Why Changes to India’s Colonial Criminal Code Concern Christians

A Supreme Court lawyer on how recent legal reforms could affect the country’s minorities.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

On June 23, authorities arrested Sarju Prasad, a pastor in Uttar Pradesh, for conducting Sunday worship in his house. Earlier that day, two Hindu men, one claiming to be a journalist, had entered his house during the morning service and taken photographs.

That evening, two policemen detained Prasad on charges of plans to commit cognizable offenses. However, their explanations only came out later; at the time, they did not notify him of the grounds of arrest, a violation of India’s Code of Criminal Procedure. They also ignored the procedure’s requirement that the offender be brought before a judge within 24 hours of being taken into custody.

Instead, Prasad was only presented before a magistrate two days later and was released on bail on June 25. Shortly after, on July 2, while collecting his cell phone at the police station, authorities re-arrested him, saying that he had violated the state’s anti-conversion law. This time, he was denied bail and is now in prison.

Prasad’s case is just one of many where the local police have allegedly colluded with Hindu extremists and arrested Christians conducting peaceful prayers, tyrannizing their rights. Indian Christians are apprehensive about what might happen under the new criminal laws that have replaced their three British-era counterparts. Described as “draconian” by some legal experts, the legislation has elicited criticism and protests, and Christian, Muslim, and other vulnerable communities fear possible abuses of the new laws.

The Parliament of India approved the three new laws last December without following due process, according to the opposition. They replaced the Indian Penal Code with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), the Code of Criminal Procedure with the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), and the Indian Evidence Act with the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), all of which came into effect on July 1.

Proponents argue that these long-overdue reforms aim to modernize the justice system, leveraging technology to improve efficiency and accessibility, such as allowing police complaints to be registered remotely or permitting the use of videos as court evidence.

Further, India needs legislation “not based on colonial prejudices and practices but on the principles of access of justice to all,” said Rajiv Mani, secretary of the Legislative Department. “The three laws have hence been enacted to overhaul the criminal justice system in the country to make it citizen-centric.”

However, critics contend that the new laws grant the government excessive authority through the police to restrict free speech and to crack down on those who express dissent or criticism of the government, potentially infringing on civil liberties and disproportionately affecting minority communities.

For instance, Father Stan Swamy, an advocate for the tribals and the Dalits, was arrested under the terrorist act. Father Swamy believed this was a deliberate effort “to put me out of the way, and one easy way was to implicate me in some serious cases.” Despite his deteriorating health conditions and being 84, Swamy was ultimately denied bail and died while incarcerated in 2021.

Christians in India, who in recent years have been subject to violence and other persecution at the hands of Hindu nationalists and the police, now worry that speaking out about their plight could lead to prosecution. They have witnessed several cases where the police have been mere spectators while Hindu extremists barged into churches, disrupting services, vandalizing church property, and assaulting the pastor.

Christians have also been falsely implicated in the past for desecrating Hindu idols, such as when Hindu extremists planted broken idols near the property of a Christian man. Ironically, the same law is not applicable to Hindu extremists who desecrate Christian religious symbols.

In a more recent instance, on July 27, Hindu extremists entered a Catholic school in Madhya Pradesh and objected to the Christian religious symbols on the school premises and in the classrooms. In the presence of the police, they removed Christian images and symbols from the classrooms and installed pictures of Hindu idols. Yet no action has been taken against the mob—instead, against the school. These stories of police officers acting sympathetically to Hindu extremists means that minority groups fear nearly any legislation giving law enforcement officers more power.

Many already believe that the criminal justice system has been stacked against minorities: 76 percent of prisoners sentenced to death in India between 2000 and 2015 were from “backward classes and religious minorities,” according to a 2016 study.

As India grapples with these significant changes to its legal landscape, CT spoke with Robin Ratnakar David, a Christian and a lawyer practicing at the Supreme Court of India, to understand the implications of these new laws, particularly for India’s minority communities.

Were these new criminal laws necessary?

The new criminal laws largely repurpose and consolidate existing ones. While there are some new provisions, the essence remains unchanged, raising questions about the necessity of such an extensive overhaul when amendments could have sufficed.

For laws to be effective and just, they must be shaped by inclusive dialogue with various stakeholders, including legal experts, civil society organizations, and the affected communities. On the contrary, when these bills were passed in Parliament, no proper debate was conducted, as many ministers had been suspended.

If the goal was to modernize and improve the legal framework, overhauling the Police Act of 1861 would have been more impactful. Viewed widely as unprofessional, insensitive, brutal, and corrupt, this measure was designed for colonial control rather than public service. The British instated it after the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, a rebellion against the British East India Company’s rule led primarily by Indian soldiers (sepoys).

The Indian government has previously recommended police reforms, and, in 2006, a Model Police Act was suggested, which was not fully implemented.

What aspects of the new criminal laws could pose problems for Christians and other vulnerable groups?

Previously, the laws concerning terrorism were only found in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA), which is not related to the recently enacted three laws and is still in effect. Under this legislation, the police require prior written permission from the designated authority before seizing the property of the accused. Terrorism now also falls under the new BNS law and gives the police a free hand in seizing any property associated with the crime. The BNS’s definition of terrorism is also broader. The UAPA requires an intention to strike terror, while the BNS includes acts intended “to intimidate the general public or disturb public order.”

This overlap creates legal ambiguity, allowing the police free rein to decide whether to book a case under the UAPA or BNS. If the goal was to expand terrorism laws, amending the UAPA might have been more appropriate than introducing parallel but contradictory definitions in the BNS. There is speculation that including these provisions under the BNS could lead to its use disproportionately against minorities, as has been the case with the UAPA.

What other sections would you call out?

The BNS has another section that states that anyone who “excites or attempts to excite secession or armed rebellion or subversive activities” has broken the law. The broad and potentially vague definitions raise concerns about potential misuses against dissenters, activists, and minority groups.

This section (305d of the BNS) punishes the theft of vehicles, government property, religious idols, and icons with up to seven years’ imprisonment. There’s already concerns that this may be subjectively applied and used to target the Christian community.

What should Christians know about the BSA’s new provisions regarding admission of electronic evidence in court?

In 2014, India’s Supreme Court warned that electronic evidence can be easily altered, potentially leading to unfair trials if not properly protected. The new BSA allows electronic records as evidence in court, such as website content, text messages, server logs, computer/laptop/smartphone data, emails, location data, etc. However, it fails to include measures to ensure the authenticity and integrity of digital evidence. This lack of safeguards raises concerns about the potential misuse or manipulation of electronic proof in legal proceedings.

Christians who are in the habit of streaming their Sunday church services live and uploading their sermons and messages, prayers and prayer meetings, should keep all of this in mind. Christians should monitor and moderate content responsibly, as failure to manage content can lead to liability.

Christians should take extra care while posting content, ensuring it is respectful and appropriate. They must share only accurate and verified information. They must obtain permission before they share someone else’s content. And they must not post any defamatory or illegal material.

How do you respond to claims that these laws give police broader powers that could be misused against vulnerable communities?

Since this act has been recently enacted, it may be too early to comment definitively on the potential abuse of police powers.

An area of concern is that BNSS Section 187 allows the police to detain and question an accused person for a total of 15 days. That was the case earlier as well, but that was 15 days in a row, unlike in this new law, where the 15 days can be spread over 40 to 60 days of the total detention period of 60 to 90 days. This means that instead of being questioned for a continuous 15-day period, the police can repeatedly detain, release, and re-arrest the accused.

This approach could prolong the accused’s anxiety and uncertainty for up to three months, potentially being used as a means of harassment. It could also lead to the denial of bail for the entire period until the police exhaust the 15-day custody allowance.

There is a legitimate concern that this provision could be misused by the police as a means of undue harassment without corresponding provisions to address police misconduct. Petitions challenging the implementation of these laws have been filed in high courts and the Supreme Court.

Are some critics exaggerating the dangers while overlooking the real issue of legal awareness among minorities?

While some critics may emphasize the dangers, it is also crucial to address the real issue of legal awareness among minorities. Ensuring that all citizens are informed about their rights and the laws can help mitigate potential misuse and promote fair enforcement. Increasing legal literacy and awareness can empower minorities and reduce the risk of discriminatory practices at the enforcement level.

Thus, while vigilance against potential misuse is essential, fostering legal awareness and education within vulnerable communities is equally critical to ensuring justice and equality for all.

- More from Interview by Surinder Kaur

Books

How to Read the Bible in Color

Esau McCaulley

Why a group of multi-ethnic editors began working on a new commentary of the New Testament.

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

I was sitting in a coffee shop, books taking up too much space on the tiny table in front of me, bemoaning the lack of attention the academy paid to the Black church and the distinctive interpretative habits of African American church leaders and scholars. My time in religious higher education had signaled, in ways large and small, its belief that the tradition that shaped me had little to say to the rest of the world.

The important ideas and trends arose in Europe or white North American spaces—Black Christians, on the other hand, were historically deemed theologically simplistic or dangerous. But I longed for people to know the tradition as I experienced it: life-giving, spiritually robust, and intellectually stimulating. We had wrestled with God and found our way toward faith in the context of anti-Black racism often perpetuated by other Christians. I wanted to make that story and the fruits of our labor known. I still do.

While I sipped my coffee, I was struck by an idea that served as the genesis for The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Commentary on the New Testament. I often complained about white scholars neglecting African American voices, but I knew little about Asian American biblical interpretation, its theological and historical developments, and the gifts it offered to the body of Christ. The same was true regarding Latino interpretation and the Bible-reading habits of First Nations and Indigenous peoples.

In some ways, I was a hypocrite. I wanted people to attend to the contributions of my community without being similarly invested in others. I needed to spend less time complaining and more time listening. The New Testament in Color thus began with that insight. It was a hope that we might come together across ethnic differences and create something beautiful.

I wondered, What fruit might come from the various ethnic groups sharing space in North America working together to produce a commentary? What did I need to learn from my brothers and sisters in Christ beyond the Black-white binary that shaped my imagination in the American South?

It was natural that my lament was directed to where the power resides in the academy. In 2019, the Society of Biblical Literature, the largest body of biblical scholars in the world, did a study of its membership. That study showed that 86 percent (2,732 of 3,159) of its members who described themselves as college or university faculty were of European or Caucasian descent.

Given the demographics of the United States (and the world), it is more than fair to say that we experience a disproportionate white or European dominance of biblical studies. If God gives his Spirit without measure and equips the entire body of Christ to read and interpret the Bible, then it is a tragedy when the whole body of Christ is not engaged in the process of reading, interpreting, and applying these texts. No one part of the body has the right to speak for the whole. We need each other.

Does a lack of ethnic diversity matter? Isn’t biblical interpretation simply a matter of translating verbs and nouns, linking together ideas as they come together into sentences, paragraphs, narratives, or letters? I was told that the only thing we needed to be good interpreters was proper understanding of the historical context alongside requisite grammatical, text-critical, and linguistic expertise.

I do not want to push any of those important and vital skills aside. All the contributors to The New Testament in Color labored hard to gain the aforementioned tools of the scholarly trade. It is precisely because I believe that biblical texts are God’s Word to his people that we must do our very best to read them well and carefully.

But here is the rub. It matters that we have diverse representation in the process of biblical interpretation because it is always ourselves as persons with our experiences, biases, gifts, and liabilities that we bring to the text. We are not disembodied spirits without histories or cultures. We are not exegetical machines; we are interpreting persons.

We come from somewhere, and that somewhere has left its mark, whether we acknowledge it or not. When one culture dominates the discourse, we are closing ourselves off from what the Holy Spirit is saying among other cultures. Socially located interpretation, when rooted in a trust in God’s Word, is a gift from particular cultures to the whole church. Socially located interpretation reflects a trust that none of our experiences are wasted, that all of who we are is useful to God.

Our cultures are not something we are called to set aside in the Bible reading process, because our cultures and ethnicities have their origins in God (Eph. 3:14–15). Every culture and ethnicity, because it was created by people made in the image of God, contains within it both evidence of its divine origins (Gen. 1:28) and elements of the Fall (Gen. 3).

Stated differently, there are no perfect cultures. Every culture and people is challenged and made into the best version of itself through an encounter with the living God. Our cultures are restless until they find their rest in their Creator. None of them are left unchanged. God’s word to persons and cultures is always yes and no. He offers us all repentance for things that have gone astray and lauds our struggles toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Socially located biblical interpretation is nothing less than the record of the Spirit’s work through scriptural engagement among the different ethnicities and cultures of the world. Unfortunately, too often, the sanctification of culture has been confused with the Westernization of culture. That lie has done tremendous damage to the church. God’s transfiguring work is not done in comparison with the West. Ethnicities do not become more holy as they approach likeness to Europe but to God.

That attempt of each culture and group to find themselves as they struggle to examine their lives and culture in light of the Word of God is instructive not just for them; it is instructive to the whole body of Christ. We can, through listening to the voices of others, see the ways in which our own location has at times hindered our ability to read the text well. What we are aiming for, then, is mutual edification.

Due to the varied ways in which Scripture has been used to justify indefensible things such as colonialization, slavery, and the studied disdain for non-Western cultures, much socially located biblical interpretation has been rooted in a hermeneutics of suspicion in the effort to resist those evils.

We believe that it is right to push back on the misuse of Scripture to justify evil, but we also believe that socially located biblical interpretation can engage in a hermeneutics of trust, wherein we recognize that the God we encounter in biblical texts is in the end a friend, not an enemy. We want to honor the fact that the ecclesial communities from which we come found liberation and spiritual transformation through reading with the text, not against it. Some might consider this naiveté. I disagree. I consider it hard-won wisdom.

We agree that Scripture is God’s word to us that functions as the final guide for Christian faith and practice. Evoking Nicaea does not mean that we are privileging Western culture as defining Christianity for the world. Instead, it is an affirmation that God was at work among Christians of the past to tell us things that are true and good. We hope, in the generations to come, that despite our compromises and failures, Christians will find some lasting value in our theological contributions. There are no pristine histories.

In other words, we do not assume that our cultures stand over the texts, but through the interaction of person, text, history, and culture, truths that others might miss shine out all the more brilliantly. The chorus can create a beauty the soloist cannot.

In the end, the fruit will be seen in the ways we help churchgoers and Bible study leaders and students read the text more faithfully. Like any group of writers committed to serving the body of Christ, we welcome pushback given in good faith. Our goal is not to replace one form of hegemony with another or to close the conversation around these texts across cultures. We desire a shared pursuit to discover the mind of Christ and his purposes for his people.

Nonetheless, we do believe that these entries will indeed do what all good commentaries endeavor to accomplish: send the reader back to the text with fresh questions, answers, and a sense of wonder at the ways in which the ancient word remains ever new, challenging and inspiring us to follow our King and Lord more faithfully.

Taken from New Testament in Color edited by Esau McCaulley, Janette H. Ok, Osvaldo Padilla, and Amy Peeler. Copyright (c) 2024 by Esau McCaulley, Amy L. Peeler, Janette H. Ok, and Osvaldo Padilla. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

Esau McCaulley is the author of How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South and the children’s book Andy Johnson and the March for Justice. He is an associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College.

- More from Esau McCaulley

News

Gordon College Loses Religious Liberty Argument for Loan Forgiveness

Daniel Silliman

Evangelical school sees discrimination in COVID-19 relief fund’s employee-counting rules.

Elizabeth Thomsen / Flickr

Gordon College could be on the hook to repay $7 million of COVID-19 relief funds. A federal court rejected eight of the evangelical school’s arguments that it should be eligible for loan forgiveness.

Gordon’s lawyers made the case that the religious liberty protections in the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act should allow the institution to count employees in a different way than the US Small Business Administration (SBA) said they had to be counted. The US district court in Washington, DC, rejected the argument, citing a lack of evidence.

“Plaintiff alleges no facts connecting its number of employees to any religious practice,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote in a ruling handed down in July. “Plaintiff fails to identify any ‘exercise of religion’ that has been burdened, and thus plaintiff’s claims can be dismissed on this basis alone.”

According to the government, Gordon has 639 employees on its wooded campus on the North Shore of Boston. Some of those people only work part time, however. So the school calculated the full-time equivalent, which is a common way to track enrollment in higher education. If you don’t tally individual people working at the school, but instead count units of time worked, Gordon only has 495.67 employees.

Organizations with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for loan forgiveness.

The government gave out nearly $800 billion as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2020. The vast majority of recipients have since had their debt waived. Gordon is an exception.

“Gordon College followed the procedures given at the time of the loan application,” the school said in a statement, “and most importantly, used these funds completely in the manner in which they were presented by the SBA: to avoid layoffs of employees and continue to provide them with a paycheck even though the College was forced to shut down operations for months.”

In court filings, the law firm Gammon and Grange said the SBA’s decision not to forgive the school’s $7 million loan was “legally erroneous and arbitrary and capricious on the merits.” It was also, the attorneys claim, religious discrimination.

Gordon, which has about 1,300 students enrolled in undergraduate programs, requested a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan in April 2020. The application form asked for a count of employees, and Gordon gave the number: 495.67. The school’s lawyers say the method of counting the full-time equivalent was clearly indicated.

According to Gordon, more than 25 other colleges and universities also used the full-time equivalent to calculate loan eligibility. Most applicants, however, just counted people.

No one was sure if there was a “right” way, at the time.

“There was widespread confusion,” Gordon’s lawsuit says, “about what method to determine the number of employees should be used.”

At the end of April, the SBA put out a statement on its FAQ page about full-time equivalent counts. The government agency said the number of employees should be determined by a simple head count, treating full- and part-time employees equally. The SBA also clarified that the 500-employee cap only applied to loan forgiveness. Organizations with more employees than that would still be considered eligible for funding but would be required to pay the money back.

By that time, though, Gordon had already gotten its loan from Citizens Bank, a PPP partner, and was using the money to keep the 639 people who worked at the school employed.

Court records indicate that the school didn’t learn of the issue with its eligibility for loan forgiveness until November 2021, when Citizens Bank said in an email that the SBA needed an “employee count per location.” The school responded within a few days, giving the government a new number, based on a head count: 639.

In April 2022, the SBA notified Gordon that its application for loan forgiveness was denied.

Gordon appealed and then appealed again, taking the SBA to court.

The lawyers claimed that the “SBA Court refused to even consider an exemption or other relief from a cramped and unconstitutional interpretation of the ‘500 employee’ threshold.” Even worse, the SBA “discriminated against Plaintiff-Petitioner, an evangelical Christian college with religiously and socially conservative views, by treating other, similarly situated religious colleges better than it has Plaintiff-Petitioner.”

Gordon alleges that 25 other schools that counted employees the same way were forgiven loans of $5 to $10 million each.

Judge Howell ruled, however, that Gordon did not back up that claim with sufficient evidence. Many of the other schools that Gordon pointed to were, in fact, also Christian institutions. The lawyers mentioned Wheaton College, Trevecca Nazarene University, Drew University, and St. Mary’s College Notre Dame.

Gordon, Howell wrote, “offers no facts to support its conclusory allegation that these 25 other colleges are similarly situated—much less similarly situated in all respects except religious affiliation.”

Howell also found there wasn’t evidence to show that counting employees was connected to religion at all.

“No allegation is made that the 500-employee cap or SBA’s methods for counting employees were enacted to target or single out any religious conduct or institutions,” the judge wrote, “nor that the cap or employee-counting methodology employed have an adverse impact on religion.”

And according to Howell, there isn’t even evidence that SBA officials knew Gordon was a Christian school.

The Massachusetts college is not the only PPP loan recipient that has been told it will have to pay the money back. The SBA has manually audited about 2 percent of all PPP loans and denied forgiveness to about 0.2 percent. That works out to around 21,000 organizations that will have to pay back relief money.

According to some experts, the approval process was rushed in response to the fear of financial crisis brought on by the pandemic. That allowed for a lot of fraud—as well as many honest mistakes.

“A lot of the details were very unclear to businesses and banks,” Eric Lichatin, a commercial loan officer who handled PPP applications for a bank in Rhode Island, told NPR.

Steven Mnuchin, who was treasury secretary under Donald Trump and oversaw the program design, had said that the needs of small businesses were too urgent to set up a lengthy loan review process in 2020. But he assured a House oversight committee in 2020 that there would be more careful scrutiny when it came time to forgive loans.

“We are going to have a very robust process,” he said. “People will be required to provide much more data.”

One lawyer who advises PPP borrowers for a New Jersey law firm said that has happened, and now the SBA is “playing hardball” on loan forgiveness.

Some borrowers—including a car dealership in New Jersey and a fitness club in Missouri—are fighting back in court. Gordon appears to be the only one, however, making religious liberty claims for loan forgiveness.

Those arguments were rejected. The school’s other arguments will go forward, with lawyers arguing the decision to deny the loan was a legal error, “made in excess of SBA’s statutory authority, and constituted an abuse of discretion (to the extent it had discretion),” and that it was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.

“We believe those do provide sufficient grounds for the Court to reverse the SBA’s denial of forgiveness,” Gordon said in a statement, “and hope to see a favorable resolution of this issue in the future. “

This story was updated with quotes from a statement from Gordon that was unavailable at time of publicaiton.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Church Life

Yes, Fiji Olympians Are Singing Hymns

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Viral videos show athletes singing in four-part harmony, a practice with deep Christian and indigenous roots in the Pacific island nation.

The Fijian rugby team singing a hymn prior to a game.

Jan Kruger / Stringer / Getty

Viral videos of the Fijian Olympic team singing in Paris show a congregation of athletes raising their voices in four-part harmony, as if they had been rehearsing in addition to training for the games. In several videos, the group is shown singing the Fijian hymn “Mo Ravi Vei Jisu” (“Draw Close to Jesus”). One video on TikTok has over 3 million views and 660,000 likes.

The Fijian men’s rugby team won gold in both the 2016 and 2020 Olympic games; this year, the team earned silver. Videos of Fijian rugby teams singing have gone viral before, like this one from 2022 showing the team Fiji Bati huddled on the field, singing a hymn in full-throated harmony before a match against Papua New Guinea.

“There is an understanding that singing, harmony, is a way of expressing our connection to the world and to each other,” said Tui Nuku Smith, a Fijian Methodist minister. “And in Fiji, community singing is related both to indigenous culture and to the Methodist tradition.”

For many Fijians, especially Fijian Christians, community singing is built into the rhythm of everyday life. In videos taken during the Paris Olympics, the Fijian delegation sings in the Fijian language (also called iTaukei), sometimes a cappella and sometimes accompanied by a guitar. (The three primary languages spoken in the country are English, Fijian, and Hindi. English was Fiji’s official language until 1997, and Hindi is still spoken by the descendants of Indian laborers brought by British colonialists to work in the sugar cane fields. Most indigenous Fijians, who make up 54 percent of the population, speak the Fijian language.)

Many of the athletes in the Fijian coalition have likely been singing in four-part harmony since they were very young, said Smith. Starting with family devotions in the home, Fijian children in Christian families grow up hearing harmony and learn to participate.

“When I would walk through the village in the mornings or evenings, I would hear singing coming from the homes,” recalled Jerusha Matsen Neal, who spent three years at Davuilevu Theological College on the island of Viti Levu with the United Methodist Church’s Global Ministries. “You’d hear singing in four-part harmony, with children.”

This tradition, said Neal, is one that Fijian Christians carefully cultivate and preserve. The four-part harmony we hear in those viral videos is the result of generations of teaching and practice.

“You can imagine that when you have three- and four-year-olds learning, it can sound like a mess,” said Neal, now an assistant professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School. “But children get to sit and sing with their families, in a circle of love, twice a day. So by the time they’re seven or eight, they have a remarkable musical ear.”

The indigenous music of Fiji and Papua New Guinea is primarily vocal and unaccompanied. Similarly, much of the traditional music across Polynesia is vocal though noticeably more “word-oriented,” incorporating a blend of chanting and heightened speaking tones. Despite the significant regional differences in indigenous musical practices throughout Oceania, the prominence of choral music is nearly everywhere.

In addition to practicing singing during family devotions and in church services each week, congregations periodically host visiting choir directors for a week of workshops and rehearsals with different vocal groupings: children, women, men, youth. In this way, even small, remote churches take seriously the task of learning to sing as a community. The country’s annual hymn-singing competition draws thousands of Fijian Methodists each year, a gathering that occasionally heightens political tension in the country.

Although Fijian hymnody grew out of Methodist songs brought by 19th-century missionaries, it has become a deeply rooted tradition that makes space for indigenous practices across the diverse country. Christianity’s connection to the legacy of colonialism in Fiji (which was a British colony from 1847 to 1970) is undeniable, but Fijian vocal music stands as an example of the ways Fijians have been contextualizing Christian worship and integrating it into their communities for nearly two centuries.

When missionaries William Cross and David Cargill, sent by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, arrived in Fiji in 1835, they realized that the region’s hundreds of islands (Fiji has over 100 permanently inhabited islands) would make a centralized approach to evangelism impossible. As ethnomusicologist Helen Black has observed, early missionaries recognized that they needed to enlist Fijian converts in spreading the gospel from island to island, and that embracing the fusion of indigenous musical practices with Methodist hymnody would allow the gospel to spread more organically.

“Indigenous Fijian music, with its central role in Fijian culture, was a perfect vehicle for communication,” Black wrote. “Christians utilizing music of their secular meke [the generic term for Fijian music with poetic text] inserted Christian text in their particular poetic style, creating their own repertoire of religious music. Thus, this music became not only part of the liturgy of the Fijian Methodist Church, but also a vehicle for evangelization.”

Fijian Christians adapted their traditional call-and-response chants to teach and recite the catechism. A leader would call out a question, and the congregation would chant the answer. They also adapted chants to recite the Psalms communally. These practices are still widespread in Fiji’s Methodist churches. Western missionaries brought Methodist hymnals with them, but the hymnals in many Fijian churches today don’t include musical notation, only words. The music is an oral tradition.

The infusion of meke with Christian content and the local adaptation and alteration of Methodist hymns formed a uniquely Fijian body of sung music, tailored to the singing style and cultural practices of the region. In some cases, missionaries found that the hymnody they brought became almost unrecognizable as Fijian Christians took charge of the music and reshaped its rhythms and harmonies.

William Woon, a Wesleyan missionary, wrote in his journal in 1830, “Several of our excellent tunes are spoilt by the natives from singing them in a minor key; others are so completely metamorphosed that we scarcely know sometimes what tunes they sing.”

Some missionaries, like Woon, worried that the hymns they prized for both teaching and stirring the emotions were being stretched too far. But most seemed content, even eager, to allow Fijians to take ownership of their musical worship and forge something new.

“There’s a kind of contextualization that happens just by claiming that a song belongs to you,” said Deborah Wong, a worship leader and ThD candidate in liturgical studies at Duke Divinity School. “God’s family includes all people. These songs belong to the global church. They may have originated in one part of the church, but they still belong to all of us.”

In the centuries since Methodism’s arrival in Fiji, it has remained the dominant Christian denomination, constituting around 34 percent of the country’s Christian population. Methodism’s emphasis on hymn singing made it compatible with Fijian culture, in which singing functioned as a way of participating in and literally harmonizing with the natural world.

Indigenous religious practices in Fiji consisted of ancestor worship and animism, but today just over 60 percent of the population is Christian, 27 percent Hindu, and 9 percent Muslim. However, the connection between community singing, even in Christian worship, and the natural world remains strong.

“If there is a hurricane, we see that as a sign that we have angered God. We have awareness that we shouldn’t violate nature but should care for it. We acknowledge that interconnectedness,” said Smith. “Singing is an expression of harmony with God, with the community, and with nature itself.”

Neal noted that the sense of connection with the natural world was taken very seriously, calling to mind biblical images of nature participating in worship.

“Singing is an embodiment of interconnection with the world, with each other, and with God,” said Neal. “In Scripture, we see these images of trees clapping their hands, of rocks crying out. In some ways, we in the West have written off those images as hyperbole and metaphor.”

The physicality of singing and its effects on a congregation are sometimes lost in worship settings where the sound of a band drowns out the voices in the room. In the US, less than 20 percent of the population regularly sings in a choir, so many American Christians have lost touch with what it feels like to be in a vibrant singing community. Neal recalled that her first encounter with the sonic power of four-part harmony in a Fijian Methodist church moved her to tears.

“I began to weep. The sound filled the space,” Neal said. “I had a hymnal to follow along with the Fijian words, and it was vibrating in my hands. That’s how powerful the sound was. There was a profound sense of communal affirmation of faith through song.”

Although choral singing has become an important part of Fijian Christian identity, the practice is increasingly precarious in a globalized world. Churches in urban centers are more frequently using instruments and incorporating popular worship music from Western groups like Hillsong, which is influential in part because of its geographic proximity.

Church leaders are aware that new music and the use of instruments can help draw younger people to a church, especially those who did not grow up in Christian communities.

“Those who have access to instruments now might use them, probably not all of the time,” said Smith. But he added, “There is a suspicion about the use of instruments, even though the Bible is filled with references to them. There is such a strong tradition here, people have almost demonized musical instruments.”

Neal commented, “Some Fijians are concerned about unthoughtfully adopting musical traditions from the West that create a more individualist definition of what music is and what the human is.”

Navigating the growing influence of Western worship music is challenging Fijian Christians to find ways to preserve the singing tradition that they highly value and practice with pride. The Fijian Olympic team’s singing in Paris demonstrates the centrality of singing to Fijian cultural identity. Smith said that the Fijian rugby team often sings before or after a match, not because they want to make an evangelistic demonstration but because it’s just part of who they are.

“When there is singing in rugby, for example, whether for a loss or a win,” he stated, “they sing because it involves their whole life, their whole community, their whole being.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Theology

Persecuted Chinese Christians Still Need Prayer After Prison

CJ Wu

Police continue to harass and monitor believers long after their release.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

In late May, Christian journalist Zhang Zhan attended a daily Zoom prayer meeting organized by members of Early Rain Covenant Church (ERCC). The former lawyer and activist had spent four years in prison for reporting about the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

“To be honest, I am truly afraid,” she told the prominent Reformed house church in Chengdu, China, through tears. “I am actually not tough, but a person who cries often. … It is painful because it is inconvenient for me to attend a church since I am being surveilled. But I long to see my brothers and sisters [in Christ], yet I dare not visit anybody.”

A week and a half later, she shared on WeChat that she was being questioned and threatened by local police, who warned that if she crossed the “red line” again, they would send her back to prison. Zhang wrote: “Whose red line are you all protecting? Is the life of the people the red line? Or is it ‘the opinion of superiors’? I don’t want to go [to jail], and I’m not the one who should go in.”

A few days later, a scheduled interview with Zhang with Christianity Today was canceled after her encrypted messaging app account suddenly disappeared.

“She is still in the eye of the storm, bearing a lot of pressure, [including] endless interrogation or police visits to her residence,” Wang Jianhong, the UK-based founder of the Zhang Zhan Concern Group, told CT. “She has to be discreet when she circumvents [China’s Great Firewall]. Being connected to overseas [people] poses great risks for her.”

Zhang’s post-jail sustained surveillance is not unique among Chinese Christians who have served their sentence and are released. Missionary John Cao, ERCC elder Li Yingqiang, and Guizhou pastor Yang Hua also continue to live under scrutiny as authorities monitor their whereabouts, their social media posts, and who they meet. Once officers spot “suspicious” activities—such as speaking out about their time in prison or connecting with fellow believers—they threaten to return them to prison.

Speaking out for the voiceless

Zhang started to get involved with human rights and political activism after becoming a Christian in 2015. Before that, she had worked as a financial advisor at a securities firm in Shanghai, until the firm fired her for refusing to falsify financial data. Her conversion further changed her life trajectory.

“As a Christian, I do things based on the gospel,” Zhang told Radio Free Asia in 2019. “I hope Christians can push for this country’s peaceful reform or change in politics. I hope to push for some breakthrough.”

Authorities suspended her lawyer license in 2016 in retaliation for signing a petition against new rules that would prevent Chinese lawyers from forming groups, gathering signatures, or issuing open letters. In 2019, she was detained for 65 days after she held up an umbrella in downtown Shanghai in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests and called for an end to the Communist Party’s rule.

When Zhang read an online post in early 2020 about the government’s silence on the newly discovered coronavirus, she took a train to Wuhan, arriving on February 1, 2020, before the city went into lockdown. Initially, she tried to pass out gospel tracts. But she quickly realized she needed to let the rest of the world know how dire the situation had become. As a citizen journalist, she walked around Wuhan with her smartphone capturing the city’s empty streets and crowded hospitals, exposing the Chinese government’s inadequate response to COVID-19.

In May 2020, authorities detained and accused Zhang of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” making her the first of four citizen journalists jailed for reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak.

A month after Zhang’s imprisonment, she started a hunger strike to protest her detention. In December 2020, the image of her frail body in a wheelchair during her trial worried international human rights groups. Zhang pleaded not guilty, rejecting an offer for more lenient punishment if she admitted her “offense.”

“She barely spoke except for saying citizens’ speech should not be censored, to protest against the ‘illegal trial,’” her lawyer, Zhang Keke, told CBS News. The Shanghai court sentenced her to four years in prison that day.

To avoid punishment and force-feeding, Zhang decided to go on intermittent hunger strikes in the following months. In July 2023, her weight reportedly dropped to 82 pounds, almost half her normal weight. Zhang’s deteriorating health sent her to the hospital for digestive diseases linked to malnutrition.

With months left until her expected release in May 2024, supporters worried that Zhang would die in prison and called on the Chinese government to release her. Their fears were only abated on May 13, when fellow activist Peng Yonghe filmed a video of the newly freed Zhang clad in pajamas at her brother’s house, thanking everyone for their support.

Two weeks later, she showed up on Early Rain’s “5 p.m. in China” Zoom prayer meeting. In an oft-rambling monologue, she spoke of how she prayed for a fellow prisoner’s runny nose and another’s toothache and saw God heal them both. She also revealed that she felt God calling her to persist in her hunger strike, even if her loved ones didn’t support her actions.

“I really struggled to see my family members under tremendous pressure,” she said on the Zoom call. “They do not believe in Christ. I cannot bear to see them constantly frightened as I continue to share statements that would upset them as well as the police. But I feel like this is what God wants me to do: to offer my body as a living sacrifice.”

For now, Zhang is still able to post on the social platform X. On July 6, she uploaded a video of herself walking in a Shanghai park, asking if anyone would like to come meet her and have a Bible study together. “This city is beautiful, the park is pretty, but the freedom of religion is not allowed,” she lamented.

“These people are absolutely lawless”

Meanwhile, in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, another recently released Christian, John Cao, is also being monitored. Cao served a seven-year sentence for “organizing illegal border crossings”—a fabricated charge targeting his Christian ministry—and was finally freed this March. Though he is back in his hometown, he is unable to freely move around or apply for a passport, as authorities refuse to give him a Chinese ID. His wife and two adult sons live in the United States.

Cao wrote on a Christian blog that on June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, police detained him for more than 20 hours without reason. (Often, people regarded as “sensitive” in China are rounded up on that day.) Two days later, he saw “two worker-like individuals installing a high-definition camera” pointed at his mother’s house, where Cao is temporarily staying. Authorities also installed two more cameras at the entrance of the apartment complex.

He noted that the cameras not only track his movements but also monitor who comes to visit. “The police have let it be known that they will not go after people who only visit me once, but people who come to visit me a second time must enter the public security’s records.” He believes the goal is to completely isolate him.

Cao told CT that police detained him for more than 10 hours a second time in June. When he asked if he had committed any crime, the public security officer said no, but that it was a directive from their superiors. “These people are absolutely lawless,” he said. “The reason I stopped writing [on a blog] is because they hinted at me that if I continue to write, they will ban me from leaving [the country] and not grant me my personal identification. I told them, ‘Fine.’ Hence, I will stop writing for now.”

Pastors “fakely released”

The harassment that released prisoners face don’t have an expiration date. Li Yingqiang, an elder at ERCC, is still experiencing surveillance and repeat detentions after officials released him in 2020. Authorities first arrested Li in December 2018 during a crackdown on the church and its outspoken pastor, Wang Yi. Because the church broached sensitive topics like speaking out against President Xi Jinping’s persecution of churches, it found itself in the government’s crosshairs. In 2019, a Chengdu court sentenced Wang to nine years in prison for “inciting to subvert state power.”

Li spent eight months in prison before authorities released him, sending him back to his hometown in Hubei Province, where he was on bail pending trial for a year. Since then, he has returned to Chengdu, where he continues to lead the church as it meets in smaller groups and online.

Because Li continued his ministry, authorities would often summon him to the police station for questioning and monitor him and his family, at one point following him every time he went out and preventing visitors from coming to their home. Education officials threatened to take his children away because he refused to send his children to public school, choosing instead to send them to the church’s unregistered Christian school. In November, authorities detained Li for 10 days after he conducted a baptism and led Communion at ERCC’s church plant in Dazhou, Sichuan Province.

Police in Sichuan warned him in 2020 that, because Chengdu authorities have officially disbanded ERCC, they will not allow the church to continue gathering and worshiping. As long as Li remains in Chengdu, they vowed to stop him from doing ministry.

“From an eternal point of view, is there any other threshing floor that is more worthy for you to invest your whole life in than China?” Li asked his congregation in a recent sermon to encourage them to persevere. “From a secular standpoint, ‘the garbage time of history’ may be the time for the church to excavate hard soil, ready hearts, and experience trials, preparing for the great spiritual harvest ahead.”

Over in Guizhou Province, authorities are also tracking Yang Hua, pastor of Guiyang Livingstone Church, whom authorities released from prison in 2019 after he spent two years behind bars for “divulging state secrets.” Authorities cracked down on his house church because it had grown rapidly and purchased a larger gathering space in an office building, all the while refusing to join the government-sanctioned Three-Self church.

Yet even after his release, Yang “remained imprisoned as police kept him under their relentless scrutiny,” China Aid reported. During major political events, sensitive anniversaries, or official visits to Guizhou by foreign diplomats, authorities either placed him under house arrest or forced him to travel outside of the province.

In 2021, Yang was planning to travel to Qingdao to meet with Christian friends when police took him into the station to prevent him from leaving. An officer interrogated him and began beating him, slapping his cheek “with such force that I could hardly hear any sounds afterward,” the pastor told China Aid. “He then started cursing and said that it is now the world of the Chinese Communist Party.” Once they released Yang, he was rushed to the hospital.

A friend of Yang, who asked not to be named for security reasons, noted that although Yang is no longer behind bars, he was “fakely released.”

“[Yang] has been monitored 24/7,” the friend said. “While he is relatively free in his town, if he goes to other cities, they will dispatch police to watch him closely. From the time he’s on the road to checking into his hotel, they escort him all the way.”

- More from CJ Wu

News

Churches Find a Homelessness Solution in Their Own Backyards

Anna Broadway

Zoning regulations give congregations more leeway to provide permanent or temporary housing.

Settled / Facebook

Jamal Love was trying to fix his wife’s bike fender so she could keep riding it to work. For most of their marriage, he would have tried to figure it out on his own. But this time, he realized he could turn to a neighbor for help: a fellow tiny house resident on the property of a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Love, 50, and his wife had recently moved into the six-house settlement, alongside five people coming out of long-term homelessness. Unlike some such communities, theirs looks like a modern housing development—but with much smaller buildings. The couple initially saw themselves as coming in as “intentional neighbors,” there to give, serve, and be generous.

But their shared life in the church’s tiny houses soon began to change their perspective. “We were wrong about all those things. We received community, and we were the ones who needed it in the first place,” Love said. “We received something greater.”

A unique protection

Sacred Settlement Mosaic is one of a growing number of tiny house communities launched to help address homelessness. It’s a partnership between the church that owns the land—Mosaic Christian Community in St. Paul—and Settled, a nonprofit that works to develop “sacred settlements.”

Churches have a unique opportunity to help with both homelessness and housing, given their combination of frequent land wealth and strong legal protection.

“The number one reason more affordable housing doesn’t get built in our nation is because of ‘not in my backyard’ sentiment,” said Gabrielle Clowdus, the founder of Settled. “NIMBY opposition is very strong.”

But churches have something even stronger, though many don’t know it: the 2000 Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The federal law offers religious freedom protection by limiting regulations on how churches use their property.

“That is like a divine golden ticket from heaven saying, ‘Your land is set apart. It is holy and sacred, and it is intended to invite the poor in,’” Clowdus said.

Claiming those rights can still take a fight in some cases. The Rock church in Castle Rock, Colorado, has sued the city over its repeated interference with them letting people stay in two RVs parked on church property. On July 19, a federal judge ruled that the church can continue its housing until the lawsuit has concluded.

In Minnesota, Settled went through a three-year process to pass a state law that lays out terms for churches to build permanent affordable tiny homes on their land.

The recent Supreme Court ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allows cities to criminalize camping on public land, could increase the urgency of providing additional shelter for people without housing.

Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California San Francisco, thinks tiny homes work better for temporary shelter. Her concerns include the size, frequent lack of indoor plumbing, compliance with building codes, and ability to withstand natural disasters.

The Minnesota law that Settled helped pass requires many of the same building standards as a single-family home, but for structures less than 400 square feet. According to Clowdus, their tiny homes have dehydrating toilets and water tanks, but not indoor plumbing as such. Other tiny home communities involve more basic structures and much shorter stays.

Size and building standards aside, however, Kushel agrees that churches could help provide permanent housing and have a unique ability to intervene. “Churches can move faster,” she said. “They have this separate status, which allows them to get through some of these things that hold things up.”

Jim Dean, executive director of Interfaith Family Shelter in Washington State, saw this firsthand with their newest shelter, Faith Family Village.

Launching the eight-structure shelter on the grounds of Faith Lutheran Church greatly simplified the process. They worked with a hearing examiner on health and safety issues, he said, and operate under a conditional use permit. Almost anywhere else, the shelter would have required a zoning change.

Churches also tend to have different relationships with their neighbors, Dean said. Since they launched Faith Family Village in Everett, two other organizations have tried similar projects on city land. But those groups struggled, he said. “All it takes is one or two neighbors to push back.”

Different models, but emerging leaders

As more churches have opened their land to tiny homes, they’ve taken a range of approaches. Interfaith Family Shelter partners with a number of community and government entities and limits stays to 90 days, per requirements from its license and some grant funding. It also works only with families.

In most of the partnerships, churches provide the land, Dean’s team manages the shelters—including providing case management for all families—and other entities help with things like food or the structures themselves. (Not all of their shelters involve tiny homes. They’ve also turned a former convent into a shelter and have helped a church with a large unused parking lot provide a safe place for people to stay in their cars.)

Green Street Church in Nashville provides a longer timeframe. It has hosted a tiny home community for almost a decade, prior to which it hosted a camp. The Sanctuary is currently comprised of 15 tiny homes and a handful of tents. “Ours are pretty primitive,” pastor Caleb Pickering said, but “for the most part, them staying here is better than where they were.”

Most people stay close to a year. Homes have a locking door and solar panels for charging things like a phone but don’t include power. Residents use shared bathrooms and showers with church-issued key fobs that limit their access within the main church building.

“It’s not a comfortable situation,” Pickering said. “It’s just stable—more stable than trying to pitch a tent on public land.” The church does not have a property manager or provide case management, but they partner with other groups that offer this.

Though many in the community offer informal support for the Sanctuary—especially in the form of frequent food donations—Green Street has remained fairly small, Pickering said.

Several years ago, its organizers discussed a merger with another church, but it ultimately fell through. “There’s that weird little liability thing all the time,” Pickering said. The other church had several young families. The two congregations couldn’t figure out how to balance safety for the children with welcome for Sanctuary residents.

Green Street has few requirements for the Sanctuary: “No drinking, no drugs, no drama”—and an agreement to stay only temporarily. It doesn’t issue leases and has allowed people with prison records to move in, provided they’ll agree to those conditions.

“We do give up things in order to do this,” Pickering said, citing his own kids’ lack of a youth group experience at Green Street. “That’s just an agreement my wife and I made.”

For Love and his wife in St. Paul, their sacrifice involved moving out of the three-bedroom house where they’d raised their son. They still own it but let a family in need stay there.

Under the Settled model, tiny homes provide permanent homes for as long as people want to stay. Clowdus said that’s critical. The PhD work that led her to start Settled showed “a profound loss of family” as one of the root causes of chronic homelessness.

To restore a sense of family, Settled includes five elements in its communities: permanent homes; “intentional neighbors” like Love and his wife; church land, which fosters regular connection; work; and friendship.

“Part of a thriving ecosystem is stability and deep, strong roots,” Clowdus said. “We would never want to rip them out of that dense ecosystem.”

With Settled, residents sign leases and pay rent. Homes are built to withstand Minnesota’s cold winters but don’t have indoor plumbing. Residents share a communal kitchen, shower, and laundry within the main church building. (Building a new settlement requires upgrades to the church building that benefit both residents and the congregation.)

Valerie Roy has lived at a second Settled community in Roseville, Minnesota, since summer 2022.

“It’s really given me my quality of life back,” she said. After more than a decade in chronic homelessness after she lost her New Jersey housing to Hurricane Sandy, she’s started gardening again and applied to a master’s program.

Though not a Christian herself, she welcomes the connections she’s gained by living on church land. “I’m not isolated anymore. I have three different communities.”

Clowdus hopes Settled will provide a model for other churches. She said they have several other communities in various stages of consideration and discernment, plus one in the planning stage. “We believe that any church—regardless of denomination, political affiliation, racial makeup—regardless of any of that, any faith community that has a strong identity of who they are, and because of that strong identity have a radical invitation to hospitality, can have a sacred settlement on their land.”

As cities adjust to their new latitude to break up homeless camps under the latest Supreme Court ruling, churches may have more opportunity than ever.

Clowdus cites their first two host congregations as evidence that Settled’s model can work in many settings. A Nazarene church hosts one settlement, an Evangelical Lutheran church the other. The two congregations have different convictions on some matters, and different ethnic and economic demographics.

Leaders from both churches said they have seen growth in their congregations since they started hosting the settlement. Michael Stetzler was president of the congregation when Prince of Peace Lutheran Church decided to host a settlement. He said at least three new members have cited the settlement as a factor in their decision to join.

In St. Paul, Meredith Campbell, who co-leads Sacred Settlement Mosaic with her husband, has seen similar signs of life.

“We’ve also seen our neighbors on the east side of St. Paul become very interested in the work of Mosaic,” she said, citing both the settlement and an immigrant program that launched around the same time. “Our neighbors are really interested in seeing a church love its neighbors in a tangible way and that has attracted them to Mosaic and, I hope, to Jesus himself.”

Roy said moving into the settlement has started to change long-held negative views of Christians.

“Everybody’s been so kind, even though I’m not Christian and all of them are. It’s really redefined my definition of what Christianity means.”

For Love, an empty nester married for three decades, it’s been a means of refinement during a season when many people might start to coast a bit and focus more on enjoyment. “It’s caused me to put the things I believe into practice in ways I didn’t have to before,” he said.

- More from Anna Broadway

Theology

Why Worship Leaders Need Theologians

Matt Redman

Matt Redman’s call to worship God for all he is.

Matt Redman (centered)

Courtesy of Integrity Music

In Acts 17, the apostle Paul arrives in Athens and discovers something strange—an altar with an inscription to an “unknown god.”

Of course, he expertly turns this moment into a chance to tell the story of the one true God. But it’s always struck me just how unhelpful this inscription must have been for any unfortunate worshipers of this supposed deity—who was both unknown and unknowable.

We know nothing of the nature, character and attributes of this god. We don’t know if this god has performed any mighty deeds, worked any miracles, or won any victories. Nor do we know anything about their appearance. We’re not even given their name. What exactly is required or desired from worshipers? We’re literally given nothing to go on.

For worshipers of Jesus, it’s a completely different story. We worship a God of self-revelation, who wants to be seen and known. Every page of his book reveals him— and not just hints, clues and whispers—but full-on descriptions of who he is, what he’s done, and why he’s so utterly worthy of our worship.

We’re left in no doubt that he is both majestic and merciful, powerful and peaceful, holy and humble, glorious and gracious. The Bible also tells us how best to approach God and what kind of offerings will find favor in his sight.

When it comes to worship, it’s always been clear that we don’t get to make this stuff up.

A worship service might never contain every aspect of God’s truth, but, as the late Marva J. Dawn once reminded us, “worship must never give us untruth.” We also must do our best to not miss key elements of who it is we are encountering.

Twenty years ago, I wrote to key pastors, preachers, and theologians asking them a simple question: “What are some essential themes of Scripture that are lacking in our current worship expressions?”

Many of the replies referenced God as creator, God as judge, and God as Trinity. While they offered positive comments about contemporary worship music, there was a sense of challenge: For the good of the church and the glory of God, we must do better.

A couple of decades later, I wonder how much progress we have made. Worship music has evolved and progressed creatively, showing up across more musical genres than ever before. The production aspects of our expressions have moved forward too. But can we say the same about the lyrical, theological content?

Some modern hymn-style songs hold up well in this area: Hillsong’s “King of Kings,” for example, tells so much of the story of God and mentions 15 of the 25 themes found in the Apostles’ Creed. Phil Wickham’s “Living Hope” covers 11 of those themes. These are singable, beautiful, weighty songs. But looking at the general landscape, we still have much work to do.

One thing I’ve noticed is how much we tend to prefer singing about the helpfulness of God rather than his holiness. We gravitate to the aspects of God that are directly and very obviously beneficial to us—God as shepherd, comforter, refuge, or rescuer.

These are, if you like, songs of helpfulness. But it’s essential that we also have many anthems of his holiness—songs that acclaim God for his worth, whether we’re in the story or not. Songs that lean into themes like grandeur, righteousness, and majesty. Just as the Book of Psalms exemplifies a balance of holiness and helpfulness, we must do likewise.

Much of the responsibility for what we sing in church falls on the worship leaders and songwriters of our day. Worship leaders and worship movements with a public profile must carry their entrustment with a sense of holy awe. It’s not enough to put out a musically captivating new record or to fill an arena. Those things can be wonderful—but they actually become woeful if we’re not handling our sacred subject material with care.

The same call goes out to every local church worship leader. Are we choosing songs that honor God as fully as we can? Or do we sometimes give songs a free pass, not running them through any kind of theological filter, because the musical vibe is simply too compelling to ignore? I love a fresh, innovative, creative expression as much as anyone, but we can have, and must have, both.

Pastors, you also carry authority in this area. You are the gatekeepers of our services. Call us out—urge worship leaders to do better. Ban songs that you think carry too little substance or even contradict Scripture. Point out themes that are missing and that you want us to find songs for (or even write songs for). Don’t let us get away with lackluster theology at the expense of a pleasing musical experience.

Not every song needs to have the lyrical punch of “Crown Him with Many Crowns”—but if too many of our songs are falling so far below the standard required, then please help us to realize that, and to grow. You might not need to give us too much musical advice—but please don’t give us the sole responsibility for all our sung theology.

Many of us, myself included, admit we need assistance in that area. We likely didn’t come into this via seminary or intense theological training; we came in through the avenue of loving music and being able to play or sing.

We humbly recognize we cannot do this on our own. We need help from thinkers, theologians, and pastors. We need to be sharpened by fellow songwriters and worship leaders too.

It’s no accident that the King James Version of the Bible tells us over 1,200 times to behold. We worship a God who wants to be recognized for who he is. My prayer is that the church will grow in this area—seeing ever deeper and truer songs—and leading worship services that help us to behold Jesus like never before.

Matt Redman is a worship leader and songwriter whose songs include “The Heart of Worship,” “Blessed Be Your Name,” and the double-Grammy winning “10,000 Reasons.”

He is the creator of WOR/TH (standing for worship and theology), a series of seminars to equip songwriters, worship leaders, and musicians, with two upcoming events in the US.

- More from Matt Redman

News

Venezuelan Churches Brace for Migration Wave After Disputed Maduro Election

Franco Iacomini

Evangelicals call for peace amid violent crackdown against opposition demonstrators.

A protest in Venezuela against Nicolas Maduro winning the presidential election due to questions surrounding his victory.

Jesús Vargas / Stringer / Getty

Last Sunday, pastor César Mermejo preached about hope in difficult times to his congregation in Maracay, a city of 1.3 million that sits close to the Caribbean coast.

But he did so via a pre-recorded audio file he distributed via WhatsApp, following the Venezuelan government’s advisory against in-person gatherings on Election Day, held July 28.

In his digital broadcast to Comunidad Cristiana Mizpa Dios de Esperanza members, Mermejo reminded them of Psalm 98:1, which affirms that the Lord “has done marvelous things,” while also acknowledging that some in his congregation probably felt more like the speaker in Psalm 43:5 who asked, “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?”

Many Venezuelans were anxious that night, hoping for a change that would end Nicolás Maduro’s nearly 12 years in office and 26 years of socialist rule since Hugo Chávez rose to power with the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV). But others were apprehensive; Maduro had warned that the country could face a “bloodbath” if he didn't win the election.

After a delay in the disclosure of partial results, the Consejo Nacional Electoral, at around 1 a.m. on Monday morning, declared Maduro the winner.

Opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia did not concede but instead blamed election fraud for his purported defeat and declared himself president-elect. On Monday night, people burst onto the streets in cities throughout the country, demanding a recount.

As demonstrations have continued throughout the week, the government has confronted protesters with tear gas; other reports have emerged of unidentified people shooting at demonstrators. Through August 1, at least 11 people have died and more than 1,000 have been detained.

Many Venezuelan evangelical churches have joined the chorus of voices that reject the result proclaimed by the electoral authorities and suspect fraud. Some, by contrast, support Maduro, appreciative of his efforts to provide tangible resources to their congregations.

Primarily, evangelical leaders have called for peace. In his role as president of the Consejo Evangélico de Venezuela, Mermejo advised local churches to cancel worship services for the foreseeable future “for the safety of their congregants.”

The council also urged Christians to pray for the country with “calm and sanity” and requested “that the review of the tally sheets of the presidential elections be carried out in a transparent process, in accordance with the provisions of the legislation.”

The election protests present yet another challenge for a country that dealt with severe economic collapse, hyperinflation, political instability, and a humanitarian crisis, despite being home to the biggest oil reserves in the world. The United Nations estimates that 7.7 million Venezuelans currently live outside of the South American country, a number that has further destabilized the nation and its churches. (The in-country population is 29.4 million.)

The loss of so many of his fellow citizens is personal for José de los Santos Rodríguez, the former pastor of the Primera Iglesia Evangélica Libre de Maracaibo. His congregation of 50 people was located 80 miles from the Colombian border in what was once a flourishing city and a business hub for oil companies.

But Maracaibo “was turned into a pile of trash,” he said. “People started to go from house to house begging for food.”

Two years ago, the church closed its doors after all the members left the city.

“Most people left the country without any planning, without even asking God,” he said. “They left because they had no job and because what they earned wasn't even enough for transportation.”

Rodríguez has kept in touch with his former church members by recording and sending out 20-minute daily devotionals.

“I have people in Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, the United States, Spain, and Peru,” he said.

Today, his church members are among the nearly 3 million Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, the 1.5 million in Peru, and the half million each in Brazil and Chile. For many of these immigrants, Christian organizations played a key role in helping them build new lives.

Among them is Darvin Delnardo Tehn, a youth leader at Encuentro con Cristo, an evangelical church in Santiago, Chile, founded by German immigrants, which runs a nonprofit that offers short-term housing for migrant families. In 2017, at age 27, Delnardo, a university graduate, left a dead-end job and his hometown of Colonia Tovar, near Caracas, to start a new life in Chile.

Many supported Delnardo’s leap of faith.

“I left Venezuela with the blessing of my family and my church,” he said. “My pastor is always interceding for me.”

Delnardo’s pastor, Ender Urribarrí, confirmed that Delnardo confided in him his plan to migrate. Urribarrí didn’t try to dissuade Delnardo, but asked him to prepare to understand the cultural challenges of a new country and not to forget that “you have a mission there too.”

“God gives us the joy of exporting church leaders to other countries. Isn’t that wonderful?” said Urribarrí.

As his churchgoers have begun to emigrate, Urribarrí, who leads Iglesia Evangélica Encuentro con Dios in Colonia Tovar, has devised a plan to help them maintain a pastoral presence in their lives as they face uncertainty and hardship. For the first two years, he communicates consistently with those who have emigrated. By that point, he expects that they will be connected to a new local church and his communication drops to one call every three months, and then to twice a year.

This strategy has been working so far, he said. “When they visit Venezuela, they come to us. They still say ‘this is my church,’” he said.

Now Urribarrí is excited about the future: “I want to keep seeing what God will do in the church and in my country.”

Rodríguez thanks God that despite the dispersal of his former congregation, he has still been able to serve in full-time ministry. He and his wife receive pensions (though they add up to less than $10 USD a month), and he also receives the bono de guerra, a subsidy paid by the government to retired people that adds $100 to the family monthly income. Without this, he would be forced to spend all his money on his blood pressure medication.

“Every time we are in need of something, there is someone who helps out,” he said.

Rodríguez does not believe change in his country will result from the pressure exerted by foreign entities such as the US government, the European Union, and the Organization of American States. (On August 1, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken issued a statement congratulating González for winning the elections in Venezuela and asserting that the claim of a Maduro victory does not represent the will of the Venezuelan people.)

“The Lord and his justice will change the country,” Rodríguez said. “I can’t say when it will occur, but I’m certain it will.”

Until then, Christians in Venezuela will have to keep finding ways to survive and aid their fellow citizens.

“What keeps us here in this country, fighting, is the love we have for this land and the faith we have in the Lord that he can bring an answer for Venezuela,” said Yosleiker Pérez, pastor of Ministerio Extendiendo el Reino de Dios, a Pentecostal church in north Caracas. “And for those who believe, everything is possible.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

News

Black Christian Leaders Find Hope with Kamala Harris

Harvest Prude

The vice president’s faith and commitment to issues stirs enthusiasm among the traditionally Democratic voting bloc.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris greets parishioners during a service at Corinthian Baptist Church in Iowa.

Justin Sullivan / Staff / Getty

Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t the type of politician to cite the Bible a lot.

Darryl Ford, the former pastor of a nondenominational evangelical church in Atlanta, thinks that might be a good thing.

“We’ve gotten used to seeing people who will make Bible quotations and pray for me on a Sunday, then vote to disenfranchise me on a Tuesday,” he told Christianity Today.

Ford and many other Black Christians say they care about the faith of the new Democratic Party nominee, who is replacing President Joe Biden on the ballot in November, but they’re focused more on issues than rhetoric. The former pastor says Black Christians support Harris because she has a good grasp on things like criminal justice and health care.

“Because she’s been in it, she’s lived amongst it. She’s not new to it,” he said. “Even if I don’t agree with her on a certain issue, I believe she has a good handle on what that issue actually is.”

Black clergy across the country report a new enthusiasm in an election year that was previously leaving voters feeling discouraged and depressed. African Americans have overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates since the party threw its weight behind civil rights legislation in the 1960s. But having Harris at the top of the ticket has brought a new energy, reminding some of Barack Obama’s historic first campaign.

“It feels like 2008,” said Khristi Lauren Adams, an ordained Baptist minister who works at a private school in Baltimore County, Maryland. “I think there’s a similar sentiment happening right now.”

According to a recent YouGov poll, nearly 40 percent of Black people say they are enthusiastic about voting this November. Seventy-four percent say they plan to vote for Harris come November. A month ago, Black support for Biden’s reelection was only 69 percent.

“The reason you’re seeing the organic response from the Black faith community is because she belongs,” Matthew L. Watley, senior pastor at Kingdom Fellowship African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Maryland, told CT. “She’s one of us, and it’s been demonstrated for a long time.”

Harris hasn’t shied away from talking about her deep roots in the Black church tradition. In a 2022 speech at the Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention, USA, the largest traditionally Black denomination in the country, Harris connected her faith and politics, crediting her childhood church experiences for giving her a framework for action.

“I was raised to live my faith,” Harris said. “Marching for civil rights, my parents pushed me in a stroller. That was faith in action.”

Now her candidacy is motivating other Black Christians to action.

“We’re ten toes down—all the way in,” said Gabby Cudjoe-Wilkes, co-pastor of The Double Love Experience Church in Brooklyn, New York, which is part of the Progressive National Baptist Convention. “We’re not saying this is a perfect person, no candidate is. … Kamala may not be leading with her faith, I’m okay with that,” she said. “I don't feel like she is dangling it for a vote.”

Some Black pastors who are known as theological conservatives have come out in support of Harris too. Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and an influential Black leader in the Southern Baptist Convention until he left in 2021, praised Harris’s “superior qualifications” on social media.

“I believe the energy, synergy, fundraising, volunteerism, and momentum driving and characterizing her campaign … is unprecedented in American political history,” McKissic wrote. “Kamala Harris represents those who’ve been rejected among us. The support she’s galvanized is amazing to me.”

He said that while he doesn’t agree with Harris on everything, he will personally vote for her.

McKissic specifically disagrees with Harris’s positions on abortion. She is believed to be the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic, and has said she supports legislation protecting nationwide abortion access.

McKissic said since the Republican Party removed the commitment to push for a constitutional ban on abortion from the party platform, however, neither major party offers a pro-life ticket. He believes many Christians will make their decision based on who seems most qualified to be president of the United States. For him, it’s an obvious choice.

Harris is not without Black Christian critics, though. Some ministers are skeptical of where she would lead the country, if she makes it to the White House.

“I don’t feel that sense of hope that I sense that others might,” said Walter Harvey, pastor emeritus of Embassy Center MKE and president of the National Black Fellowship of the Assemblies of God.

In Harvey’s eyes, Harris’s positions on social issues are disqualifying. The Democrats have “championed some policies that are unbiblical to family, that are unbiblical as it relates to sexuality, and I think it’s cost the African American community,” he said.

His majority Black congregation in Milwaukee is pretty diverse politically. He expects a divided reaction to Harris’s candidacy.

“I think half would welcome her and champion her, be excited about her,” he said. “I think there’s the other half, or close to half, who would be challenged by her message … and would not want to endorse.”

A YouGov poll found that around 10 percent of Black voters plan to vote for Trump. Less than 10 percent are unsure of who they will vote for. Around 5 percent plan to vote for a third party candidate.

Harris is just now ramping up her presidential campaign, so it remains to be seen what kind of outreach she might do to try and persuade Black Christians like those in Harvey’s church in Wisconsin to vote for her. Since the announcement that Biden was stepping down and Harris was going to run, her longtime pastor, civil rights leader Amos Brown, has organized a “100 days of prayer” campaign.

Brown, who was once taught by Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse College, is well respected by Black Christians, and many have noted his relationship with Harris. One of the first things she reportedly did, preparing her run for the White House, was to call Brown and request prayer.

Harris has also established relationships with some Black churches in the greater DC area. She has occasionally attended Kingdom Fellowship, the AME church in Maryland where Matthew Watley serves as pastor. He told CT her most recent visit was a surprise. Watley got a phone call on Sunday morning from the vice president’s staff.

“She woke up and she wanted to come worship with us,” Watley recalled.

Harris may not be in a church pew every Sunday, but it is clear she “was formed by the church and still has the principles of Christian living,” Watley said. “I think any honest pastor would say that many of our parishioners move that way these days.”

Since Biden became president in 2020, he has brought in faith leaders from various traditions to hear their concerns, get their input, and ask for prayer and support, the AME minister said. Watley hopes that outreach will deepen if Harris wins.

“My prayer,” he said, “is that the party will once again embrace faith as central to its identity, as historically it always has.”

- More from Harvest Prude

Theology

Why Christians Rebuke Evil in the Name of Jesus

Nicole Massie Martin

In a moment of great fear, Sonya Massey understood the power of the name of Christ. We should too.

Mourners bring candles to a vigil in honor of Sonya Massey.

Aashish Kiphayet / AP Images / Edits by CT

It was the early ’90s when I was first introduced to the idea of rebuking the Enemy in the name of Jesus. My sister and I had just finished watching the horror movie Candyman, and I was scared out of my mind.

I cried when the movie was over, terrified to be alone, and I was certain that the man on the screen was out to get me. For days, the Candyman lingered in my thoughts, making it impossible to focus. I was lost in my fears until I shared them with my Aunt Judy, a God-fearing woman. As she listened to me and saw my tears, she reminded me that I did not have to be afraid. “All you have to do,” she said with a confident calm, “is rebuke the Enemy, and he will flee from you.”

I needed to hear that because, in my young mind, Candyman was not just an enemy from a movie but the Enemy. The next time thoughts of him entered my mind, I took a deep breath, gathering my small courage, and with eyes closed and fists clinched, shouted out loud, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus!”

Peeking out of one eye, I felt calm for the first time since I’d watched the movie. My childish conception of evil may have been a little confused, but the peace and deliverance from the sense of foreboding evil that the name of the Savior brought me was deep and real.

Evil takes a different form when we become adults, a subtler and cleverer shape. Talk of the Devil is relegated to charismatics, and those who speak of Satan are often dismissed as unreformed, uneducated, or holdovers from the naive hellfire-and-brimstone version of Christianity that we moderns work hard to forget.

Maybe people in developing countries, where witchcraft is vibrant and corruption prevails, are seeing manifestations of evil, we might allow. But that doesn’t happen here. Not in America. Here, when we think of evil, we’re more likely to think of those across political and ideological divides. We might well rebuke them, but that has little to do with Jesus.

Yet the Bible is clear about the reality of evil and the importance of rebuke. God regularly exercises this power, from the cursing of Satan in Genesis (3:14–15) to the rebuke of Satan in Peter (Matt. 16:23) and the chastening of believers who do not repent (Rev. 3:19). In the Old Testament, we see God cursing operatives of the Enemy and reproving kings who do evil (Mal. 1:3; Ps. 11:5; Isa. 59:18; Jer. 22). In the New Testament, Jesus scolds religious leaders who act with evil intent (Matt. 23). Scripture assumes that evil is real, that it is the enemy of God, and that it is overcome by the name of Christ.

As believers, we still have the authority to rebuke in order to resist Satan and the evil of this world. Scriptural rebuke is not a personal power to be manipulated for our own purposes and rivalries. It is a weapon of spiritual warfare in God’s plan to “destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8), a sign of the intolerability of evil in the presence of a holy God.

Perhaps this is why Sonya Massey’s last instinct, before being fatally shot by a police officer in her Illinois home last month, was to rebuke evil in the name of Jesus.

Massey was reportedly having a mental health crisis when she asked police to come to her home to look for a possible prowler. We don’t know exactly what was going through her mind in her final exchange with the officer who shot her. But we do know that in extremis, in a moment of great fear, she understood that evil is defeated by the name of Jesus (Luke 10:17). She understood the truth that when we resist the Enemy, he will flee (James 4:7).

I don’t think, as some have speculated, that Sonya believed the officer who killed her was literally a demon. But because he had the audacity to authenticate his threat to shoot her in the face, there is no doubt that evil was present. As believers, “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12)—and these are the enemies Sonya was right to rebuke in her final moments.

She called on the only name that could save her. And while her life was not spared on this side, because of her faith in Jesus, we can be confident she has attained the eternal life for which we long.

Sonya’s story is a reminder of the necessity of rebuking evil—of refusing to be so “sophisticated” that we imagine ourselves not in need of God’s help in the face of the Enemy. With every generation, we yearn for the coming of Christ who will wipe every tear and finally destroy the advancing darkness of this world (1 Cor. 15:24–26; Heb. 2:14–15; Rev. 21:4). But until that time, it is our duty to rebuke the evil around us. The tactics of the enemy are not to be placated or normalized. They are to be bound and defeated.

For this reason, we must rebuke the evils of racism and sexism—not because we simply dislike them, but because they work against the equality of believers (Gal. 3:28) and the goodness of God. We must rebuke political idolatry and apathy to violence not because they are a threat to us, but because they are a threat to the power and peace of God. Our calling, as followers of Jesus, is to hate the evil that Jesus hated and to love the truth Jesus loved. While the Enemy is not always clear to us, and evil isn’t always easy to discern, God will overcome the Enemy once and for all.

The timing of that final victory is unknown, but God’s promise is sure. I pray that the church can find courage to hate evil as we cling to what is good (Rom. 12:9). The power to rebuke the Enemy is a privilege we cannot take lightly, a reiteration of the victory of Christ. The one who overcame death on the cross is the same one who overcame my childhood fears—and the same one who heard and loved Sonya Massey as she cried out for his help. In him, God has already triumphed over evil. In him, we can embrace the power of spiritual rebuke with confidence that, one day, evil will surely end.

Nicole Massie Martin is chief impact officer at Christianity Today.

- More from Nicole Massie Martin

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Speaking out for the voiceless

“These people are absolutely lawless”

Pastors “fakely released”

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share