Ban the Mob, Not the Bible

Janet Epp Buckingham

Christians are the victims of hate in some places and the targets of hate speech laws in others. How can believers advocate for nations to address both threats in a consistent, principled way?

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

Hate speech is a thorny problem in many countries of the world. Nations such as Pakistan and Sri Lanka, for example, regularly demonstrate how it can be used to incite violence against Christian minorities. But even Western nations that highly value freedom of expression have experienced demonstrations on college campuses that have turned into physical attacks.

Furthermore, evangelicals have expressed grave concern about the misuse of hate speech laws to censor and punish reasonable expression of traditional Christian beliefs. Trials in Finland and proposed legislation in Canada, for example, threaten to criminalize the view that homosexuality is contrary to the will of God, even when limited to quoting Scripture.

Attacks against Christians vary in different parts of the world, and to protect against all of them requires a carefully nuanced, principled argument. Fortunately, United Nations documents provide good guidance. Unfortunately, many politicians find it easier to score points with heavy-handed national legislation.

What is hate speech?

Article 20 in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), first proposed in 1966 and ratified by 173 nations, prohibits “any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred” that involves “incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” But in a careful attempt to balance Article 20 with freedom of speech, the 2012 Rabat Plan of Action permits restrictions on an exceptional basis and only when “narrowly defined” by law.

Taken together, it is clear that hate speech pertains to intense emotions of detestation or vilification, which create an imminent risk for persons belonging to these targeted groups. It does not, however, imply a demand for “safe spaces,” where people are protected from any expression that makes them uncomfortable.

Hate speech restrictions we should support

Many countries have laws prohibiting hate speech that meet the ICCPR requirement. First developed as an antidote to anti-Jewish rhetoric that preceded the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, properly crafted laws would assist suffering Christian minority communities around the world.

Last August in Pakistan, what started as a family conflict turned into a violent rampage when Muslims were incited to destroy churches and homes based on flimsy evidence that two men had defaced pages of the Quran. A similar attack happened again on May 25 of this year, and two Christians were reported killed. In the local context, it is not difficult to whip up such mobs, because there is an environment of regular hate speech directed against Christians.

In Sri Lanka, social media often fuels such promotion of hatred. The National Christian Evangelical Alliance tracks hate speech, and, in the first three months of 2024, it identified 15 incidents, two of which included advocacy to violence.

In many parts of the world, Christian minorities live within a climate of hostility that goes beyond religious differences. When social rejection crosses the line into incitement, we can all agree that it should be prohibited.

Restrictive actions we must oppose

Western nations, however, have witnessed an increasing use of hate speech laws to target Christian expression, particularly on controversial matters of sexuality.

In 2021, Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen was prosecuted after tweeting a picture of Romans 1:24–27 and expanding on those views in a brochure and radio interview. Her pastor, Juhana Pohjola, was also prosecuted for distributing the brochure. Both have been charged with disseminating a message that “threatened, defamed, or insulted” a group of people based on their sexual orientation. Acquitted twice, these figures now face a third trial at the supreme court. The particularly troubling part of this case is that the “speech” is the text of the Bible.

Even more alarmingly, here in Canada, there is now an effort to silence people before they even say anything. The Online Harms Act, a bill currently debated in parliament, primarily deals with protecting children from online exploitation. But one key provision would allow a person who fears that someone might engage in offensive speech to get a “keep the peace” order to restrict that individual. Secular voices have joined believers to criticize this bill that the British magazine The Spectator describes as “Orwellian.”

Canadian Christians are worried that they might face prosecutions similar to what Räsänen and Pohjola have endured. The national Criminal Code already prohibits willful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group. But this proposed legislation also seeks to revive a section of the Canadian Human Rights Act, repealed in 2013, which permits people to file anonymous complaints alleging hate speech, a move harshly criticized by the former chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

A principled path on freedom of expression

Free expression is vital for a functioning society. We need to be able to express deeply held beliefs on issues even when it is uncomfortable. But its suppression, as stated by Freedom House, “can allow unseen problems to fester and erupt in far more dangerous forms.” Furthermore, the leading human rights advocacy organization described the protection of free speech as the “lifeblood of democracy,” which facilitates the necessary debate over diverse interests and policy decisions. Consensus is not possible without it.

Hate speech is a global problem that requires global solutions. As in many such cases, a thoughtful balancing of rights is needed—in this case, to protect legitimate free expression while also protecting vulnerable communities from the threat of violence.

It is vital to have a clear definition of hate speech and criteria when it could be restricted. The Rabat Plan suggests a six-part threshold test, all of which should be fulfilled in order for a statement to be considered a criminal offence: (1) the context of the speech; (2) the status of the speaker; (3) the intent of the speaker; (4) the content and form of the speech; (5) the extent of the speech act; and (6) the likelihood of the speech inciting imminent action.

The blasphemy provisions of the Pakistan Penal Code, however, are an example of a law that is far too broad and vague. It outlaws “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings … by insulting … religion or religious beliefs” (italics mine). What is defined as criminal hate speech must go beyond insults to include incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, limited to a context where such reactions are judged to be likely.

The Rabat Plan further notes two troubling tendencies: “non-prosecution of ‘real’ incitement cases” and “persecution of minorities under the guise of domestic incitement laws.” Laws are only effective if they are implemented in a fair and just manner with an independent and unbiased judiciary.

Finally, we need to recognize that there are limits to the effectiveness of passing laws against hatred. Hate starts in the heart and mind. We should foster interfaith dialogue and a culture of peacemaking, both amid domestic groups and at the international level. We must also seek educational reform to ensure that schoolchildren are not taught to hate people who are different from them.

Sadly, many political leaders seem inclined to exacerbate divisions as a means to increase their popularity or to impose dominant cultural views on minority groups. As Christian peacemakers called to love all our neighbors, we should support carefully crafted limits on hate speech intended to foment violence or to stifle the rights of minorities. But we must also oppose any laws restricting speech, regardless of their intention, that could be used to marginalize and silence public discussion and debate, even when the issues are unpopular.

Hate speech that incites violence leads to violence. It is as simple as that. When we have the opportunity to prevent such violence through a combination of legislation and dialogue, we should do so. But we should not cast a net so broadly that legitimate discussion becomes a criminal act.

Janet Epp Buckingham is the director of global advocacy for the World Evangelical Alliance and the executive editor of the International Journal for Religious Freedom.

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News

Many Southern Baptist Women Care More About Calling Than What They’re Called

Kate Shellnutt

As the SBC debates restrictions around titles and roles, female leaders continue their work in women’s ministry in their local churches.

Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash

When women’s ministry began dominating her schedule, taking too much time from her responsibilities at work and at home, Jacqueline Heider submitted a letter of resignation.

Her pastor responded by offering her a paid position.

That was 18 years ago. Since then, Heider has led women’s ministry at Warren Baptist Church. She serves on the lead team, working alongside fellow ministry heads at the church, which spans four locations in the Augusta, Georgia, area.

Heider developed Bible studies and discipleship programs. She launched a special needs ministry, carrying over what she learned from caring for her own daughter with special needs. She became the executive director of the church’s crisis pregnancy center.

There was a time when Heider considered whether the title of “minister to women” would be a better fit than “director,” but she realized that it wouldn’t really change anything. She was getting to do the work she loved, with the support she needed, and that’s what mattered to her.

“I’m not saying it’s not valid and I don’t think it’s necessary. … It’s just not ever been a hill that I want to die on,” said Heider. “If you start getting concerned about your title and what you can’t do, it takes away from the work you are called to do.”

Women’s ministry titles have been the most talked-about issue going into next week’s Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting, when around 11,000 messengers will vote on whether to amend their constitution to state that only men can serve as “any kind of pastor.”

Supporters see the change as a necessary stance for biblical roles for men and women in the church amid society’s confusion around gender. Critics worry it’s redundant or not the best way to enforce a complementarian position—male eldership is already part of the SBC’s statement of faith and the convention has a mechanism to disfellowship churches led by female pastors.

Just under a third of annual meeting attendees are women, many of them pastors’ wives or ministry leaders themselves.

In the SBC, some women are glad for the amendment’s clarification. Others agree about the biblical principle but worry that the move could target women who serve outside of lead or preaching pastor roles. A majority of “female pastors” listed online last year as evidence of the need for such an amendment were leading women’s, children’s, or music ministries.

But many Southern Baptist women are like Heider: too busy with the work before them to pay much attention to the debate.

“There’s so much to do here, so many opportunities to be in ministry here, that I don’t concern myself with what I don’t feel is my calling,” she said. She can’t see the vote affecting her work at Warren.

Southern Baptist churches are autonomous, so the 4 million Americans who attend each Sunday are more directly affected by the decisions made in their buildings than anything voted on in huge convention halls. Leaders emphasize that local church is “the headquarters of the SBC” and its primary vehicle for evangelism and missions.

For women who already feel empowered and encouraged to lead in various areas of church life, it’s easy to focus on their own contexts. But setups vary from congregation to congregation, and there are clear patterns of ministry by and for women going under-resourced.

A survey conducted last year by Lifeway Research, part of the Southern Baptist publishing arm, found that 83 percent of women’s ministry leaders are volunteers or unpaid. Only 5 percent plan women’s programming alongside church staff.

“They often serve without recognition, without compensation, and without resources. They do so with joy and with little to no expectation of these earthly benefits,” wrote Jen Wilkin—a longtime staff member at The Village Church in Texas and an advocate for training women in the Word—in a column for CT.

Kira Nelson, a master’s student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and host of a podcast for Christian moms, is grateful for the investment and encouragement she’s received at Southern Baptist churches.

The instinct to share the gospel came naturally to Nelson, who remembers putting on a Bible study for kids when she was 12 years old. But it was a pastor at her former church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who trained her and other women to lead small groups. While her husband was in law school, she began a Bible study to minister among fellow law school wives.

Pastors at her current church, Del Ray Baptist in Northern Virginia, have continued to recognize and help her use her gifts. The church has covered the cost of some of her theological training and solicits her input through a women’s advisory board.

It also offers childcare for the Bible study she teaches on Wednesday mornings, where about 30 to 50 women show up each week. They just finished Behold and Believe, a study on the “I am” statements in the Gospel of John.

Nelson doesn’t have the SBC annual meeting on her calendar for June. Instead, the mother of four is getting plans together to travel to Indianapolis a couple weeks later for The Gospel Coalition’s women’s conference, bringing her newborn son along.

She’s excited to spend time with a handful of other women from her church and to hear from the lineup of speakers, including the authors of their recent study and several leaders who serve at Southern Baptist churches and entities.

Nelson doesn’t disagree with the proposed amendment on male pastors, but she also doesn’t see the vote affecting the ministry and calling that she has enjoyed at Del Ray. “Right now, I have more teaching opportunities than I can handle,” Nelson told CT.

About as many men as women identify as Southern Baptist, but Southern Baptist women—like American women overall—are much more devout. In Pew Research Center surveys, they’re more likely than men to attend church, belong to a small group, pray regularly, and consider their faith as an important part of their life.

Being involved in church was “never a question” for Lorin Scott, whose Southern Baptist legacy in Texas goes back generations. Growing up, she attended SBC annual meetings with her family during summer vacations. For the past nine years, Scott has served in women’s ministry at North Fort Worth Baptist Church, which is pastored by her uncle.

Last year, Scott launched a support group for women facing unplanned pregnancies and new moms through the ministry Embrace Grace. The church’s chapter has already hosted two baby showers for single moms, clearing out their registries on Amazon as a way to bless them and demonstrate God’s love.

Scott has seen women around her step up to serve and use their giftings at church, like the Sunday School teacher who went to nearby Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary later in life “just out of a thirst for the Word.”

“For me and for a lot of women, this issue isn’t meant to be divisive,” said Scott, who worries that the debate over women’s titles plays into a broader skepticism over women’s voices and involvement in church life. “Women want to be able to use our skills and use our gifts God’s given us. We don’t want to replace men. We want to serve beside them.”

A fellow Texan, Robin Marriott serves alongside her husband—not as a copastor but in her role as a proud, extroverted pastor’s wife. Marriott tries to make it to multiple services at First Baptist Burleson each Sunday. The church outside Fort Worth worships with traditional hymns, contemporary praise music, and in Spanish.

First Burleson has been growing fast, and she wants to be there to meet visitors and greet church members. She believes being a pastor’s wife is a place for her to use her giftings in spiritual discernment and hospitality. Marriott also works as a professional etiquette expert, a skill refined over 37 years of ministry and navigating plenty of awkward church drama (she and husband, Ronny, wrote a book about it).

Across several SBC congregations in Texas, Marriott encountered richer, Christ-centered community when churches intentionally welcomed newcomers and encouraged leaders through the inevitable highs and lows of ministry life. “The main thing is we need to support our staff, male and female, as a church,” she told CT. “Not belittle them, but affirm their calling.”

Nelson from Del Ray Baptist recognizes how frustrating it can be for women in churches that don’t offer a place for them to use their gifts and passions: They could burn out and give up trying to serve altogether.

Despite their shared theological convictions, women in complementarian churches still risk being viewed as “feminist” or unbiblical for pursuing opportunities to lead. “Sometimes, we feel as if we have a huge target on our backs,” writes author and speaker Dena Dyer. Plus, they have to deal with practical burdens from mental load and other family responsibilities.

Work-life balance can be a challenge, but anyone serving in the church is prone to feeling that tension, said Heider, who recently completed a doctoral dissertation on ministry resilience.

Over nearly two decades at Warren Baptist, Heider has lived her version of 1 Peter 5:10. There were difficult seasons, especially in the wake of her daughter’s special needs diagnosis, but ultimately, she has learned to set boundaries, has stayed rooted in Scripture, and has been made “strong, firm, and steadfast” in the Lord.

Heider, now in her 50s, coaches female colleagues on navigating challenges and new chapters of life—one is preparing to go on maternity leave to welcome her first child—and she helps train the staff as a whole on proactively avoiding burnout.

Summer remains a busy season in many SBC churches. Women help put on vacation Bible schools and backyard Bible clubs. They work on curricula for upcoming studies, Sunday school sessions, and workshops. They reach out to visitors, gather for morning prayer, sing in worship bands, and organize meal trains for new babies and hospital recoveries.

After the SBC passed the first of two votes on the male pastors amendment last year, Nelson wrote an op-ed for Baptist Press calling on pastors to live up to their complementarian convictions by investing in the gifted women in their churches.

“In many churches, only men are offered robust theological training. But in Paul’s ministry, women are described as colaborers,” she wrote. “Although women ought not to teach men, a woman with sound theological training will profoundly affect her entire congregation as she teaches, trains, and equips other women; as she encourages, exhorts, and spurs on her elders; and as she holds the needs of her church family before God in prayer.”

To neglect this area, she told CT, would be “ministry malpractice.”

Lifeway found that the top reason women pursue leadership is out of obedience to what they feel God has called them to do. Nearly all the respondents—over 90 percent—said that they have sensed God’s confirmation and guidance in their roles, even if they come with sacrifice.

“I’ve never wanted to be a professional in ministry,” Nelson said. “I just wanted to share the gospel.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Books

Review

Inside the ‘Secret World’ of Global Evangelism to Muslims

F. Lionel Young III

While reporting from conflict zones in Africa and the Middle East, Adriana Carranca met evangelical missionaries sent from surprising places.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

In a 2007 article, CT described British church historian Andrew Walls (1928–2021) as “the most important person you don’t know.” Among his greatest achievements was helping turn the attention of Western scholars to the remarkable growth of Christianity in the Global South. Walls’s work on what he then called “non-Western Christianity” was amplified by the efforts of David B. Barrett (1927–2011), whose groundbreaking research on global religious statistics produced the World Christian Encyclopedia, coedited by Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo.

Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims

Adriana Carranca (Author)

190 pages

$16.20

We now know that the demographic center of Christianity shifted to the Global South during the 20th century in dramatic fashion, and we also know a lot more about how it actually happened. Evangelicalism, as one of the fastest-growing demographic blocs within global Christianity, has contributed significantly to these transformations.

Today, more than 77 percent of the world’s evangelicals are Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Even if a significant number of American evangelicals may favor some form of Christian nationalism (though the numbers are likely exaggerated), and even if a majority of white American evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, what often goes unstated is that the vast majority of the world’s evangelicals are neither white nor American. Evangelicals around the world are not united on matters of politics and race, but they lay great stress on the Bible, the central message of the Cross, and man’s need for conversion.

Evangelicalism, then, is plainly not an American movement. The vast majority of the world’s evangelicals live in the Global South, and they are actively engaged in sending missionaries to the ends of the earth. The World Council of Churches began using the language of “witness in six continents” in the early 1960s to describe how new mission centers were now established on every continent in the world.

When evangelicals gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, for the First International Congress on World Evangelization, they observed that the dominant role of Western missions was fast disappearing. In the 1980s, Luis Bush, an unassuming evangelical from Argentina who became an influential mission leader, coined the expression “the 10/40 Window.” The name referred to the regions of North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, concentrated in a single geographic rectangle between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator.

Bush was hoping to mobilize evangelical missionary movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into places Western missionaries found it harder to reach. He made it clear throughout the 1990s that these missionary efforts would be led not by Americans but by Christian leaders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Americans popularized “10/40 Window” language in mission circles, but Bush was holding massive gatherings in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to mobilize missionaries from the Global South. Today, nearly half of the world’s full-time cross-cultural missionaries are being sent out from the Global South, with countries like Brazil, South Korea, and India figuring among the top senders.

Rare access

Adriana Carranca describes some of these global transformations in her new book Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims. Carranca is a Brazilian writer who has worked as a war correspondent and investigative journalist in some of the most difficult places in the world.

Educated at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, she has traveled widely in Africa and the Middle East, covering events like the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Peshawar church bombing in Pakistan, the Lord’s Resistance Army uprising in northern Uganda, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the Arab Spring in Egypt. While Carranca was working in conflict zones and refugee camps, she began meeting evangelicals looking to reach Muslims with the gospel.

As a secular journalist who had spent time in American contexts, Carranca knew something about American evangelicalism. But what she discovered while working in Africa and the Middle East surprised her. Most of the evangelical missionaries she met were not from the United States. Instead, they were being sent out to the Muslim world from places like Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, South Africa, China, and South Korea. The evangelical mission to Muslims, she learned, was emanating from the Global South.

In 2008, Carranca was in Kabul covering the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Here, she first heard about significant numbers of Muslims who were converting to Christianity. This evangelistic endeavor, she discovered, was being led by an evangelical, Luiz, who hailed from her home country of Brazil. He was part of a network of other evangelicals from the Global South.

Eventually, Carranca convinced Luiz and his wife, Gis, to share their personal stories and to introduce her to other evangelical missionaries working in different parts of the Muslim world. To better understand the growing number of evangelicals she was meeting in Africa and the Middle East, she began reading works on global Christianity by historians like Philip Jenkins, Mark Noll, Dana Robert, Lamin Sanneh, Brian Stanley, and the aforementioned Andrew Walls.

Through her friendship with Luiz and Gis, Carranca grew more familiar with the world of evangelical missionaries who were serving on the ground in places like Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria. She met the occasional American or European, but the vast majority of missionaries she encountered were from Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, China, Romania, and South Korea.

During her travels, Carranca gained rare access to what she called the “secret world” of Christian missionaries evangelizing Muslims. She also learned about the influence of Luis Bush and traveled to meet him in Indonesia, where he was mobilizing thousands of missionaries from Asia to preach the gospel to Muslims.

Carranca’s long-form journalism is serious, intimate, and gripping. Though not a believer, she confesses that she came to admire the evangelicals who became her friends. The book introduces readers to Luiz and Gis and their coworkers from South Africa, Brazil, China, and South Korea, and talks about their daily lives, their love for soccer, and the joy they find in spending time with Muslim friends.

Carranca’s narrative includes riveting eyewitness accounts of terrorist attacks, drone strikes, police inquiries, church bombings, and the martyrdom of local Christians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In one powerful anecdote, she talks about the murder of a missionary family she befriended in Afghanistan, killed by the Taliban in a brutal shooting. She flew to Pretoria, in South Africa, to attend their funeral services, where their graves were marked with a popular refrain echoing Tertullian’s words about the blood of martyrs: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

Polycentric Christianity

Soul by Soul introduces readers to some of the new faces of evangelicalism—and they are almost nothing like Barbara Kingsolver’s unflattering caricature of a failed missionary to the Congo in her popular novel The Poisonwood Bible. Rather than fictional white Southern Baptists from Georgia who are more misanthropes than missionaries, Carranca gives us real people, unmarked by what she calls the “arrogance and triumphalism” that has sometimes been associated with Western missionaries.

Her book does have some potentially misleading aspects. It begins with a concise history of Christian missions, which is largely confined to the history of American evangelical missions. This tends to give an impression of an American-led movement that runs counter to the book’s broader thrust.

Relatedly, Carranca seems to hold the view, sometimes stated subtly, that Americans are still somehow clandestinely leading the new missionary efforts now rising in the Global South. This is a highly contested interpretation. It misunderstands the polycentric nature of Christianity and it diminishes the important new role being played by rapidly growing evangelical movements outside the West. American evangelicals continue to support global missions from everywhere to everyone, but evangelicals in the Global South are often the ones leading the way.

Carranca’s work concludes by observing that American evangelicals have been among the strongest supporters of military intervention in the Middle East, even though these wars often complicate the lives of Christians in Africa and Asia and hamper the work of evangelical missionaries there. She also points out the tension between American evangelical support of Trump’s efforts to suppress migration from certain Muslim-majority nations and a simultaneous support of efforts to evangelize Muslims.

In these and other ways, Soul by Soul offers a prophetic challenge for American evangelicals who are enamored of an “America first” mindset. “Ultimately,” she writes, “American Protestant evangelicals will need to choose whether to be citizens of a nation or part of the global, diverse, and borderless kingdom of God.”

F. Lionel Young III is a senior research associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. He is the author of World Christianity and the Unfinished Task: A Very Short Introduction.

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Theology

This Is the Way: How the Dao Helps Chinese People Understand Christ

Easten Law

Ancient philosopher Zhuangzi’s teachings can be a means of evangelism.

One of Zhuangzi's most famous parables: the butterfly dream

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

In the opening lines of the Gospel of John, God’s eternal presence is rendered as “the Word,” a translation of the Greek word logos. In many translations of the Chinese Bible, including the popular Chinese Union Version, you will find this concept rendered as “the Dao (Tao).”

In English, Dao is commonly translated as “the Way.” In Chinese, the word (道) indicates a teaching or way of living that aligns with the heavens. It can also refer to the omnipresent essence of all creation in Daoism, a tradition of thought and religious practice that encourages its followers to seek immortality and achieve wisdom for discerning right responses to circumstances.

What does the Dao, or Word, of God have to do with the Dao of Daoism?

When I lived and taught in China, I encountered many sensitive hearts and inquisitive minds that were open to spiritual matters. Yet these seekers would often turn to the traditions of their ancestors for answers before considering the Christian gospel. My lack of familiarity with Chinese religion and philosophy hindered my witness, and so I decided to become a serious student of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions.

Now, as a scholar of Chinese Christianity and religions, I have a much better sense of the ways that Chinese philosophy and religion can both converge with and diverge from Christian thought. I have a clearer sense of how people of Chinese descent connect their cultural heritage to their Christian faith.

Christian missionaries and scholars have a long-standing tradition of sincere dialogue with other religious and philosophical traditions. In Acts 17, Paul observes the inscription to an unknown God in Athens, Greece, and proclaims Christ as an expression and fulfillment of some of their traditions. Later, early church fathers like Origen and Augustine utilized Greco-Roman philosophies like Neoplatonism to deepen their understanding of the gospel and extend its reach across pagan Europe.

This pattern of using culture as a bridge for revealing the fullness of the gospel extends to China. Monks from the Assyrian Church of the East preached Christ in Chinese philosophical parlance during the Tang Dynasty in the 6th century. And Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci adopted Confucian modes of thought and discourse to impress the imperial courts of the Ming Dynasty in the 16th century.

Alongside Confucianism, Daoism has shaped Chinese spirituality for centuries, and one of its greatest and most influential figures was the philosopher Zhuangzi.

Little is known about Zhuangzi besides the fact that he was a minor official in Meng (now Shangqiu), China, and was likely a contemporary of the Confucian scholar Mencius. Nevertheless, he is regarded as a famed Daoist thinker who rigorously rejected political power and social influence in favor of a life led by “free and easy” contemplation and simplicity.

In my view, a serious consideration of Zhuangzi’s teachings on the Dao are vital to understanding the gospel in and for Chinese culture. Zhuangzi is not a divine figure to be equated with Jesus Christ, nor are his teachings sacred like Scripture—but his sayings can be stepping stones for Chinese seekers to understand the New Testament and see Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

How Buddhism spread across China

One of Zhuangzi’s most enduring ideas is what a “true person” (真人) looks like. To him, this is one who lives in perfect unity with the Dao and rightly discerns every situation. Zhuangzi characterizes this individual as exhibiting “inward holiness and outward kingship” (内圣外王), in that their spiritual power gives them a majesty unmatched by those who govern by force.

When the Han Dynasty disintegrated in A.D. 220, scholars felt disenchanted with Confucianism, as it failed to hold the kingdom together. They began a new intellectual movement known as neo-Daoism or “mysterious learning” (玄学), mixing Confucian and Daoist teachings that emphasized the importance of cultivating Zhuangzi’s concept of the true person.

Leaders of this new school of thought turned to Buddhist ideas to flesh out their neo-Daoist thinking. Buddhism entered China during the Han Dynasty but failed to grow because it taught that followers should renounce family and society in favor of monastic life, which was antithetical to Chinese sensibilities at the time.

Zhuangzi’s ideas made Buddhism more appealing to the Chinese elite. For instance, he encouraged his followers to practice “fasting of the heart and mind” (心斋), language that resonated with Buddhist meditation practices. In this way, Zhuangzi’s teachings served as a link between Daoism and Buddhism, allowing the latter to flourish across China.

If scholars once used Zhuangzi’s teachings to introduce Buddhist thought to Chinese culture, can Christians use Zhuangzi to do the same for our faith? How might Chinese seekers who are steeped in Daoist influences view Jesus according to this lens? To answer this question, I’d like to compare three of Zhuangzi’s most famous sayings with three New Testament passages.

Born of the Spirit

In Zhuangzi’s worldview, transformation occurs beyond human reason. One of his most famous teachings is from a dream in which he becomes a butterfly, leading him to question if he could potentially be the opposite: a butterfly dreaming that it is a man.

Through the butterfly dream, Zhuangzi implies that there may be much more to nature than we typically perceive. There are mysteries beyond our present reality that we cannot fully fathom. The dynamic experience of waking up from one reality into another suggests that a “higher” level of consciousness can come about without warning, absent of our own effort.

When speaking to a Chinese person whose worldview is influenced by Daoism, Zhuangzi’s perspective on the mystery of transformation may help them understand how becoming a believer is not a self-driven but Spirit-initiated endeavor.

As John 3 relays, Jesus talks with Nicodemus about eternal matters, saying, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” For Nicodemus, being “born again” seems illogical and impossible. But this birth is not one of body but of Spirit, Jesus responds.

The power of the Holy Spirit is far beyond that of the natural birth that Nicodemus was thinking about. The Spirit is like wind, blowing wherever it pleases (v. 8), and his work is not something we can manufacture by our own strength and intellect.

Cultivating spiritual fruit

To Zhuangzi, actions can become almost effortless when a person is connected to the Dao. In “The Secret to Caring for Life,” he writes about a master butcher who wields his knife instinctively. “After three years I no longer saw the whole ox,” the butcher says. “And now I go at it by Spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop, and Spirit moves where it wants.”

For Zhuangzi, what begins with effort slowly becomes as natural as breathing. The result is a seemingly supernatural capacity to do whatever it is one’s sense of vocation requires.

When introducing the gospel to Chinese seekers, Zhuangzi’s concept of effortless action (无为) may provide a deeper understanding of Paul’s teaching on the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–25. We are to be rooted in the Spirit of God as opposed to the flesh, Paul writes, and since we live by the Spirit, we are to “keep in step” with the Spirit.

How do we contextualize this in the Chinese worldview?

Keeping in step with the Spirit refers to allowing the Holy Spirit to work in us daily as we abide in Christ and dwell on his Word. As we do so, there may be times in which displaying love, joy, peace, patience, and other fruit in our lives can become as effortless as Zhuangzi described, no matter how challenging our circumstances are.

Appraising worth

For Zhuangzi, seemingly insignificant things can be bearers of great worth. In a tale from “Free and Easy Wandering,” a critic complains about an ugly tree and compares it to Zhuangzi’s teachings: “Your words, too, are big and useless, and so everyone alike spurns them!"

“Why don’t you plant [the tree] in the Not-Even-Anything Village or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? … If there’s no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?” Zhuangzi responds wittily.

To Zhuangzi, the beauty of that “useless” tree is its natural capacity to stretch out and provide good in the world. He critiques humanity’s inclination to only attach value to things that are self-beneficial and asserts that there is inherent worth in all of creation.

When sharing about Christianity in Chinese culture, Zhuangzi’s story on finding worth in seemingly pointless items can serve as a springboard toward understanding Jesus’ description of the kingdom of God.

In the parable about the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31–32, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed which, when fully grown, becomes a great tree, “the largest of garden plants … so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

To Jesus, the beauty of a tiny mustard seed is its ability to grow into a great tree that provides a home for the birds. Here, the mustard seed reflects how the kingdom of God may seem to have humble beginnings but is unstoppable in its growth.

Encountering the Dao become flesh

In examining Zhuangzi’s teachings and how they can help seekers in Chinese culture understand the Christian faith, we see instances of how his teachings can point toward Christ—one who is fully human and fully divine, and the fulfillment of Zhuangzi’s idea of the true person.

Jesus is himself the Way, or the Dao: “In the beginning was the Dao, and the Dao was with God, and the Dao was God. … The Dao became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1, 14; CUV).

Nevertheless, bearing witness to Christ through the language and values of another worldview does more than just communicate the gospel to a different culture. It also provides new ways for understanding the gospel in our own culture. In this way, Zhuangzi’s sayings may also provide non-Chinese Christians with a new perspective on God’s Word, like how early Christian leaders used Greco-Roman philosophies to illustrate their theological articulations.

As Augustine said, and Aquinas later agreed, “all truth is God’s truth”—since, wherever truth is found, God is the source (John 16:13). And every signpost of God’s truth, embedded in any culture, points toward Jesus as the hope of all nations (Matt. 12:21).

Easten Law is the assistant director of academic programs at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Overseas Ministries Study Center.

Previous versions of this piece were published on ChinaSource.

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Church Life

How to Make Friends at Church

Nadya Williams

It’s tough to plunge into a new congregation. Here’s how to get your head above water.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Pexels

Once, a man decided to attend religious services while visiting a new town. He went to the meeting location and made a bunch of new friends, just like that.

The man in question was the apostle Paul, and we learn this story of his visit to Philippi, including that friendly Sabbath, from Acts 16. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t like Paul in multiple key respects, so perhaps the story should be accompanied by a warning: results not typical. For most of us, making friends in a new church is hard.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past year because, last July, my family moved from Georgia to Ohio for my husband’s job. It was a difficult move; we have way too many books, it turns out, and they’re heavy. But far worse than shifting the books was leaving behind so many people we’ve known and loved for years—friends at church chief among them.

Leaving is only part of the trouble, however, and finding a new church isn’t the end of it either. Once you’ve settled on a local congregation, just how do you make friends?

It’s important to mention at this point that my husband and I, both socially awkward academics, are not as bold as Paul and have zero skill in small talk. I’m plenty familiar with the lives and writings of people who’ve been dead for two millennia or longer but often find living people rather harder to understand. And yet, being in community with them is a requirement of our faith (Heb. 10:25). God created us for community with himself and other believers, and church community is both a scene and source of spiritual growth. It’s also—eventually—lots of fun, even for the awkward like us.

The question, then, is how you get past that “eventually.” It isn’t easy. If you haven’t been that new person in a while, I want to remind you that it can be scary and uncomfortable. Feeling like the outsider was hard in kindergarten and third grade. It’s still hard, it turns out, when you’re a full-fledged grownup. And hard as it is for a family like mine to get settled in a new community, sitting in church alone, as theologian Dani Treweek eloquently reminds us, adds yet another layer of discomfort.

But this isn’t just a matter of hurt feelings. Not making friends at church can easily become a spiritual problem. I’ve encountered too many stories of people leaving churches (or quitting church altogether) because they struggled to make friends—because after weeks or even months of attendance, no one tried to get to know them or invited them for a meal.

In one case, a family attended a large church for about a year. They never formally joined, but they were there most Sundays. Then the dad got very sick. They missed church for a month and a half, but no one ever checked in. It seemed, they thought, as if no one even noticed they were gone.

It would be easy to blame congregations in stories like these for being too cliquish—or perhaps not attentive enough to people’s needs or insufficiently welcoming to newcomers. Sometimes the villain in these stories really is a communal callousness or lack of pastoral care.

Often, though, I think the situation is far more innocent. My example above involves a large church with multiple services. It’s easy for people to get lost in the crowd. Maybe someone noticed this family wasn’t there for a few weeks and simply assumed they had switched to another service. But also, remember that the family never became members, even after attending for a year. It’d be reasonable to think they’d just decided to go elsewhere, especially if they weren’t involved in church activities outside of Sunday mornings.

I tell this story as I turn to talking solutions because it points us to the most important thing to remember when you’re trying to make friends at church: In almost every case, everyone wants to make this happen—it’s just that it takes effort and commitment on all sides. Just as the old guard must remember how difficult it is to come into a new community, so newcomers must remember that initiation is their responsibility too. As we so easily tell children, be the friend that you want someone else to be to you.

And that’s really the only solution I have to offer, because it’s the only solution there is: You make friends at church by being a friend at church.

It’s what my husband, Dan, and I have tried to do here in Ohio, however imperfectly. We started getting to know others in the congregation not only on Sundays but outside church walls. We invited people over for meals at our house and to join us at activities like local concerts. We invited ourselves over to visit friends who were housebound for a time (e.g., while recovering from surgery).

And you know what? It turns out it can be just as intimidating for established church members to connect with newcomers as it is the other way around. By being willing to take the first step sometimes, we were able to jumpstart wonderful friendships with people who have warmly opened their hearts and homes to us in the months since.

Now, within this advice, I do have two more specific tips. First, for newcomers: Often, the easiest people to befriend in a church are retirees. Why? Because their schedules are a little less hectic than those of people in my life stage—busy working and raising children. They may also have a little (or a lot) more emotional bandwidth for playing and talking with energetic children, should you have some of those. While my concern each time we invite people into our home is that the children might not behave, our new friends whose kids are grown embrace the chaos with glee.

And second, for the old guard: Your church can make it easier for everyone to get to know each other by making plans during the week. Our new church has Wednesday night classes for kids and adults during much of the school year, and our old church fostered small groups that met throughout the week. For those who make it a point to be involved, these ministries are opportunities to make new friendships as much as they’re opportunities for discipleship.

Yet, ultimately, even with that institutional help, friendships take time and effort. You reap what you sow. But take heart: Beautiful friendships that will span decades may start at any moment—even with that simple lunch of tacos after church, right there in your messy dining room, strewn with art supplies from last night’s finger-painting adventures.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).

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News

Died: Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian of Hope

Daniel Silliman

A German soldier found by Christ in a prisoner of war camp, he became a renowned Christian scholar who taught that “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”

Bernd Weissbrod/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images / edits by Rick Szuecs

Jürgen Moltmann, a theologian who taught that Christian faith is founded in the hope of the resurrection of the crucified Christ and that the coming kingdom of God acts upon human history out of the eschatological future, died on June 3 in Tübingen, Germany. He was 98.

Moltmann is widely regarded as one of the most important theologians since World War II. According to theologian Miroslav Volf, his work was “existential and academic, pastoral and political, innovative and traditional, readable and demanding, contextual and universal,” as he showed how the central themes of Christian faith spoke to the “fundamental human experiences” of suffering.

The World Council of Churches reports that Moltmann is “the most widely read Christian theologian” of the last 80 years. Religion scholar Martin Marty said his writings “inspire an uncertain Church” and “free people from the dead hands of dead pasts.”

Moltmann was not an evangelical, but many evangelicals engaged deeply with his work. The popular Christian author Philip Yancey called Moltmann one of his heroes and said in 2005 that he had “plowed through” nearly a dozen of his books.

Editors at Christianity Today were critical of Moltmann’s theology when they first grappled with it in the 1960s but still found themselves commending his work.

“We are brought up short,” G. C. Berkouwer wrote, “and reminded to think and to preach about the future in a biblical perspective. If this happens, all the theological talks have borne good fruit.”

Today, evangelicals who are ultimately critical of Moltmann’s views—disagreeing strongly with one aspect or another—have still found much to value and frequently encourage others to read him.

“Moltmann was a constant reference point for me,” Fred Sanders, a systematic theologian at Biola University, wrote on the social platform X. “Last year I taught a little bit from his book The Crucified God, and was struck by how powerful his voice still is for students. … And even for me, on the far side of abiding disagreements, re-reading Moltmann means encountering line after line of arresting ways of putting things.”

New Testament professor Wesley Hill said he disagreed with Moltmann “on what feels like every major Christian doctrine.” And yet “few theologians have moved and provoked and inspired me in the way he has. His work is all about the crucified and risen Jesus.”

Moltmann was born into a nonreligious family on April 8, 1926. His parents, he wrote in his autobiography, were adherents of a “simple life” movement that was committed to “plain living and high thinking.” They made their home in a settlement of like-minded people in a rural area outside Hamburg. Instead of going to church, the Moltmanns worked in their garden on Sunday mornings.

The family nonetheless sent their son to confirmation classes at the local state church when he was old enough. It was seen as a rite of passage. Moltmann recalled learning very little about Jesus, the Bible, or the Christian life. The pastor focused his lessons on trying to prove that Jesus wasn’t Jewish but actually Phoenician, and therefore Aryan, teaching the children the antisemitic theology promoted by the Nazis.

“It was complete nonsense,” Moltmann said.

At about the same time, in another rite of passage, Moltmann was sent to the Hitler Youth. While the uniforms and anthems made him feel very patriotic, he later recalled, he was bad at marching and hated the military drills. On one camping trip, he was crammed into a tent with ten boys. The experience left him with the strong sense that he enjoyed being alone.

Despite the rampant antisemitism of the time, Moltmann’s childhood hero was Albert Einstein, who was Jewish. Moltmann wanted to go to university and study math. That dream was interrupted by World War II.

At 16, Moltmann was drafted into the air force and assigned to defend Hamburg with an 88 mm anti-aircraft flak gun. He and a schoolmate named Gerhard Schopper were stationed on a platform set up on stilts in a lake. At night, they looked at the stars and learned the constellations.

Then the British attacked. They sent 1,000 planes in July 1943 to drop explosives and incendiaries on the city, starting a firestorm that melted metal, asphalt, and glass. Anything organic—wood, fabric, flesh—was consumed by a sea of fire. Temperatures rising above 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit sucked the air out of the streets so the city sounded, according to one survivor, “like an old church organ when someone is playing all the notes at once.”

The operation—which didn’t target military installations or munitions factories but “the morale of the enemy civil population”—was codenamed “Gomorrah,” after the biblical city destroyed by God in Genesis 19. Around 40,000 people were killed.

When the attack was over, Moltmann was floating in the lake, clinging to a shattered piece of wood from his exploded gun platform. His friend Schopper was dead.

He would later describe this as his first religious experience.

“As thousands of people died in the firestorm around me,” Moltmann said, “I cried out to God for the first time: Where are you?”

He didn’t get an answer that day. But two years later, he was captured on the frontlines and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Scotland. A chaplain gave him a New Testament with Psalms and he started reading Psalm 39 every night:

Hear my prayer, Lord,

listen to my cry for help;

do not be deaf to my weeping.

He read the Gospel of Mark and found himself deeply drawn to Jesus. The crucifixion undid him.

“I didn’t find Christ. He found me,” Moltmann later said. “There, in the Scottish prisoner of war camp, in the dark pit of my soul, Jesus sought me and found me. ‘He came to seek that which was lost’ (Luke 19:10), and so he came to me.”

When he returned to Germany at 22—the country in ruins—he went to school to study theology. The Nazis were pushed out of the universities during the American-led reconstruction, including the University of Göttingen theologian Emanuel Hirsch, who would hum the Nazi national anthem between classes and once claimed that Adolf Hitler was the greatest Christian statesman in the history of the world.

At Göttingen, Moltmann studied under people who aligned with the Confessing Church and taught the theology of Karl Barth. He wrote a dissertation about a 17th-century French Calvinist, focusing on the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.

While at school, Moltmann fell in love with another theology student, Elisabeth Wendel. They earned their doctorates together and got married in a civil ceremony in Switzerland in 1952.

After graduating, Moltmann was sent to pastor a church in a remote village in North Rhine-Westphalia. He taught a confirmation class of “50 wild boys,” and in the winter made house calls on skis. People asked him to bring herring, margarine, and other food from the store when he came.

“The first question I was asked everywhere was whether I believed in the Devil,” Moltmann later recalled. He taught people they could drive the Devil away by reciting the Nicene Creed. He wasn’t convinced they listened.

Moltmann’s second church was a challenge too. He was sent to a small village in the north of the country, near Bremen. There were rats in the basement of the parsonage, mice in the kitchen, and bats and owls in the attic. About 100 people attended church—but not all at once, and not regularly. On Sunday mornings, the young minister would wait at the window, wondering if anyone was going to be there.

He earned some respect from the farmers for his skill playing the card game Skat, though, and he learned to preach sermons that connected to people. If the older farmers rolled their eyes while he was talking, Moltmann learned, his theology had gotten too detached from their real-life concerns.

“Unless academic theology continually turns back to this theology of the people, it becomes abstract and irrelevant,” he later wrote. “l was not totally suited to be a pastor, but l was happy to have experienced the entire height and depth of human life: children and aged, men and women, healthy and sick, birth and death, etc. l would have been happy to have remained a theologian/pastor.”

In 1957, Moltmann left pastoral ministry to teach theology. He lectured on a range of topics but grew especially interested in the history of Christian hope for the kingdom of God.

At the same time, he started to engage with the work of a Marxist philosopher named Ernst Bloch. Moltmann wrote several critical reviews of Bloch’s books but found his ideas stimulating. Bloch argued life was moving dialectically toward a final utopia. In his three-volume magnum opus, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope), he made the case for revolutionary hope, claiming that Marxism was guided by a mystical impulse of anticipation for an ultimate fulfillment.

Though he was an atheist, Bloch frequently quoted Scripture. He said he was attempting to articulate the “eschatological conscience that came into the world through the Bible.”

Moltmann noted that while many theologians had written about faith and love, there was little in the Protestant tradition about hope. Theology had “let go of its own theme,” he said, and he decided to take up the task.

He started teaching on the topic first at the University of Bonn and then at the University of Tübingen, where he would spend the remainder of his career.

Moltmann published Theologie der Hoffnung (Theology of Hope) in 1964. It was met with intense interest. The book went through six printings in two years and was translated into multiple foreign languages. It appeared in English for the first time in 1967 and earned enough attention from theologians to attract the notice of The New York Times.

In a front page story in March 1968, the newspaper reported that debates over the trendy “death of God” theology had been replaced by a discussion of the 41-year-old Moltmann’s idea that God “acts upon history out of the future.” Moltmann was quoted as saying that “from first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology.”

The newspaper marveled that this “theology of hope” was founded on belief in the resurrection, “which many other theologians now regard as a myth.”

Some critics at the time, however, worried this emphasis on eschatology overshadowed the work of Christ on the cross. They said Moltmann’s focus on final things ignored or even downplayed the importance of the crucifixion.

Moltmann came to think there was something to that criticism during a symposium on Theology of Hope at Duke University in April 1968. During one of the sessions, the theologian Harvey Cox ran into the room and shouted, “Martin Luther King has been shot.”

The gathering quickly disbanded as theologians scrambled to get home amid reports of riots across the country. But the students at Duke—who hadn’t seemed to care at all about the theology of hope—gathered for a spontaneous vigil in the school’s quad. They mourned King’s death for six days. On the last day, the white students were joined by Black students from other schools, and together they sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

Moltmann, moved by the transformative power of suffering, started to work on his second book, Der gekreuzigte Gott (The Crucified God). It was published in 1972 and came out in English two years later.

“Christian identity can be understood only as an act of identification with the crucified Christ,” Moltmann wrote. “The ‘religion of the cross’ … does not elevate and edify in the usual sense, but scandalizes; and most of all it scandalizes one’s ‘co-religionists’ in one’s own circle. But by this scandal, it brings liberation into a world which is not free.”

Moltmann united the two ideas—Christ’s suffering and Christians’ hope—and that became the core of his theology. He taught that people should “believe in the resurrection of the crucified Christ and live in the light of his reality and future.”

Or more simply: “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”

Moltmann retired in 1994 but continued to work with graduate students for many years after. When his wife died in 2016, he wrote a final book on death and resurrection.

Moltmann is survived by four daughters.

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Wire Story

Growth in Faith-Based Higher Ed Prompts Colleges to Share Innovations

Adelle M. Banks - Religion News Service

Leaders in evangelical higher ed have joined a new commission to collaborate around recent innovations and adaptations.

Pearl / Lightstock

A prominent association of American colleges and universities has created a new commission of religious schools whose aim will be to share with their nonreligious counterparts recent successes in the areas of access and affordability and the innovations that have led to growth in recent years.

The Commission on Faith-based Colleges and Universities, recently announced by the American Council on Education (ACE), a lobbying group for about 1,600 college and university leaders, plans to launch with meetings on Tuesday in Washington.

The new commission comes after data from the National Center for Education Statistics showed that religious schools grew by 82 percent from 1980 to 2020, while the national average was 57 percent.

There has been growing interest in collaboration between religious and secular schools in recent years. In 2019, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) Presidents Conference hosted leaders of Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant colleges and universities for the first time.

Last year, ACE hosted a conference on religious institutions that included presidents of Latter-day Saint, Catholic and Jewish universities.

Six of the 13 schools whose presidents are members of the new commission represent CCCU schools, including George Fox University and Taylor University. Other institutions involved include The Catholic University of America, Pepperdine University, Yeshiva University, the University of Notre Dame and Dillard University.

“ACE is honored to support and convene this important commission,” said Ted Mitchell, the organization’s president, in a May 29 statement. “Faith-based institutions connect feelings of belief and belonging with intellectual expression and considering the social, economic, and environmental challenges facing us today, we can ill afford for religious universities to be hidden.”

The commission will be co-chaired by Shirley Hoogstra, president of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, and Clark Gilbert, commissioner of the Latter-day Saints’ Church Educational System.

Gilbert said schools in his group, which includes Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, grew from 60,000 students in 2020 to close to 150,000 in 2023. That growth was driven in part by its BYU-Pathway Worldwide, an online program at BYU-Idaho and Ensign College in Salt Lake City.

“We had to innovate for first-generation, low-income adult learners,” he said of the program. “It led us to the 90-credit bachelor’s degree, which made a lot more sense for adult learners.”

With financial support from the Mormon church, the program costs $81 per credit hour, allowing students, who are not charged for religion credits, to earn a 90-credit degree for less than $6,200 in three years.

Hoogstra pointed to initiatives at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, that likewise offer lower-cost access to higher education.

Southeastern, affiliated with the Assemblies of God, has reduced most of its requirements for its courses of study in fields such as psychology, business, and ministry to 120 credit hours, which can include off-site study at evangelical churches in 44 states and some online learning. At those sites, students seeking bachelor’s degrees pay $8,486 a year, or a total tuition of about $34,000 for four years. Tuition for a year on its traditional campus is $30,432.

“Too many institutions are looking at the dollar amount, and they’re not looking at the time and effort,” said Michael Steiner, Southeastern’s vice president of innovation of his school. “And what we found is that when you focus on the time it takes a student to graduate, you naturally decrease the cost.”

In general, CCCU’s analysis of national tuition costs found that its schools’ average tuition is $30,746, compared with $39,940 at a private four-year institution.

“You might come in for the price point, but you stay for the purpose,” said Hoogstra.

In a recent presentation, Hoogstra said of the 4,700 degree-granting institutions, 33 percent are public, 43 percent are private, 21 percent are private and religiously affiliated (such as Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Presbyterian) and 3 percent are CCCU members and affiliates.

She said CCCU schools and other religiously affiliated institutions are “confident and unapologetic about the fact that faith helps people have meaning and purpose.”

Gilbert said ACE recognizes that some innovation motivated by a religious mission can be adapted by secular counterparts who see benefits that may or may not be related to faith.

In addition to access to education, Gilbert said college presidents have told him they’d like to collaborate on issues of accreditation and religious freedom.

The formation of the commission comes at a time when some colleges and universities have faced closures or been put on probation as their accreditation has been in question. Hoogstra said that denominational support can help keep troubled institutions alive. Presidents of schools related to a particular faith can rely on denominational leaders to brainstorm or offer advice when facing financial problems.

“Is there a safety net? I would say yes,” she said.

To counter problems with accreditation, Gilbert said creativity is a necessity.

“The message we try to share with other religious peers is you can’t just be in this old higher ed model, where tuition goes up and up and up,” he said. “You have to innovate, you have to change. Use your mission as a source of change, not being an imperative to being stuck in an old model.”

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Wire Story

Southern Baptists Pledged to Launch an Online Database of Abusers. It’s Still Empty.

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Lack of funding and liability concerns have stalled abuse reform efforts.

Jae C. Hong / AP

A volunteer Southern Baptist task force charged with implementing abuse reforms in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination will end its work next week without a single name published on a database of abusers.

The task force’s report marks the second time a proposed database for abusive pastors has been derailed by denominational apathy, legal worries, and a desire to protect donations to the Southern Baptist Convention’s mission programs.

Leaders of the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF) say a lack of funding, concerns about insurance, and other unnamed difficulties hindered the group’s work.

“The process has been more difficult than we could have imagined,” the task force said in a report published Tuesday. “And in truth, we made less progress than we desired due to the myriad obstacles and challenges we encountered in the course of our work.”

To date, no names appear on the Ministry Check website designed to track abusive pastors, despite a mandate from Southern Baptists to create the database. The committee has also found no permanent home or funding for abuse reforms, meaning that two of the task force’s chief tasks remain unfinished.

Because of liability concerns about the database, the task force set up a separate nonprofit to oversee the Ministry Check website. That new nonprofit, known as the Abuse Response Committee (ARC), has been unable to publish any names because of objections raised by SBC leaders.

“At present, ARC has secured multiple affordable insurance bids and successfully completed the vetting and legal review of nearly 100 names for inclusion on Ministry Check at our own expense with additional names to be vetted pending the successful launch of the website,” the task force said in its report.

Josh Wester, the North Carolina pastor who chairs ARITF, said the Abuse Response Committee—whose leaders include four task force members—could independently publish names to Ministry Check in the future but wants to make a good-faith effort to address the Executive Committee’s concerns.

Task force leaders say they raised $75,000 outside of the SBC to vet the initial names of abusers. That list includes names of sexual offenders who were either convicted of abuse in a criminal court or who have had a civil judgment against them.

“To date, the SBC has contributed zero funding toward the vetting of names for Ministry Check,” according to a footnote in the task force report.

Earlier this year, the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission designated $250,000 toward abuse reform to be used by the ARITF. Wester hopes those funds will be made available to ARC for the Ministry Check site. The SBC’s two mission boards pledged nearly $4 million to assist churches in responding to abuse but have said none of that money can be given to ARC.

The lack of progress on reforms has abuse survivor and activist Christa Brown shaking her head.

“Why can’t a billion-dollar organization come up with the resources to do this?” asked Brown, who for years ran a list of convicted Baptist abusers at a website, StopBaptistPredators.org, which aggregated stories about cases of abuse.

Brown sees the lack of progress on reforms as part of a larger pattern in the SBC. While church messengers and volunteers like those on the ARITF want reform and work hard to address the issue of reforms, there’s no help from SBC leaders or institutions. Instead, she said, SBC leaders do just enough to make it look like they care, without any real progress.

“The institution does not care,” she said. “If it did care it would put money and resources behind this. And it did not do that. And it hasn’t for years.”

SBC leaders have long sought to shield the denomination and especially the hundreds of millions of dollars given to Southern Baptist mission boards and other entities from liability for sexual abuse. The 12.9 million-member denomination has no direct oversight of its churches or entities, which are governed by trustees, making it a billion-dollar institution that, for all intents and purposes, does not exist outside of a few days in June when the SBC annual meeting is in session.

As a result, abuse reform has been left in the hands of volunteers such as those on the task force, who lacked the authority or the resources to complete their task.

As part of its report, the ARITF recommends asking local church representatives, known as messengers, at the SBC annual meeting if they still support abuse reforms such as the Ministry Check database. The task force also recommends that the SBC Executive Committee be assigned the job of figuring out how to implement those reforms—and that messengers authorize funding to get the job done.

Church messengers will have a chance to vote on those recommendations during the SBC annual meeting, scheduled for June 11-12 in Indianapolis.

The task force’s report does include at least one success. During the annual meeting next week, messengers will receive copies of new training materials, known as “The Essentials,” designed to help them prevent and respond to abuse.

This is the second time in the past 16 years that attempts to create a database of abusive Southern Baptist pastors failed. In 2007, angered at news reports of abusive pastors in their midst and worried their leaders were doing nothing about it, Southern Baptists asked their leaders to look into creating a database of abusive pastors to make sure no abuser could strike twice.

A year later, during an annual meeting in Indianapolis, SBC leaders said no. Such a list was deemed “impossible.” Instead, while denouncing abuse and saying churches should not tolerate it, they said Baptists should rely on national sex offender registries.

Because there is no denominational list of abusive pastors, local church members have to fend for themselves when responding to abuse, said Dominique and Megan Benninger, former Southern Baptists who run Baptistaccountability.org, a website that links to news stories about Baptist abusers.

The couple started the website after the former pastor at their SBC church in Pennsylvania was ousted when the congregation learned of his prior sexual abuse conviction. Before long, he was preaching at another church.

“We were just, like, how does this happen?” Megan Benninger said.

When the couple posted on Facebook about their former pastor, leaders of their home church reprimanded them, telling them in an email that they should not have made their concerns public. Not long afterward, the couple decided to set up a website that would collect publicly available information about abusive pastors.

“Our goal is to share information so people can decide whether a church is safe or not,” said Dominique Benninger.

To set up their site, the Benningers modified an e-commerce website design so that instead of sharing information about products, it shares information about abusive pastors. The website became a database of third-party information, which is protected by the same federal laws that protect other interactive computer services, like Facebook.

The Benningers don’t do any investigations but instead aggregate publicly available information to make it easier for church members to find out about abusers. That kind of information is needed, they say, so church members can make informed decisions.

The Benningers have recently placed a hold on adding new names to their database while Megan Benninger is being treated for cancer. They wonder who will pick up the slack if the SBC’s proposed database fails. They also are skeptical about claims that having a database would undermine local church autonomy—which is a key SBC belief.

“You are just warning them that there’s a storm coming,” said Megan Benninger. “How is that interfering with anyone’s autonomy?”

Members of the abuse task force say the denomination has made progress on abuse reforms in recent years but more remains to be done.

“We believe the SBC is ready to see the work of abuse reform result in lasting change,” the task force said in its report. “With the task force’s work coming to an end, we believe our churches need help urgently.”

Brown, author of Baptistland, an account of the abuse she experienced growing up in a Baptist church and her years of activism for reform, is skeptical that any real change will happen. Instead of making promises and not keeping them, she said, SBC leaders should just admit abuse reform is not a priority.

“They might as well say, this is not worth a dime—and we are not going to do anything,” she said. “That would be kinder.”

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Theology

What Silicon Valley’s New Ethical Thinking Gets Right—and Wrong

Maaike E. Harmsen

Effective altruism and longtermism are all the rage these days. How should Christians engage?

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

Former cryptocurrency trade executive Ryan Salame was sentenced last week for federal financial crimes he committed while working for FTX. The company’s billionaire founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced months ago for engaging in “one of the largest financial frauds in history.” This case is making headlines and sparking long-term conversations in the burgeoning field of tech ethics.

Bankman-Fried’s name and story are inextricably connected to the new ethical thinking of Silicon Valley, which is increasingly influenced by “longtermism”—the idea that positively influencing the future is the key moral priority of our time—and “effective altruism,” which dictates that if you want to do good, you should do it as effectively as possible.

The most prominent thought leader of these principles is William MacAskill (What We Owe the Future, 2022). MacAskill taught Bankman-Fried during his time at Oxford, advising him that his acquired talents would be most effectively maximized in business and philanthropy. And so, citing longtermism and effective altruism as reasons for founding FTX, Bankman-Fried’s company earned him trust and billions of dollars—some of which went to charitable causes while much eventually ended up in his own pocket.

Not only did Bankman-Fried’s focus on long-term moral goals eventually eclipse the ethics of his immediate personal actions, but it appears thought leaders like MacAskill reportedly ignored repeated warnings about Bankman-Fried. Why? As Charlotte Alter wrote for Time magazine, “For a group of philosophers who had spent their lives contemplating moral tradeoffs and weighing existential risks, the warnings about Bankman-Fried may have presented a choice between embracing a big donor with questionable ethics or foregoing millions of dollars they believed could boost their nascent movement to help save the future of humanity.”

It seems one of the weaknesses of this new ethical thinking is an age-old “ends justify the means” mentality. Having tunnel vision about future big-picture ethical goals can often lend itself to unethical methods in the short term. It’s for this and other reasons that some are sounding the alarm about this emerging approach to ethics—including intellectual historian Émile P. Torres, for whom effective altruism and longtermism are “toxic ideologies” with “worrying dystopian tendencies.” Perhaps, he proposes, “Silicon Valley’s favorite ideas for changing the world for the better actually threaten to make it much, much worse.”

Even still, effective altruism and longtermism groups are sprouting up in universities across the country and seem to especially resonate with young college students who are eager to champion charitable causes and make a difference in the world. As Benjamin Vincent observed in a previous piece for CT, the “apocalyptic hope” of metamodernism is quickly replacing the cynical stance of postmodernism as the new cultural mood of the next generation of youth.

Longtermism and effective altruism work well together, as they are both led by a pragmatic utilitarianism—in which ethical decisions are calculated based on providing future happiness for as many people as possible. For example, donating money to prevent epidemics makes a lot of sense since it has the potential to save a high number of human lives. Likewise, combating climate change and avoiding nuclear war are effective philanthropic outlets.

These principles are becoming increasingly popular in business and among tech industry leaders, including Elon Musk, who called MacAskill’s work “a close match” for his philosophy, which includes outspoken pronatalism. In 2021, Musk offered to sell at least $6 billion worth of Tesla stock if the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) could give a detailed account of how that money would be spent on helping hungry people on the planet. But instead of providing specific data, WFP’s executive director Cindy McCain initially responded with a relational and ideological appeal.

It was like two ships sailing past each other in the night: Musk, an engineer, who wanted hard data to solve a tangible problem, and public officials who wanted to talk about the ideals and motivations behind the problem. As many people on X urged him to donate the $6 billion anyway, Musk did donate $5.7 billion of his Tesla shares to an unknown charity in the following weeks.

This new ethical thinking ultimately centers on the pursuit of happiness and well-being, which invokes a moral responsibility to actively engage in a collective struggle against environmental disasters, disease, poverty, war, and oppression. Given the comprehensive calculations needed for such large-scale humanitarian projects, it is not surprising that this approach seems to be most popular among those with a background in the hard sciences, including engineering, technology, and other fields that focus on efficiently utilizing time and money.

For Christians, there is much to applaud and to criticize. On the one hand, tech leaders are seeing future risks and are willing to employ their own resources to help mitigate them. On the other hand, their motivations and solutions are informed by a techno-optimism that often reduces the world’s problems to technical issues requiring technical solutions. In doing so, they end up neglecting the underlying causes behind some of these global concerns—which can’t be fixed by more money or better technology but only by a change of the human heart.

Take, for instance, Bill Gates’s recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021). This software engineer sees climate change as a physical problem and offers practical solutions to fix it: Let’s fund research and development for innovation on cleaner and more efficient technology, and let industry and markets work together with governments to implement this. He focuses on upscaling innovation early to ensure such technology will become economically viable.

But what he fails to mention are the many unseen and systemic drivers behind climate change, including unbridled consumerism in the West, the social trend of “keeping up with the Joneses,” the pension funds and investments in fossil industries aimed at keeping shareholders happy, and national governments that continue to subsidize fossil fuels to please their populations.

Or consider how tech leaders approach the possible threats that generative artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity. At The AI Summit London last year, tech leaders drafted an open letter asking to pause AI development due to its long-term risks. But what was never mentioned were the existing dangers of internet algorithms making us addicted to our screens and creating an anxious generation of youth. The future risk of AI was limited to its computational force, not its potential in the hands of social media giants eager to keep us hooked on their platforms.

Still, there are many elements for believers to admire in this way of thinking. Christian ethics also takes the well-being of others into account, sometimes even at the expense of our own happiness. And our worldview should also be future-focused: God himself promised the Israelites that their children and children’s children would be blessed by their obedience to his commands—or cursed by their acts of unrighteousness (Ex. 34:7).

These principles also correspond with the biblical idea that God calls us to be good stewards. When Jesus returns to renew creation, we will be judged according to our “works” (Rev. 20:12), including our treatment of people and the earth. In fact, this outlook is a helpful corrective to the tendency of some believers to focus on the urgent task of evangelism (the Great Commission) at the expense of God’s first command to humanity: that we “be fruitful and increase in number,” “fill the earth and subdue it,” and “work it and take care of it” (Gen. 1:28; 2:15).

Longtermism and effective altruism both bring up great questions for Christians to discuss and to seek scripturally sound answers, such as how our eschatological views impact the calculus of Christian ethics. On a practical level, these can also provide avenues for helpful dialogue with our fellow citizens about which policies best serve the well-being of humanity. In this way, effective altruists and longtermists can help Christians reflect on what we should stand for and what we are willing to do to better our world—both now and in the future.

We can also admire the lengths some go to in advancing this cause. MacAskill promotes giving away 10 percent of income to charitable causes, volunteering one’s services, and choosing jobs that will make a difference in the world. Likewise, Rutger Bregman finances a school for “moral ambition” to encourage young professionals to not simply choose a high paying job and give money to charity but to make a morally grounded difference in a role that best fits their talent.

But, as with anything, there can be a dark side to this ideology—especially when we trace it back to its source. Peter Singer, one of the most popular and influential ethicists of this century, was an early founder of effective altruism. He’s also an atheist who has made strange ethical arguments in the past, including placing animal rights on equal (or higher) footing as human rights. And although most wouldn’t subscribe to Singer’s more fringe beliefs, we must remember that the root of this new ethical thinking is grounded in a deeper philosophy of life—a largely secular worldview that lends itself well to a more sophisticated form of hedonism, where the ultimate purpose of human life is the pursuit of happiness.

Effective altruism, which seeks to focus all our resources on maximizing or optimizing our positive impact—on making as many people happy as possible in the far future—can also be at odds with the ministry principles of Jesus. According to this standard, leaving 99 people to save the 1 makes no sense. And neither does wasting expensive perfume at the feet of our Savior. Did the Samaritan pause to consider whether caring for his beat-up neighbor by the roadside was the most effective use of his time and money?

Christian philosophers have long criticized the tendency of post-industrial societies to perceive life’s problems, and their solutions, as merely technical. In The Technological Society (1964), Jacques Ellul warns that when we rely too heavily on technology’s capacity to fulfill humanity’s future happiness, “ideas and theories no longer dominate, but rather the power of production.”

That is not to say that productivity is unimportant. Christians can and should participate in the technical calculation of global problems and find effective, sustainable, long-term solutions. And we must also avoid over-spiritualizing by reducing everything to the spiritual dimension, where soul-saving becomes our only goal in this life. In short, whenever we reduce ethics to any one dimension—whether technical or spiritual—we can easily lose sight of all the others.

Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously proclaimed, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” He taught that all life is under common grace, and that Christians should participate in every field of inquiry. This premise was furthered by his intellectual heir, Herman Dooyeweerd, who developed a holistically Christian view of life in service to our Creator—believing Christian scholars should boldly plant “the banner of Christ’s kingship” in every field of study.

Longtermism and effective altruism can be shared moral grounds for us to appeal to our fellow citizens to secure the future well-being of our children, the earth, and society. But an ethical system that is solely defined by this outlook can lack a more holistic vision of life. We must seek a well-rounded wisdom that extends beyond the merely logistical and technical aspects of complex problems, such as global hunger, and that weighs matters closer to the heart of such issues.

As believers, we are accountable for all our actions (2 Cor. 5:10) and we must not grow weary of doing good to all (Gal. 6:9–10). Still, as fallen humans in a fallen world, we possess a certain humility in what we believe we can achieve this side of heaven—along with an innate dependence on our Creator. For although we may fail in our efforts, we are upheld by the grace of God. It is for this reason that Christ’s yoke is easy, and his burden is light (Matt. 11:30).

Maaike E. Harmsen is a Reformed theologian, preacher, writer, and part-time city councilor in the Netherlands.

- More from Maaike E. Harmsen

Books

Nominate a Book for the Christianity Today Book Awards

CT Editors

Instructions for publishers.

Pixabay / Pexels

Dear publishers and authors,

Each year, Christianity Today honors a set of outstanding books encompassing a variety of subjects and genres. The CT Book Awards will be announced in December at christianitytoday.com. They also will be featured prominently in the January/February 2025 issue of CT and promoted in several CT newsletters. (In addition, publishers will have the opportunity to participate in a marketing promotion organized by CT’s marketing team, complete with site banners and paid Facebook promotion.)

Here are this year’s awards categories:

1. Apologetics/Evangelism

2a. Biblical Studies

2b. Bible and Devotional

3a. Children

3b. Young Adults

4. Christian Living/Spiritual Formation

5. The Church/Pastoral Leadership

6. Culture, Poetry, and the Arts

7. Fiction

8. History/Biography

9. Marriage, Family, and Singleness

10. Missions/The Global Church

11. Politics and Public Life

12a. Theology (popular)

12b. Theology (academic)

*In addition, CT will be naming a Book of the Year, chosen from the entire pool of nominees by a panel of CT editors.

Nominations:

To be eligible for nomination, a book must be published between November 1, 2023 and October 31, 2024. We are looking for scholarly and popular-level works, and everything in between. A diverse panel of scholars, pastors, and other informed readers will evaluate the books.

Authors and publishers can nominate as many books as they wish, and each nominee can be submitted in multiple categories. For larger publishers (those with 50 or more employees), there is a $40 entry fee for each nomination (defined as each title submitted in each category). For smaller publishers (those with fewer than 50 employees), the entry fee is $20 per nomination. And for self-published authors, the entry fee is $10 per nomination.

To enter your nominations, click here to access the submission form. Download the form, fill it out as instructed, and email a copy (along with PDF versions of each nominee) to bookawards@christianitytoday.com. (In the box marked “total submissions,” please indicate the number of nominated books and give an estimate of the resulting nomination fees, based on the payment scale mentioned above. We will verify these totals, and begin sending payment invoices in early July.)

Finalist books:

If your book is chosen as one of the four finalists in any category, we will contact you and ask that you send a copy of the book directly to the judges assigned to that category. We will provide mailing addresses for each judge.

Deadline:

The deadline for submitting nominations is Friday, July 19, 2024.

Any questions about any aspect of the process? Email us at bookawards@christianitytoday.com.

Thank you!

—Christianity Today editors

- More from CT Editors