New Zealand Uncovers Historic Abuse in Church-Run Institutions

Isabel Ong

Survivors, advocates, and pastors call for “true repentance” among religious groups that ran schools and homes between 1950 and 1999.

The public taking part in a hikoi prior to the release of the Abuse in Care report at Parliament on in New Zealand.

Hagen Hopkins / Stringer / Getty

Not long after Frances Tagaloa accepted Christ at 16, she started experiencing flashbacks.

Over the next few years, Tagaloa began piecing together long-buried memories and came to recognize that she had been sexually abused between the ages of five and seven by a Catholic Marist Brother who taught at a school in the Auckland suburb of Ponsonby.

Tagaloa only told her parents about the abuse years later, after getting married and having children, because talking about the issue was taboo in her father’s Samoan culture, and she didn’t want her parents to blame themselves.

Her mother approached the Catholic Church in New Zealand around 1999, but Tagaloa, 56, decided not to speak with them —until three years later, when she heard the Marist Brothers were going to name a classroom after the perpetrator, Bede Fitton.

When Tagaloa met with a Catholic counselor, she wanted an apology and for Fitton’s honors to be removed. Instead, the Catholic church offered her financial compensation. Tagaloa suggested that they donate the money to the evangelical ministry where she worked.

“I was really disappointed in the process,” she said. “I remember thinking that was just a big waste of time.”

Two decades later, another opportunity arose for Tagaloa to hold the Catholic Church accountable.

The ministry leader became the first witness in the Catholic hearing with New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry, an independent body established in 2018 to investigate abuse and neglect that children and adults faced while in the care of state and faith-based institutions between 1950 and 1999.

On July 24, the Royal Commission released its final report, which found that an estimated 256,000 out of 655,000—or nearly 1 in 3—children, young people, and adults were “exposed to pervasive abuse and neglect” in state and faith-based care across the country.

Survivors included those from Pākehā (European), Māori, and Pacific Islander backgrounds as well as people who lived with mental and physical disabilities. Māori or Pacific Islanders made up the majority of those in care and were disproportionately subject to racial and cultural discrimination, as well as higher levels of physical abuse compared to other ethnicities.

Christians comprise New Zealand’s largest religious group, making up 37 percent of the population, according to the 2018 census. But believers’ responses to the Royal Commission’s 3,000-page report have been largely muted, say the survivors, advocates, and pastors that CT interviewed.

Evangelical reactions to the report range from those who are “deeply aware” to others who “barely notice and say, This is not us,” said Stuart Lange, national director of the New Zealand Christian Network.

“Personally, I have been very disappointed at the responses from the faith-based sector,” said Baptist pastor Alan Vink. “I have kept a close eye on the media, and to date, there has not been even a statement acknowledging wrongdoing, let alone any comments about redress.”

The report’s publication evoked a “mixed bag of feelings,” said Hera Clarke, who was part of the Māori advisory group during the inquiry and serves as the commissary for reconciliation and restoration in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia.

“There are 200,000 survivors, and we’ve only been able to touch the tip of the iceberg.”

Safeguarding and listening

The Royal Commission investigated eight religious groups in its six-year-long probe: the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Methodist Church of New Zealand, the Presbyterian Church of Aoetearoa New Zealand, the Salvation Army, Gloriavale Christian Community, Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The inquiry team wrote that “at the beginning of the Inquiry period, faith-based institutions were among the largest providers of residential care for children in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

Many of these churches ran children’s homes, unmarried mother’s homes, adoption and foster services, schools, and residential institutions. The Royal Commission also included situations where a person with authority in a religious institution provided pastoral care to an individual as a part of faith-based care.

Education was “the most common pathway” into faith-based institutions where people suffered physical, emotional, mental, and sexual abuse. Investigators also found that sexual abuse was more prevalent in faith-based settings than in state care. The report added: “Many survivors died while they were in care or by suicide following care.”

In October 2022, faith-based groups issued responses and statements during a public hearing held by the Royal Commission. Since the final report’s release this July, some churches included in the inquiry published statements that acknowledged and apologized for the harm caused.

“We acknowledge and take full responsibility for our failures to provide the safe, caring, and nurturing environment those who have been in our care had a right to expect and to receive,” wrote Anglican archbishops Don Tamihere, Justin Duckworth, and Sione Ulu’ilakepa.

“We are profoundly sorry for the suffering experienced by those in our care,” said the Salvation Army’s chief secretary Gerry Walker.

The Presbyterians convened a task force on July 31 to identify and recommend necessary steps to take based on the report’s findings. The Methodists, meanwhile, created a liturgy of lament ahead of the report’s release.

Lange, the New Zealand Christian Network national director, noted that evangelical churches have grown to recognize the need to implement more robust systems to protect children and youth in recent years. “A key response of every church must now be to be extremely vigilant, and do everything we possibly can to prevent abuse ever happening in our own spaces,” he wrote in an email newsletter to members.

Two months ago, Vink, who pastors Te Whānau Pūtahi, a congregation in the North Island city of Hamilton, reached out to the heads of many of these denominations, circulating a draft statement he wrote in hopes of issuing a joint response. Although he initially received positive feedback, Vink later heard that the churches would not be proceeding with this initiative.

“To be honest, the government has done a better job [than the church],” he said.

The Sunday after the report’s release, Vink gave a sermon at his church where he highlighted updates to safeguarding policies, including making their complaints policy more visible and introducing a new whistleblowing procedure. He closed with a reflection on Matthew 18:15–17, which focuses on dealing with sin in the church.

That same Sunday, Gracecity—a multiethnic charismatic church in Auckland—included a time of prayer and confession in their services. The church also published a YouTube video in which senior pastor Jonathan Dove outlined ways Christians can respond when the topic of abuse in faith-based care arises.

“Some Christians, in a desire to protect the church, come across [as] defensive,” Dove shared with CT in an email. “When hearing about the stories of horrid abuse in faith-based care, I wanted to ensure our church members responded with care, prayer, aroha (love), and a non-defensive posture.”

In the past year, Gracecity has introduced greater oversight over its preschool, children, and youth ministries, such as providing a complaints process with the option for an external review, updating their safeguarding policies, and training ministry staff and volunteers to identify signs of abuse.

Other Christians are carving out safe spaces for survivors within their churches.

Clarke, the Māori Anglican leader, listened to 317 survivor accounts in her role as commissary. For her, the work of encouraging, supporting, and providing room for survivors to share their experiences is ongoing.

With the report’s release, Clarke is now planning to hold workshops in various dioceses for Māori Anglican believers on what the recommendations from the report, such as establishing an independent “Care Safe Agency,” would look like.

“I, alongside our bishops and archbishops, take responsibility for what’s happened in the church,” she said. “How the [abuse] has impacted survivors and their families is unacceptable.”

Rising advocacy efforts

In its investigation of religious groups that employ high control—such as the Gloriavale Christian Community and Plymouth Brethren Christian Church—the Royal Commission found that authoritarian leadership and the ostracism and punishment meted out to those who leave the groups often perpetuated psychological and spiritual abuse.

Some Christians are helping people leave these religious communities. Liz Gregory, manager of Gloriavale Leavers’ Support Trust, founded the charity in 2019 to help former Gloriavale members reintegrate into society after they started showing up at her Reformed Baptist church in Timaru, four-and-a-half hours away from the commune.

Australian preacher Neville Cooper founded the Gloriavale Christian Community, a reclusive religious sect of about 700 that settled on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Islands, in 1969. In 1994, a New Zealand court found Cooper guilty of three counts of sexual assault, while Gloriavale’s current leader, Howard Temple, is facing 27 counts of sexual offending against girls between 9 and 20 years old.

At least 270 people have left Gloriavale in the last decade, and Gregory’s church is one of the places they often turn to for help in rebuilding their lives.

When the Royal Commission’s inquiry first launched in 2018, it only pledged to look into state care. As Gregory mowed her lawn, she felt powerless and began praying: Lord, I don’t understand. Why is no one doing anything? This is horrific. Who else cares about the people in Gloriavale?

The answer came quickly to her: Her church cared. So did survivors who still had family members in the group. Together, they could do something.

Gregory and other believers gathered Gloriavale survivors together and asked if they wanted the religious group to be brought to account. The survivors agreed, and Gregory invited the Royal Commission’s inquiry team to Timaru, where survivors shared witness statements and testimonies on the abuse they had endured.

The survivors are also currently seeking a declaration that Gloriavale is guilty of modern-day slavery due to labor exploitation on the commune and that the New Zealand government failed in its obligations to humanity in an upcoming court case, Gregory said.

The secretive group says on its website that it seeks to live out a practical Christian life with perfect obedience to God. It emphasizes living in community—like the early church in Acts—and uniformity, where everyone must think, act, and speak the same, said Gregory.

“[Gloriavale leadership] think they’re Moses … but really, they’re like Pharaoh,” she said. “They’re actually those people binding people into slavery. … And our message to them is: Let these people go.”

Another high-control group included in the inquiry is the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, which has 50,000 members across New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the Americas, and the UK. Its members believe that current leader Bruce Hales is “a manifestation of the Holy Spirit or the Paul of our day,” said Lindy Jacomb, who left the group 15 years ago at the age of 20.

Thirty-two survivors shared accounts of abuse or neglect within the group to the inquiry team. The Plymouth Brethren acknowledged only five allegations of abuse and “does not necessarily accept that these incidents occurred within its care,” the report stated.

When the Brethren excommunicated Jacomb for not accepting their doctrines and theology, she stayed with a Baptist couple. “They showed me everything that church was supposed to be,” she said. “They became a new family in Christ for me.”

Last November, she launched the Olive Leaf Network, a charity that aims to provide support and networking opportunities for people who leave high-control religious groups.

Many faith-based care survivors felt like they had to fight to be included in the Royal Commission’s inquiry, Jacomb said.

“Even after being included, many people have felt there was still a bias toward minimizing their harm … [and the government] having far too much faith and trust in the institutions that abused them,” said Jacomb. Many of these religious groups have also hired legal advisors and spent considerable funds to get legal advice, she added.

Seeking redress

For Jacomb, the report’s “forced exposure does not bring about true repentance” among religious groups. In her view, genuine repentance would include a public apology by faith-based leaders.

“I’m still waiting for my apology,” said Tagaloa, the abuse survivor. She has not received an in-person apology from the Catholic Church to date, only apologies communicated through the media or via email.

The New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference issued an apology to victims and survivors in 2021. After the release of the final report, the Catholic Church thanked the Royal Commission for their work and committed to reviewing the report and taking steps to make their communities safe.

Another important aspect of repentance in the survivors’ view is an independent redress system, one of 138 recommendations outlined by the Royal Commission.

Redress encompasses financial compensation as well as physical, emotional, and psychological rehabilitation. It also includes holding the perpetrators or enablers responsible, preventing further abuse, and apologizing for the abuse.

In Canada, where more than 150,000 Indigenous children attended residential schools and suffered physical, verbal, sexual, and spiritual abuse, the government and 325 First Nations settled a class-action lawsuit in 2023 that sought about $2 billion in reparations for losing their culture and language through the school system. In July, they also reached an agreement to reform the country’s First Nations Child and Family Services Program.

New Zealand’s proposed independent redress scheme, known as puretumu torowhānui in Māori, was first recommended by the Royal Commission in 2021 to “help ensure there is consistency and equity in the outcomes for survivors.”

At present, most survivors have to return to the institution that abused them to receive compensation, which may retraumatize them. It also incorporates a “huge imbalance of power,” said Tagaloa.

During the inquiry, the team uncovered evidence of attempts to hide or cover up abuse within faith-based groups like the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, Presbyterian Support Otago, and the Gloriavale Christian Community. Leaders destroyed records, moved perpetrators between institutions, or prevented survivors from reporting their abuse.

“I would strongly question whether these groups can be trusted at all to manage their own redress processes,” Jacomb said. “How can the survivor have any sense of confidence or trust that this institution is going to have their best [interest] at heart?”

Among its latest list of recommendations for faith-based entities, the Royal Commission’s report also called for the groups to work closely with the proposed establishment of a Care Safe Agency, to ensure care standards are up to par, and create a national registry of people in ministry who may pose a risk to vulnerable children and adults.

“I believe that the Christian church should acknowledge wrongdoing and express deep sadness to all the survivors,” Vink said. “We should be quick to offer full and comprehensive redress arrangements. In biblical language, this would be known as ‘restitution.’”

To other survivors of faith-based abuse, Tagaloa has one encouragement to share: Look to Christ.

“Jesus is probably the only God I know who was also abused,” she said. “He understands the experiences we’ve gone through because he’s experienced abuse.”

“That kind of God [who] loves us unconditionally, forgives, and also wants to know us personally, is the type of God I want to know—a God [who] will give us the opportunity to experience freedom and hope.”

- More from Isabel Ong

Church Life

The UK Race Riots Need the Voices of Returned Missionaries

Harvey Kwiyani

I’m a missiologist and a migrant who lives in Liverpool. Can Christians who have served overseas stand up for my community?

Far-right activists hold a riot in England targeting mosques after misinformation spread about the murder of three girls in Southport.

Drik / Contributor / Getty

Though born in Malawi, for the past eight years, I have made Liverpool my home. In this UK port city where, for centuries, millions of immigrants have passed through and at times settled, the vibrant migrant community is small but connected. Each June, for instance, we celebrate the Africa Oyé festival, a live music event that draws tens of thousands to the city annually.

At the same time, many of us who recently arrived or whose families are relative newcomers know the fragility of our feelings of belonging. Three years ago, for example, three Black players on the English team missed their penalty kicks during the European Championship match shootout and were subject to a torrent of racist insults.

In recent weeks, Liverpool has been the epicenter of the anti-migrant riots that have rocked the nation following the horrific stabbing of three young white British girls by a Black British teenager of Rwandan heritage in a nearby suburb. Since then, furor over these devastating murders has turned into nationwide riots targeting Black and brown communities (including both those born and raised in the country and those newly arrived) and their properties.

As a leader in a multicultural Liverpool church, I have found the past weeks to be strenuous. We have contended with the logistical nightmare of making sure that migrant communities (my own family included) are safe, including temporarily relocating children and the elderly to calmer neighborhoods and making sure their houses and cars are safe. We have also been trying to provide immediate and future psychological support for those traumatized. Among other violent actions, far-right protesters have attacked migrants, burned their cars, and smashed their windows as well as vandalized organizations and hotels providing support and housing to asylum seekers.

Serving my community in this way is, of course, not only draining but also isolating. I attend one of only a few congregations that have intentionally established a place where white, Black, and brown Christians, native-born and migrant, come together to worship. But many UK churches are segregated, and I know many Black and brown Christians who have experienced racism while attending majority-white congregations.

However, as a missiologist who is a migrant and is currently ministering to migrants, I believe that the white UK church may already have what it needs to initiate hard conversations within their churches and to defend migrants to the country at large. For more than two centuries, this country has sent numerous prolific missionaries around the world. And if there is one community outside the diplomatic circles in the West that knows a thing or two about the migrants and where they are coming from, it is missions organizations that have trained and sent thousands of British people to serve in mission around the world for many decades.

Returning missionaries arrive back home in the UK having learned new languages, made new friends, found new families, and developed acute awareness of the challenges of acclimating to foreign cultures. Of course, not all missionaries who are on furlough in the UK have the same capacity for ministry while at home as they do on the mission field. Yet returned and retired missionaries—and especially those leading missions agencies—should recognize the same opportunities for missional presence in their own neighborhoods.

What if these missionaries and missions agencies used this knowledge to identify with the migrants in their neighborhoods? What if they used these lived experiences to support communities like mine as we navigate the anxiety of national unrest? What if these Christian groups were the first Brits to publicly condemn the racism that too often inundates this country?

Of course, engaging in mission among migrants requires a different posture, skill set, and relational abilities. But it can generate catalytic fruit. Migrants who come to Christ or reaffirm their faith have the credibility to reach people from their home countries that might take missionaries decades to achieve. Standing up for migrants also rebukes the false narrative that missionaries have only a self-interested relationship with those they seek to convert and instead reminds the world of the love for people themselves that propels these believers to mission.

I propose three ways the missions community can embody this during this fraught time in the UK.

Advocacy

For many missionaries, returning home can mean easily slipping back into familiar cultural comfort zones. Yet their experiences of living as migrants in foreign cultures, their understanding of both the migrants’ and their own cultures, and their connections with churches among their own communities are treasures that give them a unique vantage point to help. These missionaries not only can follow the lead of those who have already organized counterprotests but also can protect asylum centers and mosques and offer food, water, and shelter to those in need of either substance or comfort. They can raise their voices to speak against racism, Christian nationalism, and the antimigrant rhetoric of the far right.

When far-right antimigrant groups stoke fear and hatred to the point that, as I wrote earlier, some of us have to temporarily leave our homes, what if missions agencies organized efforts with local churches to create safe places for migrants? What if a missions agency offered a hotline to talk to distressed migrants during a riot? Or to help migrants seeking shelter when their homes are unsafe? Or what if missions organizations offered counseling and psychotherapy support to those affected?

Reimagining missions theology

During the 1910 World Missionary Conference, out of the 1,215 delegates in attendance, 509 were from the UK—18 more than the United States and Canada together. In parts of Africa and Asia, many missionaries took advantage of British colonial rule to successfully spread Christianity. Their ministry was reinforced by the millions of European Christians in the 1800s who immigrated for economic purposes.

In the end, several former British colonies such as Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa embraced Christianity en masse. Nigeria alone, for example, has more than 102 million Christians, about one-and-a-half times the entire population of Britain today. Now, for decades, many people from these countries have arrived in the UK, along with their faith.

God has often used events we may not appreciate or may even fear to carry the gospel around the world. He who dispersed the Jerusalem church through persecution in Acts 11 now sends Africans and Asians—many of them believers—to parts of the world where Christianity has all but evaporated.

Every day we are bombarded with pundits that ask us to view mass migration from a political and economic perspective. But part of the mission community’s duty is to educate the church that this very migration will continue the spread of the gospel and to see the newcomers among us as people whom God wants to use.

Bridge building

Returned missionaries and their missions agencies must play an important role in creating better understanding and respect between British Christians and the wider UK community and newcomers. Missionaries’ command of multiple languages and grasp of the intricacies of different cultures can play a critical role in helping white Brits understand the reasons and motivations of those living among them.

In fact, during the colonial era many missionaries did this kind of work. Some, like William Carey, provided language training to foreigners while translating the Bible and other books to local languages. Today, though not missionary-sending ministries as such, organizations like Welcome Churches, Sanctuary Foundation, and the International Association for Refugees help Westerners learn how to work with the migrants.

During the recent riots, the best antidote has been white British people confronting racism in their own communities and defending migrants to fellow white Brits. Missionaries’ lived experience could allow them to go one step deeper and explain from a personal perspective what it is like to live in a new environment as someone far away from home. Their knowledge of straddling multiple cultures can offer a much more nuanced perspective of the migrant experience and a more detailed look at the alienation, loneliness, and fear that can accompany building an identity and way of life from scratch.

Returning the favor

Sadly, though I have met many missionaries who have challenged and grown my faith, I have also observed many missions agencies and churches ignore African migrants in their neighborhoods while sending their people to Africa to serve. Ironically, few seem interested in engaging Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans once they have migrated to Britain.

I remember attending a multi-agency mission conference in Manchester discussing the unfinished task of evangelizing my home country, Malawi. To my shock, the organizers of this wonderful conference did not think to invite some of the many Malawian pastors leading their (Malawian) congregations in Manchester.

When I lived in Minneapolis, our church sent nurses to Ghana for mission service but never cared to connect with the Ghanaian congregation that was next door to us. Sometimes I cynically wondered whether it was the exotic nature of working in Ghana and not necessarily working with and among Ghanaian people that drove most of that effort.

These oversights pain me because they seem to disregard hospitality—that is, the opportunity to honor and welcome newcomers. Most missionaries know that this is a fundamental part of mission work around the world and that much of their work hinges on the generosity and kindness of local people. Even Jesus told his disciples to move on to other homes and cities if such hospitality was lacking. “But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you” (Luke 10:10–11).

As someone who grew up around missionaries in Malawi, I saw how our communities went out of their way to be hospitable to visiting Western Christians. Once, members of a church I knew sold all their goats and cows to pay for a missionary’s housing repair. My experience is far from the minority; long before they migrated to the UK, many people warmly received Westerners, even at personal cost, risking their own livelihoods to help missionaries’ ministries thrive. Could those who were once welcomed now do the same for these migrants?

Harvey Kwiyani is a Malawian theologian and leads the Centre for Global Witness and Human Migration (Acts 11 Project) at Church Mission Society in Oxford, England.

- More from Harvey Kwiyani

News

Died: Timothy Dudley-Smith, Who Turned Metrical Poetry into Hundreds of Hymns

Daniel Silliman

The Church of England minister wrote “Tell Out, My Soul,” “Lord, for the Years,” “Sing a New Song,” and “Faithful Vigil Ended.”

Timothy Dudley-Smith / edits by Rick Szuecs

Timothy Dudley-Smith, author of “Tell Out, My Soul,” “Lord, for the Years,” “Sing a New Song,” and more than 400 other hymns, died in Cambridge, England, on August 12. He was 97.

Dudley-Smith was a Church of England bishop, serving as the suffragan, or assistant bishop, of Thetford in Norwich for 12 years before he retired in 1991. Prior to taking a position in leadership, he served as director of the Church Pastoral Aid Society.

He was always more widely known, however, for his hymns. Many Anglicans deeply cherished his words.

“These hymns restore our faith, not only in the gospel, but also in the action of singing that gospel together, with heart, and soul, and voice,” a retired English professor at the University of Durham wrote in 2006. “Dudley-Smith never lets us down. There are no weak lines, no approximate rhymes, no distortions of syntax, no fumbled metres … no bad hymns.”

Dudley-Smith’s most popular hymn, “Tell Out, My Soul,” has been published 190 times in Great Britain and is also popular in the US and elsewhere. It was first written in 1961, and by 1985, appeared in 42 percent of all contemporary hymnals, according to hymnary.org.

Ten of Dudley-Smith’s other songs have been published more than two dozen times. “Faithful Vigil Ended”—“Faithful vigil ended / watching waiting cease / Master, grant thy servant / his discharge in peace”—has appeared in 28 different hymnals. “Name of All Majesty,” written in 1979, appears in more than 70, including translations in French, Korean, and Chinese.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/0rsJY1evrwmWpzNgqCH3Hg?si=cd53bee83b4947b4

Dudley-Smith was a committed evangelical and identified with evangelicalism from childhood. But his work was embraced across party lines in the Church of England.

Ian Bradley, a church historian, hymnal editor, and BBC journalist, wrote that Dudley-Smith represented “a very orthodox Anglican tradition of hymn writing” and was “unashamedly evangelical.” At the same time, his work was seen as “very English,” according to Bradley, and somehow “broad enough to encompass Noël Coward, W. S. Gilbert, Stephen Sondheim, and Shakespeare, as well as J. I. Packer and Martyn Lloyd-Jones.”

Dudley-Smith, for his part, was often very modest about his hymns. He frequently noted he wasn’t actually musical and didn’t write any of the music, just the metrical poetry that could be put to various singable melodies. He titled his 2017 book on hymn writing A Functional Art.

“Not all our hymn texts will be, or even should be, Rolls-Royces,” Dudley-Smith wrote, “but they should all be decently roadworthy, and as true to Scripture, as free from blemish, as carefully constructed, as appealing to the imagination, heart, and will, and as user-friendly as we can make them.”

Dudley-Smith was born to parents Phyllis and Arthur in Manchester on December 26, 1926—Boxing Day. His father was a schoolteacher who frequently read poetry to his children, often putting them to bed with verses from A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare, and Alfred Tennyson:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To Strive, to seek, to find, and not to yeild

That trinity of Victorian poets came to be his favorites, followed by 20th-century British figures such as T. S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, and John Betjeman.

When Dudley-Smith was 11, his father died. He later recalled that was a pivotal moment for his faith.

“I had prayed when I knew he was ill, and you might think that my prayers not altering the situation would have put me off,” he said in an interview. “But it didn’t. It introduced me to my need of a heavenly Father.”

Around the same time, Dudley-Smith decided he wanted to be a minister.

“Someone at a family tea party said to me (as they did in those days), ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ I found myself replying, ‘I’m going to be a parson.’ It just came out. It was the first I knew of it myself!” he said.

Dudley-Smith was active in Scripture Union and learned the Bible in the group’s children’s programs. His faith deepened at a boys’ summer camp run by the conservative evangelical Church of England cleric E. J. H. Nash.

When he went to Cambridge, he considered pursing an education in math and education, like his late father, but ultimately decided on theology. He studied at Pembroke College and then did ordination training at Ridely Hall, both in Cambridge.

Dudley-Smith was ordained as a deacon in 1950 and a priest in ’51. His bishop—a former Olympic athlete and rugby player known as “the flying curate”—supported evangelist Billy Graham’s trip to England in 1954 and encouraged Dudley-Smith to get involved. The young minister helped ferry droves of schoolboys to the north London racetrack where Graham preached for four weeks, and then, responding to popular demand, extended his stay for two additional months.

The following year, Dudley-Smith joined the staff of the Evangelical Alliance and became editor of the organization’s magazine, Crusade.

His journalism won accolades from the priest in charge of religious broadcasting for BBC. The magazine was “something distinctly new in religious journalism in Britain. It was a glossy magazine … it had cartoons and a sense of humour, and it mixed devotional material with commentary on world events and—its editor’s trademark innovation—serious poetry.”

Dudley-Smith’s love of poetry was well-known by colleagues, and he also wrote his own verse. He had thought of trying to write songs but dismissed the possibility.

“I am totally unmusical!” he said. “I can’t sing in tune and often change key without knowing it.”

In the early 1960s, however, a priest working on the new Anglican Hymnbook approached him and asked if he wrote hymns. When he said no, the priest said, “Have you written any verse that might make a hymn?” And the answer to that was yes.

Dudley-Smith had been assigning someone to review the New English Bible for the Crusade and happened to look at Mary’s song of praise, the Magnificat, in Luke 1.

“Their version of Mary’s song begins, ‘Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord,’” Dudley-Smith later recalled. “I said to myself, ‘That’s verse,’ and wrote up four short verses.”

It became his first and most popular hymn:

Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord!
Unnumbered blessings, give my spirit voice;
tender to me the promise of his word;
in God my Saviour shall my heart rejoice.

The hymnal editors, however, first set it to a tune that didn’t work. At a conference of 600 clergy working through the songs, people actually quit singing it halfway through. Then the words were set to Woodlands, a tune composed in the early 1900s, and that worked. The hymn was well received and came to be widely sung.

The poet Betjeman said it was “one of the few modern hymns that will truly last.”

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/6WhpFj2oki2126kBroDLOn?si=6064481367604ab1

The editors of the new Anglican Hymnbook suggested more religious themes that Dudley-Smith could write on, and he made hymn writing a regular part of his life and ministry. He published a volume of his hymns in 1966 and another in ’69. Together, they sold more than one million copies.

His prodigious output drew comparisons to Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, and some contemporaries hailed him as the greatest evangelical hymn writer of his day.

Dudley-Smith’s daughter Caroline Gill recalls he would write most of the hymns while on holiday in Cornwall.

“My father would rise early to pore prayerfully over his Bible and write in his manuscript book, which contained snatches of text that had accrued during the year, ready to be honed into hymns,” Gill wrote. “My father occasionally worked on a text at the beach, between a pasty lunch and an afternoon surf.”

Though he wrote a lot, it didn’t always flow. He wanted his hymns to be simple and deep, heartfelt and clear, biblical but uncontroversial. Too much repetition would make him cringe, and he also recoiled from approximate rhymes, like sin and king. He described his process as slow, careful, and laborious.

“I find you have to be prepared for two lines from a couple of hours’ work,” he once said, “and on subsequent review to scrap them.”

The work was worth it, though, because of the impact the hymns had on people’s lives.

“Many people learn more theology from hymns than from anywhere else,” Dudley-Smith said. “They provide a corporate participation in a unique way, enabling an expression of praise, penitence, commitment, and a whole range of things together. Also, I think, for many people, the hymn offers the chance to express emotions which are in their hearts, but which they would find difficulty in articulating themselves.”

Dudley-Smith’s second-most popular hymn, “Lord, for the Years,” became popular at Church of England New Year’s services and anniversaries. It was also used to solemnize national religious ceremonies in the UK, including the enthronement of the Anglican archbishop in 1991 and Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.

He was made an officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire—several ranks below a knighthood—in 2003 for his “services to hymnody.”

Dudley-Smith also wrote an authorized two-volume biography of evangelical leader John Stott, who was a personal friend. Vol. 1 was titled John Stott: The Making of a Leader; Vol. 2, John Stott: A Global Ministry. He edited an anthology of Charles Wesley’s hymns and a collection of English hymns, and continued writing his own hymns into retirement.

“Hymn writing has been for me a most enriching and entirely unexpected gift,” he said.

He called it “the best of all trades.”

Dudley-Smith’s wife, June Arlette MacDonald, died in 2007 after 48 years of marriage. He is survived by daughters Caroline Gill and Sarah Walter and son James Dudley-Smith, who followed him into ministry in the Church of England.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/3iPP9nv4WDXJjlBe5BbrRK?si=61986e7ca80d4eaf

- More from Daniel Silliman

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After Pastor Led 400 to Starve, Some Kenyan Christians Open to Church Restrictions

Moses Wasamu

The local evangelical alliance that fought government proposals in 2016 now says it supports regulations to prevent a future Shakahola.

Bodies being exhumed at a mass-grave site linked to an investigation around a Kenyan cult that practiced starvation.

Yasuyoshi Chiba / Contributor / Getty

A year after more than 400 members of a Christian sect starved to death in eastern Kenya’s Shakahola forest, a Kenyan task force is calling for policy regulations it hopes will allow the government to better balance religious liberty and human rights.

Paul Mackenzie, who led Shakahola’s Good News International Church, is still in custody awaiting the outcome of the case filed against him by the state. He and his associates have been charged with the death of 191 minors, and authorities believe the victims acted under direction from Mackenzie, an end times preacher who promised them heaven if they starved to death.

“The policy aims at strengthening the right for the use of freedom of religion and at same time to protect the public from potential harm arising from the practice of religion and belief,” the Religious Organizations Policy report stated in its introduction. “It ensures freedom of religion and belief is not used as an avenue to abuse human rights and dignity.”

Its most wide-reaching mandate would force all churches seeking to be legally registered with the government to first affiliate to existing denominations or umbrella groups. These groups include the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya (EAK), the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Kenya National Congress of Pentecostal Churches, the Kenya Coalition of Churches Alliance and Ministries, and the Organization of African Instituted Churches.

The current law requires churches to register with the Registrar of Societies but does not require them to affiliate with any recognized religious bodies.

Working with the umbrella groups “is a mechanism for self-regulation. It is a better model of regulation,” said Kepha Nyandega, the EAK’s secretary general. “Being accountable is biblical; even Jesus was accountable to God.”

This support reflects a pivot for the EAK, which in 2016 had previously suggested that this level of regulation would hamper evangelism efforts and the growth of the church.

Nyandega explained he favored this proposal, however, because it would allow umbrella groups to self-regulate and crack down when their own members become errant.

“If the bill becomes law, it will bring order in the religious sector and it will also make it easier for religious organizations to operate and work together in a clearly defined legal environment,” he said.

At the same time, Nyandega says, small churches worry that larger congregations “may try to control who may control the membership of the proposed Religious Affairs Commission.” In turn, he has assured small churches that the proposed legislation determines the composition of the commission, and that the commission will represent all interest groups.

The report calls for clergy to have a minimum level of theological training; for the government to regulate religious broadcast content; and for it to more strictly and routinely enforce building code, sanitation, and noise pollution standards. Any new religious organizations seeking government registration will now be vetted by National Intelligence Services (NIS) and county security intelligence committees.

The 14-person task force was commissioned in May 2023 by President William Ruto. Former National NCCK secretary general Mutava Musyimi led the group, which included Christian, Muslim, and Hindu professionals as well as experts of professional bodies. The current EAK chairman and archbishop of Kenya Assemblies of God, Philip Kitoto, and the former chairman and current archbishop of Deliverance Churches in Kenya, Mark Kariuki, were among those serving.

Among its deliverables is a bill that would make the group’s 11 recommendations law. Legislators will debate the bill when the attorney general sends it to parliament later this year.

Members of the public and churches may still have a chance to influence the law that will come out of parliament. Most government-sponsored bills (like the one in question) go first to parliament for debate. Afterward, a committee solicits public feedback and writes a report incorporating the views of the public before presenting it to parliament, where the report is once again debated and amendments are made before the bill finally becomes law.

This report was released to the public just weeks after young people led country-wide protests against the Ruto government and criticized the church for its close relationship with political power. Given this timing, pastors say they have little incentive to publicly oppose the proposed regulation.

“Remember,” said Tony Kiamah of River of God Church in Nairobi, a Kenya Assemblies of God congregation. “The Gen Zs said they will come for the church after they are done with the government.”

The bill would also create the Religious Affairs Commission, which would be led by a Registrar of Religious Organizations (RRO) and create new regulatory standards.

Despite what seem like good intentions, some church leaders worry that additional government oversight will only encourage corruption and that some government officials may take advantage of churches that fail to fulfill the requirements and demand bribes.

“Are we going to allow the government to regulate churches when the government cannot regulate itself?” said Kiamah.

To him, the key to preventing another Shakahola is not religious regulations, because existing institutions are too weak. For instance, although the government has tried to ban cults and religious extremists and prevent false preachers from freely operating, this still persists.

“The law is there to deal with such matters, but corruption is what has hindered our ability to deal with such issues,” he said. “We should strengthen the police service, the intelligence, the judiciary, and other government institutions, and we will be out of the woods.”

The Gikuyu, Embu, Meru and Akamba (GEMA) Unity Forum, a group that represents Pentecostals in predominantly central Kenya, said the proposed regulations would leave them “gagged as a church.”

“Any changes should be subjected to a referendum,” said Nicholas Ikui, a GEMA leader. “Some churches were established before Kenya got her independence. So, I wonder how such would be registered afresh.”

Religious organizations need the government because they lack the capacity and means to punish errant churches, says Joseph Mutungi, the bishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya, Machakos diocese. At the same time, “the government does not have the capacity to determine spiritual matters, which only the Church and other religious organs offer.”

If the report’s recommendations are implemented, the government could investigate claims and complaints against problematic churches. If those were verified, the RRO could deregister and publish names of individuals and groups whose preaching and teachings are seen to be extremist and cultic. Additionally, if the bill passes, any church leader who gives misleading information to the government would be at risk of being fined or imprisoned.

The task force has also recommended revising the national curriculum to educate students about the dangers of religious extremism and emphasize the need for religious tolerance.

While receiving the report, Ruto promised to protect freedom of religion as well as the Kenyan people.

“We will continue to safeguard and protect the freedom of religion, but at the same time mitigate its potential abuse to harm Kenyans,” he said last month.

Moves by the government to regulate churches more directly are not new. As far back as 2015, the government had plans to regulate churches.

Under the plan put forward by then attorney general Githu Muigai, religious entity registration applications had to be accompanied by personal information about its leaders.

Church leaders were to submit a copy of their national identity card, Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) certificate, personal identification pin, a passport photograph, a certified copy of a theological certificate from a duly registered and accredited theological institution, and a tax clearance or exemption certificate.

Religious leaders pushed back, claiming that being forced to declare their salary would require them to pay taxes and that the government was asking for personal details that previously churches had not been required to give to receive registration. The protest ultimately killed Muigai’s efforts.

- More from Moses Wasamu

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In Zimbabwe, Secular Education Is Overtaking Historic Mission Schools

Nyasha Bhobo

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

Three mission schools outside of Harare, Zimbabwe.

Christian Ender / Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Nyasha Bhobo

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Wire Story

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

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

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

Courtesy of Philly Bike Action / RNS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

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Why the American Church Can’t Fix Loneliness

Russell Moore

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

Jiri Benedikt / Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books

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

Interview by Stefani McDade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Interview by Stefani McDade

Theology

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

Bruce Barron

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

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Bruce Barron

Ideas

An Anxious Generation—of Parents

Carrie McKean

Contributor

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

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Pexels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Carrie McKean

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