Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

The country’s church-run addiction centers are so effective that communist officials are taking notice.

Photography by Tim Barker for Christianity Today

In March 2013, the government-run drug rehab center in Hanoi released Hung Quang Pham early.

They didn’t want the bone-thin heroin user with AIDS to die in their facility.

But before Hung left, friends helped carry him to a Bible class held inside the rehab facility, and Christians told Hung about Jesus. He remembers a room full of jumping and singing, where men and women freed from their addictions praised God. Jesus offered joy, they said, and they told Hung how Jesus could rescue him from drugs—how he could heal his body and save his soul.

After Hung left rehab, he went home, laid in bed, and waited to die. Not long afterward, a pastor’s wife visited him and handed him a Bible. Hung started praying what he felt were impossible prayers, and God answered them, one after another. Hung got out of bed, suddenly able to walk. His body was healed.

Given a new lease on life, Hung volunteered with a Christian drug ministry, returning to the government rehab center to share his story. He found a wife, a woman who also had struggled with addiction. He was miraculously cured of HIV. And in 2021, despite being told they would never have children, Hung’s wife gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl.

Early last year, I drank bitter green tea with a healthy and grinning Hung under a gazebo in the yard of a small Christian drug rehab he was running. When we met, his ministry was helping 11 men who struggled with drug addiction and 6 orphaned boys.

“A hundred percent of the people who come here come in desperation,” Hung said. “The same way God healed and saved us, we are helping other brothers, directing them to trust God and introducing them to a relationship with Jesus.”(Hung has since relocated to Hanoi, and another Christian has taken over the rehab center.)

Each of the approximately 60 Christian drug rehab centers in Vietnam has miraculous stories like Hung’s—walking corpses rising into new life. The approach at these recovery centers is simple: Abstain from substances, read the Bible, and pray. But rehab leaders say their programs, infused with the love of the Christian staff and the power of the Holy Spirit, have helped thousands shed their addictions and become pastors, husbands, fathers, and contributing members of society. They say a revival is breaking out among the outcasts of Vietnamese society.

Even Vietnam’s communist government has noticed the transformation, especially as it struggles to curb drug use and rehabilitate users. As in many Southeast Asian countries, Vietnamese government-run compulsory treatment centers are rife with human rights abuses, including forced labor and torture. Almost everyone who completes treatment ends up back on drugs.

In contrast, the success of voluntary Christian rehabs, none of which are registered due to their religious affiliation, has the government curious: What are these Christians doing? And can they learn from them?

“God chose those people who are already rejected by society, those people who are nothing in man’s eyes, to reveal his glory,” said Nam Quoc Trung, Hung’s pastor and the founder of the Aquila Rescue Center, one of the largest Christian rehabs in Vietnam. “Right now, my life is sweeter than any billionaire’s life.”

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents eat Mi noodles and Banh Cuon (steamed rice rolls) for breakfast in an open area between the kitchen and the dorms where longer term residents reside.

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An Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents uses chop sticks on Banh Cuon (steamed rice rolls) from a shared plate at a breakfast table above the dorms for recent arrivals.

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Staff member Hoang Viet Bao (center) leads morning worship outside the dorms for longer term residents at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Rehab residents rest on a hammock while others play Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) in the spatious retreat-like setting of the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents Nguyen Viet Huyen and Hoang Tien Manh play Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) outside the rehab dorms for new arrivals whilst other residents watch on.

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Since the 1950s, the mountainous region north of Vietnam where Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos meet, known as the Golden Triangle, has been one of the world’s top producers of opium and heroin. Much of it flows south through Vietnam on its way to other parts of the world. Much of it also stays in Vietnam.

All that supply made cheap heroin widely available in most Southeast Asian countries, triggering addiction epidemics there beginning in the 1960s and ’70s.

In the past two decades, drug syndicates have taken advantage of destabilized governments in the Golden Triangle, fueling production of synthetic drugs—principally methamphetamine. In 2021, authorities in Southeast and East Asia seized more than a billion methamphetamine pills.

To combat the narcotics crisis, many Southeast Asian countries have imposed stiff consequences for drug possession, including potential life imprisonment. In Singapore, people convicted of trafficking more than 15 grams of heroin can face the death penalty. In the Philippines, former president Rodrigo Duterte’s vicious war on drugs beginning in 2016 led to the deaths of more than 6,000 drug suspects as he encouraged extrajudicial killings.

Gloria Lai, Asia regional director of the International Drug Policy Consortium, said governments often politicize the issue of drugs to win elections. People also stigmatize all drug users as criminals or dangerous.

“Drugs are framed as a social evil, and it’s blamed as the root cause of a lot of the problems that people see in society … crime, poverty, disorder, and chaos,” Lai said. “I think it’s a scapegoat, and it’s very easy to gain a political win.”

As a result, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam send suspected users to compulsory drug detention centers without their consent and often without due process or clinical evaluations.

Vietnam’s centers, established in 1992, are some of the harshest in the region, detaining children as young as 12.

A 2011 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report found that in such treatment centers, known as 06 centers, forced labor, torture, and abuse were common. Those suspected of addiction were often detained by police and then sent to detention centers. They were unable to leave and were required to perform “labor therapy,” often working in agricultural production, garment manufacturing, or construction work for meager pay. Over the years, hundreds of detainees have escaped the centers during mass breakouts.

One former detainee, Que Phong, said he was required to husk cashews for six or seven hours a day, his hands burning from the resin on the nuts. If he refused, he would be slapped, beaten, or sent to a “punishment room.” Although he had initially volunteered to be at the center for one year, he was unable to leave for five.

Photography by Tim Barker for Christianity Today

Rehab resident, Bui Minh Quan (30 years old), does push ups at the outdoor gym at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center. While many rehab residents have problems with Methamphetamine, Quan is in rehab to address his problem with Marijuana. Having recently returned to Vietnam after a number of years spent abroad in New Zealand, Quan’s parents asked him to enter the rehab program so that he could get over his Marijuana dependence.

After his release, he returned to smoking and injecting heroin. “The time and work in the center didn’t help me,” he told HRW, which noted that the relapse rate in Vietnam’s compulsory centers was between 80 and 97 percent. Lai told me that the drug treatment centers have little incentive to actually get people clean, as they would then lose their cheap labor.

Besides perpetrating human rights abuses, the overcrowded centers have also spread HIV. In 2005, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, 40 percent of detainees were HIV positive and many had tuberculosis, according to the US State Department. Few centers have appropriate medical care for these diseases.

In 2012, the United Nations cited such concerns when it called for the closure of Vietnam’s more than 100 compulsory drug detention and rehabilitation centers. Vietnam’s government vowed to reduce the use of 06 centers and increase the number of community-based voluntary treatment centers.

But within a few years, faced with skyrocketing methamphetamine use and one of the highest rates of opioid-related deaths in East and Southeast Asia, the country backpedaled on its commitment. The government doubled down on the use of 06 centers, opening or reopening dozens of them between 2014 and 2018.

Jim and Kathie Lowans, the Asia Pacific regional directors of Global Teen Challenge, said that while participants in their Christian drug rehabilitation program do have to work, the work is accompanied by discipleship, life-skills training, counseling, prayer, and Bible study. Studies of Teen Challenge programs in the United States have found them to have a 67–86 percent success rate in keeping graduates clean. Teen Challenge staff and participants often call it “the Jesus factor.”

In Southeast Asia, Teen Challenge opened its first program in Singapore in 1976, then another program in the Philippines in 1988. A partner asked the Lowanses to help start a rehab center in Cambodia in 2005. Since then, Teen Challenge has opened 12 more programs in the region.

Kathie Lowans believes voluntary Christian drug rehabs work better than mandatory centers because they make theological sense. “God gave us a choice: Choose this day whom you will serve and Today I am giving you a choice between life and death. We must give others a choice,” she said. “The desire to change must come from within, not from someone’s mandate. Following his model gives a better and lasting result.”

Photography by Tim Barker for Christianity Today

75 year old, Nguyen Dinh Ha, reads the bible in his dorm room. Ha is the oldest member of the Born Again Family Rescue Center community and he came to the center to address his addiction to alcohol. He first came to the center in 2021 but after graduating in 2023 he had difficulty staying away from alcohol on return to his home town so he has returned.

The founding father of Christian drug treatment in Vietnam is arguably pastor Ngo Tan Si.

Amid Vietnam’s drug problem—and lack of good solutions—Ngo felt God call him in 1996 to minister to those caught in the cycle of drug addiction. He said that God spoke to him, saying, “The things man cannot do, God
can do.”

The son of a pastor, Ngo had left the Christian faith as a teen after seeing how religion had left his family impoverished and kept him from going to university. (A teacher had warned him that, because the Vietnamese government viewed pastors like his father with suspicion, he would not be admitted to a public university.)

Depressed, Ngo started drinking, smoking, and doing drugs. Soon he was spending all his time and money searching for his next high. His distraught father considered resigning from the pastorate. His mother would cry all night. “My family looked like they were at a funeral,” Ngo told me.

In 1984, Ngo was returning home after a night of drinking when he started feeling ill. He collapsed on the road, unconscious. Friends found him hours later and brought him home, unable to wake him. Ngo’s father, who was also a doctor, checked his vitals; Ngo was almost dead. His mother pleaded with God for his life, convinced that if he died, he would go to hell.

Then Ngo woke up.

Ngo remembers sensing his end was near and, for the first time, fearing death. He recalled his father’s preaching and prayed that if God would save him, he would follow him the rest of his life. Two days later, Ngo says, he had an encounter with Jesus in his room where Jesus showed him all the sin in his life. Ngo knelt and cried, seeing his desperate need for salvation.

A few days later, when his old friends came by offering a cigarette and a drink, he felt God telling him to say he didn’t know how to smoke or drink. His friends thought he was crazy and left.

Ngo considers that experience to be the moment of his conversion. “I feel that I had overcome sin and since then I’ve been a Christian,” he said.

Photography by Tim Barker for Christianity Today

Pastor Ngo Tan Si sits on one of the bunks in a small room behind the church they they call the delivery room. When addicts arrive at the center they spend their first 7-10 days in this room while they endure withdrawal symptoms. During their time in the room, 2 staff members stay with them 24 hours a day.

For the next 12 years, Ngo wondered why God had allowed him to go through such a painful experience. Then he heard the call to start a drug ministry, he says, and he began to understand God’s plan. He reached out to those using drugs who had HIV. His friend, who worked in the government fighting HIV, invited Ngo to teach the Bible to around 80 men struggling with addiction.

At first, his audience seemed more interested in taking smoke breaks or getting coffee than listening to his preaching. But on the third day, as he preached, he was shocked when they began crying and praying. Twenty men accepted the Lord that day, Ngo says, and his addiction-deliverance ministry was born.

Working with his church, Ngo tried housing some men in Ho Chi Minh City. But the urban environment offered too powerful a temptation to return to drugs. A Christian offered his home two hours outside the city, so Ngo moved 15 men there, opening a new center in Bình Long now called the Born Again Family Rescue Center. When they lost the church’s funding, Ngo turned to the men’s families to pay for their rehabilitation. Today, most of Vietnam’s Christian drug rehabs rely on fees paid by families.

In the 1990s, before Vietnam had access to antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV, many of the men Ngo served, whom he called his students, passed away. He remembers one month when five men in his ministry died.

Still, Ngo pressed on. Some students found deliverance from their addictions, became Christians, and went on to start their own rehab ministries. Others got clean and then relapsed. Some went through his program multiple times. Some left and never returned.

One student, angry about some relationship advice Ngo had given him, followed Ngo into the center’s chapel with a knife, threatening to “chop [him] into three pieces.” The man tripped and fell about 10 feet from him, the knife clattering to the sanctuary floor. Later, during a worship service, the tearful student asked Ngo and God for forgiveness.

Ngo said the differences between public rehab centers and his are vast. Nearly everyone who came through his doors had been in government-run rehabs or prison; some had been sentenced to up to 30 years. I asked Ngo what portion of his students stay clean after finishing the program. He said about 30 percent are “solid and strong” now.

“The Christian rehab is all about love,” he said. “It has the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth that is the Word of God, and also the preaching of the changing of the mind. But in the government-run rehabs, there’s always [people] fighting, hating each other, and filling their minds with desires of the flesh. They feel revenge, bitterness, and unhealed wounds.”

Once a new arrival to Ngo’s rehab detoxes from drugs and acclimates to the schedule, the staff prays for deliverance in areas where the person is struggling. It’s about finding healing not only from their drug addiction, Ngo says, but also in other areas of bondage, such as unforgiveness, anger, sexual sin, or unclean spirits.

Unlike compulsory centers, Vietnam’s Christian rehabs have no barbed wire fences or locked gates to keep people in. Students can walk away if they choose. “There is [only] a fence in your mind,” Ngo said. He wants participants to know “that the center of God is not a prison.”

Students are told the rehab center is run as a Christ-ian ministry and they’re welcome whether or not they become Christians.

“We very much respect their free choice,” Ngo said. “We want to let them receive and see the presence of the Lord through older members in the rehab by the way they talk, deal with new members, and especially their love for one another.”

Transformation doesn’t stop with the men who join the center. Many parents, after suffering for years watching their children waste away from addiction, witness their sons’ transformations and put their faith in Jesus. Ngo, who often connects churches with students’ families, found that if a student’s relatives come to faith, there is a much higher likelihood the student will stay clean after finishing the program.

This is part of Ngo’s larger goal of sending students out with a vision: God changed me. God changed you. God can change anybody. Go save other drug addicts.

Of Vietnam’s 60 Christian drug rehabs, which range in size from a handful of participants to more than 100, Ngo estimates that half were started by his former students.

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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Nguyen Tri An and other Born Again Family Rescue Center members read the bible in their dorms at dawn.

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Hoang Cao Nguyen Vu stands in front of the church at the Born Again Family Rescue Center. The church is often overcrowded so the long term goal is build a bigger church that can seat up to 500 people.

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Born Again Family Rescue Center members wash their dishes in an open area at the rear of the center.

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Pastor Ngo Tan Si (left) sings during morning worship in the church at Born Again Family Rescue Center.

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Ngo’s vision has spread not only in southern Vietnam, where Christianity long been centered, but also in the north, the country’s historic seat of atheistic communism. Ngo says Christian drug rehabs are reaching families of government workers in and around the capital of Hanoi. After communist Vietnamese forces won the Vietnam War in 1975, the divided country was reunified and political power consolidated in Hanoi. As Ngo tells it, many in the north were given high-paying government jobs that allowed their kids to live carefree postwar lives. Children took up cheap and easily accessible recreational drugs. Many became addicted, and their parents grew desperate.

“God allowed this to happen to let the love of God enter [northern Vietnam],” Ngo said. “Only through the children who are addicts and in gangs and only through the deliverance from drug addictions through the power of Jesus’ blood … have a lot of government workers become saved.”

One of these wayward children was Nam, the founder of the Aquila Center and a former student of Ngo’s. As a young man, Nam’s single-minded pursuit of heroin led him to theft. He stole and sold his parents’ assets. Once, he held his month-old daughter hostage until his wife and mother gave him money for drugs.

“I was like an animal,” Nam said. He did more than a dozen stints in government treatment centers, relapsing each time.

Then in 2006, Nam ran into a friend he used to shoot up with. The man was happy and sober. He told Nam that he had gone to a Christian drug rehab and that the love of Jesus had rescued him. Nam decided to check himself into Ngo’s Bình Long center. Soon he found himself devouring the Bible and asking God for forgiveness. For the first time, he was free.

It was a new beginning. All his family soon came to Christ. Nam became a pastor and started a Christian drug rehab of his own. His parents pooled money to build a six-story building in Hanoi for churches to use and to house women addicted to drugs (the building was later sold to build a separate women’s rehab facility). Local government persecution forced Nam to shutter the rehab’s first location, but he soon gained the confidence of Hanoi officials and found himself invited back to the government treatment centers where he was once detained to share how Jesus set him free from addiction. Over a four-year period, Nam shared the gospel with 20,000 people in the rehab centers—including Hung—and launched Bible classes in several centers.

In 2015, Nam also built a new drug rehab center in Quôc Oai, a district of verdant hills an hour west of Hanoi. Today, the Aquila Center is a spacious, retreat-like property that sits beside a lake. It has a K–12 Christian boarding school, worship hall, kitchen, soccer field, swimming pool, and dormitories for 200 staff, students, and rehab clients—who call each other “brothers” and “sisters.”

On a cool January morning, the Aquila Center was bustling with the sounds of guitar strumming, chatter, and the chirping of pet birds. High school students, winter coats over their uniforms, trudged up the steps at Aquila Dream Academy, an unregistered Christian school. Their days begin with student-led worship, a short message, and testimonies. Then they sit at workspaces and leaf through self-paced lesson books, with teachers stopping by to assist when they get stuck.

Down a hill, worship music flowed from a chapel where about 100 men were swaying, clapping, and raising their hands as they sang. It was Wednesday, the day the brothers spend entirely in chapel sessions and Bible classes taught by visiting missionaries. Some brothers seclude themselves for the morning in personal “prayer caves” under the outdoor gym, where they bend over their Bibles at low tables.

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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The sun rises above the surrounding verdent hills to strike the spatious retreat-like setting of the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center and a neighbouring construction site.

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Pastor Nam Quoc Trung at the entrance of a rehab dorm where the most recent arrivals reside at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Rehab residents at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center partake in a mixture of activities in the dorms for new arrivals as some discuss and study the Bible while others practice guitar or sit in prayer or reflection.

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Former rehab resident, Vang Thi Lam Cam, chats with current rehab resident Luu Thi Thuan in the dorm that she slept in when she was a resident at Priscilla. Cam has recently found a job in Hanoi and is now living in the city with her husband, another former addict whom she met through the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Priscilla rehab resident, Nong Thi Tap, worships during a youth conference at the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center chapel.

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Pastor Nam Quoc Trung sounds a shofar during worship at a youth conference at the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center chapel.

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A short motorbike ride from the men’s rehab is the newly built Priscilla Center, a purple-and-white building housing roughly 30 women struggling with addiction. It’s one of the few Christian facilities that serve women. In Vietnam’s patriarchal society, parents often fight to help a son overcome drugs but may simply give up on a daughter who becomes addicted, Nam said. Many such women turn to prostitution.

It took Vang Thi Lam Cam six years to graduate from the Priscilla Center. Born into a poor family in central Vietnam, Vang told me her life started to fall apart after her parents divorced and her mother remarried a violent, abusive man. Eager to leave her home life behind, Vang moved away and studied to become a teacher. She started partying, drinking heavily, and earning extra income singing at bars. Then she fell in love.

She moved with her boyfriend to Hanoi. There, she learned that he and his friends were smoking heroin. Curious, she tried it herself and began using regularly. When a few friends confronted her, telling her that she had a drug problem, she pushed back at first. Then she realized they were right.

“I was so disappointed,” Vang said. “I felt so fearful and I didn’t want to live anymore. In my mind, if you’re an addict, the only way out is to die.”

Thin, weak, and exhausted, Vang tried to kill herself by overdosing. Then she started selling. She cycled in and out of government rehabs. There, in 2013, she heard Nam preach for the first time.

“I was so desperate and disappointed at myself, but at the same time I still wanted to live a good life,” Vang said. “From that moment on, hope started racing in my heart and I began to pray.”

She knew she had to cut ties with her old life, so upon release from government rehab in 2016, Vang immediately called Nam and joined the women’s program at the Aquila Center. Despite challenges—she had a fiery temper and clashed with the other women—Vang persevered. Now sober for 11 years, Vang said she’s grown and matured in her faith. “I don’t think about drugs,” she said.

Today, she’s married to a man who went through the Aquila Center’s program, and she mentors incoming women. She said she sees her younger self in them and listens patiently to their stories. As she develops more of a relationship with them, she encourages them through the Word of God.

At Aquila, stories like Vang’s are more the rule than the exception. In a government study, 100 percent of surveyed program graduates reported they had stopped using drugs. The large majority said they had found purpose in their lives, were more in control of themselves, and had more confidence. “People are amazed,” Nam said. “They can’t deny we are walking with God and what we are doing is working.”

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents participate in an early morning worship session outside the rehab dorms for new arrivals.

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab resident Do Van Hung cuts the hair of Ho David outside the rehab dorms for new arrivals.

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab resident, Nguyen Truong Giang, with his eyes on the shuttlecock during a game of badminton with Aquila Dream Academy students.

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Those stats have Vietnamese officials coming to visit the Aquila Center and meeting with Nam. Police officers and government workers have sent their children to Aquila’s school and referred their relatives to Aquila instead of compulsory treatment centers.

“Personally, they know for sure the differences [between the two] and the effectiveness of Christian rehab centers,” Nam said. He is often invited to speak to police groups and share how he’s rehabilitated many people addicted to drugs. In every meeting, he says, he speaks about the root of their success: the power of Jesus.

Despite their track records, Aquila and other Vietnamese Christian rehabs are still not recognized by the government as legal treatment centers because of their openness about their faith. They operate instead as unregistered church ministries, which bars them from receiving grants or donations from businesses. That status also limits how they can market themselves. When Vietnamese media cover the Aquila Center, they edit out any mention of God in interviews.

There are signs, though, that government attitudes may be changing. Two denominations, including the Pentecostal group that sponsors Aquila and 13 other Christian drug rehabs, received legal status in 2023. Nam believes these developments will make it easier for the centers to receive their own government recognition.

In December 2023, officials invited Nam and members of Aquila to Quang Tri, a district along the Laos border and a hotspot for drug trafficking. During a gathering where Nam shared about the ministry, he said, 100 people came forward to receive Christ. And 40 from the district have come to Aquila to get clean.

“We see the big need for people in that area,” he said. “When I came to the area, God spoke to me that he’s going to use the weak to put shame on the strong in this world. And in that place that is full of darkness, God will show his glory.”

Angela Lu Fulton is Southeast Asia editor for Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Rehab Revival".

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

Theology

The Incarnation is More than the Manger

Jeremy Treat

How an ancient African bishop championed the incarnation’s redemptive arc.

Illustration by Jocelyn O’Leary

Advent celebrates the most joyous news in the world, but it can feel cheapened by the holiday commercialization and the busyness of the season. That’s why I read one book every year, beyond the Bible itself, that cuts through the veneer of cultural spirituality and takes me deeper into the meaning of Christmas.

The brief yet famous book On the Incarnation—which unpacks the person and work of Christ—was written 1,700 years ago by Athanasius of Alexandria, an Egyptian bishop who profoundly shaped the early church. I believe his writings can renew the contemporary church as well.

While many agree that the Incarnation is key to the Christian faith, most Christians only think of it as representing the birth of Christ. For Athanasius, however, the doctrine includes the whole of Christ’s work, including assuming human nature and his life,death, and resurrection. In short, Athanasius teaches us to plumb the depths of Christmas by reflecting on the whole Christ who brings salvation to the whole creation and renewal to our whole lives.

Before we let Athanasius take us to the heart of the Christmas story, let’s briefly get acquainted with our guide and how he first entered the scene of church history.

As a young man, Athanasius attended the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, where hundreds of local church leaders came together to address the increasingly popular Arian teaching that Jesus had not always existed as God. The council affirmed the eternal divinity of Jesus—as summarized in the Nicene Creed, which says Jesus is “true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father.

Yet this consensus unraveled soon after, and Christ’s deity became a con-tested doctrine for the next 50 years.

Faithful Christianity needed a champion, and Athanasius rose to the occasion, devoting his life to seeing the truth that had been established at Nicaea worked into the life of the church throughout the Christian world.

After the council, Athanasius returned to Africa, where he was born and raised, and became the bishop of Alexandria—at a time when, as fellow church father Gregory of Nazianzus once said, “the bishop of Alexandria was the bishop of the whole world.”

For 45 years, Athanasius stood unwavering in his commitment to Christ and the church. Yet his life was anything but stable. His enemies branded him the “black dwarf,” for his short stature and dark complexion, and he was exiled five times for a total of 17 years for various political or theological reasons. It was during these years, often spent in the desert, that Athanasius did much of his writing.

What can modern Christians learn from this ancient African bishop who pleaded with a Christian world teetering on the brink of grave heresy?

First, to proclaim the whole Christ, Athanasius focused on the deity of Christ. Though this doctrine may seem elementary to most Christians today, its emphasis may be more urgently needed than we realize.

A 2022 survey showed that 43 percent of US evangelicals agree with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher,but he was not God.” Athanasius would be rolling over in his grave if he heard that. And the apostle John would’ve liked a word with that 43 percent—reminding them that “in the beginning was the Word [Jesus], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

The full humanity and divinity of Jesus is essential for biblical Christianity. But for Athanasius, advocating for Christ’s deity was not merely about upholding sound doctrine for the sake of biblical orthodoxy. His beliefs about the person of Christ were always in service to the work of Christ. In other words, without the full divinity and humanity of Jesus, he argued, the gospel is powerless to save: an empty announcement.

How, then, does the Son of God becoming a son of man bring salvation to humanity?

For Athanasius, the logic of salvation begins with God creating humanity to share in his incorruptible life and to cultivate his beautiful creation. When sin entered the world, however, death began to reign, and a process of de-creation derailed God’s good purposes.

According to Athanasius, God had a dilemma: Leaving sin unpunished would go against his character; but it would be unfitting to create humanity only to have them fall into corruption. “What then was God, being good, to do?” he asked. The only way for God to rescue humanity and uphold his character was to send his Son in the flesh to take on the sins of the world. God must become man. So, in solidarity with humanity, the divine Son assumed a human nature.

Becoming human, however, was not enough: Jesus came to die. As Athanasius says, Christ “assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all.” As the God-man, when Jesus encountered death, his humanity gave him the ability to die but his divinity gave him the power to overcome death. In this way, his crucifixion paid the debt of death so that we could have eternal life.

Gregory of Nazianzus reiterated the importance of Christ’s divine-human sacrifice, writing that Jesus had to take on flesh to save our flesh: “That which He has not assumed He has not healed, but what is united to His Godhead is also saved.”

Further, according to Athanasius, the Resurrection is a pledge of the Cross’s victory, since it reveals and inaugurates Christ’s salvation. In fact, the resurrection of Jesus provides the grounds for our resurrection, that we might experience the eternal, incorruptible life of God—which we had lost access to at the Garden of Eden.

So this Christmas, may we reflect on the paradoxical glory of our King becoming a servant, the infinite becoming an infant. But may we also remember that the manger is not the end of the story. The one born king would grow up and usher in his kingdom through the counterintuitive means of self-giving love on the cross—and then fling wide the gates of eternal life by rising from the dead.

During Christmas, we celebrate the silent night when “Christ the Savior is born.” For many American Christians, though, salvation has become an abstract and spiritual idea, as if Jesus came only to save our souls, forgive our sins, and promise us an eternity in heaven. Athanasius would see that idea is correct but not complete. Jesus came to ransom our souls but also to renew the world.

Athanasius makes this argument by appealing to the bookends of creation and re-creation in the story line of Scripture. Just as the world was created through the Word, so the world will be re-created by the Word. And by saving a fallen earth from the corruption of sin—which undoes God’s purposes by setting the world on a trajectory of de-creation and death—Jesus takes what is broken and restores it in love.

The church, as the body of Christ, also finds its place within the story of God’s grand re-creation project. We are ushered into God’s presence, invited to delight in God’s goodness, and called to participate in God’s work of renewal. Even now, God is recreating the world by grace—and he will do so until Christ returns to fully and eternally renew all things.

This message is refreshing, especially in a Western context, where our understanding of Christ’s work has often been marked by pendulum-swinging reductionism—as if Christ came to either forgive our sins & conquer the Devil. And while Athanasius prioritizes the restoration of incorruptible life (2 Tim. 1:10), being renewed in God’s image (Col. 3:10), and participating in God’s nature (2 Pet. 1:4), he embraces a comprehensive understanding of Christ’s work on our behalf. Like him, we can celebrate the many facets of salvation—such as victory, forgiveness, and reconciliation—within the broader framework of God re-creating the world through Christ.

WikiMedia Commons

Saint Athanasius by Peter Paul Rubens

For Athanasius, the biblical vision of Christ’s salvation begins with the human heart, will one day reach to the ends of creation, and touches every aspect of life in between. “So many are the Savior’s achievements that follow from His Incarnation,” Athanasius writes, “that to try to number them is like gazing at the open sea and trying to count the waves.”

Just as God is renewing creation through his Son, the Christian life is one of renewal into the image of Christ, by the Spirit, and to the glory of the Father: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”(2 Cor. 5:17). We are given a new heart, a new spirit (Ezek. 36:26), a new mind (Rom. 12:2), a new identity, a new family (Mark 3:31–35), and the hope of living in a new world (Matt. 19:28).

Athanasius was a theologian, but he was also a pastor who loved people as much as he loved truth. He believed that our theology of the gospel applies to not only our “spirituality” or our time spent at church but also to our daily lives. Just as the apostle Paul told Timothy to watch both his doctrine and his life closely (1 Tim. 4:16), Athanasius concludes his book by exhorting his readers that biblical truth must go hand in hand with a godly life.

Christmas is a time when we receive undeserved gifts as a reflection of the greatest unearned gift—God’s grace in Christ. Yet it is also a reminder that the gospel both saves us and propels us into a life of uprooting sin, confronting injustice, and seeking God’s kingdom. Athanasius helps us understand that, within the larger narrative of Scripture, Christ’s salvation does not mean escape from creation but rather renewal of creation.
Athanasius challenges us to breakthrough the surface of simplistic spirituality of Christmas and experience the multilayered depth of its meaning. The Alexandrian bishop pleads with us to embrace the whole Christ who came to bring salvation to the whole creation and renewal to our whole lives. This Christmas, when we cry out, “Let heaven and nature sing!” may we remember that both of these are being renewed and brought together by our Savior King.

Jeremy Treat is pastor for preaching and vision at Reality LA in Los Angeles and adjunct professor of theology at Biola University. He is the author of Renewal in Christ: Athanasius on the Christian Wikimedia Commons Life and The Atonement.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "More than a Manger".

- More from Jeremy Treat

Readers Praise Print Magazines and Local Churches

Kate Lucky

Responses to our July/August issue.

Photography by Abigail Erickson for Christianity Today

Three issues into the redesigned Christianity Today, feedback on the magazine has been encouraging. “It looks substantial, and it reads as substantial,” wrote a pastor on the social platform Threads. Readers have praised the larger font size, thicker paper, revised logotype, curated art, and judicious use of white space. One subscriber told us, “I cannot put it down. Began reading two hours ago, taking a break now at page 92.” Even the reduction in ads drew praise: “I was just about ready to cancel my subscription,” wrote Anita Ramlo of Oakland, California. But instead, she reported, “I have thoroughly enjoyed reading and sharing from the July/August edition!”

Many people shared feedback on a personal essay by Sophia Lee, “Confessions of a Loner.” Some shared struggles finding Christian community as single people, returned missionaries, grieving parents, or older adults. Others expressed gratitude for their churches.

“My husband and I live away from family due to his job, and with four kids you NEED family nearby,” wrote one mom. “Our church has been that family.”

A recently divorced woman said, “In my church, fortunately, I have a vocal friend who told the deaconess I needed food. The deaconess said, ‘She’s one of our own’; people gave me food, veggies from the garden, took a collection; and the deacons paid a few bills.”

When Christian community fails, it’s devastating. But when the body of Christ serves each other as it should, its members can flourish together.

Kate Lucky
senior editor, culture and engagement

Why Print Still Matters

I spend much of each day with my eyes on screens. It is refreshing to spend some time in my comfortable chair with a hot cup of coffee and the print version of Christianity Today in my hands.

Warren A. Dick, Wooster, OH

I’m grateful our library has good magazines like CT. I’m on disability and can’t afford internet or print subscriptions. It is nice to be able to take them home to read with my morning coffee or before bed instead of having to spend every day at the library to read them. Please keep printing!

Donna Cooley, Vancouver, WA

What Hath Jerusalem to Do with Mar-a-Lago?

Russell Moore’s recent editorials reflect an unbecoming and unnecessary political bias. While the editorials have raised important alarms for us concerning the importance of Christian character to our culture and politics, he consistently buries the lead in moral judgments against one candidate, Donald Trump. [Moore] claims his personal views “are beside the point,” which then begs the question as to the purpose of including them. I have no desire to be the former president’s apologist or defender. I also have no desire to read Moore’s personal political views in CT.

Dave Smith, Gainesville, GA

The commentary expressed well my own sorrow at how our politics have been corrupted, but it seemed to express anger toward the former president. There was no encouragement to pray for him, only anger.

Owen Panner Jr. , Riddle, OR

It felt good to know that I’m not the only voice crying in the wilderness that something is far amiss in evangelical circles. As an Anabaptist myself, let me recommend our traditional belief of total separation of church and state, or put another way, the “two kingdom concept,” with the church not taking part in politics at all. It’s freeing!

Merle Yoder, Gladys, VA

Why Both Parties Want Hispanic Evangelicals in 2024

Hispanic Christians are not a monolith. Like the rest of the church and nation, we are politically all over the spectrum.

Rich Rodriguez (via Facebook)

He Told Richard Nixon to Confess

As a Navy chaplain, I was assigned as district chaplain for the Seventh Coast Guard District in Miami, Florida, from 1997 to 2001. I came to know during that time a senior Coast Guard officer—a captain—who had a fascinating tale to tell of his earlier life. Before joining the Coast Guard, he was a Secret Service agent regularly assigned to President Nixon’s detail. In this capacity, his duties took him several times to guard the president inside the Key Biscayne church’s sanctuary during the worship service. Over time, he began to listen to Huffman’s sermons and, due primarily to that input, came to receive Christ! He remained an active, faithful Christian throughout his life.

Mark A. Jumper, Virginia Beach, VA

Is Sexuality a Matter of First Importance?

Allberry’s point on the danger of focusing only on one sin reminds us we are all in need of God’s grace and forgiveness.

Rob Moorlach, Groton, SD

When assigning equal gravity to same-sex sin and greed, you question why the former receives more vehement condemnation than the latter in evangelical circles. Perhaps the pushback has to do with the fierceness with which the practitioners of same-sex attraction defend their sin. Another thing: The line where [same-sex] attraction deviates from heterosexual attraction is clear, immediate, and definable, whereas the moment when the normal desire to acquire crosses the line to greed seems more blurred.

Thomas Keogh, Highlands County, FL

Behind the Scenes

Our July/August article about Eric Liddell was sports historian Paul Emory Putz’s first appearance in a CT print magazine, though he writes often for the online edition. On Threads, he shared a reflection about it:
“I grew up in small-town Nebraska, a pastor’s kid. But not a typical PK. My dad was a full-time UPS truck driver, delivering packages while also starting and pastoring a church. He had no seminary degree or even a bachelor’s degree. But he was curious about the world. He was constantly reading Christian books and literature, and Christianity Today was one of those sources.
“In my own faith journey, having CT around the house was formative. It modeled a way of encountering the world that fed my desire to follow Jesus and my intellectual curiosity. It helped set me, a first-gen college grad, on a trajectory to my work as an educator, historian, and author.
“High school me never would have thought I’d get to contribute my own words to the pages of a magazine that has meant so much to my life.”

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Responses to Our July/August Issue".

- More from Kate Lucky

Church Life

A Solution for Seasonal Overwhelm

Steve Cuss

Guest Columnist

Focusing on the few in front of us makes a tangible difference in our local communities.

Illustration by Keith Negley

The world has been profoundly broken for some time—really since the beginning of time—but doesn’t it feel particularly broken right now?

Social media and 24-hour news ensure our amygdalae and nervous systems get little relief before the next injustice or tragedy arises. These passing issues are serious and real, but they come at us like kindling. They burn quickly and turn to ash before we can grasp them, and the next issue lights the next fire.

Now, at the end of 2024, we find ourselves on the heels of another divisive presidential election and its side effect: the brink of permanent overwhelm. The culture wars and infighting distract us from long-term, complex issues like child poverty, trafficking, and the foster care crisis, to name just a few.

If we’re not careful, this barrage of news becomes the wrong constant companion. David reminds us in Psalm 139 that God is with us no matter where we go, but sometimes the brokenness and overwhelm become an accidental substitute for his presence. We might end up rewriting David’s words:

Where can I go from your problems? Where can I flee from the issues? If I go to social media, you are there; if I turn on cable news, you are there. If I make my bed on the far side of the sea, even there you hold me fast.

Some people solve this overload by adopting a permanent state of outrage. Even if it’s justified, it risks putting us into a spiral of self-righteousness. It feels good, but it often doesn’t change anything. It gives us someone to blame, someone we feel we can treat without nuance. It turns humans into two-dimensional caricatures.

Other people cope with the onslaught of brokenness through ignorance. They stay uninvolved, like the man in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:26–37) who asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” and did not like the reply of the person in need. Both approaches are what we call “attempted solutions” in my field. They either change nothing or make the problem worse.

But there is another path forward, and the Advent season is a good time to walk it. When we first think of Advent, many of our minds go to anticipation. We anticipate the coming hope of Jesus—the already and the not yet. I’ve always appreciated and reflected on John 1:5 during the Advent season: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

But Advent provides something else: a reminder on bleak, overwhelming days that the gospel is local. Jesus was born into a specific zip code, and that place was soaked in systemic injustice and downward-trending statistics.

Herod was so unhinged that the whole city’s mood had become enmeshed with his. “[Herod] was troubled,” writes Matthew, “and all Jerusalem with him” (2:3, ESV). The people were on edge because their well-being was linked to Herod’s whims. Rome was no picnic: It wielded its sword right next to extreme taxation, offered peace at the threat of death, and was conquering and enslaving as much as it was innovating and building. The place where Jesus was born was profoundly marginalized, poverty-stricken, and traumatized.

It helps me in these anxious times to remember that Jesus came to save the world—of course—but he focused on his particular place. His hyperlocal ministry began the astonishing spread of a kingdom that is still spreading in 2024. Jesus’ ministry thrived in a broken locale. People came to faith, they were healed, and they were deployed to make a difference.

When I focus on the people and events around me locally, I find much evidence of God’s goodness. In my own church, rather than getting bogged down by every single issue, we’ve focused on two efforts: care for foster and adopted children and affordable housing. Both are complex and long-term needs. We’ve encountered significant setback and discouragement in our efforts, but we’ve kept it local and have seen remarkable progress. Other congregations work with prisoners or unhoused people or domestic violence survivors. We’ll help anyone who comes through our door—in fact, we’re known for that in our city—but we focus our efforts on those two primary systemic issues. We cannot tackle every injustice, but we can move the needle on a couple in a meaningful way.

What about problems on the other side of the world? Should we stay just in our zip code? Not at all! If we travel the globe to share the gospel, we know that when we arrive, we will focus on a particular place and people, just like we do at home. We collaborate with those who live there long-term and join what God has been doing well before we arrived.

Focusing on outrage-causing issues, reading the statistics, and ranting on social media won’t feed a child or rescue a trafficked person or help a teen who’s aged out of the foster system. But efforts rooted in a hyperlocal gospel can accomplish these things, and God is pleased to use his global church as we attend to the few in front of us.

Madeleine L’Engle once wrote,

[Someone] passionately interested in the cause of the … leper, very carefully avoids speaking to the leper in his path, in order to get on with the cause. And it occurs to me that Jesus couldn’t have cared less about the cause or rights of the leper. … Jesus stopped. And healed. And loved. Not causes, but people.

I am grateful for those who are called to policy work and focus on larger systemic issues. We need those people. But for most of us, the path is local.

In the Gospels, we discover that Jesus really didn’t speak about systemic issues, and he didn’t tackle Herod or Rome. Born into a highly anxious and broken culture, Jesus submitted to his own creation. He kept his ministry hyperlocal, to the person in front of him. As we enter the Advent season, let’s cast our eyes away from the beckoning of outrage and instead on the one who is coming as we focus on the few in front of us.

Steve Cuss is the host of CT’s podcast also called Being Human.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Few in Front of Us".

Being Human: A column by Being Human’s host, Steve Cuss.

- More from Steve, Cuss

News

Vets in Ministry Won’t Retreat from the Military’s Suicide Crisis

Maria Baer

Christians say the epidemic is about more than PTSD.

Veterans Day

Jewel Samad / AFP via Getty Images

Pastor Josh Holler says his US Marine Corps regiment had a saying: Suffer in silence.

Holler, who deployed twice to Iraq, served with men who had the phrase tattooed into their skin. It was a useful aphorism in battle, where soldiers stake their lives on each other’s strength and perseverance.

But suffering in silence once they return home can be disastrous.

“If you take that idea with you when you leave the military … It’s not too long to plot out a time period where that person’s going to take their life,” Holler said.

The US veteran community has suffered a suicide epidemic for decades, and it’s getting worse. According to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, 6,392 veterans took their lives in 2021 (the most recent year that data is available)—which comes to about 17 veteran suicides every day. The veteran suicide rate is about twice that of the non-veteran US adult population.

Of the roughly 2,100 members of the 7th Marine Regiment—Holler’s unit—11 have died by suicide since his return from Iraq in 2013.

For Christian civilians, including pastors, the prospect of ministering to military vets can seem daunting. Leaders who’ve never experienced war may feel ill-equipped to tackle veterans’ unique pain and challenges. Asking about their experience in the service could seem invasive or accusatory; not asking could seem neglectful or ungrateful.

Expressing public support for the US military has also become politically loaded. Holler says a friend and fellow vet was frustrated when his Colorado Springs church moved into a new building and chose to take down the American flag inside the sanctuary, which Holler’s friend took as a personal slight.

A recent Pew Research poll found that while 60 percent of all US adults have a positive view of the military, a majority of those between ages 18 and 29 believe the military “has a negative effect” on the country.

But as the suicide crisis among US veterans worsens, particularly among younger men, some Christians are calling for more support—and not just for veterans suffering from clinical PTSD after war.

In fact, the connection between combat-induced PTSD and veteran suicide may not be as strong as previously believed. A 2014 study found that the veteran suicide rate is actually higher among those who were never deployed; and veteran suicides have continued to rise even as US involvement in foreign wars has diminished.

Holler says his regiment witnessed some harrowing violence in Iraq but “comparatively little” to veterans’ experiences in Vietnam or World War II. He was grieved and confused when so many men he’d served alongside died by suicide after returning home.

A few years ago, he started interviewing their family members and conducting his own research, which he turned into a book in 2020. He writes that veteran suicide “is not primarily a problem born out of exposure to combat and PTSD but out of a broken relationship between people and God.”

The US Department of Veterans Affairs has long dedicated the vast majority of its mental health resources toward treating PTSD, according to The Heritage Foundation. But the overall veteran suicide rate has steadily increased since 2001 and exponentially in the last ten years among veterans aged 18–34.

Holler attended seminary after leaving the military and pastors a Baptist church in St. Louis. He says faith is a necessary component of veterans’ healing after war. Damon Friedman, a Christian and special operations combat veteran, agrees.

Friedman survived multiple violent deployments with the Marine Corps and then the US Air Force and struggled with suicidal thoughts when he returned home. He spent a full year receiving treatment from medical doctors (for his mild traumatic brain injury), from psychologists (for his PTSD), and, ultimately, from pastors.

Friedman says it was this spiritual component, along with the physical and psychological treatment he received, that saved him. “My mind, it was so dark and so black,” he says, “and God radically changed and transformed me.”

That’s why in 2011 he started Shield of Faith (SOF) Missions to offer a “one-stop shop” of comprehensive care—including a strong emphasis on the gospel—to veterans struggling with their mental health.

The Florida-based SOF Missions invites veterans from around the country to weeklong Be Resilient Clinics, where they have access to 20–30 health care practitioners, including psychologists, medical doctors, physical therapists, acupuncturists, massage therapists, nutritionists, sleep specialists, and mental health counselors.

The practitioners spend the week getting to know the vets individually and developing each one’s treatment plan for the next year.

It’s all done at a Florida resort—“That’s our hospital,” Friedman says—at SOF Missions’ expense. Ten vets are invited to each clinic, after which they receive free follow-up care for a full year.

The vets also meet with pastors and study the Bible at the clinics. “We spend just as much time on the spiritual component as we do on the physical pillar, the social pillar, and the psychological pillar,” Friedman says. “I would say eight out of ten that come through our program will walk away literally confessing Jesus as Lord and Savior of their life.”

The organization’s name, Shield of Faith, is a reference to Paul’s exhortation to Ephesians 6 to “put on the whole armor of God” (Eph. 6:11).

“Many people associate the shield as a defensive measure,” Friedman said. “It’s true, but it’s also used offensively. When the enemy would get close, a thrust, a blow would literally shatter the ankles and the wrist … it is also a symbol that God is your shield.”

Like Holler, Friedman is convinced that what plagues suicidal veterans is more than the psychological residue of wartime violence.

He says most of the veterans who seek help from SOF Missions are also suffering from what he calls “moral injury.” He’s seen vets struggling with the knowledge that they’ve killed others. Some struggle to find meaning and purpose back at home after spending a year or more performing high-stakes jobs amid life-or-death circumstances.

At SOF Missions’ female-only Be Resilient Clinics, Friedman says almost every woman who signs up is dealing with another kind of moral injury: sexual assault by fellow service members.

For these vets, treating just their psychological and physical symptoms won’t be enough. “Moral injuries are spiritual in nature,” Friedman says.

Holler says he found the same connection between veterans’ spiritual and mental health as he researched the deaths of his fellow servicemen.

“The military is such an honor/shame culture,” Holler says, but with inverted virtues—many habits that are “shamed” back home are “honored” on deployment, such as excessive drinking and porn use.

He found that men he knew who’d died by suicide after deployment had often struggled to kick one or more of those habits upon returning home, thereby alienating friends and family, sinking deeper into isolation, and losing a broader sense of purpose.

But there’s an even deeper kind of moral injury. Along with the entreaty to “suffer in silence,” Holler says his fellow Marines were taught another saying: “Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

“It was drilled into you,” Holler said. “It’s not meant to look at people in a demeaning way. … There was restraint there. But it was an essential part of the combat mindset, meant in both a defensive and offensive sense.”

It’s a dark paradox of active duty: The military needs men to think like machines when they’re overseas but return home as people. Holler says mentally preparing to kill others in combat can bring soldiers across a threshold into dangerous ideation.

“If you have considered killing another person as part of your job … I firmly believe that lowers the threshold to then translate to killing yourself,” he said.

Holler and Friedman have different ideas about how the church can best serve veterans more broadly. Friedman says he wishes more churches included specific ministries and support groups for vets, while Holler says what the vets really need is deep, durable relationships with fellow believers.

Serving vets can get awkward. Holler has a sore spot for half-hearted shows of support, like “free meals for vets” or a Memorial Day sale at a mattress company. For his part, Friedman can’t stand when someone approaches him just to share that they “almost served in the military.”

Nevertheless, Friedman and Holler agree the worst way to minister to veterans—even those struggling with clinical PTSD, who may need more intervention besides friendship and community—is to ignore them.

- More from Maria Baer

Books

Excerpt

When Deities Promise Answers to Dating and Money Woes

Tony Chuang

Until the gospel starts explicitly addressing daily needs, most Taiwanese non-Christians will likely remain uninterested.

People pay their respects to the sea goddess, Mazu, at a temple in Taiwan during the first day of the 2023 Dajia Mazu Pilgrimage.

Chris McGrath / Getty

As a first grader, I had the same daily after-school routine. I had a five-minute walk past bustling skyscrapers and scooters crowding the streets of downtown Taipei, Taiwan, to my family’s apartment, where my grandparents would greet me. My grandma would remind me to greet the ancestors before I could play with my Transformer robots. I’d pick up a stick of incense, clamp my palms together, and pray a simple prayer to the ancestral shrine in the middle of the living room.

I asked for health, wealth, and good grades. Then I’d snack on the crackers that had been offered to the ancestors and deities in the shrine. Life was good. My hardworking parents provided for me, my grandparents watched me, and my ancestors blessed and protected me.

At the time, I had never heard the gospel, and what I did hear about Christianity from my grandparents was negative: Christians were out to get my money, and Christianity simply was “not our way.” Our way was Chinese folk religion, which mixed elements of Confucianism and Daoism (Taoism) with a plethora of deities, ancestors, and shamanistic rituals.

My mother always taught me about the efficacy of prayer to a deity called Jesus, so I prayed to him along with the others. It was not until high school that a classmate told me the gospel and I gave my life to this Christian God.

About 30 years later, I wrote Religiosity and Gospel Transmission: Insights from Folk Religion in Taipei to explore how folk religion shapes the worldview of Taiwanese people so that Christians can share the gospel effectively. Today, Christians only make up 6 percent of Taiwan’s population, while adherents to folk religion compose 44 percent, according to Pew Research Center. Taiwan has the third-highest percentage of folk religion followers in the world.

While my research focused on my home of Taiwan, Chinese folk religion is a widely held belief system among ethnic Han Chinese around the world. The specific practices may differ across geographic contexts, but the ideas and religiosity, such as feng shui or the unseen realm, of the people are quite similar.

Through interviews with 25 people in the streets and temples of Taipei on their thoughts on religiosity, I began to see two key questions that Christianity needed to answer for Taiwanese people enmeshed in the world of folk religion, whether they believe it deeply or not. How does Christianity engage with the spiritual realm? And how does it help the everyday life of the Taiwanese?

The gospel to believers in the spirit world

Chinese American sociologist C. K. Yang noted that Chinese folk religion is a diffused religion—meaning that it pervades everyday life, intruding secular spaces in a way that institutional religion does not often do. For instance, in ethnic Chinese communities around the world, it is common practice for stores to offer up food and incense to certain deities at their grand openings to ask for blessing and prosperity.

This means that instead of disenchanting folk religion like it has the rest of the world, modernity has had a vastly different effect on Chinese religiosity. Folk religion ensures that secular institutions and social groups are “imbued with a rich folklore of a supernatural character,” Yang wrote in Religion in Chinese Society. “The social environment as a whole had a sacred atmosphere which inspired the feeling that the gods and spirits, as well as man, participated in molding the established ways of life in the traditional world.”

The pervasiveness of folk religion in everyday life and social institutions—including government offices and schools—has made it a key part of Taiwanese consciousness, as much so as modern-day politics. This does not mean that all Taiwanese are still “enchanted by the supernatural,” as philosopher Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age, but that the “supernatural” has become part of an accepted experience of the people.

In this context, a presentation of the gospel should directly address the forces of ghosts, spirits, local deities, and ancestors that make up Taiwanese people’s lived realities.

For instance, on certain days of the year, the streets of Taipei are crowded as people carrying statues of local deities parade from one temple to the next. Mao-Hsien Lin, a leading expert on folk religion in Taiwan, explained that the parades are spiritually analogous to the patrol of police officers, as their purpose is to “get rid of evil [spirits] and calm the people’s hearts.”

If the gospel fails to do the same, it would be perceived as useless in Taiwan. Based on the interviews I did, demons and evil spirits are a real concern today in many parts of Taiwan. So the church needs a better theology and practice of exorcism. The gospel must be seen not just as insurance for the afterlife but as protection in this life against real or perceived spiritual forces.

One practical example is telling non-Christians about the power of Jesus’s name to drive back demons that may be attacking one’s house or the power of prayer to do things that no spirits or deities could do.

Taiwan’s charismatic churches are already known for doing this. Because the unseen realm is normal in Taiwan, most churches in Taiwan “have always understood the supernatural aspect of faith as recorded in the Scripture in a literal sense—which can be tasted and seen in the present day,” according to Judith C. P. Lin in The Charismatic Movement in Taiwan from 1945 to 1995. It’s what led the charismatic movement to grow so successfully on the island, she argued, noting that an estimated one-third of Taiwanese Christians have lean charismatic.

In both charismatic and noncharismatic groups, Taiwanese Christians regularly pray for deliverance, miraculous healings, and protection amid demonic warfare. These gospel practices reveal to Taiwanese people the power of God, ways to pray, the danger of spirit-mediums, and other issues are related to their everyday life.

This approach has been taught in churches, especially since the 1980s. Yet in my interviews, few people mentioned Christians speaking to them about the unseen realm. Perhaps this approach could be used more frequently for initial gospel encounters, as a gospel that adequately addresses the spiritual realm will see more responses in Taiwan.

The gospel’s implications on daily life

Another important aspect to consider when reaching Taiwanese nonbelievers is what they are seeking when they approach the gods and deities of folk religion. While gospel presentations in the West focus on more abstract concepts like how Christianity provides forgiveness of sins, new life, and hope for eternity, Taiwanese people are more interested in practical, everyday concerns.

For instance, they ask the god Guan Sheng DI Jun to help them get promoted. They ask the earth God to protect their home from thieves. They beseech Yue Lao to bring them a romantic partner.

Gospel presentations to Taiwanese people need to address how or if the gospel can help them in these practical ways. Today, many Christian teachers exhort us to gospel living—how we as Christians can live according to the grace and responsibilities given to us—but what about the gospel in daily life?

When your business is not doing well, what is the gospel’s answer to that? When you live in a crime-ridden neighborhood, how does the gospel protect you? When you are 38 years old and unable to find a spouse, where does the gospel come in? The easy answers of “have more faith” and “turn to Jesus” are not concrete enough to address the real concerns that people have.

Some Christians who have attended church for a while start to understand how the gospel can apply in specific situations. But non-Christians are not aware of this. In my interviews, I found that many Taiwanese non-Christians viewed the abstract gospel as “irrelevant,” “stupid,” or “arrogant.” Some even mistook it for another mystic chant. Until the gospel starts explicitly addressing situations in daily life, most Taiwanese non-Christians will likely remain uninterested and unconvinced.

Folk religion provides answers and concrete rituals for situations that people encounter in everyday life. Through customs, rituals, and special holidays like Tomb Sweeping Festival, folk religion in Taiwan provides a sense of security and situation-specific assurances. It does not have complicated doctrines for people to grasp—all they need to do is visit the temple and pray to the deity.

Therefore, an abstract gospel does little for most Taiwanese. What many Taiwanese need is a more down-to-earth gospel that addresses the same things that folk religion deities address: daily lives and felt needs. These needs are not a side project for the deities but their sole purpose.

A contextual approach to gospel presentations in Taiwan should frame the Lord as better than the goddess Mazu in her protection of fishermen, better than the earth God in his protection of land, better than Guanyin in her compassion for people, better than Lord Superior Wen Chang in his concern for academia, and better than Yue Lao in his understanding of love.

That doesn’t mean Christians should water down the gospel or make it only about fulfilling daily needs. The gospel has eternal significance and brings a person into a relationship with the Lord. The gospel is also not about fulfilling one’s desires; rather, it is about fulfilling the desires of God. Taken to the extreme, this kind of prosperity gospel robs Jesus’ focus on the kingdom, John’s call to love, and Paul’s admonition to live a life worthy of the calling we have received.

In Jesus’ ministry, he encountered people and provided for both their external and spiritual needs. Jesus spoke about how to deal with a Roman soldier asking a civilian to carry luggage or other items (Matt. 5:41). He spoke about paying taxes (Mark 12:17) and how often to forgive people (Matt. 18:21–22). Abstract truth sometimes came with the fulfillment of daily needs and sometimes did not. Even in large-scale public meetings like the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught people how to act in daily life.

When evangelizing to Taiwanese people, it is important to discuss the challenging issues they are facing. Christians could ask adherents of folk religion about the last deity they visited and what they were seeking. Knowing the answers to these questions can help Christians explain how the gospel speaks directly to their concerns, how God can solve their problems, and how God can do more than any deity.

Sometimes God does not fulfill every felt need. But that does not mean the gospel does not speak on a given subject. For instance, the gospel teaches people not to worry about money or promotions but to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33). On the question of protection, the gospel teaches that God “will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways” (Ps. 91:11). For someone seeking a romantic partner, the gospel teaches us about love itself (1 Cor. 13).

To show that the gospel of Jesus Christ is necessary and vital amid a culture seeped in folk religion, Christians need to show that God is more powerful than the spirits and deities that threaten the Taiwanese people and that he is a better answer to the daily needs of their lives.

The result is a gospel that is truly “good news” for Taiwanese people and an appeal that can take root in this culture.

Tony Chuang is a pastor, conference speaker, adjunct lecturer, and business director from Taiwan who is currently living in Penang, Malaysia. He received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

This excerpt was adapted from Religiosity and Gospel Transmission: Insights from Folk Religion in Taipei by Tony Chuang. Copyright © 2024 Langham Academic. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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News

Space Force Hymn Lifts Prayer to the Heavens

Adam MacInnis

Southern Baptist chaplain says God prompted him to write song for the newest branch of the US military.

Air Force Academy cadets who will be commissioning into the US Space Force cheer after taking an oath during their graduation ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

The upright piano was old and out of tune, but James Linzey couldn’t resist the urge to stop and touch the keys.

Sitting in the former Dalton gang museum building in Coffeyville, Kansas, Linzey clanked until he found the melody he had been searching for. Then he wrote the words:

Creator of the universe,

Watch over those who fly,

Through the great space beyond the earth,

And worlds beyond the sky.

The 66-year-old Southern Baptist minister composed this hymn in Coffeyville, a small town of about 9,000, back in 2020, while cleaning up the historic museum he’d purchased with plans to revitalize. Now, nearly five years later, the hymn is known as “The Space Force Hymn.”

Linzey was a military chaplain for nearly 24 years, but the government didn’t ask him to write “Creator of the Universe” for the newest branch of the service. In fact, the military does not have official hymns, out of concern they would violate the First Amendment prohibition against respecting an establishment of religion. But there are unofficial hymns. The Air Force has “Lord, Guard and Guide the Men Who Fly,” and the Navy has “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” And the Space Force has Linzey’s composition.

If you ask Linzey why he wrote it, he will tell you it’s because God told him to—although he’s quick to add that it wasn’t an audible voice. He felt an internal prodding.

“I felt very strongly in my spirit that the Lord led me—urged me—to write the Space Force hymn.”

The thought popped into his head when he first heard that then-president Donald Trump was going to create another branch of the military—the first new service since the creation of the Air Force in 1947. Some people mocked the idea when it was announced, but experts said it was necessary for the organization and prioritization of American interests in space, including the security of satellites.

“It’s not about protecting Earth from asteroids or aliens,” said Todd Harrison, who directs the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “It will create a centralized, unified chain of command that is responsible for space.”

Linzey, who was taking an intensive course in advanced Greek at Westminster Seminary California at the time, started thinking about heaven.

“The Space Force’s mission to explore space and engage in space travel inspires me because, number one, the Bible says that that is where heaven is,” he told Christianity Today. “The OT Hebrew term for ‘heavens’ or ‘heaven’ is shamayim, which can also be translated as ‘sky.’ In the Hebrew Bible, shamayim is the home of God. The NT Greek term for ‘heaven’ or ‘sky’ is ouranos, and … that is where we will go for all eternity, by believing in and living for Christ.”

It’s hard to imagine someone more suited to compose the Space Force hymn than Linzey. He served in the United States Army and Air Force as a chaplain before retiring in 1998 with the rank of major.

His experience has given him a lot of insight into the hearts and spiritual needs of the people serving their country—and what inspires them.

He also has an MDiv from Fuller Theological Seminary and a deep knowledge of biblical languages. He is chief editor of the Modern English Version Bible and general editor of the new Tyndale Bible, which will be released in 2026 ahead of the 500th anniversary of the release of the original Tyndale Bible.

Linzey believes having a strong theological background is important for hymn writing.

“You have to know the Bible,” he said. “You have to know theology so you don’t mess up.”

It also helped to know military music history. The Space Force hymn includes allusions to both the Air Force hymn and the Navy hymn. The first verse of Linzey’s composition references “worlds beyond the sky,” which plays off the Air Force hymn’s line about “great spaces of the sky.” And the final verse of Linzey’s hymn begins with “Eternal Father, strong to save,” which is the title of the Navy hymn.

Linzey said he did this deliberately to show the continuity of the new service. The first members of the Space Force also came from the Air Force, so he wanted to communicate that connection and the development of a new branch in the song.

The official recording was done by Dan Kreider, a professional composer and music minister at a church in Florida, who also has a doctorate in choral music and a business publishing custom hymnals. Linzey laughed and said that it sounds a lot better than it did when he first played it on the upright in Dalton Museum building. Kreider’s version is slow and majestic and allows people to breathe and experience the feeling of praying to God.

“It’s like you’re in a cathedral at this altar with stained glass windows and the sun’s shining through,” Linzey said. “The reverence—they captured it.”

Don Biadog, a retired Navy chaplain who has known Linzey since 2016, had a similar reaction when he first heard the song.

“The hymn impacted me emotionally and on a high spiritual level,” said Biadog, who is also Southern Baptist. “The lyrics and the tune masterfully tug at the heart, soul, and mind.”

He believes the hymn will have a powerful effect on the men and women who serve in the Space Force in the years to come.

“‘Creator of the Universe’ is a prayer that has been set to music, and all military personnel certainly need a prayer such as this that draws the soul of humankind closer to God,” he said.

Biadog hopes the hymn will be sung in lots of churches—perhaps on Independence Day, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day.

“Military hymns became recognized in the civilian churches before becoming ‘military hymns,’” Biadog explained in an article for K-Love. “After that, it became natural for military chapels and military bands to adopt them as their hymns and perform them.”

Linzey is pleased with the response the song has received so far. He doesn’t know how many churches have sung the hymn, exactly, but tens of thousands of people have visited his website, where the sheet music is free to download.

Since its release, the song has been well received, with stories written about it in the local Coffeyville newspaper and numerous religious publications. Linzey has also done his best to let churches and chapels know about it.

“I really hope in my lifetime to see it in a hymnal,” he said.

Perhaps someday it will be sung in the chapel at the Pentagon, where the more than 9,000 members of the Space Force are currently assigned:

Eternal Father, strong to save,

In prayer before Thy light,

In solitude of sov’reign grace,

Grant courage for each flight. Amen.

Wherever people sing the words that Linzey wrote in Coffeyville, though, he knows a prayer will rise to the heavens.

- More from Adam MacInnis

Ideas

Power Without Integrity Destroys Us

Justin Giboney

Contributor

Evangelicals helped elect Trump. Can evangelicals also hold him accountable?

Jeff Swensen / Stringer / Getty

In 1874, Robert B. Elliott, one of South Carolina’s first Black attorneys and congressmen, left Washington, DC, and took a trip home to Columbia to address some serious concerns. The state had become the subject of national ridicule due to the alleged corruption of its elected officials. Among other things, Gov. Franklin Moses Jr., known as the “robber governor,” had been using taxpayer funds to cover his gambling addiction.

Franklin and Elliott were in the same political party, both Republicans, but Elliott wouldn’t turn a blind eye to corruption and incompetence. One of American history’s greatest orators, he told the people of his state, “The power we have will be our condemnation, unless we arouse ourselves to our responsibilities.” Elliott knew that political victories void of honor become pyrrhic victories, and power detached from integrity destroys us in the end.

Pro-Trump evangelicals are understandably in a celebratory mood after Tuesday’s victory. President-elect Donald Trump just pulled off what some are calling the greatest political comeback in American history. And many white evangelicals, though often anxious about their “persecuted” status, find themselves in proximity to power once again, sticking with Trump despite his long and public record of misdeeds, including refusing to comply with the peaceful transfer of power after the last election.

I believe this loyalty was grossly misplaced and this victory was achieved through unacceptable compromises. I can’t ignore Trump’s words and actions, and I’m baffled by the far-fetched rationalizations it takes for my fellow pro-life Christians to continue supporting Trump after he explicitly disavowed the pro-life position.

But now that Trump has won, that support comes with a duty of accountability—just as it would for Kamala Harris supporters if she’d won instead. (In fact, my plan for this article was exactly the same for either outcome; had Harris won, I’d be writing the same things to her Christian voters now.) Those who backed Trump’s political resurgence must arouse themselves to their responsibilities as citizens and—more importantly—as disciples of Jesus Christ.

John the Baptist lost his head for speaking truth to power, and Esther risked it all to protect a vulnerable people. Christians who have the ear of the new Trump administration, whether in formal roles in Washington or simply as part of the new president’s base, must do likewise. Cozying up to the powerful to further our self-interest isn’t part of the Christian’s job description. In truth, it’s in deep conflict with our commission.

What does holding Trump accountable entail? It means recognizing that the concerns of those who voted for other candidates were not all illegitimate. And it means admitting that Trump’s shaky pro-life stance doesn’t justify anything and everything he says and does.

Yes, the Democrats’ abortion agenda is egregious—and their extreme stances on transgenderism and parental rights should be rejected in no uncertain terms. But those wrongs don’t justify ignoring Trump’s serious issues. When Elliott went back home, he didn’t excuse his party’s and state’s failures by pointing to how Wall Street was rigging the markets and fixing railroad stocks at that time. He held his own to account and passionately implored them to do what is right.

Accountability also means Trump’s disparagement of and threats toward suffering immigrants and his embarrassing lack of a health-care plan cannot be dismissed as minor discrepancies. Again, Democrats have their problems, but they do not negate the responsibilities of Trump’s evangelical voters. Christians must take immigration and health-care policies seriously because they are directly related to our care for the orphan, the widow, the stranger, and our neighbors more generally. Christians cannot be faithful in the public square while rationalizing the rhetoric and policies that neglect or violate these groups.

And if Trump’s economic policies are more influenced by Elon Musk than Vice President–elect JD Vance—if they’re friendlier to big business than to the working class—then his Christian supporters must call that out. That would mean Trump lied to his working-class voters and will increase the economic pain he promised to alleviate. Christians who served as Trump’s sword and shield should start weighing in on these matters now.

If Christian Trump voters neglect their responsibility here, overlooking his errors, it will have a devastating impact on the American church in general and evangelicalism in particular. Without a doubt, Trump’s first term served to discredit the church’s moral authority and caused many Christians to question their faith altogether. If Trump’s Christian supporters want to avoid that kind of damage to the church’s credibility in his second and final term, they must acknowledge his wrongdoing and relentlessly use their influence to hold him to account.

Historically, the victors of political contests tend to overestimate what they’ve won. This is because electoral wins are temporary and can produce their own backlash. Furthermore, what’s seen as gain in this world is spiritual loss under God’s calculus if it’s not stewarded properly. Pro-Trump Christians’ regained power will become their condemnation if they refuse to protect others and check the president’s excesses—as any self-respecting and faithful Christian who comes into authority is required to do.

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

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Ideas

Beijing, Let My Daughter Come Home

Aimee Welch

China should honor its promises to the last 300 children matched with families through international adoption.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

This week marks World Adoption Day. Poignantly, it’s also my daughter’s 11th birthday, which she will spend waiting in an institution in China—her sixth such birthday since she was told that our family would soon come for her and finalize her adoption.

Penelope, as we call her, has no idea that millions of people have heard her story in news reports and that around the world, people are advocating for her and the other 300 Chinese children whose adoptions have been left in limbo to be allowed to join their intended families.

We adopted our first daughter, Grace, from China in 2017 the day after she turned a year old. She left the kind but temporary caregivers of her orphanage and learned the meaning and permanency of family even as she learned to talk and toddle.

Delighted to add a precious daughter to our family of four beloved sons, we made plans to return to China to adopt another child––a waiting older girl who shared Grace’s birth culture and heritage. As a waiting child’s likelihood of finding a permanent home decreases precipitously with each year of age, we specifically wanted to welcome a child whose hope of a home might be running out.

We were officially matched as Penelope’s promised family in September 2019, when she was five years old. In the photos we received, her bright smile—despite her medical needs and long wait for a family—captured our hearts. We chose her English name, Penelope, because of the ancient Greek myth that told of a beautiful woman who faithfully persisted in hope of being united with her beloved. It seemed providential when we learned that the Chinese name given to her by her orphanage meant “morning light”—especially light that comes after a long night of waiting.

We completed the remainder of Penelope’s adoption process as quickly as we could, and it was approved bythe governments ofboth China and the US. When she turned six, we believed it was the last birthday she would celebrate without us. By January 2020, we had entered the final stages of the adoption process. She was told we would soon become her family and bring her home to the United States.

But then the pandemic struck. China paused adoption processing, making assurances that matches would be honored when health concerns resolved. Instead of welcoming Penelope into our arms the weekend we should have finalized her adoption, we met her virtually on a video call. Her caregiver who served as our translator said, “She has never had a mother or father before.” Although shy, she didn’t hesitate to call us “Mommy and Daddy.” Our bond grew through packages, letters, photos, and videos exchanged.

Yet more than four years later, we find ourselves still waiting to be united, uncertain whether the promise of family made to Penelope will be honored.

In September 2024, the US Department of State shared China’s decision to end its successful inter-country adoption program, leaving Penelope and roughly 300 other children who had already been matched with US families in limbo for years, perhaps never to experience the loving homes they were promised.

The news is dire because 98 percent of the more than 160,000 children in China living outside of a family’s care—a roughly equal mix of boys and girls—have complex medical needs, making them unlikely candidates for domestic adoption.

International adoption was determined to be in Grace’s best interests because she was born without her left hand and forearm. While disability is stigmatized in some cultures, she thrives in our family and is celebrated for her difference and adaptability in the US.

Penelope has a serious but manageable lifelong condition; if she receives good medical treatment and the emotional care a family can provide, we’re confident she’ll flourish as Grace has. The other children whose adoptions are pending live with spina bifida, Down syndrome, genetic disorders, spinal muscular atrophy, cardiac abnormalities, blindness, or other conditions, many of which have only become more pressing as their promised adoptions have been delayed.

More than the sum of symptoms listed in their files though, these children are precious individuals created in the image of God, of infinite worth, perfectly designed (Ps. 139:14–18). Whatever their physical needs, their great and universal need is for the love of families. Their prospective families recognize the privilege it would be to welcome them as sons and daughters.

As Ryan Hanlon, president and CEO of the National Council For Adoption, said, no one questions Beijing’s right to discontinue international adoptions going forward, but the children whose adoptions were already in process should be accommodated: “The adoptions that were happening to the U.S. were older children and children with medical special needs.”

If these children were being placed in caring, permanent families in China, that would be something we could celebrate. But both the US and China determined that, for these children, international adoption was and is their best chance for permanent families.

Beijing should reassure children like our Penelope, who had already been matched with families, that their adoptions will be finalized—rather than leaving them to languish in institutions and, at best, launch into adulthood without adequate support.

In a recent statement, President Xi Jinping pointed out that the China-US relationship is “one of the most important bilateral relations in the world” and expressed a commitment to pursue “win-win cooperation,” working “with the United States as partners and friends, which will not only benefit the two countries but also the world at large.”

Completing the nearly 300 pending adoptions between China and the US is a prime opportunity to achieve these goals. As one of the largest and most successful adoption programs in the world, the China-US adoption partnership thrived for decades as a bridge of friendship and humanitarian cooperation, placing 82,000 children in grateful American families and creating a person-to-person bond of goodwill between our nations.

This is why, earlier this month, 103 members of Congress sent a letter to President Biden in a rare act of bipartisan and bicameral unity, asking him to personally “act in the best interest of these children and families by urging the PRC to fulfill and uphold the commitment the country has made.”

While governments struggle to adequately support vulnerable children, adoption helps them flourish. Adoption can make a world of difference for one vulnerable child at a time. As part of Penelope’s adoption process, we promised to provide lifelong love, care, and support, and we have never given up hope that we might be allowed to keep that promise. The pain of another family lost isn’t what the children in adoption limbo deserve. Nor is it a fitting end to three decades of humanitarian cooperation between the US and China to secure homes for tens of thousands of children.

As parents, we follow the example of the shepherd who left the 99 to seek the one who was lost, believing that adoption can be a partial, if imperfect, answer to the brokenness that leaves children in need of families. We believe these particular children, whom we have loved and prayed for from a world away, were woven into our stories for a purpose.

Waiting children officially matched with carefully vetted and approved adoptive families shouldn’t spend birthday after birthday in institutions. This World Adoption Day, on our sweet Penelope’s birthday, China should honor the promises made to these children and make a way for them to come home.

Aimee Welch is a former journalist and an adoptive parent. The founder of Hope Leads Home, she has been a leading parent advocate for completing China adoptions since 2020.

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News

What Another Trump Presidency Means To Evangelicals Around the World

Compiled by CT Editors

Christian leaders from Nepal to Turkey greet the US election results with joy, grief, and indifference.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

As Americans headed to the polls Tuesday, the rest of the world watched to see who would become the 47th president of the United States. The election of Donald Trump affects many evangelical communities around the world in terms of foreign policy, foreign aid, religious freedom, and cultural trends. Nevertheless, Christian leaders in some countries noted that it didn’t make a difference to them who becomes the next president of the US.

CT asked 26 evangelical leaders around the world about their reaction to another Trump presidency and its practical impact on the situation of evangelicals in their countries. The responses are broken up by region: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, the Middle East, and Oceania. CT will add more responses as they come in.

AFRICA

Kenya

Nelson Makanda, president, Africa International University

On behalf of many like-minded evangelicals in Kenya, I congratulate the American people for electing Trump. We hope that his election will usher in a season where orthodox Christian beliefs are not frowned upon or criminalized by American state agencies.

We also hope that American institutions operating in Africa will freely engage with African people without pushing an immoral agenda. Africa wants to honor God and the laws of nature, and we hope that America under the president-elect will be tolerant of that. Our choices and freedoms should be respected.

We hope that our cultures and people will be treated as equal partners and deserving of mutual respect.

Nigeria

James Akinyele, secretary general, Nigeria Evangelical Fellowship

In light of Nigeria’s ongoing economic and political difficulties, this US election was not debated locally nearly as much as the prior two. For evangelicals, neither candidate was an easy option. Harris was considered more level-headed, but her strong support of abortion and LGBTQ rights made many uncomfortable. Trump’s moral stances resonated with our core evangelical convictions, but his own lack of morality and perceived white supremacy created some concerns. We hope he will become more open to immigration.

Some Nigerian Christian leaders said Trump’s victory is an answer to our prayers for a US president who will defend the Christian faith in Nigeria and around the world. Others said it should be accepted as God’s will, without positive or negative judgment. But just about everyone hopes he will become less controversial in his rhetoric and personal conduct. And many are sympathetic to his desire to protect America’s global interests, without being subservient to the rest of the world.

South Africa

Moss Ntlha, general secretary, Evangelical Alliance of South Africa

Trump’s win is a sad day for evangelicalism around the world. Prominent evangelicals in the US came out in full support of Trump, making it appear that to be Bible believing is to be Trump supporting. Their endorsement gives the impression that theological conservatism requires and leads to a right-wing political view that is dictatorial, opposes climate justice, sanctions genocide in the Holy Land, and approves what took place on January 6.

Many in South Africa who know the horrors of apartheid recognize how easily a populist politics that holds to a narrow vision of public morality can harm those on the margins. Trump already declared in his first term that African countries are “s—hole countries.” Lately, he has made it clear that when restored to the presidency, he would make sure that Israel has all it needs to “finish the job,” which many understand as the erasure of Palestinian existence.

We worry that having Trump in the White House will make it difficult to proclaim the gospel that “God so loved the world” that he sent Jesus to die for all, especially our Muslim neighbors. We worry that he will use the immense power of the US government to punish those who pursue foreign policies contrary to his own, such as South Africa for appealing to the International Court of Justice to adjudicate whether what we are witnessing in the Israel–Palestine conflict is genocide.

ASIA

Bangladesh

Philip Adhikary, chairman, Bangladesh Evangelical Alliance

The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency evokes mixed reactions. While Trump’s administration generally had a strong stance in favor of religious freedom, his foreign policies toward countries like Bangladesh were often pragmatic rather than overtly focused on the concerns of specific religious minorities. His “America First” approach and his support for religious liberty could signal both positive and challenging implications for Bangladeshi evangelicals.

However, US foreign aid, which sometimes comes with human rights conditions, might not dramatically shift in response to Trump’s priorities, especially if his administration prioritizes national interests over international human rights.

Practically, the impact of Trump’s presidency could include increased opportunities for religious NGOs in the form of aid. However, the rise of nationalist and anti-immigrant rhetoric in some Western countries during his tenure could embolden local opposition to evangelical efforts, potentially increasing societal pressure or persecution.

China

A house church pastor in China

Donald Trump’s presidency could impact Chinese Christians in a few key ways. His “America First” policy may lead to tighter visa controls, reducing Chinese students’ access to US education. This could be particularly challenging for Christian families in China who are homeschooling or sending their children to unregistered Christian schools. As attending college abroad is often their only option for higher education, these families may face difficult choices.

On the other hand, Chinese students who come to faith while living in the US may be more likely to return to China due to limited career opportunities in America, potentially strengthening local Christian communities.

Trump’s support from American evangelical groups, coupled with his controversial statements on democracy and freedom, may deepen divisions within Chinese Christian communities. His rhetoric and emphasis on national interests could provide ammunition for Chinese state media to further criticize Western democracy, potentially leading to more restrictions on religious freedoms in China.

If Trump imposes more tariffs or other economic pressure on China, that could lead to financial hardship for many families, thereby impacting Chinese Christians’ ability to support the church. However, such economic difficulties might also drive people to seek spiritual refuge, possibly increasing interest in the Christian faith.

India

Vijayesh Lal, general secretary, Evangelical Fellowship of India

I don’t expect many changes in the overall foreign policy trajectory under a new Trump administration, as India is a key strategic partner in balancing China’s growing influence in the region.

On issues like minority rights and religious freedom, it’s safe to assume Trump will not place as much pressure on India as a Democratic president probably would have. In fact, when visiting India during his previous term, he infamously praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s record on religious freedom. While the Trump administration may focus on religious freedom globally, it probably will not comment on the treatment of Christians and Muslims in India.

Many Christians in India and South Asia who lean Republican may welcome his return to office, but for the church in India, I don’t see any significant gains. The church in India doesn’t place its hopes in political leadership, whether in the US or in India.

Japan

Masanori Kurasawa, chair, Japan Lausanne Committee

I was disappointed that the election campaign was dominated by slander rather than policy debate. Trump’s discriminatory and unsubstantiated remarks about his opponents and immigrants was especially disappointing.

I don’t think Japanese evangelicals will be directly influenced by Trump. But we need to closely watch Trump’s policies in the coming months, which clearly express a vision of “America First.” Many Japanese Christians deeply repent of Japan’s Shinto-based nationalism and the church’s religious compromises during World War II. Thus, they are concerned about American nationalism and wary of American evangelicals sympathizing with its policies.

Nepal

Sher Bahadur A. C., general secretary, National Churches Fellowship of Nepal

The election of Donald Trump has brought a wave of optimism among Nepali Christians. For many, his victory is seen as good news, not only for the United States but also for Christian communities around the world.

Trump’s policies, which have shown a strong inclination to support religious freedom and global Christian causes, have made him popular among Nepali Christians. We hope that he will continue supporting Christians worldwide and stand with us in our efforts to practice our faith freely.

While we do not expect significant changes within Nepal, the global influence of the US government and the possibility of US diplomatic pressure if any actions are taken against Christians in our country could serve as a safeguard for religious minorities.

At the same time, the broader geopolitical dynamics must be considered. Trump’s administration has been known for its critical stance toward Communist governments, and Nepal is currently led by a Communist prime minister, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli. Trump also has a close relationship with India, while Nepal is more aligned with China. This could potentially create tensions between Nepal and the Trump administration if Nepal deepens its ties with Beijing.

Philippines

Noel Pantoja, national director, Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches

With joyful hearts, we celebrate the victory of Donald Trump in the recent elections, recognizing that God has ordained him to lead the US. This moment fills us with hope, as it signifies a renewed commitment to religious freedom, allowing individuals to express their faith without fear or restriction.

The Philippine church is currently opposing Philippine Senate and Congress bills on sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression; same-sex marriage; and abortion. If passed, these bills will hurt the church, schools, and businesses. All of the lobbyists are supported by US and Western LGBTQ advocates, so Trump’s stance on these issues and victory in the election encourages churches in the US as well as the Philippines.

We are hopeful about the positive impact this administration will have on foreign policy, fostering peace and strengthening relationships with nations that share values of democracy. It is a victory not just for America but for God-fearing people around the world, especially in Asia, where God’s light can shine brighter through his own divine leadership.

Sri Lanka

Noel Abelasan, national director, Every Home Crusade

Trump’s win could positively impact evangelical Christians in Sri Lanka by promoting religious freedom and possibly directing US aid toward faith-based programs. This focus on Christian principles may embolden Sri Lankan Christians and support initiatives aligned with US priorities.

However, a strong stance against China could complicate Sri Lanka’s diplomatic position, given China’s influence in the region, which may indirectly affect local evangelical groups. Overall, it may deepen solidarity among evangelicals globally, inspiring Sri Lankan Christians to feel more connected to a shared movement.

Taiwan

Andrew Chiang, pastor, Bilingual Community Church

I don’t think Trump’s presidency will impact religious freedom in Taiwan at all in the short term. Trump’s support for conservative evangelical causes doesn’t affect people in Taiwan, so it’s unlikely to trigger any backlash from the more secular parts of society. In terms of aid and foreign policy, both Trump and Biden have pursued a China-containment policy, which is to Taiwan’s benefit as long as they don’t go too far and trigger war.

Trump’s presidency will probably have a greater impact on cultural and religious trends. Conspiracy theories, end-times alarmism, and false prophecies that have been rampant in the US since Trump’s first presidency have also spread to Taiwan. This will likely continue under his second presidency. How the evangelical church in Taiwan will react is hard to predict, but in some circles, his election has prompted more reflection on public and political theology. The evangelical church in Taiwan may gain its own voice, independent of the US evangelical church, as a result of the chaos it witnesses on the other side of the Pacific.

EUROPE

Armenia

Craig Simonian, Caucasus region coordinator, World Evangelical Alliance’s Peace and Reconciliation Network

I believe that Trump’s win and the return of the Republican party to congressional leadership is unquestionably good for Armenia.

While few people outside of political circles are aware, the Republic of Armenia has been a centerpiece of American foreign policy for more than 30 years due to its strategic position bordering Russia, Iran, and Turkey. But only since Azerbaijan’s 2020 war to reclaim the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which we call Artsakh, has the importance of Armenia become known to a wider audience—especially among evangelicals. Christians in the Caucasus Mountain region have been persecuted for millennia.

Much of this awakening is a result of Republicans using congressional committees and government commissions to champion Armenia. It became the world’s first Christian nation in AD 301, and it remains in need of protection against hostile neighbors. By contrast, while Democrats have faithfully promoted recognition of the Armenian genocide over the last 33 years, they have accomplished little more.

Now, with Trump back in the White House, we can expect Christian Armenia to emerge more fully as a new ally for the promotion of Western democracy in the region. God willing, it will become a new center for world missions as well.

Russia

Vitaly Vlasenko, general secretary, Russian Evangelical Alliance

Trump was the worthiest candidate, and I am glad that he won. But the idea that he has a close relationship with Vladimir Putin is overblown. While Russians welcomed his first presidency, many were disappointed and are now suspicious. Still, his election gives us new hope that things can be different.

I hope that Trump will support international dialogue, peace, and freedom of religion. He promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. He is not God, but if this happens soon, I will be very happy. Yet because Russia is not a satellite state of the United States, it is very difficult to predict how we will be affected until Trump has selected his complete presidential cabinet. For now, I am encouraged.

It is difficult to know how Trump will impact our Russian evangelical community. Mutual support between congregations in the US and Russia depends primarily on personal and interchurch relationships, not on who sits in the White House. Historically, American authorities have not objected to our dialogue but instead have positively contributed to it. As Trump has the support of most US evangelicals, I hope his team will continue this good tradition.

Turkey

Ali Kalkandelen, former chair, Association of Protestant Churches in Turkey

American policies related to this region have flooded our nation with refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. If Israel expands its war toward Iran, it may threaten to involve Turkey. The Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict continues to fester, as it has been neglected by the US. And the Kurdish people have been seeking regional autonomy, confident that America backs them.

Our nation has been negatively affected politically and economically by these crises. We must pray for God’s mercy and wisdom for all world leaders. But Trump promises to change course and pursue peace in the region, which would be better and fairer for all. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan calls Trump “my friend,” and their relationship will likely strengthen our countries’ joint ties within NATO.

Although church members have suffered under the weight of these crises, they have also opened a new door for ministry. Many refugees have come to faith in Christ in Turkey, and our congregations include believers from Kurdish, Persian, and Arab backgrounds.

This spiritual transformation will continue and will strengthen the church. No American president can have a negative impact on this.

UK

Gavin Calver, CEO, Evangelical Alliance

We will once again have to respond to accusations from those who assume that British evangelicals marry politics and faith in the same way as those who carry the label of evangelical in the US. Politics and faith will always be connected to a degree, but the symbiotic relationship between one’s faith and one’s political persuasion, with evangelical often being perceived as a synonym for MAGA, has been hugely problematic for us in the UK.

In contrast, British evangelicals are by no means wedded to any political affiliation. Christians need to pray for and support their leaders, but they also need to take a stand against that which is wrong. Our primary loyalty must be to Jesus and not to a national leader.

I hope that the next Trump presidency may be different, that evangelicals in my country will not be wrongly assumed to be politically and nationalistically aligned, and that we can continue to be “good news” people in the UK.

Ukraine

Taras M. Dyatlik, engagement director, Scholar Leaders

I am deeply concerned about the potential impact of the US election results on our country’s defense against Russia’s unprovoked aggression. Ukraine relies heavily on US aid and foreign policy decisions, and I am afraid that a change in leadership could affect this crucial support.

It is troubling for me to see some Western evangelical leaders embracing narratives that minimize or justify Russian aggression, often stemming from sophisticated Russian propaganda campaigns. The notion that “the war will stop when Ukraine stops defending itself or when the West stops supporting Ukraine” rather than “the war will and should be stopped by making Russia leave Ukrainian territories” reveals a disturbing misunderstanding of reality.

The weaponization of Christian rhetoric and values for political purposes in both Russia and the US is also deeply concerning for me. When Christian values become too closely aligned with political powers, they are often distorted and misused to justify actions that harm the vulnerable.

I pray that regardless of US leadership and policies, the international community will continue supporting Ukraine’s fight for existence, democratic values, and human dignity.

LATIN AMERICA

Brazil

Cassiano Luz, executive director, Brazilian Evangelical Alliance

Donald Trump’s reelection carries significant implications for Brazilian evangelicals.

Trump is considered an ally and friend of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, who had widespread evangelical support. Convicted of political abuse of power and media misuse, Bolsonaro is currently ineligible for reelection in 2026 and faces investigations for money laundering, vaccine record falsification, and incitement of the 2022 insurrection that targeted the National Congress of Brazil and other government buildings in Brasília. Bolsonaro and his supporters celebrate Trump’s reelection, believing American political pressure might reverse his ineligibility in Brazil.

I believe one priority for us as the Brazilian evangelical church is to understand the factors shaping our ideological choices and positions. While many Brazilian evangelicals celebrate Trump’s reelection as being aligned with gospel principles, I prefer to echo the words of Ronaldo Lidório: The gospel is neither Democrat nor Republican; it aligns neither with Harris nor with Trump. The gospel is Jesus. “Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul” (1 Pet. 2:11).

Chile

Christian Maureira, general director, Martin Bucer Seminary

As an evangelical Christian in Chile, I view the election of Donald Trump positively, primarily because he has committed to preserving the Christian faith. Every election is a testament to God’s sovereignty, and the history of the church shows that God-fearing leaders contribute to eternal purposes. I hope that his administration will honor the principles found in the Holy Scriptures.

In areas like religious freedom, economy, social assistance, and foreign policy, Chilean evangelicals are unlikely to see major changes. Chile is geographically distant from the US and maintains stable diplomatic relations with the country.

Consequently, in Chile’s case, the election of Trump might resonate more in terms of cultural changes—such as the pro-choice movement or the US’s progressive agenda—as we know that laws passed in the US often have an influence here.

Mexico

Rubén Enriquez Navarrete, secretary, Confraternidad Evangélica de Mexico

Donald Trump has won the presidential election in the United States once again. While he may not be beyond reproach, he is a person who recognizes the origins and principles of the US as rooted in the God of the Bible. I believe God has allowed this for two reasons: to give churches greater opportunity to spread the gospel and to encourage reflection among those who have drifted away from God.

The migrant issue is a top concern for Mexican churches, and the outcome of the election will undoubtedly influence it. Mexican churches are organizing efforts to support migrants, especially at the border. For us, this isn’t a problem but an opportunity. Although many arrive here as nonbelievers, they often convert and, upon returning to their home countries, either share the gospel or support established churches.

For Mexican Christians, there isn’t a significant impact—only a sense of pride in knowing that in the US, evangelical pastors’ opinions are valued.

NORTH AMERICA

Canada

David Guretzki, president and CEO, The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada

Because of Canada’s geographical proximity, major political events in the US have a greater bearing on our political and social climate. For instance, when the US Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, abortion became a hot topic again in Canada and led to promises by our government to ensure Canada wouldn’t go the same route.

There was much angst on both sides of the abortion debate, even though absolutely nothing had changed in our legal context. The overturning of Roe v. Wade stirred up in pro-life supporters a renewed desire to see new laws enacted, while pro-choice supporters sought to allow unfettered access to abortion.

Though there are always comparisons between US and Canadian politics, we seek to remind evangelical Christians that Canada’s historical, religious, social, and political context is unique.

The EFC is grateful that the US election was carried out freely and without violence or loss of life. Scripture enjoins us to pray for all those in authority, regardless of their political affiliation. In this regard, we ask all Jesus followers to observe this exhortation while demonstrating loving forbearance to those whose political views may differ from their own.

MIDDLE EAST

Egypt

Michael El Daba, Middle East and North Africa Regional Director for the Lausanne Movement

As the world awaited the results of the US election, many Egyptian Christians were in prayer for peace. War surrounds our borders in Gaza, Libya, and Sudan, and our government has added to the problem with policy decisions that have led to inflation and unprecedented debt. Tourists are afraid to visit, while refugees have found safe haven here.

Whether for local human rights or regional peace and stability, the Biden administration has done little to help. We do not expect Trump to be much different—at least as concerns the Egyptian people. He will pursue a highly transactional approach with regional allies, including Egypt, that emphasizes arms sales, business deals, and security cooperation, while largely ignoring values-based political and diplomatic engagement. Trump will probably neglect even gentle admonitions on human rights and political freedoms.

On a positive note, the robust American evangelical backing of Trump may help Egyptian evangelicals have a stronger local voice. If Trump pursues an agenda of international religious freedom, we can contribute to the campaign for minority rights. This might further open the public square for Christian political participation and overcome administrative hurdles in the construction of church buildings.

Iran

Mehrdad Fatehi, founder and executive director, Pars Theological Centre

Note: Fatehi is from Iran and currently based in the UK.

For most Iranians, a Trump presidency is great news. Trump put the Iranian regime under pressure through sanctions, weakening the regime economically. Under his leadership, US forces killed Qassem Soleimani, the second most powerful man in Iran, who spent billions of dollars supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian proxies. Many Iranians hope these tough policies will continue.

Democrats, by contrast, have appeased the Iranian regime, helping it stay in power. In shaking hands with Islamist leaders, they close their eyes to the undermining of human rights. But there is hope in the eyes of most Iranians that Trump will help Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu attack Iran so that the Iranian nation can overthrow the government when it is at its weakest.

The Islamic regime is scared right now, wondering how Trump will deal with Iran. But there is also a general fear of war—which will bring harm to the country and may not result in the outcome people hope for. Most Iranian believers, who come from a Muslim background, likely share the above outlook. Their situation of persecution is harsh enough that any response by Trump would not make things worse.

For many, Trump gives Iranians the best chance for positive change.

Israel

Danny Kopp, chairman, Evangelical Alliance Israel

Many pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian evangelicals who are otherwise opposed to each other on US policy in the region are ironically united in their hope that a Trump presidency will be an improvement over the Biden administration. And yet if there’s one thing that can be said with confidence about Trump, it is that he will be unpredictable. He is just as capable of backing a dramatic escalation in the use of force against Israel’s enemies as he is of demanding a rapid cessation of hostilities that some would consider a capitulation.

In general, Messianic Jews don’t have any expectations that Trump will specifically address their internal issues as Messianic Jewish citizens of Israel. They are too small a demographic for him to form a specific policy toward. Like their fellow citizens, they are almost entirely consumed with how Trump’s administration will or will not support Israel in its current seven-front war.

A second Trump administration may indeed embark on a welcome effort to expand the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia and perhaps even Palestine in establishing peace agreements with Israel. However, if the United States abandons its allies in Ukraine and Southeast Asia to Russian and Chinese aggression, respectively, it will only embolden that very axis that—chiefly through Iran and its proxies—has been the main instigator of violence in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.

Lebanon

Wissam al-Saliby, president, 21Wilberforce Global Freedom Center

Note: Saliby is from Lebanon and currently based in the US.

The people of my home country historically do not see much difference between the policies of Republicans and Democrats concerning Israel and Lebanon. However, many Lebanese in Lebanon and in the US supported the election of Donald Trump because they prefer the “unknown” of his presidency over the current administration’s policies, which have permitted the war in the Middle East to continue and to expand.

Regardless, this region is being emptied of its Christian population because of war—first Iraq, then Syria, and now Lebanon. Many of my friends and family have left. And the Palestinian Christians in the West Bank continue to lose their lands and livelihood to Israeli settlers.

We urgently need a peace process that addresses the genuine grievances and the injustice at the root of the conflict, and we’ve never had that to date.

Furthermore, the destruction of Gaza and now of large parts of Lebanon has badly eroded US credibility. If the US administration reached out to a Muslim-majority country to call out the persecution of Christians in that country, the answer they would hear is “First, stop the war in Gaza; then, come back and ask us about our own human rights record.”

Palestine

Jack Sara, president, Bethlehem Bible College

US policy has had a complex and often contentious influence here, with decisions from the White House affecting our daily lives and futures in profound ways.

Trump’s support for policies favoring Israeli expansion and his disregard for the rights of Palestinians raise concerns. This could mean further marginalization for Palestinians and an even more challenging environment for Christians striving to live out their faith in this volatile context.

Trump has received significant support from many evangelicals, despite policies that appear to contradict the core values of justice, mercy, and humility that Scripture calls us to uphold. I suspect that much of this support is rooted in a misguided theological and political ideology—Christian Zionism—that sees unquestioning allegiance to the state of Israel as a biblical mandate. Many evangelicals may view Trump as the protector of Israel, perhaps overlooking his former administration’s disregard for the rights of Palestinians and the broader consequences for peace in the Middle East.

However, I hold on to hope and remain prayerful. I hope the Trump administration might work to stop the genocidal war in Gaza as well as the ground invasion and widespread bombing campaign in Lebanon. I hope Trump will work toward a peace that genuinely respects the rights and dignity of all people in the Holy Land and the region.

OCEANIA

Australia

Simon Smart, executive director, Centre for Public Christianity

On one level, another Trump presidency doesn’t have much bearing on evangelicals in Australia, which has a very different religious landscape compared to the US. But to the extent that it plays into a Christian desire to garner as much political power as you can to achieve your ends, it may not be helpful in the long run. History shows that frequently—but not always—Christian faith and political power don’t mix well. That’s a lesson that seems hard to learn.

Australia is a more secular country than the United States. For those of us trying to promote the public understanding of the Christian faith here, the now decades-long association of the term evangelical with a brand of politics that the majority of Australians view negatively hasn’t helped the cause. We need to engage with some perceptions that are impediments to a constructive conversation about faith.

Reporting by Angela Lu Fulton, Bruce Barron, Franco Iacomini, Isabel Ong, Jayson Casper, and Surinder Kaur

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AFRICA

Kenya

Nigeria

South Africa

ASIA

Bangladesh

China

India

Japan

Nepal

Philippines

Sri Lanka

Taiwan

EUROPE

Armenia

Russia

Turkey

UK

Ukraine

LATIN AMERICA

Brazil

Chile

Mexico

NORTH AMERICA

Canada

MIDDLE EAST

Egypt

Iran

Israel

Lebanon

Palestine

OCEANIA

Australia

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