School Screens Are Worst for the Least of These

Contributor

Many children are adversely affected by laptops and tablets in the classroom. Some, like my son, are affected more.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash / Getty

Halfway through fifth grade, the school district issued a laptop to our son. Up to then, his “accelerated learning” classroom had been a pretty good fit. He had a great teacher, dynamic peers, and a pace that challenged and stimulated him.

But with the laptop, our son’s learning immediately went off-track. He browsed the internet in class, played online games, fiddled around with display settings, changed his desktop photo, and then changed the photo again. His grades, behavior, and organizational skills suffered. Even after his 504 educational plan for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was adjusted, he had less and less success in school.

Our son is an insightful kid who’s in constant motion, as prone to getting locked into classic literature as arranging his toy cars. He joined our family through foster care and adoption and is, as his fourth-grade teacher informed us, “twice exceptional,” possessing both significant capabilities and significant impairments.

I’ve long observed that children like him, with backgrounds of early adversity, develop deep sensitivities to things that others do not particularly notice. In so many cases, their responses are the canary in the coal mine, alerting us to something important that will soon affect everyone.

Classroom tech is something important—and as another school year begins, parents and pundits, organizations and educators are hearing the canary’s song on school-issued laptops and tablets. Screen-based learning, it turns out, has not proven particularly effective, negatively affecting students by interrupting their focus, decreasing their attention spans, and desensitizing their brains’ reward systems. One study found that about 13 percent of US teens have viewed pornography on a school-owned device during school. Even when conventional social media platforms are blocked by internet filters, laptops open up channels of cyberbullying through Microsoft Teams, YouTube, and Google Docs.

These realities impact all students. But for kids like my son—for the 11 percent of school-aged children with ADHD or for children suffering the lingering impacts of trauma—screens have even more severe effects. Their conditions make them more susceptible to developing the attention fragmentation, sleep deprivation, social deprivation, and addiction that psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies as the major risks of a high-tech childhood.

Thus, screen-based learning creates an educational disparity for children who are especially vulnerable through no fault of their own. My son’s disability meant that he paid a higher price for the district’s laptop decision relative to his peers—and there seemed to be no remedy. His school was unwilling to accommodate off-screen learning for him, telling me, “It’s just not possible.”

Christians should want to address this. We’re called to cherish children, helping them avoid whatever causes them to stumble (Matt. 18:6). We also serve a God who prioritizes the needs of the most vulnerable community members (Ps. 68:5; Matt. 19:14; 25:40). By advocating for school-tech policies that accommodate disability interventions and establish loving guardrails, we take a stand against the “war on the weak.” We flourish as Christ followers, becoming his hands and feet in specific commitments to the least of these.

Our Christian advocacy on this issue also offers an opportunity to understand anew God’s enduring intention for human flourishing. Through the struggles that our son and other vulnerable children have with screens, we reaffirm something marvelous about our created human nature and the Lord’s delight over us (Zeph. 3:17).

In our son’s encounter with classroom tech, it became impossible to ignore how essentially creatural he was—how important it was for him to learn in an embodied, relational environment. Already his childhood trauma—connected to his ADHD—had led him to struggle with attachment, a word that’s always felt too sterile to describe the rich sense of mattering. Babies matter first to their parents, through eye contact and loving touch; children who experience disruption or pain during their formative years develop “disordered attachment.” That intrinsic sense of being unique, cherished, and secure within loving relationships, that inner conviction of worth and innate sense of personal security, is broken.

Screens can exacerbate this brokenness for kids who already experience it. And screens also seem to break something in all of us, exerting a pull out of our God-ordained personhood and into a nonpersoned, disembodied, and nonreal world of missing attachments.

Good learning takes not more solo time in front of a screen but rich relationships that span the spectrum of intimacy. Close family is important, but so are peer, teacher, and public relationships. Good learning means we stop scrolling and involve our full bodies, moving in space and time.

Our family had a very rare opportunity to enroll our son in a school where every tech tool is “ruthlessly evaluated” before being used in the classroom. Students have scheduled sessions in a computer lab for writing, attend classes like website development, and can use a graphing calculator for some math problems but have no access to an “under-regulated digital world.” The school makes participation in class and extracurriculars independent of individualized screens as much as possible. Our son has wrestled with his attention and organizational skills, found decent academic success, and further developed his gifts.

A retreat from high-tech learning might not be a retreat at all. It might be an opportunity to affirm that learning apart from personal interactions is bankrupt for everyone, not just students like my son. It might be a chance for God’s people to shape education that honors children’s need for attachment as they grow and flourish. In that shaping, we refer back to a God who exists in eternal relationship, a God who took on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and who provides for all our embodied needs.

Wendy Kiyomi is an adoptive parent, scientist, and writer in Tacoma, Washington, whose work on faith, adoption, and friendship has also appeared in Plough Quarterly, Image, Mockingbird, and The Englewood Review of Books. She is a 2023 winner of the Zenger Prize.

- More from Wendy Kiyomi

Ideas

Shielded from Truth at Our Own Expense

Justin Giboney

Contributor

The Bible consistently tells us we must examine ourselves and accept correction, but our culture is forgetting the art of fair critique.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Lightstock

Around my sophomore year of college, I approached my African American History professor, Dennis C. Dickerson, to inquire about my performance. Honestly, I was fishing for a compliment. I spoke frequently in class and expected his praise. And since he was one of a limited number of Black professors on campus, I thought he’d flatter me as a show of solidarity given our shared identity.

He did not. In no uncertain terms, Dickerson told me I was a poor communicator and needed to tighten up my half-cocked and convoluted arguments.

I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I was devastated. I was so shocked that I lost a couple nights of sleep. I’d assumed I was a proficient communicator, but he’d candidly burst my bubble. He exposed that I was more verbose than artful, more opinionated than informed. (I’m sure my detractors will say his assessment is still true.)

That was the most important and formative moment in my academic career and remains one of the most valuable moments of my life. As André 3000 said, his words were hard “to swallow. But so is cod liver oil.”

Once the sting of the truth subsided, I saw his critique was right. His reproach has rung in my ears for years, and I’ve become determined to communicate more concisely and persuasively. I don’t believe I could’ve learned the lesson so well without his frankness. A sugarcoated message wouldn’t have had the same impact.

Dickerson’s straightforward correction was the method of many of my elders. My grandparents’ generation had a way of bluntly letting you know when you were in the wrong. It was more than tough love. It was wise guidance that demanded humility and self-examination in the listener.

Both are necessary for self-awareness and growth. But in too many circles today, candor is frowned upon. And pointed critiques, no matter how truthful, are prohibited. We’ve expanded the definitions of concepts like harm and victim blaming to include anything that causes embarrassment or guilt. The question now is how a comment will make one feel, not whether it is right or wrong.

In some contexts, your social location can protect you from all correction. It has become acceptable to disallow candid critique of entire groups of people.

We identify an enemy—the “woke” for some, “cisgender males” for others—and imagine them as the source of all that is mean and evil. No one from these groups could possibly have anything to contribute to our betterment, we tell each other. We’re good, of course. And even if we’re not completely good, it’s only because they’ve forced us to be bad to survive. We parade around in our façades, shouting this false narrative to exalt ourselves while ignoring or trying to censor those who dissent.

It’s not only the commentary of outsiders that we are quick to malign. Sometimes we also scorn the unflattering appraisals of people inside our own tribes. Any conservative Christian who critiques Christian conservatism will quickly be branded a phony and a sellout—as if there’s no possibility that a culture that got slavery and Jim Crow wrong might also have more recent errors. I’ve seen the same basic pattern play out among Black social media influencers when someone questions whether an aspect of the culture is healthy or seeks in-group accountability.

This pattern is in partisan politics, too, where supporters of candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris reject even friendly scrutiny—which is not just unreasonable but undemocratic. The pushback I’ve received from fellow Christians for scrutinizing political candidates has left me to wonder, like Paul in his letter to the Galatians, “Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” (4:16).

Of course, discomfort with criticism isn’t always unfounded. In America, women and racial minorities have too often been the recipients of malicious and unfair judgments. They’ve been measured by discriminatory scales and called unfit based on arbitrary norms. This is what happens when critique is disconnected from relationship and compassion, and it’s wise to be skeptical of critique from those who’ve shown us neither fairness nor love.

Still, that very important reality does not put anyone above or below fair and constructive criticism—especially not those running for office. The Bible consistently tells us we must examine ourselves, both individually and collectively (2 Cor. 13:5; Lam. 3:40). What does good reproof look like in practice?

I’ve found a model worth imitating in Nannie Helen Burroughs, who is the subject of two books from Jasmine L. Holmes and Kelisha B. Graves. Both have given me a greater appreciation for the art of cultural critique as Burroughs practiced it.

An advocate for civil rights and women’s rights, Burroughs was also an educator, orator, and devout Christian. She dedicated her life to bettering her people and America more broadly through social action and forthright commentary. She didn’t pander to white America, nor did she pander to Black America.

Burroughs’s work reflected the love of Jesus, and her words could cut like a two-edged sword. She told the white American church it needed to stop using the Bible to perpetuate lies. She told Black elites to stop separating themselves from and looking down on common people.

Burroughs would never have accepted the dangerous notion that her people—or any group—were without value or without their own cultural pathologies. She had the moral knowledge to understand that a love which only affirmed and coddled was a lesser love. She knew that when coupled with relationship and self-sacrifice, piercing words can liberate us from ignorance of our own faults.

Burroughs earned the credibility to critique through her sacrifices for the people she was critiquing. And if she could constructively scrutinize her own people in a time of great oppression, then Christians of all ideologies and races can do the same. We must have the courage to critique our own cultures and the humility to accept the corrections of others. The people we love cannot grow and thrive without self-examination, and neither can we.

We must “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15, NLT) and reject the pride that lures us into rejecting good and fair critique—whatever its source. We are shielded from truth at our own expense.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the coauthor of Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.

- More from Justin Giboney

Books

Excerpt

God at the Bottom of the Glass

Francis S. Collins

An excerpt from “The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust” on discovering the hand of God in the science of his creation.

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

As a child I had no formal religious training. My parents were not opposed to faith, but they did not find it particularly relevant to daily life.

At age five, I was sent to a local Episcopal church to sing in the boys’ choir so that I could learn music. I learned to love the hymns, but the theology washed over me without leaving any discernible residue. I can still play most of those hymns by heart on the piano—yet for the most part, I have trouble remembering the words because they had little impact on me.

As a child and adolescent, I had occasional moments of a strange longing for something that might be called spiritual, oftentimes inspired by a musical experience. But I couldn’t put it into words. Much later I learned to recognize this as a potential glimpse of the eternal, something described by C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy. But at the time, I had no framework for interpreting such experiences.

Going on to college and graduate school in physical chemistry, I lost any glimmers of spiritual interest and essentially became an atheist. I was unwilling to accept anything as having meaning or consequence if it couldn’t be measured scientifically. That of course denied the very possibility of anything outside of nature.

My adopted worldview thus presupposed that materialism is all there is. That in turn rendered such questions as “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and “Is there a God?” irrelevant. In its exclusionary stance, this philosophical view was actually not science—this was “scientism,” although I did not recognize it at the time.

But then I underwent a transition in my professional plans, moving from a focus on basic questions in chemistry and physics to an interest in life science and enrolling in medical school. I found the study of the human body fascinating on scientific grounds, and it was harder to keep those deeper questions about the meaning of life at bay when I found myself dealing with life and death on a daily basis.

I could see that many of the patients I was assigned to were facing the end of their lives and that our medical interventions were unlikely to save them for long. Some of them were angry, some depressed, but some who had strong faith in God seemed oddly at peace.

One afternoon, an elderly woman with advanced heart disease shared her Christian faith with me, explaining in deeply personal ways how her faith in Jesus provided her with a sense of comfort as she prepared to die. I was silent, awkwardly not knowing what to say.

But then, in a moment when time seemed to stand still, she looked directly at me and asked, “Doctor, what do you believe?” With an intense and unexpected flush of discomfort, I realized I had just been asked the most important question of my whole life.

Struggling to provide an answer, I knew that down deep I had nothing to say. I stammered something like “I really don’t know,” saw her look of surprise, and ran from the room.

This interaction tormented me over the next few days. I still thought atheism was the only rational option for a thinking person, but then why did her question make me so uncomfortable?

I realized that I had arrived at atheism without considering whether there might be evidence for other alternatives—something that a scientist is not supposed to do. I knew a few friends and professors who were Christians. While I assumed they must all have been brainwashed about this as children, I still wondered whether there was some explanation for how such scientifically minded people could hold ideas about God in the same brains that were studying biochemical pathways or cardiac surgery.

So, I began a search of books and people to try to understand this mystery. Through the assistance of a pastor who lived down the road, that search brought me to a little book by C. S. Lewis called Mere Christianity.

As I turned the pages, I realized with considerable alarm that my atheist arguments were laughably superficial. One by one, they were demolished by Lewis, an Oxford don who had also once been an atheist. Lewis anticipated my objections at every turn.

He helped me understand how atheism suffers from the arrogance of asserting a universal negative (again, something that scientists aren’t supposed to do). His logic also helped me see that atheism presents a colder, more sterile, and more impoverished view of humanity. Lewis led me to consider, for the first time, the true significance of good and evil.

He described something I knew from experience but hadn’t really thought much about: the universal human experience of being called to be moral creatures, though we all know that we regularly fail. Purely naturalistic explanations for morality (for example, the argument that it somehow has improved our chances for successful reproduction over many millennia) seem to account for some of this, but they fail to explain examples of sacrificial actions that we humans consider truly noble—the ministry of Mother Teresa, the legions of people volunteering for the Peace Corps or Habitat for Humanity, or countless other individual acts of radical altruism. Was this a signpost to God?

Lewis also opened my eyes to considering experiences he called “joy” that I had dismissed—those rare moments, often inspired by the beauty of music or nature, when I had a glimpse of something profound, a sense of longing I could not name, a piercing ache that was somehow more satisfying than any earthly happiness but gone too soon. I recognized those in myself. Was this another signpost?

Additionally, I became aware that science itself provides pointers to a Creator. Examining the data from multiple different perspectives, physicists now tell us unequivocally that there was an initial start to our universe around 13.8 billion years ago, where out of nothingness came this unimaginable explosion of matter and energy. This so-called Big Bang cries out for answers to the questions “How did that happen? What came before that?” But I was stymied.

Nature has not been observed to create itself. If there is to be an answer, therefore, it would seem to require a force outside of nature—a “supernatural” force. However, to resolve the dilemma of the origin of the universe, this Creator would have to be unconstrained by space and time. Otherwise, the next question would be “Who created the Creator?”

The more I looked at how our universe has been put together, the more amazed I became at the evidence for an intelligent Creator. As a scientist, I had studied and admired the elegant physical laws that govern matter and energy. These were simple, even beautiful, mathematical representations of scientific truth. But why should the universe have such properties?

As I further explored these laws, I learned something even more stunning—that the universe is precisely tuned to allow something interesting to happen after the Big Bang. Go with me here for a minute. The mathematical laws that govern matter and energy all include constants whose actual value cannot be derived by theory; you just have to measure them. They are what they are.

Take gravity, for instance. Gravity has a very specific, measurable, universal force. (Don’t worry about the exact number, but here it is, just to show you how specific it is: 6.674 × 10⁻¹¹ N⋅m²/kg².) Gravity made it possible after the Big Bang for matter to coalesce into stars, galaxies, planets, and ultimately us.

But what would happen if the value of that gravitational constant were just a little different? Here’s the stunning answer: If it were just one part in 10¹⁴ (that’s 1 with 14 zeros) stronger or weaker, there would be no stars, galaxies, planets—and hence no possibility of life.

It’s not just gravity that has this knife-edge fine-tuning to allow for an interesting universe. All the other major constants—the speed of light, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the mass of an electron, and several others—that determine the physical properties of matter and energy have precisely the value they need for us (or any other complex life form) to be here.

This can’t just be good luck. Even the atheist Stephen Hawking allowed that “the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” Either these parameters were set by a Creator, or we are forced to consider the possible existence of an infinite number of alternative universes with different values of these constants.

Because we are here, we are in the one (or one of the very few?) where it all worked out. Scientists tell us that it is extremely unlikely that we will ever be able to observe the existence of these other hypothetical universes. Furthermore, their postulated but unproven existence does not solve the problem of how these universes all got started and why there is something instead of nothing. Given these options, I had to conclude that the Creator hypothesis was profoundly more compelling than the atheist alternative.

Ultimately, I seem to have lived out the predictions of a quote attributed to the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, the author of the famous uncertainty principle: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” I had reached the bottom of the glass.

Francis Collins is a physician scientist. He founded the BioLogos Foundation, led the Human Genome Project, served as director of the US National Institutes of Health, and leads an initiative to eliminate hepatitis C in the United States. He is the author, most recently, of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust.

Excerpted from the book THE ROAD TO WISDOM by Francis S. Collins. Copyright © 2024. Available from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group Inc., New York, NY, USA. All rights reserved.

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News

Wire Story

Half of Pastors Plan to Vote for Trump, Nearly a Quarter Wouldn’t Say

Aaron Earls - Lifeway Research

The former president receives the most support from Pentecostal, Baptist, and nondenominational leaders.

Dallas pastor and Trump evangelical adviser Robert Jeffress

Suzanne Cordeiro / Getty Images

Like other Americans, pastors are deciding who they’ll vote for in the November election. Compared to previous elections, however, they’re much more hesitant to share their preference.

Almost all US Protestant pastors (97%) plan to vote in the 2024 presidential election, according to a Lifeway Research study conducted August 8–September 3, 2024. But almost a quarter (23%) refused to answer the question of whom they’ll cast their ballot for. Few felt the same hesitancy in 2020 (4%) or 2016 (3%).

Still, among those who plan to vote and shared their preference, 50 percent say former president Donald Trump is their choice, while a quarter (24%) back Vice President Kamala Harris and 23 percent are undecided. No third-party candidate garnered more than 1 percent support.

“We ask pastors about many things going on in the culture today, and they are willing to provide their opinion. However, the growing number of pastors unwilling to respond with their voting intentions shows how sensitive or divisive politics has become in some churches,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research.

The 2024 voting preferences are similar to those during the leadup to the 2020 election, when 53 percent of US Protestant pastors said they planned to vote for Trump, 21 percent for Joe Biden, and 22 percent were undecided. In 2016, 40 percent of pastors were still undecided in September, while 32 percent supported Trump, and 19 percent planned to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Currently, pastors are less likely to be solidly supportive of either major party candidate than their congregants, according to a Pew Research study. Around 3 in 5 US Protestants (61%) say they would vote for or lean toward voting for Trump if the election were held today, while 37 percent would choose Harris.

Self-identified evangelical pastors are more likely to vote for Trump (61%), while half of mainline Protestant pastors (50%) say they support Harris. African American pastors are among the most likely to say they plan to vote for Harris (71%) and among the least likely to back Trump (5%). Pastors under 45 are among the least likely to support Trump (41%).

Denominationally, Pentecostal (65%), Baptist (64%), non-denominational (64%), Restorationist movement (55%) and Lutheran pastors (48%) are among the most likely to plan to cast their ballot for Trump, while Methodist (52%) and Presbyterian/Reformed pastors (44%) are among the most likely to choose Harris.

Half of US Protestant pastors (50%) say they are either a registered member or consider themselves to be a part of the Republican party. One in 5 (18%) are Democrats, and 25 percent say they’re independent.

Evangelical pastors are more likely than mainline pastors to be Republicans (64 percent v. 30%), while mainline are more likely to be Democrats (35 percent v. 8%). Specifically, Baptist (67%), Pentecostal (67%), nondenominational (67%) and Restorationist movement pastors (57%) are among the most likely to identify as Republican. Methodist (36%), Presbyterian/Reformed (36%) and Lutheran pastors (25%) are among the most likely to say they’re Democrats.

Among Republican pastors, 78 percent support Trump. Among Democratic pastors, 85 percent back Harris.

“Out of all the descriptors of pastors, their own political party preference is the best predictor of how they will vote,” said McConnell. “Denominational groups often lean one way politically, but pastors must minister alongside many clergy who don’t share their political views. The same is true within their own congregations. In a culture that increasingly doesn’t want to tolerate people with different political views, pastors lead churches that strive for unity centered on their faith.”

From a list of 11 characteristics, a majority of pastors say 10 are important in deciding how to cast their vote. Around 4 in 5 say they are looking for a candidate with the ability to maintain national security (85%), the ability to protect religious freedom (84%), the position on foreign policy (83%), the ability to improve the economy (83%), the position on immigration (81%), the position on abortion (80%) and personal character (79%).

Three in 4 (75%) say likely Supreme Court nominees are important. Around 7 in 10 are looking for the ability to address racial injustice (71%) and the position on the size and role of government (70%). Fewer (38%) say the ability to address climate change is an important factor in how they vote.

When forced to choose the most important factor, 24 percent say personal character, 18 percent say the candidate’s position on abortion, 16 percent say the ability to protect religious freedom and 12 percent say the ability to improve the economy. Every other issue is the top priority of 4 percent or fewer pastors.

“Pastors are not single-issue voters. They care deeply about where presidential candidates stand on many issues,” said McConnell. “There are moral dimensions to all of the characteristics that could be selected, and pastors did not all pick the same characteristic as most important.”

Pastors voting for Trump are among the most likely to say an important issue in their voting decision is the ability to protect religious freedom (96%), the ability to maintain national security (95%), the ability to improve the economy (94%), the position on abortion (93%), the position on immigration (92%) and the size and role of government (89%).

Those voting for Harris are among the most likely to say they’re looking for a candidate with personal character (96%), the ability to address racial injustice (92%) and the ability to address climate change (91%).

Evangelical pastors are more likely than their mainline counterparts to say their primary vote-determining issue is the candidate’s position on abortion (22% vs. 12%). Mainline pastors are more likely than evangelical ones to say their top issue is the personal character of the candidate (35% vs. 17%).

Pastors planning on voting for Trump are the most likely to place as their top priority the candidate’s position on abortion (29%) and ability to protect religious freedom (25%). Those supporting Harris say their most important issue is personal character (58%).

- More from Aaron Earls

News

Arrested Filipino Pastor Apollo Quiboloy Claims He’s the Messiah

Beng Alba-Jones

Why millions of Filipinos are drawn to his movement and other heretical sects.

Supporters of Apollo Quiboloy, founder of the Philippines-based Kingdom of Jesus Christ church, hold a prayer rally at a park in Manila.

Ted Aljibe / Getty

Apollo Quiboloy called himself the “Appointed Son of God.”

But to Filipino and American authorities, he was a man wanted for years on charges of sexual abuse and human trafficking.

Quiboloy, the 74-year-old leader of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, surrendered to authorities on September 8 after 2,000 security officers descended on the religious sect’s massive complex in Davao City in the Philippines. Thousands of followers gathered at the 74-acre compound to protest Quiboloy’s arrest as videos of his sermons blared on the building’s giant screens.

Authorities have accused Quiboloy of rape—including of minors—and engaging in sex trafficking, fraud, and smuggling cash into the US. Quiboloy’s lawyers denied these charges.

Quiboloy, who claims to have millions of followers in 200 countries around the world, is politically powerful. He has a close relationship with former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, allowing him to continue preaching even as the FBI placed him on its most wanted list. It was only after Duterte stepped down in 2022 that Philippine authorities brought charges against him and issued a warrant for his arrest.

The Kingdom of Jesus Christ is one of many sects that have sprouted up in the Philippines. They have an outsized impact on the country’s politics and culture. Because the Philippines is an archipelago of 7,000 islands, different homegrown religious leaders often come to represent certain regions, knitting people’s faith and identity closely together.

In a 2022 CT article, Timoteo D. Gener, chair of Philippine Council of Evangelical Church’s Theological Council, noted that indigenous non-Trinitarian heretical groups like Iglesia Ni Cristo, Ang Dating Daan (The Old Path), and Kingdom of Jesus Christ have grown out of “the prevalence of modalism, the belief that God is a single person who reveals himself in three forms, among folk Catholics. Countering modalism in faith and practice remains a continuing challenge for biblical Christians in the country.”

Another similarity in these communities is that they often center around a messianic leader. This is an idea that is attractive to the Filipino psyche, according to Rod Santos, a minister at Greenhills Christian Fellowship, an adjunct professor at the International Graduate School of Leadership, and the author of a book on why Filipino evangelicals disaffiliate.

“Historically, we as a people adore and value tagapamagitan [“intermediary”] figures,” Santos told CT. “There is always somebody who will be a go-between because it’s impossible to go straight to the mayor or it’s hard to court this girl, so you will need a ‘bridge.’ Likewise, we long for a deliverer, a savior who will save us from oppression or poverty.”

Here is a summary of the beliefs and origins of four Filipino local religious groups: Kingdom of Jesus Christ, Iglesia Ni Cristo, Ang Dating Daan, and Philippine Benevolent Missionaries Association.

Kingdom of Jesus Christ (KOJC)

Quiboloy claims that he started KOJC in 1985 after he heard God whisper, “I will use you” while attending a Billy Graham event in South Korea a decade earlier. Formerly a pastor in the United Pentecostal Church of the Philippines, Quiboloy left to start his own church after the denomination began investigating him for unorthodox teaching and disparagement of fellow pastors.

KOJC started with 15 people and grew quickly in the Philippines and among the Filipino diaspora. Today, the sect reports between 3 and 7 million members worldwide, according to The New York Times.

Quiboloy considers himself the “Appointed Son of God” because “he was the first man to have endured all the fiery trials of persecution and hardship and to have overcome them all without breaking his covenant with the Father,” according to an archived page of Quiboloy’s website. “He was the first man to finally eject the serpent seed, breaking the chain of sin by his absolute obedience to the Father’s will.”

The website went on to say that those who listen to Quiboloy, believe in him, and repent “will enter in the Kingdom of God on Earth today, and after judgment, unto eternity.”

In 2021, a federal grand jury in California indicted Quiboloy, claiming that girls as young as 12 who worked as Quiboloy’s personal assistants (called “pastorals”) were forced to have sex with Quiboloy or else risk “eternal damnation.” In addition, the group sent its members to cities in the US to solicit donations for a “charity”; the funds instead financed the lavish lifestyle of the KOJC leaders.

Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC)

Established in 1914 by Felix Y. Manalo, this religious group now has 7,000 congregations across 166 countries and territories, with about 3 million members worldwide. Followers of Iglesia Ni Cristo made up 2.6 percent of the Filipino population as of 2020, making it the third-largest religion in the country after Roman Catholicism and Islam.

Like Quiboloy, Manalo is viewed as a messianic figure, known as the “Messenger of God in the Last Days” and the angel from the east mentioned in Revelation 7:1–3. In Understanding the Iglesia Ni Cristo, Anne C. Harper noted that Manalo believed “his work is God’s last work of salvation,” according to official INC lessons.

“INC teaches that it is the only true church and the continuation of the church founded by Christ Himself,” she wrote.

The group asserts the only way to receive salvation is to join INC. Followers also recognize Jesus’ humanity only, not his deity. “We do not subscribe to the belief that Christ is a God-Man or both God and man,” INC’s website states. “He had in so many instances introduced Himself as the Son of God but never did He appropriate the title ‘God’ nor ‘God the Son’ for Himself because He is not God but a man.”

INC also endorses candidates whom its followers vote for in a bloc. As a sign of the group’s political influence, Duterte appointed INC executive minister Eduardo V. Manalo as special envoy for overseas Filipino concerns, a role he continues under current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

INC members who left or criticized the religion have faced intimidation and violence, according to an investigation by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate. In 2018, Canada granted ex-INC minister Lowell Menorca asylum, as the immigration and refugee board believed the group had “both the means and the motivation to seriously harm or kill” him if he returned to the Philippines.

Members Church of God International (MCGI), better known as Ang Dating Daan (ADD)

Eliseo F. Soriano, a former leader in an INC offshoot church called Iglesia ng Dios kay Kristo Hesus, Haligi at Suhay ng Katotohanan (“Church of God in Christ Jesus, Pillar and Ground of Truth”), started MCGI in 1977. The group started to grow rapidly after it began using radio and later TV programs—most famously Ang Dating Daan—to broadcast its message. During the 30-minute show, Soriano would discuss passages of the Bible, debunking the beliefs of other religious groups.

“Although ADD members claim to believe the Bible as their only source of authority, this is [only] half-true,” said the blog The Bereans: Apologetics Research Ministry. “They also believe Eliseo Soriano is the ‘sent one’ or ‘sugo’ the reason why he alone does the Bible explaining. In other words, an individual member could not just explain the Bible out of his own personal study.”

Soriano’s teachings reject the Trinity. He often cites Matthew 3:16–17 to make the claim that during Jesus’ baptism, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were in three different locations, so they cannot be one. The Bereans also noted that followers believe Jesus is not the only Savior of humanity but that Moses, Paul, and Timothy were also saviors, and on his second coming, Jesus will save ADD members.

The number of ADD members is not public, yet the group has churches, known as “locales,” across the country and the world. The group’s 143-acre headquarters in Pampanga province includes a massive conference center that is one of the largest indoor facilities in Southeast Asia.

On his program, Soriano often skewered INC’s beliefs, leading INC to create its own TV show Ang Tamang Daan (The Right Path) to refute ADD. In 2003, INC sued Soriano for libel and later won its case. In 2006, a court issued a warrant for Soriano’s arrest on charges of raping his former aide, Daniel Veridiano. To escape what MCGI called “religious persecution,” Soriano fled to Brazil in 2005, where he continued to lead his ministry until he died in 2021.

Philippine Benevolent Missionaries Association (PBMA)

Another religious group centered around a messiah figure, PBMA, was founded by Ruben Edera Ecleo Sr. in Dinagat Islands in 1965. Ecleo claimed to have learned Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Aramaic, which allowed him to interpret “ancient mysteries.” Through uttering a mantra given by God, he claimed to possess supernatural abilities, including appearing in more than one place at the same time, transfiguration, and the ability to heal and even resurrect the dead.

At its peak, PBMA had between 1 and 3 million members nationwide, according to the Philippine National Police. Unlike the other three groups, which primarily base their beliefs on Christianity, PBMA’s doctrine is a mix of Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Akashic ideas.

PBMA teaches that the new heaven and new earth will be in Dinagat Islands, where the group’s shrine is located, said Fred Dungganon, an evangelical pastor in Manila who grew up in the religious group. PBMA also teaches that God is Ecleo, and Jesus Christ is his son, Ruben Ecleo Jr., he added.

The founder was also the mayor of San Jose from 1963 until he died in 1987. Ecleo Jr. took over leadership of the group and succeeded him as the elected mayor of San Jose. He later became the representative of Dinagat Islands’ sole district.

PBMA’s numbers dwindled after Ecleo Sr.’s death and then again in 2002 after Ecleo Jr. was accused and later convicted of murdering his wife. Similar to Quiboloy’s arrest, PBMA’s followers squared off with police as they sought to issue Ecleo Jr. a warrant. In the ensuing shootout, 16 PBMA members and 1 police officer were killed. Ecleo Jr. escaped arrest until 2020. He died from cardiac arrest a year later while imprisoned.

Dungganon, who now leads Blessed Church Manila, said he remembers seeing PBMA members heal illness and perform miracles presumably through reciting mantras. In 1998, he accepted Jesus at a church youth camp but ended up backsliding and returning to PBMA, even becoming a faith healer himself.

One night in 1999 after healing a feverish infant, he couldn’t sleep. “I didn’t feel satisfaction in what I was doing,” he recalled. “No joy, no peace.” He recalled the unexplainable joy he had felt at the camp and began searching for truth in the Bible. A few months later, he surrendered his life to the Lord, leaving PBMA and facing persecution from his family and friends in the group. “There was no turning back,” he said. “The grace of God was so overwhelming, and my experience with Jesus was incomparably better than my previous faith.”

Santos noted that some of these pastors initially started with orthodox Christian doctrines but found that they could amass a larger gathering by promising deliverance. “Since no one is checking them, then they are not accountable to anybody, leading them to [start] a cult.”

To reach more people like Dungganon, Santos said that Filipino evangelicals can take advantage of the cultural inclination to seek a mediator by pointing those enmeshed in unorthodox movements to the true Messiah. “To connect with them, Christians can emphasize the role of Jesus, the Son of God, as the only true Mediator and Messiah.”

- More from Beng Alba-Jones

Church Life

South Korea’s Missions Success Won’t Be Its Future

Isabel Ong

The extraordinary church story of the 20th century is struggling with a demographic crisis, disillusionment with Christianity, and a 2007 Taliban attack.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Beginning in 2002, South Korean national Helen Lee served as a missionary in Bengaluru, India for five years. In 2015, she embarked on another mission trip to the country’s capital, New Delhi.

It was a new city and a different team, but one thing remained the same: She was the youngest missionary there.

Lee, 45, sees this same dynamic playing out in her work as a member care coordinator in a mission agency that reaches out to Muslims.

“In the last three or four years, we never had any young families candidate [to become long-term missionaries from South Korea],” said Lee.

By the first half of the 21st century, South Korea became a missionary-sending powerhouse. In 2015, the country was ranked second in terms of overall missionary-sending activity, according to the World Christian Database.

The East Asian country is now in third place, after the US and Brazil, in terms of missionary-sending activity, according to 2020 statistics from the World Christian Database that were cited in the Lausanne Movement’s State of the Great Commission report.

But the explosive growth of the country’s missions force does not appear to be sustainable.

“The Korean church and mission have recently plateaued due to secularization, a general disinterest in religion among young people, and the possible impact of megachurch scandals,” wrote Uchenna Anyanwu, Cristian Castro, and David Ro in the Lausanne report. “For this reason, the Korean missionary population is gradually aging.”

Data from the Korea Research Institute for Mission (KRIM) reflects steady growth in the number of missionaries over the past two decades, with a slight downturn beginning in the 2020s.

In the ’90s, the Korean church called for 10,000 missionaries to go and preach. This vision was realized in a decade, and the number of missionaries doubled to 20,000 by 2010.

Since then, growth has been marginal, KRIM’s data shows. Last year, South Korea sent a total of 21,917 missionaries, down from 22,204 in 2022 and 22,259 in 2020.

One reason for a slower missions pipeline in the aughts may be the 2007 kidnapping crisis in Afghanistan, where the Taliban killed two believers after abducting 23 South Korean church volunteers on a medical aid trip.

“The number of Korean missionaries continued to grow, but at a much lower rate since the hostage case in 2007,” said Steve Sang-Cheol Moon, founder and CEO of South Korea’s Charis Institute for Intercultural Studies. (More recently, two South Korean missionaries were kidnapped in Kenya this August.)

The incident, in which the Taliban claimed it received $4 million from the South Korean government to release hostages, prompted intense criticism of mission efforts from both Christian and non-Christian Koreans.

Many came to regard churches as self-serving and critiqued the exclusivity of the faith after this happened, Moon said.

The Taliban murder-kidnapping also created a “huge phobia” against Muslims among the Korean people, particularly in Christian circles where believers feel the need to protect the faith against Islam, said Lee.

“A lot of people in church are still very afraid of [Muslims]. … [They think] the Muslims are terrorists,” she noted.

Korean missionaries and leaders CT interviewed agree with the data and the trends observed by the Lausanne report. Still, most are optimistic about the future of South Korea’s missionary movement as they see growth in new conceptualizations and expressions of missional living among younger Korean Christians.

A prophetic push

In 1973, Billy Graham predicted that South Korea would become a base for evangelism and outreach across Asia. The history of the South Korean church has reflected this ardent devotion to missions that Graham pinpointed.

The first Korean missionary was ordained at the 1907 Pyongyang revival. In 1974, the Korean missionary movement (KMM) began when Korean churches sent out 24 missionaries. Since then, South Korean missionaries have brought the gospel to 170 countries.

Nationwide evangelistic events such as Explo ’74 in Seoul, attended by 300,000 believers from South Korea and around the world, contributed to boosting missionary fervor in that period. And after the country hosted the Olympics in 1988, the government allowed Koreans to travel freely, further propelling the KMM forward.

Central Asia and China were some of the places where Korean missionaries had a large impact.

In countries like Mongolia, they were instrumental in growing the Christian population. “In 1989, there were just four Christians; by 2008, that number had grown to 40,000,” a 2019 Lausanne article on the gospel movement in East Asia revealed.

Missions to China began when the Presbyterian Church of Korea sent three ministers and their families to the province of Shandong in the 1900s.

This was “the greatest and most significant missionary work of the Korean church,” wrote Timothy K. Park in Korean Church, God’s Mission, Global Christianity. “It was the first Asian mission by Asian people since the days of the apostles.”

By 2017, there were about 500 officially registered South Korean missionaries in China, although the actual number may have been closer to 2,000, a CT report stated. Many served in Jilin Province due to its proximity to North Korea, helping refugees resettle after they defected.

But after China expelled Korean missionaries that year, along with the Afghanistan kidnapping crisis a decade earlier, South Korean missionaries have had to look elsewhere for opportunities to serve.

Many missionaries stopped serving in Afghanistan and other creative access countries where sharing the faith is restricted or prohibited because “local people were more aware of the presence of Korean missionaries in their regions,” Moon says.

The COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a decline in church growth, has also caused the KMM to stagnate in recent years, Korean Christian leaders told CT. Churches are more financially strapped, which means less funding for missionaries.

And yet, while the number of Korean Christians going on overseas missions is decreasing, missionaries are venturing farther.

Today, South Korean missionaries serve in countries like the United States, the Philippines, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian countries that have more restrictions on preaching and sharing the Good News.

In the Hindu-majority country of Nepal, which has an anti-conversion law in place, a South Korean missionary couple has planted nearly 70 churches in the Dhading district as of last year. Kenya has also become “a bridgehead for Korean missions to Africa,” with more Korean missionaries based there compared to other nations on the continent, said a 2014 report.

Going gray

Only around 7 percent of South Korean missionaries are in their 20s or 30s. The majority (67.9%) of long-term missionaries are 50 years old or over, according to KRIM’s 2023 report.

These “silver missionaries” often enter the mission field after retirement, said 35-year-old Eun Hee Kim, who served as a church planter in northeastern Thailand and is currently on sabbatical.

Kim was 23 when she decided to serve God full-time in cross-cultural missions. There are young South Korean Christians interested in doing the same thing today, but how missional their church is plays a part in determining whether they pursue it, says Kim.

“If the churches no longer see missions as essential and cease to pray, support, or mobilize for missions—that would indeed mark the beginning of the end for Korean missions,” she said.

Traditional church sending structures may also inadvertently impact the age of missionaries being sent out. Most South Koreans think that to be a missionary, you have to be ordained as a pastor and undergo theological training, which takes around five to six years to complete.

While that perception is gradually changing, whether churches are willing to send people in their 20s and 30s on the mission field without theological study is debatable, said Kyungnam Park, international director of WEC International, which focuses on evangelizing unreached people groups.

Parents’ opinions also matter more in Korean culture compared to the Western world, says Sung-Min Park, Korean Campus Crusade for Christ’s (KCCC) vice president for East Asia. As a form of filial piety, young graduates feel pressured to work in a well-known company and become financially stable rather than serve the Lord as a long-term missionary in a faraway country.

Hyerin Kim, 26, went on two short-term mission trips with KCCC. After graduating from college in 2022, she moved to Japan for a short-term mission stint a year later.

When she told her family she wanted to be a full-time missionary, they opposed the decision fiercely. “They think that I am giving up a lot of good things and taking a particularly harder and more difficult path to be a missionary,” she told CT.

“But I don’t see it that way,” she said. “I am not giving up any of the good opportunities I have, but I am taking the best and most unique opportunity to please and honor God more than any other.”

Mission Korea Congress, an ecumenical and biannual conference for high school and college students, has also seen a drastic dip in attendance over the years, particularly after the new millennium.

At its peak in 1998, the conference had 6,300 participants. In 2010, the number of participants dropped to 3,975. Last year, there were 1,403 people.

Still, the waning attendance doesn’t faze the congress’s executive director, Job Choi. God’s ministry is not dependent on numbers, he asserted.

As they seek ways to live out their faith, Gen Z and Gen Alpha believers are asking different questions compared to previous generations, in Choi’s view. Young Christians are pondering questions like “What is beautiful, good, and human?” rather than “What is true or real?” he said. They’re also wondering: “If your gospel is right, why is your church not beautiful?”

Creating change

Not everything that has transpired in recent times has weakened the Korean church. To some leaders, the events of the last few years have helped to strengthen and reshape the Korean missionary movement, especially in its posture.

The pandemic has allowed the Korean church to reckon with its pride, arrogance, and sense of triumphalism in carrying out missions, opined Daewon Moon, senior pastor of Daegu Dongshin Church.

“We no longer emphasize that the Korean church will and should play a pivotal role in fulfilling the Great Commission,” he said. “We don’t want to repeat the same mistakes of European missionaries.”

The Fourth Lausanne Congress in September, held in the South Korean city of Incheon, is not a time for “the Korean church to celebrate its missional achievement before the global church,” said Moon, who serves on the board of the Korea Lausanne Committee.

Instead, it is a time for the Korean church to reflect, repent, and learn from the global body of Christ, Moon argues.

Some leaders pointed to the Korean wave—the booming popularity of South Korean pop culture in music, film, food, and more—as a propitious opportunity for mission work. “When we go to Latin America and Africa, a lot of people already know the songs [from K-pop groups] BTS and Blackpink,” said KCCC’s Park.

“Particularly notable is a new energy to combine worship and mission ministries among young Korean Christians,” said Moon, the pastor.

The birth of mission-oriented worship collectives like Isaiah 6tyOne is representative of this new movement. Recently, the group visited a high school in Iloilo, Philippines, where they shared God’s Word and taught students how to play musical instruments. “Jesus, you’re victorious / with the angels sing / the wonder of the risen King,” the teenagers sang.

Another discernible trend, say leaders, is that although long-term missions are decreasing, short-term missions are on the rise.

Many churches and mission agencies offer a range of options in duration, from week-long to three-month trips and one-year commitments. This summer, Moon’s church sent 17 short-term mission teams to countries like Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Tanzania, and the UK.

KCCC is also “doing better than before” when it comes to sending short-term missionaries overseas, said Park. This year, the ministry has already sent 3,000 students and full-time staff on two- to four-week-long mission trips.

Going on a short-term mission trip helped Kim, the young missionary in Japan, to experience deeper and more authentic fellowship with God. “I felt that everything I did, whether it was eating, drinking, meeting up with friends to laugh and talk, or just walking around campus, was a mission and for the glory of the Lord,” she said.

A favorable future

While South Korea’s rankings in terms of missionary sending may have slipped, most leaders still think the country can be considered a powerful mission-sending force. Many expressed optimism about the future of mission in South Korea because they’ve noticed a shift toward a more holistic understanding of what being a missionary is all about.

“The division between evangelism and social responsibility (which older generations argued [about] and maintained) does not seem to bother younger generations,” said Moon, the pastor.

In the past, Korean missionaries would prioritize evangelism and church planting over other types of ministries such as area development, medical services, and relief work. Today, there are more missionaries seeking to care for a local community’s physical needs instead of solely focusing on their spiritual needs, said Charis Institute’s Moon.

In a 2006 cover story for CT, Moon also critiqued the lone ranger approach that many Korean missionaries possessed when starting projects. While this may still ring true in many cases, younger Korean missionaries are better at collaborating with local churches and leaders than before, he said.

Korean missionaries today also have a more “flexible missionary identity,” continued Moon. Previously, they would often link their identity with a certain country, but now they are more aware that their country of service can be changed.

Mission Korea Congress’s Choi experiences both worry and welcome when thinking about the future of missions. He also finds that the Korean Christian conceptualization of missions is healthier and more balanced now.

The dimensions of what missions entails are expanding, he says, where everything in life—education, government, creation care, social justice—is part of a believer’s missional identity.

“Revival is dependent on God’s time,” said Choi. “Our responsibility is to keep the fire holy and pure.”

Kim, the missionary in Japan, stressed the importance of living for God in the prime of one’s life.

“The young adult years are a time of great strength, energy, and possibility, and I think it’s the best time to think about what to do with your life and to discover your purpose, meaning, and values,” she said. “Whether we spend that time living according to the flow of the world or giving ourselves fully to the work of the Lord will shape the rest of our lives.”

Lee, the member care coordinator, also believes that young Christians might be missing out on opportunities to encounter God’s transformative love if they only stick to short-term mission trips.

“When you live [in another country] for a long time, I think you can see better how much God is really passionate about missions, and how God really cares for these people,” she said.

“Through those decades [as a missionary], I learned so much about his love.”

- More from Isabel Ong

Church Life

The Rural Cambodian Community that Fostered 76 Children

Erin Foley

Over 16 years, a Christian nonprofit moved dozens of Cambodian orphans out of institutions and into local families.

Sam Ang and his family

Photography by Amy Higg

In 2008, Keo Ravy and Amy Sullivan of Children in Families (CIF) drove to an orphanage outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to pick up two toddlers with severe developmental delays. They then brought the children to a rural village where they would meet their new foster families.

In the car, four-year-old Sam Ang, who was blind and could not yet eat solids, suddenly started violently banging his head against the car floor. Startled, Sullivan tried to stop him, unaware that due to neglect, this was his way of communicating hunger. As Sullivan pulled him into her lap, he began to calm down as he felt her face with his hands.

Sullivan, a CIF volunteer, recalled feeling worried about whether his foster mother would be able to care for him.

Yet that anxiety dissipated as they pulled up to the village in Svey Rieng province three hours later. A group of villagers stood by a house, waiting for their arrival. Ravy parked, opened the car door, and gently lifted the boy from Sullivan’s lap. Quickly, a woman ran up and whisked Sam Ang out of Ravy’s arms, hugging and kissing him repeatedly. She was his new foster mother, Pang Sokha. Smiles erupted on everyone’s faces, and several villagers clapped with delight.

This is the vision of the Christian nonprofit CIF: to provide resources for impoverished families to raise their own children or take in abandoned children instead of sending them to orphanages.

Sam Ang became the first of 76 children, most of whom have disabilities, to be fostered in the village and its surrounding communities. CIF has also supported 113 children at risk of family separation. Since domestic adoption became legal again in 2017, 47 families have adopted their foster children, transitioning them out of CIF’s program. (Cambodia made foreign and domestic adoption illegal in the early 2000s due to corruption and the lack of legal framework.)

“Our role at CIF is to help Cambodian parents fulfill their God-given responsibility to children, not to take their kids away,” said founder Cathleen Jones.

A different way to care for orphans

I first visited Sam Ang’s village in Svey Rieng in 2016, a month after I came on staff at CIF as its communication and media director. A coworker took me on her motorbike down a dusty path to a small farm on the outskirts of the village, where a grandmother and aunt cared for a little boy with cerebral palsy.

Abandoned by his mother at birth, the boy had been cared for by his extended family, who had little knowledge about his condition. He spent his first six years of life on his back, staring at the rusting, corrugated ceiling. After CIF intervened with medication, physical therapy, education, and the love of God, he began gaining strength and mobility. His grandmother and aunt caught glimpses of his personality as he started to communicate nonverbally. They pushed him in a custom wheelchair to visit neighbors, removing not only his isolation from the world but also their own.

I also witnessed a baby from a crisis pregnancy placed with a childless couple that had spent five years longing for a child. Tears streamed down my face as I watched them hold their dream in their arms for the first time.

This way of caring for neglected and abandoned children was completely different from how I viewed orphan care growing up, as some of my earliest memories are centered around orphanages.

When I was five years old, my parents moved to Mexico to work in a children’s home. We lived in humble but separate quarters, isolated from the other children. Most of the children still had living parents, but I was told they had been abandoned.

A few years later, we moved to Venezuela so that my parents could start an orphanage. The plans eventually fell through as the government began to create a more stringent legal framework around foreigners taking in local children. Still, I grew up believing the world was full of parentless children who were best served in orphanages.

That was an idea that Jones and her husband, Dale, initially held as well when they arrived in rural Cambodia in the early 1990s and were tasked with running an orphanage. Yet after caring for more than a hundred children, they realized that institutionalization left many with lifelong trauma that exhibited itself through addiction, difficulty bonding with their own children, perpetuation of sexual abuse, and inability to assess risk. They realized there was no good substitute for God’s design of children raised in families.

Globally, 80 percent of children have at least one living parent, but many families are forced give up their children because they can’t afford more mouths to feed. Due to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in the ’70s—which killed a third of Cambodia’s population—families lack access to basic sanitation, shelter, and food, let alone social services and birth control.

The Joneses realized that even the children without parents had extended family or community members who wanted to care for them. They started to wonder, Why not support children and their family units?

From orphanages to families

So in 2006, Jones started CIF, which focuses on emergency care for kids who were trafficked or living in abusive families, kinship care, or foster care. CIF provides each foster family with between $40 and $150 per month depending on the child’s disability, age, and medical needs.

In the beginning, it was difficult for orphanages to get on board with CIF’s vision. At most, they would hand over children with disabilities, who were the hardest to care for, while keeping the cute, healthy children who could entertain visitors and look good on fundraising material.

Jones also had to contend with the myth that Cambodians would not accept non-biological children into their families. After the Khmer Rouge, many families took in children whose parents were killed and raised them as their own. Yet as foreign aid flooded into the country in the 1990s, Cambodians started to see well-funded foreign orphanages as a better way to care for their children.

CIF believed the best way for foster care to flourish was within a community where several families could take in orphans and help each other raise them. Ravy, CIF’s Cambodia director, felt that the village where she grew up in Svey Rieng province would be a good fit. Why? First, the villagers didn’t discriminate against people with disabilities, which CIF observed in way local leaders showed respect to a young man with Down syndrome. Also, the village had access to a school and a clinic, it was safe, and it was close enough to Phnom Penh that CIF staff could regularly visit and monitor the program.

CIF and the UK’s Strengthening Families and Children came to the village to train 40 families interested in fostering. “You have the gift of time,” Jones told the families. “You have the space. You can give these children love. You can teach them to be Cambodian.”

The first families to take in foster children were Christians, as Buddhists in Cambodia feared that bringing a child with disabilities into the family would bring bad karma. But as they saw how much joy children like Sam Ang brought to the families’ lives, the stigma began to lift.

Other families in the village agreed to take in children with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and trauma. Soon, eight more children joined the community.

“Before we knew it, half the village had their hand up to foster,” Jones said. The waiting list grew exponentially, impacting surrounding communities.

When CIF places a child with a foster family, the paper signing and placement ceremony happen with pastors, village leaders, and other community members present. This way, the well-being of the child becomes the responsibility of not just the foster parents but also the community.

Families with foster children meet regularly to share their struggles and encourage one another. Having foster families grouped together also makes it easier for social workers to visit and address problematic patterns and concerns.

CIF has seen communities change their view of Christianity because of how the group involves the entire village instead of removing children from their families and cultures to mold their minds in an institutional setting.

When donors offer to provide wells or water filters, Jones and Ravy let the village leaders choose the families who are most in need of these projects, regardless of whether they are supported by CIF. Local staff also holds classes on topics like hygiene or parenting, which are mandatory for the foster parents and open to all villagers.

“[CIF] works with entire villages, so it’s not just our kids and families who benefit,” Jones said. “If a non-CIF family is struggling in one of our communities, we also support them.”

Orphanages’ chokehold

Today, CIF’s foster care program works in three provinces as well as Phnom Penh, each of which has at least three families fostering near each other for support. In total, it has placed 160 children into foster families. The organization says there are hundreds of vetted Cambodian families waiting to foster children. However, the organization recently had to pause adding new children into its program, as donations have dropped due to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 and donors looking to fund other areas of development.

At the same time, orphanages continue to house tens of thousands of Cambodian children because donors are willing to fund them, said Rebecca Nhep, founder of the Australian Christian Churches International (ACCI) Kinnected program, which also focuses on family care. Images of cute babies and children tug at donors’ heartstrings and loosen their purse strings. In 2021, American churches alone donated $2.5 billion to fund orphanages.

Yet Nhep believes the theology behind orphanages is flawed. When the Bible talks about looking after the orphans and widows, they should be viewed as a vulnerable family unit rather than separate entities, she noted.

Orphanages are also costly compared to family care. Cambodian orphanages receive about $50 million annually according to Sarah Chhin, the founder of M’lup Russey, an organization that helps young adults who have aged out of orphanage care. That funding could instead be used to eradicate the extreme poverty in Cambodia that causes parents to give up their children.

Christian orphanages see a spiritual dimension to their work, yet Nhep questions if it’s right to disciple children by taking them away from their family units.

“What aspect of the gospel promotes raising Christians by separating families?” Nhep asked. “We are told to go into the nations … not extract and take in, divorcing children from their social structure and culture.”

Back in the Svey Rieng village, Sam Ang grew up like his peers, riding bikes and learning to speak Khmer. With the help of CIF, the local school opened its doors to Sam Ang, making him its first blind student. Today, Sam Ang is training to be a massage therapist and is a competitive runner. At the 2023 ASEAN Para Games in Phnom Penh, he sprinted to a third-place finish in the 1,500-meter race with his sighted guide.

Sokha cheered him on from the stands, waving her arms and shouting, “That’s my baby!”

“Our family is so poor I thought I would have to leave and work in a factory to support my family,” Sokha told CIF. “But I love being a mom, and being a foster parent finally makes me feel valued for the work I can do as a mother.”

Erin Foley formerly worked in Communications & Media at Children in Families and authored the book Where They Belong : A Journey from Orphanages to Loving Families. This article includes excerpts from her book.

- More from Erin Foley

News

‘Wesley Is Fire Now’ and Evangelicals Are Being Strangely Warmed

Clayton Sidenbender

Two decades after New Calvinism, some young Christians are turning to Methodist history for theological sustenance.

A student worshiping at the Asbury Revival.

Asbury University

Shawn Hamilton does what a lot of college-aged guys do on Christian campuses. He goes to class. He does his homework and reads his Bible. He plays video games, hangs out with his friends, and thinks about prevenient grace.

“The Holy Spirit tries to beckon people,” the 22-year-old told CT. “It’s more than just common grace, as Calvin articulates it. It’s the reason why all people can do good things. Because we are totally depraved, but it’s the Holy Spirit continuing in every life to give a little bit of light to respond to what God is doing.”

The focus on Wesleyan theology is perhaps a bit out of the ordinary.

But Hamilton attends Asbury Seminary in Kentucky, a school deeply grounded in the Wesleyan tradition. He was a Bible and theology major at Asbury University, so he’s interested in these kinds of things, and he also had a religious experience at a worship service at Asbury University as a freshman. His heart, as Methodist movement founder John Wesley famously described the experience, was “strangely warmed.”

“I felt an immense peace that I had never felt before in my entire life,” Hamilton said. “I cried in that moment because it was so warm and experiential, and that was a moment that really left me questioning, ‘What does it mean to be a Christian and live a Christian life?’”

After that, he found that the doctrines of grace and virtue developed by Methodist movement founder John Wesley in the 1700s started to make a lot of sense to him. As he tried to explain his experience of the Holy Spirit and his sense of what God wanted, Wesleyan theology felt like it fell into place.

Hamilton may not be unique here. There appears to be a growing number of young people drawn to Wesleyanism and Wesleyan-Arminian theology. Nearly 20 years after the rise of New Calvinism—when “Young, Restless, Reformed” Christians embraced the doctrinal system taught by French theologian John Calvin—there’s a new and renewed interest in another theological tradition, which has a bit of a different flavor.

Where Calvin taught predestination, Wesley believed that, through prevenient grace, God freed the human will sufficiently to accept or reject the offer of salvation. God predestined a plan of salvation, but not individual people.

Theologians in the Wesleyan tradition, like many Christians, emphasize the centrality, inspiration, and reliability of Scripture. They also teach the importance of sacraments. And many of them—though not all—are egalitarian, affirming that women can be gifted and called to ministry.

Wesley himself said he was just a “hair’s breadth” from Calvinism, and many Wesleyans, including Hamilton, think there’s just a different emphasis, not outright antagonism between the two positions.

However one thinks of the difference, it’s Wesleyanism today that has an energy and vibrancy drawing in people like Hamilton.

“Things have shifted,” said Brian Shelton, Asbury University’s Wesley Scholar in Residence. “Wesley is fire now.”

Groups of theologians are working to articulate Wesleyan theology in a fresh way. A small Wesleyan seminary has grown 500 percent in just six years. A new Wesleyan denomination, the Global Methodist Church, is sparking revived interest in the history and theology of the tradition and increased attention to spiritual practices, including Bible reading, worship, and prayer. Last year, a revival among the students at Asbury University drew international attention to Wesleyan spirituality.

Andy Miller III, a sixth-generation Salvation Army officer who has joined the Global Methodist Church and is currently a preaching and theology professor and president of Wesley Biblical Seminary (WBS), told CT this is an “amazing moment in Methodism.”

In addition to being president of a historically Wesleyan seminary, Miller leads More to the Story Ministries, which “exists to create content with orthodox Wesleyan convictions to serve the world in the name of Jesus Christ.” His weekly podcast boasts more than 750,000 views and downloads.

There is also a small fleet of Wesleyan institutions, including Seedbed, More to the Story, the Francis Asbury Society, the John Wesley Institute, the Fundamental Wesleyan Society, Firebrand Magazine, and Holy Joys.

Johnathan Arnold, who helped start Holy Joys in 2019, recalls he was steeped in Calvinist theology in high school. He read whatever was on his dad’s bookshelf and really loved a biography of Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. He also started reading contemporary Calvinist preachers and teachers, including John MacArthur, and watching videos of them on YouTube.

One day, however, he found a Q&A with a question that tripped him up on his path toward Calvinism. On the YouTube video, someone in the audience asked a Calvinist pastor how to explain to people who are not Christians that Jesus didn’t die for them.

“I thought, That’s a weird question,” Arnold told CT. “Surely he’s going to say, ‘Of course he died for the world. He’s not only a propitiation for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world’” (1 John 2:2).

Instead, the pastor said this was a complicated issue.

“That just blew me away,” Arnold, now 29, recalled.

It made him question whether Calvinism, which teaches a doctrine called “limited atonement,” was really biblical. He started looking around for other ways to systematize what Scripture said about God’s grace.

That’s when he discovered a book called Wesleyana, a collection of John Wesley’s writings. He liked what he read and found Wesleyanism to be a much more satisfying option. He started to identify as a Methodist.

Today, Arnold is senior pastor of Redeemer Wesleyan Church in Mount Pleasant Mills, Pennsylvania, and is president of Holy Joys. The organization seeks to equip local churches with Wesleyan-informed resources. It spends little time opposing Calvinism but instead tries to recover classical Methodist theology, much of it from the 19th century, developed by people such as Richard Watson, William Burt Pope, and Thomas Ralston.

“Of course, the name Holy Joys comes from John Wesley,” Arnold said. “In that little book, Wesleyana, that I read, one of the very first chapters is on true religion and in that chapter, Wesley says, ‘Christianity is holiness and happiness.’”

The Holy Joys Podcast has more than 25,000 downloads. A lot of listeners seem interested in questions about church structure, discipleship, and building a strong church community.

“Ecclesiology has really become the driving doctrine,” said Holy Joys board member David Fry, who is also senior pastor of Frankfort Bible Holiness Church in Frankfort, Indiana. “We want to write theology for the church and developing healthier churches.”

Chris Lohrstorfer, associate professor of Wesleyan theology at WBS, said Wesleyan ecclesiology offers a vision of the church as a community. Many people, in recent years, have craved a community-oriented Christian life, he said, and that has only increased in response to what some experts have called an “epidemic of loneliness.”

“The Wesleyan understanding of church and Christianity is … what our society is looking for,” Lohrstorfer said.

In addition to putting more Wesleyan sermons on its website, Holy Joys also has an event called the Holy Joys Healthy Church Conference. The first year, 50 people came. The second, that number almost doubled. Around 100 pastors and lay leaders came to the conference this year.

The next big project for Holy Joys is a new catechism, helping people teach its historic theological tradition in their local churches. The group has been working on this for several years.

The catechism won’t be the only new teaching document for a revived Wesleyanism. As CT reported in 2022, a group of 64 scholars from Wesleyan traditions came together to write a statement on the nature of God, Creation, revelation, salvation, the church, and eschatology or “the fullness of time.” The goal was to “shape the future of Methodism, define orthodox Wesleyanism, and ground more Christians in the story of sanctification and restoration through grace.”

Asbury University New Testament professor Suzanne Nicholson called it a “breath of fresh air” for Wesleyanism, presenting traditional teachings like sanctification in clear and compelling ways, that could connect with modern readers.

“This is a document that should lead people to joy at what Christ and the Spirit and the Triune God has done for us,” Nicholson said.

The interest in Wesleyanism has been bubbling for a few years, but an interest in the Arminian strain of Wesleyanism goes back even further. Matthew Pinson, president of Welch College, a Free Will Baptist school in Tennessee, points to the influence of scholarly work that started to come out in 2006 or 2007 in response to the new attention to Calvinism that CT chronicled in an article titled “Young, Restless, Reformed.”

“As young people started adopting Calvinism, and as they started bringing that into their classrooms in different colleges and seminaries,” he said, “professors and pastors who were against it began to see the need for more up-to-date theological material that would oppose it.”

Some dug into the works of Jacob Arminius, the Dutch theologian who critiqued Calvinism in the 16th century. Roger Olson, emeritus professor of Christian theology at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary, wrote Arminian Theology, which was published by InterVarsity Press in 2006. Olson said Arminius’s teachings had for too long been seen as obscure theological wrangling, when actually they speak directly to one of the most pressing spiritual questions today.

“It’s relevant because people today want to know if God is good,” Olson, a self-described “Bapticostal,” told CT. “And Arminius explained how God can be sovereign and good.”

A few years later, theologian Leroy Forlines published Classical Arminianism. Pinson in 2022 released 40 Questions About Arminianism.

Their tradition is not Wesleyan but what Pinson and others refer to as Reformed Arminian or Classical Arminian theology. Classical Arminianism holds to the more Reformed positions Jacob Arminius held, such as radical depravity and the traditional notion of original sin. Classical Arminians also believe in imputation of the righteousness of Christ and apostasy coming only through defection from faith and being irremediable.

Pinson said Arminius offers people the beauty of Reformed theology without the problems of modern-day Calvinism. Arminianism also opens up a pathway from Reformed teachings to Wesleyanism, since Wesleyans teach Arminianism too.

For Wesleyans, the theological question is mostly about sin.

“While all Christian traditions believe God transforms us to the image of his Son, Wesleyan-Arminian thought confronts the sin that holds us back and expects a victory,” said Shelton, Asbury University’s Wesley scholar in residence. “The sanctification offered by Wesleyan-Arminian thought is a hope that is offered with strength.”

Christopher Bounds, who teaches theology at Asbury Seminary, said many of the students drawn to this historical theology seem especially attracted to the way Arminius, Wesley, and Wesleyans talk about grace.

“The Wesleyan-Arminian tradition recognizes that even repentance in faith that saves us is a gift of grace,” Bounds said.

Some of the institutions promoting revitalized Wesleyanism have been explicitly modeled on the New Calvinist movement. Organizations such as Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, and IX Marks have been very influential and offer Wesleyans an example of how to promote their theological ideas.

“What do the Reformed got going?” said Fred Sanders, author of Wesley and the Christian Life and professor at Biola University. “They’ve got an infrastructure of generating a lot of online articles and a steady content stream.”

While Sanders teaches at the Torrey Honors College at Biola and is not a member of a historically Wesleyan church, he is contributing to a resurgence in interest in historic Wesleyan voices. He hosts a section on his personal website dedicated to the writings of 19th-century Methodist theologian William Burt Pope.

Some Wesleyans, watching the influence of Calvinists over the years, have felt compelled to offer an alternative.

“We have to be in the marketplace of ideas or we lose by default,” said Vic Reasoner, president emeritus of the Fundamental Wesleyan Society and director of the Francis Asbury Institute. “We have to be there to present our option. If people don’t know that there is this option in their pursuit of truth, they won’t even consider this option.”

Others just noticed a big void in popular presentations of Wesleyan thought and decided to fill it. That’s what happened to Jeffrey Rickman, who is pastor of Nowata Methodist Church, a Global Methodist congregation in Oklahoma and now hosts PlainSpoken, a YouTube channel that gets a few thousand views per video.

“There wasn’t really anybody doing it that I could see,” he said.

Starting a new organization to promote Wesleyan theology can provoke a good deal of trepidation, though. Matt Reynolds, president of Spirit & Truth, said he saw the need for a Wesleyan version of The Gospel Coalition for a long time. He kept meeting people who seemed to really need Wesleyan theology—spiritually hungry people, lacking in resources. But he doubted himself.

Reynolds finally asked a friend, United Theological Seminary professor David Watson, for his opinion.

“I think that God is calling me to do something here, but it sounds nuts to me,” Reynolds recalled telling Watson.

He explained his vision for a ministry that would go into local churches. They would train people, help them have a divine encounter to become empowered by the Holy Spirit, and mobilize them for mission. They would promote connections between Wesleyan churches and put on conferences and publish some stuff too.

“What do you think?” Reynolds asked when he finished. “Do you think I’m nuts?”

“No, I don’t think you’re nuts,” Watson said. “I think the Methodist world needs a ministry just like what you’re describing.”

Today, Watson serves as the lead editor for Spirit & Truth’s online publication, Firebrand Magazine. Watson champions the magazine as a place for “virtuous public conversations” in the midst of Methodist divisions. Firebrand launched in 2020, “around the time the United Methodist Church and Global Methodist Church rancor was reaching its high point,” he said.

Watson and others wanted to strike a semi-academic tone, publishing think pieces from the Wesleyan tradition that could help people who wanted to be more deeply rooted in the riches of Wesleyanism. The magazine could be a forum for debate among people who shared some key commitments and a theological vocabulary.

Today, the magazine gets about 40,000 hits a month, and the Firebrand podcast has about 1,500 downloads a month.

Firebrand and the other institutions promoting new interest in Wesleyanism don’t have the big names that New Calvinism did in the early 2000s. There are no figures equivalent to John Piper, Mark Driscoll, or Tim Keller. Partly this is intentional—a reaction to the perils of Christian celebrity. At the Asbury outpouring in 2023, one of the phrases repeated over and over was that there should be “no celebrity except Jesus.” Some Wesleyans argue that “radical humility” is an important part of the theological tradition.

“I would not expect, in any sort of Wesleyan-Arminian resurgence, that it would revolve around a certain personality or dogmatic preaching presence,” said Fry, the Holy Joys board member.

Historically, some of the most important early leaders of Methodism, including John Wesley, his brother Charles, and American bishop Francis Asbury, were not strong speakers, he said. They worked instead to build up the church and empower Christians to do the work of the gospel.

If a revitalized Wesleyan movement is successful, people in the movement say, it will not be because of one well-known preacher but many, many faithful ones.

Timothy Tennent, professor of World Christianity at Asbury Theological Seminary, said there’s reason to think that is going to happen. He pointed to the success of Seedbed Publishing House, which started 12 years ago and has published six of his books, including This We Believe! and The Call to Holiness, as well as a metrical psalter, a new hymnal, Bible study materials, and introductions to Wesleyan theology like The Absolute Basics of the Wesleyan Way.

Ryan Danker, director of the John Wesley Institute, said the book he co-edited with Asbury Seminary Professor Kenneth Collins, The Next Methodism, is one of Seedbed’s bestselling books. The popularity of the book shows the eagerness of regular churchgoers to learn more about Methodism.

The ministry also has a partnership with Zondervan, offers online courses, and launched an annual conference called New Room. Attendance has grown rapidly in the past few years, Tennent said.

Tennent is witnessing similar growth at Asbury Seminary. In his 15 years as president, he oversaw seven straight years of enrollment growth and the highest attendance numbers in the seminary’s 99-year history.

“I think there’s a lot of demonstrable evidence that Wesleyan theology now has a new surge and new voice that it didn’t have 10 or 15 years ago,” Tennent said.

Some of the leaders of this Methodist moment are cautious, though, about declaring it a revitalized movement, an Arminian comeback, or a rise of something that could be named “New Wesleyanism.”

Reynolds, at Spirit & Truth, says he sees a new spiritual hunger. Hamilton, the student at Asbury, just knows he’s found Wesleyanism to be really important to his spiritual life. Watson, at Firebrand, says maybe there’s not a full movement of new Methodism right now, but there could be soon.

“I think God is doing something,” Watson said. “I think God is raising up a new generation.”

- More from Clayton Sidenbender

Ideas

Unclench Your Fist

Kristen Deede Johnson

Instead of white-knuckling our way through life in a pluralistic, rapidly changing society, Christians should learn from Augustine’s openhanded discipleship.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Questions about the place of Christianity and the posture of Christians in a pluralistic society have never been merely theoretical for me. They have always been very personal.

I was first drawn to the Christian faith as a child in London. Both the city and the school I attended there were marked by profound religious, ethnic, and cultural pluralism. A few years later, while a freshman in high school, I began to follow Christ more intentionally after a conversion experience in a church youth group in the Washington, DC, area. I spent the rest of high school and college navigating how to inhabit my faith in settings where few shared my convictions.

When I got to grad school and discovered the life and writings of Augustine of Hippo from the fourth and fifth centuries, I felt like I’d finally found the resources I needed to begin imagining a faithful, generous Christian witness in our own time and place.

We live in a diverse and quickly changing democracy, surrounded by people with many divergent beliefs and ways of life, and this comes with both opportunities and challenges. We’re able to know and love neighbors very different from ourselves as we share and embody the gospel. But navigating deep difference and rapid social shifts can also be difficult and scary, and we may end up hurting our neighbors rather than loving them well.

I remember a friendly but heated conversation with a classmate in our high school senior lounge, on the brink of graduation. I was wrestling with what kind of moral expectations I could have for those who didn’t share my Christian faith. I was still naïve to the moral brokenness found within the church, and I had high expectations for the behavior of believers and low expectations for everyone else.

My friend wasn’t a Christian, and she pushed back on that assumption, arguing that people could have deep moral commitments outside of faith in God. I realized my line of thinking was offensive to her. I’d unintentionally implied that she had no moral grounding and failed to consider the personal ramifications of my theoretical ideas. It was a clarifying moment.

A few years later, my friend and I picked up the conversation again. I’d stayed near Washington for college and, along the way, had sobering experiences at the intersection of faith and politics. I saw fellow Christians responding to the realities of pluralism with fear, anger, and anxiety rather than faith, hope, and love, and these experiences left me asking a lot of questions.

Meanwhile, my friend had gone to an elite college in the Northeast and was on the brink of law school. Her convictions about the role of religion in a pluralistic society had become much stronger. She was convinced religion was harmful and no longer had any positive role to play in our society, politically or otherwise.

I’d read this viewpoint in the writings of people like philosopher Richard Rorty, who argues that religion is inevitably a “conversation-stopper” and causes harm. But to hear a friend speak this way about faith—including my faith—was painful. I could acknowledge that harm had been done in the name of Christ throughout the centuries. Yet this critique of Christianity felt very personal. It felt like my friend was saying that I, as well as my brothers and sisters in Christ, had no place in American public life.

These conversations and similar experiences were what led me to conclude that Christians need to learn how to better embody and articulate our convictions. So when I encountered the witness and writings of Augustine, I was delighted to discover resources for that project within the Christian tradition.

Augustine, too, became a Christian in a deeply pluralistic and tumultuous setting. Throughout his life, including his many years in ministry and as a public figure, he was always aware of the many religions and philosophies around him. Augustine didn’t expect Christianity to dominate society, and he rejected the impulse to respond to rapid political and cultural change with fear or anger.

Instead, Augustine called Christians to remember that we are citizens first and foremost of the City of God. This is our primary identity. He encouraged us to trust that no matter what happens in politics or culture (even the fall of the Roman Empire!), Jesus Christ is King. If we know this biblical truth, we never need to be afraid amid societal turmoil.

That rejection of fear does not mean retreat from society. Augustine taught that this kind of trust in God should inform our engagement in this world, not lead us to withdraw from it. We can seek the welfare of our earthly cities (Jer. 29:7) without losing sight of God’s kingdom. No political society will be or become the city of God in this age, but we can still contribute to public goods, like peace.

I’ve learned from Augustine an approach to Christian engagement amid pluralism that I’ve come to call “openhanded discipleship.” We learn about openhandedness all throughout the biblical story, going back to the very beginning when God gave humans everything: the breath of life, creation in his image, the gift of each other, a calling to be fruitful and multiply, a calling to steward the created world, and the power to fulfill those callings faithfully (Gen. 1:26–2:25). We were to receive all these gifts with gratitude and offer them back to God with open hands of our own.

Instead, humanity fell. Failing to trust God’s counsel, we used our hands to take rather than to receive. Since then, we’ve tended toward a posture of tightfistedness rather than openhandedness, of hoarding rather than sharing. To use a classic Christian term, humans became incurvatus in se (“turned in on ourselves”)—looking out for ourselves and our own instead of offering ourselves in love and service.

But even after the Fall, God didn’t let go of this vision of his people living with open hands. God called his covenant people, Israel, to remember that all they had came from God and was to be freely offered back, every moment of every day. We see this explicitly in Deuteronomy: “If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need” (15:7–8).

That same vision underlies Israel’s calls to tithe and give God the first fruits of the harvest, as well as the command to leave the edges of fields unharvested so those in need could glean enough to survive. The land was a gift from God to be openhandedly received by God’s people, then offered back to God and to others.

This openhandedness was also behind God’s call to love him “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5), a call famously reiterated by Jesus (Matt. 22:37). And not just reiterated but embodied by him, who loved so fully that he offered all of himself for the salvation of the world.

As his disciples, it is our call to “have the same mindset as Christ Jesus,” who emptied himself, opening his hands wide enough to die on the cross for us and our redemption (Phil. 2:5–8). In Christ and by the Spirit, we are to openhandedly offer all of ourselves to God every day, not tightfistedly holding anything back but loving God fully and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

This always lies at the heart of the call to follow Jesus, but it is particularly vital as we seek to live faithfully in pluralistic spaces. Even amid great political and cultural change, openhanded discipleship remains our calling. With Augustine, we can still find our primary identity in the kingdom of God. We can still generously offer ourselves as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1–2). We can still seek the welfare of our cities, countries, and public institutions, whether or not our neighbors share our faith. We can still look for points of overlap rather than demarcating lines of division.

Trusting that Christ is King no matter what and rooted in Christ instead of fear or anger, we can become known as people who with open hands offer life and hope to the world.

Kristen Deede Johnson is the dean and vice president of academic affairs and the G. W. and Edna Haworth Professor of Educational Ministries and Leadership at Western Theological Seminary. Her scholarship focuses on theology, culture, formation, and political theory. She is coauthor of The Justice Calling and is writing a book about openhanded discipleship, to be published by Zondervan Reflective.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

- More from Kristen Deede Johnson

News

Egyptian Christians Show ‘Love of Jesus’ to Displaced Palestinians

Jayson Casper

Courtesy of Christian Mission to Gaza

Almost six months have passed since Issa Saliba boarded a bus in Gaza with 15 other Christians to seek safety in Egypt. But he still relishes how they sang, clapped, and danced as they escaped devastation.

The air conditioning cooled his nerves, frayed from the harrowing journey to the border. Later that day, the wayside stop provided his first full meal.

As 1.9 million Palestinians—90 percent of Gaza’s population—remain internally displaced, less known is that 100,000 have managed to take refuge in Egypt. Saliba, allowed to depart because he is enrolled at the American University of Madaba in Jordan, left behind his father, two younger brothers, and the hundreds of other Christians remaining in the war-torn Mediterranean strip.

Saliba’s trip in April took him south along the damaged, dusty coastal road through Israeli checkpoints to the Rafah crossing. Then came a six-hour ride to Cairo. Saliba got out just in time: In May, Israel took control of Rafah’s Philadelphi Corridor and closed the border. The 8-mile-long strip of land remains a key sticking point in current negotiations over a ceasefire.

But from the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, the Egyptian government has resisted overtures to resettle displaced Palestinians in the adjacent Sinai Peninsula. Wary of terrorist infiltration but also fearful Israel will permanently refuse refugee reentry to Gaza, Egypt limited entry to people with medical emergencies, the financial means to pay up to thousands of dollars in fees, and international educational connections, like Saliba.

Evangelicals, though, are becoming known for giving food and supplies to refugees, whether Christian or Muslim. The Egyptian church, partnering with like-minded Palestinians, has even sent aid into Gaza for the believers huddled for safety in churches, as well as thousands of others displaced from their homes in makeshift camp communities.

“We show the love of God to everyone,” said Samuel Adel, chairman of the pastoral, outreach, and missions council of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Egypt, also called Synod of the Nile. “When people ask why, we tell them it comes from our love of Jesus.”

Soon after the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, aid to refugees began under the leadership of Hanna Maher, an Egyptian Presbyterian pastor who formerly led Gaza Baptist Church. While most Palestinian Christians traveled onward to Cairo, Muslims settled primarily in the Mediterranean towns in and around Arish, about 30 miles west of Rafah.

The synod is displaying Christian charity by giving weekly food parcels to 50 Muslim families. An additional 20 families received fans with which to endure the oppressive heat. Seven families received essential household supplies like refrigerators, washing machines, and cooking equipment. And the synod gave eight wheelchairs to government hospitals to ease transport of the wounded to specialized medical centers in the humanitarian area designated for Palestinians.

Sinai was once a hotbed for terrorism—100 Christian families fled in 2017.

But some Muslims’ attitudes have changed. Maher’s local Muslim driver, impressed that the church has done so much to help, doesn’t charge Maher for rides. The driver has told several new families: These are Christians, coming to help you.

And sometimes Maher is invited into discussion about whom to blame for the devastation of Gaza—Israel or Hamas. He replies with what Jesus said in the Gospel of John about a man who was born blind. When asked if the sin that caused the blindness came from the man or his parents, Jesus answered, “neither;” the blindness was so “the works of God might be displayed in him” (9:3).

But Maher struggles to know how to further counsel the Gazan displaced.

“We pray for peace, but I don’t know what to say about this terrible war,” he said. “‘God is with us,’ I tell them—but it is difficult; I don’t have an answer beyond this truth.”

The Egyptian government has allowed Christian humanitarian efforts, but the refugee presence is politically sensitive. Egyptian leaders remember how Palestinians who fled from Israel to Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria in the 1948 and 1967 wars never returned home. Officials have categorically rejected the permanent settling of Gazan refugees in Egypt. Israel will not accept the displaced in its territory either.

Israel and Egypt jointly imposed a blockade on Gaza in 2007. Prior to 2011, Egypt’s government unofficially tolerated a network of Gaza-Egypt tunnels but has since destroyed thousands. Despite Egyptian denials, Israel stated that smuggling continues and links its control of Rafah to ongoing ceasefire negotiations.

But beyond the political and security concerns, humanitarian needs of the displaced do not fall under official United Nations refugee jurisdiction. Yet whether through the church, diverse grassroots initiatives, or other UN agencies, assistance is available.

Assistance is more difficult in Gaza. This summer, Egyptian Christians have worked in conjunction with Christian Mission for Gaza (CMG) to provide meals for over 15,000 Muslims in Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, Jabaliya, and the Remal neighborhood of Gaza City. Residents have lined up with bowls and tins to receive ladlefuls of yellow rice, often heated over makeshift fires in metallic vats. Sometimes they get canned vegetables, and very rarely, chicken.

During last month’s distribution, children beamed while receiving the latter in tinfoil-wrapped portions. Black-robed women in headscarves extended their hands through tent openings to receive the same.

The Gaza-born former pastor of the Baptist church, Hanna Massad, serving prior to Maher, founded CMG in 1999. An Israeli missile flattened his family’s home in the Remal neighborhood, which took ten years for his father to build in the 1960s. Aware that most Gazans believe a “Christian West” is selling bombs to Israel, Massad said he wants his former neighbors “to know there are Christians who care—and are helping them.”

CMG has also distributed bread fifteen times in various areas and clean water five times. At each location, posted signs flap in the wind: From Gaza Baptist and the Presbyterian Church in Egypt. Many Muslims have offered thanks to their “brothers” for caring about their needs, and one even made the sign of the cross. Others have asked how they can learn more about the faith.

“People in Gaza have begun to see the true light, but they need guidance,” he said. “So I pray that the situation here will change after this war and that there will be a space to work freely with these people.”

About 200 of the 1,000 Christians who were living in Gaza before the war have since fled to Egypt, Massad estimated. Many have already received visas to Australia, and more are likely to emigrate as soon as they can.

Saliba, waiting in Cairo, prays for the Gazan Christians who remain.

“I thank God I was able to leave Gaza,” he said. “Jesus was with me every step of the way. Now I just want my family to join me.”

- More from Jayson Casper

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Kingdom of Jesus Christ (KOJC)

Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC)

Members Church of God International (MCGI), better known as Ang Dating Daan (ADD)

Philippine Benevolent Missionaries Association (PBMA)

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A prophetic push

Going gray

Creating change

A favorable future

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A different way to care for orphans

From orphanages to families

Orphanages’ chokehold

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In this series

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