News

When One Christian College Closes, Another Takes Care of Its Alumni Needs

Houghton University agreed to help two shuttered evangelical schools with files and transcripts going back decades. It ended up being more work than anyone bargained for.

Christianity Today July 1, 2024
Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Last summer Alliance University, known as Nyack College for most of its history, was in the middle of suddenly shutting down its operations after 140 years. As the frantic eight-week closure process began—helping students finish out classes, selling the school’s Steinway grand piano, pulling art off the walls—Alliance sought out another institution to become the ongoing custodian of records for students and alumni.

Needing a permanent home were transcripts going back decades, student financial records, and athletic records, as well as licensure documentation for Alliance counseling, nursing, teaching, and social work programs. Alumni might need those documents at any time for employers or licensing bodies.

It was tens of thousands of documents—some digital and some in filing cabinets.

Alliance asked Houghton University, another Christian college about five hours away in New York State, to take on the responsibility. Around the same time, The King’s College, another New York Christian college in trouble, asked Houghton to be the custodian of its records.

“It was loading the life rafts because the Titanic is going down,” said David Turk, the provost of Alliance University at the time that it closed. With so many Alliance and Nyack graduates going into ministry work, Turk felt it was important to have another Christian college care for the documents.

Christian higher education is a small world, especially in New York. Some Alliance administrators were Houghton graduates. Some Houghton professors are Alliance/Nyack graduates. Houghton readily agreed.

“For us there was no question,” said David Davies, Houghton’s provost and the son of two Nyack graduates. “We have such strong alignment with them. … Alliance and Houghton are two of the oldest Christian higher ed institutions in the state and in the region.”

But he added, “No one had a good firsthand sense of how much work this would be. … It has been more than we anticipated.”

Houghton’s experience may be useful for preparing other Christian higher education institutions to help fellow schools close well. Though a number of Christian colleges are seeing booming post-pandemic enrollment, the economics of Christian higher education are sobering.

Total undergraduate enrollment has been declining at schools affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) since 2015. And all schools are facing the “demographic cliff” of 2025, where the population of high school graduates drops significantly.

Last week, Eastern Nazarene University in Quincy, Massachusetts, announced its plan for closure. Eastern Nazarene is a member of the CCCU. Three other Christian schools have entered a teach-out agreement with Eastern Nazarene, which means they will take transfer students to help them finish their degrees in the same time frame.

“Like all small, private, liberal arts colleges, Eastern Nazarene has faced significant financial headwinds in recent years,” the school said in a statement.

Houghton is one place staying afloat. It welcomed its largest class in six years last fall and has an enrollment of about 800 students. It received 23 students from Alliance and 2 from King’s (most King’s students opted to stay in New York City).

When Alliance announced its closure, the school was in chaos. Turk was trying to help current students graduate. Deans of programs like nursing were working overtime to put their records together for Houghton, he said. Meanwhile, representatives from the Christian and Missionary Alliance headquarters came to gather all the personnel documentation, take pictures off the walls, and gather old yearbooks, Turk said. The school had the ed-tech company Parchment digitize as many records as it could for Houghton.

Kevin Kettinger, Houghton’s registrar, was working closely with employees at the Alliance registrar’s office.

“Seeing how painful it was for them made me really want to help even more,” Kettinger said. It was “raw,” he said.

“[Alliance staffers] bent over backwards in the midst of what they were going through,” said Davies.

In August of last year, Alliance’s athletic director (a Houghton graduate) drove a semitruck of Alliance’s paper records in dozens of filing cabinets to Houghton’s campus. Houghton distributed the 28 filing cabinets to various offices: athletics, counseling, student financial services.

Houghton had to bring in tech services to check on how to store Alliance’s digital data. The staff had to learn to use Parchment’s digitization system. All in all, it was more than 60,000 documents.

Davies said the school could have used a full-time person managing the process, although the work is tapering down some now.

“Alliance has a really large alumni base,” he said. “A lot of folks understandably panicked when they heard the institution was closing. They wondered how they were going to get information. … We had a lot of requests.”

Kettinger said Houghton staff were getting a flood of calls every day from Alliance alumni needing transcripts, replacement diplomas, licensure paperwork filled out, or degree verification. A year later the school still receives calls every day.

“We’re talking probably 20 master-degree programs,” said Turk from Alliance/Nyack. “Very, very complex. It’s not an easy thing to handle.”

People also called with requests Houghton couldn’t fulfill, about financial aid or tax forms or billing. They called because they hadn’t realized Alliance had closed and wanted to know what was going on. Some were upset about grades or graduation status, things Houghton couldn’t change or address. The records agreement stipulated that Houghton simply stewards the documents, and Houghton staff can’t go ask a former Nyack professor why he gave a certain grade. But Kettinger said the alumni “handled it really well” once they understood the situation.

“We’re hoping this is going to move into a more sustainable maintenance phase,” said Davies.

Houghton is still waiting for when it might receive student records from King’s. While King’s has ceased operations as a college, it still has a small staff and exists as an organization, so it has so far maintained its own documents.

Though Houghton made agreements to take records from King’s and Alliance, it is getting the files of four shuttered institutions in the bargain. Alliance’s records included 2,000 from another Christian school, Pinebrook Junior College, that closed in 1992 and transferred its records to Nyack.

And King’s is the custodian of records for Northeastern Bible College, a school that closed in 1990 and transferred its files to King’s.

For other schools facing this, Houghton administrators said having time to work with a closing school early in the process to know how to communicate to students and between institutions is helpful. Having a dedicated staff person helps the process, but that’s tough for small colleges to pull off.

Yet for all the work over the last year, the Houghton staff felt they were giving a gift to a fellow Christian college.

“We’re serving their students in the way we would want people to serve our students,” said Davies. “It’s an awful thing when your institution closes. You can’t turn it into a positive. It’s difficult emotionally; it’s difficult professionally.” As a Christian institution, “we don’t see ourselves in isolation,” he added.

Alliance staff felt that.

“[Closing] was a nightmare,” said Turk, the former provost of Alliance. “But Houghton was a dream.”

Theology

Celebrating the Stars and Their Maker on Māori New Year

As Matariki is celebrated in New Zealand, Christians navigate a return to the festival’s pagan roots.

Te Taumata Kapa Haka being performed for Matariki in New Zealand.

Te Taumata Kapa Haka being performed for Matariki in New Zealand.

Christianity Today July 1, 2024
Fiona Goodall / Stringer / Getty

The appearance of the Matariki star cluster (also known as Pleiades) in the New Zealand sky just before sunrise in late June or early July marks the new year in traditional Māori culture. Celebrated with feasts, prayers at dawn, and time spent with family, Matariki is a time to remember those who died in the past year, celebrate and give thanks for the present, and look forward to the future.

After the British colonized New Zealand in the mid-1800s, traditional Māori practices began to decline, and by the 1940s, public celebration of Matariki had stopped. Yet since the 1990s, Māori culture has undergone a successful revival, leading the New Zealand government to designate Matariki as a national holiday in 2022, celebrated this year on June 28 (although the festivities continue until July 6). This re-indigenization has also elicited the reintroduction of traditional beliefs, including the worship of ancestors and a pantheon of gods.

For Christians, this has led to a parsing of what believers should and should not embrace when celebrating Matariki. CT spoke with Michael Drake, who is of English and Māori heritage, about Christianity’s legacy among the Māori people and how believers can engage with Matariki today. Drake worked in Christian education for 50 years, including as a teacher, principal, curriculum writer, and school founder. Today he pastors and writes books, including the 2023 explainer A Christian Looks at Matariki.

Could you describe what Matariki is?

Matariki is a celebration embedded as far back as we know in Māori culture. It celebrates the rising of the Matariki star constellation, which is the beginning of the new year in our culture and indicates when harvesting and planting should be timed.

Rather than one unified group, the Māori are made up of different tribes with different customs, and we recognize the event in different ways. Yet there are common themes of eating, fellowshiping, and praying.

We cook hāngī by digging a hole in the ground and placing big rocks on the bottom and lighting a fire on top of it. After fighting the fire off, you put meat, fish, cabbage, and kūmara (sweet potato) in baskets in there with lots of water and cover it up with dirt. A few hours later, you open it up and the food is steamed.

It is a celebration of the new year. At that level, it’s something that Christians might well celebrate.

But traditional Māori culture is deeply animistic. There are prayers and incantations to the stars. The ancestors who died in the previous year are believed to have migrated to the stars, the Matariki constellation in particular. During the feast, the steam rising from the food you’re cooking goes up as a prayer to the stars, the ancestors, and those who died in the last year.

Did you celebrate Matariki growing up?

No, I was raised post–World War II at a time when my parents, who didn’t look overtly Māori, were able to hide the fact. I knew I had Māori ancestors but didn’t know I was Māori. They did this to keep us safe, due to the prevalent racism against Māori in New Zealand society.

It wasn’t until I was about 20 and went to college that I really understood my Māori heritage. It was quite exciting to see what my ancestry was and also to learn the significance of the gospel in Māori history.

How did the gospel come to the Māori people?

Anglican missionaries proclaimed the gospel to the Māori on Christmas Day in 1814. Over the years, God turned hearts massively. At the time, Māori were using muskets and cannons to fight each other, decimating the population. In God’s providence, Māori were ready for the gospel as they saw the promise of peace. Missionary Henry Williams came here in 1823 and established trust with them. He stood in the middle of a battlefield and told them to put down their rounds because God commanded them to live in peace.

By 1860, 80 percent of Māori were attending church on Sundays. The three keys to the Māori rapidly accepting the gospel were the preaching of the gospel, the translation of Scriptures into the Māori language (there was no written language previously), and the Māori themselves becoming evangelists.

How did the introduction of Christianity change their beliefs and practices?

There was a massive abandonment of pagan religion. The Scriptures were their rule of life. For example, in northern New Zealand, a group of chiefs each had multiple wives. As they read the Scriptures, they felt that was wrong—they should have only one wife. They decided to build a village where the surplus wives would be housed and placed under their protection so that they could be the husbands of one wife. They sought husbands for the other women. They worked out for themselves how the Scripture should be applied.

Christmas and Easter were celebrated. Matariki was celebrated in terms of celebrating family and community and thanking God for the food, the harvest, and the promise of a new year.

Based on the 2018 census, only 30 percent of Māori say they are Christian. What led to this large drop in the faith?

In the 1860s, the military confiscated massive amounts of Māori land, which led to the Māori’s alienation from Christianity. Many Māori lost confidence in the gospel and in the church as they associated the European settlers with the faith. The colonizers stripped Māori of their land, their territory, and their identity.

A hundred years later, in the middle of the 20th century, Māori tried to rebuild their identity again, and many resorted to the old paganism. Celebrations like Matariki, which many Christians celebrated simply as a new year, returned to being a pagan festival.

The government is now promoting Matariki in a religious way. State schools are being supplied with specially written prayers and incantations, which they claim are not religious but cultural. Some Māori young people are coming to believe in the traditional deities, and even non-Māori take part in it. That’s impacting the church, as many of our churches are struggling to reach Māori and be seen as open. You get quite a bit of syncretism in evangelical churches today.

How are Christians responding to prayers to Māori gods and deities happening in the workplace and taught at schools?

Most Christians are not quite sure what to do with it. Public events will often open with a kind of karakia or prayer. It depends on who is doing the karakia: A Christian would pray to God, while someone who isn’t Christian will pray to the stars or earth or ancestors. When Christians ask what to do in those situations, I say you just don’t have to say “Amen.”

There are all sorts of situations where as Christians, we see things going on [and] we do not have to participate in them, nor do we have to be antagonistic to them. We’re called to be wise and prudent. I think there’s a danger that we’ve become too confrontational about things we don’t need to confront.

We have an opportunity to share the gospel. You see that with Paul in Athens speaking about the unknown god. He says, Let's talk about him; I can tell you about him. This is a classic example of how we can use the culture without confronting it. On the other hand, in Ephesus and Philippi, they did have to confront the culture. There comes a time when you have to.

What was New Zealanders’ reaction when the government decided to make Matariki a public holiday?

There’s a significant group of non-Māori New Zealanders who are bitterly opposed to anything Māori. Sadly, there are a lot of Christians among them—they just don’t understand it; they can’t stand it. On the other hand, there are people who think it’s wonderful to celebrate Māori culture. In the middle are a large number of New Zealanders who are not particularly concerned; they are fairly benign toward different cultures as long as they don’t have to do anything about it.

What aspects of the festivals should Christians partake in?

We can celebrate the rising of Matariki and the fact that God has built the universe and continues to rule it in a way that for centuries Māori have been able to identify when this was going to happen. We celebrate the wonderful order in creation that declares the glory of God.

A lot of Christians will get up and pray during the dawn of Matariki because it is tradition to pray at that time. I personally avoid anything that can be misunderstood by somebody. To me the gods mean nothing, but if somebody sees me praying at dawn, they could misinterpret it.

Other Christians are quite happy to do that. I have no problem with that at all; it's perfectly right. You have that freedom in the gospel. Matariki is fun—it’s fellowship; it’s talking about those who have recently died and building family relationships.

Last year, I put out this booklet on how Christians can engage with Matariki, written for non-Māori believers unfamiliar with the holiday. I also opened the church service with a Matariki greeting and encouraged people to embrace it as a celebration of God’s grace.

How do you see Matariki as an evangelism opportunity?

This week, a handyman who came to fix my burglar alarm asked me what I thought of Matariki, and I got to share with him that God set the stars in their place.

He responded, “But [the universe is] so huge it doesn’t need us.”

“Yes, that shows how great God is,” I said. This is the type of conversation I’m happy to have around Matariki.

I cited Genesis 8:22 to him: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” We have not only a glorious God but a constant God, a reliable God, a faithful God. All these you can show through Matariki. It’s an exciting time to share the gospel: Jesus is the bright and morning star.

Books

It’s Not Reverse Mission If You Just Stay in Your Own Church

Johnson Ambrose Afrane-Twum wants African migrant Christians to collaborate with and revitalize churches in the UK.

Christianity Today July 1, 2024
Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Several years ago, Johnson Ambrose Afrane-Twum was under consideration to become a black lead pastor of a white-majority church in the United Kingdom, when a white friend approached him.

Christian Mission in a Diverse British Urban Context: Crossing the Racial Barrier to Reach Communities (Studies in Missiology)

“Johnson, everybody here knows that you can lead this church,” he said. “There is only one problem: Some people say they don’t want you as a pastor because you speak with a Ghanaian accent.”

“I thought to myself, what has an accent got to do with this?” said Afrane-Twum. “Is this the way God wants us to do church?”

Originally from Ghana, Afrane-Twum had planted churches in three West African countries through the Calvary Chapel movement before immigrating to the UK in 2005 to further study theology and leadership. He soon observed many newcomers to Britain starting vibrant congregations—and numerous local churches dying. These realizations, in tandem with his challenging experiences working cross-culturally, led Afrane-Twum to research how African Christian leaders could better work with UK locals to revitalize faith across the country.

In Christian Mission in a Diverse British Urban Context, Afrane-Twum explores African identity in UK churches, the cultural barriers Africans face in the UK, and the need for more creative ways to reach out to diverse communities. He recently spoke with CT about the African migrant community in the UK and its potential to bring revival to the body of Christ in that country.

How would you assess the current relationship between the established UK churches and African immigrant congregations?

Some people refer to the black churches in the UK as doing reverse mission. The UK brought the gospel to us in Africa, they say, and now we are bringing the gospel back to them. But this is often a misnomer. If you are an African in the UK today and you are tending only to your own kind and not to the wider community, then there is no reverse mission. That issue must be addressed. How do we partner with the white churches so that we can be effective in our missionary work to the whole UK and not only to our fellow black Africans?

Many white-majority churches allow migrant churches to use their buildings. But for an effective partnership, we must go a step further. Both the African immigrant church and the UK church agree on winning souls to Christ, but we are subject to cultural changes that have occurred in the past few decades because of migration. The first thing we must do is to commit ourselves to building a spiritual relationship of mutual love and trust. We need to help the white churches know that we are here on a mission. At the moment, they think we are here just for our own people.

God has providentially allowed black churches to come over here to sustain the UK churches. If we have a spiritual relationship of mutual love and trust, then we can work together for kingdom goals. If the white churches come to believe that they need revival and that we have been called to help them, then the next question is, “How we can best help?” How do they see us, and how do we see them? If there are cultural biases, then we have to address them. Achieving the goals of the kingdom of God should be our highest purpose, even though we may have other differences.

You chose four distinct churches to study for your research on intercultural ministry in the UK. What did you find?

Two congregations (All Nations Church in Wolverhampton and Harborne Baptist) are white-majority churches that have worked hard to bring in people from multiethnic backgrounds. My study of All Nations revealed that second-generation migrants in the UK can not only adapt to the lifestyle and culture of the wider white community but, if nurtured properly by local leaders, can themselves become leaders in multiethnic churches.

At Harborne Baptist, I saw how important it is for pastors to train local youth as cross-cultural ministers and to release them to work cooperatively with Christians from other backgrounds.

The other two congregations were the Ethiopian Church London, which is mono-ethnic, and the Church of Pentecost, a very successful congregation connected to a denomination from Ghana. The Ethiopian church prefers to organize itself around its own cultural allegiances and values. The congregation feels they can best connect with God at a place with people who share their background, language, history, culture, worship style, and social needs.

The Church of Pentecost, in contrast, is a migrant church that has tried to collaborate with a white-majority church in the UK. They believe that second-generation migrants’ ability to participate in multiethnic gatherings will increase as they develop confidence in their own ability to navigate the social spaces of the new host culture. They are working out a strategy to reach out to the wider community, which they believe would be accomplished by their next generation.

In general, migrant churches have enabled their members to discover a sense of identity and self-respect, which we lacked when we came into the country. But we need to work harder to partner with the white-majority churches toward creating a society that models the values of the kingdom of God.

What has been your experience with racism in the UK church?

Some white people in the UK feel that churches should continue to do business as they have always done and that you shouldn’t have to cross cultural barriers to reach out to other groups. When I was doing my master’s degree, one of the lecturers taught us about some of the models on church planting. He said that black churches should be for blacks and white churches for whites. Comments like these are why I am doing this work.

As for those people in my church who resented me because of my accent, I don’t think they were racist. I think they were ignorant.

How has the African migrant community in the UK helped give it a sense of identity?

What unites us in the UK is that we have been marginalized by society. When we come together as the African church community, we gain a sense of self-respect and identity and feel like we are with our people.

New arrivals also need help from their fellow Africans. If you go to a white-majority church and say, “I don’t have my immigration papers,” the next day the police may be knocking on your door.

Africans come to church no matter what their problems are. We pray for them, lift them up, encourage them, and help them integrate. That is what the church does. It’s both a spiritual and a social institution.

But the key question is—are we going to be cemented in our own glue? Are we going to find comfort in what we get from our fellow African Christians, or are we going to share what we can offer with others? That’s where we want to be, and the wider community is also waiting.

Do you see this collaboration happening?

African churches share the universally accepted doctrines of the Christian faith. I don’t see why we cannot work with our brothers and sisters in the UK if both sides practice equality and respect. Differences and commonalities are present among any groups. That shouldn’t bring division. Through interaction and dialogue, we can promote understanding of different cultures and foster greater participation and inclusiveness.

As the case of All Nations suggests, second-generation migrants can negotiate effective partnerships between black churches and white churches. The second generation is better placed to do this because they know both cultures. The challenge, however, is how these next generations can maintain their families’ culture, identity, and Christian faith, while at the same time adapting to the culture of the host country that has much influence on them.

The influence of the wider community has caused many migrant children to lose faith in God. These young people acknowledge their ethnic heritage but place a greater premium on adapting their lives and values to the culture and values of the wider society, which is an increasingly secular social context. This is concerning because the survival of the African immigrant churches hinges on our success in raising the next generation. The success of any meaningful cross-cultural initiatives will depend on how well the next generation of immigrants is equipped.

Black liberation theology is mentioned in the book as a way of understanding African contexts. How has this theology shaped African churches in the UK?

Black people coming from Africa are not all the same. Blacks in South Africa developed a theology of liberation, a South African version of what African Americans developed in the United States, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a conscious and theological dimension of their struggles against apartheid.

But other sub-Saharan African countries, although they also had encounters with colonialism, did not experience struggles like those of black South Africans. As a result, the liberation theology expressed in these countries is quite different.

Africans ascribe spirituality to everything they do. They believe that everything an African does should be grounded in Scripture. We believe that demons are real and that we need the power of God to overcome demonic forces and witchcraft. For most Africans, liberation comes through prayer, fasting, and living a holy life to overcome the evil forces.

In this version of liberation theology, the place of the Holy Spirit and his empowerment is incredibly significant to assist us in our encounters with the demonic.

News

Canadian Megachurch Puts Ministry on Pause After Insurer Pulls Abuse Coverage

It’s been two years since its former pastor resigned and was arrested, but The Meeting House continues to feel the impact of its past.

The Meeting House building in Oakville, Ontario

The Meeting House building in Oakville, Ontario

Christianity Today June 28, 2024
R.J. Johnston / Toronto Star via Getty Images

The Meeting House was one of the largest megachurches in Canada, but this Sunday, each of its locations will be empty. Its home church gatherings won’t meet during the week. Kids won’t get together for youth programs. Members can’t see their pastors for counsel.

In the aftermath of an abuse scandal that shook the congregation and its leadership, the Ontario-area multisite church announced that it had lost a portion of its insurance coverage and would have to pause its ministry activities.

“Our current insurer has advised us that they will not be renewing our Abuse Liability (AL) and Employment Practices Liability (EPL) coverage as of June 30, 2024,” according to an email sent to congregants, explaining that the Anabaptist megachurch has struggled to get an extension from its insurer or to find another option for replacement coverage.

“In light of this development, we feel led to pause our normal ministry for the month of July to dedicate time to continue discerning what form God is inviting us to take into the future as a network of churches,” the Transition Board of Overseers and Network Leadership Team wrote.

The scenario at The Meeting House showcases the lasting damage that churches can face as a result of abuse by leaders and their response.

It’s been over two years since pastor Bruxy Cavey resigned from The Meeting House and was charged with sexual assault. Since then, further allegations have emerged. The church lost leaders and members, shuttering at least one of its sites, and has scrambled to recover. With the insurance status in question, ministry activities will be shut down at least through July.

“When I heard that news, I was just flabbergasted,” said interim online pastor Chris Chase, discussing the news on The Meeting House’s online livestream last Sunday. “I couldn’t believe it, because we’ve gone through so much, and you think, Oh, we finally got through the valley, we’re cresting up the mountain, and then you realize that you’re still in the valley.”

One viewer replied in the comments, “I am heartbroken that former leadership put the current leaders in this position.”

Cavey resigned in 2022, following a third-party investigation that found evidence of clergy sexual abuse against an adult victim at The Meeting House. Additional reporting has pointed to underlying problems at The Meeting House dating back years.

Canadian theologian Randal Rauser, who serves as director of faith-based organization investigations with Veritas Solutions, compared the revelations to an ice shelf breaking away after years of cracking under the surface.

“When the situation of church abuse finally ‘crashes’ into the ocean of public awareness, it is likely the result of patterns of abuse and dysfunction which had been unfolding for a long time,” he told CT.

Members at The Meeting House ended up making complaints against a total of four former pastors. Three more women alleged sexual abuse by Cavey, including one who says she had been a minor. (He is awaiting trial on three sexual assault charges and maintains his innocence.)

The Meeting House had already been struggling to get members to return after COVID-19, and the abuse scandal hurt attendance even more. It draws 1,565 people in person and online on Sunday mornings, according to its 2023 annual report, compared to over 5,700 five years ago.

The church once had 19 sites and now lists 12. There continues to be turnover among staff and the church’s board of overseers. The victims advocate contracted by The Meeting House to help with its response was replaced with someone from within the denomination. It faces at least three multimillion-dollar lawsuits involving abuse.

“The historical incidents and allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse at The Meeting House continue to impact our church today in many ways, including how we are viewed by insurers,” leaders wrote in the email to congregants.

Insurers may decline to provide liability coverage for ministries that don’t have solid policies to handle abuse, according to Charlie Cutler, president of ChurchWest Insurance Services, an agency insuring more than 4,000 ministries in California. To him, it’s a stewardship issue: Other churches’ premiums shouldn’t be spent covering another organization’s repeated mistakes.

“If there’s been a pattern of abuse, a pattern of bad governance in the ministry, you’re going to have a hard time getting coverage,” he said. “Every time there’s a claim, it’s going back to these offering plates at other ministries. They’re wanting everybody else to pay before they’ve proven that the problems have been addressed.”

The Canadian Centre for Christian Charities recently surveyed member ministries about costs and challenges around insurance. Nine percent said they had been refused coverage and another 9 percent said they “risked losing coverage without implementing risk management changes.”

The Meeting House continues to invite congregants to submit sexual harassment complaints. It says it has a policy for prevention and response, as well as “regular training and appropriate measures of accountability.” Its website also links info about its protection plan for youth and children.

The Meeting House leaders determined in June that “for the protection of our staff, volunteers, vulnerable people including kids and youth … it is not responsible to continue engaging in ministry work through The Meeting House church entity without full insurance coverage.”

They told members that they “grieve the need to pause ministry as a church” yet “have tremendous hope in the process of surrendering and listening to the Spirit as we discern together during this difficult time of pause.”

The evangelical minority in Ontario and even in other parts of Canada who have followed the situation at The Meeting House don’t know whether the church will be able to recover. At one point, it stood out for its growth, engagement, and messaging— The Meeting House began worshiping in movie theaters in the 1990s before that was a common model, and Cavey was a beloved leader who wasn’t afraid of breaking the mold of what ministry looked like.

“The Meeting House was long recognized as arguably Canada’s flagship megachurch, and as such, the cultural impact of its tragic downfall feeds into a general culture of cynicism about evangelicalism, Christianity, and organized religion altogether,” Rauser said by email. “This is tragic for many reasons, not least because a single high-profile instance of abuse within a church may overwhelm all the good the church accomplished along the way.”

Evangelical scholar Peter Schuurman wrote a doctoral dissertation on Cavey’s leadership at The Meeting House, published as The Subversive Evangelical: The Ironic Charisma of An Irreligious Megachurch. Schuurman has continued to follow the impact of Cavey’s abuse and departure on the congregation he led.

“It is a reminder that even if congregation members have no direct involvement as victims in clergy sexual abuse, they are all indirect and often unacknowledged victims,” Schuurman told CT.

“Not only are they reeling from the shock of their pastor being revealed as a predator and scrambling to find some redemptive path forward in the mess left behind, they may lose their spiritual home and faith community as well.”

Chase, the online pastor, asked participants to pray for a miracle for insurance coverage to come through, for leaders making difficult decisions, and for members of the church who have dealt with years of challenges.

“Pray for one another because, for some, this is as much as they could take,” he said. “They’ve journeyed through, and this might be their breaking point.”

With reporting by CT freelancer Meagan Gillmore in Canada. Gillmore also covered Cavey’s resignation and the fallout at The Meeting House for Toronto Life magazine in 2023.

Theology

Biblical Reflections from a Ukrainian Theologian’s War Diary

As Russia’s invasion fades from Western interest, daily musings from an evangelical seminary leader remind readers of the war’s ongoing reality for Ukrainian Christians who stay and serve.

Christianity Today June 28, 2024
Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Editor’s note: Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Taras Dyatlik, an evangelical Ukrainian theological educator, has shared his daily reflections in a WhatsApp group. The following are two recent journal entries from June (edited for style and clarity).

In an old carriage with shabby walls and faded curtains, I am traveling on a train from Kharkiv to Uzhhorod in the same cabin as a soldier returning home for a short but longed-for vacation. His wife and children have found temporary shelter in a land saturated with pain and fear.

Yesterday, this soldier bought his daughter a small puppy. Now, he plays with it like a child, hugging and kissing it as if he has found a ray of light in this tiny creature. In a few days, he will return to the hell of war, and the puppy will remind his daughter of her father’s love.

The soldier is about 30, with a weathered, tanned face. He has scars on his arms and legs and deep wrinkles near his eyes. He naps nervously, anxiously, like almost everyone who has returned from the frontline.

Sometimes, he falls into a deep sleep and starts snoring loudly as if trying to drown out the memories of explosions and cries of pain. And when he is not snoring yet still asleep, he shouts orders as if he were back in the middle of a battle.

At one of the stations, when the rattle of the wheels and the squeaks of the worn-out railway car have subsided for a moment, an elegant woman of medium height in a blue tracksuit flies out of the neighboring cabin. She's about 35, and once upon a time, she must have driven men crazy with her beauty. But now her face is haggard, with deep shadows under her eyes.

Bursting into our compartment, she cries out to me, Tell him to stop snoring! Right now! What are you looking at me for?”

I look up from my laptop screen and calmly reply, “Keep your voice down; please don't shout. Don't wake him up.”

Clearly unhappy with my response, she retreats to her own berth.

Half an hour passes. The soldier wakes up, goes to the vestibule to smoke, and takes the puppy with him.

I hear the woman coming out of her cabin again. I meet her in the corridor, look at her beautiful yet tired face, still marked with irritation, and say what has been running through my mind all this time: “You can’t wake up a soldier who is coming home from frontline hell for a short vacation, even if he snores like a bear. Let him plunge into this healing sleep, safe from explosions and screams.”

The woman clamors, “I can’t rest when he snores! And I have my own personal front….” But then her voice breaks as she begins to tremble.

I reply gently, sensing that her reaction reflects a pain and tragedy of its own. “We are not under a hail of bullets.”

The woman freezes; her eyes are filled with tears that are about to spill out. She looks out the window and bites her lip.

After a while, the soldier returns from the vestibule, a slight smile on his exhausted face. The woman looks at me pleadingly as if asking me not to tell him about our conversation. She approaches him and says something about the puppy, gently stroking the little creature as she takes its paws in her palms and kisses them gently.

The soldier enters our cabin, softly closes the door, and lies down to rest again.

The woman turns to me, her eyes two lights of longing and pain. She whispers, barely audibly, “Forgive me. My husband was killed in the winter. I miss his snoring at night so much! I'm going to my mother; I can’t live alone anymore.”

Her words contain the pain of the whole country—the pain of every broken woman’s heart. And while the old train keeps rattling along, carrying each of us in our own thoughts, memories, and hopes, I am silently praying:

For those who are at the frontline, like this soldier.

For this woman and the irreparable loss of her beloved one.

For the opportunity to live and love again without war, which came to our land to sow death and destruction.

I pray for just peace in Ukraine:

For the healing of the wounds in our souls—of the soldiers, civilians, and volunteers who have experienced deep trauma.

For bridging the gaps between us.

For unity in diversity.

And the train keeps rushing along, giving us precious moments of rest—and humanity—amid the chaos of war.

[One week later]

Today, I woke up again with my heart torn in two. Shelling, deaths, and propaganda go on and on, day and night. I am tired of sharing our daily nightmare in this war diary.

This terrible Russian war seems to be sucking the very life out of us. Every day, we observe an ocean of human suffering, rivers of tears, and mountains of destroyed lives. And somewhere in my soul, a traitorous thought creeps in: God, where are you? Why are you silent? Do you really not care?

I remember how Jesus cried out on the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

Now I understand his pain—maybe only 0.000001 percent. But I want to believe, like Job, that my Savior lives and that on the last day, he will raise us from the dust (Job 19:25–26). I cling to this hope like a drowning man to a life-saving float.

And then there is this black hatred that comes up in my throat like bile. After every shelling, after every news of Russian atrocities, my heart is filled with a thirst for revenge. Oh, how I hate them! I want to scream like the psalmist, “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (Ps. 137:9).

And then a still, small voice whispers, But I tell you, love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44).

How is this possible, Lord? How do we love torturers and murderers?

But I know that if I let hatred seize my heart, I will become like them, and then evil will win. Love for enemies is my Garden of Gethsemane, my bloody battle. It is the only way I can remain human.

This endless exhaustion, this spiritual desert—my “volunteer marathon” is a carrying of the cross. I fall under the weight of other people’s pain, and there is no end in sight. Will I have enough strength? Will I break down like Peter, who promised to follow Jesus to the end but denied him before the rooster crowed?

Lord, I pray like Paul that your grace will be sufficient for me, that your power will be perfect in my weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).

And then there are these thoughts: I am not like others! I do so much. I sacrifice so much in this civilian life and ministry!

And then I stop myself: Do you think that your righteousness is greater than that of the scribes and Pharisees? (Matt. 5:20).

All my good works are but filthy rags before the holiness of God (Isa. 64:6). All I have is his undeserved gift. So, down with pride, Taras. Serving is a privilege, not a merit.

And how often I find myself judging my brothers in faith—in both Ukraine and the West. But who am I to judge another’s servant? (Rom. 14:4). Each of us has our own Calvary. My job is to carry my personal cross—and then lend a shoulder to those who fall under their burdens, like Simon of Cyrene on the Via Dolorosa.

But the worst thing is when you realize that in the whirlwind of your ministry, you have forgotten the main thing: your relationship with the Stranger on the road to Emmaus. Prayers have turned into dry, short reports with figures and requests. The Word of God has become an unopened book with too many painful questions.

I work hard, but have I become a modern Martha who cares for many things but forgets the ”one thing” that is necessary—to sit at the feet of Jesus, forgetting about job descriptions (Luke 10:41–42)?

Forgive me, Lord! Without you, I am nothing. The source of my life is in you.

How unbearably painful this contradiction is sometimes: I love my country to the core, every piece of land. But at the same time, I know that my true homeland is in heaven, from which I am waiting for the Savior (Phil. 3:20). What do the borders of earthly states mean in the face of eternity? “There is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col. 3:11).

Even if my body is handed over to be burned for Ukraine, if I do not have the love of Christ, I am nothing (1 Cor. 13:3). Sometimes, amid the hell of war, I want to escape into sweet oblivion—not to think, not to remember, to live one day at a time.

But then your Spirit reminds me, Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matt. 6:33).

For what is our life? A vapor that appears for a moment and disappears (James 4:14). Every day can be a step toward eternity, where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death will be no more. There will be no more sorrow, no more crying, no more pain (Rev. 21:4).

Although the whole world and politics cries out to us like the movie title, “Don’t look up! Don’t look up!”—we must look up.

And how often we must wrest joy from the teeth of despair—to fight for hope in a battle with hopelessness. It is so easy to give up. But doesn’t the kingdom of God belong to children (Matt. 19:14), like that boy and girl who smiled at me from under the rubble of a ruined house? Where did they get this fierce strength of spirit?

I, too, must shine forth to a war-torn world. Let them see my joy and glorify my Father in heaven (Matt. 5:16).

The path is narrow, and the gate that leads to life is small (Matt. 7:14). Every step of our life and ministry in Ukraine is a battle. The enemy is external, but even stronger are the internal demons that cry out, “Taras, don’t look up!”

Every choice is a risk. Did Christ promise us a cloudless life? No! He warned, “In me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). How, Lord, can this be true?

And yet I choose to believe, despite …

To serve, despite …

To sow seeds of goodness in my soil scorched by hatred, despite …

To be a light in this oppressive, almost physical darkness, despite …

Because I know that one day, there will be no shadow, no trace of war, only light, only peace, only love.

One day.

Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war.

Taras Dyatlik coordinates seminary-based refugee hubs in Ukraine and serves as a theological education consultant for Scholar Leaders and Mesa Global in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Click here to join his WhatsApp community.

Editor’s note: CT offers dozens of select articles translated into Ukrainian and Russian.

You can also join the 12,000 readers who now follow CT on Telegram: @ctmagazine (also available in Chinese and Russian).

Theology

A New Blueprint for Chinese Churches: Beyond the Four Walls

In a rapidly urbanizing China, some houses of worship are taking inspiration from the Bible while rethinking local architectural tradition.

The Julong Church atrium.

The Julong Church atrium.

Christianity Today June 28, 2024
Shikai / INUCE

A scroll-shaped steeple. An imposing ark-shaped atrium. A pipe organ feature reminiscent of 19th-century North American Methodist churches.

These are some of the more striking elements in the Three-Self churches that Brazilian German architect Dirk U. Moench has designed in China. The Lutheran founded the design firm INUCE in 2011 and has offices in Fuzhou, China, and Münsterlingen, Switzerland, where he is currently based.

Moench has designed four churches in China. Two churches in Fuzhou and Luoyuan were completed in 2018 and 2021, respectively, while one in Julong was finished this year. Another ongoing project in Jinshan has garnered nationwide attention and received tens of thousands of likes on social media platforms like Weibo and Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), according to Moench.

CT interviewed Moench on how Chinese church design interfaces with Western architectural principles and the ways a church’s physical building can interact with and participate in China’s swiftly evolving urban landscape.

When you were asked to design a church in Fuzhou’s Jinshan district, Chinese officials and politicians told you that they wanted “a modern church for a modern China.” How did you interpret this?

In many ways, this is a political sentence. You have to fill it with meaning as an architect and as a Christian. Architects like to refer to the term genius loci, or “spirit of the place” in Latin, in that a building is a reaction to its immediate built environment, like historic buildings, specific roads, landscape features, and also built tradition—an architect’s filtered and amplified perception of a place’s essence.

Since Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 reforms, the country has been transformed, and cities today don’t have much of a tradition as a place. There are modern buildings built alongside modern roads, with residential developments, offices, factories, and so on. You don’t have the “spirit of the place” that you can react to.

But what’s always very important to me is to understand the spirit of a community, the spirit of the individual congregation. I have learned that Chinese Christians are asking themselves big questions: How will this new building express who we are? How will it relate to this place and fulfill our needs?

Chinese and Western architectural traditions are often in dialogue here, and I try to create an artistic synthesis of them. This doesn’t occur on a universal scale but in more particular terms, such as: What is the physical environment in which this church is going to grow? What are the concerns of the individual community? What are their interests in the European and Western elements of Christianity, if at all?

Some years ago, authorities removed crosses from church buildings in China. How do the churches you’ve designed feature crosses?

China is a vast country. It’s a continent of its own. It’s hard to say that what happens in one area will happen in another part of the country. Local culture, religious policy, the relationship between Christian churches and the religious bureau might differ across places.

I’ve heard that there are regions in which the relationship between the authorities and Christian congregations is more harsh. But I’ve never had to consider or compromise my artistic and architectural pursuits.

The crosses I’ve designed involve aesthetic and situational considerations. For instance, the Jinshan church cross is 70 meters high and looks like a simple cross with classic proportions. The surprise for Chinese Christians lies in its color.

Almost all Protestant churches today have a red cross on top of their spire—it’s quite chubby and made of plastic to be illuminated at night. Westerners often feel reminded of the Red Cross or hospital signs. So I opted against that color and the neon light illumination and proposed to have it in white to complement the purity of the church building below it.

Dirk U. MoenchShikai / INUCE
Dirk U. Moench

What were some Eastern and Western architectural principles that influenced the churches you designed?

One of the big ideas that I try to bring across is the very European notion that the church is a piece of public infrastructure. It’s part of the city, and it’s there to service the city visually but also spatially and functionally. Even though Christianity is a minority religion in China, a church building can still be appealing to a broader public. This idea has been received very favorably by the local congregations.

In the West, we think of a beautiful curved roof as an icon of Chinese architecture. But what is most genuine and central to the idea of Chinese spatial organization is the wall.

Traditionally, the Chinese city is composed of courtyard houses, which are fully enclosed by a wall. There will be a major gate, usually at the center of the south wall, which has decorative features and a little roof of its own, that serves to represent this unit, this house, this family, to the outside world. The wall is not a safety concern; it’s a millennia-old tradition.

When missionaries in China started to build churches there, they often acquired plots in the middle of a Chinese city that were once a courtyard house. So the idea of a wall or enclosure around a “Western” church is not entirely foreign, and this principle was continued.

Hence, the earliest contemporary churches that we have in China are all behind walls and have gates as well. The spatial thinking is very Chinese, while the actual church is more Western-inspired.

Now, I want to challenge this because the Chinese Christian communities that I have talked to do not see themselves as a protective minority anymore. They see themselves as a vital element of society that can contribute and help to make a better city, not just through charitable works but also in being a part of public, urban life.

How did you translate this refreshed understanding of Christian community into reality?

The Hua Xiang church in Fuzhou is one example. People call it “the pink church of Fuzhou.” It’s surrounded by high rises and shopping malls, and sits beside an old church built by Methodist missionaries in the 1930s.

Main Entrance to the Hua Xiang Church.Shikai / INUCE
Main Entrance to the Hua Xiang Church.

I was not the first architect that the community had consulted for this project. There were already several designs—a gothic church with two spire towers and another with a more Romanesque basilica look. The congregation was not very satisfied with these ideas because they looked “lost” and did not have a harmonious relationship with the city. At the same time, they were wondering about their mission and whether the new building should cater to older members or draw young people. What I said was that the answer is not either-or; it’s both-and. To attract young people, you have to give them a sense of historical depth. They need to know their foundation and what they are building upon.

We had to let go of the notion of a European-inspired ideal church, like a cross-shaped church with a tower, and instead take inspiration from the city’s heterogeneous and chaotic situation. Maybe this new church could help to establish positive relationships to the skyline or continue the pitched roof motif emblematic of Chinese architecture.

Instead of high walls and formal entrance gates, like in traditional Chinese architecture, we installed retractable barriers at access points to the church, which are hardly visible and stay open late into the night. There is ample greenery providing shade and generous outdoor seating for believers and tourists alike.

Your other church designs also take inspiration from the environment. Why is that important to you as a Christian and as an architect?

In Chinese cities, you see shops moving in and out, façades being redecorated to look fancier, louder, and more attractive than the neighbors. But a church design is more timeless and stable. It is an architectural mediator that can help to harmonize imbalances in the built environment or bring the beauty of the place into focus.

In this way, a church building has a dialectical relationship with its environment: It stands out and blends in.

Julong ChurchShikai / INUCE
Julong Church

For example, Julong is a newly developed town in the outskirts of Quanzhou, a port city in the southern province of Fujian. People who live there have come from all over the country. Making the Julong church into an ark or a haven, inspired by the idea of Peter as a rock on which Jesus will build his church (Matt. 16:18), sends a message of stability within the torment of a changing world.

Its location at the foot of Julong mountain also doesn’t just allow people to gaze at the beauty of nature; it’s a visual reference to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus went up a mountain to preach and teach.

Do you think beautiful church architecture contributes to spiritual practices like worship or prayer? Or is it a distraction?

It’s the age-old Protestant question you’re asking: Does formal beauty inspire and bring you closer to God or distract you from this? That question needs to be answered by the congregation. As an architect, you cannot create a place of worship that suits your personal inclinations or beliefs. You have to listen to what the community wants.

The interior of the Hua Xiang church is a very simple white space, with gently undulating upper gallery floors, a flat ceiling, and a reduced number of light fixtures. It’s a very classical, almost Reformed understanding of how a liturgical space should look.

But a large pipe organ, popular in North American churches in the second half of the 19th century, functions as the main feature of the stage. That was a wish from within the congregation, who wanted an element of continuation with their Methodist heritage.

Does that pipe organ inspire the sermon or inspire prayer? I don’t think so. But I do think that the music it creates does reestablish bonds to the very Christian forms of being together. The church appreciates that they feel closer to their own tradition through it.

Is there something you hope for visitors to these churches to take away about God and about Chinese Christianity?

As an architect, I don’t impose myself into what people should think about God. I am not here to protect a specific or single understanding of God. I plan and design the physical church, but the real church is the people inside, the pastors and brothers and sisters who preach and project and teach Christianity.

If they think that my architecture helps them to do all of these, then I’m happy. I do not think it’s appropriate for me to think further than that.

Church Life

Presidential Debates Can’t Help Us Face the Future

Character matters more than talking points in choosing a leader. And it’s hard to know what questions to ask about it.

Christianity Today June 28, 2024
Win McNamee / Staff / Getty

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

It used to be that watching two 80-year-old men argue about what to do in the Middle East might happen accidentally at McDonald’s at seven on a Saturday morning. Now, the whole world is watching because one of those two men will get the nuclear codes.

The presidential debates this year will have all sorts of implications for the country, but Christians should especially pay attention to what these events don’t do. The most important factors in choosing a leader aren’t the ones being debated.

The problem is not simply that presidential debates—and, increasingly, debates for lower offices—are entertainment driven, in ways that Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman warned us about. The moments most people look for in a debate are more like pro wrestling than rational discussion of qualifications and issues.

Plenty of people—from all over the political spectrum—are nervous about this year’s debates, but they’re not nervous that their candidate won’t have the right policy response. They are nervous that one candidate or the other might walk to the microphone and order the value meal with extra fries or fall down the steps of the platform. But there’s a deeper reason why debates—even in the best of situations—don’t help us as much as we think.

Debates tend to reinforce a fundamental problem with what we think we’re doing when we choose leaders. The problem is not that the debates aren’t focused enough on issues; it’s that we are choosing a leader to deal with issues that can’t possibly be asked about in a debate. That’s because the most critical questions facing any leader usually aren’t all that foreseeable.

Debate moderators asked John F. Kennedy about the “missile gap” with the Soviet Union and about Cuba, but they couldn’t peer into how he would deal with a crisis about offensive weapons in Cuba that might spark a nuclear war. Richard Nixon didn’t debate anyone in 1968 when running for president, but if he had, nobody would’ve thought to ask him if he would try to use the CIA to pressure the FBI to drop an investigation.

A debate stage couldn’t show how George W. Bush or Al Gore would respond to an attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Even if pandemic preparedness policy had been a question in the debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it would have been an abstract hypothetical, nothing like how decisions are really made about infected Americans on cruise ships or spurring on a fast development of a vaccine.

Many things in debates are more evident in hindsight than at the time. Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again” line with Jimmy Carter in 1980 was a preplanned talking point, but it really did demonstrate a basic leadership approach that characterized his presidency—an approach that his critics would dismiss as reading from cue cards but that most Americans would come to see as a genial steadiness. Donald Trump’s message from the debate stage to the white nationalist militia the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” was stunning at the time, but it takes on an entirely different vibe watching it after January 6, 2021.

In any given election, you aren’t voting for a set of abstract issues. From a Christian perspective, the role of the state is, ultimately, to “bear the sword” of maintaining justice and order (Rom. 13:4). In a democratic republic, the people are entrusting that sword to someone to wield it on their behalf.

That means electing leaders who are not just bundles of issues but rather those with the kind of character and temperament to be entrusted with nuclear codes, with the stability to make prudent decisions about sudden matters we can’t even predict right now.

Since that’s the case, sometimes it’s more important to see how candidates arrive at positions than what boxes they check off on a list of policy options. Sometimes it is as important to see how candidates articulate positions than to know what those positions actually are.

Even those who disagreed strongly with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal could see that his articulation of his vision—“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—was a benefit to the country when something happened that no one was asking about in 1932: how a commander in chief would rally a nation to respond to an attack by imperial Japan.

This has implications beyond the presidency, to the general question of how and on what basis we choose our leaders.

Despite the caricatures, we who believe character matters for, say, the presidency do not mistake a president for a pastor. The qualifications for any church office are different than those of a civic office—starting with the necessity of a living faith in Christ and an ability to teach doctrine and discipleship to others.

What’s held in common, though, is that any position of leadership—whether church ministry director or county supervisor—rests on more than just the ability to parrot the “right positions” on whatever issues are being argued about at the moment. In instructing the church how to choose leaders, the Holy Spirit devotes far more time to the needed character of a leader than to the things for which we fallen human beings typically look.

We are to look to the past and to the present of the potential leader’s life: Is this person quarrelsome? Does this person have a good reputation with outsiders? Does this person lead well in his own household? Is it someone demonstrated to be sober-minded and self-controlled, able to teach, gentle, not violent or argumentative or given to drunkenness or love of money? (1 Tim. 3:1–13). These things are not boxes to check off.

The requirements of secular leadership are different spiritually from those of a pastor, but that does not mean that only issues matter and character or temperament do not. Centurions and tax collectors could not excuse extortion or fraud because their work was “secular” (Luke 3:12–14). The biblical civil law does not apply to those outside the covenant of Old Testament Israel, but the Proverbs apply to everyone. What one can tell by private characteristics as well as how a person talks can reveal much about whether one is wise or a fool (Prov. 6:12–15).

Sometimes, in the ecclesial or civil realm, we are deceived. Someone seems to have the necessary integrity but fools us. That’s an awful situation, but it’s not nearly as awful as not even asking the important questions—much less not caring about them.

Presidential debates are of some value, but the real question is a much longer game, extending to the past—to the honesty, integrity, and gravity shown in candidates’ lives—and to the future—to how we might best predict the character traits, intuitions, and wisdom of this person in dealing with matters we can’t even imagine now.

Debates and forums can show us a little bit of that sometimes, but they can’t get at the most important things. Those things can’t be scripted out in a practice session or shared on TikTok. The most important matters just aren’t up for debate.

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

Ideas

Are Brazil’s Catholic Street Festivals Idolatry or Harmless Fun? Evangelicals Weigh In

Second only to Carnival, festivals for St. Anthony, St. John, and St. Peter pack the June calendar. Pastors debate if the Festas Juninas are folk celebrations or idol worship.

Quadrilha dancers in Brazil.

Quadrilha dancers in Brazil.

Christianity Today June 28, 2024
Marcelo Casal Jr / Agência Brasil

When it comes to festivals, the world knows Brazil best for Carnival, its raucous celebration of Mardi Gras, full of elaborate costumes, dancing on the street, and revelry.

But ask many Brazilians, and they’ll tell you they enjoy their June festivals even more. Originating from European pagans to celebrate the arrival of summer and call for a bountiful harvest (hence the fact that they fall during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer), these fests were later co-opted by the Catholic church under Festa Junina, or a set of holidays celebrating saints Anthony, John the Baptist, and Peter. Later, Portugal exported the holiday to colonial Brazil, which has since transformed the festivities into a multiweek celebration marked by eating canjica (a dessert made from corn that has the consistency of a thicker porridge) and pamonha (creamed corn cooked inside corn husks), decorating streets with colorful flags, and streaming forró and baião songs from speakers.

Traditionally, those street parties were part of broader Catholic celebrations that included Masses and processions accompanied by images of the saints. Devotees followed, and many used this time to pay off promises made to the saints, which included walking on their knees as a penance or making donations to the parish.

Despite its Christian heritage, like Carnival, many evangelicals have similarly scorned Festa Junina, deeming Roman Catholic devotion to saints as idolatry. While some say that the word Junina comes simply from the name of the month, Junho (June), others say it stems from Joanina and is a nod to Saint John the Baptist, consequently making it a form of hagiolatry (worship of saints). In fact, the most celebrated festival is named after him, on June 24.

Christians who do celebrate these festivals say the customs changed long ago and today reflect an appreciation of the sertanejo music, food, dancing, and way of life.

Although they are celebrated throughout the country, these festivals are most grandiose in the Northeast. A region prone to severe droughts, the festivities occur at the beginning of the rainy season and serve as a promise of prosperous days ahead.

CT invited five Brazilian evangelical pastors and leaders in Northeastern Brazil to weigh in on whether evangelicals should feel comfortable participating in the June festivities. Responses were edited for length and clarity and arranged from yes to no.

Marcos Fróes, pastor of Casa da Bênção, a Pentecostal church of Maranguape, Paulista, Pernambuco

These religious festivals in celebration of Catholic saints coincide with the harvest season. Thanking God for the harvest is not something new. The Jewish people already celebrated the Feast of Weeks or the harvest, Shavuot, between May and June. During this period, all of Israel would go to Jerusalem to celebrate and bring offerings. They would eat and remember God's promise of a land rich in milk and honey.

Celebrating the harvest as an act of God's kindness and mercy is not a sin when done with a grateful heart to the Lord. Just as we rejoice in December at Christmas for the coming of Jesus our Savior, in June we celebrate the provided sustenance, recalling our rural origins, regardless of whether the occasion also honors the June saints or the June festivities.

Ricardo Leite, youth pastor at the Primeira Igreja Batista of Juazeiro do Norte, Ceará

In past decades, the presence of evangelicals at Festa Junina was practically nonexistent. Those who did take part were generally viewed negatively by their fellow community members. However, in more recent years, their participation has become more common. Some churches are incorporating elements of these festivals into their own events (traditional foods and bonfires, for example), and many converts see no reason to stop participating in parties they used to go to.

When Paul wrote [his first letter] to the Corinthians, he dealt with a similar situation about engaging in a non-Christian culture. In chapter 10, he offered three important principles. First, he told the early church that the question of whether or not one should take part in the festivities wasn’t a question of lawfulness but of appropriateness (1 Cor 10:23). What message are we signaling? Second, Paul wanted to know whether participation would be edifying. Would God's people come out stronger and more like Christ? Third, would their participation glorify God (10:31)? That is, would the presence of Christians doing a given action exalt God above all else?

I would advise Christians that if their answer to any of the three questions is negative, their conscience is already strongly declaring that they shouldn’t take part in it.

Pedro Pamplona, pastor of Igreja Batista Filadélfia, Fortaleza, Ceará

My answer depends on what you mean by Festa Junina. There is a diversity of cultural manifestations of this festival today, and many of them no longer have any connection with religious elements. Where I live in the Northeast, our food, decorations, and music associated with this time of year have no clear religious connection.

Therefore, if the specific festival includes Catholic content (like Masses and processions), practices, or worldly and immoral aspects, I don't see the participation of evangelicals as advisable. We have important disagreements that need to be taken into account. But if the festivities are limited to food, flags, and clothing, I see no impediment for evangelicals. Some families, companies, and schools hold gatherings, and I don't consider them sinful.

Thiago Italo Rocha, assistant pastor at Igreja da Família, a reformed church in Santo Antônio de Jesus, Bahia

This long-awaited festival is, in short, a tribute to the Catholic saints. In this sense, it is undeniable that the entire festival originates from the Catholic tradition, but over time, it gained a certain air of syncretism. Given strong anti-Catholic sentiment in Pentecostal, neo-Pentecostal, and (independent) community churches, the answer seems to be a resounding no. But perhaps, in the light of the Bible, this answer is not so simple.

The apostle Paul, when dealing with various controversies in the church of the Corinthians, seems to appeal to conscience and love. Most of the time, Paul seems interested in preserving the conscience of Christian brothers and sisters and avoiding scandal in the church (1 Cor. 10.32). The apostle also seems to want to warn those who are strong in the faith not to make their freedom a stumbling block. In this context, Paul argues, it would be better to abstain in love so that your brother or sister in Christ, seeing your freedom, doesn't want to take it as a model and commit sin against his or her conscience.

I understand that the São João festival has become largely a commercial event, and in many places we don’t even see remnants of original Festas Juninas. Within this reality, where the music and atmosphere are extremely sexualized, my advice to Christians would be to avoid such places. However, when it comes to craft fairs and traditional food venues, those who are mature in their faith would have no problem participating. The only thing they should watch out for is that they do not exercise this freedom in such a way that “the weak” don’t sin.

Looking at such situations in the light of the gospel, the truth is that we have one God and everything needs to be done for his glory. “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). As Christians, we need to avoid extremes—first, from imposing legalism and, second, from toxic freedom, pride, and inability to empathize with others’ hardships.

Sávio Vinícius, pastor at Primeira Igreja Batista of Valença, Bahia

If you consider the Festas Juninas something related to Saint John, the biblical command not to drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons is undeniable (1 Cor. 10:14–22).

As a leader, based on the principles found in 1 Corinthians 6:12–13 (you have the right to do anything, but not everything is beneficial) and 1 Corinthians 8:13 (you should avoid any behavior that may lead a brother or sister into sin), I don’t think it’s appropriate to get involved, even if it isn’t a Saint John celebration, as participating can confuse people.

However, I see no problem in celebrating traditional foods, clothes, and forró that glorify God at other times of the year or in other places. The main goal is to live for his glory in all things (Col. 3:23–24).

Inflamed Passions, Itching Ears, and Other Pitfalls to Avoid While Watching Presidential Debates

How Christians can navigate the Trump-Biden showdown with discernment and love for neighbor.

Christianity Today June 27, 2024
Jim Bourg-Pool / Getty Images

As the 2024 election approaches, so too does our inexorable march toward presidential debates. And while the year’s first debate today takes place far earlier in the calendar than normal, this is far from a normal election.

Joe Biden, already the oldest president in American history, is facing criticism and questions about his readiness to lead and mental acuity. Donald Trump, also advanced in age, continues to spread unfounded accusations of electoral malfeasance in 2020 and, depending on the outcome, in 2024.

God’s people are called to love their neighbors and “seek the welfare of the city” (Jer. 29:7). One way we do this is to be informed and engaged in the contemporary political process. This means researching candidates for office, considering the ways our voting affects not just ourselves and our families but also our neighbors and fellow citizens, and, yes, at times tuning in to debates between candidates.

At their best, political debates highlight differences between candidates and give voters a clear choice when they cast their votes. Debates provide platforms for candidates to share not just specific policy proposals but also a broader vision for their community, state, and nation. This is consistent with the political science idea of “responsible party government,” in which political parties articulate an agenda that voters can reasonably expect from them should they win an election. Debates, in theory, afford candidates the same opportunities.

Unfortunately, debates usually fail to reach these goals. Instead of providing people with rich and substantive information to aid their inevitable voting, debates tend to devolve into scripted soundbites, attempts at “gotcha” moments, and unhelpful back-and-forth exchanges aimed at tearing down opponents. Rather than offering a positive vision of governance, debates too often yield the worst of our political impulses and a limited, weakened understanding of what politics ought to be.

These dynamics, combined with a historically polarized electorate and the dynamics of yet another Biden-Trump showdown, could mean this year’s debates will be even less fruitful than normal. People who are most excited about debates tend to be the most politically attentive, meaning they have probably made up their minds going into a given debate. Not much could happen that could convince them to alter their evaluations of the candidates, particularly in an election like this one where the candidates have been in the public eye for decades. Political junkies see debates, warts and all, as vehicles for reinforcing the positives of their preferred candidate and the negatives of the opposition.

Others who are exhausted by the political day-to-day may be unlikely to tune in at all. Why would somebody turned off by the normal ebb and flow of politics and partisanship willingly spend a couple of hours experiencing the extremes of today’s political environment? Just as folks who relish every moment of these debates are unlikely to change their minds because of what is said, those who don’t watch for a second will not either.

So do debates matter? Perhaps. Research shows that a very small group of people—around 1 in 10, it seems—goes into an election season sincerely questioning how they will vote, including for president.

Given that big elections are often decided by small margins in key states, a swing of a few percent here or there could be the difference. Seen in this light, the moments we will remember from this year’s debates might affect how things shake out in November after all.

So what are we to do as we approach yet another season of political debates? Should we tune out entirely, rejecting the essence of these debates as sowing conflict and division in our relationships and communities? Should we begrudgingly pay attention, staying informed while maintaining a disengaged posture toward the process? Should we enthusiastically tune in, consuming all we can about the debates and lending our comments and evaluations to social media and our neighbors?

One can be a faithful Christian and tune out from what amounts to spectacle and political theater. At the same time, enjoying these spectacles is not indicative of a weak or immature faith. What matters is the posture and perspective we bring with us in this arena. Just as Paul clarified that eating meat offered to idols was a potential stumbling block for some yet not inherently sinful, so too could a political debate be a source of difficulty for some Christians but not others.

With this in mind, here are three suggestions for approaching the debates with a renewed mind (Rom. 12:2):

Know your tendencies and plan accordingly.

For those who tend to approach politics in a combative way, seeking to win above all else, practice watching these debates with an emphasis on humility and a willingness to learn from perceived opponents. For those who tend to approach politics cynically, considering the political world to be hopelessly corrupted, it might help to watch these debates with an eye toward how our fallen politics can be an avenue for loving our neighbors.

Prioritize positivity.

Some of us may have a preferred candidate going into these debates and believe that the other candidate is hopelessly lost in terms of his goals for government. But this does not require negativity or hostility toward the opposition. In watching these debates, try to identify something positive from the candidate you oppose—or, if you’re a “pox on both their houses” person, look for positive takeaways from both candidates. Neither Biden nor Trump is the personification of evil; each is a fallen person who is made in God’s image. We should treat them as such.

Practice discernment and seek truth.

Most citizens shouldn’t have to carry the burden of fact-checking the hundreds of claims coming out of these debates. But you can practice healthy skepticism in the spirit of biblical discernment when reading others’ treatments of the debates. Did Joe Biden really seem to be wearing an earpiece feeding him answers? Did Donald Trump really seem to be on stimulants or other drugs to boost his energy?

Activists will often spread falsehoods to build or fit narratives. Christians should take claims such as these—particularly those seemingly designed to inflame partisan passions and appeal to “itching ears” (2 Tim. 4:3)—with a grain of salt.

Ultimately, as we set out on what will likely be an arduous season of political contests and debates, we should prepare ourselves in the same way we ought to live in our fallen world: with the mind of Christ, embodying a spirit of discernment, graciousness, and love that can only come from him.

Daniel Bennett is an associate professor of political science at John Brown University and assistant director at the Center for Faith and Flourishing. He is the author of Uneasy Citizenship: Embracing the Tension in Faith and Politics.

Church Life

Rites of Passage Can Help Boys Become Men

Jesus’ initiation in Jerusalem can guide American churches in raising Christian men.

Christianity Today June 27, 2024
Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash / Pexels

Twin crises afflict contemporary America: The Great Dechurching and The End of Men, as the titles of recent books label them. Put briefly: Many churches fail to lead young people into Christian maturity, while contemporary culture fails to bring boys into mature manhood.

We cannot solve either crisis without solving both, together. And we have resources for addressing these crises together—time-honored, transcultural resources attested in Scripture, manifested in the church, and affirmed by contemporary research into adolescent formation.

While “the great dechurching” is a crisis for girls as much as for boys, the overall challenges they face differ. As Richard Reeves shows, girls are outpacing boys in schools and, increasingly, in the workplace and in general health. American girls face challenges no less severe, but they are different.

In asking how all of us, especially our boys, can grow into Christian maturity, we should start by considering how our Lord left his boyhood behind in order to be about his Father’s business.

When Jesus was 12 years old, Luke’s gospel tells us, his family went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover, as they did every year. “After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem” (Luke 2:41–43).

This is the sixth time Luke describes Jesus as either “the baby” or “the child”—he never calls him just plain “Jesus” up to this point. But then, at the end of the story, we read, “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man” (2:52, emphasis added).

Over the course of three days, Jesus leaves his boyhood behind. As Jason Craig points out in Leaving Boyhood Behind, Jesus does so through a rite of passage.

As Arnold van Gennep shows in his time-tested classic, rites of passage involve three stages. First, a boy is temporarily removed from the domestic family. Second, he is initiated into manhood through challenge, often with a funereal quality—the boy must die for the man to emerge. Finally, the emerging young man is assimilated into a group of peers and an adult vocation.

Jesus’s youthful temple visit bears the unmistakable marks of each stage.

After Jesus slips away from his parents, they travel a full day’s journey before they realize he is missing (evidently Mary and Joseph were not helicopter parents). They seek him “among their relatives and friends” before turning back to Jerusalem to look for him (vv. 44–45).

After three days, they finally find Jesus sitting in the temple courts “among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions” (v. 46). Luke doesn’t tell us what Jesus has been eating or where he’s been sleeping, but there he is.

“Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers,” Luke writes. His parents were also “astonished”—and exasperated! His mother addresses him with a classic mixture of parental relief and frustration: “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you” (vv. 47–48).

Jesus, for his part, seems surprised. “Why were you searching for me?” he asks. “Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” (v. 49, NKJV). Although Jesus not so subtly reminds them of his divine paternity, this is not passive-aggressive preteen rebellion with a divine spin. He returns to Nazareth with them and “was obedient to them” (v. 51). He perfectly obeys, and he also slips away to be about his Father’s business in the temple.

And it is in being about his heavenly Father’s business that Jesus ceases to be a boy.

More specifically, he is initiated into his Father’s business through a rite of passage: He is removed from his domestic sphere, initiated into manhood through challenge and a kind of death, and then assimilated into an adult vocation and community.

The removal is obvious—this is the first time Jesus is separated from his parents in Luke’s gospel. The second stage, initiation into manhood through challenge, shows up in at least three ways.

First, Jesus spends three days in the big city fending for himself as a 12-year-old boy. Second, Mary and Joseph find Jesus participating in rabbinic discourse in the temple, essentially a form of intellectual combat. Imagine a 12-year-old wandering into a heated dispute in a seminary’s faculty lounge and jumping into the fray.

Most significantly, Luke frames the story as a foreshadowing of Christ’s death and resurrection. Throughout his gospel, Luke associates being lost with death and being found with life—Christ came “to seek and to save the lost” (19:10); the prodigal son “was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found” (15:32). It is no coincidence that Jesus goes missing for three days in Jerusalem before being found alive. The boy has died. The young man is emerging.

Finally, Jesus is assimilated into a set of peers and an adult vocation. This brief story already points toward the major themes of his ministry. He is found amid the teachers of Scripture—he will be the authoritative teacher of Scripture. He is in the temple—he will eventually return both to cleanse it and to predict its destruction because his flesh is the true temple, the dwelling place of God with man.

“I must be about My Father’s business.” The word translated as must here—“it is necessary”—is one of Luke’s favorites, usually communicating messianic necessity: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (24:26, ESV). Being about his Father’s business leads Jesus slowly, surely, inevitably back to Jerusalem, where he will once again go missing in Jerusalem for three days before being found alive.

Removal. Initiation. Assimilation.

Practically every culture has ushered adolescent boys into emerging manhood through rites of passage. Not only Christ, but a host of Old Testament figures. Consider the stories of Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, and David—all feature removal, initiation through challenge, and assimilation. In fact, coming-of-age stories, both ancient and modern, often feature the same threefold pattern.

That’s because adolescence itself is a time of passage. Puberty removes a boy from his childhood, and he only exits adolescence when he has achieved some degree of settled adulthood. Rites of passage reflect these underlying realities, and they powerfully answer to the needs of adolescent formation.

The Roman Catholic theologian and educator Luigi Giussani says that, until adolescence, parents are handing on a tradition to their children—“an explanatory hypothesis of reality,” the meaning of life, and the shape of human flourishing. If mom and dad tell their five-year-old child one thing and the whole world says something else, mom and dad tend to win out.

This is not the case with a 15-year-old, as most parents know. That’s because, as Giussani puts it, adolescents are testing this tradition. Parenting adolescents is stressful because adolescents are quite literally “stress testing” the parental hypothesis. They’re asking, “Is it true? Does it work?” Parental answers no longer suffice, because it is precisely those answers that are being tested.

During adolescence, parental words matter less than parental examples. Do parents live up to their words? And parental words begin to matter less than those of peers and nonparental adult mentors, who, along with the broader culture, constitute the testing ground that will either confirm or deny the parental hypothesis. The upshot is that parents (and churches and schools) have a deepening responsibility to curate their adolescents’ context—by deciding on churches, youth groups, schools, extracurriculars, and so forth.

But there is a Catch-22. Just when it is more important than ever to curate context, it is likewise critical to give adolescents more independence, responsibility, and freedom than ever before, and for the same reason—an adolescent is moving out of the home and into the world. Parents must let their children test the hypothesis in order to leave childhood behind.

Giussani says failing to test the hypothesis in adolescence results in one of two outcomes: either an uncritical fundamentalism or an uncritical cynicism. Having failed to test the tradition’s worth, one either clings to it blindly, immaturely, fearfully—or one blindly, immaturely, and angrily rejects the tradition, refusing to consider its claims at all.

Successfully testing the tradition requires maximal curation of context and maximal independence—at one and the same time. American society gives teenagers neither. We are perhaps the first culture in world history in which a 17-year-old boy’s daily routine and responsibilities are more like that of his 11-year-old little brother than his 20-year-old brother who is off at college or working and living independently. The exception—the one way in which we practice “free-range parenting”—is in giving our youth free reign to digitally explore our incoherent if not malignant culture.

To riff on a common line in educational circles, our culture is perfectly designed to achieve the results we are getting. Our challenge, collectively, is to restore the conditions necessary for healthy adolescent formation.

The answer for boys rests in part on recovering traditional rites of passage. When we consciously remove a boy from the domestic sphere, purposefully separating him from his childhood; when we initiate him into manhood through challenge; when we assimilate him into an adult vocation and community—we are honoring the givenness of his adolescent development.

This is possible but not easy. Honoring rites of passage means giving emerging young men adult responsibilities and adult consequences. Responsibility requires risk.

It also requires a mature adult community. Like any liturgy, rites of passage are effective only insofar as they reflect reality and are authorized by a community. This is perhaps the greatest challenge, because no family can do it alone. Boys and girls alike need real Christian community and real Christian culture.

Every family, every church, and every school must consider how to incorporate these principles. At the boarding school I am helping to launch, we invite high school boys to live alongside faculty families under a temporary rule of digital poverty. Our curriculum pairs an education in the classics with small-scale agriculture and skilled trades—an embodied formation with real work and the responsibility that comes from growing your own food and building your own buildings.

We chose our rural 176-acre campus to give boys freedom to explore God’s good creation and as a fitting setting for the challenges of strength and endurance that come from hiking the Blue Ridge Mountains, playing rugby, and splitting the wood that will warm them through the winter. We plan to build a beautiful chapel at the heart of campus to order our lives—literally and symbolically—around the life of the church.

Ultimately, rites of passage foreshadow, anticipate, and echo the true rite of passage: baptism. The baptismal liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer specifies that, just before baptizing, “the Minister shall take the Child into his arms.” The child is thus removed from the literal arms of the domestic family before being initiated into God’s family by being “buried with Christ” in baptism and raised to walk in “newness of life.” After baptism, the minister declares, “We receive this Child into the congregation of Christ’s flock.”

The gathered community, standing and facing the baptismal font, is exhorted to pray “that this Child may lead the rest of his life according to this beginning,” which means living out in daily life the reality of initiation into the family of God—taking up one’s cross daily, crucifying the flesh and its affections, and living in holiness through ever-deepening conversions into Christ.

We can only invite our children into such a life if we ourselves exhibit the life of Christ individually and communally. We must be about our Father’s business. We must increase in wisdom and in favor with God and man. As we grow into full maturity as Christian men and women—“unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13, KJV)—we must do so together in community.

Mark Perkins is chaplain and assistant headmaster of St. Dunstan’s Academy in Roseland, Virginia.

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