Trash Problem Pushes Pastor to Action

A Honduran church leads the way in local garbage collection while praying for an international plastics treaty.

Pastor Wilfredo Vásquez collects and sorts trash in Honduras.

Guevara Tearfund

A banner hangs outside the Church of God in the village of El Rincón, Honduras, that says, “Let’s be part of the solution, not the pollution.”

It’s a message pastor Wilfredo Vásquez posted after witnessing the harmful effects of plastics in his community.

“More and more, I understand that if we want to see changes in any area of society, we as children of God must take the initiative for those changes, because the church is the hope of the world,” he told CT.

Vásquez, who shepherds the Wesleyan-Arminian congregation in the Central American town of about 4,000 people, has started taking steps to help his community and hopes world leaders will do the same by establishing an international treaty on plastics.

From April 23 to 29, delegates from around the world met in Ottawa for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution (INC-4). It’s the fourth stage in a five-stage process working toward an agreement that has the potential to change how plastic is handled globally.

If passed, experts believe it could have a similar impact on plastic usage as the Montreal Protocol of 1987 had on chemicals such as freon.

While the final stage of the process isn’t until November in South Korea, after the most recent round of discussions in Canada, delegates from more than 150 countries agreed to begin intercessional work. Right away, delegates will start meeting to develop ways to identify plastic products and chemicals of concern.

In El Rincón, 3,600 miles away from the latest round of discussions, Vásquez is praying for the treaty’s passage.

Vásquez knows exactly what’s at stake and what a difference even small changes can make, because he’s experienced it firsthand in his village. Speaking to CT through a translator, Vásquez shared about how until recently, there was no proper recycling or waste collection in his community.

“What people do with solid waste is either they throw it, they bury it, or they burn it,” he said.

The negative impacts could be seen all around. Trash littered playgrounds and sports fields. Smoke from trash fires polluted the air and caused respiratory problems for many people, including Vásquez’s mother-in-law.

“They close the doors and the windows and keep these people isolated,” Vásquez said. “They can’t go out because of the smoke.”

Compelled by love of neighbor and the biblical command to care for creation, Vásquez decided to do something to change what he saw.

He started encouraging church members and people in the community to stop burning trash. Then the church organized community cleanups and encouraged members to use reusable cups and utensils instead of single-use plastics.

Alongside Tearfund, a Christian charity that partners with churches in more than 50 of the world’s poorest countries, the pastor talked with community leaders and the local government about the need for waste collection.

The community now has a weekly garbage pickup. In addition, youth from Vásquez’s church collect and recycle plastic, while other recyclable waste is collected at sorting points established across the community.

As a result of these changes, the village is cleaner, and those with respiratory conditions can breathe easier.

Miriam Moreno, Tearfund’s environmental and economic sustainability manager for Latin America and the Caribbean, has worked with Vásquez to help make the changes in his community. One thing Tearfund did was fund containers for sorting waste.

“It’s very inspiring to have leaders like him to be able to share his experience and what he’s done,” she said.

Like Vásquez, Moreno says it is her faith which motivates her to do this work.

“I think it’s my responsibility as a Christian, and I feel very inspired to mobilize others and to get to know what others are doing,” she said.

She and Vásquez hope to encourage similar changes in other parts of Central America.

“While the waste collection and bins being installed in El Rincón will make a big difference to this community, there are hundreds of thousands more communities like this,” she said.

She believes addressing plastic pollution through an international treaty will be a key step toward helping impoverished countries.

“Everyone has heard the problems of plastic waste and pollution,” she said. “Everyone has a technical knowledge. But something that has been missing is that connection to make people aware of our responsibility as Christians to take care of creation.”

One of the people representing Tearfund at INC-4 is Rich Gower, a senior economist for the nonprofit. As an organization that works in more than 50 of the world’s poorest countries, he said, they’ve seen firsthand how plastic disproportionately impacts those living in poverty.

He said an estimated 2 billion people worldwide have no safe way to dispose of garbage. Like El Rincón, these places have few other options but to burn or dump their plastic and other waste on street corners and in open dumps.

“The results are wide-ranging and extremely harmful—causing toxic fumes; flooding; increasing the risk of cancer and other serious diseases like heart disease, respiratory infection, and other health conditions; and also creating climate emissions,” Gower said.

A Tearfund research paper, “No Time to Waste,” found that this results in the deaths of up to 1 million people each year.

Tearfund’s team at the UN talks is calling on governments to push for a treaty that fully addresses the impacts of waste on people living in poverty by ensuring four things are mandatory in the final agreement:

Reduction: legally binding targets to reduce plastic production and scale up reuse solutions
Recycling: universal access to waste collection and recycling
Respect: support for waste pickers, including a just transition
Response: mechanisms to ensure businesses and governments take action

Gower believes Christians have an important role to play in the process.

“Christians from around the world have joined together in Tearfund’s Rubbish campaign because we believe that every person created by God should be able to live a full life free from rubbish,” he said. “The growing waste crisis is having a huge impact on the lives of people living in poverty and is also harming God’s beautiful creation.”

The fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution will be held November 25 through December 1. If an agreement is reached, the plastics treaty could go into effect in 2025.

- More from Adam MacInnis

News

Hillsong Abuse Settlement Rejected Over NDA

Daniel Silliman

Victim says she wants accountability more than money.

Andrew Merry / Getty Images

Hillsong Church Australia’s legal settlement with a former student who was groped by a worship leader fell apart on Thursday when the survivor refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

“I will not give up my voice,” Anna Crenshaw, daughter of Pennsylvania megachurch pastor Ed Crenshaw, told Australian reporters. “This has never been about money for me but about justice and accountability.”

According to lawyers, one condition of the agreement was a joint statement saying the church reported the assault immediately. Crenshaw claims Hillsong—embroiled at the time in a scandal over founder Brian Houston’s failure to report his father Frank’s sexual abuse of a young boy—actually waited four or five months to contact police.

Crenshaw was studying at Hillsong College in 2016 when Jason Mays, an administrative staff member and volunteer worship leader, put his hand on her inner thigh. The young woman—18 at the time—got up to leave, but Mays, 24, grabbed her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and touched her legs, butt, and crotch, according to a statement Crenshaw wrote several years later.

“He lifted up my shirt and was kissing my stomach,” Crenshaw, now 26, said in a TV news interview. “So I’m just, like, stuck there with this guy groping me.”

Crenshaw did not immediately report the incident because, she said, she was ashamed.

She also didn’t believe she could report Mays to human resources, because the department was run by Mays’s father. Two years later, a counselor pushed her to report to someone, and Crenshaw went to the head of pastoral care, who said, “I’m sure he’s really sorry,” according to Crenshaw.

The church then assigned Crenshaw to work on a team with Mays’s wife. After several months and pressure from Crenshaw’s father, Hillsong reported the incident to local police.

Mays pleaded guilty to indecent assault in 2020. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and mandatory counseling, but no criminal conviction will go on his record.

Mays told Eternity that he accepted he “crossed a boundary” after getting very drunk. But he claimed the media blew the details out of proportion and made him out to be a monster because of its anti-Christian agenda.

“I wish my apologies had been enough,” he said. “There needs to be reconciliation. Instead, this story of ours has evolved into a weapon that’s been used against the Church.”

Mays later returned to work at Hillsong. The church told Crenshaw’s father that there were “no additional concerns” about Mays, and that “we also have an obligation to care for Jason, his wife, and family.”

Hillsong’s founder also downplayed the incident to the congregation—saying it was really just an attempt at a hug—and told them “the Lord has forgiven Jason, and we felt he deserved another chance.”

Crenshaw sued the church. She claimed negligence and breach of duty.

According to her lawsuit, the church “had no proper or adequate policy or procedure in place for the proper or adequate handling of complaints of sexual assault” and had failed to take any precautions to protect students, interns, or volunteers “from the general risk of sexual assault by its members.”

The church denied the allegations. It also claimed not to be legally liable, since Mays was not “acting in any capacity relating to his paid employment or volunteer duties with Hillsong” when he touched the student inappropriately.

The litigation was set to go to trial on Monday in New South Wales. Hillsong, however, offered to settle the case for an undisclosed sum of money, and the trial was taken off the court calendar. When the attorneys returned the following day to work out the details, though, they came to an impasse.

Hillsong required a non-disclosure agreement. Crenshaw refused.

She would not agree to “get their money and walk away without my voice,” she told reporters. She wanted “accountability and real sense of justice and hope that they would really change moving forward.”

Christian abuse victims and victims’ advocates have increasingly opposed the use of non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements, claiming the common legal tools called NDAs are widely misused to protect powerful institutions from accountability.

NDAs were originally designed to protect tech industry “trade secrets.” They are now used by many industries and are often written so broadly that they include anything an employee learns in the course of employment.

Many evangelical churches and ministries require staff to sign them, though it is not clear what trade secrets the organizations could have. One agreement reviewed by CT included the prohibition of the disclosure of any “information regarding ministries,” as well as the names of anyone the staff member had ever worked with, even though their names, photos, and bios were listed on the parachurch’s website. Many of the Christian NDAs seen by CT also include prohibitions against disclosing the non-disclosure agreement, cloaking even the secrecy in secrecy.

It is not clear whether these agreements would hold up in court. To date, they have not been tested.

There have been a number of recent efforts to limit the scope of NDAs. In the US, President Joe Biden signed a law saying these legal agreements cannot cover sexual assault or harassment if they are signed before the incident as part of the conditions of employment.

The UK is currently considering legislation that would say NDAs cannot prevent someone from reporting information to police, lawyers, government regulators, counselors, or close family members. The head of the justice department said, “We are bringing an end to the murky world of non-disclosure agreements, which are too often used to sweep criminality under the carpet.”

Not everyone agrees that goes far enough, though.

“We need a complete ban of NDAs in cases of sexual misconduct, harassment and bullying,” a center-left member of the UK parliament said, “to ensure that no victim is silenced.”

A group called #NDAfree was organized in 2021 to push Christian organizations to stop using NDAs and to encourage people not to sign them.

“I’m not against settlement as a process,” one of the organizers told CT. “But using payment and NDAs as a way to not investigate something, that’s totally unacceptable.”

Crenshaw, for her part, said she had been hopeful that Hillsong’s approach to accountability had changed with the departure of founder Brian Houston. The condition of an NDA as part of the settlement convinced her she was wrong.

“It’s very disheartening and devastating,” Crenshaw said. “I think this is just evidence that despite their new leadership, they have the same tactics.”

The Hillsong trial has been rescheduled on the New South Wales court calendar for May 13.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

Excerpt

Chinese Christians Have Conflicted Feelings About ‘Saving Face’

Jolene Kinser

Though a significant part of their culture, not all feel like it best honors how God wants conflict dealt with.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

In 1997, I moved from America to China to teach English and study Mandarin. I ended up working there for 15 years. While in the country, I ran an organization with team members of diverse ages, cultures, and ethnicities. Just like in the United States, I discovered that many interpersonal conflicts in China are left unaddressed and unresolved.

Changing Normal: Break Through Barriers to Pursuing Peace in Relationships

Kinser, Jolene

January 13, 2024

On my team, two Chinese colleagues resisted working together due to past conflicts that had never been addressed. A local pastor in my community told me about a pastor and an elder of a church who didn’t speak to each other for months due to a church split.

The term that most mainland Chinese people associate with conflict is maodun (矛盾) according to research conducted by Stonehill College’s communications professor Xuejian Yu. Maodun is typically perceived as something negative and destructive that should be minimized or dealt with through an avoidant or evasive nonconfrontational manner, thus preventing the loss of “face” or any experience of shame for all involved.

The Chinese words for “face” are mianzi (面子) and lian (脸). They refer to each individual’s perception or awareness of his or her own reputation in the eyes of others, which then forms the basis for one’s personal sense of integrity, honor, shame, prestige, and dignity. (For simplicity’s sake, I have combined the meanings of mianzi and lian in my description of face.)

In a broader context, face is “the pervasive human attempt to establish a sense of worth and meaning (‘esteem’) and to find acceptance (esteem that is ‘social’),” describes American missiologist Chris Flanders. Simply put, individuals possess face when they believe they are solid and respected in their identities, perceive that their reputations are intact, and feel accepted and socially affirmed as having value to others and their communities.

I interviewed 31 believers from 13 different urban city churches in China and discovered that many consider face as a negative and significant hindrance to living the Christian life. (All the names of the Chinese Christians quoted here are pseudonyms for security reasons.)

“Face doesn’t help reconciliation at all,” said Wang Min, a pastor’s wife from western China. “If no one else is present to mediate and a person has been shamed in a group, they will not reconcile because they feel like they have lost face. Even if they were clearly wrong, they won’t admit it.” “When a person is paying attention to face, they would rather die before reconciling. Or they reconcile at the surface level, only reconciling in response to the pressure of someone else being present,” Wang added. These findings led me to ask, How does the Bible speak into the concept of face in Chinese contexts? To what degree does giving, saving, or losing face in conflict contribute to or hinder reconciliation in this particular culture?

A theology of face

The concept of face is not bad, negative, or a hindrance, argues Flanders, the American missiologist. Our preoccupation with face is not a result of sin entering the world at the Fall but was present in a positive way pre-Fall, he adds.

God created us in his image (Gen. 1:26–27), which is by nature a reflection of the Trinitarian relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are hardwired to desire peaceful, joyful, and harmonious connections with others in community.

Face is a gift from God that structures each one’s identity and relationality at a basic level. Giving and receiving acceptance and affirmation of value through the mechanism of face establishes harmony in a communal sense, which is how God intended things to be.

Only when Adam and Eve disobeyed God did they feel afraid and view their nakedness as something shameful to be hidden (Gen. 3:7). Instead of coming to God, confessing their sin, and seeing what God would do, they hid, no longer connecting or getting their “face needs” met through the face of God.

From that point on, people have used negative face-saving strategies, such as avoidance and denial, to respond to situations in which they feel shame, embarrassment, and loss of face.

Based on this understanding of the origin of face and its relational purpose, I argue that we don’t need to get beyond face or get rid of the concept in Chinese Christian contexts. Rather, we need to look to God instead of people to meet our fundamental face needs for love, value affirmation, esteem, honor, and acceptance.

Nevertheless, face remains a fragile concept today since we can gain or lose face at any moment. When people disagree with us, raise concerns, or point out our mistakes or sin, we unconsciously sense that our reputations are in jeopardy. We get defensive and angry. We feel a need to prove our positions or protect ourselves.

Unmasking cultural beliefs

In face-conscious societies, losing face is a serious issue and can affect a person’s ability to function effectively in social settings. While it may sometimes be isolated to only one relationship, the loss of face may also impact a person’s relationship with a whole community. For instance, divorce is often perceived as something shameful that brings dishonor to one’s parents and impacts their esteem in the larger community.

Face is something that others can give to you, based on your relative positions in your social networks and on how well you conduct yourself in those positions. To give or save face shows respect and boosts one’s self-esteem.

People commonly give face to others through compliments on diligence, status, beauty, wisdom, or elegance and by complying when asked to do something. When critiquing someone’s performance, people save that person’s face by avoiding direct criticism, using tactful or ambiguous words instead. Showing respect for someone’s suggestion or position, even if one does not agree with the person, also saves face.

The common thought is that by saving face for others, one can prevent conflicts, and that by giving face to others, one can enhance interpersonal relationships.

“In Chinese culture, face is very important, especially for men,” explained Li Jie, a math teacher from western China. “A man is supposed to display his position in society, so from those in the very top of the government to the very lowest in the household, men especially want face.

“As a result, face has caused a lot of conflicts. I pretty much have never truly reconciled with someone. Every time, our reconciliation has strictly been to maintain face, meaning that on the surface level, everything looks fine and we are speaking with one another, but in fact, we have not reconciled.”

As Li Jie pointed out, reconciliation is often superficial in a face-oriented culture. Although people may behave politely toward one another after a conflict and cooperate again, their relationship remains distant or broken.

A deeper and truer heart-level reconciliation, where genuine harmony is present or being cultivated, seems less prominent in Chinese contexts. This is when two people hold “positive perceptions of each other” and interact “in a sincere, trustful, active, supportive, accepting, and natural manner,” describes Li-Li Huang, a professor of social and indigenous psychology in Taiwan. Genuine harmony looks like two people who are willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Building a face-safe community

Relating to each other in this spirit of genuine harmony is meant to be a hallmark of Christian community. Likewise, a face-safe community is intended to be a loving environment in which we can honestly confess sins and discuss grievances instead of ignoring them.

But in Chinese culture, confessing our sins and apologizing to one another is perceived as something that will cause a loss of face. Doing so between people of equal status, such as friends or coworkers, includes some degree of losing face. Yet this is exacerbated between people of superior and inferior status—think father and son, or boss and subordinate. It is thought that someone of superior status should not apologize to someone inferior because of the hierarchical Confucian notions of positional power and authority. The subordinate is to obey and defer to the superior and to stay silent and submit in times of conflict.

Chinese Christians are thus confronted with a big conundrum: Culturally speaking, confession results in face loss, but in God’s kingdom culture, to reconcile is to apologize and confess, no matter your age or position.

After all, God doesn’t give or save face. He doesn’t pretend everything is fine relationally when it is not. God genuinely loves, values, and forgives us. He calls us to acknowledge our mistakes and transgressions (Ps. 32; 103:8–14) and purposefully addresses our innermost issues so we can be transformed (Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 3:18).

Apologizing merely to save face does not acknowledge one’s complicity in the situation. It strives to protect the person’s own honor and esteem. In contrast, giving a “confession apology” does not excuse, explain, or defend. Rather, it acknowledges the hurt that the other person feels and takes responsibility for one’s own contribution to the conflict. This might entail losing face, but when done sincerely in face-to-face conversations, we can also gain valuable gifts such as mutual understanding and empathy.

In short, when we don’t fear losing face because our identities are rooted in Christ and not in the eyes of others, our community can turn into a “face-safe” place where hierarchy and power differentials do not impede opportunities to reconcile.

After Chen Meizhen, a counselor in western China, apologized to a subordinate, she discovered that her face was not impacted the way she had feared it would be. “I originally thought that if I, the leader, apologized, I might become lower than my coworker,” Chen said. “I would worry and wonder, Will she look down on me? But after I truly apologized, she didn’t look down on me! She still respected me.”

Su Lijuan, a woman in marketing and sales in northern China, went so far as to say that genuinely apologizing restores one’s face: “What I knew to be true has been turned upside down. Previously, I thought that any time you apologize, the result will be a loss of face. However, if you can sincerely apologize, you actually restore your own face, your own dignity and honor.”

As people who have had our face needs met in God, we can “image” God’s face to each other. Instead of shaming, scolding, lecturing, or viewing ourselves as inferior when we acknowledge a mistake or confess sin, we can learn to accept, love, forgive, and support one another to “go and sin no more” (John 8:11, NLT).

Amid the cultural pressures to save or give face to preserve superficial harmony, a face-safe community becomes a place where authentic, heart-level reconciliation can occur. The reconciliation process often starts with apologizing but does not end there. Confessing our sin, acknowledging harm, making reparations for damage done, and changing our behavior, together with granting and receiving forgiveness, are ways in which genuine reconciliation can take place. When our fundamental face needs are met first in Christ, we can courageously be kingdom-minded peacemakers in a face-conscious society.

This excerpt was adapted from Changing Normal: Break Through Barriers to Pursuing Peace in Relationships by Jolene Kinser. Copyright © 2024 by Jolene Kinser. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Theology

Conservative Methodists, Unite

W. James Antle III

After this week’s UMC votes on LGBTQ issues, African Methodists should join American conservatives in the new Global Methodist denomination.

A sign outside the Charlotte Convention Center promoting the United Methodist Church General Conference.

Chris Carlson / AP Images

That was fast. In the first General Conference since the most conservative congregations disaffiliated, the United Methodist Church liberalized its teachings on marriage, sexuality, and the ordination of LGBTQ clergy.

In other mainline denominations, like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Presbyterian Church (USA), the conservative exodus has tended to come after the progressive victory. But in the UMC, the conservative American contingent is already gone, so the vote wasn’t close.

With that settled, the next and perhaps final battle between American Methodists who have been on opposite sides of theological and social issues for more than half a century will concern who can win over the Africans, who have been the “main group opposing the changes in policy” on sexuality and are also the largest UMC contingent outside the United States. The breakaway conservative denomination called itself the Global Methodist Church in no small part because members hoped to remain in fellowship with churches in the Global South, where Methodism is more orthodox—and growing as Methodism in the US hasn’t in years.

But the United Methodist Church has also set in motion a plan to allow regional autonomy on the very issues that broke up the denomination domestically. This would permit African churches to remain traditional in how they define marriage and—so the pitch goes—otherwise insulate themselves from the Americans’ liberal course.

African Methodists have previously rejected similar proposals, likely understanding how such rules would dilute African churches’ influence over the denomination and exempt leaders of the shrinking US church from accountability to their African counterparts. They would be wise to reject the plan again.

I give that advice as a conservative Methodist myself—and one facing a similar quandary over denominational affiliation. For now, I remain a United Methodist. My church is theologically traditional but fell short of the congregational vote threshold to disaffiliate, and there’s no Global Methodist presence in my area.

Yet, longer term, I see no future for conservatives of any nationality in this denomination. With so many evangelical congregations and much of the organized resistance to theological liberalism gone, the trajectory displayed in this week’s conference votes will only accelerate.

A better path, as we near the end of the mainline, would be continued connection between the African and American Methodists who together prevented the UMC from going down this road for more than 50 years. Global Methodists have an opportunity to inherit the most vibrant parts of United Methodism while disentangling from its outdated bureaucracy. More importantly, they have a chance to provide an orthodox Wesleyan witness that is compromised neither by liberalism nor by fundamentalism.

The UMC held together as long as it did because it was orthodox on paper but progressive in practice, except in jurisdictions where traditionalists were numerically prevalent. But eventually, liberals who saw prohibitions on same-sex marriage as morally equivalent to racial discrimination could no longer live with even nominal orthodoxy. And conservatives could no longer watch those prohibitions being routinely flouted without consequence.

Yet our divides were never solely about same-sex relationships. When Methodists began debating homosexuality in 1972, it was a reliable proxy for beliefs about biblical authority and the Christian understanding of love. Today, I still believe liberalizing on sexual morality reflects an errant, culture-conforming view of Scripture and tradition, but I also think Methodists have other pressing questions to address—questions that sometimes cut across lines of debate over gay marriage and related topics.

Today there are more Methodists who passionately disagree with each other on LGBTQ questions while being able to recite the creeds together without crossing their fingers. And there are Methodists who are slipping away from very basic doctrines about Christ and Scripture. If we can complete the denominational split and welcome the African churches into Global Methodism, perhaps conservative Methodists can set aside decades-long sexuality debates and focus instead on core theological matters—and the broader work of the church—without compromising on marriage or abortion.

That vision is particularly appealing because many of us on the conservative side have come to believe we were not ambitious enough. Over a long period of time and with considerable effort, even without real executive authority to expedite the process, maybe we could have gradually transformed the UMC from a center-left denomination with a strong evangelical subculture to a (mildly) center-right one with a strong liberal subculture.

That opportunity, if it existed, has passed. But now, perhaps, we can do even better by going our separate ways. I was recently at a dinner outside Washington, DC, with longtime combatants in the fight for Methodist renewal. Many expressed their wonderment and relief now that the fight was “lost”—that they could now follow conscience and conviction without active resistance from progressive church leaders.

Just a few years ago, they would have been hunkering down to do battle at the General Conference, an experience a pastor friend once described to me as being like attending the Republican and Democratic National Conventions at the same time. Now, conservative Methodists are free to practice an orthodox faith marked by the distinctive parts of our Wesleyan heritage.

There’s no guarantee that conservative Methodists will flourish, of course. But the new beginning offers real promise, and our prospects will be better if our African brothers and sisters join us. Global Methodism is continuing a tradition that shares their values and biblical perspective, and membership from the Global South is vital to the church we’ve sought to build together for so long.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.

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News

One of Oldest Books in Existence Sells for $3.9 Million

Emily Belz

An ancient codex, containing perhaps the earliest complete versions of Jonah and 1 Peter, went up for auction and sold to an anonymous bidder.

The Crosby-Schøyen Codex is one of the oldest examples of a book.

Courtesy of Christie's Images Ltd. 2024

Update (6/11/24): The Crosby-Schøyen Codex sold in London on Tuesday for $3.9 million to an anonymous phone bidder after several rounds of back-and-forth bids in the afternoon sale at Christie’s. A Christie’s auctioneer and expert on the ancient texts, Eugenio Donadoni, conducted the auction, telling the room the codex was “one of the cultural monuments of this sale.” Scholars and the public will not know the ownership of the prized text for now, but it’s possible the new owner or owners could reveal themselves at some point. If an institution purchased the codex, as scholars hoped, it’s more likely that would become public.

————

One of the oldest books in existence, which contains what is perhaps the oldest complete versions of Jonah and 1 Peter, is going up for auction in June. The sale of the Crosby-Schøyen Codex has scholars excited to talk about its uniqueness—and nervous about whether it could go into private hands and disappear.

The Crosby-Schøyen Codex is a primary example of the invention of books, which coincided with the spread of Christianity, said Eugenio Donadoni, a specialist in books and manuscripts at Christie’s London, which is auctioning the codex. The growth of Christianity spurred the need to “maximize the text you can write down and transmit … around the Mediterranean,” Donadoni said.

Before codices appeared in roughly the third century, scrolls “for several thousand years were the primary vehicle for transmitting literature,” said Brent Nongbri, an expert in early Christian manuscripts and a professor at the Norwegian School of Theology.

Codices were a technological advancement that “that wouldn’t be surpassed until the discovery of the printing press,” Donadoni added. Donadoni just finished touring the codex for potential buyers in New York and Paris before returning it to London, where it will be auctioned on June 11. About the codex he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

A single scribe wrote out the texts of the codex on papyrus leaves in Sahidic Coptic somewhere between A.D. 250 and 350, according to carbon dating of the codex conducted in 2020. That means it’s likely the text was written before the fourth-century church councils and during the time of the great persecutions.

“This is being used at a time when Christians are still finding their feet,” said Donadoni.

The codex contains Jonah, 1 Peter, a passage from 2 Maccabees, a Passover text from second-century church leader Melito of Sardis, and an Easter sermon.

New Testament scholar David Horrell has argued that these different texts in the codex relate to each other in how they talk about suffering and resurrection, and may have been an Easter liturgy. Melito’s text on the Passover talks about Christ as the Passover lamb and uses parallel language to 1 Peter. Jonah, some scholars argue, was a major figure in early Christianity in Egypt and repeatedly appeared in Christian art there.

Horrell notes Jonah’s “perceived relevance as a type of the Easter story, a sign of resurrection, notably in the ‘three days and three nights’ Jonah spends inside the fish.” The Maccabees text, focused on martyrdom, goes along with that liturgical theme of the suffering of both Christ and God’s people.

“We can slip into thinking that there’s just the New Testament—this particular collection of books—and that’s what everybody was reading,” said Nongbri. “But when we get back into this early period, there's actually different collections circulating. And this one is an interesting group of texts and allows us to imagine, What would have this been used for? … What kind of liturgical use might this have had?”

The codex comes from the private collection of Norwegian Martin Schøyen, who has one of the largest collections of biblical texts. Some of the other largest biblical-text reserves are the Green Collection behind the Museum of the Bible and the British and Foreign Bible Society collection at Cambridge.

Museums and private collectors have had issues with ancient items’ provenance, like whether they were looted. The codex has a documented provenance and was a legal export out of Egypt, although the story of its original discovery is “open for debate,” said Nongbri. Yet Donadoni says there is “general consensus” that the codex was found near a particular monastic complex in Egypt.

The codex was buried in a jar in sand, according to the collector. An antiquities dealer first placed it on the market in the 1950s, and it eventually went to the University of Mississippi in 1955, which had a large archaeology department at the time. The university sold it in 1981, and then it passed to private collectors.

If the codex was from the earlier end of its carbon dating between 250 and 350, that would make it the oldest book, including the oldest copies of 1 Peter and Jonah. William Willis, an early scholar studying the codex, argued that “it may be dated with some confidence to the middle of the third century,” or 250.

But if it was produced at a monastery, then it likely came at the later end of the carbon-dating window, according to Nongbri, because monasteries took off in the fourth century.

Other scholars have argued that it could have been produced earlier and stored at the monastery where it was later discovered. Horrell, for one, argued the codex was produced before the monastery was founded.

Is it the oldest book in existence?

“It could be,” said Nongbri. “But it's not certain.”

In the codex, the 1 Peter text is described as “the letter of Peter” and does not make any reference to 2 Peter. The Schøyen Collection says that means it was copied in A.D. 60–130, making it the “single most important [manuscript] of 1 Peter.”

Christie’s estimates the codex will sell for $2.5 to $3.75 million. Last year the Codex Sassoon, considered the oldest near-complete Hebrew Bible, broke records for the sale of a book or historical document when it sold at auction for $38.1 million.

Scholars worry about where the codex will end up.

“There’s always the fear when something goes up for sale … it could go behind doors that would make it hard for researchers to access it,” said Jordan Jones, an expert in biblical texts and archaeology at the University of Iowa.

Nongbri concurred: “We just worry about it disappearing.”

Nongbri and Donadoni both noted that the Schøyen Collection allowed scholars in to study the codex, with the carbon-dating study as the most recent example. The Schøyen Collection had photographed the codex, and Christie’s also photographed and digitized it.

But there is more research to conduct on it with newer imaging tools. Jones noted how multispectral imaging, for example, helped researchers see words no one had seen on the Dead Sea Scrolls. That hasn’t been done on the codex, he said.

“Researchers would have a field day [with the codex] if they got a chance,” Jones said. “These pages are in a better state of legibility than the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Multispectral imaging could show any changes made to the text, such as whether there was initially a different word under the visible word, Jones explained. He also said there could be more studies on the way the codex was bound.

“There's definitely more to look at from a sort of book history standpoint,” said Nongbri. “Certainly multispectral imaging would be great.”

Donadoni from Christie’s London said he is hoping an institution steps in to buy the codex. The auction will include other biblical texts: the Holkham Hebrew Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus, and the Geraardsbergen Bible. In the Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus, the Gospels were written in fifth-century Christian Palestinian Aramaic that was largely erased and written over by a tenth-century Georgian Palestinian monk.

Scholars of these texts will be watching the auction on June 11—and hope that they might know who the buyer is afterward. Sometimes buyers are not disclosed.

Nongbri said any major university that has a papyrus collection has the proper conditions for storing the codex, the personnel to care for it, and the systems for academics to study it.

“That’s the ideal setting for something like this,” he said.

This article has been updated to clarify that the fourth century church councils were not establishing biblical canon.

- More from Emily Belz

Theology

Why Almost Nobody Likes a Politician Shooting Her Dog

Russell Moore

The widespread outrage over Kristi Noem’s book should awaken moral responsibility—not just toward pets but for one another.

Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota.

Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty / Edits by CT

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

Decades ago, before he was a nationally recognized face, Stephen Colbert featured a “Better Know a District” segment on his show The Colbert Report in which he would parody a far-right cable news host as he interviewed members of Congress, trying to get them in awkward situations for comedic effect.

In his interview with John Yarmuth, then a congressman from Louisville, Kentucky, Colbert referenced Yarmuth’s past life as a debater on local television. He challenged Yarmuth to show his debating chops by instantly debating the opposite side of a question of Colbert’s choosing. The stance Colbert chose to take was that throwing kittens into a wood chipper was a bad thing to do—and he then pointed to Yarmuth to argue the other side—that sometimes, throwing kittens in a wood chipper is the right thing to do.

The joke, of course, was that no decent human being, much less a politician seeking votes from a majority of the population, would ever want to be seen making the case for throwing kittens in a wood chipper. This past week, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem proved that, as much as the American public has shifted on all kinds of issues, there still isn’t much of a constituency in this country for “Throw Kittens in the Wood Chipper”—or, more accurately in this case, “Shoot Puppies in the Head.”

In fact, many people have noted that this might be the most united that Americans of both parties and all tribes have been of late—all in expressing revulsion at Noem’s self-disclosure in her memoir that she “hated” her 14-month-old dog Cricket. When Cricket wasn’t trained enough to hunt pheasants instead of chickens, then bit the governor, Noem shot the dog and buried her in a gravel pit.

There’s little question that Noem won’t be gunning down her next pet from the vice-presidential residence at the Naval Observatory. That’s obvious. What’s less obvious is why, even with all of our moral divisions, this kind of story can still call forth such strong emotions in most people.

Michael Knowles, a commentator at The Daily Wire, argued that the outrage over Noem’s boast of her dog-killing skills is just one more example of liberal elitism. Urban progressives are the ones who treat pets like children, he said, sometimes pushing their dogs or cats down city streets in baby strollers.

To some degree, he’s right. I can’t imagine a soul where I grew up, in the little Woolmarket community of Biloxi, Mississippi, ever putting a dog in a baby carriage. That said, Knowles’s argument could only come from an urban dweller who knows no more about rural America than the people he lampoons. It had the feel of The Office’s Michael Scott—after getting caught undressing in his office—telling receptionist Pam that “European offices are naked all the time.” Pam replies, “They’re so not.”

Yes, rural Americans often don’t rely on veterinarians to euthanize their sick pets. Sometimes, a quick, merciful shooting—rather than an injection—is, in fact, how someone will “put down” a dog suffering with distemper or rabies or cancer. It does not follow, though, that most people—rural, urban, or suburban—would kill a pet for not being trained properly (or a cow for not producing enough milk, etc.).

So why does this story evoke such strong emotion—enough to shoot a politician’s political career in the face in front of the whole world?

A friend texted me that question on day three of the news story. He wasn’t for gunning down puppies, but how, he wondered, with all that’s happening—including the potential for World War III erupting from Gaza or Ukraine or Iran or Taiwan—would this be such a big story?

Other people would point out that there’s so much human suffering that we put out of our mind. Those who believe (as do I) that abortion is a violent act, or those who believe (as do I) that some capital punishment techniques are inhumane, might wonder why a puppy can unite us in recognizing cruelty when these other things do not.

That’s a good question. It might be that recognizing animal cruelty is not necessarily a replacement for a concern for (vastly more important) human dignity, but it might be a starting point for recognizing a greater truth.

As much as some caricature the Bible’s picture of humanity as the crowning point of creation as being the origin of a rapacious mistreatment of the earth—including animals—almost no one really believes that animal life and human life are equal in moral value or moral accountability.

When the ethics entity I led came out for legislation banning animal fighting (such as when one gambles on which pit bull or which rooster will kill the other), a very concerned church lady let us know that she thought it was a waste of time. “Animals don’t know what the law is,” she said. “If they want to fight, they just fight.”

We had to explain that the bill was not to penalize animals in the wild from fighting each other. She misunderstood the bill, but her intuitions were in the right place. We find Kristi Noem shooting Cricket to be morally weighty in a way we don’t find Cricket killing chickens. Human beings are morally responsible creatures in a unique way—including in the way we treat our fellow creatures.

The Bible tells us so. When Jesus said that a human life is worth “more than many sparrows” (Luke 12:7), he did so in the context of saying that not one of those sparrows is forgotten or unnoticed by God (v. 6). In fact, the Bible itself shows us that we are designed to see a parallel between animal creatures and ourselves in some key respects.

The apostle Paul references the command “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain” as an analogy for paying those who labor within the church their just wages (1 Tim. 5:18). The entire Old Testament sacrificial system is about seeing something morally significant, though not ultimate, in the shed blood of bulls and lambs in a way that would not be the same with, say, an offering of wheat or of bread.

God commanded the people of Israel under Moses—just as he would before in the days of Noah and afterward with the early Christian church—not to eat the blood of an animal: “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life” (Lev. 17:11).

We learn to recognize the Lamb of God through thousands of years of God’s people seeing, well, actual lambs.

We recognize this created analogy when things go horribly wrong with the way people treat animals. Almost every story about a serial killer’s childhood includes the torture of animals. Consciences that are seared in some things often move to greater and greater things. The loss of the ability to wince at the sight of a suffering animal is often an early sign of a similar loss of conscience at the pain of other human beings.

By contrast, how many of us grew up better able to care for and love other human beings because we loved and took care of a Labrador retriever or some guinea pigs?

Children starving in Gaza are more important than dogs and cats. Vulnerable unborn human life is of more significance than that of pets. The poor should compel us to compassion more so than cruelty to animals. That human beings are more important does not mean, though, that the lives of animals are not important.

Part of the fallenness of this world is that, as sinners, we seek to make invisible whatever we as human beings don’t want to see. When we don’t want to see the suffering of a poor Lazarus under the table or a beaten man off the road to Jericho, we turn away.

Often, our proximity to the pets we love means that we don’t sinfully protect ourselves from seeing them. We wince when we hear of cruelty to them because we aren’t expecting it, and we can imagine it.

Rather than denouncing the inconsistency here—of loving sparrows more than people—perhaps we should do it the other way around. Maybe we should note that we all seem to rightly recognize that we should treat our pets without cruelty—and then we might ask ourselves why we do not extend an even more emphatic moral responsibility for one another.

We live in a world of moral numbness, of human cruelty. We disagree on matters that should be obvious to any functioning conscience. When we see an exception to that, we should note it and be glad.

We seem to still know that shooting a puppy and throwing kittens into a wood chipper is a bad thing to do. We should try to ask why we notice it and seek to build on that.

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

The Basketball Team Created to Represent God

Paul Putz

The Dallas Mavericks were intended to be the first Christian team in the NBA.

Mike Powell / Getty

At the time, 1980 did not seem like a great year to launch a new professional sports franchise. Interest rates were high. The Iranian hostage crisis dominated national attention. A presidential election loomed. There was a general feeling of pessimism and uncertainty for many Americans.

But Norm Sonju had a vision—inspired by God, perhaps, but also from data and market analysis that showed Dallas had untapped potential as a National Basketball Association (NBA) city.

For two years, Sonju had worked to make his dream a reality. Now, in 1980, when his plans looked like they might be crumbling, he turned to two Bible verses he had learned from his mother as a child: “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jer. 33:3), and “Neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39).

“The truth of God’s Word made such a difference in my attitude in those hectic days of starting the franchise,” Sonju would write a decade later. “I knew that God was in control even when things looked hopeless.”

Sonju’s Christian faith was more than a source of comfort. It was the central force behind his efforts to bring the NBA to Dallas, fueling his hopes for what the team could become and providing the point of connection with the owner who had the money to animate his vision.

These days, Christian athletes seem to be everywhere in professional sports: kneeling in prayer, pointing to the sky, writing Scripture on their shoes, thanking God from the podium and in front of television cameras.

But the origin of the Dallas Mavericks was not just an effort to create and build an NBA franchise that included Christian players. It was also an effort guided by Christian values.

The son of Norwegian immigrants, Sonju grew up in Chicago before enrolling at Grinnell College in Iowa. Though he played on the basketball team, his role as a bench player indicated that pro sports were not in his future—at least as an athlete.

After graduating in 1960, Sonju made his way back home. He earned an MBA from the University of Chicago, got involved with Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru), and took a role as an executive with ServiceMaster, a company founded by Marion Wade and shaped by an evangelical ethos centered on “service to the master.”

As Sonju learned how to infuse his faith with his role as an executive, his love for basketball continued. He developed friendships with NBA players Don Nelson and Paul Neumann, and with legendary basketball coach and pioneering civil rights advocate John McLendon.

He also befriended two NBA executives who shared his evangelical faith: Jerry Colangelo, who worked for the Chicago Bulls from 1966 to 1968 before departing to lead the Phoenix Suns, and Pat Williams, who served as the Bulls’ general manager from 1969 to 1973 before moving on to a long career with Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Orlando.

These connections put Sonju on the inside of two emerging sports institutions. First was a growing evangelical subculture in sports, the “Christian athlete movement,” a network of ministries like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Athletes in Action, Pro Athletes Outreach, and Baseball Chapel that established team chapels, Bible studies, and off-season retreats in college and pro sports.

Second was the NBA. Although professional basketball trailed behind baseball and football in popularity throughout the 1970s—limited, in part, by a racial backlash from white fans who complained about a league in which over 70 percent of the players were African Americans—the potential for growth was present. In 1977, when Sonju was hired to run the Buffalo Braves (thanks to Colangelo’s recommendation), he was uniquely positioned to merge his passions for Jesus, basketball, and business.

“I find the teachings of the Scriptures applicable every day in business, even basketball,” he told reporters during his first year on the job.

Sonju spent that year overseeing Buffalo’s move to a new city. When the team ended up in San Diego, changing their name to the Clippers, Sonju did not join them. In the search process, he fell in love with Dallas’s potential as an NBA market. Sonju settled in the city in 1978 with the goal of bringing an expansion franchise to the city.

To get a team in Dallas, however, Sonju needed money. He found it in Donald J. Carter.

The son of Mary Crowley, an evangelical businesswoman who built Home Interior and Gifts into a direct-sales empire and served on the board of Billy Graham’s association, Carter made his fortune by investing in and managing his mother’s business. He followed his mother’s Southern Baptist faith too, attending Dallas’s First Baptist Church and supporting evangelical ministries.

He had no interest in basketball until he was introduced to Sonju by his pastor, W. A. Criswell. At first, Carter was suspicious. Sonju was efficient and practical, a buttoned-up business executive trained in the latest corporate strategies. Carter, whose ten-gallon cowboy hat became a fixture at Mavericks games, was more of a risk-taker with an intuitive mindset, attributing his success more to his heart than his head.

Carter often framed these differences in regional terms. “He’s a Yankee,” Carter said of Sonju. “You can’t make a real down-home person out of a Yankee overnight.” Yet the two bonded over their shared goal: to build an NBA team shaped by their evangelical faith and cultural values.

It was a vision that had political resonance. White evangelical voters at the time were mobilizing around Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, inspired by his support for conservative family values and his description of the United States as a “shining city on a hill” for the world to follow.

Sonju and Carter saw their team, too, as a model for others to emulate.

“What an example we could set for the NBA and our country if we had a brand-new, clean model that worked just right,” Sonju told Sports Illustrated. “Dallas is football country, but it’s also Bible Belt country. We can win the respect of the people with wholesomeness and goodness and respect for God and country.”

In April 1980, the NBA awarded the duo their franchise. In October 1980, two weeks before Reagan’s election, the team began to play.

As Sonju and Carter embarked on their project, they spoke of putting together a “team full of Roger Staubachs.” The star quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, though a Catholic, was a strong supporter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and a prominent cultural symbol representing conservative moral values.

But while baseball and football had developed a cohesive network of outspoken Christian athletes like Staubach, the NBA lagged behind. There were Christians in the league, but they were not organized as part of a movement, and evangelical sports ministries did not have a strong presence. This was due in part to the disconnect between a predominantly Black league and a Christian athlete movement led primarily by white evangelicals.

Recognizing that he could not simply fill out a roster with Christian players, Sonju thought strategically. He was especially excited about his first player acquisition after the expansion draft: the signing of Ralph Drollinger. The seven-footer had been a back-up center for UCLA in the 1970s before turning down opportunities in the NBA to play for Athletes in Action (AIA), an evangelistic basketball team sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ.

In 1980, however, Drollinger decided the time had come to make his move to the NBA. Sonju outbid other teams with a guaranteed contract of $400,000. He knew Drollinger would not be a star player, but he thought the center could be a leader within the team while helping to galvanize the evangelical movement in the league.

Drollinger would later recall that the Mavericks “told me they were going to be the first Christian team in the NBA.” A young reporter in Dallas named Skip Bayless also took note, wondering if “you had to be a born-again Boy Scout” to join the Mavericks roster. “These guys can speak at First Baptist, but can they play?” he asked.

In Drollinger’s case, the answer was no. His NBA career lasted six games and featured more personal fouls than points scored. He also turned out to be a liability instead of a leader within the locker room. “It was one of the worst mistakes of my career,” Sonju later said, and a reminder that born-again players did not necessarily lead to on-court success. (In the 1990s, Drollinger went on to become a controversial right-wing political activist. Drollinger later disputed this characterization in a May 3 email.) In fact, in the team’s very first game, it was Abdul Jeelani, a Muslim player, who scored the first points in franchise history.

Still, there were other ways to shape the team’s culture and to present an image linked with evangelical Christianity. Sonju hired former AIA staff members like Paul Phipps to work in the front office, recruited girls from a local chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ to serve as ushers, and led Bible studies for his staff. He invited Dallas pastor Tony Evans—early in his long and influential career in ministry—to serve as a team chaplain.

Sonju also implemented a pre-game ritual unique to Dallas. Instead of the national anthem, Sonju had “God Bless America” played at home games, and he insisted that players stand at attention during the song, “arms straight, no gum chewing,” presenting an image, in his mind, of unity and respect.

With their focus on building a positive culture and cultivating a family-friendly environment, Sonju and Carter found a winning formula that attracted fans. Led by players like Rolando Blackman, Mark Aguirre, and Derek Harper, the Mavericks’ record gradually improved each year, culminating in five straight playoff appearances between 1983 and 1988.

“I think the reason that franchise has done so well,” former staff member Paul Phipps said in 1984, “is because they had a lot of people who wanted to honor God in what they did. And God honored their effort.”

But while some Dallas locals took to calling the team the “First Baptist Mavs,” and a local magazine described the Mavericks as “the most Christian-influenced organization in pro sports,” the team’s religious reputation did not receive widespread national attention.

In an era dominated by the Lakers’ Magic Johnson, the Celtics’ Larry Bird, and the rise of Michael Jordan, Dallas could not break through on the big stage. By 1996, when Carter sold the team and Sonju retired, Dallas had not become the NBA “city on a hill” that they had envisioned.

But their efforts were not in vain. As Carter and Sonju brought their personal Christian faith into the work of building an NBA franchise, however imperfectly, they learned to adapt to the pluralistic culture of sports. And by creating a shared Dallas cultural institution for fans of all faith traditions to enjoy, they offered a testimony and witness of its own.

Paul Putz is assistant director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor’s Truett Seminary and author of the forthcoming book The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports.

- More from Paul Putz

Theology

The Anxious Church

J. D. Peabody

Why the church has struggled to address mental illness well and how we can care better.

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

Nearly five years ago, a high-profile pastor—one who had shared bravely and publicly about his battle with depression—took his own life. In the days after his death, a call circulated widely on social media platforms for clergy with mental health issues to be removed from their posts.

I understand the motivation. The argument was made out of a concern to prevent similar tragedies. But as a pastor who has endured chronic mental torment, the simplistic appeal struck me as an example of the widespread clumsiness within the church when it comes to addressing mental illness. Prominent Christian teachers, most recently including California author and pastor John MacArthur, have denied diagnosable conditions such as OCD and ADHD even exist.

In my own ministry, my struggles with anxiety and OCD have proven to be unexpectedly fertile soil for connecting with people. Opening up about the brokenness in my mind has led to deeper relationships as God took the affliction that initially felt to me like pure deficit and put it to work. His strength, as he tells us, shows up in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).

So I find it heartening to see the increased attention to mental health and compassion for mental illness in our culture. Christian resources addressing the intersection of faith and mental illness are also proliferating, providing theologically grounded pathways to better care. And there are countless examples of congregations powerfully demonstrating the love of Christ to those in mental anguish.

Still, the stigma accompanying mental illness persists, and in church settings, the issue is often complicated further by ignorance or misguided theology. Clergy tend to be the “first responders” for Christians experiencing psychological distress, yet many pastors are ill-equipped to recognize or treat mental illness.

Fewer than 10 percent of people seeking counsel from pastors end up being referred to mental health professionals, even when their symptoms would warrant it. And the need is acute, with around one in five American adults dealing with a diagnosable mental illness (of widely varying severity), according to the National Institute of Mental Health—a figure that grows to a shocking one in two among adolescents.

In my early years of pastoring, I was unprepared to deal with the torrent of human need I would encounter on the job. The limited training I had received in seminary regarding mental health did little more than give me a smattering of knowledge that made me feel more equipped than I was.

Hitting my own mental wall drastically altered my understanding and gave me greater compassion. It turns out that the same verses you quote to anxious congregants sound very different when you’re the one paralyzed by anxiety.

There is unmatched comfort and strength to be found in the One who took up all our sorrows and infirmities, including those of the mind and soul. But the person of faith who is steeped in a mental crisis often must contend with a community that exhibits great unease with ongoing, unresolved pain.

I recently heard a well-known Christian speaker on the radio, forcefully declaring that people caught in depression and anxiety weren’t experiencing the anointing of the Lord. The message was clear: If you’re feeling the wrong feelings, you’re not going to receive God’s blessing. Such thinking may sound biblical but promotes a graceless gospel.

So how should the church respond to mental illness? How can we do a better job caring for one another? I asked a group of noted Christian authors, experts, and fellow sufferers to weigh in.

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

What is good mental health, anyway?

Steve Cuss, author and host of CT’s Being Human podcast: What a fantastic question. Mental health is where the way you see yourself, others, the world, and God is congruent with reality. You are able to think clearly, and you have access to a wide range of emotions without being swallowed up by them.

Aundrea Paxton, cohost of the Rise and Form podcast, clinical psychologist and founder of Take Heart Counseling: The Bible gives us a glimpse of what perfect well-being and health look like. In Genesis 2, we see that humans thrive when they have a strong relationship with God and others, when they take care of their physical bodies, when they appreciate and enjoy God's creation, when they have a sense of purpose, and when they feel no shame.

O. Alan Noble, associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and author of On Getting Out of Bed : Among other things, good mental health includes the ability to sit alone without distractions and not fall into anxiety, depression, or despair. It involves feeling the full range of human emotions but not allowing those emotions to override your capacity to reason or your will to pursue the good.

Why does the absence of good mental health make us uneasy? I suspect most of us feel unprepared to come alongside people with mental health challenges. Is that unique to Christians?

Hannah Brencher, online educator, TED speaker, and author of Come Matter Here and Fighting Forward : Supporting someone through a mental illness is a tough thing. That’s a reality we can’t sugarcoat or downplay.

I’ll be honest—before I walked through my own depression, I don’t think I knew how to fully show up for someone in the same pit. Walking and living through depression allowed me to understand how I needed to be cared for and then express that to other people.

Paxton: Although the church has become stronger, there are still remnants of false assumptions about how different emotions and illnesses relate to one’s faith and salvation.

What sort of assumptions?

Paxton: Assumptions of sin and shame can cause people to hide, deny, and suppress their mental health needs, which makes it difficult to tolerate these needs in others.

Brencher: I’m shocked by how many Christians still assume that mental illness is correlated with not having enough faith in God. That was expressed to me multiple times throughout my severe depression.

How did that impact you?

Hannah Brencher: The notion was very damaging, especially since I was using all my extra energy to seek God amid the struggle. I understand now, but unfortunately did not know it back then, that God is not dangling a certain level of faith over my head and asking me to get on that level before relief comes.

It has taken me a long time to see that God is a companion in the journey toward mental wellness, not a foe.

Noble: Evangelicals are by definition concerned with evangelism, and in the secular world we live in, evangelism very easily comes to be a sales pitch: “Christianity will make your life better than it currently is.” Christianity becomes just one more lifestyle option in a sea of options.

When that happens, we become very anxious about giving any indication that our lives might not be great. So, we hide our suffering even from other Christians because we don’t want to give the impression that our faith is weak or a bad witness.

What is your response when well-meaning Christians point people with anxiety disorders to verses such as “Do not be anxious about anything” (Phil. 4:6)?

Paxton: First, I would encourage them to read the whole book of Philippians. Too often we take Scriptures out of context. Second, I would remind them of the role of the Holy Spirit in empowering us to do what is good for us. We can do nothing good in our own might.

Finally, I would focus them on verse 7 of Philippians 4, which says, “And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” The behaviors listed in verse 6 are merely to refocus us on our source for that peace.

So what do you see the church getting right in response to the current mental health crisis?

Paxton: The church has made significant strides in promoting discussions around mental health and reducing hostility toward psychology. There are now more sermons and resources dedicated to mental health.

Cuss: Many churches I work with either partner with mental health professionals or have their own clinic with state-licensed therapists. I see more preachers who share openly about mental health, and we are slowly becoming more trauma-informed, understanding the complex nature of whole-body health and trauma triggers.

And where is there still room for improvement?

Cuss: I still see many Christians and church leaders who have an anxious need to cheer people up. They do not realize that their words and advice aren’t actually for the person who is struggling but a way to assuage their own anxiety when they are in the presence of someone struggling with a complex mental health issue.

The other challenge is that debilitating mental health struggles must be treated by a trained professional, and most of us are amateurs. I don’t think we have provided enough resources to help amateurs be helpful when dealing with a peer or congregant who battles mental health.

Noble: The church needs to learn how to balance the real value of spiritual wisdom with the real value of professional mental health services. There is a danger in outsourcing all cases of mental suffering to mental health professionals. It’s easy for even Christians to professionalize things like mentorship, wise counsel, the advice of elders, and friendship. There is a similar danger in attempting to treat all cases of mental suffering only with prayer and pastoral counsel.

Are there ways the church body could be a uniquely powerful source of care?

Paxton: The church is a place where we can find the most valuable asset to address any need: hope in the works of Christ and peace in the eternal salvation of our souls. Although these truths do not prevent us from experiencing the trials and afflictions in life, our stories will not end in pain; our virtues and values can ground us during chaos; and our God is all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing.

Cuss: Debilitating mental health is profoundly isolating. Church can offer powerful healing community. Most people do not want our advice; they want our presence. They want to feel seen; they want a safe space to be exactly themselves.

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the first service we owe to one another is to listen. He believed that we’re doing the work of God himself when we pay that kind of attention, which is a profound thought.

Noble: It may be the single most important element of your recovery. The church, particularly as it is manifested in the local context, is a beautiful community of mutual care. The contemporary world is terribly isolating, and many people don’t have friends, let alone friends they can depend on to walk with them through suffering. It ought to be the case that every Christian has friends through their local congregation who can minister to them.

Cuss: I have absolutely seen this happen within church contexts, and it is powerful. I know of many people with debilitating mental health struggles who say, “I would be lost without my church community.”

Conversely, though we know the singular power of the gospel for addressing mental health concerns, the very communities entrusted with that gospel often inflict religious trauma that compounds mental health challenges. How do we reconcile those two truths?

Noble: There’s nothing particularly surprising about this. It’s a phenomenon that is present in every aspect of the church.

How so?

Noble: The church teaches fidelity in marriage and yet pastors are regularly caught in infidelity. The church teaches us to give generously to those in need and yet many Christians practice what Francis Schaeffer once called the “[noncompassionate use of] accumulated wealth.” Christians fail to live up to the standard set by the Word of God. And they will continue to do so, individually and collectively, until Christ returns. This is a hard teaching.

Cuss: For every positive story I hear of the church being helpful, I hear two that cause significant harm. I think the religious trauma is compounded by a few dynamics:

We do not realize the spiritual power we hold as church leaders, so our words carry significant power. But so does Scripture, so when we “prescribe” the Bible, we can unintentionally do damage.
Some religious leaders simply do not understand the nature of mental health, and they see it through a simplistic dichotomy of angels and demons, or they prescribe some Christian version of “Look on the bright side.” Many Christian leaders do not know what to do or say in the face of someone’s overwhelming or complex pain.
It is vulnerable to share your inner world and journey, and when someone prescribes a simplistic and incorrect Christian solution, it does real damage and further isolates you.

Paxton: I believe that two things can be true at the same time, especially when it comes to God. Firstly, as humans, we are broken and flawed, and therefore, we will hurt others. Secondly, God can work through imperfect humans in a powerful way. No human will ever be able to perfectly reflect the fullness of God's character, but God is not limited by that.

Let’s turn from the church to your own experiences with mental illness. Victory in Christianity is often equated with being entirely freed from affliction. Yet I keep coming back to the apostle Paul’s unremoved thorn and how God’s strength showed up more in that ongoing weakness than in a miracle cure for him.

Noble: So far, God has asked me to endure the suffering of mental illness. I hope and pray and work for recovery, but I rest in the knowledge that, ultimately, I will be healed, even if it’s not in this life. This is the posture I encourage for everyone suffering. Hope, pray, and work for your recovery—advocate for yourself! But put your faith in Christ and accept that you may be asked to endure and glorify Christ in your weakness.

Brencher: I believe God’s power shows up in me through daily life and walking out a lifestyle that supports my mental health. I take medication for my depression, and I have for almost a decade. I don’t know if I will be on it for the rest of my life, but I do know that it enables me to thrive daily, which matters most to me.

So you feel your prayers have been answered in spite of the ongoing battle?

Brencher: I don’t think my story is less than because I did not get a miraculous healing. I think healing is something that I am exercising and leaning into every single day, and there is so much power in that.

Paxton: The end of my parents’ marriage was a significant experience that led me to study psychology. Although it was a painful time that left many wounds, I have seen God use it for his good. When I sit across from my clients, I sometimes have the privilege of working with them long enough to see how God was present with them in their pain and later used that pain as a steppingstone in their lives.

In your own history of suffering, do you have examples of ways you experienced grace and healing through Christian community?

Noble: Times too numerous to count. Nearly all the grace and healing I have experienced has come through community, through friends who were willing to call me when I sent them a panicked text, through friends who shared wise counsel, through friends who gave me firm but necessary admonishment.

Cuss: I have so many tangible examples of experiencing love and care when I was not well. The most poignant was a Sunday morning when I learned that a friend had taken his life. I got the news about an hour before I preached, and I was in shock but didn’t recognize it as shock. So, I went out to preach and completely unraveled in front of everyone. My congregation cared for me so well, in that those who were close to me came closer and took care of me. Those who weren’t close left me alone. Sometimes care means giving someone space rather than smothering them with care.

Brencher: In my walk with depression, I will never forget those who showed up physically– bringing meals, driving me to appointments, holding me, making cups of tea, and sitting with me in the storm. Their presence brought me back to life.

It sounds like we agree on the power of Christian community and relationships. But what would you say to someone who desires that but has not yet found such a church family?

Noble: I’m sorry this has not been your experience. These communities exist, but you will need to be intentional. If you are not an active participant in the cultivation of friendship, it will not happen.

Brencher: I constantly have to remind myself that the church is made up of people, and we, people, get it wrong all the time. Keep looking for the places that know grace and power. Keep looking for the people who will walk with you through the rain. If you encounter people who can only take you at your best but not in the storm, those are not your people.

Aundrea, you get the closing word here. Knowing that pastors can’t force anyone to seek professional help, what might be some indicators of when it is time to refer a congregation member for more than spiritual care?

Paxton: Support for mental illness should always involve a community of people. However, if any of the following are evident, a mental health professional should definitely be one of those people:

Any safety risk involving self-harm, substance use, or suicidal thoughts or actions
When the distress a person is sharing is impacting their ability to function on a daily basis or causing persistent and/or increasing distress
Significant changes in appetite, sleep, energy level, and social engagement
A long period of no change to a poor mental state or resistance to change

I encourage pastors to consider having a mental health professional they trust who can be an ongoing consultant and support for them personally.

J. D. Peabody is pastor of New Day Church in Federal Way, Washington, and the author of Perfectly Suited: The Armor of God for the Anxious Mind.

- More from J. D. Peabody

Culture

‘Wildcat’ Is as Unsettling as Flannery O’Connor Would Have Wanted

Jessica Hooten Wilson

Ethan Hawke has made a movie as scandalous as one of the writer’s short stories.

Maya Hawke (center) as Flannery O'Connor in Wildcat.

Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories

Why not write something that “a lot, a lot, of people like?” Regina O’Connor asks her daughter, the writer Flannery O’Connor, in the middle of the new biopic Wildcat. The same question might be put to the film itself. It’s not a movie that a lot of people will like. But unlike the author’s mother, I mean that as a high compliment. Director and screenwriter Ethan Hawke has made a film worthy of Flannery O’Connor’s genius.

An epigraph from O’Connor’s essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” sums up what Wildcat sets out to do: “I’m always irritated by people who imply writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality.” Fittingly, rather than depict the writer’s life from birth to death, Wildcat uses her fiction to discover what’s real, to “get down under things” to the problem of suffering, the limitations of human experience, the desire for goodness, the habits of evil, and, always present, the longing for God.

The result is a movie as scandalous as one of O’Connor’s short stories—“shocking to the system,” to borrow her words. Her devotees will applaud it; most of the audience will be left wondering what just clobbered them.

After that opening epigraph, Wildcat rolls a fake trailer for a 1950s-style horror flick inspired by O’Connor’s story “The Comforts of Home.” (A mother brings home a wayward, orphaned teen who tries to seduce her grown son. The son attempts to kill the teen, but shoots his own mother instead.) The trailer, starring Laura Linney and Maya Hawke—who also play the roles of Regina and Flannery— sets up expectations for Wildcat’s time period, for its gothic weirdness, and for its blending of fiction and biography.

Most of the movie’s action occurs in 1950, the year O’Connor returned home to Milledgeville, Georgia, and was diagnosed with lupus. Fictional stories, threaded throughout the biographical narrative, are drawn from all over her corpus—from “Good Country People” (a Bible salesman steals a crippled woman’s prosthetic leg) to “Revelation” (Mrs. Ruby Turpin is a warthog from hell capable of having her virtue burned clean).

Flannery O’Connor wanted to be a great writer and a good Catholic, and viewers witness her wrestle with disappointments as she tries to be faithful to both God and vocation. We hear voiceover petitions from her A Prayer Journal, composed while she was a student at the University of Iowa MFA program, with beautiful shots of the young woman as a pilgrim. She confesses to the priest Father Flynn (Liam Neeson) in a scene that mimics her story “The Enduring Chill.” (Asbury Fox returns home to his mother’s farm, sick and debilitated, and is catechized by the local priest.)

When O’Connor attends a graduate school party, she drops a bottle of rum before she arrives. This scene is drawn from her biography; in fact, her friend Sally Fitzgerald thought this incident was a real-life metaphor for how “Flannery seemed fated to asceticism.” Wildcat does portray O’Connor as an outcast from what her friend called “frolics”; she simply can’t compromise her zealous Christian faith. Through scenes both real and imagined, the film demonstrates the untiring dedication to truth that made O’Connor perhaps unpopular with her peers. That zeal also made her the great writer (and good Catholic) that she desired to be.

Wildcat also brings O’Connor’s writing to life, defamiliarizing even the most well-known of her stories. Take, for instance, the ahistorical treatment of “Parker’s Back” (1964). (This synopsis is a straightforward one: O. E. Parker has a tattoo of Jesus on his back.) We hear the name of the central figure, “Obadiah Elihue,” in the mouth of an editor at Rinehart Publishing. In reality, the editor had nothing to do with this story’s publication, though he did notoriously decide not to publish O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood.

Later, O’Connor reads “Parker’s Back” at Iowa in front of Robert “Cal” Lowell (Philip Ettinger). The scene is cast as a first meeting, though the two writers actually met at the artists’ retreat Yaddo in 1948, and Lowell didn’t teach at the university until 1950. But seeing his imagined response intensifies our own understanding of the story. The newly converted poet listens enthralled.

And later, Wildcat riffs on “Parker’s Back” yet again, dramatizing the story on screen. O. E. Parker (Rafael Casal) and his future wife Sarah Ruth (Maya Hawke, again) fall in love. Their marriage as portrayed here is even more believable than on O’Connor’s page—perhaps in part because of that final scene, when Sarah Ruth beats her husband’s back. Reading about Christ’s bleeding face is one thing; seeing it, droplets running over the tattoo ink, is another. Wildcat does not merely translate words into images; it glosses O’Connor’s stories for us, so that we can reimagine them anew.

Though fans are often tempted to deify O’Connor, Wildcat resists that temptation. It allows us to know the woman behind the artistry: her illness, her feelings for friends, her nuanced relationship with her mother. It’s one thing to hear about her deterioration from lupus; it’s another to see the rash on her face, to watch a young girl inject cortisone shots into her thigh with a needle the size of her hand.

Because of her sickness, O’Connor had to forego mild love interests that could have become something more. Biographers publicized her brief affair with Erik Langkjaer, a traveling textbook salesman from Denmark, who said kissing her was like “kissing a skeleton.” That unfortunate description casts O’Connor as less than flesh and blood. However, Wildcat shows a young woman enamored with her writing mentor (who seems just as drawn to her). One rightly wonders what might have happened had she been spared the ravages of lupus.

Instead, the dominant relationship in O’Connor’s life was with her mother, whom she called Regina from the time she was a child. Some have characterized Regina as overbearing and suffocating, much like the comic maternal characters in O’Connor’s short stories. Other biographers uplift her as sacrificing everything for Flannery, trying to support the daughter that she didn’t understand but to whom she was devoted until her death. The reality is likely a mix of both, which the film balances well.

In 1957, O’Connor’s short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” was made into a televised play starring tap-dancing sensation Gene Kelly. Everyone in Milledgeville thought that “Regina’s daughter who writes” had finally done something worthwhile (“They feel I have arrived at last,” O’Connor wrote) because her uncomfortable stories had been sanitized for public consumption. In a letter to a friend, O’Connor derides the congratulations: “The local city fathers think I am a credit now to the community. One old lady said, ‘That was a play that really made me think!’ I didn’t ask her what.”

Clearly, Flannery O’Connor did not take any pleasure in growing her audience by making her stories more palatable. (Thankfully she was not alive in the era of platform building!) She wrote not to placate lukewarm Christians, but to startle them. Like a 20th-century Kierkegaard, she knew the truth was absurd, and therefore it would have too few adherents. She had a prophetic imagination, which means that if she was true to using her talent, she’d have as many fans as Ezekiel or Jeremiah.

Wildcat is loyal to that prophetic gift. If 1950s adaptations of Flannery O’Connor’s work to the screen dishonored their maker, Wildcat accomplishes the opposite. It celebrates a writer who was once called “prematurely arrogant,” but who was, by much suffering that she did not deserve, beautifully transfigured.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and senior fellow at Trinity Forum. She is the author of several books, most recently Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress.

- More from Jessica Hooten Wilson

News

Wire Story

United Methodists Strike Ban on LGBTQ Clergy

Yonat Shimron – Religion News Service

After years of disagreement and the departure of thousands of churches, the change passed without debate.

United Methodists react to the vote at their General Conference on Wednesday to repeal a ban on LGBTQ clergy.

Chris Carlson / AP

United Methodists meeting for their top legislative assembly Wednesday overwhelmingly overturned a measure that barred gay clergy from ordination in the denomination, a historic step for the nation’s second-largest Protestant body.

With a simple vote call and without debate, delegates to the General Conference removed the ban on the ordination of “self-avowed practicing homosexuals”—a prohibition that dates to 1984.

With that vote, the worldwide denomination of some 11 million members joins the majority of liberal Protestant denominations such as the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the United Church of Christ, which also ordain LGBTQ clergy.

“We’ve singled out one group for discrimination for 52 years,” said Ken Carter, bishop of the Western North Carolina Conference. “And we’ve done that on an understanding of homosexuality whose origins came when it was understood to be a disease and a disorder.”

That, he said, has now changed. “Increasingly,” he said, “people see that God’s spirit is in gay and lesbian people.”

The morning vote on the motion was part of a larger series of calendar items voted on in bulk. They also included a motion barring superintendents, or overseers, from punishing clergy for performing a same-sex wedding or prohibiting a church from holding a same-sex wedding, though the actual ban on same-sex weddings in churches has yet to be voted on.

The vote on the calendar items was 692–51, or about 93 percent in favor.

After the vote, LGBTQ delegates and their allies gathered on the floor of the Charlotte Convention Center to sing, hug, cheer, and shed tears. As they sang liberation songs, “Child of God” and “Draw the Circle Wide,” they were joined by Tracy S. Malone, president of the denomination’s Council of Bishops.

The votes reverse prohibitive policies toward LGBTQ people taken on at the denomination’s 2019 General Convention, when delegates doubled down and tightened bans on gay clergy and same-sex marriage. Most of those 2019 measures have now been reversed.

After the 2019 General Convention, some 7,600 traditionalist churches across the United States—about 25 percent of the total number of US churches—left the denomination, fearing that the tightening of the bans would not hold.

The absence of delegates from churches that left the denomination accounted for the quick reversal of the policies.

Wednesday’s vote follows several others approved Tuesday that removed mandatory minimum penalties for clergy who officiate same-sex weddings as well as a ban on funding for LGBTQ causes that “promote acceptance of homosexuality.”

Tom Lambrecht, vice president and general manager of Good News Magazine, a theologically conservative advocacy group, said the votes were expected.

“It indicates a consensus in the United Methodist Church that it wants to go in a much more liberal pathway,” said Lambrecht, who previously served as a United Methodist pastor.

Lambrecht, who is observing the conference along with some members from the Wesleyan Covenant Association, another dissenting group, wanted to reopen the time period churches may leave the United Methodist Church with their properties. That exit window closed at the end of 2023.

The General Conference instead voted to eliminate the pathway to disaffiliation that was created in 2019. In another motion, it directed annual conferences to develop policies for inviting disaffiliated churches to return to the fold, if they wish.

Still to be voted on is a larger measure to remove from the rule book, called the Book of Discipline, a 1972 addition that says homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The Book of Discipline also defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Those are expected to be debated as part of a revision to the denomination’s social principles on Thursday.

US Methodists are hoping that a radical realignment of the worldwide church would give different regions of the church greater equity to tailor church life to their own customs and traditions, including on issues related to sexuality. That so-called “regionalization” plan passed the General Conference but must still be ratified by individual conferences over the course of the next year.

The main group opposing the changes in policy toward LGBTQ were some African delegates, many of whom live in countries where homosexuality is illegal. The United Methodist Church is a global denomination and its footprint outside the US is greatest in Africa.

“We see homosexuality as a sin,” said Forbes Matonga, the pastor of a church in West Zimbabwe. “So to us, this is a fundamental theological difference where we think others no longer regard the authority of Scripture.”

- More from Yonat Shimron – Religion News Service

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A theology of face

Unmasking cultural beliefs

Building a face-safe community

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