In Zimbabwe, Secular Education Is Overtaking Historic Mission Schools

The private school boom corresponds with a bigger move away from colonial-era denominations.

Three mission schools outside of Harare, Zimbabwe.

Christian Ender / Getty Images

Neville Mlambo, 65, a retired missionary, shakes his head. His United Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (UCCZ) church had educated some of the finest Black ministers, CEOs, bishops, and judges in the last 100 years when Western colonialism and the church landed together in Zimbabwe.

“Colonial church-owned schools were prestigious. They groomed the cream of Black army commanders or city mayors,” said Mlambo. “Twenty years ago, we would overflow with 1,000 students squeezing for a place to study at our mission boarding schools. Today, we hardly attract 350 in some schools.”

Historic church-run mission schools in Zimbabwe—affiliated with a range of traditions, including Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, Baptist, or Salvation Army—are now on the decline.

“They are losing money, students, and the next generation of congregants as more Black families troop to private secular schools,” he said.

Zimbabwe has one of Africa’s highest literacy rates: 97.1 percent of the population in urban areas are able to read and write. Its educational system has included a mix of free state schools, plus thousands of Christian seminaries, primary schools, high schools, and colleges. The Catholics, Anglicans, and American Methodists have vast tracts of lands in Zimbabwe and dominate ownership of missionary-led schools.

“Christian mission schools took off in the 1920s as the colonial project deepened along with a need to train clerks, teachers, nurses, or judges that served the colonial conquest. That story is unwinding today, fast,” says Edgar Shuwa, a theology lecturer at Rusitu Bible College, which is run by remnants of the American Baptist mission in east Zimbabwe.

There’s an explosion of secular private schools owned by Black entrepreneurs across Zimbabwe today, says the government. Nearly 500 private-owned primary and high schools were operating in the capital, Harare, in 2022, with authorities battling to even distinguish between licensed and unlicensed ones, said Zimbabwe’s education minister in April.

After Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, almost all students attended low-fee public schools run by the government and private schools run by Christian denominations. But in the last 20 years, more parents have turned to secular private schools, citing a decline in teaching quality and facilities in older schools. According to UNESCO, 29 percent of all schools in Zimbabwe are now privately run.

Church mission schools have run their course, according to 45-year-old Marlon Danga, who studied at the famous Catholic Kutama Mission, where Zimbabwe’s first Black prime minister, Robert Mugabe, was schooled by Jesuit fathers. Danga sees their strict doctrine-based curriculum as outdated as culture liberalizes.

“Like many Black parents today, I went against the script when it came to my offspring. I sent my kids to secular private schools that teach no adherence to any religion,” he said.

New money is empowering Black families to cut ties with schools run by colonial churches, says Stella Ngomwa, 49, a finance manager for a brewery. More Africans—in Zimbabwe and across the continent—are working to detangle their institutions and identity from Western colonialism.

“It’s a seismic shift, and we have lost,” pastor Mlambo said. “Less money coming from mother churches in America or Scotland means—for old churches like us Baptists, Methodists, or Anglicans—that we can’t adequately maintain our schools’ infrastructure or dole out more scholarships to poorer Black students. And we are losing appeal.”

With the rise of African-initiated churches, “the new African not only wants to own the church, he/she also wants to own schools, cities, land, identity,” wrote Yasin Kakande, author of Why We Are Coming: Slavery, Colonialism, Imperialism, and Migration.

Church-run mission schools dominated the colonial heyday, but the reality is that Black Zimbabweans lacked options, Ngomwa explains.

Now, the country’s Christian landscape is changing. More believers church-hop between denominations, rather than maintaining a strong identity within one of the older colonial-era denominations.

“I don’t want my daughters to be forced to recite Anglican hymns and attend Scripture Union meetings every evening at an Anglican or Dutch Reformed boarding school,” said Ngomwa.

Secular private schools also broaden the options for students to excel in programs like sports, which open doors for university placement abroad; Ngomwa’s daughter’s athletic involvement got her a place at a UK university.

Meanwhile, the quality of facilities and education in church-run schools is declining fast as old colonial churches get poorer, said pastor Ado Manake, a cleric with the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), a Black-founded, post-colonial Pentecostal Christian denomination that’s home to some of the biggest congregations in Zimbabwe.

“New Black-owned evangelical and Pentecostal churches are forcefully challenging colonial Catholic, Presbyterian, or Anglican churches in Zimbabwe,” said Manake. “We are opening new schools, making some nondenominational, and getting lots of students, because we understand the new Black clientele.”

Over the past 20 years, secular private schools have dismantled the monopoly of old-church-run mission schools. They charge pricey sums like $1,000 per semester in primary or high schools, compared to church schools that were a mixture of modest fee-paying students and those on scholarships .

Rusitu High School, situated in Zimbabwe’s far east province of Manicaland and established by American Baptists, had been a prestigious and popular option throughout the 20th century. Today, it can barely enroll 400, down from around 1,000 high schoolers at its peak. “We must accept times are changing—we used to attract students from all corners of Zimbabwe,” said Amos Gwade, the school’s treasurer.

There are still Christian options available: Some of the newer evangelical and Pentecostal schools continue to incorporate faith and doctrine in the curricula.

“In those schools, we make sure students, be they high school or college, are taught and prescribed key concepts like salvation through grace, not works, and miracles as a key manifestation of faith,” said Manake, of schools run by AFM and similar traditions. “We don’t want to go all-secular in our schools.”

- More from Nyasha Bhobo

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Wire Story

Philly Pastor: Church Parking Can Be a ‘Stumbling Block’ in the Bike Lane

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

A PCA congregation gives up their Sunday spots after weeks of protests from cyclists.

Courtesy of Philly Bike Action / RNS

If all goes well, worshippers at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia will be able to park on the streets near the church in peace.

They just may have to walk a little bit farther to do so.

Earlier this week, after months of protest by Philly Bike Action, a local association of cyclists, the church decided to give up a city permit that allowed congregants to park on the street outside the building. Those temporary parking spots, which were valid on Sunday mornings, were located in what is otherwise a bike lane.

That drew the ire of Philly Bike Action, which staged 18 weeks of what organizers called “bike lane parties” in front of the church on Sundays, where cyclists often held signs of protest and took photos of church members parked in bike lanes.

While church leaders defended the congregation’s right to park in the bike lane, they also realized they were alienating the community. As a result, the church decided to work with the city to find alternative parking.

“The point is that many of our neighbors see us as self-centered, pursuing our own interests and unconcerned with their welfare,” Tim Geiger, executive pastor of Tenth, told church members in a video posted to the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) congregation’s Facebook page. “That’s something that could easily become a stumbling block for them, as we try to invite them to know the Lord and to know us as a church.”

The growing popularity of bike lanes has caused unintended challenges in older cities like Philadelphia—where city officials have to balance access for bikers with the needs of the broader community, including churches, on narrow streets first designed for horses and buggies.

In Washington, DC, for example, work on a bike lane on Ninth Street NW was delayed for years after leaders of nearby Black congregations said the bike lane, which included a protective barrier, would limit access to their buildings. Earlier this year, leaders at Asbury United Methodist Church in DC complained that a bike lane blocked an accessible entrance to the church.

Kurt Paulsen, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that allowing street parking for churches can make sense, especially since their services usually happen at times of low traffic. Cities often make accommodations for churches or other institutions that lack off-street parking lots.

“The city certainly doesn’t want to make it hard for people to attend an historic church downtown and normally there isn’t a lot of business or tourist traffic on Sunday mornings,” he said in an email.

But adding bike lanes can make that complicated—especially as the best practice for those bike lanes calls for adding a concrete barrier or other dividers.

Christopher Dascher, a board member of Philly Bike Action, which was organized about a year ago, said the group has been focused on ending street parking on Spruce and Pine streets, which he said were popular east-west routes for bicyclists in Philly. They identified seven congregations—four churches, a pair of synagogues and the Philadelphia Ethical Society—that had street parking permits on a mile-and-a-half stretch of road. The group had hopes of getting those congregations to give up the permits.

Five of the congregations have found alternatives or given up their permits, according to the Philly Bike Action website. Two remain in discussions over the permits, said Dascher. He said Philly Bike Action sees all the congregations as vital to the city.

“We very much believe that having these congregations is part of what makes our city great,” he said.

But Dascher, who said he often rides with his two young kids, also said the practice of parking in bike lanes is inherently dangerous. Doing so means bicyclists have to enter lanes designed for auto traffic, which can be unsafe.

He said protests over the bike lanes heated up after a bike rider was killed this summer when a car veered into the bike lane. Dascher said the accident proved more safety measures are needed. Along with the ending of street parking, he’d like to see some kind of protective barrier set up.

“I’m passionate about street safety,” he said. “I believe very much that everybody in their community deserves to be able to get around without fear of being injured or killed by a car.”

Dascher said the protests were meant to draw attention without being too confrontational. It’s not clear that was always the case. In his video, Geiger, the pastor at Tenth, said there had been acts of vandalism as part of the protests. Dascher said he was aware of Geiger’s claim but had been given no details of any incidents.

“Philly Bike Action does not condone property destruction or harassment and actively discourages these actions,” he said. “We communicate this to volunteers in public facing ways, such as on Instagram. Our goal has been to maintain a civil and constructive tone to our efforts.”

Elizabeth Kiker, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, said that cycling groups and churches can work together on issues involving bike lanes. She said that bicycle groups can do more outreach before a bike lane is built, to work through any concerns.

“I think there’s a way to meet in the middle and say we do need bike lanes on the streets where these beautiful churches are,” said Kiker. “And we recognize that churches need parking, particularly on Sunday mornings.”

For some congregations along Pine and Spruce streets, finding new parking took some ingenuity. Cheryl Desmond, the administrator for the Philadelphia Ethical Society, a humanist congregation, said she’d been looking for alternative parking for several years.

Desmond said the street parking for the Ethical Society was grandfathered in when the bike lanes were set up. But the society had more parking spaces than it needed, said Desmond, who also was concerned about respecting the intent of the bike lanes—and questioned whether parking there was the right thing to do.

“When someone doesn’t like what we do, they say, are you being ethical?” she said.

During the pandemic, Desmond began looking for new parking spots. She noticed a local farmers market blocked off lanes at a nearby park and wondered if the society could do the same. The city agreed to the request.

“Once I had a solution, it was the right thing to do,” she said.

Worshippers at Old Pine Street Church, a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation just over a mile from Tenth, will also begin using new parking spots. The congregation recently negotiated a permit that allows street parking on Sundays, just one block over.

The Rev. Jason Ferris, pastor of Old Pine Street Church, said that when bike lanes were first proposed, the city came to congregations like Old Pine Street Church and asked for their support. The church was in favor of the bike lanes, provided there was still parking for Sunday services, which seemed like a workable compromise .

Ferris said the church had been looking for alternatives to parking in the bike lane for several years, knowing it was not an ideal situation. But past attempts to find a solution had stalled.

“We were happy to look at alternatives,” said Ferris. “We just didn’t want to lose our parking altogether.”

Protests by Philly Bike Action added a sense of urgency and led to a solution.

“I feel like we were lucky that we had a reasonable alternative and were able to make a switch,” he said. “But I do feel for these other churches and synagogues. I think it’s just one of these tough urban issues.”

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Books

Why the American Church Can’t Fix Loneliness

Russell Moore

Broken bonds and burned bridges can’t be mended by imaginary networks of relationships.

Jiri Benedikt / Unsplash

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

I don’t know how to say, ‘I’m lonely,’ without sounding like I’m saying, ‘I’m a loser,’” a middle-aged man said to me not long ago. “And I don’t know how to say it without sounding like I’m an ungrateful Christian.”

After all, this man said, he’s at church every week—not just there, but active. His life is a blur of activities. But he feels alone. In that, at least, he’s not alone.

Repeatedly, almost all of the data show us the same thing: that the so-called “loneliness epidemic” experts warned about is real. We all know it’s bad, and we sometimes have a vague sense of why it’s happening. The answers that some come up with are often too big to actually affect any individual person’s life. Smartphones aren’t going away. We aren’t all moving back to our hometowns. We see a kind of resigned powerlessness to change society’s lonely condition. So why can’t the church fix this?

The answer lies partly in a book published a near quarter-century ago: political scientist Robert Putnam’s famous Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Earlier this summer, The New York Times interviewed Putnam, asking him whether, since he saw the loneliness crisis coming, he saw any hope of it ending.

Putnam reiterated that the answer is what he calls “social capital,” those networks of relationships needed to keep people together. Social capital comes in two forms, Putnam insists, and both are necessary. Bonding social capital is made up of the ties that link people to other people like themselves. Bridging social capital consists of the ties that link people to those unlike themselves.

The first time I was on set with a television talk-show host who, like me, grew up Southern Baptist, he turned to me before we went on the air and said, “Pop quiz: What should always be the first song in a hymnal?” I immediately responded with the right answer (“Holy, Holy, Holy”), and we high-fived. No one else on that set knew what we were talking about. The secularist in the producer’s chair might have thought, “What’s ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’?” The churchgoing evangelical behind the camera might well have thought, “What’s a hymnal?”

That little detail of shared tribal memory, though, represented more than trivia. It was a way of recognizing one another—the same sort of church background, from the same sort of time period, the same sort of shared experience. We knew in that moment that, even if no one else in New York City knew the names of Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong, we did, and, even if no one in that television network building could say what words would follow “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag,” we would. All of us experience equivalent moments of bonding social capital.

Putnam makes it clear that one form of social capital is not “good” and the other “bad.” When you’re sick and need to be taken care of, usually that comes from relationships made with bonding capital. That’s good, but—when taken too far—really dangerous. Putnam notes that the Ku Klux Klan is “pure social capital” of the bonding sort. Bridging capital, Putnam argues, is much harder, but both are needed for a person or a society to escape isolation.

We know the statistics on religious decline in the United States, especially when it comes to actual weekly church attendance. Some (though not all) of that decline is driven by the same factors that wiped away bowling leagues and Lions Clubs and neighborhood watch programs.

But maybe we ought to flip the question around. We live in a country with churches everywhere, and the vast majority of people—at least for a long time in the 20th century—belonged or currently belong to some sort of church. So why weren’t the factors that eroded social capital not arrested long before we arrived at this point?

One factor is what Putnam’s getting at with the necessity of bridging and bonding. The Bible holds both sorts of social capital together.

In the Old Testament, Israel is distinct from the nations, with the highest bonding capital imaginable employed to keep them together. At the same time, they were reminded constantly that they were to be a “light to the nations,” bridging the divides that had sundered humanity since Babel.

In the New Testament, the pioneer church was to be bonded—serving each other at the Lord’s Table, equipping each other with spiritual gifts, uniting voices together in worship. That’s why the imagery of the family is applied constantly in the epistles to the church. Simultaneously, the Great Commission—to disciple all nations—requires bridging capital, often of the sort we see Paul employ at Mars Hill in Athens or with Gentile audiences of all sorts.

In fact, the bonding of people who were bridged to one another is one of the primary themes of book after book of the New Testament (Acts, Romans, Galatians, etc.).

A church that is evangelistic (seeking to share Christ with one’s neighbors and with the nations of the world) relies on bridging social capital. A church that considers its members as brothers and sisters, as one body with many members, counts on bonding social capital.

What we have long seen in the American church—almost without reference to theological distinctives or denominational identity—is a severing of bridging social capital from bonding social capital.

Many of the more “missional” congregations—especially the larger ones—did bridging social capital very well. They taught married couples how to relate to single young adults, how to talk to the Buddhist down the street, how to anticipate the way a secularist might think about why a good God would let bad things happen to good people, and so on. But many of these churches now admit they did so without a lot of bonding social capital. The people didn’t know each other. They weren’t deeply discipled.

On the other hand, lots of other churches did bonding without bridging. Some of these churches were ingrown, of the sort we’ve all seen, where two or three families are the inner circle and no one else can ever really belong. Some of them thought themselves to be “evangelistic,” but without teaching their people any real bridging social capital: a church of white, college-educated, suburban young professionals with children, for instance, devoted to reaching white, college-educated, suburban young professionals with children.

Once the bridging and bonding forms of social capital are broken, then, something must take their place. What that’s turned out to be is imaginary social capital. A number of people turn to imaginary bridging capital. Some who’ve fled what they considered the smothering conformity of the church think they are now bridging people unlike themselves, but just end up with other people who’ve fled what they considered to be the smothering conformity of the church. That’s imaginary bridging capital—not the real thing.

And some people turn to the imaginary bonding capital of Christian nationalism or ethnic Kinism. Why is almost every neo-Confederate I know a Yankee from Minnesota or Ohio or Idaho? It’s because it’s a way to pretend to have bonds with “one’s own kind.” But hating the same people does not a community make. What’s the end result? More loneliness, and then resentment at the being lonely, and the finding someone to blame for being lonely. As Dwight Schrute from The Office once put it, “They say that no man is an island. False! I am an island, and this island is volcanic.”

All around us, we see archipelagoes of lonely islands, with volcanoes spewing hot, molten lava on many of them.

In his interview with the Times, Putnam makes a point that too many of us miss. We need something like bowling leagues to save democracy, he said, but it doesn’t work if people are joining the bowling leagues to save democracy. They have to bowl because it’s fun. Along the way, communities get healthier, but that’s a byproduct.

Churches combat loneliness not by telling people, “Come to church so you won’t be lonely; it’s good for you.” People should come to church because it’s true—Jesus is alive and seated at the right hand of the Father, forgiving our sins and coming again. Those of us convinced of this should then remind ourselves that we belong to one another, that we are not our own. We should remind ourselves that the great congregation in heaven is made up of every tribe, language, people, and nation (Rev. 5:9).

On mission together to bridge the outside world to the God who loves them, we bond along the way. In fellowship to bond as a family whose commonality is Christ, we stir ourselves up to love the people he loves, so we become bridges along the way.

Social capital is not the most important thing. The kingdom of God is (Matt. 6:33). But the brokenness of social capital—inside and outside the church—might prompt us to retrace our steps. We might see some burned bridges, some broken bonds—all of which Jesus knows how to piece back together again.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Books

N.T. Wright: What Jesus Would Say to the ‘Empire’ Today

Interview by Stefani McDade

How Jesus and the Powers, cowritten with Michael F. Bird, calls Christians into the political sphere.

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

In a year seeing over 50 countries at the polls—half of which could shift geopolitical dynamics—the timing of Jesus and the Powers’ release was no accident.

A few years ago, N. T. Wright (author of Surprised by Hope) and Michael F. Bird (Jesus Among the Gods)—who had collaborated on The New Testament in Its World—realized there was a lack of biblical guidance on how Christians should engage with politics, and they decided to do something about it.

“We both had the sense that most Christians today have not really been taught very much about a Christian view of politics,” Wright said. “Until the 18th century, there was a lot of Christian political thought, which we’ve kind of ignored the last 200–300 years—and it’s time to get back to it.”

The “gateway” to political theology, Wright believes, is the idea that, until Christ’s return, “God wants humans to be in charge.” And while all political powers have in some sense been “ordained by God” according to Scripture, he says, Christians are called to “take the lead” in holding them accountable.

“The church is designed to be the small working model of new creation, to hold up before the world a symbol—an effective sign of what God has promised to do for the world. Hence, to encourage the rest of the world to say, ‘Oh, that’s what human community ought to look like. That’s how it’s done.’”

And as the global church becomes “a community worshiping the one God and doing justice and mercy in the world,” this is a “sign to the caesars of the world that Jesus is Lord and that they are not” and a “sign to the principalities and powers that this is the way to be human.”

In an interview with CT, Wright discusses the need for more theological collaboration around political issues, the skewed eschatology behind Christian abdication from the political sphere, and how the global church should engage with the various forms of empire “let loose” in our world today.

I’d heard from a couple people at the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) conference last fall that there’s not a lot of scholars doing work in political theology right now. Would you agree with that?

Yes, let me give you an example. When the Ukraine scenario broke two years ago, I wrote to two or three leading Christian thinkers in the US and said, “Okay, guys, you work on this front more than I do. What should we be thinking about this? If we had the ear of President Volodymyr Zelensky, let alone Vladimir Putin, what should we be saying to them?” And it was quite clear from their responses that there’s a lot of caution—that this is a hugely difficult area, and we’re not quite sure how to get into this.

I think that reflects the fact that even among those who’ve written books about political theology, when a crisis happens, I’m not sure any of us have a clear roadmap for how we would address that. My point is, we’ve hardly begun to think through all these things and how we structure our politics wisely.

An awful lot of Christians have been told, in so many words, that politics is a dirty game. We leave it to the politicians and the social workers while we’re teaching people how to say their prayers and go to heaven—and never the twain shall meet. I think we’ve got to the point, now, where most Christians realize that split simply doesn’t reflect the Bible in general or Christian witness. Particularly when you start thinking about what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God “on earth as in heaven.”

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” what does that lead us to think of Jesus having authority on earth? It looks, in the New Testament, like Jesus delegating tasks through the Holy Spirit to the church. Not that the church should be running the world, but that the church has a vital role to play in speaking truth to power—in holding up a mirror to power and in modeling what God’s new creation should look like.

In your introduction, you referenced previous works of yours and Mike’s have partly inspired this book. But I was wondering if you could speak more about its biblical or theological underpinnings?

One of the things that’s really come strongly to me over the last couple of decades has been the role of human beings within God’s good creation. The idea in Genesis 1, the creation of humans in God’s image, means that God is committing himself to working in the world through human beings.

In Western theology, we often read Genesis 1–2 as God’s setting human beings up to a moral examination, which they then fail. That gets the whole conversation off on the wrong foot, instead of around the question of how is God going to wisely rule his world through obedient, responsive human beings if they’ve messed up and if they’re worshipping idols? The answer is that God has rescued them from their idolatry so that they can run his world as his vice regents in the way that he wants.

For me, one of the key texts that jumped out to me when I was first working on this is from John 19, where Jesus says to Pontious Pilate, “You could have no authority over me unless it was given you from above.” So, Jesus acknowledges that this second-rate Roman governor has a God-given authority.

In other words, yes, rulers have a God-given authority, and God will hold them to account for what they do with it. … The early church, like the Jews, thought it was their responsibility to critique them. It’s like the prophetic witness of John the Baptist saying to Herod, “You’re out of line here,” or Jesus himself telling the rulers and authorities that when they were misstepping.

Faithful Christian engagement with politics isn’t saying to political leaders, “You don’t have God-given authority.” It’s saying, “We’re going to be your critics in how you’re using that God-given authority.” I suspect most people in most churches in the Western world—let alone anywhere else—have never even begun to conceive of it like that. But until we do, we won’t understand what the church’s responsibility should be.

How should Christians hold the government accountable and ensure those in public service use their powers responsibly? And how do you envision that happening in a pluralist society where people hold different religious views and may have different standards for justice?

When I read, say, Psalm 72—which I go back to again and again, the great Messianic psalm—some people have objected to the “royal” psalms, because “it’s all in service of empire.” But, actually, if you look at Psalm 72, it says, “Lord, give your justice to the king, so that he will look after the widows and the orphans and the strangers,” etc., and it repeats that again and again. Then, at the end, it says, “and so the earth, the whole earth shall be full of his glory.” This is how God wants to be glorified.

There is something that you could call a kind of natural theology of global ethics. Most traditions would say looking after the weak and vulnerable sounds like a good idea. And unfortunately, vested interests get involved, because if the weak and vulnerable happen to be migrants who are coming into your country, and you don’t want any more people in your country, then you say, “No, tell them to go away, go somewhere else.” But we need wise, thought-out policies on migration, because not all countries can support the thousands of people who want to come and live there.

The church needs to train people to think wisely about all those relevant issues. We shouldn’t be leaving it to the professional economists—or, at least, we need Christian professional economists. We need Christian people to look at issues of development or migration or the huge issues that are facing us globally and to advise the church wisely, so that the church can speak truthfully. Not just in sound bites, as I’m doing now, of course, but with real depth and authority on serious issues.

What would you say to Christians who are like, “Well, this world is going to hell in a handbasket anyway”—those who don’t get involved in government because they’re thinking, “Well, the church is separate—it’s a bastion away from the world”?

Right, and it’s very interesting, the transition was in the early 18th century. So much in Britain and America was almost triumphalist in the sense that “We are now taking over the world, and the gospel is going to rule”—and Handel’s Messiah, “He shall reign forever and ever,” you know—which sounds great in the 1740s. But interestingly, by the 1790s, something has turned, and Epicureanism has won—the French Revolution has happened, people are getting frightened and wondering what’s going on.

I think it does go back to the Enlightenment, where you get that split of religion and politics. The Epicureanism of the 17th and 18th centuries basically split heaven and earth miles apart. This leaves people to run earth the way they want—which usually means for their own advantage, by keeping anything religious out of the question. And that has been a disaster.

Then you get the dispensational movement, particularly in America, and other similar movements with a very negative eschatology—that the only way anything can happen is if God ditches this whole project and starts again from scratch. So, many Christians turned back to Plato to say, “Well, actually, we have souls that are going to escape from this place anyway and go somewhere else.” But as I never tire of saying to students, the word heaven in the New Testament is never used for the place of our ultimate destiny. And the word soul is never used for the beings we will be in our ultimate destiny.

People have come with the assumption that the biblical story is about how human souls can find their way up to the beatific vision in heaven. Whereas the entire biblical narrative runs the other way—it’s about how God comes to dwell with humans here. The strapline in Revelation chapter 21 isn’t that the dwelling of humans is with God—it’s that the dwelling of God is with humans.

The older I get, the more I realize Acts 2, the descent of the Spirit filling the house, is a temple scene; it goes straight back to 1 Kings 8 or Exodus 14. It’s a way of saying, “This is what God always intended to do. God, the Holy Spirit, always intended to live with and in—and be operative through—human beings. And wow, it’s actually happening.” This is a totally different way of doing theology.

The old idea of God throwing the present creation away—so why would we bother to put it right?—simply does no justice. We urgently need as a global community to think more Christianly, more biblically, about the whole scenario.

N.T. Wright is Research Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary’s College in the University of St Andrews and Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. His most recent book, co-written with Michael F. Bird, is Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies.

- More from Interview by Stefani McDade

Theology

Wanted: No Visa Issues, Fast Wi-Fi, and a Ballroom that Inspires Intimacy with God

Bruce Barron

Global Christian organizations scour the world in search of the best conference sites.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

This September, about 5,000 Christians will assemble in Incheon, South Korea, for the Lausanne Movement’s Fourth Congress on World Evangelization. Some of them wish Lausanne had picked a location with a better exchange rate and lower hotel prices near the conference venue.

However, local costs are just one of many considerations when global Christian organizations select a conference site. Beyond the common refrain about the shift in Christianity’s center of gravity, numerous other factors have pushed most major global events toward the Majority World, especially Asia.

CT asked leaders of prominent Christian international entities to talk about their site selection process. Their answers depict the complex logistical, diplomatic, and interfaith issues involved in bringing Christians from all over the world together in one place.

For most conference organizers, the single most important concern is choosing a site that everyone can come to. Due to complicated international relations and many affluent countries’ concerns regarding visa abuse, this is a major challenge.

“Whether people from Global South countries could get visas was our number one question,” stated Samuel Chiang, deputy secretary general of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), who planned the Future of the Gospel Forum in Istanbul last year. “Canada and the United States accept visitors from about 70 countries without a visa, which sounds like a lot until you are trying to bring people from 200 countries.”

Difficulties in obtaining visas were a key reason why Africans were underrepresented at the United Methodist Church’s General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, this year. Their absence affected the vote that resulted in reversing the Methodists’ prior ban on same-sex marriage.

John Criswell, chief people and culture officer for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES), oversaw that organization’s 2023 World Assembly in Jakarta, Indonesia, which included 1,000 participants from 180 countries. Criswell said the Indonesian government was very cooperative and ultimately admitted delegates from every country but one.

Criswell added that Mexico, where IFES held its 2015 World Assembly, can be a difficult location because of the problems associated with getting visas for connecting flights through the United States. In 2015, IFES held an adjoining event in Atlanta, which made it easier for people attending both events to get a US visa.

Media Associates International (MAI), which equips Christian writers and publishers across the globe, is holding its triennial LittWorld conference in Puebla, Mexico, this November. MAI president John Maust said they chose Mexico because of a strong core of local support and a desire to make their training more accessible to Spanish-speaking participants. But Maust noted that participants who need a visa for Mexico have been asked for extensive documentation if they do not already have a US visa.

David Bennett, Lausanne’s global associate director, indicated that South Korea has been very accommodating, requiring either no visa or only an electronic visa for a majority of countries, though travelers from some countries have had to provide notarized physical copies of documents.

Bennett, who is also the director of the upcoming Lausanne congress, acknowledged the relatively high cost of lodging in Incheon, near Seoul. But he noted that Korean churches have subsidized planning meetings and have contributed logistical and transportation assistance.

Other factors Bennett cited in Korea’s favor include the Korean church’s recent growth and vitality in missions, making it an inspiring model for Lausanne participants; the growing significance of Asia in global affairs; the availability of a large convention center and abundant hotel space close to the airport; and the perceived opportunity to strengthen the unity and health of the Korean church. (The WEA canceled its 2014 General Assembly, scheduled for Seoul, because of divisions among Korean evangelicals.)

Thailand is a second popular conference destination in Asia, despite its relatively small number of Christians. World Without Orphans (WWO), which facilitates a global movement to reduce the institutionalization of children and to strengthen families, welcomed people from 63 countries this year at its global conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Andrii Fedun, WWO’s events and logistics lead, said his organization favors locations in Asia, especially Thailand, for their simplified visa processes, convenient travel, reasonably priced accommodations, and reputation for welcoming tourists.

Indonesia is another frequent conference option. In addition to the IFES World Assembly, it hosted the last WEA General Assembly in 2019, a WEA emerging leaders event and the IFES World Assembly (both in 2023), and a meeting of the Empowered21 global network of charismatics this year.

Bambang Budijanto, general secretary of the Asia Evangelical Alliance, listed the strength and generosity of the Indonesian church, low costs, a welcoming attitude toward foreigners, ample conference facilities, and interfaith tolerance as attractive features.

“The Indonesian church is growing in number, capacity, and global vision,” Budijanto said. “It is eager to bless other nations.”

Bennett agreed that Southeast Asia is an attractive option for a global congress “if you’re looking for efficient logistics at the least expense. You can find inexpensive flights and housing, large facilities, and major travel hubs.”

Selecting a venue away from a major metropolis can reduce site costs, Bennett indicated, but the inconvenience of arranging ground transportation discourages this option.

Casely Essamuah of the Global Christian Forum (GCF)—which brings together leaders from the WEA, World Council of Churches, Vatican, and Pentecostal World Fellowship—worked through significant logistical challenges to hold a GCF Global Gathering in Ghana last spring.

“Hosting is not easy for Global South leaders,” he explained. “For them, it’s easier to find the money to go elsewhere, even though holding events in the Global North is more expensive. Two of my executive committee members were concerned about the quality of medical facilities in Ghana. I had Westerners wanting to book travel a year in advance and hosts telling me their currency changes its value every few weeks.”

Essamuah hoped to use a church-owned conference center as the venue but eventually abandoned the idea due to inadequate internet access and accommodations. “I can’t put archbishops in a dormitory with 10 people to a room and no internet,” he said.

Instead, the Global Gathering met at a hotel in Accra, the capital city. “That tripled the cost, but we had comfort, internet, safety, and peace of mind. Someone wrote to me afterwards saying this was his sixth trip to Africa and the first time he was assured of a hot shower. What he forgot was that he paid for it.”

The World Council of Churches’ (WCC) site selection process for its general assemblies every eight years resembles the Olympics, with prospective hosts submitting bids. WCC staff then visit each candidate location and write a summary report (without a recommendation) to the WCC’s central committee, which makes the final decision.

Doug Chial, director of the WCC’s office of the general secretariat, highlighted a disability-friendly environment as an important criterion, noting that about 100 of the 4,000 people attending a WCC assembly have some type of disability that requires special consideration.

The WCC prefers a church-owned conference center or a university campus with single-occupancy dorm rooms over hotels. “A university campus reminds people of their student days, and everyone feels equal,” Chial said.

Lausanne does not request formal bids, but Bennett described local interest, as evidenced by invitations and encouragement from Christian leaders in a prospective host city, as a “very significant factor” in site decisions for both the third congress in Cape Town in 2010 and the Seoul-Incheon congress this year.

Meaningful exposure to local churches and local history is important to some groups. The GCF conference in Ghana included a poignant visit to Cape Coast Castle, built by Portuguese traders in the 16th century as a slave trading post. The Religious Liberty Partnership held a global consultation in Abuja, Nigeria, to express solidarity with the church in northern Nigeria as it faced severe persecution. And the WCC recently held an executive meeting in Colombia that included exposure to the peace-building process between the government and the FARC rebel group.

Fedun said that World Without Orphans seeks to hold events “in countries where orphans and vulnerable children face significant challenges but may not have a strong voice,” to raise awareness and support local efforts.

Carrie Reinhard, the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s director for events, said a venue’s family-friendliness is a high priority, because the Alliance encourages participation by families with children at some global conferences. She planned a recent event in Málaga, Spain, where she found an affordable hotel with swimming pools, kid-only areas, and a beach across the street.

Efforts to hold conferences in some locations can arouse objections to the host country’s human rights record. The WEA’s Chiang said he heard concerns about the group’s decision to go to Turkey, “but the head of Turkey’s evangelical alliance is so well regarded that, while we were there, [Turkish president Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan invited him to participate in a ceremony at the opening of a historic church. We were able to make it known to everyone that the president respects evangelicals.”

Another challenge Turkey posed for Chiang was the popularity of smoking, which forced him to look for a hotel with nonsmoking floors and good ventilation. Individually controlled air conditioning units became an important attraction. Furthermore, “we wanted a place with a ballroom conducive to intimacy with God and people,” he said. Chiang sensed that feature at a Radisson hotel in Istanbul, but before deciding, he sent photos and videos to a group of intercessors who prayed with him.

Steffen Zoege, chief operating officer of the mission agency OM International, emphasized the need for assurance that conference participants could speak freely without being observed or monitored. OM has held its recent annual global meetings in Indonesia, Cyprus, and Thailand.

One point on which all interviewees agreed was that, even in the age of virtual events, in-person conferences, despite their cost and logistical demands, are still essential.

For the GCF’s Essamuah, much of the value of global gatherings “isn’t the plenary sessions but the small table conversations where you can go deep with people, and the people you meet while on the bus from the hotel to the venue. You can’t do that with Zoom.”

“You might get some level of connectedness and oneness [virtually], but it’s not intimate enough to close the deal,” Chiang observed. “Christians want to have fellowship with an actual presence, rather than mediated by technology.”

Nevertheless, some organizations now offer a virtual option to those who cannot attend personally. Criswell said the 2023 IFES World Assembly included an online component offered through a secure connection. And Lausanne hopes to have as many virtual as in-person registrants for its upcoming conference. “We want to make the virtual experience as robust as possible for people with economic limitations,” Bennett said. “But 6 hours on Zoom are exhausting, whereas 12 hours of face-to-face contact can be energizing.”

Chial said the WCC encourages online participation but will not permit hybrid decision-making processes because of the imbalance of engagement opportunities between in-person and virtual participants. He added that trying to fit the whole world’s time zones into a single meeting creates a consistent inequity: “It inevitably falls to people in the Pacific to take responsibility for staying awake into the middle of the night.”

Bennett said that for the Lausanne Movement, “reflecting the realities of the global church” remains a crucial driving factor. “Many Latin Americans are having financial struggles getting to Korea,” he lamented. “There are no inexpensive flights. We are working hard to find subsidies for them.” In addition, conference registration costs are generally lower for Majority World participants.

But to reach overlooked groups, there’s no substitute for bringing conferences to where the left-out people are. “When we have a meeting in Africa, we get more Africans,” Bennett averred. “It’s the same in Latin America. We know that many Majority World leaders, when they see a pattern of meetings in Europe or North America, feel they are secondary voices in the conversation. They need to be primary voices.”

- More from Bruce Barron

Theology

An Anxious Generation—of Parents

Carrie McKean

Jesus told us not to worry, but worry is our culture’s parenting default. It’s harming our kids.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Pexels

As my daughter dangled 10 feet above the ground, legs wrapped around the thick, smooth trunk of a vine in the middle of the Belizean jungle, I stood below her and considered how far she was from solid ground, a paved road, and the nearest hospital.

Needless to say, this had not been on my agenda for the day. We were visiting a small village on a mission trip to western Belize with friends from our church who’ve been coming annually to the same town for more than a decade. Our task was to help in the village school, support community development projects, share the love of Jesus, and deepen friendships with people who live in a totally different cultural context from our own.

It was that last part that put my daughter up the tree. We took a morning walk to see some little-known Mayan ruins but detoured to a no-safety-harnesses jungle adventure course led by Crocs-wearing Julio, our local friend who clearly didn’t find it worrisome to let a child free climb.

Back home in the States, we’re constantly worried about our kids. It’s well-documented and generally accepted that smartphones, social media, and a lack of childhood independence and free play contribute to creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt famously dubbed an “anxious generation.” But in all this collective handwringing, we tend to overlook a closely related and equally pervasive problem: unchecked, socially normalized parental anxiety and the smothering parenting style it produces.

There’s nothing new under the sun, and I’m sure, to some extent, that’s true of parental worries. Throughout the ages, parents have feared losing their children to sickness, accidents, or violence. Right now, while I worry about volleyball team tryouts and first day of school jitters, mothers around the world worry about bombs and bullets, famine and frontlines.

The problem of the relatively comfortable, like us, seems to be what we do with our worries. Our parenting strategies successfully soothe our own fears, but that doesn’t mean they meet our children’s developmental needs. We disempower our kids instead of helping them grow into competent, confident adults. We rebrand hyper-concern as proof of love and treat our pursuit of safety and ease like whipped cream on hot chocolate: If some is good, surely more will be better.

Across political and social divides, for example, parents are among the fiercest opponents to school smartphone bans, despite the mountain of evidence telling us they’re disrupting education. The rationale? Safety and ease. Smartphones give us the previously unimaginable ability to know where our children are at every single moment. We envision ourselves rescuing them from a school shooting—or, far more realistically, rescuing them from the consequences of a forgotten lunchbox.

And phones aren’t all of it. We stack one caution on another: halved grapes and five-point harnesses give way to AirTag tracking and compulsive grade checking. With all our hovering and fixing and fretting, we accidentally tell our children the world is a dangerous place they’re ill-equipped to manage without our ever-present help.

But we’re wrong about the pursuit of safety. More isn’t better. We have a generation of anxious children in part because we are a generation of anxious parents. However good our intentions, we’ve harmed a generation because our risk calibrators are broken. We scramble for protection from rare dangers while paying little heed to the cascade of far more probable dire consequences our own parenting has created.

In some cases, course correction here may require professional help to get our own anxiety under control. But beyond the clinical realm is a more garden-variety anxiety, the kind of chronic worry that all modern parents have seen, whether in ourselves or in our peers. And in this, most Western Christians look no different from the world.

We are just as anxious as our secular neighbors, and our parenting is just as overcautious. That reality should give us pause considering all Jesus said about the birds of the air and lilies of the field (Matt. 6:25–34). What we call caution, God may call sin: a clamoring for control and a refusal to trust God with the children he has entrusted to us.

This issue is also different for Christians because we can recognize what other parents cannot: that at its core, the challenge facing us is far more spiritual and existential than practical and procedural.

I know this firsthand. My elder daughter started eighth grade at her public middle school this month. I get the lockdown emails from her campus. Each morning, I watch her walk into the building alongside all those kids carrying invisible burdens and God knows what else in their backpacks, and I have to swallow my fear. I have to dismiss the intrusive thoughts suggesting this may be the last time I’ll ever see her.

As my girls get older and their lives spin ever further outside my orbit into a world of disorder and chaos, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, feeling as if I’m standing on the edge of a precipice, clutching my daughters’ hands so they do not fall. In the rational light of day, I know there’s no way to contingency plan my way out of all the ways tragedy or hardship could visit our family. Yet in the deepest part of those nights, it seems I can’t stop trying.

Two things can be true at the same time: These sleep-disrupting anxieties are real and profound, and, as Christians, we do not have to be consumed by them.

We—I—must start with confession. The illusion of control is a most enchanting elixir, but it will never satisfy. We must admit that we know this is true and that we have pursued control anyway. Perhaps this honesty will make us more ready to turn to Jesus.

“In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33). In his final earthly sermon, Jesus made this promise to his disciples. It is also for us. This is not a verse emblazoned on plaques at the local Christian bookstore, but maybe it should be. It is at our peril that we disregard God’s promises of weeping and mourning and grief in this world.

To spend so much time and worry trying to avoid trouble is not only unrealistic; it is a rejection of Christ’s invitation to trust in the hope he offers no matter our circumstances. It is a rejection of the rest of this very verse: “Take heart!” Jesus commands. “I have overcome the world.”

But what does it look like to trust and take heart? We must pair our confession with real repentance. We must surrender and face each and every day, come what may, with the trust of little ones who know their Father gives good gifts (Luke 11:13).

This is the first parenting lesson in the life of Jesus, given in Mary’s prayer upon hearing that she will give birth to the Son of God: “Let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38, NRSV). This is a “true prayer of indifference,” says pastor and author Ruth Haley Barton, in which Mary demonstrates a “profound readiness to set aside her own personal concerns in order to participate in the will of God as it unfolded in human history.”

This kind of holy indifference doesn’t mean uncaring disregard but a willingness to accept God’s will in our lives. The term dates to the 16th-century theologian Ignatius of Loyola, but the concept has deep scriptural roots. We see it in Hannah’s relinquishing her son Samuel at the temple (1 Sam. 1:28) and in Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39). As Barton advises, sometimes a prayer of indifference must start with a prayer for indifference, asking God to help us loosen our grip on whatever we want to hold too tightly.

In Belize, I listened to Julio’s calm voice as he guided my daughter’s descent down the vine. “Let go,” he said, encouraging her to slide down the vine, even though she couldn’t yet see where her feet would land. It was as if I was suddenly startled awake by his words. Let go. Let go. Let go.

Julio wasn’t the one exposing my child to inordinate risk and worry. I was—by giving her a life of curated experiences and limited responsibilities, by trading in-real-life adventures for online ones, by making a habit of everyday hovering and motherly helpfulness and near-constant reminders to be careful. Dear Jesus, help me let go.

Watching the two of them, I realized the best thing I could do in the moment was get my own nervous energy under control. And when I contrast that moment with life back home, I’m more and more convinced that this is what our children need from us. For when my daughter’s feet were planted firmly on the ground once more, I saw something new flash in her eyes. It was a spark of accomplishment and confidence, I thought, after she’d practiced the trust I’m praying to learn.

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

- More from Carrie McKean

Theology

Some Evangelicals Are Leaving Protestantism for Other Traditions

Andrew Voigt

A number of high-profile Christians have converted to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. What is driving them away?

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

In recent decades, there has been a significant and sustained trend of Protestants converting to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The most notable figure recently is J. D. Vance, the vice-presidential running mate of former president Donald Trump.

But he’s not alone. Vance is just one name in the growing list of high-profile, theologically conservative Christians who have made public shifts away from their Protestant backgrounds (often evangelical) to these more liturgical or “high church” traditions.

A past president of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis Beckwith, reverted to Catholicism in 2007, and former Anglican Bishop Nazir Ali, has lately returned to the Catholicism of his youth. Other recent Catholic converts include Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity (a popular YouTube channel), historian Joshua Charles, and John Richard Neuhaus, founder of First Things journal. Past prominent converts to Eastern Orthodoxy include Hank Hanegraaff (the “Bible Answer Man”), Lutheran scholar Jaroslav Pelikan, and English bishop Kallistos Ware.

Of course, there are always exceptions to every trend—as is the case with former Eastern Orthodox priest Joshua Schooping, author of Disillusioned: Why I Left the Eastern Orthodox Priesthood and Church, and the Catholic-turned-Protestant Chris Castaldo, who published Why Do Protestants Convert? with Brad Littlejohn last year.

This phenomenon appears less notable in nondenominational churches, since a previous CT article reports that former Roman Catholics have gone from comprising 6 percent of unafilliated congregations to 17 percent in the past 50 years. Also, a 2014 Pew Research Center study highlighted a reverse trend of Catholics converting to Protestantism in Latin America, indicating this may be a geographical trend rather than a global one.

Still, Roman Catholicism is the single largest Christian tradition worldwide, with more than a billion followers, and Eastern Orthodoxy is the second largest, with more than 260 million. According to a recent report by the Orthodox Studies Institute, Eastern Orthodoxy in the US has seen an increase in conversions over the past couple years—with most of the converts from a Protestant background (65%) citing theological reasons for converting (60%). Likewise, the Catholic News Agency recently reported that many US dioceses are seeing a 30–70 percent rise in conversions.

It’s no secret that a growing number of Protestants in the US have become embittered with American evangelicalism. There is, of course, the disillusionment with sexual abuse scandals among well-known leaders and institutions—as well as a distaste for the corporatization and consumerism of the megachurch and “celebrity pastor” model. In addition, the deconstruction movement, mainline progressivism, and many other forces have exerted pressure on 21st-century Protestantism.

But there is also the appeal of these other ecclesial traditions themselves. And while we must be careful not to conflate these two institutions and their significant doctrinal differences, there are similarities in terms of the allure they hold for Protestants who feel disillusioned with their church tradition.

A foundational element in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic institutions is a rich tradition with doctrinal clarity. This can be quite appealing when compared to modern evangelicalism, which has often exhibited an amnesia for even its own theological tradition that often leads to ambiguity and divisiveness. However, I believe this reflects less on historic Protestantism and speaks more to the lack of organizational leadership, doctrinal consensus, and ecclesial unity among today’s church leaders.

Those who find Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy appealing also share in common a longing for the deeper reverence of liturgy and the sacraments, which is often far more mystical, reflective, and reverent than in Protestantism. Aside from the debates around transubstantiation, we can all appreciate this deep reverence for the Eucharist and other biblical mandates. Yet most Protestants don’t realize that many of the early Reformers, like Luther and Calvin, had a similarly high regard for the Lord’s Supper and baptism and that these historic views could be easily recovered within the tradition.

Overall, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have done a better job of staying connected to the rich heritage of Christendom, and the more ancient catechisms and wider theological retrievals can be appealing to those jumping from the Protestant ship. If you were to step inside a typical American Protestant church and mention John Chrysostom, Irenaeus, or any other church father other than Augustine, for example, I’d wager that most of the congregation would be ignorant of their contributions. And yet these figures are as much a part of our own tradition as they are a part of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

Sadly, this ignorance can often be weaponized in interdenominational polemics, with which very few Protestants are prepared to engage. Whereas Protestant apologists and theologians have focused most of their efforts on combatting atheism and secularism, Roman Catholic apologists, for instance, have leaned more heavily into ecclesial dialogue when it comes to promoting their traditions, doctrines, and dogmas—as evident in the reach and influence of organizations like Catholic Answers.

On his podcast, popular Protestant apologist Frank Turek recently spoke with Roman Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin in an episode that revealed his ignorance of the doctrinal differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics. “To be honest, I would love the Roman Catholic Church to be the true church. I have nothing against it. I would love it to be. I just don’t see it,” Turek said. “I’m happy to know that if we get our terminology right, at least we agree on what I think is the most important thing, and that is justification in terms of theology.”

I have a lot of respect for Turek, particularly surrounding his ability to engage with current cultural and societal matters. Yet during this discussion with Jimmy Akin, I couldn’t help but feel he was out of his depth. For one, Protestants and Roman Catholics inarguably do not have the same shared views on justification.

This goes to show that even some of these popular Protestant voices seem unable to accurately discern our theological differences and to graciously engage with important doctrinal distinctions. Protestant leaders should offer better examples of how to respond to claims levied by non-Protestant institutions—both from the pulpit and in the public square. Otherwise, we will continue to see crises of faith, where people are left questioning their ecclesial identity, even converting to other traditions altogether.

So, if Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have the appearance of richer ecclesial institutions—why should we remain Protestant?

First, Protestantism encourages ecumenical engagement. On an episode of his podcast, Truth Unites, Gavin Ortlund points out that the Protestant tradition is equipped to be more ecumenical toward the global body of Christ. Historically, the claims of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have often been inherently exclusive and anathematizing to those outside their circles. Protestants, on the other hand, have greater grounds for affirming other church traditions with orthodox Christian doctrines on the Trinity, the Resurrection, and Christ’s atoning work of forgiving our sins.

Every soul craves a deep belonging that is rooted in something bigger and more profound than anything we can conjure for ourselves. And that abiding sense of belonging is one of the greatest gifts Christ has offered believers through his church for the past two millennia. In Jesus, we have an eternal connection to all other Christians as we are fellow participants in the same grace, mercy, and salvation.

Secondly, the case for remaining Protestant is bolstered by historical Christianity, which is itself not anti-Protestant. Many Roman Catholics and uninformed Protestants have believed a common misperception that Protestantism is at odds with the ancient church. For instance, Catholic Answers repeated the famous quote from John Henry Newman, Roman Catholic theologian, back in the 19th century: “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” To the layperson with no sense of the historical depth supporting the Reformation and Protestantism, such an argument can be easily convincing. Yet a deeper examination of the writings of the Reformers tells a different story.

In fact, contrary to the claims of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, numerous early church teachings are more closely aligned with Protestantism than non-Protestant traditions. When Reformers like Luther and Calvin argued against the doctrinal distortions of Rome in the 16th century, they leveraged their deep knowledge of church history and pointed back to the early church fathers. This can be seen, for instance, in their denouncement of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy for embracing the extrabiblical practice of venerating icons beginning in the first millennia.

And yet most Protestants today are inept and ill-equipped to discuss our history with well-informed Christians from other traditions. As the 21st century faces daunting moral and religious challenges, American Protestants must faithfully study church history to return to our deep historical roots and recover its rich catholicity. As one writer emphasized in a previous CT piece, evangelicals can learn from the likes of theologians like Thomas Aquinas, despite our theological differences.

Finally, the Reformation that started Protestantism served an important purpose: Though not perfectly, it removed non-apostolic and non-scriptural doctrines and dogmas that had infiltrated the church over the course of the first 16 centuries. I am convinced that if Protestants researched the driving factors behind the Reformation, they would be alarmed at some of the unbiblical church teachings that existed during that period. I fear many Protestants do not even know what they believe and why the Reformation was an essential corrective.

For instance, while every tradition claims belief in God’s grace, I believe Protestantism promotes the most scriptural and apostolic reliance upon divine grace—apart from human works—as the sole condition for salvation. I know this may be a contentious statement, and there is much more to say on this subject than we have space to explore here, but I firmly believe the biblical doctrine of divine grace apart from human merit, in its fullness, is one you may forfeit by leaving the Protestant tradition.

On Ortlund’s podcast, Joshua Schooping shares his story of returning to Protestantism, and in the opening line of his book Disillusioned, Schooping explains that he left the Eastern Orthodox Church because he believed some of its “canonical positions have formally and critically wounded the purity of the Gospel.” After my own study of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrines, I share this sentiment—and have gained a renewed appreciation for the Reformation.

“Far from trying to break with tradition, the Reformers were seeking to recover it, a legacy that we must recapture and emulate in our own day,” argues Littlejohn and Castaldo in their book. They believe the solution to our present Protestant disenchantment “is to dig deeper into the Reformation, not to run from it.” Too often, they say, “converts are so intent on running away from the Protestantism they grew up in that they don’t pause to ask whether it was authentically Protestant at all.”

For those wrestling with Protestantism, resources like Ortlund’s upcoming book, What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church, and The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church by Matthew Barrett can help us first examine and seek to understand our own tradition before considering converting to another tradition. If we do not have a firm grasp of our theological heritage, we cannot expect to have an appropriate response to alternative claims. I urge my fellow Protestants to not make the leap without fully examining all the doctrines you will embrace—and those you may leave behind.

As we pray about and study such matters, we must all be sensitive to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, wherever he leads. May we remain humble in our convictions, always submitting ourselves to Christ’s lordship. In doing so, I firmly believe he will direct our steps in grace and truth.

Andrew Voigt is a writer, journalist, and passionate student of theology and church history based near Charlotte, North Carolina. Andrew and his family are members of Providence City Church.

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News

Died: Patricia Gundry, Evangelical Feminist Who Wanted Women to Be Free

Daniel Silliman

Studying Scripture, she argued patriarchy was a result of Adam and Eve’s sin, not God’s good plan.

Patricia Gundry / edits by Rick Szuecs

Patricia Gundry, an evangelical author who taught that “God was the first feminist,” died on July 31 at age 87.

She was part of a movement of women—including Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Letha Scanzoni, and Nancy Hardesty—who reevaluated Christian teachings on gender and hierarchy in light of Scripture.

With an evangelical commitment to rejecting tradition unless it could be backed up by the ultimate authority of the Bible, they came to believe the church had been wrong about women. The limitations and strictures placed on women were cultural, they said, and the hierarchy supposedly found in “creation order” was not part of God’s good plan but a result of sin entering the world.

The evangelical feminists argued that people who loved Jesus should follow him in his proclamation to the woman “crippled by a spirit” in Luke 13, declaring, “Woman, you are set free.”

Gundry adapted Jesus’ phrase for the title of her first book, Woman Be Free! It was published by Zondervan in 1977 and sold about 9,000 copies in two years—a moderate success, but with a significant impact.

Complementarian theologians John Piper and Wayne Grudem identified Gundry’s book as one of the “new interpretations of the Bible” that had provoked a “great uncertainty among evangelicals,” leaving many men and women “not sure what their roles should be.” They coined the new term complementarianism and developed a theology of gender roles in response.

Many regular readers of Woman Be Free! said they weren’t thrown into uncertainty, though. To them, the book was validating.

“I felt seen,” one woman in Ohio wrote on Goodreads after finishing Woman Be Free! in a single day. “Knowing you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, and you’re not defective is a great feeling.”

In 1996, Christianity Today called Woman Be Free! one of the books with the greatest influence on American evangelicals since World War II.

In it, Gundry urged women to read the Bible for themselves. She said they should start at the beginning, remember to interpret each passage in light of the whole, and always keep an eye on the larger story of sin and redemption.

“There is no indication of a subordination of woman in the beginning. … No indication of man’s position of authority appears until after the Fall,” Gundry wrote. “Instead of looking to the Fall for our example, let’s look to Christ and His dealings with men and women. He dealt with them as equals whom He cared about intensely and impartially.”

Gundry’s trust in Christ and reliance on Scripture started in childhood. She was born Patricia Lee Smith in Boone County, Arkansas. Her parents, Leonard and Frances Smith, bounced back and forth between farming in the Ozarks and working in the aircraft industry in Southern California. The Smiths were Southern Baptist and raised Patricia and her brother Daniel in church and Sunday school wherever they lived.

Gundry later recalled two born-again experiences. At age six, at “some sort of after school thing for children in a woman’s home in the Los Angeles area,” she heard about Jesus standing at the door of her heart and knocking. She invited him in. Then, at 13, at a rural church in central California, she went forward at the end of a “hell fire and brimstone sermon.” She was pretty sure she was already converted, she said, but wanted “to make sure it was clear.”

She was baptized—and that also happened twice.

“Just as I was catching my breath, the pastor dipped me under again,” Gundry said. “He explained that he’d not immersed some part of me completely, and he knew there would be objections if he didn’t do it again. I don’t know what kind of Baptist that makes me, maybe a DuoBaptist.”

As a girl, Gundry bought her own Bible at a dime store and read it continuously. She became a “whiz” at trivia, memorizing the names of Job’s three daughters and the lineage of Esther’s persecutor. At the same time, she developed a deep trust of Scripture, calling the Bible “the most important book I own.”

She enrolled at Los Angeles Baptist College (now The Master’s University) in 1956. She met Stan Gundry, a young man who was preparing for ministry and thinking about going to grad school to study the Bible, and they got married two years later.

Stan Gundry told CT the wedding happened as soon as he turned 21 and didn’t need his father’s permission for a marriage license.

“He didn’t approve,” Stan Gundry said. “He thought she was pursuing me when, truth was, I was pursuing her. She was the most amazing woman I ever met.”

Stan Gundry admired the way his wife was fearless and so committed to getting answers from Scripture, she wouldn’t let church leaders dismiss her questions. As he became a pastor and took a ministry job at a church in Everson, Washington, about 100 miles north of Seattle, she began to have a lot of questions.

She asked her husband:

If women are not to be the leaders and teachers of men, how does one account for Deborah, Huldah, Philip’s daughters, and Priscilla’s role in the instruction of Apollos?
Why is it that Paul instructs women to be silent in one place and acknowledges with apparent approval that women publicly pray and prophesy in another?
Doesn’t the prominence of women among the followers of Jesus and in Paul’s Epistles suggest something significantly more than women leading and teaching children and other women?
How is it that in the church the benefits of Galatians 3:26–28 apply equally and in very tangible ways to men, Jews, Gentiles, slaves, and those who are free, but not to women?
If a woman is to obey her husband, is she not responsible directly to God for her actions? Is he in effect a priest, an intermediary between her and God?

Stan Gundry didn’t know.

In 1964, Gundry tried to ask a visiting preacher. They had him to lunch at their house after church and she brought up 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul says that women cannot teach men, and Acts 18:26, where a woman named Priscilla is described teaching a man “the way of God more adequately.” What did he make of that?

The preacher snapped at her: “Why do you want to know?”

“He was sitting at my table, eating my spaghetti, and being obviously rude to me about a simple conversational question,” Gundry later said. “That’s when the light bulb moment came to me. I thought, He doesn’t know. None of them know. But they are willing to limit all women’s lives and participation on the basis of Bible passages they know are problematic and they don’t know how to interpret.”

Gundry started researching the questions herself.

She went back to the Bible, reading the Scripture passages again. And when her husband went to graduate school at Union College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and then the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, she made use of his access to academic libraries to discover forgotten generations of evangelical feminists. She read God’s Word to Women by Katharine Bushnell and The Bible Status of Woman by Lee Anna Starr.

Gundry went back and forth with Stan Gundry about what she was learning and occasionally asked him to research a biblical text for her in the original Greek or Hebrew. She started writing Woman Be Free! in 1974. The first person persuaded by her arguments for evangelical feminism was her husband.

“The Fall turned everything topsy-turvy,” Stan Gundry later wrote. “After the Fall, the relationship between man and woman is quite different than it was before the Fall. It morphed from one of equality and complementarity to one of male domination and patriarchy, and that is the backdrop to all that follows in the Bible. … In Christ right relationships are restored and in him ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’” (Gal. 3:28).

When Stan Gundry graduated from seminary, he took a job teaching theology at Moody Bible Institute. Before Woman Be Free! came out, he spoke to the dean about the arguments of the book and said he agreed with them. He was assured, he later said, that this wouldn’t be a problem.

At first, it wasn’t. Woman Be Free! received no significant backlash when it was published in 1977.

“The people who liked it told me so,” Patricia Gundry said. “The people who didn’t like it just plain ignored it, pretended it wasn’t there, the way they pretended feminists aren’t there.”

Then in ’79, Gundry spoke at a meeting organized by Housewives for the Equal Rights Amendment in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She wasn’t asked to address the constitutional amendment itself but spoke on her research about what the Bible said about women’s equality.

“The reason we have the situation we have now in the church is historical and theological. It is not because of what the Bible says,” Gundry said. “God was the first feminist because he created women as fully equal. There’s nothing wrong with us. It’s only our interpretation of the Bible that’s lopsided.”

A group of conservatives opposed to the amendment started a letter-writing campaign. Moody received around 80 letters, according to reporting at the time, and the issue of whether people who believe in women’s equality could teach at Moody went to the trustees. The school decided the answer was no. Stan Gundry was told that if he resigned, he could receive a severance.

Stan Gundry couldn’t find a job teaching at a Christian college after that and had to change careers, going to work as an editor for Zondervan. He told CT he didn’t regret it, though.

“I wore it as a badge of honor,” Stan Gundry said. “It was the right thing to do and I stood by her.”

Also, it wasn’t all bad. Free from Moody’s strict lifestyle rules, he told the Chicago Tribune at the time, Stan Gundry was finally able to go and see Star Wars.

Patricia Gundry went on to write three more books about the biblical view of women: Heirs Together, published in 1980; The Complete Woman, in 1981; and Neither Slave nor Free, in 1987. She also wrote and edited The Zondervan Family Cookbook, which came out in 1988.

When she wasn’t researching and writing, Gundry raised four children, played music, taught art, and grew a garden that earned her the nickname “the flower lady” among local school children.

Later in life, Gundry developed an interest in self-publishing, started a number of blogs, and maintained several active email Listservs, including one for evangelical feminists called PHOEBE-L, named for the woman Paul entrusted to deliver the letter to the Romans.

“To those who say women cannot fill positions of leadership, the Bible says women did,” Gundry wrote. “Remember who you are. You are a child of God. He is your director. You need no pope, bishop, synod, or council to tell you what you may believe or how you may serve Him.”

Gundry is survived by her husband Stan and their children, Ann Gundry Teliczan, Daniel, David, and Jonathan.

Correction: Gundry was born March 2, 1937, and died at age 87. A previous verion of this article incorrectly stated she was 90.

- More from Daniel Silliman

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Wire Story

Some Churches Lose Coverage as Insurers Hit by a Wave of Storm Claims

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Natural disaster costs have overwhelmed the market for carriers, which are raising rates or dropping policies for congregations in high-risk areas.

Scott Olson / Getty Images

John Parks was taking his first sabbatical in 40 years of ministry when he got a call from his church’s accountant with some bad news.

Church Mutual, the church’s insurance company, had dropped them.

“This does not make sense,” Parks, the pastor of Ashford Community Church in Houston, recalls thinking at the time. “We’ve never filed a claim.”

Five months and 13 insurance companies later, the church finally found replacement coverage for $80,000 per year, up from the $23,000 they had been paying.

“It’s been an adventure,” said the 69-year-old Parks from his home in Houston, where the power was out after Hurricane Beryl. “That’s putting it politely.”

Parks and his congregation are not alone. An ongoing wave of disasters—Gulf Coast hurricanes, wildfires in California, severe thunderstorms and flooding in the Midwest—along with skyrocketing construction costs post-COVID have left the insurance industry reeling.

As a result, companies such as Church Mutual, GuideOne and Brotherhood Mutual, which specialize in insuring churches, have seen their reserves shrink. That’s led them to drop churches they consider high risk in order to cut their losses.

Hundreds of United Methodist churches in the Rio Texas Annual Conference learned they’d lost property insurance in November last year, leaving church officials scrambling. More than six months later, some churches have found new insurance, often at a steep increase. Others still have none, said Kevin Reed, president of the conference board of trustees.

Reed said the conference had about a month’s notice that its property insurance policy, which local congregations could buy into, was being canceled. That wasn’t enough time to find new coverage before the policy expired. It also left local churches on their own.

We have not found a good solution,” said Reed. “It continues to be a significant problem for our churches.”

United Methodist churches in Iowa have also lost insurance, according to the Iowa Annual Conference, in the aftermath of severe weather in the area. The Rev. Ron Carlson, treasurer of the Iowa conference, said that both small rural churches and larger churches have been affected. Carlson said the conference reminded churches earlier this year to be proactive in checking on their insurance and not waiting for a renewal offer.

The UMC’s Book of Discipline requires churches to carry insurance for the full replacement cost of their buildings as well as liability insurance. For some churches, said Carlson, that’s just not possible. He said the conference is trying to sort out what happens to those churches.

For struggling churches dealing with declining membership and giving, he said, rising insurance may be the last straw.

“There have been some that have said we can’t do this anymore,” he said.

For churches that lost their insurance, finding replacement coverage is difficult. That’s in part because churches are a niche market that’s difficult to insure and full of risk, say experts. They are open to the public, work with everyone from infants to senior citizens, sometimes house social service programs, are run by volunteers and often have large and expensive buildings.

Churches also operate with little oversight, said Charles Cutler, president of ChurchWest Insurance Services, which works with about 4,000 churches and other Christian ministries.

“Because of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state, ministries are largely unregulated,” said Cutler. “And unregulated businesses are difficult to underwrite.”

The church insurance market, like the insurance industry overall, has been hit with a perfect storm in recent years. Supply chain shortages for construction materials that began during the pandemic have driven up the cost of rebuilding after a disaster. When the cost of rebuilding goes up, so does the size of claims, said Cutler. That led insurance companies to raise their rates in order to cover those claims.

Then a series of natural disasters hit the industry hard—including hurricanes, wildfires and what are known as “severe convective storms”—thunderstorms with extreme rain and wind that caused billions in damage last year, according to the Insurance Journal. Claims from those disasters have stressed the reserves that insurance companies use to pay claims.

Pam Rushing, the chief underwriting officer for Church Mutual, said that the company is still renewing policies and accepting new business in every state. However, the company no longer offers property coverage in Louisiana. Church Mutual did not give details of how many policies have been canceled.

“We do not take nonrenewal decisions lightly and it represents a small percentage of our overall portfolio,” Rushing said in an email. “For us to remain financially strong, viable and best able to serve our mission, we need to mitigate the severe impact catastrophic weather has had—and will continue to have—on our bottom line and our ability to serve customers nationwide.”

Brad Hedberg, executive vice president of The Rockwood Co., a Chicago-based agency, said church insurers are facing pressure from the reinsurers—large companies such as Lloyd’s of London that provide insurance to insurance companies so catastrophic claims don’t overwhelm them. Those companies are looking to reduce their exposure to certain types of claims—meaning church insurers can’t offer as much coverage as they did in the past.

Hedberg, who works with churches and other ministries, said he spends a lot of time helping clients keep the insurance they already have and reduce their risk of filing claims. That means making sure churches have policies in place for everything from abuse prevention to who gets to drive the church van, as well as being proactive with building maintenance and safety projects. It also means being strategic in when to file a claim—and when to pay for a loss out of pocket. Churches should only tap their insurance for large losses—not small claims, he added.

“If small claims get filed, your coverage could be nonrenewed or your premium could go through the roof,” he said. “The market is just that bad.”

Once a church loses coverage, it may face higher prices for years. That’s likely the case for Bethany Covenant Church in Berlin, Connecticut, said Greg Pihl, who chairs the church’s finance committee.

The church had been paying $12,500 for insurance and had made a claim for flooding damage due to a faulty sprinkler. Pihl said the church learned this past spring that its insurance had been canceled. Now Bethany will pay about $73,000 for less coverage, said Pihl.

That made for a difficult conversation at a church business meeting and midyear changes to the church’s budget. The church was able to tap some reserves to cover the increased premium this year. But it’ll likely be paying higher rates for the next three to five years, said Pihl. And those reserves, meant to pay for things like a new roof, still have to be built back up.

Pihl said that before the church’s policy was canceled, he expected rates to go up, perhaps by 10 percent or 20 percent. But that proved overly optimistic.

“It’s just a terrible market,” he said.

Nathan Creitz, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Bay Shore, New York, a congregation of about 100 people on Long Island, said that in the past, getting insurance hadn’t been a worry. The total annual cost for all the church’s insurance—the church building, a parsonage, liability—was less than $4,000.

“We got lucky,” he said. “We were grandfathered into some really low rates.”

Things changed last summer after Calvary’s insurance carrier dropped the church, deciding not to renew the policy. With the help of a broker, the church found new insurance for about $14,000. Since most of the costs of running a church, such as paying staff and keeping the lights on, are already fixed, that meant cutting programs. The church also had to put off capital improvements to the building, which ironically are the kinds of things that would make them easier to insure.

“It’s not ideal but that’s what happened,” Creitz said.

For Ashford Community Church in Houston, finding the funds to cover the increased insurance has also been a challenge, especially post-COVID, when church attendance and giving are down.

Higher insurance costs also mean less money for ministry at the church, which Parks described as a mission-focused congregation.

The church’s 40,000-square-foot facility is currently home to about a dozen congregations, through a partnership called Kingdom City Houston. Parks said he came to the church about a decade ago after hopes of starting a church overseas fell apart. At the time, the church was struggling and was using only a quarter of the space in its building.

Today about 1,200 people worship every weekend in the building—which holds multiple services in its three sanctuaries. Parks said worshippers come from more than 60 countries. The churches each have their pastors but share some back-office staff.

The idea is to show that Christians from different backgrounds can still be united. “We can walk side by side, even if we don’t always see eye to eye,” he said.

Parks said Ashford’s building has been largely untouched by recent storms. After Hurricane Harvey caused massive flooding in 2017, the church hosted volunteers from around the country who helped residents recover.

“It was a good time of serving the community,” he said.

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

I Grew Up Serving the Church in the Middle East. Coming ‘Home’ Was Hard.

Annie Meldrum

My return to the United States brought grief and loneliness as I realized I was different from my peers.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Unsplash

On an early morning flight out of the country, I claimed the window seat. Alongside the usual anticipation that accompanies travel, I felt joy and fear and sadness. I don’t remember if I cried. What I do remember are the mountains, the wobbly takeoff in the rundown plane, and the small comfort of knowing that I didn’t forget anything. Everything we owned sat in the belly of the plane, packed neatly into a dozen trunks and a few suitcases.

That was almost four years ago.

Most people would never guess now that I spent my childhood as a homeschooler in northern Iraq. Our family moved to the country to serve the Kurdish church when I was six; we moved back just before I turned 18. And when we returned, I did my best to erase every trace of those years from myself.

But their impact, of course, has remained. I still blank when someone asks where I’m from. I have struggled to find an identity outside of “the girl who lived in Iraq.”

I have a tattoo of the mountains on my right forearm now, and a reference to Joshua 1:9 in Kurdish: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” The tattoo is a tether to the place that was both home and foreign, the place that I love and hate, fear and miss; the place that elicits just about every possible emotion.

That first fall back in the United States, after I graduated from high school, I moved to the Northwoods of Wisconsin for nine months to attend a gap year program. It was one of the worst years of my life. I know now that no matter where in the United States I’d been, this season would have been a dark one. I was anxious, depressed, and lost, overwhelmed by the differences between the place I’d left and the place I found myself now.

As a young girl who grew up in a Muslim world, I had never experienced independence. Instead of slowly working my way into freedom, though, I rebelled in as many ways as I could. I praise God now that my choices didn’t lead to greater consequences.

In Iraq, dating wasn’t an option, and I had internalized many broken messages about myself and men. Instead of talking through those messages with a trusted advisor, I started dating someone who didn’t understand the baggage I was carrying.

My parents had always guided my faith; I lived at home, I went to school at home, and we were a close-knit family, often each other’s only Christian community. I never had the chance to learn what my own faith looked like. During my gap year, I didn’t open my Bible or pray for months. I felt myself pulling away from my faith and my parents, deeper into confusion, grief, and insecurity.

Starting college in Indiana brought a fresh start. I explored my relationship with God through Bible classes and chapel and in my own times of praying and journaling; I started calling home more.

But the culture shock wasn’t over. I wasn’t just getting used to living in America; I was getting used to being part of “Gen Z,” with its fast-paced chaos of micro-trends, social media, and nostalgia. In a new context, on the cusp of adulthood, I was immediately overwhelmed by the memes and inside jokes familiar to my peers.

When we first moved back, I’d tried to ignore all the references. How could I stay on track with God and schoolwork while also keeping track of fashion and slang and jokes?

But despite my efforts to ignore my feelings, I was terrified and embarrassed by my lack of knowledge. I didn’t know every Disney Channel theme song (or any, for that matter). I didn’t have a pair of dirty Air Force 1s. (I had a pair of faded Nike tennis shoes I got at the secondhand market in Iraq.) I had never listened to Kanye or Taylor Swift. My idea of fun was exploring a mountainside that might have a couple unmarked landmines, not running to Starbucks to grab an overpriced drink. I didn’t understand what it meant to be “normal.”

It took time and effort to learn my peers’ culture: Years of study, years of mimicking everyone around me. Next year, I’ll be a senior in college, but from time to time, I’m still haunted by imposter syndrome. I’m supposed to belong here, but I don’t—not fully, anyways. I still like sitting on the floor more than I like sitting at a desk. I know what it’s like to live in a world where peace is a privilege, not an expectation. I miss pushing my way through crowded, sweaty markets, haggling with vendors in a different language. That tattoo will remain on my forearm.

These challenges aren’t unique to me. Missionary kids returning from long stints overseas—“third-culture kids,” as American sociologist Ruth Useem described us—often have difficulty returning to our sending cultures. We suffer from the loss of well-known sights and smells, food and language—while, at the same time, we are expected to love being “back home.” Sometimes, we’re haunted by the poverty, suffering, and oppression we saw abroad. Some of us feel that our needs were neglected in the shadow of the mission. These are all familiar feelings to me.

A pair of 2009 studies from Mental Health, Religion & Culture showed that college-age missionary kids score lower than their peers in both physical well-being and sociocultural adaptation. Surveyed missionary kids said one of their biggest struggles upon returning “home” was knowing how to fit in and understanding the references their peers were making. They all expressed frustration that there hadn’t been more support.

I certainly needed a support system when I returned to the United States. I was told I would grieve, but I needed more than a warning. I needed someone to tell me what that grief would be for, exactly, and to reassure me that it was okay if my grief didn’t look the same as anyone else’s. I needed a reminder that I was not alone in my pain. I wish there had been someone—a friend, a mentor—who had understood where I was at and checked in on me, someone who could have shared their own process, however messy and disorganized.

If I could speak to my 18-year-old self now, I’d tell her to take it slow; there’s no shame in learning to walk before you try to run. But I didn’t have an older version of myself looking out for me. In order to adapt to the new, I just tried to get rid of everything old. I tried to throw away the shaping that God had done in me during my time overseas. I wanted to be the same as everyone around me. It has taken me a long time to accept that Iraq has forever made me a little different.

Some part of me will always be the girl who grew up in Iraq. That part of my story, the leaving and the longing and the adjusting, has come with suffering—which has also produced in me perseverance, character, and hope (Rom. 5:3–5). Obviously, that process has been far from perfect. I am stubborn and adverse to change. But I have learned the grace of God; I am learning to trust that he will use me in a way I might not see yet.

Today, I can say with certainty that I wouldn’t give up my time overseas for anything. We only saw one person give his life to Christ during our years there, but my heart for the nations was forever changed by the Kurds. I carry with me the burden of lost hearts, the children who will never see outside of their city, the memories of the most authentic, frustrating, and hospitable people I’ve known. Instead of denying the difficult gifts of my past, I can say with sincerity, “Here I am, Lord: Send me!”—with all my sadness and fear, my joy and anticipation.

Annie Meldrum is an intern at Christianity Today.

- More from Annie Meldrum

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