The Rural Cambodian Community that Fostered 76 Children

Over 16 years, a Christian nonprofit moved dozens of Cambodian orphans out of institutions and into local families.

Sam Ang and his family

Photography by Amy Higg

In 2008, Keo Ravy and Amy Sullivan of Children in Families (CIF) drove to an orphanage outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to pick up two toddlers with severe developmental delays. They then brought the children to a rural village where they would meet their new foster families.

In the car, four-year-old Sam Ang, who was blind and could not yet eat solids, suddenly started violently banging his head against the car floor. Startled, Sullivan tried to stop him, unaware that due to neglect, this was his way of communicating hunger. As Sullivan pulled him into her lap, he began to calm down as he felt her face with his hands.

Sullivan, a CIF volunteer, recalled feeling worried about whether his foster mother would be able to care for him.

Yet that anxiety dissipated as they pulled up to the village in Svey Rieng province three hours later. A group of villagers stood by a house, waiting for their arrival. Ravy parked, opened the car door, and gently lifted the boy from Sullivan’s lap. Quickly, a woman ran up and whisked Sam Ang out of Ravy’s arms, hugging and kissing him repeatedly. She was his new foster mother, Pang Sokha. Smiles erupted on everyone’s faces, and several villagers clapped with delight.

This is the vision of the Christian nonprofit CIF: to provide resources for impoverished families to raise their own children or take in abandoned children instead of sending them to orphanages.

Sam Ang became the first of 76 children, most of whom have disabilities, to be fostered in the village and its surrounding communities. CIF has also supported 113 children at risk of family separation. Since domestic adoption became legal again in 2017, 47 families have adopted their foster children, transitioning them out of CIF’s program. (Cambodia made foreign and domestic adoption illegal in the early 2000s due to corruption and the lack of legal framework.)

“Our role at CIF is to help Cambodian parents fulfill their God-given responsibility to children, not to take their kids away,” said founder Cathleen Jones.

A different way to care for orphans

I first visited Sam Ang’s village in Svey Rieng in 2016, a month after I came on staff at CIF as its communication and media director. A coworker took me on her motorbike down a dusty path to a small farm on the outskirts of the village, where a grandmother and aunt cared for a little boy with cerebral palsy.

Abandoned by his mother at birth, the boy had been cared for by his extended family, who had little knowledge about his condition. He spent his first six years of life on his back, staring at the rusting, corrugated ceiling. After CIF intervened with medication, physical therapy, education, and the love of God, he began gaining strength and mobility. His grandmother and aunt caught glimpses of his personality as he started to communicate nonverbally. They pushed him in a custom wheelchair to visit neighbors, removing not only his isolation from the world but also their own.

I also witnessed a baby from a crisis pregnancy placed with a childless couple that had spent five years longing for a child. Tears streamed down my face as I watched them hold their dream in their arms for the first time.

This way of caring for neglected and abandoned children was completely different from how I viewed orphan care growing up, as some of my earliest memories are centered around orphanages.

When I was five years old, my parents moved to Mexico to work in a children’s home. We lived in humble but separate quarters, isolated from the other children. Most of the children still had living parents, but I was told they had been abandoned.

A few years later, we moved to Venezuela so that my parents could start an orphanage. The plans eventually fell through as the government began to create a more stringent legal framework around foreigners taking in local children. Still, I grew up believing the world was full of parentless children who were best served in orphanages.

That was an idea that Jones and her husband, Dale, initially held as well when they arrived in rural Cambodia in the early 1990s and were tasked with running an orphanage. Yet after caring for more than a hundred children, they realized that institutionalization left many with lifelong trauma that exhibited itself through addiction, difficulty bonding with their own children, perpetuation of sexual abuse, and inability to assess risk. They realized there was no good substitute for God’s design of children raised in families.

Globally, 80 percent of children have at least one living parent, but many families are forced give up their children because they can’t afford more mouths to feed. Due to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in the ’70s—which killed a third of Cambodia’s population—families lack access to basic sanitation, shelter, and food, let alone social services and birth control.

The Joneses realized that even the children without parents had extended family or community members who wanted to care for them. They started to wonder, Why not support children and their family units?

From orphanages to families

So in 2006, Jones started CIF, which focuses on emergency care for kids who were trafficked or living in abusive families, kinship care, or foster care. CIF provides each foster family with between $40 and $150 per month depending on the child’s disability, age, and medical needs.

In the beginning, it was difficult for orphanages to get on board with CIF’s vision. At most, they would hand over children with disabilities, who were the hardest to care for, while keeping the cute, healthy children who could entertain visitors and look good on fundraising material.

Jones also had to contend with the myth that Cambodians would not accept non-biological children into their families. After the Khmer Rouge, many families took in children whose parents were killed and raised them as their own. Yet as foreign aid flooded into the country in the 1990s, Cambodians started to see well-funded foreign orphanages as a better way to care for their children.

CIF believed the best way for foster care to flourish was within a community where several families could take in orphans and help each other raise them. Ravy, CIF’s Cambodia director, felt that the village where she grew up in Svey Rieng province would be a good fit. Why? First, the villagers didn’t discriminate against people with disabilities, which CIF observed in way local leaders showed respect to a young man with Down syndrome. Also, the village had access to a school and a clinic, it was safe, and it was close enough to Phnom Penh that CIF staff could regularly visit and monitor the program.

CIF and the UK’s Strengthening Families and Children came to the village to train 40 families interested in fostering. “You have the gift of time,” Jones told the families. “You have the space. You can give these children love. You can teach them to be Cambodian.”

The first families to take in foster children were Christians, as Buddhists in Cambodia feared that bringing a child with disabilities into the family would bring bad karma. But as they saw how much joy children like Sam Ang brought to the families’ lives, the stigma began to lift.

Other families in the village agreed to take in children with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and trauma. Soon, eight more children joined the community.

“Before we knew it, half the village had their hand up to foster,” Jones said. The waiting list grew exponentially, impacting surrounding communities.

When CIF places a child with a foster family, the paper signing and placement ceremony happen with pastors, village leaders, and other community members present. This way, the well-being of the child becomes the responsibility of not just the foster parents but also the community.

Families with foster children meet regularly to share their struggles and encourage one another. Having foster families grouped together also makes it easier for social workers to visit and address problematic patterns and concerns.

CIF has seen communities change their view of Christianity because of how the group involves the entire village instead of removing children from their families and cultures to mold their minds in an institutional setting.

When donors offer to provide wells or water filters, Jones and Ravy let the village leaders choose the families who are most in need of these projects, regardless of whether they are supported by CIF. Local staff also holds classes on topics like hygiene or parenting, which are mandatory for the foster parents and open to all villagers.

“[CIF] works with entire villages, so it’s not just our kids and families who benefit,” Jones said. “If a non-CIF family is struggling in one of our communities, we also support them.”

Orphanages’ chokehold

Today, CIF’s foster care program works in three provinces as well as Phnom Penh, each of which has at least three families fostering near each other for support. In total, it has placed 160 children into foster families. The organization says there are hundreds of vetted Cambodian families waiting to foster children. However, the organization recently had to pause adding new children into its program, as donations have dropped due to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 and donors looking to fund other areas of development.

At the same time, orphanages continue to house tens of thousands of Cambodian children because donors are willing to fund them, said Rebecca Nhep, founder of the Australian Christian Churches International (ACCI) Kinnected program, which also focuses on family care. Images of cute babies and children tug at donors’ heartstrings and loosen their purse strings. In 2021, American churches alone donated $2.5 billion to fund orphanages.

Yet Nhep believes the theology behind orphanages is flawed. When the Bible talks about looking after the orphans and widows, they should be viewed as a vulnerable family unit rather than separate entities, she noted.

Orphanages are also costly compared to family care. Cambodian orphanages receive about $50 million annually according to Sarah Chhin, the founder of M’lup Russey, an organization that helps young adults who have aged out of orphanage care. That funding could instead be used to eradicate the extreme poverty in Cambodia that causes parents to give up their children.

Christian orphanages see a spiritual dimension to their work, yet Nhep questions if it’s right to disciple children by taking them away from their family units.

“What aspect of the gospel promotes raising Christians by separating families?” Nhep asked. “We are told to go into the nations … not extract and take in, divorcing children from their social structure and culture.”

Back in the Svey Rieng village, Sam Ang grew up like his peers, riding bikes and learning to speak Khmer. With the help of CIF, the local school opened its doors to Sam Ang, making him its first blind student. Today, Sam Ang is training to be a massage therapist and is a competitive runner. At the 2023 ASEAN Para Games in Phnom Penh, he sprinted to a third-place finish in the 1,500-meter race with his sighted guide.

Sokha cheered him on from the stands, waving her arms and shouting, “That’s my baby!”

“Our family is so poor I thought I would have to leave and work in a factory to support my family,” Sokha told CIF. “But I love being a mom, and being a foster parent finally makes me feel valued for the work I can do as a mother.”

Erin Foley formerly worked in Communications & Media at Children in Families and authored the book Where They Belong : A Journey from Orphanages to Loving Families. This article includes excerpts from her book.

- More from Erin Foley

Church Life

South Korea’s Missions Success Won’t Be Its Future

Isabel Ong

The extraordinary church story of the 20th century is struggling with a demographic crisis, disillusionment with Christianity, and a 2007 Taliban attack.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Beginning in 2002, South Korean national Helen Lee served as a missionary in Bengaluru, India for five years. In 2015, she embarked on another mission trip to the country’s capital, New Delhi.

It was a new city and a different team, but one thing remained the same: She was the youngest missionary there.

Lee, 45, sees this same dynamic playing out in her work as a member care coordinator in a mission agency that reaches out to Muslims.

“In the last three or four years, we never had any young families candidate [to become long-term missionaries from South Korea],” said Lee.

By the first half of the 21st century, South Korea became a missionary-sending powerhouse. In 2015, the country was ranked second in terms of overall missionary-sending activity, according to the World Christian Database.

The East Asian country is now in third place, after the US and Brazil, in terms of missionary-sending activity, according to 2020 statistics from the World Christian Database that were cited in the Lausanne Movement’s State of the Great Commission report.

But the explosive growth of the country’s missions force does not appear to be sustainable.

“The Korean church and mission have recently plateaued due to secularization, a general disinterest in religion among young people, and the possible impact of megachurch scandals,” wrote Uchenna Anyanwu, Cristian Castro, and David Ro in the Lausanne report. “For this reason, the Korean missionary population is gradually aging.”

Data from the Korea Research Institute for Mission (KRIM) reflects steady growth in the number of missionaries over the past two decades, with a slight downturn beginning in the 2020s.

In the ’90s, the Korean church called for 10,000 missionaries to go and preach. This vision was realized in a decade, and the number of missionaries doubled to 20,000 by 2010.

Since then, growth has been marginal, KRIM’s data shows. Last year, South Korea sent a total of 21,917 missionaries, down from 22,204 in 2022 and 22,259 in 2020.

One reason for a slower missions pipeline in the aughts may be the 2007 kidnapping crisis in Afghanistan, where the Taliban killed two believers after abducting 23 South Korean church volunteers on a medical aid trip.

“The number of Korean missionaries continued to grow, but at a much lower rate since the hostage case in 2007,” said Steve Sang-Cheol Moon, founder and CEO of South Korea’s Charis Institute for Intercultural Studies. (More recently, two South Korean missionaries were kidnapped in Kenya this August.)

The incident, in which the Taliban claimed it received $4 million from the South Korean government to release hostages, prompted intense criticism of mission efforts from both Christian and non-Christian Koreans.

Many came to regard churches as self-serving and critiqued the exclusivity of the faith after this happened, Moon said.

The Taliban murder-kidnapping also created a “huge phobia” against Muslims among the Korean people, particularly in Christian circles where believers feel the need to protect the faith against Islam, said Lee.

“A lot of people in church are still very afraid of [Muslims]. … [They think] the Muslims are terrorists,” she noted.

Korean missionaries and leaders CT interviewed agree with the data and the trends observed by the Lausanne report. Still, most are optimistic about the future of South Korea’s missionary movement as they see growth in new conceptualizations and expressions of missional living among younger Korean Christians.

A prophetic push

In 1973, Billy Graham predicted that South Korea would become a base for evangelism and outreach across Asia. The history of the South Korean church has reflected this ardent devotion to missions that Graham pinpointed.

The first Korean missionary was ordained at the 1907 Pyongyang revival. In 1974, the Korean missionary movement (KMM) began when Korean churches sent out 24 missionaries. Since then, South Korean missionaries have brought the gospel to 170 countries.

Nationwide evangelistic events such as Explo ’74 in Seoul, attended by 300,000 believers from South Korea and around the world, contributed to boosting missionary fervor in that period. And after the country hosted the Olympics in 1988, the government allowed Koreans to travel freely, further propelling the KMM forward.

Central Asia and China were some of the places where Korean missionaries had a large impact.

In countries like Mongolia, they were instrumental in growing the Christian population. “In 1989, there were just four Christians; by 2008, that number had grown to 40,000,” a 2019 Lausanne article on the gospel movement in East Asia revealed.

Missions to China began when the Presbyterian Church of Korea sent three ministers and their families to the province of Shandong in the 1900s.

This was “the greatest and most significant missionary work of the Korean church,” wrote Timothy K. Park in Korean Church, God’s Mission, Global Christianity. “It was the first Asian mission by Asian people since the days of the apostles.”

By 2017, there were about 500 officially registered South Korean missionaries in China, although the actual number may have been closer to 2,000, a CT report stated. Many served in Jilin Province due to its proximity to North Korea, helping refugees resettle after they defected.

But after China expelled Korean missionaries that year, along with the Afghanistan kidnapping crisis a decade earlier, South Korean missionaries have had to look elsewhere for opportunities to serve.

Many missionaries stopped serving in Afghanistan and other creative access countries where sharing the faith is restricted or prohibited because “local people were more aware of the presence of Korean missionaries in their regions,” Moon says.

The COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a decline in church growth, has also caused the KMM to stagnate in recent years, Korean Christian leaders told CT. Churches are more financially strapped, which means less funding for missionaries.

And yet, while the number of Korean Christians going on overseas missions is decreasing, missionaries are venturing farther.

Today, South Korean missionaries serve in countries like the United States, the Philippines, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian countries that have more restrictions on preaching and sharing the Good News.

In the Hindu-majority country of Nepal, which has an anti-conversion law in place, a South Korean missionary couple has planted nearly 70 churches in the Dhading district as of last year. Kenya has also become “a bridgehead for Korean missions to Africa,” with more Korean missionaries based there compared to other nations on the continent, said a 2014 report.

Going gray

Only around 7 percent of South Korean missionaries are in their 20s or 30s. The majority (67.9%) of long-term missionaries are 50 years old or over, according to KRIM’s 2023 report.

These “silver missionaries” often enter the mission field after retirement, said 35-year-old Eun Hee Kim, who served as a church planter in northeastern Thailand and is currently on sabbatical.

Kim was 23 when she decided to serve God full-time in cross-cultural missions. There are young South Korean Christians interested in doing the same thing today, but how missional their church is plays a part in determining whether they pursue it, says Kim.

“If the churches no longer see missions as essential and cease to pray, support, or mobilize for missions—that would indeed mark the beginning of the end for Korean missions,” she said.

Traditional church sending structures may also inadvertently impact the age of missionaries being sent out. Most South Koreans think that to be a missionary, you have to be ordained as a pastor and undergo theological training, which takes around five to six years to complete.

While that perception is gradually changing, whether churches are willing to send people in their 20s and 30s on the mission field without theological study is debatable, said Kyungnam Park, international director of WEC International, which focuses on evangelizing unreached people groups.

Parents’ opinions also matter more in Korean culture compared to the Western world, says Sung-Min Park, Korean Campus Crusade for Christ’s (KCCC) vice president for East Asia. As a form of filial piety, young graduates feel pressured to work in a well-known company and become financially stable rather than serve the Lord as a long-term missionary in a faraway country.

Hyerin Kim, 26, went on two short-term mission trips with KCCC. After graduating from college in 2022, she moved to Japan for a short-term mission stint a year later.

When she told her family she wanted to be a full-time missionary, they opposed the decision fiercely. “They think that I am giving up a lot of good things and taking a particularly harder and more difficult path to be a missionary,” she told CT.

“But I don’t see it that way,” she said. “I am not giving up any of the good opportunities I have, but I am taking the best and most unique opportunity to please and honor God more than any other.”

Mission Korea Congress, an ecumenical and biannual conference for high school and college students, has also seen a drastic dip in attendance over the years, particularly after the new millennium.

At its peak in 1998, the conference had 6,300 participants. In 2010, the number of participants dropped to 3,975. Last year, there were 1,403 people.

Still, the waning attendance doesn’t faze the congress’s executive director, Job Choi. God’s ministry is not dependent on numbers, he asserted.

As they seek ways to live out their faith, Gen Z and Gen Alpha believers are asking different questions compared to previous generations, in Choi’s view. Young Christians are pondering questions like “What is beautiful, good, and human?” rather than “What is true or real?” he said. They’re also wondering: “If your gospel is right, why is your church not beautiful?”

Creating change

Not everything that has transpired in recent times has weakened the Korean church. To some leaders, the events of the last few years have helped to strengthen and reshape the Korean missionary movement, especially in its posture.

The pandemic has allowed the Korean church to reckon with its pride, arrogance, and sense of triumphalism in carrying out missions, opined Daewon Moon, senior pastor of Daegu Dongshin Church.

“We no longer emphasize that the Korean church will and should play a pivotal role in fulfilling the Great Commission,” he said. “We don’t want to repeat the same mistakes of European missionaries.”

The Fourth Lausanne Congress in September, held in the South Korean city of Incheon, is not a time for “the Korean church to celebrate its missional achievement before the global church,” said Moon, who serves on the board of the Korea Lausanne Committee.

Instead, it is a time for the Korean church to reflect, repent, and learn from the global body of Christ, Moon argues.

Some leaders pointed to the Korean wave—the booming popularity of South Korean pop culture in music, film, food, and more—as a propitious opportunity for mission work. “When we go to Latin America and Africa, a lot of people already know the songs [from K-pop groups] BTS and Blackpink,” said KCCC’s Park.

“Particularly notable is a new energy to combine worship and mission ministries among young Korean Christians,” said Moon, the pastor.

The birth of mission-oriented worship collectives like Isaiah 6tyOne is representative of this new movement. Recently, the group visited a high school in Iloilo, Philippines, where they shared God’s Word and taught students how to play musical instruments. “Jesus, you’re victorious / with the angels sing / the wonder of the risen King,” the teenagers sang.

Another discernible trend, say leaders, is that although long-term missions are decreasing, short-term missions are on the rise.

Many churches and mission agencies offer a range of options in duration, from week-long to three-month trips and one-year commitments. This summer, Moon’s church sent 17 short-term mission teams to countries like Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Tanzania, and the UK.

KCCC is also “doing better than before” when it comes to sending short-term missionaries overseas, said Park. This year, the ministry has already sent 3,000 students and full-time staff on two- to four-week-long mission trips.

Going on a short-term mission trip helped Kim, the young missionary in Japan, to experience deeper and more authentic fellowship with God. “I felt that everything I did, whether it was eating, drinking, meeting up with friends to laugh and talk, or just walking around campus, was a mission and for the glory of the Lord,” she said.

A favorable future

While South Korea’s rankings in terms of missionary sending may have slipped, most leaders still think the country can be considered a powerful mission-sending force. Many expressed optimism about the future of mission in South Korea because they’ve noticed a shift toward a more holistic understanding of what being a missionary is all about.

“The division between evangelism and social responsibility (which older generations argued [about] and maintained) does not seem to bother younger generations,” said Moon, the pastor.

In the past, Korean missionaries would prioritize evangelism and church planting over other types of ministries such as area development, medical services, and relief work. Today, there are more missionaries seeking to care for a local community’s physical needs instead of solely focusing on their spiritual needs, said Charis Institute’s Moon.

In a 2006 cover story for CT, Moon also critiqued the lone ranger approach that many Korean missionaries possessed when starting projects. While this may still ring true in many cases, younger Korean missionaries are better at collaborating with local churches and leaders than before, he said.

Korean missionaries today also have a more “flexible missionary identity,” continued Moon. Previously, they would often link their identity with a certain country, but now they are more aware that their country of service can be changed.

Mission Korea Congress’s Choi experiences both worry and welcome when thinking about the future of missions. He also finds that the Korean Christian conceptualization of missions is healthier and more balanced now.

The dimensions of what missions entails are expanding, he says, where everything in life—education, government, creation care, social justice—is part of a believer’s missional identity.

“Revival is dependent on God’s time,” said Choi. “Our responsibility is to keep the fire holy and pure.”

Kim, the missionary in Japan, stressed the importance of living for God in the prime of one’s life.

“The young adult years are a time of great strength, energy, and possibility, and I think it’s the best time to think about what to do with your life and to discover your purpose, meaning, and values,” she said. “Whether we spend that time living according to the flow of the world or giving ourselves fully to the work of the Lord will shape the rest of our lives.”

Lee, the member care coordinator, also believes that young Christians might be missing out on opportunities to encounter God’s transformative love if they only stick to short-term mission trips.

“When you live [in another country] for a long time, I think you can see better how much God is really passionate about missions, and how God really cares for these people,” she said.

“Through those decades [as a missionary], I learned so much about his love.”

- More from Isabel Ong

News

Arrested Filipino Pastor Apollo Quiboloy Claims He’s the Messiah

Beng Alba-Jones

Why millions of Filipinos are drawn to his movement and other heretical sects.

Supporters of Apollo Quiboloy, founder of the Philippines-based Kingdom of Jesus Christ church, hold a prayer rally at a park in Manila.

Ted Aljibe / Getty

Apollo Quiboloy called himself the “Appointed Son of God.”

But to Filipino and American authorities, he was a man wanted for years on charges of sexual abuse and human trafficking.

Quiboloy, the 74-year-old leader of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, surrendered to authorities on September 8 after 2,000 security officers descended on the religious sect’s massive complex in Davao City in the Philippines. Thousands of followers gathered at the 74-acre compound to protest Quiboloy’s arrest as videos of his sermons blared on the building’s giant screens.

Authorities have accused Quiboloy of rape—including of minors—and engaging in sex trafficking, fraud, and smuggling cash into the US. Quiboloy’s lawyers denied these charges.

Quiboloy, who claims to have millions of followers in 200 countries around the world, is politically powerful. He has a close relationship with former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, allowing him to continue preaching even as the FBI placed him on its most wanted list. It was only after Duterte stepped down in 2022 that Philippine authorities brought charges against him and issued a warrant for his arrest.

The Kingdom of Jesus Christ is one of many sects that have sprouted up in the Philippines. They have an outsized impact on the country’s politics and culture. Because the Philippines is an archipelago of 7,000 islands, different homegrown religious leaders often come to represent certain regions, knitting people’s faith and identity closely together.

In a 2022 CT article, Timoteo D. Gener, chair of Philippine Council of Evangelical Church’s Theological Council, noted that indigenous non-Trinitarian heretical groups like Iglesia Ni Cristo, Ang Dating Daan (The Old Path), and Kingdom of Jesus Christ have grown out of “the prevalence of modalism, the belief that God is a single person who reveals himself in three forms, among folk Catholics. Countering modalism in faith and practice remains a continuing challenge for biblical Christians in the country.”

Another similarity in these communities is that they often center around a messianic leader. This is an idea that is attractive to the Filipino psyche, according to Rod Santos, a minister at Greenhills Christian Fellowship, an adjunct professor at the International Graduate School of Leadership, and the author of a book on why Filipino evangelicals disaffiliate.

“Historically, we as a people adore and value tagapamagitan [“intermediary”] figures,” Santos told CT. “There is always somebody who will be a go-between because it’s impossible to go straight to the mayor or it’s hard to court this girl, so you will need a ‘bridge.’ Likewise, we long for a deliverer, a savior who will save us from oppression or poverty.”

Here is a summary of the beliefs and origins of four Filipino local religious groups: Kingdom of Jesus Christ, Iglesia Ni Cristo, Ang Dating Daan, and Philippine Benevolent Missionaries Association.

Kingdom of Jesus Christ (KOJC)

Quiboloy claims that he started KOJC in 1985 after he heard God whisper, “I will use you” while attending a Billy Graham event in South Korea a decade earlier. Formerly a pastor in the United Pentecostal Church of the Philippines, Quiboloy left to start his own church after the denomination began investigating him for unorthodox teaching and disparagement of fellow pastors.

KOJC started with 15 people and grew quickly in the Philippines and among the Filipino diaspora. Today, the sect reports between 3 and 7 million members worldwide, according to The New York Times.

Quiboloy considers himself the “Appointed Son of God” because “he was the first man to have endured all the fiery trials of persecution and hardship and to have overcome them all without breaking his covenant with the Father,” according to an archived page of Quiboloy’s website. “He was the first man to finally eject the serpent seed, breaking the chain of sin by his absolute obedience to the Father’s will.”

The website went on to say that those who listen to Quiboloy, believe in him, and repent “will enter in the Kingdom of God on Earth today, and after judgment, unto eternity.”

In 2021, a federal grand jury in California indicted Quiboloy, claiming that girls as young as 12 who worked as Quiboloy’s personal assistants (called “pastorals”) were forced to have sex with Quiboloy or else risk “eternal damnation.” In addition, the group sent its members to cities in the US to solicit donations for a “charity”; the funds instead financed the lavish lifestyle of the KOJC leaders.

Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC)

Established in 1914 by Felix Y. Manalo, this religious group now has 7,000 congregations across 166 countries and territories, with about 3 million members worldwide. Followers of Iglesia Ni Cristo made up 2.6 percent of the Filipino population as of 2020, making it the third-largest religion in the country after Roman Catholicism and Islam.

Like Quiboloy, Manalo is viewed as a messianic figure, known as the “Messenger of God in the Last Days” and the angel from the east mentioned in Revelation 7:1–3. In Understanding the Iglesia Ni Cristo, Anne C. Harper noted that Manalo believed “his work is God’s last work of salvation,” according to official INC lessons.

“INC teaches that it is the only true church and the continuation of the church founded by Christ Himself,” she wrote.

The group asserts the only way to receive salvation is to join INC. Followers also recognize Jesus’ humanity only, not his deity. “We do not subscribe to the belief that Christ is a God-Man or both God and man,” INC’s website states. “He had in so many instances introduced Himself as the Son of God but never did He appropriate the title ‘God’ nor ‘God the Son’ for Himself because He is not God but a man.”

INC also endorses candidates whom its followers vote for in a bloc. As a sign of the group’s political influence, Duterte appointed INC executive minister Eduardo V. Manalo as special envoy for overseas Filipino concerns, a role he continues under current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

INC members who left or criticized the religion have faced intimidation and violence, according to an investigation by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate. In 2018, Canada granted ex-INC minister Lowell Menorca asylum, as the immigration and refugee board believed the group had “both the means and the motivation to seriously harm or kill” him if he returned to the Philippines.

Members Church of God International (MCGI), better known as Ang Dating Daan (ADD)

Eliseo F. Soriano, a former leader in an INC offshoot church called Iglesia ng Dios kay Kristo Hesus, Haligi at Suhay ng Katotohanan (“Church of God in Christ Jesus, Pillar and Ground of Truth”), started MCGI in 1977. The group started to grow rapidly after it began using radio and later TV programs—most famously Ang Dating Daan—to broadcast its message. During the 30-minute show, Soriano would discuss passages of the Bible, debunking the beliefs of other religious groups.

“Although ADD members claim to believe the Bible as their only source of authority, this is [only] half-true,” said the blog The Bereans: Apologetics Research Ministry. “They also believe Eliseo Soriano is the ‘sent one’ or ‘sugo’ the reason why he alone does the Bible explaining. In other words, an individual member could not just explain the Bible out of his own personal study.”

Soriano’s teachings reject the Trinity. He often cites Matthew 3:16–17 to make the claim that during Jesus’ baptism, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were in three different locations, so they cannot be one. The Bereans also noted that followers believe Jesus is not the only Savior of humanity but that Moses, Paul, and Timothy were also saviors, and on his second coming, Jesus will save ADD members.

The number of ADD members is not public, yet the group has churches, known as “locales,” across the country and the world. The group’s 143-acre headquarters in Pampanga province includes a massive conference center that is one of the largest indoor facilities in Southeast Asia.

On his program, Soriano often skewered INC’s beliefs, leading INC to create its own TV show Ang Tamang Daan (The Right Path) to refute ADD. In 2003, INC sued Soriano for libel and later won its case. In 2006, a court issued a warrant for Soriano’s arrest on charges of raping his former aide, Daniel Veridiano. To escape what MCGI called “religious persecution,” Soriano fled to Brazil in 2005, where he continued to lead his ministry until he died in 2021.

Philippine Benevolent Missionaries Association (PBMA)

Another religious group centered around a messiah figure, PBMA, was founded by Ruben Edera Ecleo Sr. in Dinagat Islands in 1965. Ecleo claimed to have learned Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Aramaic, which allowed him to interpret “ancient mysteries.” Through uttering a mantra given by God, he claimed to possess supernatural abilities, including appearing in more than one place at the same time, transfiguration, and the ability to heal and even resurrect the dead.

At its peak, PBMA had between 1 and 3 million members nationwide, according to the Philippine National Police. Unlike the other three groups, which primarily base their beliefs on Christianity, PBMA’s doctrine is a mix of Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Akashic ideas.

PBMA teaches that the new heaven and new earth will be in Dinagat Islands, where the group’s shrine is located, said Fred Dungganon, an evangelical pastor in Manila who grew up in the religious group. PBMA also teaches that God is Ecleo, and Jesus Christ is his son, Ruben Ecleo Jr., he added.

The founder was also the mayor of San Jose from 1963 until he died in 1987. Ecleo Jr. took over leadership of the group and succeeded him as the elected mayor of San Jose. He later became the representative of Dinagat Islands’ sole district.

PBMA’s numbers dwindled after Ecleo Sr.’s death and then again in 2002 after Ecleo Jr. was accused and later convicted of murdering his wife. Similar to Quiboloy’s arrest, PBMA’s followers squared off with police as they sought to issue Ecleo Jr. a warrant. In the ensuing shootout, 16 PBMA members and 1 police officer were killed. Ecleo Jr. escaped arrest until 2020. He died from cardiac arrest a year later while imprisoned.

Dungganon, who now leads Blessed Church Manila, said he remembers seeing PBMA members heal illness and perform miracles presumably through reciting mantras. In 1998, he accepted Jesus at a church youth camp but ended up backsliding and returning to PBMA, even becoming a faith healer himself.

One night in 1999 after healing a feverish infant, he couldn’t sleep. “I didn’t feel satisfaction in what I was doing,” he recalled. “No joy, no peace.” He recalled the unexplainable joy he had felt at the camp and began searching for truth in the Bible. A few months later, he surrendered his life to the Lord, leaving PBMA and facing persecution from his family and friends in the group. “There was no turning back,” he said. “The grace of God was so overwhelming, and my experience with Jesus was incomparably better than my previous faith.”

Santos noted that some of these pastors initially started with orthodox Christian doctrines but found that they could amass a larger gathering by promising deliverance. “Since no one is checking them, then they are not accountable to anybody, leading them to [start] a cult.”

To reach more people like Dungganon, Santos said that Filipino evangelicals can take advantage of the cultural inclination to seek a mediator by pointing those enmeshed in unorthodox movements to the true Messiah. “To connect with them, Christians can emphasize the role of Jesus, the Son of God, as the only true Mediator and Messiah.”

- More from Beng Alba-Jones

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Egyptian Christians Show ‘Love of Jesus’ to Displaced Palestinians

Jayson Casper

Courtesy of Christian Mission to Gaza

Almost six months have passed since Issa Saliba boarded a bus in Gaza with 15 other Christians to seek safety in Egypt. But he still relishes how they sang, clapped, and danced as they escaped devastation.

The air conditioning cooled his nerves, frayed from the harrowing journey to the border. Later that day, the wayside stop provided his first full meal.

As 1.9 million Palestinians—90 percent of Gaza’s population—remain internally displaced, less known is that 100,000 have managed to take refuge in Egypt. Saliba, allowed to depart because he is enrolled at the American University of Madaba in Jordan, left behind his father, two younger brothers, and the hundreds of other Christians remaining in the war-torn Mediterranean strip.

Saliba’s trip in April took him south along the damaged, dusty coastal road through Israeli checkpoints to the Rafah crossing. Then came a six-hour ride to Cairo. Saliba got out just in time: In May, Israel took control of Rafah’s Philadelphi Corridor and closed the border. The 8-mile-long strip of land remains a key sticking point in current negotiations over a ceasefire.

But from the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, the Egyptian government has resisted overtures to resettle displaced Palestinians in the adjacent Sinai Peninsula. Wary of terrorist infiltration but also fearful Israel will permanently refuse refugee reentry to Gaza, Egypt limited entry to people with medical emergencies, the financial means to pay up to thousands of dollars in fees, and international educational connections, like Saliba.

Evangelicals, though, are becoming known for giving food and supplies to refugees, whether Christian or Muslim. The Egyptian church, partnering with like-minded Palestinians, has even sent aid into Gaza for the believers huddled for safety in churches, as well as thousands of others displaced from their homes in makeshift camp communities.

“We show the love of God to everyone,” said Samuel Adel, chairman of the pastoral, outreach, and missions council of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Egypt, also called Synod of the Nile. “When people ask why, we tell them it comes from our love of Jesus.”

Soon after the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, aid to refugees began under the leadership of Hanna Maher, an Egyptian Presbyterian pastor who formerly led Gaza Baptist Church. While most Palestinian Christians traveled onward to Cairo, Muslims settled primarily in the Mediterranean towns in and around Arish, about 30 miles west of Rafah.

The synod is displaying Christian charity by giving weekly food parcels to 50 Muslim families. An additional 20 families received fans with which to endure the oppressive heat. Seven families received essential household supplies like refrigerators, washing machines, and cooking equipment. And the synod gave eight wheelchairs to government hospitals to ease transport of the wounded to specialized medical centers in the humanitarian area designated for Palestinians.

Sinai was once a hotbed for terrorism—100 Christian families fled in 2017.

But some Muslims’ attitudes have changed. Maher’s local Muslim driver, impressed that the church has done so much to help, doesn’t charge Maher for rides. The driver has told several new families: These are Christians, coming to help you.

And sometimes Maher is invited into discussion about whom to blame for the devastation of Gaza—Israel or Hamas. He replies with what Jesus said in the Gospel of John about a man who was born blind. When asked if the sin that caused the blindness came from the man or his parents, Jesus answered, “neither;” the blindness was so “the works of God might be displayed in him” (9:3).

But Maher struggles to know how to further counsel the Gazan displaced.

“We pray for peace, but I don’t know what to say about this terrible war,” he said. “‘God is with us,’ I tell them—but it is difficult; I don’t have an answer beyond this truth.”

The Egyptian government has allowed Christian humanitarian efforts, but the refugee presence is politically sensitive. Egyptian leaders remember how Palestinians who fled from Israel to Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria in the 1948 and 1967 wars never returned home. Officials have categorically rejected the permanent settling of Gazan refugees in Egypt. Israel will not accept the displaced in its territory either.

Israel and Egypt jointly imposed a blockade on Gaza in 2007. Prior to 2011, Egypt’s government unofficially tolerated a network of Gaza-Egypt tunnels but has since destroyed thousands. Despite Egyptian denials, Israel stated that smuggling continues and links its control of Rafah to ongoing ceasefire negotiations.

But beyond the political and security concerns, humanitarian needs of the displaced do not fall under official United Nations refugee jurisdiction. Yet whether through the church, diverse grassroots initiatives, or other UN agencies, assistance is available.

Assistance is more difficult in Gaza. This summer, Egyptian Christians have worked in conjunction with Christian Mission for Gaza (CMG) to provide meals for over 15,000 Muslims in Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, Jabaliya, and the Remal neighborhood of Gaza City. Residents have lined up with bowls and tins to receive ladlefuls of yellow rice, often heated over makeshift fires in metallic vats. Sometimes they get canned vegetables, and very rarely, chicken.

During last month’s distribution, children beamed while receiving the latter in tinfoil-wrapped portions. Black-robed women in headscarves extended their hands through tent openings to receive the same.

The Gaza-born former pastor of the Baptist church, Hanna Massad, serving prior to Maher, founded CMG in 1999. An Israeli missile flattened his family’s home in the Remal neighborhood, which took ten years for his father to build in the 1960s. Aware that most Gazans believe a “Christian West” is selling bombs to Israel, Massad said he wants his former neighbors “to know there are Christians who care—and are helping them.”

CMG has also distributed bread fifteen times in various areas and clean water five times. At each location, posted signs flap in the wind: From Gaza Baptist and the Presbyterian Church in Egypt. Many Muslims have offered thanks to their “brothers” for caring about their needs, and one even made the sign of the cross. Others have asked how they can learn more about the faith.

“People in Gaza have begun to see the true light, but they need guidance,” he said. “So I pray that the situation here will change after this war and that there will be a space to work freely with these people.”

About 200 of the 1,000 Christians who were living in Gaza before the war have since fled to Egypt, Massad estimated. Many have already received visas to Australia, and more are likely to emigrate as soon as they can.

Saliba, waiting in Cairo, prays for the Gazan Christians who remain.

“I thank God I was able to leave Gaza,” he said. “Jesus was with me every step of the way. Now I just want my family to join me.”

- More from Jayson Casper

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Expert: Ukraine’s Ban on Russian Orthodox Church Is Compatible with Religious Freedom

Interview by Jayson Casper

Despite GOP concerns over government interference, local evangelicals agree that the historic church must fully separate from its Moscow parent.

Orthodox priest blesses Ukrainian soldier's icon-decorated body armor.

Roman Pilipey / Stringer / Getty

During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump of a fondness for dictators, alleging that he supported a negotiated settlement with Vladimir Putin following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Trump, declining to affirm that a Ukrainian victory would serve US interests, replied that if he were still in the Oval Office, the war would never have happened, and he claimed that he could bring it to an end even as president-elect.

Both candidates failed to address the most salient current issue on Ukraine for evangelicals: religious freedom.

Last month, the Ukrainian parliament overwhelmingly approved a proposal to ban the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and compel the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) to break all ties with the patriarchate in Moscow. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the bill into law, hailing his nation’s “spiritual independence.”

Some Republicans, including vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, have accused Ukraine of “assault[ing] traditional Christian communities.” Vance linked these alleged violations to the continuation of US military support, stating that military aid should be used as leverage to ensure religious freedom.

The charge is nonsense, said a leading Ukrainian expert in an interview with CT.

The law, said Maksym Vasin, director for international advocacy and research at the Institute for Religious Freedom in Kyiv, is meant to protect Orthodox believers in Ukraine from Russian propaganda. The State Service for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience (DESS) studied ROC and UOC documents to demonstrate the continuing link between the two churches, despite the UOC’s postwar assertion of independence. Each of the UOC’s 10,000 parishes has now been given nine months to demonstrate that it is not connected to the ROC, subject to court judgment.

However, the GOP is not alone in its concern.

Pope Francis stated last month that no church should be abolished “directly or indirectly” based on how its people pray. The World Council of Churches urged “caution.” And according to various reports, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, considered first among equals in the Orthodox world, sent a delegation to Ukraine to inquire about canonical structure and whether individual UOC parishes are being forcibly transferred to the rival Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).

The state said 1,500 parishes have voluntarily aligned with the OCU since 2018.

In 2019, Bartholomew granted autocephaly (canonical independence) to the OCU, a then-schismatic body that had earlier broken off ties with Moscow. The move, supported by the United States, shifted OCU allegiance to the ecumenical patriarch’s church in historic Constantinople.

Orthodoxy first spread among the Slavic people from Kyiv, which was joined to the ROC in 1686. Following passage of last month’s law, the OCU reached out to the UOC for dialogue, emphasizing the need for unity and reconciliation.

CT spoke with Vasin, who contributed a chapter analyzing an earlier draft of the law in last year’s Security, Religion, and the Rule of Law, about the response of Ukrainian evangelicals, the limits of individual criminal prosecution, and whether the law should be considered a “ban.”

Please explain the aim of the new law.

The law aims to terminate Russian influence on Ukrainian society through Russian religious centers and to limit the propaganda of the chauvinistic ideology of Russkiy Mir (Russian World) in Ukraine. Ever since Soviet times, Russia has systematically used religion and religious centers of various denominations, primarily the ROC, as a tool of propaganda to achieve its military and geopolitical goals.

Churches are then manipulated to exert totalitarian control over their citizens or are closed down if they refuse to cooperate. This repressive policy is clearly visible in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, annexed following the Russian invasion. There, the Russian authorities are carrying out brutal repression against Ukrainian Christian churches and religious communities of various denominations, including Muslims and Jews who do not support Russian aggression.

Putin and the Kremlin want to maintain a key instrument of influence in Ukraine, namely the ROC and its affiliated local Orthodox eparchies and parishes. For this reason, Russia is most vocal critic of the Ukrainian government’s initiatives aimed at protecting religious freedom from abuse.

Is the new law a “ban” of the UOC?

It is a ban of the ROC in Ukraine, because of its open support for Russia’s war.

It is not an immediate ban on the activities of the UOC, which is not even directly mentioned. The government will issue directives to break administrative and canonical subordination to the ROC or other Russian religious centers. If a religious community refuses to sever these ties, the government will have the right to apply to the court to terminate the activities of this legal entity, given the danger to national and public security. But if the defendant parish complies during these hearings, the court case will be dismissed.

Thus, it is wrong to say that this law bans the UOC. Instead, the law allows this church and any other religious associations in Ukraine to liberate themselves from the influence of Russian intelligence services and stop being mouthpieces for Russian propaganda.

It is up to the UOC priests and parishioners to decide whether they will continue to agree to be used by the Kremlin or whether they will end their dependence on the ROC and Russian authorities.

Your analysis of an earlier version of the law advised the government to concentrate on individual criminal proceedings against clerics who collaborated with Russia. Why is this not a sufficient safeguard against Russian interference?

Religious communities should not be responsible for the activities of their clerics, and a ban must be the last resort if other measures have been ineffective. But in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that the ROC is losing the features of a religious organization and has become an instrument of political influence in the hands of the Kremlin.

Therefore, now, when it comes to the existence of the people of Ukraine in the face of genocide committed by the Russian military, the UOC must make a clear choice to refuse any ties with the ROC. This is a reasonable requirement of the law that meets the expectations of Ukrainian society, which is on the verge of survival.

The UOC can fulfill this simple legal requirement and continue to exist legally in Ukraine. However, when the UOC bishops refuse to obey the law and claim persecution, it becomes evident that its leadership wants to maintain its dependence on Moscow.

Court rulings will consider the assessment of DESS. But its previous director, prior to her removal, reviewed changes in UOC internal canons and stated in 2022 that it was independent of Moscow.

It is not enough for the UOC to declare independence alone. It must be confirmed not by words but by practical actions, such as the condemnation of traitorous bishops and priests who have collaborated with Russia—especially in the ROC-annexed UOC eparchies of Crimea, Berdiansk, and Kherson.

The government has several requirements for the UOC, the fulfillment of which could demonstrate not declarative but actual termination of influence from Moscow.

The UOC has already condemned the war, stopped prayers for the ROC’s Patriarch Kirill, and called on Ukrainian members to defend their country against Russian aggression. Why is canonical separation necessary?

Some UOC bishops and priests continue to pray for Kirill and do not condemn his statements justifying Russian aggression, such as calling it a “holy war.” At present, it does not appear that the entire UOC leadership has severed its ties with Moscow. Each case should be considered separately. And if senior leaders refuse to comply with the government’s legitimate demands, the individual parishes can prove in court that they have done everything to be independent of Russia’s influence.

Slavic nations have fought wars previously without shifting religious orientation. Should religious liberty allow citizens and clerics to adhere freely to the spiritual heritage of either Kyiv or Moscow, independent of current politics?

Freedom of religion is a fundamental human right. But it should not be abused for political purposes, especially in the context of a brutal war to destroy Ukraine. If we look at history, Moscow illegally established its canonical influence over the UOC. Now, the Ecumenical Patriarchate is trying to correct this historical injustice. The Ukrainian government’s intervention in this process is necessary only because the UOC leadership allows Russia to use it to spread the “Russian World” propaganda, collaborate with the Russian military, and weaken Ukraine’s resistance.

How have Ukrainian evangelicals responded to this law?

The Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations (UCCRO), except the UOC, supported President Zelensky’s initiative to protect them from Russian influence. The council includes various evangelical churches, including Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists, and Lutherans. Their statement condemned the ROC, calling it an accomplice to the “bloody crimes of the Russian invaders.” The council furthermore confirmed that religious rights and freedoms are respected in Ukraine, even in the face of a brutal war.

Evangelicals, like the other denominations, see that the main threat to religious freedom in Ukraine is Russian aggression, which has killed dozens of clergymen and destroyed hundreds of churches and houses of worship in Ukraine.

The Orthodox world is divided about the legitimacy of the Ecumenical Patriarch’s recognition of the OCU. And some argue that this law is evidence of government persecution of the UOC, to compel their merger. Should there be one Orthodox church in Ukraine, or does religious freedom demand a plurality if believers so choose?

This law does not force Orthodox churches to unite. Since 1991, every religious community in Ukraine, as a legal entity, has the right to freely and independently choose its canonical subordination. The only restriction is the prohibition of ties with countries that have committed armed aggression against Ukraine, meaning Russia.

Religious pluralism is a sign of flourishing religious freedom, of which Ukraine can be proud and can continue to cherish.

What consequences will Ukraine suffer if the UOC continues to protest this law?

The UOC is advised to break ties with Russia now and not wait for a court judgment. Even if the court bans some local parishes, their members can continue to freely practice their faith and hold worship services without the status of a legal entity. Unlike Russia, Ukrainian legislation allows unregistered religious communities to operate and retains a broad scope of religious freedom for their members regardless of denomination.

But it would be beneficial for Russia if the UOC ignored the law and continued to play the role of a martyr church. The Kremlin will undoubtedly use future court decisions against the UOC to spread propaganda about religious persecution, while concealing their war crimes against Ukrainian churches in the occupied territories.

I hope the government will implement this law without haste and in accord with legal procedure, to protect Ukraine’s religious communities from Russian influence.

Some Republicans argue that the issue of religious freedom is one reason the US should stop contributing to the war effort in lieu of a negotiated settlement. How would you respond?

Despite undisputed US commitment to freedom of speech, the House of Representatives is not averse to debating a bill to ban TikTok over its links to China, due to concerns about national security interests. Similarly, the law adopted in Ukraine seeks to protect Ukrainian society from “Russian World” ideology and the influence of Russian intelligence services through the churches, while remaining unequivocally committed to the value of religious freedom.

The Kremlin uses religion as a tool of war. Russia will use any reason, real or fake, to deprive Ukraine of international military support.

- More from Jayson Casper

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Ohio Haitians Feel Panic, Local Christians Try to Repair Divides

Emily Belz

As Donald Trump’s unfounded claims circulate, Springfield pastors and immigrant leaders deal with the real-world consequences.

The skyline of Springfield, Ohio.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

On Thursday, Viles Dorsainvil, a former pastor in Haiti and the leader of Haitian Community Help and Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, was getting phone call after phone call from local immigrants feeling “panic” over their safety.

The 60,000-person city has felt the strain and culture clash of welcoming 15,000 Haitians over the past four years, most of whom have temporary legal status in the US due to violence in their home country. Those tensions escalated this week as false rumors about Haitians— fanned by former president Donald Trump—came into the national spotlight.

Local Ohio church leaders are largely supportive of the Haitian community, which is predominantly Christian, but they are navigating division in their own Christian communities too. Pastors of some of the largest local churches joined meetings, press conferences, and phone calls this week to debunk misconceptions about Haitians and the situation on the ground.

Still, social media and the national news cycle (conservative news outlets ran headlines featuring a resident describing Springfield as a “dystopian nightmare”) have been louder locally than church responses, with a feedback loop that has deepened divisions even within the local Christian community.

Local pastors, in interviews with CT, said the social fabric of the community has been ripped apart, with real-world consequences for locals and immigrant neighbors in their own churches. Some schools and government buildings shuttered on Thursday over unspecified threats, and officials who spoke against the rumors were doxxed online. On Friday, two elementary schools in Springfield were evacuated and another school was closed.

“Words matter,” said Dorsainvil. “What you say can unite people, or it can create great division in a community. This is what we are experiencing now.”

One Haitian who bought a home in Springfield a month ago told Dorsainvil that he was considering leaving. The former pastor counseled him to remain calm, to not make an emotional decision. Dorsainvil admitted that he felt panicked too.

But he added, “We’ve been through a lot from Haiti to here—we are used to situations like this.”

At the presidential debate on Tuesday, Trump repeated internet claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were stealing and eating people’s pets. Trump’s running mate and Ohio native JD Vance also asserted that Haitians were killing and eating pets.

“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said.

Springfield officials have denied that they have reports or evidence of that happening. The rumors originated from social media—one viral post had a photo that was taken in Columbus, Ohio of a Black man carrying a goose.

“It’s like a tornado right now, politically and socially,” said Jeremy Hudson, pastor of one of the largest churches in town, Fellowship Church. “We don’t know what direction it’s going to go, what it’s going to take out, what the devastation is going to be.”

He added, “We do know in about five weeks the election is going to be over … and we’re going to be left trying to sew up the tears.”

On Wednesday night, Fellowship held a worship service, and Hudson found himself despondent about “the brokenness of our community and the brokenness of the ‘big C’ church” and the “slander” he had seen become the norm in conversations.

“Too many people in the ‘big C’ church in Springfield have taken up sides on the left or the right,” he said. “Because talking heads on TV are saying certain things, we’re giving ourselves [permission] to repeat those things, whether they’re true or not.”

Pastor Carl Ruby of Central Christian Church in Springfield has spoken in support of the Haitian community and saw Facebook comments in a local group that he needed to be run out of the area.

Ruby said he hopes it’s “one of those bad things that can give a megaphone to the gospel. … The contrast of the gospel message is so stark. It’s so hopeful.”

The city has been tense for months. Springfield has been working to absorb the arrival of an influx of Haitian immigrants who are filling jobs in a growing manufacturing sector.

Conflict in the community bubbled up a year ago when a Haitian immigrant crashed into a school bus and killed an 11-year-old boy. The Trump campaign began to talk about the crash again this week, with Vance posting that the child was “murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”

This week, the boy’s father, Nathan Clark, said it was an accident, not a murder, and asked Trump and other politicians not to bring up his son in political debates.

Haitian immigrants are largely in the United States legally. Ever since the big earthquake in Haiti in 2010, Haitians have fallen under a “temporary protected status” (TPS) federal immigration program that allows immigrants to have temporary legal status in the United States following a natural disaster or other upheaval. Haitians can register through TPS to receive documents to work and public benefits even if they entered the country illegally.

The Trump administration tried unsuccessfully to end the program for Haitians but was blocked by federal courts. The Biden administration extended Haiti’s TPS status, based on the country’s spiraling gang violence and lack of a functioning government.

“You can critique the program,” said Matthew Soerens, who leads advocacy at World Relief, an evangelical refugee resettlement organization. “But you shouldn’t malign the people … they are lawfully present.”

Some of the biggest churches in the Springfield area have tried to support the Haitian community. Fairhaven Church, a megachurch in Dayton, has partnered with immigrants, and its leadership participated in impromptu calls with other community leaders this week about the fallout.

Fellowship Church’s campus near downtown Springfield has seen a big increase in Haitian residents.

“Parts of having your community grow by 33 percent almost overnight is good. There is a lot of opportunity in that,” said Hudson. “And part of this influx of people without the resources for our infrastructure is really difficult … to say it’s been consuming is to put it lightly.”

Hudson is a chaplain for the police department, so he knows how difficult it has been for officers to navigate the sudden arrival of 15,000 people, though he said the department hasn’t seen a rash of crime attributed to Haitians.

The city is mainly feeling pains from sudden population growth, along with barriers of language and culture. Pastors said health clinics are overwhelmed, schools don’t have enough teachers or translators in classrooms, and first responders are stretched to cover a much bigger population.

“It’s not refugee resettlement, so there’s not a support infrastructure in place,” said World Relief’s Soerens. Refugee resettlement, but not TPS, comes with federal funding for experienced resettlement organizations to help immigrants with transition. “We would never resettle 20,000 refugees in a community in a short period of time.”

But he said it’s common for immigrants to move for jobs, as happened here.

On the positive side, Springfield pastors said Haitians are buying homes in a Rust Belt city that had seen decline, opening Creole restaurants, starting nonprofits, and growing churches.

Other declining Rust Belt cities have seen revitalization with incoming immigrants. In Utica, New York, one in four residents is a refugee—but that process happened over decades.

“The Haitian church is the fastest growing church in Springfield,” said Hudson.

Most of what local churches in Springfield are doing to minister to arriving Haitians is providing language classes. The Nehemiah Foundation, an umbrella organization connecting churches and Christian nonprofit work in Springfield, is working with churches to start a large ESL program, Ruby said.

But previous immigrants are also helping the new immigrants adjust. Pastor Laurent Muvunyi, a Congolese refugee who immigrated to the United States in 2007, works at his church Living Hope and in local nonprofits at the area to help immigrants integrate into the community.

A Haitian family is part of his church, he said, and he’s been checking on them to see how they are doing. He’s been encouraged to see Christian organizations getting involved in the situation.

But Muvunyi said the local and national tensions have made immigrants locally feel ill at ease. Now he hears more people ask in everyday conversation if someone is Haitian, which he finds disconcerting.

“God is bringing neighbors to us here in the United States,” said Muvunyi. “But I feel like Americans need … to see who are these people, what can they do in our lives, how can they be a part of our economy and our Christian lives, and also our community life.”

“Pray for us,” said Dorsainvil, the Haitian nonprofit leader in Springfield. “Understand our reality. Be patient with us. We can pray together, work together, understand each other.”

- More from Emily Belz

Ideas

The Church Can Help End the Phone-Based Childhood

Emily Crouch

Christians fought for laws to protect children during the Industrial Revolution. We can do it again in the smartphone age.

Edits by CT / Source Images: Library of Congress / Pexels

As American kids head back to school this fall, many will do so with smartphones in hand. The average age at which American kids receive their first phone is just 11, and most public schools only ban nonacademic classroom phone use—and struggle to enforce even that.

We know this is a problem. Research from academics like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge continues to show American young people are in a mental health crisis, and there’s compelling evidence that the phone-based childhood is the leading cause. And the church is not an outlier here; if you’ve worked in youth ministry recently, you understand the challenges that come with a room full of teens who are chronically online. If you’re young yourself, you understand how tightly tech use is linked to belonging and how difficult it can be to pull your attention away from your own device out of fear that you may be missing out.

Christians have already begun to consider how churches can encourage safer digital media use in ministry and approach tech use as a matter for discipleship. But I want to recommend another response with a long history in the church: political discipleship.

If we believe that the gospel has the power to speak to our whole lives, we must recognize that this includes our digital lives, and not just individually but together: as families and congregations, yes, but also in politics. Political discipleship—how we follow God as people rooted in a certain time and place in a political community—can be part of how we love and serve God and neighbor in our digital age.

I understand why some Christians are wary of getting involved in politics and government, whether for theological or historical reasons or simply because of skepticism about the government’s ability to do anything productive. But if we have the opportunity to advocate for public policies that promote safety and flourishing for us and our neighbors, we must steward that responsibility well, like the servants in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. From time to time, we may have a duty to step into the role of advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves.

That particularly means children and teenagers whose families do not have the knowledge, resources, or wherewithal to make limiting screen time a priority. Low-income children are two to three times as likely as their peers to develop mental health conditions, and some research shows that they’re also more likely to spend a lot of time online. Phone-free public schools would provide at least some respite from intentionally addictive digital media.

So how has the church historically engaged in political discipleship for the good of our neighbors? Christians who navigated the rapid technological, economic, and social changes of the Industrial Revolution provide examples we can learn from today.

The shift from agrarian to industrial economies in the US and UK brought with it new convenience and opportunities, but also new dangers for children. Sound familiar? It may be difficult for us to imagine now, but this was an era without mandatory schooling or many safety regulations. Children often worked alongside parents or other adults in fields or factories.

Without the labor laws we now take for granted, children sometimes worked 16-hour days or longer. They had few breaks. Injuries were common, and no special care was taken for children. Even child prostitution was found in many workplaces, as historian Penelope Carson wrote for Christian History, and there “were no safety regulations, and financial penalties and beatings were imposed for the slightest slip or misdemeanor. Accidents and deaths were all too common.” Orphans were particularly vulnerable, with no guardians to intervene on their behalf.

But some Christians did intervene, playing an integral role in the passage of child labor laws on both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Oastler, a devout Methodist and abolitionist of the 19th century, began spreading public awareness once he learned how children were treated in British factories. Then, he sought legal solutions to ensure the protection of children. Oastler’s sometimes radical methods and rhetoric got him in trouble more than once, but his concern for the poor and victims of injustice helped pass the UK’s Factory Acts of 1833 and 1847, which limited work hours for women and children.

Decades later, in the US, an Episcopalian priest named Edgar Gardner Murphy was concerned for the well-being of children working in mills. For years, he advocated for legislation that would shorten the hours children worked, raise the age of children working in factories and mines, and outlaw overnight work. Understanding that reforms were essential to protect children from employers and sometimes their own parents, he established the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in 1904 to spread awareness and advance policy solutions.

Just two years after the establishment of the NCLC, conversations about reforming child labor laws were elevated from a state to a federal level, and the committee succeeded in highlighting both the injustice of child labor and the benefits that public schooling would provide. Many parents and employers were content with the status quo, but photographs taken by Lewis W. Hine exposed the plight of children working in factories and mines, prompting legislative action.

Smartphones don’t pose the same physical dangers as early industrial mines or cotton mills, but their risk for American children is real. So is Christians’ responsibility to intervene on vulnerable kids’ behalf by advocating for better public policy around tech in public schools.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that our advocacy will succeed. History and current polls alike suggest that in spite of our best efforts, proposals to protect kids online have a high chance of failure. Many parents—and certainly many kids—would rather maintain the status quo. That possibility shouldn’t discourage us from trying.

In a speech at the International Christian Political Conference in 1977, Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon listed many bills he had championed or voted for because of his Christian faith. “As it happens,” he continued, “each of these proposals was defeated. Yet in each case, a witness was borne, I trust, to the goals which would move us in the direction of the kingdom, as I understand it.” Even if we don’t get the policies we want, we can still practice this kind of faithfulness in the public square. We can still bear witness to the hope we have in Christ, trusting that God will accomplish justice.

At a practical level, Christians—and especially pastors and other church leaders—should build relationships with school board members, state and local officials, and even members of Congress who can shape tech policies in our local schools. We can make the case to these leaders, just as Oastler did with British policymakers two centuries ago, that we have both the duty and ability to better protect vulnerable youth and families in our communities—to better love our neighbors.

Emily Crouch is a public policy and communications professional living and working in Alexandria, Virginia. She leads college student programming and the fellowship for early-career congressional leadership development at the Center for Public Justice.

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Culture

Taste and See If the Show is Good

Kate Lucky

Staff Editor

Christians like to talk up pop culture’s resonance with our faith. But what matters more is our own conformity to Christ.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Of this year’s Emmy-nominated television shows, my husband and I have watched all of The Crown, a fair bit of Abbott Elementary, and a couple episodes of Only Murders in the Building. We used to have a Hulu subscription, so we watched the first season of The Bear and several seasons of What We Do in the Shadows. (We’ve since canceled our subscription, so regrettably, no Reservation Dogs.)

Ask me what I liked or disliked about any of these shows, and I can tell you: the dialogue, the sets, the costumes, the pacing. But you might not agree with my verdicts. I find What We Do in the Shadows, a show about vampires living on Staten Island, extraordinarily funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. But Ted Lasso, a show about a soccer team? Three years ago, it took the Emmys by storm. I have friends who love it. But I watched, and I’m sorry … Ted Lasso just isn’t for me.

Taste. As the saying goes, there’s no accounting for it—but Christians are certainly inclined to try. We’re told to turn our thoughts to “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable” (Phil. 4:8). So which paintings and novels and TV shows qualify?

I think this is the wrong question to ask. As CT’s culture editor, I often encounter writers trying to discuss their favorite pop albums or hit summer movies this way. Don’t worry, they argue, this is actually Christian! Or at least it has Christian themes. The film mentions gardens and water and wine. The song touches on love and hope in ways that resonate with Scripture. It’s okay for Christians to like this show because it’s not just good TV. It’s true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable.

This kind of analysis usually falls flat. It tends to feel like a stretch—silly at best, disingenuous at worst. And yet, I understand the appeal. We don’t want the works of art we love to run counter to the claims of our faith. We want to follow Paul’s injunction to “set our minds on things above,” so we go looking for loftiness in sitcoms and pop songs (Col. 3:2). We fear returning to a reflexive fundamentalism that sees “worldly” music, literature, or cinema as inherently dangerous.

Truth is, the best music, literature, and cinema do reference our faith, in a way. These works tell stories, and Christianity tells the grand story underneath them all. Insofar as works of art tell the truth about human nature and the world in which we live, we’ll be able to find those threads of connection—even if only as simple as “sin is real.”

The gospel of Jesus makes sense of sacrifice and typifies love, and distinguishes life from death. Now, as in the beginning, there is the Word, undergirding comedy and tragedy, absurdity and futility, suffering and joy. In that sense, every artwork is that Athenian altar of Acts 17, inscribed to a too-often unknown God.

But whether a television show gets us thinking about what’s noble and pure often has less to do with the show itself and more to do with us as viewers. For Paul, the altar to the unknown God was the basis for a sermon pointing to the God he knew in Christ Jesus. Yet for thousands of Athenians who’d passed it day in and day out for decades, it made no such connection.

Rephrasing my earlier question, then: Which paintings and novels and TV shows qualify for me?

Which pieces of art can move each of us—with our unique aesthetic sensibilities, our God-given proclivities for particular jokes, our besetting sins—to reflect on what’s admirable and right?

Posing the question this way doesn’t disregard the guidelines in Philippians 4:8. Some films or songs or texts—such as those with wildly gratuitous violence or pornographic sexuality—will never help any of us meditate on things above. Art isn’t like meat sacrificed to idols (1 Cor. 8:4–8); it’s not all neutral for the Christian. Not everything is on the table.

Yet this approach does allow for personality, flexibility, and yes, taste. I reveled in the award-winning show Breaking Bad and its companion, Better Call Saul. Those series are violent, but they didn’t tempt me to wrath. I spent the days after each episode meditating on good intentions and underlying motives and how susceptible we are to faulty explanations of our own behavior.

But Baby Reindeer I couldn’t stomach. Its portrayal of human brokenness aligned with my understanding of sin-corrupted reality. But the show’s depictions of sexual violence made me queasy; they stuck with me too long after I’d turned off the TV. The show felt dark; it made me feel dark. I decided not to finish the series.

The reverse may have been true for a different believer: yes to Baby Reindeer, no to Breaking Bad. In that sense, art is like that idol-sacrificed meat: A stumbling block for one of us won’t be for the other (1 Cor. 8:9–13).

This makes the task of the Christian critic at once more difficult and more interesting. Our job is not to justify our taste in culture but to explain what we see from a vantage point oriented to Christ. Not, This art is actually kinda Christian, but rather, Here’s what I realized as a Christian encountering this art.

We needn’t try to force cultural artifacts into a set of parameters they were never meant to meet, grading on a curve so our favorites get a pass. Instead, we come to those artifacts as changed people, minds renewed, and see what there is to see.

This is not how most of us think about taste today, whether we are Christians or not, but it harkens to an older tradition. Once, philosophers thought of taste not in terms of “what band you like, what books you read, what clothes you wear,” writer Kyle Chayka explained in a recent interview with the critic Ezra Klein. They understood it rather “as a more fundamental human experience, like a moral capacity, a way of judging what’s around you and evaluating what’s good and … almost making it part of yourself.”

Developing taste like that will require confidence, born of sanctification and informed by the Spirit, about what is good and worthy of our attention. It will require humility, too, about our own capacity to see rightly, our self-flattering accounts of what we like and dislike, and the fact that our minds could always change, perhaps from the benefit of another believer’s view.

This is how I hope my own taste will come to operate as a Christian culture critic: as a bellwether for the admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy. As an aid to my faith. As a means of encountering God in a brushstroke, a laugh line, a well-written truth.

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

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Books

Review

A Pastor’s Wife Was Murdered. God Had Prepared Him for It.

Ericka Andersen

In the aftermath of a senseless killing, Davey Blackburn encountered “signs and wonders” hinting at its place in a divine plan.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

When disaster strikes, it’s easy to comfort ourselves with empty phrases like “It was a freak accident” or “That’s so unlikely to happen.” Much easier, certainly, than acknowledging that none of us are immune to tragedy. We soothe ourselves with statistics of survival, but inside we know the path of our lives has already been determined. Data is no weapon against God’s sovereignty.

Those unlikely, catastrophic events do happen—as they did to Davey and Amanda Blackburn. Davey, a pastor, had hardly expected to come home one morning and find his pregnant wife fighting to survive on the kitchen floor. He couldn’t have guessed that a violent crime would take Amanda’s life and tear his family apart.

Nearly nine years after Amanda took her last breath, he’s able to see that with God in control, even such brutality isn’t just random senselessness. But the pathway he took to reaching that conclusion wasn’t so smooth. In his new book, Nothing Is Wasted: A True Story of Hope, Forgiveness, and Finding Purpose in Pain, Davey documents his walk through that season of grief, sharing what he learned about trusting God amid horrific tragedy.

‘Things seem too easy’

When I first heard about Amanda’s savage murder, I was eight months pregnant. Only weeks before, I had moved back to my hometown of Indianapolis. Amanda, already the mother of a 2-year-old boy, had been pregnant herself. She lived in downtown Indianapolis, just a few miles from my sister’s house.

The murder hit me deeply as an expectant mom and fellow Christian. Amanda was the picture of an all-American girl, the last person anyone would expect to be killed in a drug-fueled robbery. The community was shaken—heartbroken and shattered for Davey, their son Weston, and Amanda’s close-knit family.

Given Amanda’s close connection to ministry and evangelism, local Christians were especially rocked. Everyone seemed to have a connection to the family, including me, when I discovered a member of my Bible study was Davey’s cousin.

The Blackburns had moved to Indianapolis after feeling God’s call to start a church there. In the book, Davey writes about launching Resonate Church and planting his family in this new Indianapolis community. The church grew, friendships formed, and Amanda’s budding venture as a furniture restorer began to thrive as well. With a second child on the way, their lives seemed charmed—almost too much so.

In the brief time Amanda spent in the hospital before her death, Davey remembered something she had said months prior: “Davey, things seem too easy right now. There’s no way this can last. I feel like we’re about to walk into a tough season.”

As she lay unconscious in the hospital bed, he was convinced God would heal her, but that belief soon passed when doctors told him Amanda was brain-dead. Suddenly, Davey faced a question he never anticipated: What happens when God doesn’t answer our prayers in the way we wish?

This question anchors the narrative of Nothing Is Wasted, where Davey candidly shares his experience in the aftermath of Amanda’s death, recounting depression, confusion, and even sinful responses (like feeling prejudice against men of color because the killers were Black).

To its credit, the book doesn’t advertise “feel-good” Christianese as a formula for overcoming suffering. Rather, it honestly portrays the stages of grief and their effects on one’s faith. “What do I do with God now that it seems His calling actually led us into this tragedy?” writes Davey. “If He were God, couldn’t He have prevented this? And if He were good why wouldn’t he have?”

Readers also get to know Amanda in her own words through some of her journal entries, where she recalled feeling peaceful about moving to Indianapolis and blessed by Hillsong United lyrics that read, “I will take up my cross and follow Lord where You lead me.” We meet a woman who was fully devoted to the Lord and grateful for his hand in nearly every aspect of her life.

The utter injustice of Amanda’s death was nearly impossible for Davey to comprehend. The world without Amanda felt unsettled, dark, and temporary, as he imagined Amanda entering heaven with the little girl he never got to meet, Everett Grace. He writes, “I could feel my heart longing for an otherworldly place—one that would last forever, one that could not be shaken or torn down, one that could not be stolen from me.”

Like many survivors, he also felt guilt—for going to the gym that morning, leaving the car unlocked, and talking on the phone in the driveway before heading back inside. Davey writes of being comforted by Amanda’s father, who assured him that God was not surprised—that he had “orchestrated things ahead of time to show us that He’s in this!”

Davey began seeing small signs of this orchestration at work. A casket was mistakenly sent to the funeral parlor made of reclaimed barn wood, which was Amanda’s favorite material to work with in her furniture restoration business. He then found that the church hosting her celebration of life service had also used reclaimed barn wood to renovate its stage and walls.

Past conversations with Amanda and her detailed journal entries revealed God’s prophetic provision for a future where Davey would be on his own, something they couldn’t have anticipated then. “I know it may not be like this forever, and you may have things ahead of us that are unbearable,” she wrote in a prayer. “When the valleys do come, please keep our family strong.”

These glimpses of God’s providential care shape the book into a guide for those facing tragedy, encouraging them to recognize the supernatural signs of his presence where they least expect it.

An architecture of hope

As Davey put his life back together, a divine architecture of hope took shape. It helped him view Amanda’s killers, at least in part, as victims of their life circumstances. It gave him the freedom to cultivate forgiveness.

Seemingly insignificant memories would resurface in Davey’s mind, illuminating clear markers of God’s preparation for moments of resentment and disorientation. “Your sin and my sin murdered Jesus,” Davey recalled a pastor telling him at seven years old. Remembering this remark, he was reminded that no matter how violent a crime, all sin is deadly in God’s eyes.

Along the way, God provided words of wisdom, encouragement, and prophecy from meticulously placed pastors, friends, and community members. When Davey began having regular nightmares, consistently jolting awake at exactly 6:37 a.m., random friends began texting him with prayers right at that moment each morning. None of them knew about the nightmares.

“You were built for this. You have been placed in this position for such a time as this.” In a serendipitous meeting one day, Davey heard these words from a local Black pastor who worked with inner-city youth like the ones who killed Amanda.

Such confirmations began to appear at every turn. All the signs and wonders could only point back to God, who was leading Davey to something far bigger than himself or Amanda. Davey recalls hearing God say, “I’m a God who restores out of the ruin,” and that he would “completely” restore this situation too.

In one of the book’s most powerful pages, a friend asks Davey if he thinks Amanda would have chosen to move to Indianapolis if she had known her fate in advance. The question floored him, but in considering it, he remembered something Amanda wrote just one day after moving. It read, “I will take up my cross and follow wherever you lead.”

Soon, a rush of other divine moments came flooding back: a night of small-group prayer, when the Holy Spirit had clearly been moving; the morning before Amanda’s death, when Davey found her face-down on the bedroom floor in the posture of a surrendering prayer. He could finally see that Amanda would have said yes to Indianapolis even if she had known what was to come.

Ministry to the grieving

Nothing Is Wasted covers nearly eight years of Davey’s life, showcasing his process of healing and the restoration of his faith, trust, and mission. Without sugarcoating the details, Davey offers a pathway to a deeper purpose within our pain—even the worst kind.

Ultimately, as the court case proceeded against Amanda’s killers, he was able to look them in the eyes and say, “I do not hold this against you.” He recognized a recurring theme amid his pain and the pain of others he met on the journey. Simply put: Nothing is wasted. Our pain and tragedies will be used for God’s purpose and our good, no matter how bad things get.

This realization resulted not only in the book but also in Davey founding the Nothing Is Wasted ministry, through which he hosts a popular podcast, along with classes and retreats for those walking through hard things.

He remarried and had another child, still cherishing the love he had with Amanda and mourning the loss of his unborn daughter. Over the years, he’s faced hurtful rumors, hateful criticism, and even murder accusations, but he walks forward in his divine calling to minister to the grieving.

In this book, readers will find resonance, hope, and a truth that holds even in the darkest of nights.

Ericka Andersen is a weekly columnist at World magazine. She is the author of Reason to Return: Why Women Need the Church and the Church Needs Women.

- More from Ericka Andersen

News

What It Takes to Plant Churches in Europe

Ken Chitwood

Where some see ambition as key to evangelism, others experiment with subtler ways of connecting to people who don’t think they need God.

Luigi Olivadoti

The goal is audacious. But as far as James Davis, founder of the Global Church Network, is concerned, Christians need deadlines. Otherwise, they will never do what they need to do to fulfill the Great Commission.

His group gathered in Zurich, Switzerland, last September with 400 ministry leaders from across Europe who committed to raising up and equipping more than 100,000 new pastors in the next decade. The network plans to establish 39 hubs in Europe, with a goal of 442 more in the years to come, for training church planters, evangelists, and pastors to proclaim the gospel.

“A vision becomes a goal when it has a deadline,” Davis said at the event.

“So many Christian leaders today doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts. It is time for us to doubt our doubts and believe our beliefs. We will claim, climb, and conquer our Mount Everest, the Great Commission.”

Davis has a number of very motivated partners in this project, including the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. The network also counts The Wesleyan Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, the Church of God in Christ, and OMF International (formerly Overseas Missionary Fellowship) as members of a broader coalition working to complete the Great Commission in the near future. If it turns out their European goal is a bit beyond reach, they will still undoubtedly do a lot between now and their deadline.

And the Global Church Network is not alone. In Germany, the Bund Freikirchlicher Pfingstgemeinden (Association of Free Church Pentecostals) has announced plans to plant 500 new churches by 2033. The group, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2024, told CT it is currently planting new congregations at a rate of about seven per year. Raising up new pastors is key to its growth strategy.

And the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland (Association of Free Evangelical Churches in Germany) has planted 200 churches in the past decade. It has grown to about 500 congregations with 42,000 members. The Free Evangelicals also have plans to launch 70 new churches by 2030, at a rate of 15 per year, and then start another 200 by 2040.

“Goal setting is a bit of a thing in Europe,” said Stefan Paas, the J. H. Bavinck Chair for Missiology and Intercultural Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and the author of Church Planting in the Secular West.

He’s not convinced it’s a good thing for Christian missions, though. In fact, he doesn’t think ambition, verve, and goal setting actually work.

Paas’s research shows that supply-side approaches—the idea that if you plant it, they will come—seem promising and often demonstrate early success, but the results mostly evaporate. While it is widely believed that planting new churches causes growth, he said, that’s not what the evidence shows.

“Yes, newer churches tend to draw in more people and more converts, but they also lose more,” Paas told CT. “There’s a backdoor dynamic where people come into newer churches but then leave.”

He examined the Free Evangelicals’ membership statistics from 2003 to 2017 and found that church plants often correlated with quick growth but then slow decline.

“It’s one thing to draw people, and another thing to keep them,” he said.

Part of the problem, according to Paas, is that the things that attract people to new churches, like great music, dynamic preaching, and a sense of real passion about something happening, don’t translate into deeper discipleship. People don’t get more involved or committed, and when church stops being new or exciting, they fade away.

This is why church plants often seem very successful in urban contexts, where lots of new people arrive every day; it can ironically prove easier to attract new converts in deeply secular contexts, such as former Communist countries. But getting people to come in the front door is not as big of a challenge as connecting in deep, meaningful, and life-transforming ways. Many newcomers don’t last.

Paas says Christians should focus more on contextualizing, trying new things, and training pastors to build real relationships. While Davis and others argue ambition is necessary to mobilize people to evangelize the world, church plants in Europe succeed through experimentation and creativity, according to Paas.

“Experimental spaces and fresh expressions are much more important than traditional church plants,” he said. “Innovation is much more important than growth-driven entrepreneurship.”

One church doing this is in Eisenach, a small town with about 42,000 inhabitants in the eastern German state of Thuringia. Eisenach has historical ties to the Protestant Reformation—Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach both lived there, though at different times—but today about 70 percent of the population has no religious affiliation. They are, as the Germans say, konfessionslos (“without confession”).

“Belief is just not a thing here,” said pastor Cordula Lindörfer. “When Eisenachers are in trouble, or in crisis, they don’t think of God or the church. They never look to the supernatural. They just don’t see it as relevant.”

That can make planting a church rather tricky. So Lindörfer and her team, with the support of the Association of Free Evangelical Churches, decided not to start with a Gottesdienst (church service) but to focus first on three other G’s: gemeinschaft, geniessen, and gestatten—community, enjoyment, and permission.

At StartUp Church, their plant in Eisenach, the team invites community members to monthly brunches to discuss topics like whether “justice for all” is a utopian pipe dream or something that could be achieved. The church’s first event, back in 2020, was at a pub. They advertised it as a meetup to “discuss doubts, beliefs, talk about God and the world.”

Today, StartUp has a weekly gathering at a local bar named Cat’s Leap, and families socialize at a local park.

At one recent gathering, people explored the different possible perspectives in the story Jesus told about workers in a vineyard all getting paid the same, even though they worked different amounts (Matt. 20:1–16).

Lindörfer said most of the people who come to StartUp are between 30 and 40 years old. Her own job is less that of a typical pastor—she doesn’t do a lot of preaching and teaching—and more moderator and convener.

“Eisenachers are all ready for a conversation; they all have opinions and ideas,” she said. “For me it’s all about creating a space where they feel welcome, where people come to connect rather than compete.”

Paas thinks this is probably the real future of church growth in secular Europe. Success will have less to do with big goals and more to do with the difficult ones, and it will focus on the daily work of making friends, building connections, showing people God’s love, and inviting them to imagine that Christian faith could be relevant to their lives.

Anyone who thinks that church planting in Europe is going to be quick and easy should probably stay home, Paas told CT. “Otherwise, you’ll get disappointed; you may even lose your faith,” he said.

Paas hasn’t lost his.

When he surveys the mission work taking place across the continent, he finds hope in the promise, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18–31, that God uses foolish things to accomplish divine purposes.

“I know this is God’s work,” he said. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”

Church Plant Struggles to Take Root in Liechtenstein

Driving south on European route 43, you might notice there are only five exits for the country of Liechtenstein. Or you might not notice, given how quickly the 24-kilometer-long German-speaking monarchy flies by.

Sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland and surrounded by the Alps, Liechtenstein is one of the world’s smallest nations. It is also one of the richest. Liechtenstein’s gross domestic product is a staggering $197,000 per person. That’s more than twice the economic value produced in the United States every year and more than three times the value produced by Germany, which is considered Europe’s “economic powerhouse.”

So most people, if they think about Liechtenstein at all, don’t think of it as a mission field.

But most people are wrong, according to the father-son pastor team Paul and Mike Clark. Since June 2022, the Clarks have been trying to plant a church in Liechtenstein.

“Here there is just as much need for the gospel as elsewhere,” son Mike Clark, 44, told CT on a walk through the capital of Vaduz, a town of about 6,000 people located down from the castle where the monarch, Prince Hans-Adam II, lives with his family.

About 70 percent of the 40,000 people are Roman Catholic. There are some small minorities of other religious groups—8 percent of the country identifies as Reformed Protestant and 6 percent as Muslim—but most people are counted as Catholic.

“Don’t let the official statistics fool you,” Mike Clark said. “Only about 10 percent of these people are in church on any given Sunday.”

Convincing Liechtensteiners to consider going to church—and to an evangelical church at that—has proved to be quite challenging in a country defined by private capital and established Catholicism. Few people seem interested in conversations about faith. Few seem to feel they have spiritual needs. The idea of something different than nominal Catholicism is very foreign to them.

“We’ve tried just about everything to connect with people,” said Paul Clark, a 72-year-old American who has spent decades in Europe. “Setting up an informational table in Vaduz’s city center. Starting a gospel choir. And now launching an Alpha course in the summer,” which teaches the basics of Christianity.

The gospel choir was popular, but no one came back to the church to visit. Getting permits from city hall for the Alpha course demanded lots of time and energy, but the classes weren’t especially popular.

Maybe it will turn out that people are just not that interested in church. Currently, there are actually more casinos (seven) in Liechtenstein than non-Catholic congregations (five). There are only two evangelical churches: Free Evangelical Church in Schaan and Life Church Liechtenstein in Eschen, where the Clarks minister to a small group of people and dream of reaching many, many more.

Life Church meets once a month in an office park on the outskirts of town. The church’s setup is simple: a few rows of plastic chairs, a drop-down screen with a background image of the Alps, a smattering of tabletops in the back, and a mix of homemade cakes and store-bought chips and guacamole for visitors to snack on.

Paul Clark leads worship on acoustic guitar alongside a young man from Brazil playing cajon. One Sunday, about 25 people came to the 4 p.m. service. Most were from partner churches in eastern Switzerland and western Austria. They sang “10,000 Reasons” and “Goodness of God” in German. Paul reminded them what the church plant is all about. Quoting the German lyrics of “Shine Jesus Shine,” he prayed that Jesus would shine the light of his Father’s glory on Liechtenstein.

If numbers remain low, they might close by the end of 2024.

“In my experience, if a church isn’t gaining traction in the first couple of years, it won’t ever,” Paul Clark said.

Luigi Olivadoti

Church plants in Germany, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland show the challenges—and opportunities—for evangelicals in Europe.

He knows what he’s talking about. Paul Clark first came to Europe from Michigan in the 1970s with Teen Challenge. He met his wife, Mechthild, who was also working with Teen Challenge, in West Germany. In the past 50 years, the couple has helped establish six European churches in collaboration with the Association of Free Church Pentecostals. They’re in the German states of Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Thuringia.

Mike Clark followed in his parents’ footsteps and has helped start ministries in Missouri, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

Both the Clarks, however, say Liechtenstein may be the toughest place they’ve ever tried to tell people about Jesus. Planting a church has been harder here than anywhere else they’ve experienced.

“There’s a cost for following Christ here,” Mike Clark said. “It’s not your life, but it is a certain loss of anonymity and the social pressure that comes with saying, ‘I follow Jesus.’ ”

But the father-son pair remain resolute. They believe—or maybe hope is a better word—that some hungry souls have questions about faith that they can’t explore in the context of the Catholic church. They want people in Liechtenstein to have a local evangelical option. Today, many would have to go out of the country for that.

In fact, the original idea for the plant emerged when visitors from Liechtenstein came to the Clarks’ more established church, FCG Bregenz (Free Christian Church Bregenz) in Austria. Similar to Life Church, FCG Bregenz operates out of an office park. It’s located in a former textile factory area on the shores of Lake Constance, in a building with a modern, postindustrial feel.

Heading over to Austria, as boundaries between some of the richest nations flitted by, Mike Clark noted, “Borders are no big deal when it comes to commerce in this part of the world.”

He added, “People shouldn’t have to cross borders to come to Christ.”

FCG Bregenz is very international, though, as are many evangelical churches in Europe. Austrians attend services, but so do people from Germany, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, as well as expats from Kenya, Syria, and the United States.

Mike Clark himself grew up in Germany; studied theology in the US; earned a doctorate in law in the Netherlands; and, with his wife, Laura, spent 15 years in church emergency and development aid work before feeling the call to plant a church in Austria and then another in Liechtenstein.

The Clarks founded FCG Bregenz in 2016. Mike Clark, who was ordained in a Pentecostal church in 2004, has led it since 2020.

He brings all of that experience to ministry and his cross-cultural identity comes through when he preaches. When he pops on stage, worshipers might think they are at church in the US. With his beard, skinny jeans, gray sweater, white tennis shoes, and iPad, “Pastor Mike” looks the part of a hip megachurch pastor. But then he starts preaching in excellent German.

About 60 people attend his Austrian church on a given Sunday, and about that many watch online. According to Mike Clark, FCG Bregenz is one of several churches planted in the westernmost Austrian state of Vorarlberg in the past 10 years. Most of the churches in the network have fewer than 50 worshipers every Sunday, which makes FCG Bregenz a leader. The church has become a training ground for church planters looking to evangelize more Europeans.

Evert van de Poll, a Dutch missiologist, said Europe presents a particular challenge for evangelism. The weight of a cultural Christian heritage and a century of secularization means few people are seeking out churches.

New forms of individualized spirituality can be quite popular, but that rarely translates into curiosity about spiritual experiences at an evangelical church.

Van de Poll said he has seen evangelicals successfully reach out to migrants and refugees in Europe. And some churches—in Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and even rich little Liechtenstein—are trying a more seeker-sensitive model, with contemporary worship, relevant preaching, and a message that the gospel matters today.

But what works on one side of a European border, Van de Poll said, doesn’t necessarily work on the other.

“You’d think that the basic principles are the same, but borders matter,” he said. “Pastors and missionaries need to appreciate Europe’s diversity and the dividing lines between different states; cultures; and their varying degrees of Protestant, Catholic, or secular influence.”

This may be the lesson the Clarks learn from Life Church in Liechtenstein. Despite their success in Austria and their varied international experience, nothing seems to be taking root in the affluent topology of Europe’s smallest German-speaking state.

Maybe next year, if the church can string things together that long, a few shoots of life will appear in the soil.

But maybe not.

“If nothing comes from our efforts … we are probably going to close up shop,” Paul Clark said. “But God called us here, we know that.”

Evangelicals Flourish in One Town in Switzerland

For a small town, Buchs has a surprising number of churches. The municipality on the eastern edge of Switzerland has a Roman Catholic community, of course, and a Swiss Protestant congregation, but it also has an Evangelical Alliance church, a Free Evangelical Church, a New Apostolic Church, an International Christian Fellowship, and the nondenominational GRACE.Church.

In fact, there is about one evangelical congregation for every 1,000 people, which has earned Buchs the nickname “Canaan on the Rhine,” a promised land for Swiss evangelicals.

Only about 2 percent of Switzerland identifies as evangelical. But in Buchs, for some reason, about 10 percent of people worship at an evangelical church.

Why is this town different?

The pastors leading churches in Buchs have a few theories. There may not be a sociological explanation, they say—the Holy Spirit works in ways beyond human comprehension.

“There is something prophetic in this place,” Ben Stolz, pastor of GRACE.Church, told CT while sitting in a Buchs café drinking a cappuccino. “The town has a deep spiritual background.”

Ulrich Zwingli, the 16th-century Reformer, was born just outside of Buchs. The farmhouse where he was raised still serves as a place of pilgrimage and spiritual reflection.

More recently, the charismatic preacher Leo Bigger was born in Buchs. Raised a Catholic, he was a disco promoter and had his own rock band before becoming an evangelical and rising in the leadership of the International Christian Fellowship (ICF). Today he’s the pastor of the largest Protestant congregation in Switzerland, ICF Zurich, and the fellowship has grown to about 60 congregations in 13 countries. One of them is in Buchs, of course, led by wife-and-husband team Sarah and Werner Eggenberger.

Stolz’s church attracts about 150 people on an average Sunday, with another 30 or so checking in online. The nondenominational congregation is one of the largest in the city and is known for contemporary worship, a relaxed atmosphere, and topical sermons.

Stolz, who grew up in Buchs, describes it as a “modern,” “living” church. He dreams that one day Europe could be “dotted with vibrant, healthy communities” like GRACE.Church, “where people come to know Jesus Christ, experience healing, and thrive through their growing knowledge of the love and grace of our wonderful God.”

Some people, he knows, find that vision upsetting and even offensive. Several years ago, the Catholic theologian Günther Boss, just across the border in Liechtenstein, used GRACE.Church as an example of what was wrong with modern Christianity. He said its theology was thin, its sermons “repulsive,” and it was simultaneously too modern and too old-fashioned.

“In their form they are very jazzed up, youthful,” Boss told the Liechtensteiner Vaterland, one of the country’s two daily newspapers. “But in their content they are reactionary and have very narrow moral ideas.”

Such criticisms are not uncommon in Europe. Free churches—those that operate without state-granted privileges—are often stigmatized as strange, antisocial sects. In Buchs, however, there are enough evangelicals that most people know one, and here attacks carry less weight than they might elsewhere.

“We go to each other’s weddings, attend one another’s funerals, celebrate births and baptisms together,” Martin Frey, the pastor of an official, authorized Swiss Protestant church, told CT. “This helps educate people about the free churches and makes the ‘sect’ image seem outdated.”

Frey considers Stolz a friend and likes to drink coffee with him at the café. He works with other evangelical pastors in town too. They have theological differences, of course, but he knows them, relates to them, and can see how invested they are in meeting Swiss residents’ spiritual needs.

People in Buchs find something in an evangelical church, according to Frey, that they can’t find in more mainstream religious communities.

“To raise hands, to stand and sing, to proclaim in tongues is very, very far away from the typical Swiss mentality,” Frey said. “The Swiss tend to hold back.”

Yet some people in Buchs feel they’ve connected with God and other Christians only when they stop holding back—overcoming or at least overlooking their own instinctual restraint.

Olivier Favre, a Reformed Baptist pastor and sociologist who coedited Phänomen Freikirchen (Free Church Phenomenon), argues this is the key to evangelicals’ success. They understand human needs. They show people how to connect to each other and have a relationship with the divine.

“In our very individualized society, where many are alone, the idea of a personal relationship with God, belief that he answers prayers, that he can heal the sick and effect miracles, meets a spiritual need,” Favre writes.

In this way, of course, Buchs is no different than other European countries. The town may have a unique history, a sense of spirituality, and enough evangelicals that they’re not seen as odd and marginal as they are in other places. But still, people are people. Europe is Europe. And efforts to evangelize are all pretty similar.

At a recent vision Sunday at GRACE.Church, Stolz laid out a plan to grow the church. The formula is friendship and faithful Christian witness, he told CT. He hopes this will soon lead to the construction of a new building in which to worship, making one of the many churches in Buchs a little more visible.

He wants GRACE.Church to be like a light to people in the dark. Or a warm fire for those who are cold.

“People are lonely,” Stolz said, “and the churches here in Buchs are here to help build connections.”

Ken Chitwood is CT’s European correspondent.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "That Europe May Know".

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