How Can Evangelicals Navigate Political Tensions? Practice.

Harvest Prude

This campaign season, Christians have tried to proactively address political polarization—starting with tough conversations among themselves.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Daniel Breed has heard all the politics-related horror stories: members leaving their small groups, new cliques forming, churches splitting entirely. So the Presbyterian pastor isn’t taking chances with his flock this year.

Emmaus Road Church in Appleton, Wisconsin, draws in around 200 faithful on a Sunday. It’s a mostly conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) church; some congregants sport Donald Trump campaign signs on their cars or lawns, and others voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Beyond the one-on-one conversations that crop up during the campaign, Breed hosts a faith and politics class in the months ahead of Election Day. Every other week, participants gather at their new church building downtown to share a meal, then divide into classrooms.

They discuss historical instances of evangelical involvement in politics, examples of faithful Christian engagement, and ideas for how to interact across the political aisle.

People need a place to process the fear and anxiety surrounding political issues, and Breed believes the close-knit church community is the right testing ground for listening and asking questions.

“I think it’s because we built a lot of social capital,” he added. “I haven’t had anyone leave because of these issues.”

Breed thinks churches need to be direct about these kinds of conversations and hopes more will see that, even though members “might have differing opinions, it’s possible to do that and stay together.”

Researchers are finding that polarization is currently at a height in modern history, with Americans less likely to hold a mix of liberal and conservative views and more likely to be entrenched in partisan camps.

By the last presidential election, nearly 80 percent of Americans had “just a few” or no friends across the political aisle, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Researchers have also found that people’s partisanship leads them to perceive others as “more extreme” than they actually are, leading to negative views not just of the opposing political party but also of the voters who identify differently than themselves.

And those who manage to keep across-the-aisle relationships often find they can do it only by barring political discussion entirely: Nearly half of Americans have stopped talking politics with someone due to differences.

But more evangelicals like Breed are done accepting the polarization in their pews and are calling on their fellow church members to engage with rather than avoid the issues that divide them.

In the aftermath of tensions surrounding the 2020 election, this year’s race has seen a batch of organizations offering mediators, curricula, and other resources to combat polarization. Some groups, like The After Party, are new and explicitly evangelical. Others, like Essential Partners, date back decades and are seeing there is fresh interest in their offerings due to today’s divisions.

In places where people are willing to lean into tough conversations, experts said they’ve seen encouraging results.

Essential Partners is one of these groups. It offers coaching, mentoring, and facilitating dialogue on particularly fraught topics—essentially, divorce-proofing institutions. The organization isn’t explicitly religious but has worked with denominations and faith-based groups.

John Sarrouf, a Christian and a coexecutive director at Essential Partners, has had plenty to do the last several years. He’s helped churches face local issues related to congregational merges, church summer camp programming, and COVID-19 policies. Currently, he’s seeing issues crop up around politics and the war in the Middle East.

Sarrouf has found two main reasons churches bring in organizations like his. About 30 percent of the time, it’s “inspiration.” They want to “get better at living together.” Then there’s the other 70 percent: “desperation.”

“Something has come up that’s really threatening that congregation or the denomination and their ability to live and work and worship together,” he said.

Conflict and polarization “flattens people,” Sarrouf explained. Suddenly, people go from Bible study partners and church committee friends to opponents. Eventually, stubborn polarization leads to people simply leaving.

“A lot of churches suffer from that. When there’s a conflict, there’s a divide. People stop showing up. Not because they don’t love the church,” Sarrouff said, “but it’s really exhausting to be in a toxic, polarized space like that.”

An important component of his work is to help people “rehumanize” their neighbors or fellow church members who are on the other side of a conflict. He nudges them to remember, That person was the first to show up with food for dinner when my mom was sick. Or That person who votes differently is the person in the choir who helps keep me on pitch.

Leaders can see changes in congregational interactions. People go from standing with stiff postures and avoiding eye contact to leaning in, smiling, and nodding. “It’s really life-changing for people,” he said. “People can get back to doing the important work that they want to be doing in a community.”

Sarrouf said he’s seen communities who have participated in resources like his have more tools to navigate conflicts well in the future and “become incredibly resilient to the next impulse or opportunity for division.”

“We tend to train people to do this themselves,” he said. “It’s not their first conflict. It won’t be their last. They have to learn how to do this and own it and make it a part of their everyday lives—so that it becomes just how they live together.”

Last month, a coalition of evangelical leaders released the statement “Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction,” which seeks to remind Christians what they have in common theologically even as people are divided politically. (Signatories include Christianity Today editor in chief Russell Moore.) Some churches plan to read the document publicly.

Moore is also a part of The After Party, a six-week video course launched this year that focuses on how Christians can develop a “Christ-centered political identity.”

Since it came out in April, The After Party’s program has been used by around 75,000 people through conferences, books, training for pastors and lay leaders, and small groups, according to The Washington Post.

Another group, the Mending Division Academy, established last year, has a particular focus on pastors whose churches are struggling with divisions. The organization is headed by Napp Nazworth, who resigned from The Christian Post in 2019 due to disagreements over a pro-Trump column. The group’s curriculum deals with everything from misinformation to polarization to deconstruction.

Bob Roberts, a Baptist pastor in Keller, Texas, has seen polarization on some extreme levels in his work overseas in Vietnam and Afghanistan. In addition to pastoring, he’s been involved in religious freedom advocacy and interfaith work abroad, which has heightened his concern over infighting among Christians at home.

“We’ve dealt with extremists around the world. Sorry to say we now have them in our own country,” he said. “And once somebody is truly radicalized in how they think, not just the actions they carry out, it’s incredibly hard to shift them. The most important thing to do is to get upstream of that and deal with it before they’re radicalized.”

Roberts wants to start with some concerning ways Christians talk to each other: How can you be a Christian and vote for this candidate? Or that candidate? You must not be a Christian if you vote for this candidate or that candidate.

Roberts cofounded the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network, a group that brings together pastors, imams, rabbis, and leaders from various faith groups to foster peace in their communities and combat radicalization and polarization. His group has already worked with around 500 people and had several hundred download online resources.

One resource he uses for churches is the Peacemaker’s Toolkit. It explores how the Bible handles peacemaking and moves to how everyday Christians can practice this with each other. One small tool involves is pocket-sized cards with best practices: how to refrain from bad mouthing others on social media, how to verify information online, and how to listen well to people despite disagreeing with their point of view.

Left unaddressed, polarization spreads to a host of other issues—including weariness among younger generations toward politics and church spaces.

“One of the reasons they’re leaving is they’re just sick of how Christians talk to each other, particularly Christian leaders,” said Biola University professor Tim Muehlhoff. “A lot of the young generation, they’re done with the argument culture. They’re like, ‘I can’t do that. … I’m not demonizing the other political party.’”

Muehlhoff asked a group of students how many of them had stopped talking to a friend or family member due to political disagreements. Half of his class raised their hands.

Muehlhoff and fellow professor Rick Langer have asked Biola students to lean into these hard conversations. The two professors partnered with Pomona College, a private liberal arts school, as part of a group called Bridging the Gap, which pairs conservative universities with liberal ones to have one-on-one discussions. Biola students have also participated in a program called Unify America, which sets up Zoom calls between political opposites.

Participation in these projects has at times garnered criticism from fellow Christians or concerned parents, who have accused the professors of being “all winsome, no convictions.” Parents have worried that participation in the Zoom conversations would negatively impact their children’s faith.

Muehlhoff said one student told him, “I don’t think anybody trusts our faith. Everybody thinks we’re so fragile. Like, one call and we’ll walk away from the faith.” Nearly all the students are scared going into the discussion, Muehlhoff said. But they leave exhilarated.

Much of each call is spent finding areas of common ground—unreasonable professors, too much homework, plans for summer break. By the time the students get to the hard questions at the end—one example was discussing their definitions and views on marriage—they’d already established the camaraderie necessary to have a respectful discussion.

The students told him they left the conversations encouraged by being able to share their own views and learning about someone else’s. “Good, because you’re all doing it again,” Muehlhoff told the students. “I signed you up for a second one.”

Their work goes beyond the classroom. The two former pastors have also authored books on disagreeing well and combating cancel culture and now helm Biola’s Winsome Conviction Project, which seeks to help Christians counter polarization and unhealthy ways of communicating.

The project does this through weekend church retreats, public forums, events, workshops, and small groups. They tackle hot button issues, from abortion to sexuality. Basically anything, Muehlhoff said, that “is just splitting communities and churches.”

The project sprang out of the “concern that we just lost the ability to talk to each other as Christians,” he explained.

Too often, the church has added to the division rather than providing an alternative model for engaging with both non-Christians and fellow Christians, Muehlhoff said: “People are splitting over preferred pronouns. They’re splitting over Black Lives Matter. They’re splitting over … whether to have a smoke machine during worship.”

But often, just under the surface are the real concerns: The dispute over the smoke machine, Muehlhoff explained, represented to some members evidence that liberalism was infiltrating their church.

Some pastors are worried that proactively engaging these issues will lead to more problems. “The sentiment is ‘I’m not opening this can of worms because, quite frankly, I don’t know if our church will survive,’” Muehlhoff said. They think that “politics will do us in.”

But faith leaders may underestimate the appetite regular people in the pew have for talking about these issues. At one event in 2022 in Washington, Winsome Convictions set up chairs for an expected 250 people. Almost 600 Christians from area churches ended up coming, including many walk-ins.

At that same session, Muehlhoff recalled a woman coming with her adult son. The two had not spoken in two years over political disagreements, but the mom begged her son for one last favor: to come to the Winsome Convictions event. At the end, the son stood up during a testimonial session and said participating had led to the best conversation he’d had with his mom in a decade.

Breed also hopes that more Christians will lean into these discussions via formal curricula or one-on-one discussions in their churches rather than simply leave spaces where they don’t agree.

“My opinion is, if you can’t get along with Christians and you have to go somewhere else, those churches aren’t gonna last very long either,” he said.

And he thinks faith leaders will increasingly have a role to play.“The voices that their congregation is hearing outside of the gospel are going to be very, very loud. They are going to say things such as ‘This person is going to be the end of the republic. If you vote for this person, it’s going to be the end,’” Breed said. “They’re going to be hearing those voices loud. The question is, will they hear the gospel louder?”

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Church Life

Lessons from Philippines’ Martial Law Still Hold for the Church Today

Interview by Caleb Maglaya Galaraga

Filipina social anthropologist Melba Padilla Maggay, who fought for democracy 40 years ago, critiques today’s evangelical politics.

A Filipino activist lights candles to remember victims of martial law in the Philippines.

Ezra Acayan / Stringer / Getty

One September day in 1972, Melba Padilla Maggay stepped outside to find Manila’s newspaper stands empty and massive lines for jeepneys, the Philippines’ local public transportation. Then-president Ferdinand Marcos had declared martial law, giving him wide-ranging power over the government.

At the time, Maggay was a journalist and a young Christian who had come to faith through the ministry of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. The nine-year period of martial law saw tens of thousands of Marcos’s critics thrown in prison and thousands tortured or killed.

In 1978, she and some friends started the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC) to wrestle with the question of how Christians should respond to martial law. Maggay and ISACC later joined the nonviolent 1986 People Power Revolution, which eventually deposed Marcos and restored democracy in the Philippines.

Maggay, who has long studied the intersection of religion, culture, and development in the Philippines, is a founding member of the international Life & Peace Institute and an ambassador for Micah Global, an international alliance of over 700 faith-based development organizations.

Currently, she is working to mentor a new generation and “disciple young people who will be formed in holistic witness, not just evangelism,” Maggay said. She hopes to raise leaders not just of churches or Christian organizations but of the Philippines’ barangays (“neighborhoods”), cities, and country.

Christianity Today recently spoke with Maggay about how Christians should respond to the current challenges facing the Philippines. The responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Several weeks ago, we marked the 52nd anniversary of the Philippines’ declaration of martial law. Today, the former dictator’s son—Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.—is now in office. Why is understanding that period of martial law important when viewing current events?

It’s hard to tell these stories, even though we’re talking about something from 40 years ago and people like me weren’t jailed and didn’t experience human rights violations from the martial-law years. But what I didn’t realize was that I was traumatized by the experience and the fact that the church didn’t understand the implications of martial law properly.

I was also traumatized when I was suddenly out of a job and could not exercise what I felt was my calling: journalism. [Marcos had shut down all independent media.] Some people, including Christians, thought martial law was okay because they thought the victims of human rights abuses were rebels anyway. But the whole country was traumatized without realizing it.

Because so many people didn’t fully grasp what happened to our country during this time, I’ve encouraged everyone to write down our stories. That’s why my book—Dark Days of Authoritarianism—is a book of personal accounts of people who lived through this period. Unlike ideology, nobody can quarrel with a story.

How did the church respond to the declaration of martial law?

At that time, I was a young Christian and a new university graduate. I was a cub reporter at the Manila Chronicle. Then, suddenly, there was martial law and the newspaper was shuttered. I spent the first three months of martial law visiting my friends in jail. The editor of The Manila Chronicle was the first to be imprisoned because he was investigating an incident of gun smuggling. I did not want to write for the newspapers allowed to operate at the time, as they were all run by Marcos’s cronies.

I remember that in our church, one of the leaders praised God for martial law. He said, “Now our freedom to worship is secure, and we are not going to [fall into communism].” But as I was sitting there listening, I thought, Wait, there’s something wrong with this. Why should we praise martial law? Just because of our freedom to worship?

Christians can praise God even in jail. The right to worship is not something that the state gives and takes away; you can worship God anywhere. Paul was a tremendous witness when he was in jail. So I told several leaders within the evangelical community, “Wait, why are we prioritizing our freedom to worship?”

If that’s the case, we are no different from lobbyists as we lobby for our freedom to worship.

It seemed that ISACC was at odds with a lot of the evangelical community when the group joined the nonviolent People Power Revolution.

There were two forces that disagreed with the People Power Revolution. One was the evangelicals; the other was the extreme left. The evangelicals didn’t want to join because they say faith has nothing to do with politics.

Like Protestants in many countries, the Protestants in the Philippines have been divided over whether they should put a greater focus on social justice or gospel proclamation. How can believers bridge that divide?

The dichotomy of When you’re for evangelism, you don’t care about social justice; if you are for social justice, you don’t care about evangelism is wrong. This is a legacy of Western dualism. But this dichotomy is too ingrained in our brains, and I think we should get out of that.

Filipino culture is very holistic. In fact, most Asian cultures are. That’s why religion in Asia has always been the basis for culture.

In the Philippines, we’re just labeled as Catholic, but the indigenous culture and religious imagination of Filipinos are strong. I have always said, “We are not Christianized; we simply adapted,” because that is a very strong feature of the culture. The Filipino always adapts.

Look at the Overseas Filipino Workers everywhere. Local cultures love them. Why? Because we adapt. In other words, people mistake that for conversion. No. Five hundred years of Christianity did not really change us.

In anthropology, there is what we call surface and deep structures of culture. The surface is easy to change. In our case, the anitos (“ancestor spirits”) were exchanged for saints with Caucasian features—then, the church, instead of huts or shrines near our houses. Stonemasons were called to build churches. It’s easy to change the surface. But the mindset has remained. In other words, we may have 500 years of Christianity, but when it comes to our idea of morality, nothing changed.

You mentioned that Filipino evangelicals seemed to withdraw from the public square during martial law. But what are your thoughts about those who preach dominionism, the idea that nations should be governed by Christians and biblical law?

That is also wrong. Today, Filipino evangelicals are entering politics in the same way evangelicals in America did in the 70s after they lost cultural power. The Filipino church is made in the image of the American Bible Belt. But the problem is that Christians should not use the coercive powers of the state to persuade people about the values of their faith.

This is why separation of church and state is in both countries’ constitutions. What the separation of church and politics means is that you tolerate everybody. We are now in a pluralistic world.

In other words, you do not coerce people to conform to your values. Paul said that “we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience” (2 Cor. 4:2). Fight for your values in the public space, but without using the coercive powers of the state, where there is a punishment for those who hold different values.

For instance, when it comes to same-sex marriage, the church has to stand for its values. In the same way, we must be prepared to tolerate other people’s values as long as they’re not criminal behavior.

Filipino evangelicals in political office share the same strategy as the Religious Right in America. Before, they didn’t want politics. Now that they’ve entered politics, they got off on the wrong foot. In other words, they are sensitive to values that are against us, like abortion. But they don’t speak out on issues of justice. That’s wrong. Christians, when they’re in politics, should be seen as people who speak for those who are voiceless.

Is there a better way for Christians to engage with politics or run for political office?

In the New Testament, dominion means servanthood. Leadership is servanthood.

The only meaning of dominion is that when we fell, we lost mastery over creation. But now, Jesus has given us power. Human agency was restored. That’s why I tell my elderly friends, “We can do something for as long as we are alive.” We have human agency, including the poor, who think they can’t do anything because they are victims of social forces around them. But no, they can take hold of these things. It is part of the restoration of dominion.

Dominion is not lording it over people. We should be servants to everybody. If you want to be a leader, you have to serve everybody. So dominionists’ take on dominion is wrong. In other words, we have power now to serve everyone. We have power, agency, in such a way that we can help all others in human society.

What is the most pressing challenge facing the Filipino evangelical church?

Developing a theology that will respond to our context of poverty and injustice, as millions of Filipinos are still mired by these societal ills, should be the first priority of the church. We have been reductionist in our understanding of what it means to bear witness. In 2 Corinthians 10:5, Paul says “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” That’s the witness—not just formulas like “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” and “You will get saved and go to heaven.”

What does it mean to bear witness? To take every thought captive, whether it happens in theological circles or in the public square.

There’s a strong need for Christians to be biblically literate. The Bible is too important to be left to theologians. We have to go back to what the Bible says about all the issues around us. You should always think about it. It should be second nature.

What does God’s Word say here? That’s number one for me, making every thought captive to obey Christ, regardless of what ideas are discussed—social justice, university education, or the media.

Christians must be able to relate the Word of God to the everyday issues they face, whether personal or social. That is very important but not commonly practiced. People like “canned” Bible studies and are shallow in their grasp of the Scriptures.

You said in Transforming Society, “I do not like politics. Like many of that generation … of the early 1970s, the white heat I used to feel over political issues has been tempered by years of disappointment, or, perhaps, by the tiring and corrosive effect of having worked too hard and too long at social change with only marginal success.” What keeps you doing this work?

I am thankful that the Lord has kept me. I just turned 74, and most of my contemporaries are either dead or gone or have given up. Some of them say, “What can we do? We are old; we cannot go out marching the streets like we used to do. And the forces around us, like social media, are very powerful.” They feel nothing can be done.

But the meaning of the Cross is not just forgiveness of sin. The Lord Jesus did not die just to forgive us and give us a ticket to heaven. The Lord Jesus died for the redemption of the whole earth.

The missio Dei (“mission of God”) is not to secure a ticket to heaven just for us. The missio Dei is the redeeming of the whole creation, the new heaven and the new earth.

And we are being asked to participate in the remaking of that earth. That is my missional task: Obedience to what it means to be part of God’s agenda of remaking the new heaven and the new earth. But of course, many evangelicals don’t see this because they think the world is going to fall apart. So they let go of the environment, let go of social justice, and so on.

But anything that we do in the name of Christ will contribute to this remaking of the new heaven and the new earth.

Our problem is that we are only focused on Ephesians 2:9: “not by works, so that no one can boast.” We overlook verse 10. But verse 10 says, we are saved “to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” In other words, we were chosen and elected. God has an agenda that he is inviting us to participate in.

Additional reporting by Geethanjali Tupps.

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News

SBC Pastor Admits Creating Fake Document to Deceive FBI

Daniel Silliman

Former Southwestern Seminary professor Matt Queen faces possible five years in prison for his part in cover-up.

Youtube screen grab

Southern Baptist pastor Matt Queen pleaded guilty Wednesday to the federal crime of making a false statement to the FBI. He created a fake document and gave it to agents as evidence, allegedly in an effort to help Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) cover up its failure to report a student accused of sexual assault, according to court documents.

Queen got caught in his lie and admitted it to federal prosecutors in June 2023. On Wednesday, he pleaded guilty to one felony charge after the US government agreed to drop an additional charge of obstruction of justice.

“He made a false statement. He has great remorse for doing so,” Queen’s attorney, Sam Schmidt, told The Tennessean. “He regrets it and wish[es] that never happened.”

Queen, who had taught evangelism at the seminary and currently serves as a minister at a church in Greensboro, North Carolina, faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison but is expected to be sentenced to several months. If he had been found guilty in a trial, the judge could have sent him to prison for as long as 20 years.

The North Carolina pastor is the first—and so far only—Southern Baptist to face criminal charges in a federal investigation of the convention’s handling of sexual abuse allegations.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has been looking into the nation’s largest Protestant denomination since 2022. The probe was prompted by a report commissed by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) that found Executive Committee staff, who are responsible for the denomination’s day-to-day operations, refused to do anything about allegations of sexual abuse. Executive Committee presidents had a secret list of more than 700 abusive pastors but flatly rejected calls for reform and maligned abuse survivors and advocates calling for change.

SBC lawyers turned internal discussions about abuse into discussions around legal liability, according to the report, until protecting the institution from lawsuits became the highest priority—higher than protecting people from sexual predators in pulpits and Sunday school classrooms across the country.

The Executive Committee announced in March the federal investigation concluded without any charges but later clarified the broader investigation was still ongoing.

Queen was indicted on federal charges two months later. The author of Everyday Evangelism worked at SWBTS for 14 years and served, for a period, as interim provost.

“The FBI will never tolerate those who intentionally lie and mislead our investigation in an attempt to conceal their malicious behavior,” FBI assistant director in charge James Smith said at the time.

According to the indictment, Queen “knowingly altered, destroyed, mutilated, concealed, covered up, falsified, and made a false entry into a record, document, and tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, and influence” a federal investigation.

Prosecutors sent a subpoena to the Fort Worth, Texas, seminary in October 2022, demanding any and all documents “related to allegations of sexual abuse against anyone employed by or associated with” SWBTS. The following month, an employee later identified as dean of women Terri Stovall was told that a current student had committed sexual assault.

Nothing happened to the student for three months, until a local police force received a report and made an arrest.

In January 2023, Stovall wrote up a document detailing the allegations against the student, the actions she had taken in response, and the seminary’s failure to report the student to police. According to the federal government, Stovall’s report became evidence in the investigation as soon as she created it and was subject to the subpoena.

The next day, however, she was told to destroy it by an employee later identified by SWBTS as seminary chief of staff Heath Woolman. According to federal prosecutors, Woolman ordered Stovall to make her report “go away.”

Queen was at that meeting, according to the indictment, in his capacity as interim provost. But when FBI agents asked him about Woolman’s instructions to destroy evidence, he said he had not heard that.

Queen then wrote about the meeting in a notebook—leaving out the part about destroying evidence—and gave it to the FBI, according to the indictment. He told the investigators it was a contemporaneous account of the meeting and supported his account of events. His notes said the administrators had discussed giving Stovall’s report to another department but noted nothing about destroying evidence or covering anything up.

Queen had actually written it five months later, according to prosecutors, manufacturing evidence to back up his story and strengthen the lie.

In June 2023, Queen confessed under oath that he had in fact heard the seminary chief of staff tell the dean of women to make her report “go away.” He acknowledged the notes were falsified.

Federal prosecutors have not filed any other charges in the case. They also have not indicated whether the investigation is ongoing. Federal officials usually do not speak about investigations before bringing charges.

Woolman, who allegedly ordered evidence destroyed, left SWBTS and now ministers at a church in Florida. He has not spoken publicly about the allegations. The head of campus police has also left the seminary.

SWBTS president David Dockery praised Stovall for refusing to cooperate with a cover-up.

“This episode is a matter of deep regret to me,” he said in a statement earlier this year. “I am, however, grateful that several employees in whom I placed great trust acted responsibly, especially Terri Stovall. I commend the service and integrity of these employees.”

On Wednesday, the school reiterated its commitment to complete cooperation with authorities.

Queen’s sentencing is scheduled for February.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the year that Matt Queen said under oath that he had made a false statement to the FBI. He confessed in 2023.

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Theology

The ‘Least of These’ and the Quest for a Post-Christian Conscience

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

Human suffering should not cause us to categorize our neighbor but to be one.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

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

Every few years, someone makes the point that, “actually,” the “least of these” passage from the Gospel of Matthew doesn’t really have anything to do with how we treat the poor or the stranger or the hungry.

The “brothers” to which Jesus refers, the argument goes, are the messengers he sent out—meaning that the way one responds to the bearers of Jesus’ word signifies the way one responds to him. It’s not about the poor, the argument goes, but about mistreated fellow Christians.

A friend told me last week that some social media controversy dusted up for a bit over just this question. He needn’t tell me who posted it, because it doesn’t matter in this ephemeral medium—the players always change and the game remains the same.

Anybody who’s ever been a youth pastor knows that there’s a certain kind of question—like “How far is too far?” or “Actually, Jesus wasn’t talking about the kind of sex I want to have”—that’s less about “just asking questions” of the text than about doing what one wants to do.

The text in question here, of course, is a familiar one to those who’ve been in the orbit of the Bible for any time at all. After a series of parables about the kingdom of God, Jesus portrays for his disciples a haunting description of Judgment Day, in which the nations are gathered before Christ the shepherd, who divides the sheep of the redeemed from the goats of the damned.

To both groups, Jesus notes that he had been among them—as hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, a stranger. The sheep, Jesus said, had fed him, given him water and clothing, welcomed him in, visited him in his distress. The goats, Jesus said, had ignored him. Both groups are shocked and ask, “When did we do this?” Jesus responds, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40, ESV throughout).

Even those who believe that “brothers” refers to those whom Jesus sent out with the gospel are quick to say that the point of his teaching is hardly “Which vulnerable people can we safely ignore?” As a matter of fact, under any reading of Jesus’ words, the application is the exact opposite, and it’s hard to imagine how Jesus could have worded it to make the point any stronger.

Suppose, for a moment, that the “brothers” here are, in fact, those whom Jesus sent out. The scene is of the gathering of all the nations—very few of whom would have encountered this relatively small group of people. As a matter of fact, all of those originally sent out are now dead. Are the nations of people outside that small circle now exempt? Of course not.

More to the point, the entire teaching centers on the surprise of both groups—sheep and goats—as to when, in fact, they ever encountered Jesus. The sheep do not respond, “Yes, we know. That’s why we did it. We had the chart telling us which strangers to welcome and which to ignore.” The goats could not have said, “If we’d known they were with you, we, of course, would have given them some porridge!”

The question is about conformity to Jesus himself. This is the one charged, repeatedly, with eating and drinking with those outside the approved definition of “brothers” (Matt. 9:9–13; Luke 19:1–10; John 4:5–26). This is the Jesus who told us that the “friend/enemy” distinction—love those who are “with” you, and hate those who aren’t—is contrary to the kingdom he is announcing. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’” he said. “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:43–44).

The question raised by these sorts of “actually” arguments, about parsing out who fits in the “least of these” and who does not, is not a new one. It is, quite literally, the question Jesus answered from a lawyer seeking to parse out how he was within the bounds of “love God and love your neighbor” with the question, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). One can almost hear the equivocating “Actually, neighbor in the context of the Torah refers to those within the household of Israel, so …”

Jesus deconstructs all of that with a story, choosing the most hated possible example of negative identity politics—a Samaritan—to make the point that the question is not about figuring out how to categorize “neighbor” but about how to be a neighbor, by showing mercy and compassion (vv. 36–37).

The entire canon makes the case that our response to the poor does indeed tell us something about our response to God. “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will repay him for his deed,” and “whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered,” the Bible says (Prov. 19:17; 21:13).

The Psalms repeatedly argue that the fatherless, the widows, the strangers, those deemed too powerless to matter, have a God who knows and hears them and who will plead their case (Ps. 68:5). The prophets make the point that the ill treatment of the vulnerable—the poor, orphans, widows—makes worship noxious in the presence of God (Isa.1:14–17).

Jesus’ own brother, James of Jerusalem, likewise argues that landowners robbing their workers of wages is an offense to God because “the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts” (James 5:4).

Why else have Christians—from the first century—cared for unwanted children and opposed abortion and infanticide? Our treatment of the vulnerable reveals what we think about God, for the vulnerable are made in his image too. The idea that some people are disposable because of their lack of value by the world’s categories of power and wisdom is directly opposed to Christ and the meaning of the Cross. An assault on human dignity is an assault on the image of God (James 3:9).

And the image of God is no abstraction. The exact image of the radiance of God has a name: Jesus of Nazareth (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3). As we do to those who bear that image—even the “least” of them—we have done unto him.

Does that resolve all of our prudential arguments about how best to care for the poor when it comes to governmental systems and policies? Of course not. It does not answer every question about how best for you, personally, to address the needs of those around you. It does mean, however, that when you confront the need of a vulnerable person in need of help, your response is not to ask for their papers. Those who welcome strangers have, at times, entertained angels unaware, the Bible tells us (Heb. 13:2). And the key word there is unaware.

If one is embarrassed by the miracles or morality of Jesus, one can always demythologize him with all the fervor of a 19th-century German scholar. If one is embarrassed by the compassion or empathy of Jesus, one can demythologize him there too, with all the frenzy of a 20th-century German soldier. None of that will change, not one iota, that Jesus is ultimately seated on the throne. Before him, “Has God really said?” is a terrible question to ask. So is “Who is my neighbor?”

And when confronted with the suffering of human beings around you, making the point that those who are suffering are less than the “least of these” is no argument at all.

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

Ideas

Mind the Power Gap in Missions

Josh Irby

Western missionaries can make good partners if they avoid trampling on their majority world friends.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

In the past 50 years, the center of Christianity has shifted from the West to the Majority World. As Zambian mission leader Lazarus Phiri told me during a recent interview, “Those who were once a mission field are now looking like a mission force.”

Yet all too often, well-meaning mission partners in the West operate as if this shift has not occurred. The reason, in part, is that the centers of power (including money, education, institution, passport privileges, etc.) remains in the West.

This power gap in mission partnerships between Western and Majority World members, if it is not acknowledged, can result in wasted resources, discouraged missionaries, decreased engagement, and broken relationships.

Author and missiologist Miriam Adeney relates a story she once heard from an African Christian leader:

Elephant and Mouse were best friends. One day Elephant said, “Mouse, let’s have a party!” Animals gathered from far and near. They ate, and drank, and sang, and danced. And nobody celebrated more exuberantly than Elephant.

After it was over, Elephant exclaimed, “Mouse, did you ever go to a better party? What a blast!” But Mouse didn’t answer. “Where are you?” Elephant called. Then he shrank back in horror. There at his feet lay the Mouse, his body ground into the dirt—smashed by the exuberance of his friend, Elephant.

“Sometimes that is what it is like to do mission with you Americans,” the African storyteller concluded. “It’s like dancing with an elephant.”

When I first read this story, it felt like a gut punch. I mentally scrolled through my 25 years of cross-cultural mission engagement and wondered if anyone would say this of me. Have I been an elephant? In my exuberance for the mission, have I ever crushed my friends and partners?

Of course, no one enters global missions with a plan to stomp on their partners. But if you speak with missions leaders from around the world, as my colleagues and I have in researching for the Mission Shift podcast, you will discover many unwitting elephants dancing across mission fields.

Considering the power differential in missions, how can we Westerners work with others in a way that lifts our partners rather than grinding them into the dirt?

First, we need to recognize the power of money. Mary Lederleitner, author of Cross-Cultural Partnerships: Navigating the Complexities of Money and Mission, writes of the distorting power of wealth, “The person coming from the more affluent or developed country assumes he or she knows what is best.” She adds, “It is very counterintuitive to learn from people that have less wealth and less education than you.” But a failure to do so can lead to a sense of superiority that, when played out in partnership, becomes a patriarchal relationship.

As Layo Leiva, who has developed partnerships between Latin America and the United States through his regional role with Cru, said succinctly in an interview for our podcast, “The role of money is the role of power—who has the money has the power.” This is not to say that money should not be involved in missions. The sharing of resources within the body of Christ is central to gospel transformation. But we need to recognize the challenges to partnership it creates.

We also need to recognize the power of choice. Brian Virtue, who researched hundreds of cross-cultural partnerships for his PhD work, describes a scenario he saw multiple times:

People [on the lower side of the power difference] were granted access to the initial conversations, but when it came time for the decision-making and the implementation, they were no longer part of the process. It’s almost like they heard, “We’re going to go to the adult’s table and talk about it. And we’ll get back to you.”

Who is at the adult table in a partnership? If the table is populated exclusively by those from the West, or with the highest degrees, or with the biggest budgets, then your partnership is probably affected by power disparities.

There are many more powers in a mission partnership we need to recognize: education, nationality, organizational size, language, and history, to name a few. If we have eyes to see them, then we have a chance to use them for the benefit of the mission. You have money? Great! Invest it in God’s mission. You have education? Great! Use it to uplift your brothers and sisters. “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them” (Rom. 12:6, ESV throughout).

But also, if we recognize the effect power has on partnerships, we can heed Paul’s warning: “I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment” (v. 3). Elephant could have done so much good with his size if only he had recognized the potential dangers it presented.

Once we recognize the presence of power, we need to learn to walk softly in our partnerships. Slavko Hadžić, an evangelist in Bosnia and Herzegovina and associate regional director with Langham Preaching, advises, “If you come for the first time to a country or region, don’t come with an agenda. Come to observe. Don’t rush with promises. Wait, learn, be open to hear. Let the Lord lead the steps.”

Part of walking softly is recognizing that God is already at work on every continent and in every corner of the earth. What if we entered every cross-cultural situation looking for the signs of God’s work rather than a place to plant our flag or insert our own agendas? Too often we use the urgency of the mission as an excuse for injuring our partners in the mission. To walk softly, we must walk slowly.

Milan Michalko, a local pastor in the Czech Republic, also encourages a slow pace. “Partnership without relationship? I have no time for that,” he says. Relationships take time to build. Michalko has a theory as to why this is often hard for American organizations: “Because they have money, they have no time.” The abundance of money demands an abundance of quick results, but healthy partnerships demand more than a 30-minute lunch and a shared Google spreadsheet. “If you want a quality partner, that’s time consuming. You have to be here. You have to invest time. You have to build trust,” Michalko says. To walk softly, we must walk in relationship.

Forrest Inslee, coauthor of the book Re-Imagining Short-Term Missions, shared of a moment in Haiti when a team learned how to walk more softly in partnership. On the island of Haiti, the history of colonialism and inequality have embedded the idea that, because of their superior resources, the West always knows best. The actions of Western teams have only confirmed this conclusion.

Once, when a team was participating in some community performances, the American visitors took center stage, as if they were compensating for a program that was deficient or incomplete. But this time, the Haitian leaders spoke up. “Would you please stand in the back of the room instead of on stage?” they asked.

By speaking up, these leaders risked offending their guests and jeopardizing the flow of resources from their American partners. And some were offended. But the majority learned from the challenge. They stood in the back. Over time, the partnership grew in mutuality, trust, and health. To walk softly, we must sometimes stand in the back.

Leiva shares one nonintuitive way of walking slowly. In mission partnerships, the higher-power partner often shares the products of their system (money, books, programs) but rarely lets the lower-power partner behind the curtain to see how the products are made.

Money is sent, but no one shares how to raise money. Books are translated, but no one shares how to write a book. One partner maintains control, and the other becomes dependent.

Layo now asks his partners to not only send the product but also “transfer the technology” that produced it. This way, instead of creating endless dependency, we contribute our strength to grow our partners’ strength. As we walk softly, our power lifts our partners rather than crushing them.

When we recognize our power and learn to walk slowly, we have an opportunity to make the most important discovery in partnerships. The principle is found in another story of a mouse, this one from Aesop:

A Lion lay asleep in the forest, his great head resting on his paws. A timid little Mouse came upon him unexpectedly, and in her fright and haste to get away, ran across the Lion’s nose. Roused from his nap, the Lion laid his huge paw angrily on the tiny creature to kill her.

“Spare me!” begged the poor Mouse. “Please let me go and some day I will surely repay you.”

The Lion was much amused to think that a Mouse could ever help him. But he was generous and finally let the Mouse go.

Some days later, while stalking his prey in the forest, the Lion was caught in the toils of a hunter’s net. Unable to free himself, he filled the forest with his angry roaring. The Mouse knew the voice and quickly found the Lion struggling in the net. Running to one of the great ropes that bound him, she gnawed it until it parted, and soon the Lion was free.

“You laughed when I said I would repay you,” said the Mouse. “Now you see that even a Mouse can help a Lion.”

Too often, we in the West define power by the ways we are powerful: money, education, passport privileges, and other resources. Like the Lion, we laugh at the idea of being helped by a Mouse. But other powers are at play than those that can be measured: cross-cultural flexibility and understanding, dependence on God, willingness to suffer, and missional ingenuity.

Every follower of Christ—even the one who appears small—is powerful. Every believer is filled with the Spirit. Every believer is a part of the body with a crucial role to play. Every believer is formed by God for his mission. And as Paul reminds us, those who seem the weakest are indispensable (1 Cor. 12:22–27).

Even lions and elephants have needs. In fact, sometimes our strengths are the sources of our needs. Because of our abundant resources, we can be slow to pray. Because of our efficient systems, we can be slow to improvise. Because of our set plans, we can often miss what God is doing in the margins. More than ever, the West needs the many strengths of the Majority World.

Even Jesus, whom Lederleitner calls “the ultimate high-power partner,” positioned himself to rely on the strengths of others. He made himself nothing, taking the form of a man. He walked softly among us. He invited the disciples “behind the curtain” of his life and shared everything with them. He entrusted them with the mission.

The Lion of Judah did not laugh at the contribution of common men and women from the villages of Galilee. He called them friends and gave them the keys of his kingdom. Likewise, our Lord has commissioned and empowered us with his Spirit. And whenever we follow his example, our mission partnerships will give us all a reason to truly celebrate.

Josh Irby is Cru City Global’s partnership director for Europe and a cohost of the Mission Shift podcast. He is a former missionary and coauthor of Cross on a Hill: A Personal, Historical, and Biblical Search for the True Meaning of a Controversial Symbol.

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Ideas

Pastors and Public Servants: Lead Your Neighbor as Yourself

Claude Alexander

Lessons from the prophet Ezekiel during exile on guiding our people through times of crisis.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

As a pastor, I’ve found one of the main difficulties in leading faithfully and living as good neighbors is that we can’t always choose our neighbors or the context and circumstances in which we lead and live. And in a time of tense divisiveness, global conflicts, natural disasters, and other complex crises, this sense of helplessness is nearly universal.

We have all experienced the reality of a world beyond our control—not least during the COVID-19 pandemic, when life changed for all of us. Many of us were shuttering in place and scrambling to find masks, sanitizers, and so forth, grappling with a staggering amount of uncertainty about what we could and could not do. For me personally, the pandemic was a crucible for my leadership, and one I find instructive for ministry to this day.

As a multigenerational, multisite African American congregation in Charlotte, North Carolina—one of the earliest cities to issue stay-in-place mandates—we faced multiple challenges and points of tension during the initial years of the pandemic. Our staff wrestled with the same questions many Christians did as we sought to balance our individual and congregational freedom with community responsibility.

How do we honor the value of embodied, collective public worship while simultaneously protecting our congregation, especially those most vulnerable with comorbidities? How do I negotiate concerns about the budget and potential loss of income considering my responsibility to protect the livelihood of my staff and their families? How does a congregation of our size and influence set a good example in how we operate during a public health emergency, including in our rhetoric?

Above all, I believe the pandemic—as any major crisis facing our community can—created a unique opportunity for us to demonstrate our confidence in God when every aspect of life as we know it seems threatened and compromised. And as I’ve reflected on this truth since then, I’ve gleaned insights from the life and ministry of Ezekiel about what it means to lead faithfully and live as good neighbors in a world beyond our control.

In the first verse of the book, the 30-year-old prophet Ezekiel identifies himself as being among the Israelite exiles by the Kebar River in the land of Babylon for seven days, “deeply distressed” (1:1; 3:14–15).

The first step for us as leaders guiding our people through times of turmoil is to absorb the reality in which we find ourselves. Rather than being in denial, withdrawing from the world, or detaching from our emotions, we are called to stay present in moments of crisis and experience life alongside those we lead. Ezekiel himself was among the people of Israel who were being exiled, and he remained in their midst.

This kind of presence cultivates the necessary empathy to know where our people are and what they need. Part of leadership in general and pastoral leadership in particular is the work of giving language to whatever our churches are facing and feeling. Leaders must name the tension in those they lead, just as Ezekiel named the emotion of the exiles, who were “deeply distressed.” Identifying a traumatic event and the feelings it causes can help people come to terms with their reality—which in turn helps them understand and transcend it.

One way our staff tried to absorb the reality of the pandemic was by reading surveys provided by Gloo, which helped us identify trends and gave us snapshots of how people were doing in real time. We tried to name the disruption, dislocation, displacement, and disappointment people were facing, along with their losses, grief, frustration, and fear.

In the book’s opening, Ezekiel also described the experience of receiving a vision of God (1:4–28). It is here that we get the next aspect of leadership during crises, which is reframing—that is, placing people’s experience and feelings within a larger framework.

Providing your people with the bigger picture often involves seeing and showing how God is at work in any given situation. Ezekiel’s vision of God’s glory did not take him away from where he was but happened while he was seated among his fellow exiles. This vision broadened his frame of reference and showed him God was at work in their midst. Likewise, it is crucial for faith leaders to identify God’s presence in situations that are out of our control.

With the pandemic, reframing moved me from asking why it happened to seeing how God was at work. It prompted our church to look for God sightings in the lives of our fellow congregants, in our neighborhoods, and in our own families. Some might call this attunement—the practice of attuning ourselves to the personal presence of God. Reframing can move a person from a posture of frustration or blame into one of curiosity and empowered expectation.

The next aspect of biblical leadership is discerning purpose.In the book’s second chapter, Ezekiel received God’s call to be a prophet. Having absorbed his people’s reality, identified their tension, and seen God at work in their midst, he learned of God’s purpose. Part of living faithfully is discerning the purpose to which we are called. How is God calling us to live, and what is God calling us to do? Whom has he placed near us, and how can we serve them?

In the case of our church not being able to meet during the pandemic, we found ways to volunteer in our community and distribute food to people in need. We chose to see our virtual worship as honoring our city and assisting our health-care system by avoiding super-spreading events. And while our gathering function was removed from the equation, we leaned heavily into our serving function.

This leads to another aspect of leadership in crisis, which is embracing opportunity. While there were restrictions during the pandemic, there were also a host of opportunities. Seeing them required a liberated imagination, intensified curiosity, and out-of-the-box creativity. It necessitated us letting go of how things used to be and embracing what might be—asking questions like “What could we do and what would it look like if … ?” and “Where might we meet people if … ?”

In the process, we came up with an idea to help our unhoused neighbors by developing a mobile unit that provides showers, washers, and dryers—named M25:40 after the famous passage Matthew 25:40 (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”). We also developed our virtual presence and resources, which broke down barriers in terms of who we could reach, where we could interact with them, and how we could reach and engage them. As a result, our numbers did not shrink after the pandemic but grew.

The next aspect is clinging to hope. What we initially thought would last two weeks or even couple months ended up persisting for far longer than we anticipated. In the meantime, our church suffered tragic and unexpected losses. The length of displacement—when our services stayed online only—tempted many in our congregation to despair. Those who grew fatigued with virtual services began attending churches that opened earlier, producing another point of tension.

The encouragement of Psalm 27:13–14 comes to mind: “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”

The final aspect is encouraging our people to look toward the future. In the case of the pandemic, after having gone completely virtual for so long, we could not assume our congregation’s attending habits would immediately return to what they were before the pandemic. That change caused us to ask how our future might look.

With some people remaining virtual, some showing up primarily in person, and others opting for hybrid attendance, did we really need to keep our three campuses? After praying about whether having three campuses was the highest and best use of our resources, we discerned that it wasn’t and eventually sold one of our buildings to another ministry.

We continued gathering Sunday mornings at the main campus location, and we are redeveloping our second campus into a 30-acre hybrid site with residential, office, retail, hotel, and conference spaces. We also opened an affordable senior living project and are in the process of developing another 30 acres to build a combination of market-rate homes and independent living. All these ventures meet critical needs in our community.

While many see the pandemic as a net loss, the decisions our church made in that time allowed us to pursue other opportunities which ultimately redefined our vision for the future. As a people of faith, we are called to be forward-thinking. Whatever the present may bring, there is a future reality which we can anticipate and pursue. Chasing that future assumes a degree of risk and ambiguity, which calls for faith, discernment, and courage.

Bishop Claude R. Alexander Jr. is the lead pastor of The Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and author of Becoming the Church and Necessary Christianity. He also serves on the board of Christianity Today.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

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News

Died: Bill Pannell, Black Evangelical Who Raised the Issue of Racism

Daniel Silliman

He wanted white believers to reckon with “cultural captivity,” but saw them become “more and more American and less and less Christian.”

Courtesy of InterVarsity Press / Edits by Christianity Today

Bill Pannell, a Black evangelical who pushed white evangelicals to recognize their captivity to the culture of American racism, died on October 11 at age 95.

The evangelist and seminary professor argued that the Good News is all about reconciliation—between God and humanity, but also horizontally, between people—and Christians are called to the ministry of reconciliation. But white Christians who claimed the name evangel, he said, could only seem to muster occasional interest in racism, even though it was the most acute division in American society, the area in the greatest need of reconciliation.

And then they mostly asked Black people to do the reconciling.

“It’s like inviting someone to comment on the quality of the dinner when you haven’t [invited them] to the table,” Pannell said in the 2024 documentary The Gospel According to Bill Pannell. “Most of the evangelical movement could only go so far. They could only go so far.”

Pannell wrote about his experience of racism in My Friend, The Enemy, published in 1968. He described how pervasive assumptions of white supremacy impacted him and his sense of dignity and worth, growing up. He found his dignity restored by the gospel, but then discovered, to his dismay, that the people who preached it to him were not interested in addressing the social problems caused by that sort of sin.

Twenty-five years later, he wrote about racism again. Watching the city of Los Angeles consumed by six days of riots following the acquittal of four police officers who severely beat a Black man named Rodney King, Pannell warned white evangelicals about the possibility of a coming race war. Americans could not afford to keep ignoring the problems caused by racism, he argued, and Christians are uniquely called to reconciliation.

The book was republished 28 years after that, in 2021, as four more officers in another city appeared in another court to face more charges of “unreasonable force” following the death of a Black man named George Floyd. Pannell couldn’t help but notice that while the names and dates had changed, the problem persisted. And white evangelicals still seemed captive to a culture deeply invested in ignoring the issue.

“Somehow or other in my lifetime,” Pannell said, “the evangelical movement became more and more American and less and less Christian.”

Pannell was born on June 25, 1929, to William and Olive Davison Pannell. He was the eldest of eight children and was raised as part of a tiny Black minority in Sturgis, Michigan. The census counted fewer than 200 Black people in Sturgis in 1930, which was less than half a percent of the population of St. Joseph County. Some of the Black people, like Pannell’s stepfather, Joseph Perkins, wouldn’t have lived there at all, but they had jobs just across the border in Indiana in towns where they weren’t allowed to stay after dark.

Pannell recalled later he never heard the word racism as a child, and yet the sense of it pervaded everything.

“I was aware that I was different and that the difference made a difference in a white world,” he said. “You belong and yet you don’t. You are embraced—but not really.”

Pannell excelled in sports and was a high-scoring shooting guard for the basketball team. And yet off the court, he was not accepted as an equal by his peers or their parents. He was not made to feel welcome.

The one significant exception was Eunice Randall. A pastor’s daughter, she invited Pannell to a party for young people at Sturgis Missionary Church. He went and found a community of people eager to embrace him. Pannell started attending the church, went forward during an altar call, and accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior.

The church gave Pannell a Bible and told him to read it. He did—and discovered a sense of worth and dignity he’d never known before. He was peeling potatoes at a segregated country club and reading Ephesians 1:4–14 when it hit him.

“To think that God has chosen me before the foundations of the world—had his eye on me, chose me, picked me out, plucked me out of the tribe as it were, made me his own. If that’s true, whew! Lord have mercy,” Pannell later said. “I really am somebody, no matter what anybody else says.”

After high school, Pannell went to Fort Wayne Bible College with the encouragement and financial support of a Black housekeeper, or “domestic,” named Mildred Bedford. She had somehow saved $500 and gave it to him, he recalled in the 2024 documentary, telling him he needed to “strike while the iron’s hot.”

In Fort Wayne, he learned he needed to go out into “all the world” to preach the gospel, but received very little education about that world, Pannell later recalled.

“I didn’t know from beans,” he said.

Nevertheless, the young Black man became an evangelist, traveling around the country with white classmates to lead revivals and crusades, calling people to come forward, confess their sins, and accept Jesus. It gave Pannell another perspective on American racism. Christians across the country were happy to have him lead the singing as people got saved, he noticed, but they wouldn’t want him to live in their communities.

“A singing Negro has always been welcome,” he wrote in My Friend, The Enemy, “as long as he is a vagabond.”

Pannell said evangelicals in the north were not fighting to maintain segregation—but he noticed they wouldn’t speak out against it either. Their silence seemed to handcuff him to his suitcase, he wrote, making sure he never unpacked, never made himself at home.

Pannell decided he needed to learn more from Black Christians. At 25, he moved to Detroit to work under B. M. Nottage, a Plymouth Brethren minister from the Bahamas who evangelized in Black communities across the US. Nottage and his two older brothers started gospel halls and Brethren assemblies in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. In the Detroit alone, they founded Gospel Chapel, Grace Gospel Chapel, Berean Bible Chapel, River Rouge Bible Chapel, the Open Door Rescue Mission, and Bethany Tabernacle, where Pannell joined Nottage as an associate pastor in 1954.

The young evangelist considered Nottage a mentor and a father figure. Pannell lived with him in a back room and in 1955 married his secretary, Hazel Scott, who was from Memphis.

After a decade, Pannell went back to working with white evangelicals. In 1964, he joined Youth For Christ, the evangelistic ministry that launched Billy Graham’s career.

He quickly found himself unsettled, however, by the way white evangelicals cared about Black people’s souls but not their civil rights, economic conditions, educational opportunities, or housing. When practical issues impacting the well being of Black people came up, Pannell said, the white evangelicals objected that they didn’t want to get distracted by politics. Other issues, however, did not seem like a distraction: prayer in schools, liberals on the Supreme Court, and communism around the globe.

Some problems seemed to merit social and political action, “but mention the inhumanity of a society which with unbelievable indifference imprisons ‘the souls of black folks,’” Pannell wrote, “and these crusaders begin mumbling about sin.” He tried to argue the impact of racism couldn’t just be waved away like that but was mostly unsuccessful.

Much of white evangelicalism seemed to be captured by the culture of the suburbs, Pannell said. As white people fled cities following desegregation, white evangelicals went with them. Born-again Christians came to identify so strongly with their white, middle-class, family-focused, conservative communities, Pannell said, that they found it impossible to understand or even consider the concerns of their minority brothers and sisters.

In the 1990s he pointed to Christianity Today as an example.

“It ought to be called Suburban Christianity Today,” he wrote in The Coming Race Wars. “Its board of directors comes from suburbia, as do most of its writers, most of its editors, and all of its management elite. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in the values espoused in the magazine.”

There were some white evangelicals, of course, who did want to address the problem of American racism. Pannell said they expressed hope for racial reconciliation and encouraged him and other Black evangelicals to work on the issue. But their focus would quickly wander, their interest fade. Few seemed committed to anything that would require change.

“Long after all the coffee was drunk and the little sandwiches eaten, the uneasy smiles were retracted and it became clear that reconciliation with most of these saints was still a ways off,” Pannell said. “In fact, it was a long ways off.”

He came to believe that, in the meantime, white evangelicals didn’t have the moral authority to evangelize Black people. Ignoring the reality of racism undermined their ability to proclaim the gospel.

“Don’t preach love to me. Especially if you intend I do all the loving,” Pannell wrote. “What right has the oppressor to demand that his victim be saved from sin? You may be scripturally and evangelistically correct, but you are ethically wrong. You have the right message, but your timing is off.”

Pannell wrote his book on racism, and it came out in 1968, the same year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and it seemed like hope for peaceful change vanished in America. Pannell left Youth For Christ and joined a group of Black evangelists led by Tom Skinner. Pannell thought he was done with white evangelicals.

A few years later, however, he was approached by David Allan Hubbard, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and asked to join the board of trustees. Pannell wasn’t interested. But Hubbard argued the evangelical school was not interested in affirmative action of symbolic representations of diversity. Fuller believed Black leadership was essential to its mission.

“Almost everybody needed one of us,” Pannell said. “He didn’t seem to be playing that game. He said, ‘We don’t think we can model the kingdom of God well monoculturally.’ Whoa!”

Pannell joined the board in 1971, becoming the first Black board member. He left the board to join the faculty in ’74, becoming the first Black professor. He ran an innovative program for the theological education of Black pastors, which later became the African American Church Studies Program and in 2015 was renamed the William E. Pannell Center for Black Church Studies.

Pannell spent the rest of his career teaching and mentoring Black ministers. He was, on occasion, drawn back to the task of challenging white evangelicals to take racism seriously but noted that despite “some paroxysms of curiosity” about the theology of racial reconciliation, little seemed to change.

And yet he continued to believe that white evangelicals could change.

“The evangelical movement could be born again,” Pannell said. “I would issue a call back to the cross, back to repentance, and I would ask that God would, somehow or other, save us from our cultural captivity.”

Pannell’s eldest son, Philip, died in 2015; his wife, Hazel, died in 2021. He is survived by his son Peter.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

How Messianic Jews Are Serving Israelis Displaced by Hamas and Hezbollah

Heather M. Surls

In Israel’s only communal village of believers in Jesus, three women reflect on loving their neighbors—and their enemies—in the midst of war.

School principal Chani Kalni surveys damaged classrooms at Shalhavot Chabad elementary school in Gedera, Israel.

Leon Neal / Staff / Getty

As the sirens wailed on October 1, Nirit Bar-David took refuge in her familiar safe room. Iran had just launched another 180 missiles at Israel, and she had about a minute to take cover. So did the other 350 residents of Israel’s only Messianic Jewish moshav.

Sitting on a pine-covered ridge about ten miles west of Jerusalem, the Yad HaShmona community has lived in steady tension over the past year of war with Hamas in Gaza—now extended against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Thirty members of the community have served with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on both fronts, severely disrupting their families’ lives.

Yad HaShmona’s sirens did not sound on April 14, when Iran first launched drones and missiles at Israel, because the projectiles did not come within range of the village. But Bar-David, a financial manager who has lived at Yad HaShmona since she was seven years old, took cover in her bomb shelter anyway. Intelligence reports indicated that the unprecedented Iranian attack would arrive at night, so she decided to play it safe. She slept in the shelter attached to her home—an enclave with thick cement walls and a heavy metal door—and all the while, surrendering herself to God’s sovereign care.

“A bomb can ruin my whole house—not only this room,” she said. “I really believe that God is here and will protect me—and if not, it will be his decision, not a mistake.”

Since October 7, members of the moshav—a community resembling a kibbutz but with more individual autonomy—have had to make similar decisions over and over again: how to act quickly while trusting God.

At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Ayelet Ronen, chair of Yad HaShmona’s management committee, turned on the radio and heard the initial reports of a security breach on the border with Gaza. One of her sons, a member of IDF, wanted to ride her husband’s motorcycle south to help. Ronen and her husband convinced him to stay, but two hours later, he and around two dozen others from the community were officially called up to serve.

That was a Saturday, the morning after the moshav celebrated the end of Sukkot, the Jewish Festival of Booths. As a leader in the village, Ronen worked to soothe shock and panic in those who remained. While older men patrolled the village’s perimeter, she and the staff of the moshav’s Logos Hotel started to receive calls from Israelis fleeing the towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip.

“By Tuesday we were fully booked,” Ronen recalled. “To all of them, we just said, ‘Come, we’ll figure out the funds later.’”

Yad HaShmona—which in Hebrew means “memory of the eight”—was founded in 1971 by a group of Finnish Christians who wanted to atone for the sins of their country in a tangible way; during World War II, Finland had surrendered to the Nazis eight Jews, seven of whom died in Auschwitz. Miraculously, Israel granted land to this group of Gentiles, who envisioned building up the Jewish state alongside Jewish believers in Jesus, known in Hebrew as Yeshua.

Fifty years later, Yad HaShmona is home to around 60 families. A member of the moshav must be a believer in Jesus, an Israeli citizen for at least 10 years, and willing to serve beyond his or her immediate family for the collective success of the village.

“Yad HaShmona has played an essential role in the formation of the Messianic community’s identity in Israel,” said Danny Kopp, general secretary of Evangelical Alliance Israel. Not only does the moshav host national gatherings for believers, he elaborated, but also it models communal life while remaining integrated with the broader society.

Within a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Yad HaShmona had welcomed around 200 evacuees—a fraction of the 200,000 Israelis displaced in the conflict’s early months. Since evacuees were housed in small hotel rooms without kitchens, the moshav’s management decided to convert a large hall into a common area for them. Between piles of donated clothes and toys, observant Jews gathered to pray. Sometimes men of the moshav would join them to make a minyan—the quorum of ten Jewish men needed for prayer.

“The religious people didn’t want to talk about [faith],” Ronen says, “but whenever we had an opportunity, we would tell them.”

Evacuees learned about the Christian organizations that helped pay for their room and board before Israeli government aid kicked in, a month and a half after the start of the conflict. And as they were able, moshav residents testified to their belief in Yeshua as Messiah.

Ronen recounted the story of an ultra-Orthodox woman who was driving to stay at Yad HaShmona when she received a phone call.

“Don’t go there,” her caller warned. “Those people are dangerous; they will change your faith.”

She immediately purposed to reverse her course. But Highway 1, a major road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, had no place for a U-Turn. She ended up at the moshav, and sometime during her stay, expressed her appreciation for the community’s welcoming members.

“You’re nothing like what people told me,” Ronen said the woman concluded.

Historically, Israel’s Messianic community has been maligned, especially by ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are estimated at 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population. But with conservative estimates of 30,000 believers in Israel worshiping in at least 75 congregations, Ronen thinks secular Israelis increasingly consider Messianic Jews an acceptable stream of society.

When the first group of evacuees was able to return to their homes after a three-month stay at Yad HaShmona, the moshav received a new group of 25 families, who stayed in temporary housing until the end of August. And since Israel’s offensive in Lebanon began in late September, in response to near-daily rocket exchanges with Hezbollah, more than a dozen families from northern towns have taken refuge at Yad HaShmona.

Mona Pelled, a guide with the Messianic Jewish travel agency Sar-El Tours, has lived at Yad HaShmona since 2017. Last fall, she interacted with her displaced neighbors at a sandwich bar opened in the moshav parking lot by the Christian Broadcasting Network. When anyone asked questions about Jesus, she shared the gospel in ways appropriate to each person’s background.

“We need to respect everyone,” Pelled said, “and if they see Yeshua in you, they will discover the truth.”

Pelled’s friendships extend beyond her Jewish circles as well. For 12 years, she has regularly met with Arab Israeli Christian women for fellowship and prayer. Most of these women are pacifists, she said, and she wishes she could be one too. But her parents and grandparents were Libyan Jews sent to a work camp in Italy at the end of World War II. As a Jew living in a state facing hostile extremist groups, her instinct for self-protection runs high.

Hamas’s massacre was a mini-Holocaust, she said. Though Israel must maintain a strong military because of its many outspoken enemies, she lamented the isolation Jews feel now that international opinion has turned against them.

“People in the world do not understand that this is the only land we have,” Pelled said.

Ronen’s background also informs her position on politics; in 1948, her grandfather came to Palestine during the British Mandate with an Auschwitz ID tattooed on his arm. Within a month, he enlisted with the Haganah—the early Jewish paramilitary organization—to fight for Israel’s independence.

Since October 7, Ronen said the people of Yad HaShmona have spent many hours studying the Bible and considering the meaning, in light of their new reality, of the Messiah’s command to love one’s enemies—a complex discussion, she admits. Distinguishing between armed militants and Palestinian civilians who are suffering the consequences of war, her community agrees that Hamas is not the enemy Jesus meant for them to love.

Believers are called to love enemies in close proximity to them, Ronen said, individuals who spitefully use and hate them. Jesus commanded love and prayer for these because he knows it is human nature to despise people who wrong them. To these people, she said, Jesus’ followers are called to “turn to them the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39), to do good (Rom. 12:20), and to share God’s transforming message of salvation.

But as an evil organization that opposes God’s plan for the Jewish people in their covenant land, Ronen said, Hamas differs from these individual, personal enemies. Citing Psalm 83:1–4, she said that any group set on Israel’s annihilation is in fact an enemy of God. As such, war can be waged against these groups without transgressing Jesus’ command.

“You can actually fight an enemy—fight a just war—and not develop hatred in your heart for the individual person before you,” Ronen said.

In agreement, Pelled added that Jesus does not intend for believers to love the “demonic,” which is how she characterizes Hamas.

“If the enemy comes against you, you have to protect yourself,” Pelled said. “It doesn’t mean I don’t love them or that I don’t pray for them. We do pray for them … we pray for the Gazan people, for those that are innocent. We pray for the children. We pray for a future for them.”

Nirit Bar-David also mentioned wicked spiritual forces at work, calling Hamas’s animosity toward Israelis “the work of the devil.” But even in the face of attacks against her people, she said she turns to God and prays that everyone—including her nation’s enemies—will find salvation in Jesus. Their repentance is necessary, she said, to halt the evil Hamas perpetuates.

“We need this change,” Bar-David said. “And having this attitude which Hamas has toward Israel, I think it comes from a very deep, wrong place that really needs healing—if they would choose that.”

- More from Jayson Casper

Theology

My Friend, Bill Pannell

Edward Gilbreath

A reflection on the trailblazing Black theologian and his influence on American evangelicalism.

Photo courtesy of Fuller Seminary

I first met the late William Pannell in 1993 in a hallway of Christianity Today. I was in my early 20s, just a year removed from graduating college. Dr. Pannell was visiting his old friend, former CT president Paul Robbins, and the pair was on a leisurely tour around the office.

I remember being enthralled by this dashing Black man in a tailored suit, his throaty laugh echoing around the building. Excited to see a young Black editor on CT’s payroll, Pannell greeted me with that winsome smile that had launched a thousand provocative sermons.

We were both slightly taken aback to see another African American in an office that was then so thoroughly white. At the time, I was one of only two or three people of color employed by CT and the lone Black person on the editorial team. What I didn’t know then was that I was shaking hands with one of the people who had helped create the conditions for me to hold that very role.

Pannell was a trailblazer whose leadership at organizations such as Youth for Christ, Tom Skinner Associates, and Fuller Theological Seminary had unlocked doors for later generations of Black evangelicals to enter through. Long after that first meeting, he would tell me, “When we [pioneering Black leaders] were taking our lumps in the ’50s and ’60s at evangelical ministries, colleges, and publishers, we were imagining a future where leaders like you could be possible.”

Over the years, I had the privilege of interviewing Pannell for various articles, books, videos, and other projects, both public and personal. In each interaction, he was brilliant and exceedingly generous with his time. Although he was a walking embodiment of “speaking truth to power,” he always led with humor and humility.

I quickly learned that I was not alone in my fandom; he was a mentor to scores of women and men—pastors and preachers, scholars and activists, folks who had passed through his classrooms at Fuller, as well as scraggly strays like me whom he happened to find along the way. When I wrote my 2006 book, Reconciliation Blues, about being a Black evangelical in mostly white settings, I was taking cues from what he did in his groundbreaking 1968 tome, My Friend, The Enemy, a passionate corrective to a white evangelical community that he both loved and distrusted.

Pannell loved Jesus and his church. As a preacher, his heart beat for the gospel and its biblically rooted values of evangelism, discipleship, and justice. His teaching was grounded in a strikingly honest understanding of how Christianity and the church really operate in the world. He was frank about how they are often accessories to the sins of racism and social injustice rather than proponents of reconciliation.

A lack of real discipleship was at the core of our troubles, Pannell believed. “Christ’s parting command was that we go and make disciples of the nations,” he wrote in his last book, an expanded edition of his 1993 release, The Coming Race Wars? “It wasn’t build more churches; it was make disciples. It seems fairly clear today that we have far more churches and Christians than we have disciples.”

Before going into hospice care earlier this month, Pannell more or less worked until his 95-year-old frame could go no further. He preached via Zoom, finished a memoir, and conducted interviews for two documentaries, including one about his life and ministry. Throughout our three decades of acquaintance, he and I would periodically call or send a text to check in on one another. I never took the gift of his friendship for granted, but now that he’s gone, I’m appreciating those exchanges even more.

My final text from him came early Sunday, September 22. I had sent him a message the day before to congratulate him on The Gospel According to Bill Pannell, a documentary that had its premiere that weekend. “Beautiful film about an amazing man of God! That Bill Pannell is a remarkable fella,” I wrote.

His reply: “Thanks be to JESUS! And to his friends like you.”

Edward Gilbreath is the author of Reconciliation Blues and Birmingham Revolution.

- More from Edward Gilbreath

Ideas

What Are Parents For?

Nadya Williams

Contributor

Scripture has a clear vision for parents as stewards of our children. It’s not an instruction manual for modern parenting spats.

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

In his 1990 essay collection, Wendell Berry considered the question “What are people for?” The answer, in true Berry fashion, is a beautifully intricate web of answers that add up to human flourishing.

That flourishing is connected to the flourishing of the environment around us, and this answer also has deep theological roots. God’s promises in the Old Testament repeatedly revolved around blessing the land and the people together, not separately. We flourish when planted, rooted, and nurtured together, with others around us. Most of all, we flourish when rooted not only in human community but also in a covenant with God.

From the premise that people are made for flourishing, we can ask the same question about specific human roles, like that of a parent: “What are parents for?” What guidelines does the Bible offer in answering this question?

The timing of my exploration is not accidental. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen vicious attacks within Christian circles against Christian parents who embrace public schooling and those who choose homeschooling.

And there’s no shortage of other parenting wars, both within the church and outside of it. Parenting Facebook groups have become legendary for all the wrong reasons. They’re the place to berate and be berated for every parenting choice imaginable: breastfeeding or bottle, Tylenol or no, travel sports or local only. Outspoken anti-vaxxers meet weekend-warrior dewormers meet all-natural-raw-foodists and many, many more—each convinced that their answer alone will save not only their children but also the world.

It would be funny, except the anxiety is far too real for anyone to be laughing. There’s no essential oil blend to help with this.

I contend that, like so many other problems we face, this one is theological at its root. We’ve lost track of any real theological imagination for understanding the purpose of parents. That’s true of the church and our broader society today, and we are the worse for it.

True, the Bible isn’t an encyclopedically precise instruction manual—you can’t just go to the index, look up “public schools” or “vaccinations” or “diapering options,” and find out exactly what the Lord has ordained on each particular issue. And if that’s what we are hoping to find, even subconsciously, that’s another problem that lies with us. It means we’re viewing parenting as a set of instrumentalized tasks—to feed, to wash, to chauffeur to activities—and losing track of the larger vision, a true calling for a purpose much larger than any list of tasks.

As it happens, the Bible does offer such a vision: Parents are called to be stewards of our children. Whether we’ve given birth to these children ourselves or have adopted or fostered them, we receive them as a gift for just a short time. During this time, we are but stewards appointed by God to hold in trust the treasure we have been given: image-bearers with immortal souls! At the end of their growing-up years, in most cases, off they go, on to adulthood.

But—and this is key—while the Bible’s teaching on this overall vision is clear, we also see repeatedly that there is more than one way to be a faithful steward.

In one of the most poignant passages, the opening section of the Shema prayer and the instructions that follow it in Deuteronomy 6:4–25, we learn of parents’ obligation to teach our children constantly about God, at home and outside, sitting and lying down and walking about during the day. Children raised in such households will ask earnest spiritual questions:

In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?”tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.Before our eyes the Lord sent signs and wonders—great and terrible—on Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household.But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land he promised on oath to our ancestors.The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.” (Deut. 6:20–25)

We see here that it is our duty as parents to keep teaching our children about God at every chance we get. It is also our duty to be prepared to answer deep theological questions from our children when they inevitably arise.

Without parental teaching, the passage implies, how would the next generation even know anything about God? This makes the task of theological education and spiritual formation that is entrusted to parents all the more urgent and necessary. The loss of key theological truths is always just one generation away.

This process of telling children about God through every activity imaginable adds up to what we today call discipleship. Though direct teaching is commanded, too, this modeling of the Christian life is primarily caught, not taught. It’s through everyday life in family, in other words, that children learn to follow Jesus. Designated times set apart for explicitly spiritual things are not enough.

Of course, another way to see it is that all of family life itself is a designated time set apart for discipleship. Every moment of life is God’s, and we as parents should model this truth. Such discipleship is how we live out our call to be faithful stewards of our children.

God expects much from those to whom he has given a trust, 1 Corinthians 4:2 reminds us. The parable in Matthew 25:14–30 elaborates further. In this story, Jesus tells of a master who entrusted various amounts of gold to three different stewards—to each “according to his ability.” Two of them invested the funds and made a profit, earning praise and further rewards. But the third simply hid the gold in the ground and returned it to the master exactly as he had received it, without any profit. He earned a harsh rebuke for his laziness.

Presented in a series of stories illuminating God’s kingdom, this parable is not about the virtues of wise financial investment. The real investment, rather, is in people. The stewards are—or should be—sharing and growing their knowledge of God. That includes parents teaching our children in word and example, preparing them to become thoughtful believers themselves.

Other passages also describe the high expectations God has for stewards to whom he entrusts serious responsibilities. And yet, Matthew 25 also makes it clear that there’s more than one way to be a good steward. Not every praiseworthy steward made the same decision, yet as long as they each wisely invested the treasure given to them, the master was happy.

Of course, we could also note the many unfortunate stories of parents and children throughout the Bible. These are examples of what happens when parents do not steward our children well.

This is a major theme of 1 and 2 Kings, where the kings of ancient Israel repeatedly appear to be terrible fathers who neglect their children’s spiritual education, largely ignoring their sons except when considering their potential as heirs. The result is one disastrous king after another, failures not only in spiritual terms but also by any earthly metric. And in each of those cases, Scripture describes spiritual and relational failures within the family. The problem is never the sort of parenting choices we bicker about: education styles, sports teams, or diet.

I’ve written before about the strong preferences that I have for my children, the image-bearers I have personally been called to steward and disciple together with my husband. But my investment choices are not what every other good and faithful steward will select, and Christian parents have the right and responsibility—spiritually as well as legally—to make those investment choices for themselves, informed by prayer, Scripture, and sound counsel as needed.

This knowledge of God’s praise for stewards with varying investment strategies should reconcile us to differences in parental and educational decisions among Bible-believing Christians. We need not all steward identically to be faithful servants.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).

- More from Nadya Williams

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