‘The Chosen’ Breaks Record for Most-Translated TV Show

The popular series about Jesus is now available in 50 languages with plans for 550 more.

Courtesy of The Chosen

The film was familiar but the language was new for Come and See CEO Stan Jantz.

As he sat in a theater in Warsaw, he looked around the room and saw people laughing and crying in the same places he had laughed and cried when he watched The Chosen, the popular streaming series that tells the story of Jesus through the eyes of the disciples. That was the moment of truth for Jantz. The real test for a translation—going beyond accuracy alone—is whether it connects with human hearts.

“Translation also has to be beautiful,” Jantz told CT. “It’s an art as much as it is a science.”

Come and See has dubbed or subtitled The Chosen into 50 languages so far. The group has plans to do the same for 550 more languages.

No TV show has ever been translated into that many languages. Few shows are dubbed more than a handful of times, even in an era where viewership of translated programs has dramatically increased, thanks to streaming services’ global business plans. Netflix can dub shows into about three dozen languages but mostly works in French, German, Polish, Italian, Turkish, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Some very popular shows are remade in another language, like Suits, which has Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian versions.

Baywatch, starring David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, has been translated 34 times. That was the record, until Come and See started turning out dubbed versions of The Chosen.

There’s not a lot of profit in dubbing, so for-profit efforts will only go so far. A nonprofit like Come and See can do more.

The group wants to reach 1 billion people with the show, so The Chosen can connect people to Jesus and bring them to faith. Come and See has partnered with The Chosen to translate the program for audiences that would otherwise never get to watch Jesus walk on water, heal the sick, and preach the Good News in their own language.

“It’s a huge challenge,” said Jantz, “but we’re finding it to be a goal that is so very important.”

The dubbed versions of The Chosen are currently available on an app. It takes Come and See between three and five months to translate a season of the show into a new language. The group partners with other organizations that specialize in translation to speed up the process.

As with Bible translation projects, Come and See has prioritized the most-spoken languages, where a translation of the show could have an impact on the largest number of people.

“But there are what I would call exceptions,” Jantz said.

One of the first 50 translations, for example, was into Malagasy, which is spoken by about 25 million people in Madagascar and the Comoros. That dub job was prioritized at the request of Madagascar’s president, Andry Rajoelina.

Rajoelina watched the show and wanted everyone in his country to be able to see it, Jantz said. It’s typical for TV to be subtitled for viewers in the African island country, but many people in Madagascar cannot read. Rajoelina wanted those people to understand The Chosen too.

The Chosen was dubbed into Malagasy in 2023. It is believed to be the first show ever dubbed in the language. The impact was powerful.

“The effect goes on to this day,” Jantz said. “It’s been almost a year since that was done, but we still get stories of how they’re taking these translated episodes into remote places. It’s really exciting to see.”

The most-watched translation of The Chosen, so far, is Brazilian Portuguese. The first two episodes of season 4 were shown on 1,100 screens across Brazil and viewed by 275,000 people.

“Our prayer is that this series will be used by God to have a meaningful impact around the world and introduce many to the hope that is only found in Jesus,” Rick Dempsey Sr., a vice president at Come and See, told CT in an email.

Translation is a challenge, though. Come and See not only has to assess the number of people who might want to watch The Chosen in another language but whether the technology is available in an area for people to be able to watch. Dempsey called this the “digital vitality” of a language.

When Come and See decides to translate The Chosen into a language, they seek out pastors, Bible translators, and Bible scholars who speak that language.

“Whenever the English script includes a verbatim quote from Scripture, it’s crucial to ensure we refer to the corresponding passage in the vernacular Bible translation,” Dempsey said. “We document the book, chapter, and verse from the Bible where a quote comes from to help ensure consistency.”

They also have to find native speakers and language experts to help with English idioms. Phrases like sitting ducks or train of thought—or even born again—can be easily misunderstood if not handled with care, he said.

One of the experts who has helped is Imed Dabbour, a Christian journalist and poet from Tunisia. Dabbour started watching The Chosen with his children during a COVID-19 lockdown and loved it.

“The show’s unique Christian message speaks volumes, especially through its genuine depiction of Jesus and the compelling and unique story of Matthew, which personally resonated with me,” he said. “When I stumbled upon a plan for translating the show into Arabic, I felt compelled to reach out and take action.”

Dabbour, like Jantz, believes that accuracy is really important but that the test of translation is capturing linguistic subtleties and connecting with people on an emotional level.

“We strive to effectively convey the intended message to a Middle Eastern audience while respecting cultural nuances. It’s a delicate balance,” he said. “Bringing the show to diverse audiences in their mother tongue is a powerful way to touch hearts and ignite curiosity, potentially leading viewers to explore Scripture further.”

Kyle Young, head of The Chosen’s marketing and distribution department, said the show has now reached 200 million viewers. The viewership outside the US is now larger than its American audience. It is especially popular in Brazil, Mexico, India, Poland, and the Philippines.

“We have seen an explosion of The Chosen all around the world,” he told CT. “If the translation work was poor, we would certainly not see that level of engagement. That is a huge aspect of the success internationally.”

The Chosen is expected to conclude after three more seasons. The translation of the show into 550 more languages will go on for years after that, Jantz said. For him, it’s worthwhile, because the show is more than a show. The people who watch it could become not just fans but followers of Jesus.

- More from Adam MacInnis

News

‘Offering Everything They Have’: How Small Churches Are Saving Lives in Brazil’s Floods

Franco Iacomini

In the country’s most secular state, tiny congregations have made a big impact by their disaster response.

A resident walks through a flooded street as people are evacuated from their homes in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Stringer / Getty / Edits by CT

For weeks, Tárik Rodriguez had been working on bringing a guest preacher and worship leader from across the country to help his church celebrate its third anniversary. In 2021, Rodriguez and a small team launched Viela da Graça Igreja in Novo Hamburgo, a small city in Brazil’s most southern province, Rio Grande do Sul.

Then, it started raining.

The floods have done more than interrupt the small Reformed congregation’s celebratory plans. They’ve devastated the community. The storms that began at the end of April struck Rio Grande do Sul’s most densely populated areas and have killed at least 116 people. Around 130 people are still missing. The high water has closed roads and even the airport, which has grounded flights until May 30. As of Friday, May 10, nearly 400,000 people have been displaced from their homes and 70,772 are in public shelters.

Some of those have found their way to Viela da Graça, which is located on higher ground and has been largely protected from a water breach. Since May 4, Rodriguez and members of the 75-person congregation have been hosting around 50 people in a two-bathroom, 3,500-square-foot building.

“As Christians, we needed to open our doors,” Rodriguez says. “And that’s what we did.”

Beyond the bathroom constraints, the situation has been less than ideal. There are frequent power cuts (1.2 million people have been affected by outages) and the building has lost access to both running and potable water because the sanitation company cannot treat the dirty floodwaters. A nearby residential condominium, which gets its water from a well, has provided drinking water and showers.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C6nEjVZt2AB/

Though Brazil’s evangelicals are known worldwide for their megachurches, flood relief efforts have highlighted the impact that small churches can have in serving their communities in the country’s most secular state.

“It’s like the offering of the widow in Luke 21,” said Egon Grimm Berg, executive secretary of the Baptist Convention of Rio Grande do Sul. “They are giving everything they have.”

Or sometimes, even more.

Igreja em Reforma, a congregation founded three-and-a-half years ago by pastor Emanuel Malinoski in Quarto Distrito, a trendy neighborhood in Porto Alegre, has 80 members. When the nearby Guaíba River overflowed last week, it flooded the first floor of the church building. The water could take weeks to recede.

Nevertheless, since last Sunday, the church has been cooking, cleaning, and providing donations for 82 people in an improvised shelter, offered up by a church family in the neighboring city of Canoas, that was a warehouse until a month ago. Now the state’s civil defense is sending flood refugees there.

“None of [those being served] are evangelical,” said Malinoski, who was in the church building attempting to save furniture when the waters started rising. “We are giving an important testimony to our community.”

Rio Grande do Sul has one of the lowest percentages of evangelicals among Brazil’s 26 states. The capital, Porto Alegre, had 11.6 percent evangelicals according to the most recent census in 2010, the lowest proportion among all 27 Brazilian capitals. Most churches have fewer than 80 members, according to Ricardo Lebedenco, the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Ijuí.

Located 300 miles west of Porto Alegre—ground zero for the disaster—Lebedenco’s 800-member congregation is sending supplies to distribution hubs in the city of 1.3 million.

Though they are just one of numerous organizations sending resources to victims, many secular leaders are encouraging people to prioritize working with churches when it comes to donating and distributing clothes, bottled water, food, and money.

“They say we are more organized and more mobilized,” said Tiago Gomes de Mello, pastor of Igreja Batista Boas Novas in Novo Hamburgo.

This is the second tragedy that Gomes de Mello has witnessed firsthand. In 2014, a storm’s strong winds damaged the church to the point where the building had to be rebuilt. During the reconstruction process and then later during the COVID-19 pandemic, the previously 500-person church lost 90 percent of its members. Gomes de Mello took over as pastor in 2022 with a mission to revitalize the now 51-person church.

Around 5 a.m. on Friday, May 3, he began receiving requests for help. He left his home in Porto Alegre to open the church to two families—only to find he couldn’t return.

Water had flooded the streets and surrounded his home. His wife, Thaís, and their children Ester, 16, and Josué, just over a year old, were rescued by boat on Monday and taken to a relative’s home. Gomes de Mello finally reunited with his family on Tuesday, but only after four days of relentless work at the church, which now houses 45 people.

The sacrificial service of churches stems from people’s love of God, says Marco Silva, pastor of the Primeira Igreja Batista de Montenegro, which sits 55 miles from Porto Alegre and has been sending support to smaller churches in the region.

“When we prepare a meal, when we go out by boat to take food, when we fold blankets to take to the displaced, each of these things is an act of worship,” he said.

For church members, then, the focus is not on suspended worship services but on the opportunity to put their “theology into practice,” said Rodriguez. On Tuesday, the Viela da Graça pastor recorded his sermon from his living room and will upload it to YouTube for people to watch on Sunday. It will be a condensed program, with two praise songs, announcements, and a sermon on Jude 20–21, verses that have served as his personal reference in these difficult times: “But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.”

Igreja Batista Boas Novas is one of the few churches in the affected region that has managed to hold in-person services. In fact, they have even expanded their number. Gomes de Mello has preached on Sunday, Saturday, and Wednesday.

On Sunday, the message was about Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from?”

Many of those attending were aware that the weather forecast for the region was calling for more rain and that temperatures would be continuing to drop as winter begins in a few weeks in one of the coldest areas of the country.

“The church knows that our help comes from the Lord,” said Gomes de Mello, who took the opportunity to do an altar call at the service. “And after the rain comes the harvest.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

Culture

Rage Against the Apple Machine

Paul J. Pastor

The controversial iPad ad proves that technology can indeed flatten—or crush—what is real.

The Apple Ad, Crush!

Screenshot from Youtube

A recent advertisement from Apple for the new iPad Pro has somehow managed to existentially disturb me. Titled “Crush!” it shows an ominous hydraulic press above a platform filled with symbols of humanity, creativity, and joy: a metronome, guitar, classical statue, piano, analog cameras, books, paint, and more.

The metronome starts, and the press descends to Sonny & Cher’s “All I Need Is You,” slowly obliterating everything in high-def slow motion, before rising again to reveal only a “thinner than ever” iPad Pro. “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create,” Apple CEO Tim Cook posted on the social platform X.

I am not alone in my revulsion. Actors Hugh Grant and Justine Bateman join me, as do apparently thousands of vocal people on the Internet and what appears to be the entire nation of Japan. The backlash, particularly from the “creatives” that Apple was courting for their product, was so pronounced that the company issued a rare apology, saying they had “missed the mark.”

But what mark did they miss? More than missing just the tastes of their buyers, they missed the mark of reality—both of the creative process and of the goodness of the embodied nature that is essential to our humanity.

I see why Apple produced the ad. There is tremendous economic incentive for tech corporations to replace previous, more embodied experiences and tools. Apple Music will never scratch like the fragile grooves of a vinyl record (also, it contains most of the recorded music in the world). GarageBand can’t go out of tune (and its digital “instruments” can mimic the entire orchestra). One can “paint” all day on the iPad without needing to wash the brushes. In half the space taken up by a paperback, a little tablet can hold libraries.

There are many ways in which the connectivity of contemporary life has, I dare say, blessed me (I watched “Crush!” on the screen of my old iPhone, after all). But it matters how sensitive we are to the incursions of the digital and the disembodied into our lives. For humans, the intimate and physical knowledge of our bodies in their relation to creation must be part of any real creative endeavor (even in the more abstract disciplines such as creative writing). We lose our connection to the embodied world to our deep loss.

How could the binary code of digital brass even remotely replicate the way Louis Armstrong’s lips, alive with blood, knew the mouthpiece of his trumpet—like the one pulverized in that hydraulic press?

There will be no replacement for the balanced weight of a piano key under your pinky finger, nor for the texture of a bronze by Rodin in a rainy sculpture garden, nor for the scratch of a fountain pen on decent stationary—a pen you have used so much that it has begun to flex for the unique contours of your handwriting.

This connected way of living, as Wendell Berry would say, “all turns on affection.” I don’t think this is just quaint sentimentality. I have spent my career writing and working with writers. My wife, Emily, is a classically trained oil painter. We will testify that good limitations, “friction,” and difficulty define the creative process. You know the practice is working when you are wrestling, painfully, with something larger than yourself.

The essential human core to art is intimately related to the limitations of the artist. These limits, because they are limits, allow for fruitful negativity. There are so many things we cannot do, and it is in the engagement of these limitations that real art arises. It is there that real love arises. When it comes to real creativity, easy is a four-letter word.

South Korean–born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han addresses this in two influential monographs, titled Saving Beauty and The Burnout Society. For Han, contemporary life is characterized by a lack of negativity, a quality he calls being “smooth.”

Smooth culture, while possessing superficial attraction and visual appeal, does not have the capacity to be beautiful. Beauty requires elements that are foreign to those perceiving it, and those elements are known because of their “roughness,” their negativity. The smooth thing is not capable of being truly known. It can only be perceived as a reflective surface. For Han, this means that so-called “art” produced in a smooth culture is incapable of being loved. The only way that one can relate to it is with a “like.”

In this way, we move from a culture of reality to a culture of simulacrum. The illusion is excellent. Often, smooth art can have the appearance of being more attractive, pleasant, and frictionless. But it is cheap, and it cheapens us to be close to it. Our engagement with the creative act becomes defined by endless positivity and the illusion of power. Apple, the very icon of smooth culture, wishes me to believe it can crush all of the painful, fruitful, human, good struggle into an iPad.

Our culture of consumption has, in the past 40 years, revealed itself with increasing clarity to be part of a social and spiritual phenomenon that poses a challenge not only to Christianity but to the traditional ways of human life that have defined us for the extent of historical memory.

Writer and recent Christian convert Paul Kingsnorth has brilliantly termed this phenomenon “the Machine,” whose goal, he says, “is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream: to become gods.” He continues,

We are increasingly unable to escape our total absorption by this thing, and we are reaching the point where its control over nature, both wild and human, is becoming unstoppable. … Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity. We are not made by the world now; we make it.

Kingsnorth’s Machine has gained tremendous momentum since the rise of digital technology, and we have entered what I have begun to call the “Age of Pretend.” Never in history has our technological capacity to create illusion been so powerful. The results are everywhere.

The quality of pretend dominates entertainment (CGI and digital shortcuts have hollowed the film and music industries), cultural conversation (gender debates are defined by pretending away unwelcome realities), and even money (both today’s dollar and the Bitcoin are fundamentally currencies of make-believe). This pretending is the enemy of art (which is concerned with revealing the interior order and beauty of creation) and the enemy of true imagination, which goes outward into the world with curiosity instead of attempting to rule the world by means of the dominating self.

Instead of encountering a world larger than ourselves, able to kill us or to be loved by us precisely because of its otherness, we have begun to live in bubbles of illusion. If we want something, we pretend until it happens. Our contemporary illusions are invariably safe (unlike reality, they offer no immediate threat to us) and easy (difficulty is dealt with either in the past or in the future). And all along the way, in the contemporary world, the pretending is monetized.

In the end, it will be everywhere. We will never have to be alone with our thoughts. We will never have to hurt to make something. We will never have to stop smiling. We will pretend until we die.

The Greek mythological character Narcissus, entranced by his image in the smooth water, stared at his reflection until he died. This is the end of all self-obsession. Pretend is wonderful, until the real lungs need real air. You cannot breathe in the land of pretend.

The Christian vision of the essential goodness of the body; of the essential quality of the human spirit as creative; of a rich philosophy of art that claims we uncover and reveal reality, rather than making it; of inheriting joyfully the great Western tradition of art and literature —all these ought to ground an honest revulsion at any attempts to promote the pretend as a replacement for the real.

In the magical Age of Pretend, you can be anything you want to be. It’s not about art in the land of pretend. It’s about the artist. About you. It was always about you. That black screen, before you turned it on, was a mirror. It will never stop being a mirror. And like Narcissus, we will be in danger of drowning in it.

The Apple ad was not just an ad. It was a visceral and violent statement of belief claiming the “goodness” of the Machine, the “beauty” of the smooth, and the conquering of reality by the pretend. It is all a lie, and of far sadder and smaller dimensions than meet the eye. Because the truth is that there is much joy, and life, and time, and gift, and goodness symbolically set beneath that crushing press.

We ought, in the name of Jesus, the embodied Word, to speak up with strength and gentleness to rebuke those who would crush the real world flat, and to invite them out of the suffocating land of pretend back into the rich goodness of their rough, painful, beautiful human lives.

Reality, the holy natural habitat of the human, is worth it.

Paul J. Pastor is senior acquisitions editor for Zondervan, contributing editor for Christianity Today’s Ekstasis, and author of several books, most recently Bower Lodge: Poems.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece misidentified Louis Armstrong.

- More from Paul J. Pastor

News

Wire Story

Grace College Professor Terminated Following Facebook Campaign

Kathryn Post – Religion News Service

Matthew Warner, who had tweeted about gay marriage, is the latest in a string of Christian college faculty who have lost their jobs after being accused of theological misalignment.

Matthew Warner

Chinges E. Sabol / Grace College & Seminary

With glowing performance reviews and above-average student evaluations, by most measures Matthew Warner’s first year as a communications professor at Grace College was a triumph.

But he spent most of that first year knowing it could be his last. After four months on the job, Warner was informed by the school’s president, Drew Flamm, that the board had “come to the conclusion that we don’t think it works out to move forward,” according to a recording obtained by Religion News Service.

Warner’s termination is the latest in a string of professor terminations at Christian colleges seemingly tied to clashes over narrowing and often unspoken political and theological criteria.

While Flamm didn’t specify the reasons for Warner’s dismissal, it was preceded by an online termination campaign clear about its goals. Launched by conservative influencers and Grace College stakeholders, the campaign demanded Warner’s removal due to his social media posts about LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, and critiques of the GOP. Almost all the posts predated Warner’s employment at the college.

Grace College declined to answer questions about Warner, saying it was a personnel matter. “Dr. Matt Warner fulfilled his agreement for the year. Grace College wishes Dr. Warner well in his future endeavors,” Norm Bakhit, Grace College’s chief officer of human resources, told RNS in a statement. Flamm did not offer further comment.

Warner and his wife said they both left behind jobs and sold their home in metro Detroit to move with their three kids to Warsaw, Indiana, for Warner’s job at Grace. It was his dream position, they said, and noted that they gave up 60 percent of their income for him to take it.

Warner was eager to work with colleagues he described as “world class,” and quickly became known for his interactive teaching style and enthusiastic participation in department events, according to student evaluations and interviews with faculty. Early on, administrators tapped him to be a faculty mentor to first-year students.

Then, in October, Warner learned there was a group of local moms calling for him to be fired. Warner traced the outcry back to a Facebook post by Evan Kilgore, a Grace alum and onetime employee who captured screenshots of Warner’s past tweets, which included such phrases as “I support gay marriage,” “My pronouns are he/they,” “Tucker Carlson is fascist,” and “When Christendom is conservative it ceases to be transformative.”

A former Turning Point USA ambassador and now faith-based political commentator, Kilgore told RNS he posted because “parents might want to be aware of somebody who has influence over their child with these beliefs.”

Kilgore said he was originally tipped off about Warner’s posts by Monica Boyer, a Grace College parent and local political organizer. While Kilgore’s post clarified that he was not calling for Warner’s termination, Boyer took a different approach.

“I am OFFICIALLY calling on Grace College to fire this professor IMMEDIATELY,” Boyer wrote on Facebook. “The devil probably shouldn’t mess with moms who fight for their kids,” she wrote the same day, adding that moms were driving around campus, praying.

Warner proactively met with supervisors as Boyer’s repeated demands gained traction among her nearly 8,000 Facebook followers. But initial conversations weren’t reassuring. Flamm and Bakhit, the chief human resources officer, told Warner he wasn’t yet a faculty member because the board hadn’t ratified him. Now, the board was considering voting against Warner’s ratification, a move that would end his employment.

Warner, who distinguishes between his support of people’s civil rights and his theological convictions, said he had no qualms with the school’s faith standards or lifestyle commitments. Affiliated with Charis Fellowship, a theologically conservative network of churches with roots in German pietism, Grace College requires all faculty to sign a lifestyle commitment that affirms marriage as between one man and one woman and bans homosexual behavior.

“They’ve created a caricature of me based on taking a very small number of social media posts out of context,” Warner said. “I was treated from the beginning as a threat or liability. And nobody at any time had a conversation with me about what I believe, or what I’m willing to do to support the college.”

The news that he wasn’t already a faculty member also came as a shock.

“Most faculty here seemed very surprised to learn that two months after they moved here and started their jobs, they technically were still not employees,” one faculty member, who requested not to be named, told RNS.

In mid-October, Flamm offered Warner the option to voluntarily resign, and, alternatively, outlined a “potential pathway forward” that involved meeting regularly with Flamm and other administrators to restore trust before the board’s ratification vote.

But the “path forward” never materialized, according to Warner, who had emailed Bakhit asking for a breakdown of the process. Bakhit told him there were no specific steps. Warner met with some administrators but not with Flamm.

Things came to a head on December 7, when Flamm told Warner the board had voted not to ratify him. Bakhit offered Warner $60,000 for his voluntary resignation and a confidentiality agreement that included a nondisclosure agreement clause, an offer Warner eventually refused, in part so he could finish out the school year. Though Flamm didn’t provide rationale for the board’s decision, Bakhit told Warner it was due to the “tone and tenor” of his social media posts.

“The fit isn’t because of your theology, the fit is more about … how you’ve come across in the past, and the concern, or the confidence that it wouldn’t happen again in the future,” Bakhit said in a recording obtained by RNS.

Meanwhile, many Grace College employees said they felt in the dark about Warner’s departure.

“It feels like it’s only a matter of time before I or anyone else cross an invisible line we didn’t know was there, and are determined to not be ‘missionally aligned,’” one Grace College employee told RNS.

Cliff Staton, director of Grace College’s school of arts and sciences partnership programs, said he wondered, if Warner didn’t fit at Grace College, did he?

“In a low-trust culture, you start thinking, I must be at risk too,” said Staton. “That was pervasive across faculty. Especially because there was no definitive language around the ‘why.’”

In the spring, students tried to organize a petition and a protest vouching for Warner but were unable to secure the administration’s approval. Students are disappointed in Grace for not saying anything publicly about the situation and “caving to outside pressure,” one student told RNS.

As Christian colleges vie for a dwindling number of incoming students, many are struggling to navigate the chasm between the convictions of conservative stakeholders and those of their more theologically, politically, and racially diverse faculty and student bodies.

In many cases, precarious finances have led schools to prioritize the former. Last year, English professors at Taylor University and Palm Beach Atlantic University were dismissed after receiving alumni, donor, and parental criticism for their teachings on racial justice, though both had been teaching on that topic for over a decade.

Matthew Bonzo, who has taught philosophy at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for 26 years, told RNS he was pushed out after refusing to sign an oath of loyalty committing unwavering support to the president and his policies. Even after pushback led to the oath being dropped, Bonzo said he was notified that his position was being eliminated.

Bonzo told RNS he’s seeing many Christian colleges attempt to shield students from conversations about race and gender due to fear of undermining students’ faith.

“The thing that strikes me is the willingness of boards and administration to kind of alter the process to achieve the end that they want,” Bonzo told RNS. “At the very moment when Christian higher ed could be helping to navigate difficult cultural moments, we’ve been sidelined by these kinds of controversies.”

RNS independently confirmed that over 100 employees have departed Cornerstone since the arrival of the current president in 2021. In an email to RNS, the vice president for enrollment said the school has had a strong retention rate of about 81 percent for faculty and staff and has seen a slight increase in enrollment since last year.

At Grace College, those demanding Warner’s removal prevailed. In January, Warner filed a faculty grievance charging Flamm and Bakhit with alleged violations of college policy, but per the college bylaws, the president is the final arbiter of faculty grievances, and Flamm did not find that he or Bakhit had misstepped. Warner also submitted a board appeal requesting that a third party hear his case, but instead, the board affirmed Flamm’s ruling on the grievance.

“Even in all the complexity and hardship of this experience, at all points, he has been on team Grace,” Warner’s pastor, the Rev. Emily Cash, said of him. “His intention was never to show up at Grace to stir the pot, but to love students and engage them in the kind of learning he himself was delighted by. … He wanted, truly, to be at Grace, and for Grace to be a place of grace.”

- More from Kathryn Post – Religion News Service

Books

Review

Christians Shouldn’t Run from a ‘Negative World.’ But They Can Depend on It Less.

Daniel Bennett

Aaron Renn outlines individual, institutional, and missional strategies for adapting to a hostile culture.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Rarely does an essay cause such a stir as Aaron Renn’s “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” Published in First Things in 2022, Renn’s framework for describing Christianity’s fall into cultural disfavor since the 1960s elicited a wide range of responses, from wholehearted agreement to sympathetic skepticism to vociferous disagreement, and seemingly everything in between.

Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture

Aaron M. Renn (Author)

272 pages

$16.75

Renn’s essay categorizes the recent history of evangelicalism in the United States into three periods, or worlds. In the positive world, Christianity was in a position of cultural dominance; most Americans, even those who were not particularly religious, recognized the importance of Christianity to the country’s collective moral fabric. In the neutral world, the broader culture came to see Christianity not as uniquely good, but still as a belief system and worldview doing more good than harm.

Since the early 2010s—the dates themselves, Renn admits, are not binding—evangelicalism has been in the negative world. Here, culture and its elites are inherently suspicious of evangelical Christianity, especially when it challenges or conflicts with emerging, more attractive ideologies. Christians in the negative world, according to Renn, will encounter resistance to previously acceptable beliefs and behaviors. This resistance could take many forms, from simple yet pronounced disagreement all the way to the dreaded C-word: cancellation.

Less than two years after his essay, Renn’s book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, updates and elaborates on his framework and provides tangible resources for Christians concerned about this cultural transformation. Renn’s work, he admits, is not pastoral, nor is it necessarily prescriptive. Rather, drawing on his experience in the world of management consulting, he proposes a way forward for American evangelicals wanting to adapt to the new normal in faithful and prophetic ways—that is, to be in the negative world while refusing to be of the negative world.

After briefly recapping his “three worlds” framework, Renn pivots to strategies for theologically conservative evangelicals finding themselves gradually alone in and at odds with the negative world. Renn organizes these strategies around three elements of evangelical identity: the personal, the institutional, and the missional. In the three chapters for each element—Renn is apparently a fan of trios—he advises Christians in a variety of contexts, from individual choices to organizational decision making.

In his section on personal living, for example, Renn exhorts Christians to remain obedient to Christian orthodoxy in the years and decades ahead, even as the larger culture continues to disincentivize such obedience. This sort of obedience, he believes, could bring real consequences to Christians in particular industries, including loss of work. This is why, Renn later argues, Christians should also seek to become less dependent on the world around them, shrewdly managing finances and networks to provide a sort of “cancellation insurance.”

Directing his attention to evangelical institutions, like churches and businesses, Renn warns Christians that there may come a time to “rethink their relationship with mainstream institutions, adopting a less transformational approach with less investment in them.”

Renn is adamant that he is not arguing for a “head for the hills” strategy in response to the negative world, but rather, as Rod Dreher proposes in The Benedict Option, a reorientation toward local, thick communities. Not only does this approach insulate orthodox Christians from prevailing cultural pressures, but it also encourages investment in congregations, neighborhoods, and communities, traditional incubators of the social capital necessary for a flourishing civil society.

Concluding with words on mission, Renn encourages Christians to boldly stand for truth. In this context, he spends a lot of time critiquing some evangelicals’ inordinate attention to gender and sexuality. He is skeptical of the wisdom of debating complementarianism and egalitarianism, even as he applauds thinkers who speak clearly and simply on these questions. (Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, Renn notes, “has attracted millions of followers” for his brand of “folk wisdom.”) Evangelicals, Renn believes, should develop thicker skin when making claims that were taken for granted as recently as the last 30 years, lovingly yet boldly being people of the truth in a progressively post-truth environment.

Reasons for optimism

When I read his First Things essay two years ago, I was skeptical of Renn’s “three worlds” framework. I thought it was a blunt instrument that ascribed questionable motives to leaders embracing an engagement model for Christian political and cultural participation. But in reading Life in the Negative World, I found myself nodding along far more than I had anticipated. Renn does not write as someone who has an axe to grind against Christian actors with whom he disagrees. He is, at the very least, trying to make sense of our undoubtedly changing cultural environment, and generally does so graciously and humbly.

In response to Renn’s original essay, critics pointed out that his framework seems to ignore the long history of prejudice and suffering among other elements of the American church—most notably, of course, our Black brothers and sisters. To claim that conservative Christians are at an especially perilous period in American history is, for these critics, shortsighted and obtuse.

To be fair, Renn confronts this criticism head on, claiming that Black Protestants faced discrimination and violence not because of their religion but because of their race. Renn does not discount the struggles of the Black church for most of American history, but he doesn’t think that comparison to today’s challenges for conservative evangelicals is exactly fair.

Still, there are reasons American Christians may be more optimistic than Renn about our futures in a changing cultural environment. Consider, for example, today’s legal and constitutional landscape. While Renn points to the same-sex marriage decision in Obergefell v. Hodges as indicative of an emerging negative world, he doesn’t acknowledge other Supreme Court decisions, before and since, more favorable to Renn’s conservative evangelical audience. These cases, which have strengthened personal and institutional religious freedom protections, include 2012’s Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, 2018’s Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 2020’s Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, 2021’s Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, and 2022’s Carson v. Makin, to name just a few.

Now, Supreme Court decisions do not necessarily follow the broader cultural trajectory; conservative evangelicals may be protected from legal discrimination and government persecution and still face social costs for adhering to Christian orthodoxy. And Renn’s book is certainly not a legal analysis of the state of First Amendment jurisprudence pertaining to religious freedom. But considering the Supreme Court’s solid 6–3 conservative majority and years-long trend toward accommodating religious exercise, evangelical Christians might have more reason for optimism in the negative world than Renn lets on.

There is a lack of empirical rigor in Life in the Negative World that is at times frustrating. For example, some of Renn’s claims are questionable without supporting evidence—he calls Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood controversy “a forty-eight hour blip of scandal,” argues that a holistic pro-life position is evidence of a “softened” cultural engagement, and claims that “evangelicals especially hold few top positions in important institutions.” Renn may be advancing his own opinions throughout his book, but they are too often presented as matters of fact. And if they are bolstered by evidence, Renn does not often support them as such.

Additionally, as a political scientist, I was discouraged to see just one short chapter focused on Renn’s proposal for Christian political engagement in the negative world. The crux of Renn’s advice in this area is that “evangelicals must remain prudentially engaged,” demonstrating “expertise and wisdom.” But what this means in practice is not specified. Coming after chapters rife with practical recommendations, I was disappointed to see such a comparatively light chapter on how Christians should consider their political engagement amid an increasingly suspicious culture.

New models for new challenges

Despite these criticisms, I am convinced that Life in the Negative World is an important book at an important time. It should age well, as American culture—and evangelical Christianity’s place in it—continues to evolve, either deeper into the negative world or into something else entirely. For my money, Renn’s positive-neutral-negative world framework is among the most thought-provoking ideas pertaining to American evangelicalism this century. You don’t have to be convinced by every element of Renn’s framework to appreciate it.

Crucially, Renn’s book is not a jeremiad against models of Christian political and cultural engagement with which he disagrees. To be sure, he does think these models are going to be ineffective in the years and decades ahead, singling out the culture-war and cultural-engagement models of the 1980s and 2000s, respectively, as popular but ill-suited to our present challenges.

The negative world, Renn predicts, will require more (and different) ideas from evangelicals than can be found in earlier models.

But Renn’s negative world strategies are not condescending or tinged with superiority. Instead, he approaches the negative world with an eye for creativity and fresh ideas to match the seriousness of this moment. Indeed, his advice seems to be offered with sincerity and a desire to help his fellow Christians. And whatever you think of Renn’s three-worlds framing, I think it’s fair to say that evangelicals need all the help we can get.

Daniel Bennett is an associate professor of political science at John Brown University and assistant director at the Center for Faith and Flourishing. His forthcoming book is Uneasy Citizenship: Embracing the Tension in Faith and Politics.

- More from Daniel Bennett

‘I Knew I Would Pay a Price for My Faith’: China Releases Missionary After Seven Years

Interview by CJ Wu

John Sanqiang Cao shares how hand-copied Bible verses, prayers, and a mother’s love buoyed him during his imprisonment.

Amos Cao holds a family photo showing his father, Pastor John Cao (far right).

Paul Sancya / AP Images

When pastor John Sanqiang Cao, 64, crossed the border back into China from Myanmar’s Wa State on March 5, 2017, Chinese officials were waiting to arrest him. For years, he had traveled across the porous border from Yunnan Province to the impoverished Wa State, where he founded more than 20 schools, established drug rehabilitation centers, and provided medicine, books, school supplies, and Bibles to locals. Wa State is part of the notorious “Golden Triangle,” one of the world’s largest producers of methamphetamine.

Yet the courts in Yunnan sentenced Cao to seven years in prison for allegedly “organizing illegal border crossings,” a crime usually applied to human traffickers.

His case garnered widespread attention as Cao’s wife and two sons are US citizens, and Cao has permanent residency in the US. While he could have applied for US citizenship, Cao decided to keep his Chinese passport so that he could return to China for ministry work. He split his time between pastoring a Chinese church in North Carolina and training Chinese house church leaders and mobilizing them to do missions.

Various international religious freedom groups and US lawmakers have long advocated for his release. In 2019, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Cao was targeted due to his Christian faith.

Chinese authorities released Cao on March 5 after he finished serving his sentence. Four police officers escorted him to his hometown of Changsha, where he is now subjected to supervision and “thought reform” by the local government for five years.

CT spoke with Cao about his time in prison, the Bible verses that sustained him, his views on persecution, how it feels to be released to a changed China. This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.

How are you feeling now? It has been more than 40 days since I have been freed. My health has improved a lot: My tinnitus was serious in the beginning, now it is much better. Every day I go out and jog for 20 minutes, so my body is recovering well.

How free are you right now? I am generally free, although two agencies, the judicial office and the police station, still monitor me every month by visiting my house. I can go out and about without being followed. However, I do not have a Chinese ID, so I am unable to go see a doctor or travel elsewhere. What was your time in prison like? I stayed at two prisons during my imprisonment. Because I shared the gospel with fellow prisoners at the first prison (Menglian Detention Center in Yunnan), I was transferred to Kunming Prison in 2019. To punish me, I was no longer allowed to speak with other inmates.

Pastor John Cao

In China, prisoners need to go through laogai, which means “reform through labor.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regards labor as noble and imposes long hours of work on prisoners. The purpose of laogai is to transform a bad person into a good person. At Menglian Detention Center, we sewed pants and clothing, for which we received next to nothing. At Kunming Prison, I assembled paper bags for tea leaves, as well as gift and fruit bags, without getting paid. While I was imprisoned, I did not get sun exposure—I probably only saw sunlight about 10 times a year. Without sunlight and the vitamin D it produces, my body became weak. I was not allowed to go outside or to exercise. I could not even exercise in my room. Every day from 7 to 7:30 a.m., we had to watch a state-owned news program. I had zero interest in the news, as it is dogmatic and meaningless to me. I usually bowed my head to pray as the news played in the background. I did learn about the COVID-19 pandemic and other major outside news to some extent. All of us had to learn dozens of “red songs” [praising the CCP] to “inherit red genes and ready ourselves to liberate all human beings.” Since I could not speak to anyone when I was in the Kunming prison, I would pray and sing praise songs. I would also write some poems of praise. I was placed under surveillance by four fellow inmates, and I could not step out of my room. Although they could freely interact with inmates from other cells, I could not speak to any of them. Similarly, prisoners would not approach me once they saw the four guards standing beside me. Are there particular Bible verses that encouraged you? I did not have a Bible while in prison. Although both my mother and my lawyer brought Bibles to my prison, the correctional staff refused to hand them over to me. My mother would write down Bible verses in her letters to me. Yet the police checked our correspondence: If faith was mentioned in my letters, they would not be delivered.

Both prisons had small libraries with hundreds of books. I would search for Leo Tolstoy’s books, since there are some Bible verses in his books. When I found them, I’d be very, very happy and copy the verses in my notebook. In the four years I was there, I copied dozens of verses. I especially liked the verses that remember believers who are suffering in prison. In Psalm 137:1–3 it says,

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept, when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; They said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ These verses about Israel and the Jewish people’s grief during their Babylonian exile spoke to me.

Have you ever doubted your faith or wondered why you had to go through this trial? I have never wondered. Once I returned to China to spread the gospel, I knew that sooner or later I would be persecuted for my faith. Jesus said we will go through what he had experienced. For whosoever will pursue his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for the Lord’s sake shall find it. Also, I have been to every province in China, where I visited many Christians who were persecuted, beaten, and imprisoned. I’ve heard their testimony. So when the day came, I had a great peace in my heart. I knew I would pay a price for my faith, so I felt very joyful. Your mother went to great lengths to visit you. What is behind her strength and courage? My mother may seem like an ordinary Christian, but she is a very remarkable Christian. It took her two full days to reach the detention center where I was held in Menglian, and oftentimes she could not even see me. On the days when we were able to meet, we had to talk on the phone through a glass window. Our conversations were monitored.

One time, my mother mentioned that a fellow believer passed on his greeting and was praying for me. Before she even finished her sentence, the keyword praying triggered the police to cut off the conversation and end our meeting. For her to ride the train for so many hours to merely have a three-minute conversation with me caused her to burst into tears.

According to China’s prison law, prisoners have the right to write letters to their loved ones, but I could only write letters to my mother. That cut off my contact with the outside world, as I could only communicate through her. I wrote a poem to pay tribute to my mother. I talk about how during World War II, many mothers sent their sons to the frontline to fight. One line goes, Mothers sent off their sons in the past, side by side my mother stands with me now. I regard my mother as my comrade, who fights besides me. She is mightier than the WWII mothers.

Many people, from local Christians to US government officials, have called for your release and prayed for you. What would you like to say to them? I am extremely grateful for all the brothers and sisters around the world who prayed and advocated for me. I also know that they tried through many channels to convince the Chinese government to correct this mistake and release me.

I am very thankful for the many US lawmakers and officials who put in a lot of effort to free me. Whether ordinary citizen or official, they spoke out for me out of a sense of justice.

Many Chinese Christians also came to the entrance of my prison to pray for me. This could get them arrested, so they took great risks. The police at the prison knew that if there were people standing at the gate, they would be praying for me. An officer once secretly notified me that there were people who kneeled at the gate to pray for my freedom.

When you were released, you returned to a very different China with even less freedom for Christians, a worsening economy, and a crackdown on civil society. How are you coping? Initially, when I learned about my seven-year sentence, I could not wrap my head around the fact that they would persecute me, even though the things I did in northern Myanmar were beneficial to China. Once I was released, I realized that many pastors had been arrested. I came to realize that this is a crackdown against the house churches in China as a whole, and I just happened to be among the first few individuals.

Chinese Christians are not anti-government, they obey the constitution. An ordinary citizen does not possess a gun—how can he incite subversion of state power? For the government to crack down on Christians, it is an act of self-harm and self-damage. Not only do the Christians get hurt but the government also hurts its reputation and is discredited.

What are your plans going forward? First, I would like to get a Chinese ID so I can reunite with my family in the US. Without my ID, I cannot move freely to other places, purchase a cell phone, register for accounts online, or see a doctor.

It is not only about the reunion or about the inconvenience. It’s also an expression of me being a Chinese citizen. I highly value my citizen’s rights, so for them to be deprived, it is very unfair and unjust. Christians experience a lot of similar treatment like this in their daily lives.

Other than that, my life has been good. Changsha has been good. I am able to participate in in-person and online church services. I have been contacted and invited by house churches to pastor them, but I have not yet decided, since house churches are still considered illegal in China. As always, my main purpose is to share the gospel.

- More from Interview by CJ Wu

Theology

Reality Is Now a Diss Track

Russell Moore

Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s rivalry reveals our craving for controversy—and what’s lost when community is based on shared hatred, not love.

Drake (left) and Kendrick Lamar (right)

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

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

Not since Tupac died have we seen the country quite as fixated on a feud between rappers. Over the past several weeks, artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar kept the news cycle abuzz with their dueling diss tracks—ridiculing each other in trivial matters of height and weight and popularity before getting nastier with implications of secret love children and the possible grooming of minors.

As the lyrics amped up, police even investigated whether the argument was related to a shooting of a security guard outside Drake’s home in Toronto. For most people, though, the feud didn’t seem dangerous; it just seemed fun. And that’s what worries me.

I am far from qualified to judge who the better artist is between Drake and Lamar. My dogs were named Waylon and Willie, but, come to think of it, the Outlaws wrote a diss track or two themselves. Even so, if this were just a story about musicians’ egos battling, it could be quickly forgotten. The greater concern is not that these two artists have diss tracks, but that we are all living in one ourselves.

Drake and Lamar obviously do have some genuine dislike of each other. I share sarcastic barbs with a good friend sometimes, but I’ve never accused him of being a pedophile or of neglecting his child support. And yet, it also seems that much of this feud is theatrical—meant to mutually benefit them both.

After all, the question in the music industry press right now is not whether restraining orders will be sought but whose tracks are beating whose on the charts. The truth is, no matter who is “winning” or “losing” in that competition, both are winning. People are listening, if only to see which one will hit lyrically lower, jab more personally.

And the consuming audience wins too. It’s one thing to be a fan. It gives fandom an extra hit of adrenaline, though, to move that fandom from liking someone’s work to liking someone’s work while hating someone else’s. That transcends genres and platforms. Not long ago, some fans were enraged by DC Comics writer Tom Taylor’s musings that he would like to revisit some aspects of the backstory of the character Batgirl. They showed it by posting pictures of them burning photographs of Taylor’s face. He responded by posting, “I write COMIC BOOKS.”

This would be one thing if it were limited to fandoms vicariously living out virtual feuds, posing their favorite artists / movie franchises / characters / video game avatars / restaurant chains as imaginary gladiators at war with one another. The problem is that, as with so much else, these online realities are becoming real world realities. And they are affecting every part of life, including that of the church.

Texas Monthly recently highlighted the way that many Eastern Orthodox church communities in the United States are disturbed by the phenomenon of “Ortho Bros” tearing apart their communions. These are usually young men, almost always somewhere on the spectrum of white nationalist/Putinist/neo-Confederate. They are perhaps disproportionately “incel” (involuntarily celibate), but almost always with a view of women that confuses misogyny with masculinity.

And in their churches, they take the tactics of online troll discourse—complete with “I was only joking” when caught in one-step-too-far indefensible behavior—into the actual life of the congregation. These are usually, the Orthodox say, un-discipled young men, often with “father issues,” who aren’t drawn by the spirituality or liturgy of Orthodoxy but by being able to use it like a gamer would a “skin”—an identity from which to identify enemies and to fight them, “safely” and from a distance.

We, of course, have seen a much, much larger phenomenon like this in our own evangelical circles. The theology differs, but not the vibe—and, after a while, one realizes that the vibe is what matters, when one is bored of following Jesus and learning the Bible.

Decades ago, there was an evangelical trope that one should be a disciple of Jesus, not a fan. That’s true, but perhaps we should recognize what particular kind of fandom is infecting our religions communities: the kind that finds belonging by a shared hatred rather than a shared love.

This damages not just the witness of the church but the souls of the “reverse fans” who use it as a place to spike their adrenaline with a constant craving for controversy. It also hides what’s really damaged and hurting, in need of the repair that can come only from grace.

Long before hip-hop, one unbelieving philosopher launched what one might call a “diss track” against another (by then long dead) anti-theist philosopher that almost predicted the reverse fandom we would see now—especially with the theatrical pseudo-masculinity that denigrates women. In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell dismantled Friedrich Nietzsche’s tough-guy portrait of himself as a woman-hating nihilist who valorizes the strong and abhors “weakness.”

“It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military,” Russell wrote. “His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotions towards them, which is obviously one of fear. ‘Forget not thy whip’—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.”

Even as atheistic as he was, Russell also called out the ridiculous nature of Nietzsche’s dismissal of Christianity for its “weakness” and “slave mentality.” He wrote: “He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear: I am afraid my neighbor may injure me, and so I assure him that I love him.”

“It never occurred to Nietzsche that the lust for power, with which he endows his superman, is itself an outcome of fear,” Russell wrote. “Those who do not fear their neighbors see no necessity to tyrannize over them. Men who have conquered fear have not the frantic quality of Nietzsche’s ‘artist-tyrant’ Neros, who try to enjoy music and massacre while their hearts are filled with dread of the inevitable palace revolution.”

With a few minor tweaks, the same could be written of the kind of trolling we see now—absent Nietzsche’s intellect but with all of his bile—that seems obsessed with putting women in their place and longing for a caesar who can impose a Nietzschean kind of “Christianity” on the rest of the world.

These are often people who are terrified of women and who would rather fantasize about cracking the whip in an imaginary, restored Christendom of the future than leading a prayer group in their own actual church. This kind of soul does not resonate with the psalms of the faithful but only with diss tracks—of whatever genre or denomination or tribe, as long as they channel anger and punish enemies.

The police responding to shots at Drake’s house unnerved those who remember previous “feuds”—not just between musicians but even between Olympic athletes and high school athletes and cheerleaders (or their parents), not to mention rival mob bosses—that ended in blood, not just words. Many remember that what starts as theater often becomes real. Artist rivalries are one thing—competing fandoms usually don’t hurt anybody. The stakes are higher, though, for a neighborhood, for a nation, for a church.

A people who lose truth turn to theater. A people who have given up on mission entertain themselves with feuds. A people who forget how to sing the songs of the redeemed can find that all that’s left are the diss tracks of the enraged.

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

News

Died: Gospel for Asia Founder Athanasius Yohannan

Daniel Silliman

The champion of “native missions” trained more than 100,000 evangelists but got in trouble for financial mismanagement.

Believers Eastern Church / edits by Christianity Today.

Athanasius Yohannan, who built one of the world’s largest mission organizations on the idea that Western Christians should support “native missionaries” but got in trouble for financial irregularities and dishonest fundraising, died on May 8. He was 74 and got hit by a car while walking along the road near his ministry headquarters in Texas.

Born Kadapilaril Punnoose Yohannan and known for most of his ministry as K. P., Yohannan founded Gospel for Asia in 1979. Over the next 45 years, the organization trained more than 100,000 people to preach the gospel and plant and pastor churches in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and other places in Southeast Asia, according to a recent ministry report. Gospel for Asia raised as much as $93 million in a year and in 2005 reported it was supporting about 14,500 indigenous evangelists and pastors in same-culture and near-culture ministry. Christians in the US were asked to give $30 per month to support them.

“If we evangelize the world’s lost billions … it will be through native missions,” Yohannan wrote for CT. “The native missionary is far more effective than the expatriate. The national already knows the language and is already part of the culture. In many instances, he or she can go places where outsiders cannot go.”

Yohannan’s death was mourned by Gospel for Asia, the church that he started and served as metropolitan bishop, and prominent political leaders in India.

“He will be remembered for his service to society and emphasis on improving the quality of life of the downtrodden,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on social media. “May his soul rest in peace.”

Both the governor of Kerala and the leader of the opposition in the state assembly released statements offering condolences, saying Yohannan’s death was a great loss.

In Yohannan’s final “Shepherd’s Letter” as the head of Believers Eastern Church, he urged his followers to remain disciplined and faithful.

“During our time on earth, we are embarking on a journey to become more like Christ,” he wrote. “I am so proud of all of you for your faithfulness to the church and for your thirst to become like Christ our Lord. The greatest desire I have for all of us is that we are known by our love for others.”

Yohannan was born on March 8, 1950, the youngest of six sons in a family that raised ducks. They lived in the village of Niranam, where a stone monument in the local Orthodox church memorializes the arrival of the apostle Thomas in the year 54.

His mother was a devout Christian and, as Yohannan later told the story, secretly fasted and prayed that one of her sons would grow up to be a minister. She didn’t think it would be her youngest, “Yohannachan,” however, because he was so shy and insecure. When he announced at 16 that he was dedicating his life to serving God and fulfilling the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations, she gave him 25 rupees (about 30 cents US)—his first donation.

Yohannan said he was inspired by a missionary team that was raising support for work in northern India.

“As they explained the desperate need of the subcontinent, I felt a strange sorrow,” he wrote in 2019. “That day I vowed to help bring the love of Jesus Christ to those mysterious states to the North. At the challenge to ‘forsake all and follow Christ,’ I somewhat rashly took the leap, agreeing to join the student group that summer.”

But then the missionary organization turned Yohannan down. He was too young and hadn’t even finished high school. The rejection stung. He recalled how much it hurt even decades later.

“I had nobody to stand with me,” he told a newspaper reporter in 1980. “There were no churches or missionary societies to say, ‘Hey, we’re behind you.’”

Yohannan was, however, allowed to attend a training program in Bangalore the next year. That was the first time in his life he wore shoes, he later recalled. In Bangalore, Yohannan heard George Verwer, founder of Operation Mobilisation, challenge people to live and die for Christ. That night, Yohannan prayed, giving his whole life to Christ and committing himself to “breathtaking, radical discipleship.”

He joined Operation Mobilisation and started street preaching—experiencing the empowerment of the Holy Spirit in the process.

“I felt a force like 10,000 volts of electricity shooting through my body,” Yohannan wrote later, describing his first sermon. “All at once God took over and filled my mouth with words of His love. I preached the Good News to the poor as Jesus commanded His disciples to do. As the authority and power of God flowed through me, I had superhuman boldness.”

Yohannan traveled around India with Operation Mobilisation for about seven years. He met and married a German missionary named Gisela. His youth was noticed by Western missionary leaders, such as John Haggai, who praised his talent and charisma and challenged him to do great things for God.

The young evangelist’s relationship with his missionary teammates was not always good, however. Some felt that he wanted attention too much and that preaching gave him an inflated sense of importance. At one point, as he later recalled, no Operation Mobilisation team would work with him.

“You are proud and arrogant,” one of the leaders told him. Another said, “Nobody wants you. No one can help you. Only God can help you.”

After that, Yohannan decided to move to the United States to get more ministry training. He went to Criswell Bible Institute (now Criswell College) in Dallas and took classes for two years. He was ordained in a local Baptist church.

As he considered the prospect of pastoral ministry, however, Yohannan felt himself drawn again to missions. He began to pull out world maps at a Tuesday-night Bible study and led the Baptists in prayer for the people of faraway places, as George Verwer had often done. He talked to the Christians about giving a dollar a day, or $30 a month, to missions.

In 1979, Yohannan and his wife started Gospel for Asia, based in Texas. The ministry established its India headquarters four years later, according to Gospel for Asia.

Yohannan published Revolution in World Missions in 1986. It was part autobiography, part critique of Western missions, expounding Yohannan’s theory about the superior effectiveness of national evangelists. The lost do not need your missionaries, he told Christians in America and Europe. They need your money.

“The Holy Spirit is moving over Asian and African nations, raising up thousands of dedicated men and women to take the story of salvation to their own people,” Yohannan wrote. “These national missionaries are humble, obscure pioneers of the Good News taking up the banner of the cross where colonial-era missions left off.”

Yohannan did not go so far as to call for the withdrawal of Western missionaries from Asia or other parts of the world, but he did argue that sending people from the US and Europe was a bad use of resources, unwise, and colonialist.

Gospel for Asia grew quickly. According to the ministry, Western funds were going to support 4,500 native missionaries by 1990. Gospel for Asia has reprinted Revolution in World Missions seven times, and there are now about 4 million copies in circulation.

Yohannan also started his own church in 1993. Believers Church was conceived as an indigenous Indian denomination, separate from Western influences, but also more evangelical than some historic Indian churches.

Over time, the church adopted a more Eastern Orthodox style. Yohannan was elevated to bishop in a service in 2003 and claimed apostolic succession. He took the title “Metropolitan,” to designate himself the head of the church’s bishops, and the honorific “Moran Mor,” which is similar to the Western designation of “Most Reverend” or “His Holiness.”

The increasing emphasis on authority raised concerns for some Gospel for Asia staff.

“K. P. functions as an episcopal bishop,” a group of them wrote, “and wears the robe, hat, ring and some other accompanying items. Staff and leaders there commonly kneel or bow and kiss K. P.’s ring in a sign of veneration. … This is not how Jesus taught and modeled authority.”

Yohannan denied that anyone kissed his ring, but the staff members released photos and videos. They also reported he had started to teach that disobeying him was a sin. If he told a staff member to move to Myanmar, Yohannan reportedly said, the correct response was “yes sir,” not “I’ll pray about it.”

The staff raised additional concerns about fundraising issues, prompting an investigation by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA). In September 2015, the ECFA concluded that Gospel for Asia had violated five of seven standards. The ministry misled donors, soliciting donations for specific purposes and then using the restricted funds for other projects, including the construction of a new headquarters. Some of the movement of money was not properly documented.

Blogger Warren Throckmorton reported on the roiling scandal extensively at the time.

Yohannan appeared to be unaware of the basics of nonprofit management and the board failed to provide adequate oversight, according to the ECFA.

Gospel for Asia acknowledged it had been “unintentionally negligent” but also pointed out that no one had personally benefited from the financial irregularities and that no money was found to be missing, even if it wasn’t all where it was supposed to be.

The ECFA took the unusual step of expelling Gospel for Asia.

Some donors sued the ministry, claiming their funds were misused. Gospel for Asia ultimately settled, agreeing to refund $37 million to a class of 200,000 donors. The ministry did not accept any guilt, however, and the terms of the settlement required plaintiffs to agree that “all donations designated for use in the field were ultimately sent to the field.”

Several prominent evangelical leaders spoke out and endorsed Yohannan’s integrity, including George Verwer, pastor and author Francis Chan, Anglican Church in North America bishop Bill Atwood, and D. James Kennedy Ministries president Frank Wright.

“I cannot say enough good things about K. P. Yohannan and all my friends at Gospel for Asia,” Wright said. “This ministry is exceptionally effective, fully Christ-centered and worthy of broader support.”

Chan, the author of Crazy Love, said he had examined Yohannan’s life—his tax returns, his home, his car, and even what he ate—and was convinced he had not taken any money or enriched himself or his family with ministry donations.

“How could anyone accuse someone like this [of] fraud and racketeering and trying to take money?” Chan said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

After the expulsion from the ECFA, Believers Church decided to change its name to Believers Eastern Church to emphasize the difference and distance from Western evangelicalism.

In 2018, the bishops all took the names of early church fathers, martyrs, and saints. Yohannan chose Athanasius, a fourth-century theologian from Egypt known for his writings on the Trinity.

After that, he was referred to by the church as Athanasius Yohan I. Toward the end of his life, his writing focused on the biblical basis for liturgy, ritual prayer and prayer ropes, the importance of tradition, the use of incense in worship, and the sacrament of Communion.

He continued to lead Gospel for Asia until his death.

“We are called to be witnesses for the Lord Jesus Christ by telling people about His love through words and actions,” Yohannan wrote to the church about a year before he died. “My dear children in Christ, please remember that if we live for the Lord and are His witnesses, we will have to go through suffering, whether it’s persecution, misunderstandings, or other problems.”

Yohannan is survived by his wife, Gisela; their daughter, Sarah; and son, Daniel, who is now the vice president of Gospel for Asia.

- More from Daniel Silliman

I Didn’t Want a Baby. I Wanted This Baby.

Faith Chang

Mourning miscarriage means acknowledging the particular life that’s been lost.

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

You’re young. You can try again,” the phlebotomist says as he sticks a needle in my arm. He’s drawing blood for tests that will confirm what ultrasounds are already saying: I am miscarrying. I recognize the young man’s attempt to offer comfort and receive it as such. What I do not say is, It’s not that I just want a baby.

Before this third pregnancy, I’d told my husband I was done. Any additional members added to our family of four would not be coming from my body. So it is with two young children at home and in the middle of waiting for our first foster care placement that we find out we are pregnant again.

My body tells me early on that I am mothering my third child, affirming in intimate ways the hidden presence of the little one being formed in my womb. The all-day queasiness of “morning” sickness. The fatigue. The slow tightening of pants around my waistline. In these ways, in the giving of myself, I am getting to know this baby just as I did his or her older sisters.

When I begin spotting and having cramps, I get to know—to love—this baby another way, through anguished pleading with God. I’d prayed similar prayers once before. That time, a doctor’s “I don’t see a heartbeat …” was followed by the relief of seeing the tiny, flickering heart of my now 10-year-old. This time, there is no flicker.

The heaviness settling deep in me is not because I want a baby. I want this baby, my baby. I want my child to live.

My baby dies in my womb early in my first trimester, and I am unprepared for the grief that rocks me. I am also unprepared for the ways I will struggle to feel that this grief is permissible, even as sobs seize my body unexpectedly throughout the day, even as a mild depression settles in for months, even despite the news that I am pregnant again.

Eventually, I’ll come to find this is common, that those who miscarry often seek permission to grieve. Although 10–20 percent of all known pregnancies end in miscarriage, it can feel like an “invisible” loss, often occurring before family and friends even know about the pregnancy. Medical trauma, involuntary childlessness, societal stigma, and guilt or self-blame can converge to make this suffering complicated.

But there’s something else that can make grieving hard—and that’s wondering whether or not our heartache is justified; about what, or more precisely, who we’re grieving.

In the weeks following my miscarriage, I feel a dissonance. Even as I mourn, a part of me casts suspicion on my sadness. My pain tells me that I have indeed lost a child. But is that really true?

A few things contribute to this question. I’ve been influenced more than I realize by the cultural milieu, which frames any affirmation of the personhood of unborn babies as ignorant at best and harmful to women at worst. Given how common miscarriage is, some argue, it’s absurd to believe each loss is the death of a person. Someone once casually remarked to me that she didn’t believe heaven would be filled with fetuses.

I’ve also spent my life in Asian American churches and ministries, where topics like sex, abortion, and miscarriage are rarely explicitly addressed. Outside of church, most of the arguments I’d seen from the pro-life movement appealed to later stages of fetal development. But my baby never looked like the ones pictured on posters at rallies and, to my knowledge, he or she never had a heartbeat.

Is it appropriate for me, then, to grieve the death of a baby who I have only known in positive pregnancy tests and nausea and a slightly swelling belly?

Some would argue that it doesn’t matter whether my baby was a person with a soul. They’d reassure me that it’s ultimately my “conception of the pregnancy” and personal attachment to the fetus that matters, not any objective claim about fetal value. But for me, there is no escaping the question of personhood. The claim and comfort of my faith is far more wide-reaching than subjective experience and emotional relief.

The Christian hope is based on the person of Christ, broken not in my imagination but truly, bodily, for me. Jesus’ heart really did begin to beat again in that tomb on the third day, so our bodies really will be raised imperishable on the last (1 Cor. 15:51–54). Christianity acknowledges that one implication of paradise lost is the physical reality of death reaching inside me, so that I know it in cramps and bleeding and cries of “My baby, my baby.” It also assures me that insofar as my grief corresponds to reality, my hope—that the Creator truly has my baby in his hands, that he sees and cares, that he will bring this child beyond the veil into eternity—is real too.

In the end, it is through the sorrow and comfort of others that I find full permission to grieve.

My husband says, “I miss Pax”—the name we end up giving our baby. My father-in-law weeps for our loss. My mom tells me that Pax will always be her grandchild. Church members who’d hoped with us for better news now drop off pig’s trotters in black vinegar, chicken and ginger soup, and sweet red bean porridge—Chinese postpartum food—at our door. In doing so, they are honoring the toll pregnancy has taken on me. As they tend to my body, they are tending to my heart. Each person who acknowledges our loss is saying, You’re right. Your sadness is justified.

If each human life can invariably be traced back to its very beginnings, and if every person is made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27; James 3:9), then we who have lost babies in the womb are right to grieve.

But even in a church that affirms life from conception, there are subtle ways in which the narratives we absorb prevent us from mourning with those who miscarry.

We are tempted to give false assurances about the future (“You’ll get pregnant again”) or reasons the miscarriage might have been good (“It’s better than if the baby had been born with a genetic disorder”). Sometimes blame is harmfully placed on parents (“You disobeyed God” or “You didn’t take care of your body”). These responses fail to acknowledge the reality and weight of our loss, and the personhood of the babies we grieve.

If the babies we lost were truly babies, then Christians—tenderly and in ways sensitive to each person suffering—must weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15). The church must be solidly pro-life here. We must acknowledge the personhood of children from the womb not merely by teaching against abortion but through entering into the grief of those who suffer pregnancy loss in all its forms.

Many in our pews have lost babies to miscarriage and stillbirth. Others are brokenhearted over babies lost to abortions, those they could not prevent or once chose and now regret. In a culture that extends sympathy for pregnancy loss but stops short of acknowledging the fullness of what that loss implies, Christians have a unique opportunity to make space for this suffering. We of all people have solid ground from which to offer comfort, hope, and healing.

In the weeks and months following my miscarriage, I have conversations with other women who have miscarried. Some are older women who had no pro-life movements in their countries of origin. Many have never had anyone affirm to them the personhood of the babies they lost. So it is healing for me and for them to speak openly about these children now.

“I also have a child in heaven,” one mother tells me. Another woman wants to know, “Do you really believe that your child is with God?” She is asking me about Pax, but she is thinking of her own sorrow, the babies she will later tell me she’s lost too.

Do I believe my baby is with God? Yes, I tell her without hesitation. I do.

Faith Chang is the author of Peace over Perfection: Enjoying a Good God When You Feel You’re Never Good Enough. She serves at Grace Christian Church of Staten Island and on the editorial board of SOLA Network.

- More from Faith Chang

Theology

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Train

Kate Lucky

I’m learning that motherhood is less about technique and more about wisdom and formation.

Bastien Jaillot / Unsplash

Almost six months ago, I had my first baby. Ever since, I’ve been thinking about sleep: how long; how deep; whether it’s happening in a car, on a walk, in a lap. And I’ve been thinking about how to achieve that sleep faithfully, honoring both the dignity of my baby and my duty as a mom.

For many new parents, sleep is a controversy, a series of choices that open you up to criticism. Some parents put their baby in bed with them. (Dangerous!) Others opt for a bassinet. (Cold-hearted!) Some use a pacifier. (Problematic.) Others don’t. (Equally problematic.)

In the newborn months, night feedings are necessary. The controversial faith-based program Baby Wise, promising full nights of sleep at only seven weeks, has therefore been condemned by pediatricians. But even as their babies grow, some parents continue to respond to every whimper. Loving, they proclaim. Unrealistic, say their opponents. And ultimately, not good for the baby!

Others choose to “sleep train,” putting their baby down awake so that they’ll learn to fall asleep on their own. This often involves crying. Worth it, parents insist. Selfish, say their critics. And ultimately, not good for the baby!

If you’ve cared for an infant in 2024 and successfully avoided sleep debates, I commend you. I have not. In part, because of Instagram. Also, because I needed information. My baby seemed tired all the time, and yet his eyes simply would not close. How could I help him rest?

I read some curriculum; I watched some videos; I browsed blogs; I talked to friends. Over time, I learned some strategies. We sang lullabies. We purchased blackout curtains and overnight diapers. We used a swaddle, then a “sleep suit,” then a “sleep sack.” Everything helped.

As for sleep training? Ultimately, we adopted a hybrid approach—putting the baby down “drowsy but awake,” tolerating some fussing but continuing to comfort. He took most of his naps in the crib. His eyes weren’t red anymore. Sometimes he slept the whole night through. For this blessed development, I had the sleep experts to thank.

And yet: Sometimes, sleep still made me anxious. When the baby went down for bed 30 minutes too late, or took another too-short nap, I worried I’d ruined his schedule. I wasn’t being disciplined enough. When the baby complained at 3 a.m., I lay in bed, watching the monitor, wondering if I was being too withholding, if I shouldn’t just gather him into my arms regardless of “the plan.”

Adopting the sleep techniques is one thing. But what hasn’t worked for me are the philosophies undergirding both sides of the debate: the regimented and strategized versus the freewheeling and improvised, and what they assume about human nature.

For the sleep training experts, kids are codes to be cracked. Put a baby down to bed at the same time each night—no more than 15 minutes too early or too late. Rocking or feeding to sleep can create a dreaded bad habit that can ruin a good sleeper in an instant. The science of REM and a table of nap times can tell us most everything we need to know about how to care for our children, they say.

It’s correct that infants respond well to routine, and that typically developing kids follow a certain predictable trajectory. But spend time with a baby and you’ll realize that they’re so much more than a machine, preset to roll, babble, and eat solid foods as the months progress. Each child has her own temperament. Each will buck the guidelines in his own way. Each is “fearfully and wonderfully made,” utterly distinct, not a prefab copy (Ps. 139:14).

The sleep training literature does offer caveats. Some babies don’t respond to the methods. Many babies experience temporary regressions. Babies get sick and grow teeth and sometimes get inexplicably cranky. The caveats feel more descriptive than the norms. Why did the baby wake up three times? Ultimately, explanations are futile, an attempt to understand a child’s needs within an adult rationale.

But what if adult rationale is getting in the way—in parenting and in the rest of my life as a Christian? Jesus asks us to come to him as children, guileless, lowly, utterly honest in our dependence on him.

The sleep trainers, with their charts and protocols, sometimes underemphasize the goodness of this kind of relationship, the beauty in pure, unruly, inexplicable need. When my baby wants me in the night, that’s not a failure of a system. It is the system.

Rather than trying to explain my baby—why he loves his fox toy, why he drinks bottles three ounces more than the guidelines, why he sticks his legs through the bars of the crib—what if I simply beheld him, content with a measure of mystery? What if I allowed my baby to come to me as Jesus invites us to come to him, through a Holy Spirit that understands groanings we ourselves can’t comprehend (Rom. 8:26)?

Yet I don’t think the “attachment” types have it all right either. For these moms—the co-sleepers and the snugglers—babies are ultimate authorities. Your child wants to suck for five minutes every half an hour? He’ll sleep only while touching you? Let him; he knows what’s best for himself. He’ll eat only until he’s full, and he’ll only cry when he has a need to be met.

But this doesn’t feel true either. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do,” writes Paul to the Romans (7:15). He’s speaking about sin. In a fallen world, this tension—doing things that run counter to our best nature, wanting what’s bad for us—is present from our earliest days, willed or otherwise (Ps. 51:5).

Babies want to stick their hands in their diapers, then into their mouths. They hate car seats. They hate socks. My job as a mother isn’t just to let my child lead, even when he’s small. It’s to raise him up in the way he should go. It’s to set parameters, to lay some plans, even if they have to be adapted along the way.

Being a mother, I’m learning, isn’t so much about the strategies and techniques, after all, whether it comes to sleeping, or eating, or the more complicated tasks to come: discipline, education, spiritual formation.

This isn’t just a matter of eschewing two camps for some kind of “middle way.” It’s rethinking the very idea of “camps” at all, understanding parenting less as a philosophy we adapt and more as a calling we answer, at times full of confusion, inconsistency, and improvisation.

God, after all, doesn’t call us to be experts, to read one more product review or research study, or to know all the answers in advance. Instead, we’re simply called to be wise, which has more to do with attention than information, more to do with end goals than tactics.

Wise people are authorities who depend on the ultimate Authority, asking questions of God, depending on and submitting to him even as our children depend on and submit to us. That’s my prayer this Mother’s Day, my first with a baby in my arms: wisdom. And more sleep.

Kate Lucky is senior editor of culture & engagement at Christianity Today.

- More from Kate Lucky

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Reasons for optimism

New models for new challenges

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