the most powerful passport in the world, granting its citizens visa-free access to 195 countries.

“Our passport gives us access to so many parts of the world, more than most countries,” said Ng Zhiwen, a pastor who leads transdenominational missions movement Antioch 21. “If we are not participating in God’s mission, then we will not be found to be a faithful steward of all that God has blessed us with.

“We believe that we have been blessed to be a blessing to the nations, in the spirit of Antioch.”

A galvanizing force

Like Ng, many of the leaders CT interviewed say that conceiving of Singapore as an Antioch of Asia has served as a good rallying call for the church, despite its puzzling origins and potential for developing hubris.

The gospel arrived in Singapore in the 1800s through British missionaries from the London Missionary Society. In the early 20th century, fiery Chinese evangelist John Song’s preaching in the country stirred up a nationwide revival, and by 1938, Christians comprised 11.1 percent of the population.

The 1970s saw the birth of the charismatic movement in Singapore alongside the growth of evangelical presence in the country.

“The Graham Crusade was really the peak [of evangelical fervor],” said then honorary chairman of the event, Benjamin Chew. “I definitely see a greater evangelical influence in Singapore in the ’80s.”

Still, the first local missionaries from Singapore were sent more than a decade before Billy Graham landed on its tropical shores.

In 1965, the year the country became an independent republic, Singaporean believers Kate Cheah and Tan Kai Kiat each left for Hong Kong on separate missions. Cheah served refugees in the notorious walled city of Kowloon, while Tan ran a medical mission there for a year, said Ng.

More recently, other Christian leaders have advanced Singapore’s prophetic calling.

The Antioch 21 movement, which Ng now leads, was founded by Rick Seaward in 2003 to encourage the country to live out its calling as Antioch of Asia.

“I believe that Singapore is supposed to be an Antioch of Antiochs,” Seaward wrote in an article for local Christian publication Salt&Light in 2018. “We are called to challenge other cities and nations to be Antiochs.”

The movement was relaunched in 2021 and led by Joseph Chean, former YWAM Singapore national director. He gathered pastors and leaders in the marketplace, education, health care, and mission agencies to pray and seek the Holy Spirit’s leadership in guiding the Singapore church, and he also established a sub-movement, Joshua 21, to mobilize believers aged 40 and below to go to the unreached, said his wife, Kim Chean.

Seaward and Chean died in separate car accidents: the former in Três Pontas, Brazil, in 2018 and the latter in Istanbul last year. But their vision for Singapore as an active missionary-sending base persists through the Antioch 21 movement, which declared 2023 to 2033 “the decade of missions.” The hope is to raise up a new generation of workers to go to the least reached places of Asia and beyond, said Ng.

“In the 1990s, the church of Singapore was one of the top mission-sending churches in the world,” Ng said. “Back then, there were 300-plus churches. Today, the number of churches has easily doubled.”

Ng’s main goal is to foster relationships among different churches and parachurch organizations to fulfill the Great Commission.

There are a lot more independent megachurches now, and not all of them are regularly engaged in missions, he said. The upcoming Antioch Summit in October, which aims to embolden believers to become “an Antioch to the nations,” has 600 sign-ups so far, said Ng.

Other ongoing nationwide movements like LoveSingapore have also placed a strong emphasis on Singapore’s role as an Antioch church. In a video prayer devotional released last year, Jeremy Seaward, pastor of Victory Family Center and Rick Seaward’s son, highlighted the importance of having an Antioch spirit. He referred to Acts 13:2–3, where Barnabas and Saul were set apart for God’s work.

The Antioch church’s example here is instructive for Singapore, says Corea.

“The struggle is for Singapore churches to realize our gift may be to give away the best of what we have for the sake of new, greater centers and movements of God happening in places other than home.”

Missing the mark?

Several key trends, however, have placed Singapore’s prophetic role as Antioch of Asia on shaky ground.

One such trend is the aging missionary population, which is also noticeable in other countries like South Korea. Fewer than 1 in 5 career missionaries in Singapore are under 40 years old, and more than 1 in 3 are 60 and above, according to the 2019 National Missions Study.

Another trend is a decline in long-term sending and a rise in short-term missions. “The notion of being a ‘career missionary’ is virtually nonexistent now,” said Syn, the author.

Singapore’s requirement for its men to enlist in mandatory military service when they turn 18 may well affect the duration of time spent in the mission field.

Missionaries often choose to return to the country to fulfill these obligations. Those who serve abroad are often required to place a bond of at least $75,000 SGD (around $58,000 USD) with the government when their son turns 13 years old if they intend to stay overseas for two years or more, says Corea, whose family returned to Singapore from Thailand when his son was that age.

Other leaders are less convinced of the detrimental impact that mandatory conscription might cause. “It’s hard to say, because the majority of our mission workers are female,” Ng said.

Young Singaporean Christians, meanwhile, may be less inclined to embark on longer-term missionary work because “they lack strong convictions about the lostness of people without Christ” or don’t want their children to miss out on Singapore’s excellent education system, said Lai Kheng Pousson.

Some families are bucking the trend. Chean’s daughters, 19-year-old Ashley and 21-year-old Olivia, are open to becoming long-term missionaries.

Ashley visited 14 countries, including Macedonia, Kosovo, and Lebanon, this year while attending YWAM’s discipleship training school, and Olivia will enter the same program when she completes her studies.

“Missions is certainly in the hearts of the girls and myself,” said Chean. “They see the benefit of setting aside time to focus on growing as a disciple.”

Yet one danger with the popularity of short-term mission trips is that missionaries may be “cultural novices [who] repeat the ethnocentric, imperialistic mistakes of the past,” Syn said.

Singapore’s enjoyment of religious freedom has led many missionaries to share the gospel in other cultures without recognizing or understanding the religious dynamics and composition of the people there, added Peh, the lecturer.

Many short-term mission trips also do not go to unreached people groups (UPGs) but tend to focus on visiting existing ministries or adopting projects in other countries, said Syn.

Findings from the 2019 study reflect this trend as well. “More than 60% of churches are not engaged in UPG work, and there has been limited take up of such work over the last 6 years,” researchers from the National Missions Study wrote.

To some leaders, the history of how the Singapore church was founded is precisely why the need to boost mission efforts across the country is critical.

“We were once an unreached nation, and it’s our privilege to pay it forward by also continuing the work to go to the unreached,” said Ng, the Antioch 21 movement leader.

The Poussons, who are in their 70s, continue to pray, preach, teach, and write in Singapore. They hope to inspire young believers to “take up the Antioch challenge [and] be like Paul: strong in spirit, strategic in thinking, sacrificial in lifestyle, and servant in posture.”

“We love Singapore,” they affirmed. “This miracle of God is blessed to be a blessing. To whom much is given, much is required (Luke 12:48).

“This little red dot [a moniker for Singapore’s depiction on a world map] has a big responsibility to go bless the nations through Good News and good works.”

- More from Isabel Ong

News

Brazilian Evangelicals Are Split on Lausanne’s Legacy

Franco Iacomini

Latin American Christians developed integral mission theology. Do they still want to own it?

Ingo Roesler / Getty

For years, integral mission—a theological vision that saw evangelism and social justice as inseparable components of Christian life, or as “two wings of an airplane,” as Ecuadorian theologian René Padilla once wrote—has been a legacy of the Lausanne Movement in Brazil. The concept was developed in the 1970s by members of the Latin American Theological Fellowship and motivated Brazilian evangelicals to fight street violence in Rio, battle alcohol abuse in indigenous reserves, and deliver homeless people from drug addiction, among many other achievements.

Recently, however, the legacy of integral mission theology (IMT) has come under scrutiny in Brazil, for generational, demographic, and theological reasons.

In June, the Lausanne movement held a conference in São Paulo to present its Great Commission report, an exhaustive survey of trends affecting global missions efforts. Leading up to the event, evangelicals debated on social media whether the event would become a kind of “funeral for IMT.”

Most of the speakers were young and had joined the movement only in recent years. And no one mentioned “integral mission” from the main stage.

This reality did not escape the observations of longtime Lausanne leaders, who were focused on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the inaugural conference, which will be held next week in Incheon, South Korea.

“Some of us are going to Lausanne 4 with this question in mind: what will become of integral mission?” said Valdir Steuernagel, one of the most prominent Brazilian names in evangelicalism and a senior executive advisor of the Lausanne Movement.

Though the controversy over this concept may have reached fever pitch in Brazil, it goes back decades.

When integral mission was initially conceived in the 1970s, emerging from the first Lausanne congress in 1974, some evangelicals expressed concern about the implications of a gospel that addressed people’s material as well as their spiritual needs. Lausanne-friendly evangelicals were often accused of being influenced by Marxist thought or merely adopting a Protestant version of l iberation theology.

These criticisms have persisted over time. In a 2015 video, Reverend Augustus Nicodemus, a former high-ranking leader in the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, described integral mission as “a corrupted or, at the very least, incomplete reading of reality.” Eventually, division over integral mission arose within the national Lausanne network as well.

Increasing tribalism within domestic Brazilian politics has intensified the conflicts.

In April 2018, pastor Ariovaldo Ramos attended a political rally at which he prayed for Brazil’s embattled president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Shortly after that, the left-wing leader was sent to jail on corruption charges.

That same day, Yago Martins, an influential YouTuber and podcaster in the field of theology, lamented Ramos’s presence at the event on Facebook, using the situation to criticize integral mission. In his words, it was “nothing more than Marxist missiology and theological leftism.”

Eighteen months later, Lula was freed, and he regained the presidency in the 2022 elections. The impact of Ramos’s presence at that 2018 event, however, continues to reverberate in the Brazilian church and in the Lausanne Movement.

Ramos—a former president of World Vision in Brazil and founder of the Frente de Evangélicos pelo Estado de Direito (Evangelical Front for the Rule of Law), which describes itself as a Christian movement promoting social justice and human rights—had long been one of the main Brazilian faces of integral mission in Brazil. In the eyes of the opponents of integral mission, Ramos’s support for Lula was seen as evidence that it was a left-wing political movement, an assertion that Ramos rejects.

“The theology of integral mission has no partisan commitment under any circumstances,” he said. “When I went to that rally, I did so out of my convictions as a citizen. And when I visited Lula in prison, I did it because I was invited to a pastoral visit. No pastor can deny a visit to someone who is in prison.”

In the following years, political polarization worsened among evangelicals, exacerbated by the contentious 2018 and 2022 presidential elections. Critics on the right observed champions of integral mission conspicuously defending a president (Lula) who had allegedly broken the law. Those on the left asked why evangelicals were supporting a candidate (Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018) whom they viewed as making misogynistic and prejudiced remarks.

“It has been a very hard season. It has left wounds that are still open,” said the leader of one Christian social services organization, who asked not to be identified so as not to impede his group’s ability to collaborate with other ministries. “People who are admired and respected, including theologians and missiologists, started avoiding each other and even exchanged insults due to different political views.”

This polarization has had notable consequences.

“Today, few preachers use the term ‘integral mission.’ They may even address the topic, but they do not use these words so as not to be canceled, labeled, or excluded,” said Ramos.

Though Lausanne Brazil’s integral mission task force still exists and the national Lausanne network has not suffered any high-profile resignations, Ziel Machado, who attended Lausanne’s second global gathering in Manila in 1989 and currently serves as vice-chancellor of the Servo de Cristo Seminary in São Paulo, acknowledges that Brazil’s divisive political situation has undermined a community once characterized by cooperation and fellowship.

“The term ‘integral mission’ is tarnished and is now part of the conflict,” he said. “Lausanne teaches us to think about reconciliation. But we can’t apply this principle if we don’t address our problems. We need to understand which areas are affected and what reconciliation needs to be made.”

About a year ago, Lausanne’s Latin America director, Daniel Bianchi, asked whether it was time to retire the phrase. “At this time it is necessary to recognize that the term ‘integral mission’ has become a kind of buzzword and has been used for many things to the point of almost losing its meaning,” wrote Bianchi, from Argentina, who assumed his role with Lausanne in 2017.

Fernando Costa, coordinator of the Lausanne Brazil executive committee and executive director of the Centro Evangélico de Missões, said that integral mission has weakened after the death of many of its pioneers, such as Padilla and Puerto Rican Orlando Costas. “This has become something of a dirty word. Anything that is not very healthy for the church is labeled as integral mission,” said Costa. “It’s unfair to integral mission, but no one will put their face forward to defend it.”

These tensions around the idea of integral mission and within Lausanne have occurred simultaneously with the explosive growth of evangelicals in the country. According to the 1970 census, Brazil had 4.8 million evangelicals, representing 5.2 percent of the population. Today, there are 3.5 million evangelicals just in São Paulo, the country’s most populous city. Overall, 63 million Brazilians, or 31 percent of the total population, are evangelicals, according to a Datafolha survey.

Most of these are converts—only 7 percent of the evangelicals indicated to Datafolha that they had attended church since birth. In contrast to the evangelicals of the 1970s, these newcomers are joining a movement that enjoys increasing influence in pop culture and politics.

Many of these new converts are Pentecostals (in Brazil and Latin America, Pentecostals and independent Christians are counted among evangelicals), who represent about 65 percent of evangelicals in the country. These groups have been underrepresented in the Lausanne Movement, in part because in the past they didn’t have their own seminaries or colleges, instead relying on less formal frameworks to train their pastors and missionaries or using institutions operated by other groups, such as Baptists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans. This lack of scholars has in turn meant that Pentecostal positions on theology and missiology have been less visible.

Indeed, Brazil’s largest evangelical denomination, the Assemblies of God, was, until a few years ago, averse to theological scholarship and resistant to academic environments. More recently, many Assemblies of God members have sought theological training. “This has brought them closer to groups like Lausanne,” said Marcos Amado, who led the Lausanne Movement in Latin America from 2011 to 2016. But it has also created the challenge of integrating a different type of theological tradition into a cooperative environment.

Many Pentecostals attended Lausanne’s June Great Commission event. “What I saw was a young crowd very eager to serve Jesus. They have plans. They want to be an influence through social media and spread [the gospel] to as many people as possible,” said Amado.

Costa said that many leaders who are heavily involved in missionary work had limited knowledge of Lausanne’s history. “We are working with these individuals who are shaping the Brazilian missionary movement, to bring them closer to the theoretical and theological understanding of mission,” he explained. “They are discovering the identity of Lausanne along the way.” To do this, they rely on the mentorship of a group of experienced missiologists who have partnered with Lausanne for decades—older and more experienced participants like Valdir Steuernagel, who attended Lausanne’s 1989 global event at Manila.

But is there any chance of restoring the image of integral mission, in Lausanne Brazil or elsewhere?

“The injury that the theology of integral mission has suffered will be healed only if there is repentance. It may come,” said Ramos. “I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to convict people of sin, righteousness, and judgment.”

For Steuernagel, this conflict is part of the Lausanne Movement’s maturation process: “There is always tension in these meetings. If you take away the tension, I think you also kill the spirit of Lausanne.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

Church Life

Becoming a Church for People of All Abilities

Sunita Theiss

We need a culture shift to welcome everyone into the full life of the church.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash, Pexels

It was our first Christmas season as a family of four, and we were excited to attend our new church’s lessons-and-carols service. As my husband carried our infant daughter into the service, I noticed my son marveling at the decorations and the music. I could see him taking it all in with reverence and delight.

After a few hymns my son didn’t know, it was clear he wanted to sing something familiar. Unfortunately, his song of choice was not in our hymnal. As he continued to express with increasing urgency and distress a desire to belt out “Jingle Bells,” I gently shushed him, offering a coloring book and suggesting we sing together somewhere else or after the service had ended.

The couple in front of us turned around as he began to cry. The woman made eye contact with me, glaring as she firmly said, “Maybe you should just leave.” Shocked, we collected our children and moved as quickly as my postpartum body would allow.

As we exited, I found myself in tears. The group of women setting up refreshments outside the sanctuary rushed over and reassured me that our family was always welcome. One of them took my son’s hand and offered him a large piece of cake. The next day, our pastor texted me to let me know he’d heard what had happened and was sorry we had experienced that. He reiterated that our family was always welcome.

Unfortunately, this kind gesture isn’t typical for many families like ours.

My son and I are autistic, and multiple members of our family are neurodivergent—a term that refers to brain-based differences such as autism, ADHD, learning difficulties, and more. To put it another way, we often experience the world differently than the people around us. My son and I are both sensitive to our surroundings and notice subtle patterns that others might miss. For him, this also means he may experience intense fear and distress when he perceives a threat, but he also experiences joy and delight more acutely than most of us.

In recent years, I’ve noticed an increase in conversations about inclusion and hospitality within the church. Indeed, the church is called to hospitality (Heb. 13:2) and care for the marginalized in our communities (Luke 14:12–14; Matt. 25:35–40). I’m grateful for these conversations.

At the same time, we often overlook the need for churches to better welcome and include adults and children with disabilities in all areas of church life. One estimate suggests that 80 percent or more of churches have no form of disability ministry, and yet nearly all churchgoers and pastors say someone with disabilities would be welcome at their church. It feels uniquely challenging for my family to join this conversation—to advocate or seek accommodation—because our disabilities are not externally visible.

In 2018, a robust national study indicated that children with certain chronic health conditions are far less likely to attend church than their typically developing peers. Specifically, children navigating “invisible” disabilities such as autism, anxiety, depression, ADHD, and other types of mental health issues and neurodivergence were the least likely to attend church.

Other studies have found that the majority of parents surveyed indicated that their children with disabilities had been excluded at church. Parents have also reported leaving churches or refraining from church activities because a child was not included or a church seemed unwilling to learn more or make accommodations.

Yet throughout Scripture, we see Jesus reaching out to forgotten, ostracized, or otherwise excluded individuals—healing and restoring them to their communities and loved ones. When Christ encountered a blind man in John 9, he made it clear the disability was not a punishment for sin. Instead, our Savior said, this man’s disability was “so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (v. 3).

I’ve previously heard “the works of God” in this passage defined as the miracle of the man’s ability to see. But what if, when we read passages like this, we consider that the miracle and works of God are also the restoration of community and dignity? I often find myself reflecting that perhaps the work of God and his church lies in enabling all of his image bearers to fully participate in the life of the church, regardless of ability.

Lamar Hardwick, an autistic pastor, writes in his book Disability and the Church: A Vision for Diversity and Inclusion about the importance of making a culture shift alongside practical and tangible changes so that everyone can participate in church life. Like me, Hardwick received his autism diagnosis as an adult.

Physical improvements can certainly be made through facility upgrades, such as ramps, elevators, accessible restrooms, and designated areas for people with mobility needs. Churches can also offer sensory accommodations and communication aids, such as sign language interpreters, assistive listening devices, and large-print bulletins. We can create accessible educational programming, provide training for leadership, and support caregivers.

But this isn’t enough, Hardwick emphasizes. True inclusion requires a culture shift—a movement toward a radical sense of belonging and welcome that values the perspectives of individuals with disabilities and advocates on their behalf.

Inclusion begins with recognizing that every person, regardless of ability, is created in the image of God and has gifts to offer the church community. Rather than viewing individuals with disabilities as needing charity, we are called to recognize their full humanity and the ways they contribute to our collective worship. Galatians 3:28 reminds us that in Christ, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (ESV). This unity includes people of all abilities.

A few months after the lessons-and-carols service, my son was “promoted” from the nursery to children’s church. It wasn’t a seamless transition. He made it clear he didn’t want to go yet, and we agreed that perhaps he wasn’t ready.

We found ourselves at a loss for what to do during the service. We would color and read books in our church’s small library or take walks around the church building. He would pick flowers out of the weeds and offer small bouquets to me as we chatted. One Sunday, as we walked toward the outdoor chapel, he bent to pick a dandelion. As he presented the yellow flower to me, he asked, “Why did God make things different colors?”

I stumbled through an answer, sharing that colors serve many purposes in both nature and the built world—from pollination of flowers to communicating which snakes are venomous to knowing when to stop and go at an intersection. I remember looking at his small outstretched hand, holding still more flowers, realizing that perhaps I wasn’t answering in a way that conveyed the Father’s affection for us. I took the flowers into my own hand, tucked one behind my ear, and added, “But sometimes God just wants us to enjoy beautiful things too.”

There is a movement in the design world to create spaces that are universally accessible from the outset, and designers like Susie Wise and Sara Hendren would argue that the tangible manifestation of this culture shift has to do with how we create and curate our physical spaces to cultivate belonging in the built world. For example, when we place a dumpster next to the accessible entrance, what are we conveying about how we value individuals with disabilities?

The church has the opportunity to radically transform our communities toward belonging—to make every aspect of the way we engage universally accessible and uniquely beautiful for every member of the body of Christ so that no person is limited from fully participating in the life of the church.

Inclusion is not just a moral imperative; it is a lifelong spiritual practice. By intentionally creating spaces where individuals with disabilities are welcomed and celebrated, the church can become a true reflection of the kingdom of God, where all are valued and all belong.

Sunita Theiss is a writer, communications consultant, and homeschool parent based in Georgia.

- More from Sunita Theiss

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A modern marvel

A galvanizing force

Missing the mark?

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