How the ‘Jezebel Spirit’ Keeps Empowering Sin

Editor in Chief

The phrase is convenient for demonizing women—while teaching people to excuse immorality.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

Early in our marriage, when my wife and I had just moved to a new city while I was starting doctoral work, we attended a worship service—knowing almost no one there but hoping to make friends. The preacher, who mumbled a bit, was trying to make a rhetorical point about the importance of a good name: “I mean, how many of you ladies out there have the name Jezebel?” Time seemed to be in slow motion as I turned to see my wife, Maria, raising her hand.

Turns out she thought he had said, “How many of you ladies out there have heard the name Jezebel?” which, of course, she had. She blushed and immediately dropped her hand when she discovered the actual question, while I imagined meeting all of these new people to have them say, “It’s so nice to meet you, Jezebel. Welcome to our church.”

We made it through that moment, seemingly without anyone noticing (or else too polite to bring it up), and the years have proven that my wife lives up to her actual name—that of the mother and some of the disciples of Jesus—and not at all to that of the murderous queen who once hounded the prophet Elijah almost till death did them part. She sighs and rolls her eyes every time I tell that story and says, “That preacher was hard to understand—and you know it.” She’s right. Thirty seconds of Jezebel confusion—in this case—has made for thirty years of laughter from me.

Old Jezebel keeps showing up in other kinds of confusion, though, in ways that are not funny at all. On any given Sunday, I am at my church teaching through the Book of Revelation. I said the first week, We’re going to have a couple months in more familiar territory—as I teach through Jesus’ messages to the seven churches of Asia Minor— before things get weird.

What I meant was that the themes at the beginning of the Apocalypse are easier to grasp: keep persevering, repent of sin, don’t lose heart while suffering, return to your first love, and so on. Most people get confused or scared right after that part, with images of trumpets and seals and horsemen and multi-headed dragons and marks on the forehead. And so, I thought, the first third of Revelation is freer from the bad speculative teaching that keeps some people distant from Revelation. But then I remembered Jezebel.

The ascended Jesus sent a message through John the Revelator that there was one major point of disobedience in the congregation at Thyatira, namely that they “tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols” (Rev. 2:20, ESV throughout).

This past week, I happened upon a social media post from a minister (apparently in the Pentecostal or charismatic tradition) asserting, “There is no ‘Jezebel Spirit.’ At best, these are words used to silo and demoralize people you disagree with.” He went on, “I believe in the gifts of the Spirit—all of them. This is not godly. It’s wrong and demonic and needs to be purged from our vernacular.”

I’m not yet familiar with this minister’s work so I don’t know exactly what’s theologically in the background for him, but I do know that, on this, he’s exactly right—the concept of a “Jezebel spirit,” the way it’s often used today, has no grounding at all in Scripture and, ironically enough, is often used to fuel the very sin Jesus charged the Jezebel of Revelation with promoting.

Part of the confusion, of course, is with the way we use the language of “spirit.” One can speak of the “spirit of ’76,” referring to patriotism; or to someone having “the spirit of Barnabas,” implying they’re an encourager; or “the spirit of Lydia,” meaning they’re generous. One could speak of someone seeking to sell access to God as being of “the spirit of Simon.” But, usually, the language of the Jezebel spirit is used in our churches today to refer to something quite more than just that.

Many preachers or teachers name the Jezebel spirit as a specific demonic being or force, and, in doing so, portray a particularly dangerous and evil aspect of women—especially of women to men. Often, this will come with a list of “characteristics of the Jezebel spirit” that are disconnected from the actual words of the Bible. In most cases, one does not have to be a Freudian to wonder if these “characteristics” are not describing a particular woman or group of women with whom the preacher or teacher is perturbed.

The Bible does teach exactly what Jesus unequivocally acknowledged as true—that there are dark, spiritual personal beings afoot in the cosmos. The Scriptures sometimes speak of these beings as “principalities and powers.” In most cases, though, these beings are not named and classified for us. This is because their power is not, like a pagan god, independent of us.

The powers of this present darkness work through deception (Gen. 3:1–3) and accusation (Rev. 12:10). One of them screamed in his presence, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24). But they had no power over Jesus. Of Satan, Jesus said, “The ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me” (John 14:30). [S1] That’s not only because of his deity but also because of his obedient humanity.

The spirits of darkness work through human fallenness and rebellion, which is why the scriptural remedy for them is the gospel, prayer, and repentance of sin—not talismans or incantations. When Jesus rebuked those in the church who “hold the teaching of Balaam” (Rev. 2:14), he was not speaking of some specifically masculine entity hypnotizing the congregation. He was speaking of those who imitated the prophet-for-hire of old. And when Jesus referenced a teacher as “Jezebel,” he did so in terms of the villain of ancient Israel—one who taught that God could be replaced with idols and that immorality could be carried out without accountability.

When the Jezebel spirit is taught, it is usually presented as eerily consistent with the pagan myths of the succubus, who would sexually attack men by night, or the myths of the sirens, who would lure unsuspecting men to their deaths. The implication is usually that there is something especially treacherous and dangerous—indeed, supernaturally treacherous and dangerous—about women.

Men, in this view, are seen through the lens of frailty—they are the sum of instincts and desires that are uncontrollable when in the presence of the power of the temptress—while women are viewed through the prism of calculating evil. This, of course, is inconsistent with the fundamental gospel truth that both men and women are fallen and, left to ourselves, under condemnation (Rom. 3:10–18).

The Jezebel spirit is convenient in a couple ways. I’ve seen it used to suggest that women who call for holiness and justice in the church should be shunned or ignored. In working with survivors of church sexual abuse, I’ve lost count of how many of them were told that their work for accountability was that of a Jezebel spirit. I have seen women who have done no wrong have their reputations destroyed. Some of them are exiled from their communities. Some are unjustly and unrelentingly harassed in law courts or by church discipline.

I’ve also lost count of how many male leaders have used the term, or something akin to it, to minimize their own culpability for sexual sin. The Jezebel spirit enables them to point to the problem before God as “the woman thou hast given to me,” who is simultaneously a superhuman serpent in the garden.

In many cases, men have used Jezebel language to use purported biblical authority to blame others—sometimes innocent people—for their own abuse of power. In other words, one is able to point to the Jezebel spirit while doing exactly what Jezebel did—crushing those who stand in the way of the sin one wants to commit (1 Kings 21:8–15). In so doing, it’s possible to twist the Bible to say what it doesn’t say (thus leading people to idolatry) while literally demonizing women in order to minimize one’s own sexual transgression (thus teaching people to excuse immorality). That’s exactly what the false prophet of Thyatira was doing.

Women are sinners, just as men are. The way of Jezebel is death; the way of Ahab is too. A woman who thinks she’s unable to follow the path of Nimrod or Esau or Jeroboam or Herod is deceiving herself. A man who thinks he’s unable to mimic the pattern of Jezebel is also. Redeemed women are heirs of the kingdom, just as redeemed men are. Women can fall into false teaching, just as men can. Women need the gospel, just as men do. To project one’s fear or loathing of women onto a Jezebel spirit isn’t to identify a demon but to imitate one.

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

News

Lausanne Report: Most Missionaries Are Reaching the Reached

Caleb Maglaya Galaraga

The State of the Great Commission Report examines the challenges and opportunities amid a changing missions landscape.

Courtesy of The Lausanne Movement / Photography by Grace Snavely

Today, more than 40 percent of the world has not yet been evangelized. Yet about 97 percent of the current global total of 450,000 Christian missionaries are sent to people who already have access to the gospel.

Another startling fact: In 1900, more than 80 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe or North America, but today only about 25 percent live in those regions. The remainder reside in the Global South, which includes Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.

The geographic shift in Christianity also means a change in missionaries’ countries of origin. The United States still sends the greatest number of missionaries, but the next four countries are Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines, and Nigeria.

These are some of the findings from the State of the Great Commission Report released by the Lausanne Movement earlier this year, in advance of the Fourth Lausanne Congress in Incheon, South Korea. The report draws on research from international nonprofits and Christian organizations and presents insights from 150 global missions experts.

“The Great Commission is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end,” wrote Victor Nakah and Ivor Poobalan in one of the report’s essays. “The future is the presence of all tribes, tongues, nations, and languages worshipping the King at the end of the age.”

The success and unfinished task of global missions

Due to the work of missionaries and indigenous Christian movements, the gospel has now reached an estimated 4.57 billion people, while 3.34 billion have still not heard the gospel, according to data from the Joshua Project.

Yet most missionaries today aren’t going to countries with unreached people groups. “Most missionaries go to predominantly Christian or post-Christian contexts, leading to a lack of connection to and understanding of adherents to other religions,” the report noted. More missionaries go to Europe than to Asia, even though 60 percent of the world lives in Asia and sending a missionary to Europe costs 10 times as much.

The top sender—and the top receiver—of missionaries is the United States, with 135,000 missionaries going out and 38,000 coming in from abroad, according to the World Christian Database’s 2020 figures. The US Christian population is still the largest in the world, as about one-tenth of all Christians are American. Brazil follows with nearly 8 percent of the world’s Christians, due largely to the rapid spread of Pentecostalism. Brazil also sends out the second-highest number of missionaries with 40,000.

South Korea, with 35,000 missionaries, dropped from second to third place between 2015 and 2020. An aging missionary force and decreased involvement by younger Christians has contributed to this plateau. The 25,000 missionaries sent from the Philippines are mostly Catholics, and this number doesn’t include the Filipinos working overseas who function as bivocational missionaries.

In Nigeria, some churches are bypassing mission agencies and sending their missionaries directly to the unreached. An essay in the Lausanne report quoted a book by Yaw Perbi and Sam Ngugi: “The history of the world Christian movement is the story of collaboration between local churches and mission agencies [which] God has used … to advance the gospel right from the first century to date.”

Christianity’s growth in Africa

In the past century, sub-Saharan Africa has seen the fastest growth of Christianity anywhere in the world. That region and Latin America are the areas where Pentecostalism has grown most powerfully. In 1970, sub-Saharan Africa had about 20 million Pentecostals; today that number has skyrocketed to 230 million, according to the World Christian Encyclopedia.

The Pew Research Center projected that by 2060, more than four in ten Christians will call sub-Saharan Africa home. Much of this shift is attributable to demographics, as the region has the world’s youngest population. Currently, the median age of Christians there is 19, compared to 39 in North America and 42 in Europe.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also more religious. In Nigeria, about 90 percent of adults attend religious services weekly, compared to less than 40 percent in the US. Although people age 18 to 39 attend weekly church services less often than those over 40 all over the world, the gap is smallest in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Pew.

“Every person thinking about missions must not only consider how Africa participates, but Africans themselves must be ready to be on the frontlines of the mission force,” wrote Ana Lucia Bedicks, Menchit Wong, and Maggie Gathuku in a Lausanne report essay.

The unreached in India and Pakistan

Meanwhile, a majority of the world’s unreached people groups (UPGs), defined as groups that don’t have “an indigenous church capable of evangelizing their own people,” reside in South Asia, specifically in Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Nearly 3,000 UPGs—or about three-fifths of the world’s total—are in those two countries.

Currently, more than 60 percent of the 30,000 Indian missionaries work within the country, according to Operation World. Christians in India are facing greater persecution as a Hindu nationalist government is in control and Hindutva ideology becomes entrenched in society.

India’s expanding middle class offers both barriers and opportunities for the gospel to flourish, according to an essay by Carl Ebenezer, Ted Esler, and James Patole. “The combination of India’s religious, deeply caste-based social structures with this secular and pluralistic context poses a huge challenge in presenting the uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” they wrote.

Yet at the same time, the authors noted that many in India’s middle class “are not necessarily convinced by and dedicated to the teachings of their religion. Many would be open to listening and changing their view if invited to do so in a way that speaks to their experiences and needs.”

Pakistan has the strictest blasphemy laws among Muslim-majority countries, which can lead to imprisonment and even death. Christians living in the cities are also forced into low-paying jobs in sanitation.

The report noted that South Asia “is poised to remain the least evangelized region for many decades to come.”

Polycentric missions

As Christian centers shift away from the West and toward the Global South, missions activity is now polycentric, a term that means “from all nations to all nations,” according to Patrick Fung, global ambassador of OMF International.

An essay entitled “Polycentric Global Missions” argued that “mission has been polycentric from the start.” Although the early church began evangelizing in Jerusalem, persecution forced it to scatter across the Roman world and preach to the Jewish diaspora. Then believers went to Antioch to preach to the Gentiles; from there, Paul began his missionary journeys and planted churches, and those churches went on to spread the gospel further.

The report noted that with the exception of Europe, every region of the world “both sends and receives more missionaries than 50 years ago.” More missionaries are coming from countries where Christians are the minority, often helping them relate to the people they are trying to reach.

Yet one challenge is that Christian wealth is centered in North America, requiring discussions on how polycentric churches can encourage generosity, create “healthy channels” between Christians with more wealth and those with less, and identify new funding sources.

“If every culture has received the Great Commission, then every culture has the privilege of supporting the Great Commission,” said Scott Morton of the Navigators, who is quoted in another essay.

Diaspora missions

One way the gospel is spreading is through the movement of people leaving their home countries due to hunger, war, persecution, better job opportunities, or family. In 2020, there were 281 million international migrants in the world, an increase of 60 million from a decade prior, according to the World Migration Report. Of those migrants, nearly half are Christians.

This pattern fits into polycentric missions, as Christian migrants are relocating to new locations where they can witness and plant seeds. At the same time, Christians in the destination countries can evangelize the new arrivals, who often are more willing to accept a new faith as they are far from the traditions and religions of their home.

“God is sovereign over human history and human dispersion,” Sam George wrote in the essay “People on the Move.” One result, he stated, is that “Christianity in the West is not declining, but immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin American are reviving it and transforming it with renewed missional thrust.”

For instance, the tightening of freedoms in Hong Kong has led to a boom of Chinese churches in Britain as citizens of the former British colony find refuge in the UK. In Belgium, African Christians are increasingly teaching religious education classes. In the US, Bhutanese Nepali churches are growing as they meet in church buildings where the local congregation is dying.

“Christianity is a missionary faith par excellence since it is a faith that was born to travel,” George noted.

The church opposing injustice

Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from 2 billion in 1990 to 1 billion in 2019, according to the World Bank. The Lausanne report connected this trend with the importance of integral mission, which addresses not only a person’s spiritual needs but also physical, social, and economic concerns.

Human rights are more protected than in previous centuries. Yet government restrictions on religion have increased globally. North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have seen the highest percentage of government use of force against religious groups, according to Pew.

Today, an estimated 40 million people are victims of forms of modern slavery, which include forced labor, sexual exploitation, and unwanted marriage. Women and girls are disproportionately affected, accounting for 70 percent of the victims of exploitation and 99 percent of victims in the sex industry.

“Though the church speaks out in certain pockets favoring the oppressed, in many of these cases it limits itself to statements from leadership and does not get it converted into actions,” wrote Christie Samuel, Jocabed Solano, and Jenny Yang in a Lausanne report essay. They urged the church to “take on its prophetic role by working more promptly in denouncing injustice, freeing the oppressed, and rising against the unrestricted freedom of the oppressors.”

Artificial intelligence presents both pitfalls and possibilities

Another seismic shift the missions community needs to take into account is how the internet is changing every facet of human life. The report stated that “the rise in digital media is potentially as transformative to Scripture engagement as the advent of the printing press in Early Modern Europe.”

With about 60 percent of the world connected to the internet, there are new opportunities for Bible apps that allow people to easily read and hear the Bible in their own language. Bible apps also provide a new way for people to access the Bible, especially in countries where security is a concern. Translation software, online collaboration tools, and crowd-sourcing have also expedited the Bible translation process.

At the same time, technological advances pose challenges for the church, particularly around artificial intelligence (AI) and what it means to be human.

“The proclamation of the gospel is not simply about information transfer but is rather a whole person transformation by the power of the Holy Spirit,” wrote the authors of the report’s essay on AI. They added that “many are seeking to harness the immense power of AI tools in the furtherance of the gospel message to all people, tribes, and nations.”

The authors acknowledged that God uses such tools to aid the church but warned that their use must be “guided by the unique nature of humanity and the recognition that machines are fundamentally different from humans.”

- More from Caleb Maglaya Galaraga

Books

Review

An Evangelical’s Warning to Evangelical Christian Nationalists Aims Beyond the Easy Targets

Ralph C. Wood

Joel Looper’s prophetic arrow pierces Trump sycophants and revered historical figures alike.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Getty

Donald Trump’s manifold sins and acts of wickedness are so numerous that they are almost too tedious to repeat. He is a danger to democracy, a would-be fascist who has promised that voting for him means never needing to vote again, and he fomented the worst event in recent American history, the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol—the refrain could go on ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

Yet Joel Looper convincingly shows that these are the obvious political symptoms of a subtle theological disease. Leprosy cannot be cured pustule by pustule, as Martin Luther said. Looper is not preaching to the already converted; he is an evangelical issuing a clear alarm to his fellow evangelicals. He takes the title of his book, Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity, from Galatians 1:6–7, where Paul warns all believers against the deadly heresy of embracing a “different gospel” than Jesus Christ and his church, “which is really no gospel at all.” Hence his clarion warning:

The Trump strategy … encourages Christians to identify the nation rather than the church as their primary community and to practice America’s politics rather than the politics of Jesus. It encourages us to believe another gospel, the gospel of America, which is no gospel at all.

That Looper writes in an engaging, informal style accessible to ordinary no less than learned readers does not diminish the sharpness of his central argument: Evangelicals are confronting nothing less than a status confessionis: a condition of crisis wherein a political threat “puts serious barriers in the way of preaching the gospel.” The churches must take a strong public stand on behalf of their central beliefs and thus for the Word of God that they confess. As Looper elaborates,

Those who embrace this anti-gospel are cursed because just as no one will be justified before God by observing the Jewish law (Gal. 3:11), no one will be justified before God by living as a “real” American or a good citizen. To put your hope in the gospel of America means that you are cut off from grace. If the outcome of an election means “everything” to you, the new creation cannot mean anything.

Looper skewers such obvious targets as Eric Metaxas, who told Trump in 2020, “Jesus is with us in this fight for liberty. … This is God’s battle even more than it is our battle.” He also takes aim at Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, who said in 2016, “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation. And so that’s why Trump’s tone doesn’t bother me.”

Lest liberal Protestants cluck in self-satisfaction at Looper’s evisceration of evangelicals—since their churches may contain few if any MAGA-style Trumpers—they too should beware. “Since the late 1960s,” writes Looper, “many liberal Protestants have slipped into a brand of Americanized Christianity without realizing it. The worship of God came to seem extraneous to their primary task of community activism, nonprofit work, and getting out the vote, and the Democratic Party slowly displaced the church as their primary community.”

Looper also takes on such weightier figures as Reinhold Niebuhr and Rod Dreher, as well as Stephen Wolfe, the Presbyterian author of The Case for Christian Nationalism. But contemporary malefactors are not Looper’s only bêtes noires. He also shows how Protestant heroes like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli were willing to use coercive state power in alleged service of the church—burning heretics, for instance.

Not even such revered figures as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. escape Looper’s theological critique. He has no desire to tarnish authentic American heroes. He confesses that only the flint-hearted can fail to be moved by the Gettysburg Address. Yet the unchurched Lincoln more readily adverted to an abstract Providence than to the incarnate Lord.

Quoting Lincoln’s words, Looper writes that he thus turned the blessed dead of Gettysburg into little “Christs through whose shed blood ‘the nation might live.’” Looper concludes, “The military has become America’s savior and redeemer … because the nation had first assumed the place of the church as the primary vehicle for God’s work in the world.”

Looper dares even to challenge the most revered Christian martyr in our nation’s history. In his justly celebrated “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” sermon, delivered on the night before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. was altogether justified, Looper affirms, to put “African Americans in the place of Israel. They too came out of slavery. They too hoped for centuries in the Lord’s redemption and still suffered under the weight of injustice in the years that followed.” Even so, he argues, King erred in “identifying Black America … with Israel. [For] biblically speaking, the church—and there is only one church!—is to be identified with Israel, and no one else.”

Looper continues in this vein:

The church does not just work for the common good, for justice, or for as many people as possible to identify as Christians. The church witnesses. We point forward into the future, toward what, on the basis of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, we expect him to do to set the world right. All other such hopes, including those noble hopes King himself held, will sooner or later be dashed. History is a slaughter bench. … Its arc does not of its own accord bend toward justice. As long as Christ tarries, the world is never going to stop being the world. And America and its founding vision are very much a part of the world.

Looper does not confine his prophetic warning to America alone. In a remarkably learned chapter, he lays out the complex historical developments that have led Vladimir Putin to become a self-avowed Christian nationalist with a claimed mandate from God. Not only elite Muscovites but also Russia’s rural poor—despite their disregard for Orthodox doctrine and their rare church attendance—have embraced Putin’s willingness to use nuclear weapons in a holy war that aims to de-Satanize Ukraine. In 2023, Orthodox patriarch Kirill of Moscow thus declared that war-making on behalf of Russia is “the greatest duty and a holy deed.”

Looper’s powerful conclusion about Putin’s messianism is worth quoting at length because of its patent relevance to the American scene:

Putin, his yes-men, and many in the Russian Orthodox hierarchy chose Russia over the body of Christ. They decided that the future they wanted to build was more important than what God has [built] and will build. They decided that the political community of the nation was more important than the political community joined together in the flesh of Jesus Christ. In so deciding, they put themselves in danger of blaspheming the Spirit. They, not the Ukrainians, broke communion with their brothers and sisters when the Patriarch of Constantinople granted Ukraine its own church in 2019. They then destroyed the property, institutions, and lives of those they called brothers and sisters in the faith and agreed together to lie about their reasons for doing it. The rejection of the one, universal church implied by this war tells us that the revival of faith in Russia is not orthodox (little o) even if it is Orthodox, that it propagates another gospel, not the gospel of Jesus Christ and his kingdom, but the gospel of the greatness of Russia.

In the end, however, Looper’s theological arrow strikes most directly at Donald Trump and his strongest devotees. The messianic character of Trump’s campaign rhetoric is unmistakable. Speaking to supporters at his New Jersey golf club in 2023, he boasted, “I am the only one that can save this nation.” Looper also reported that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn offered this paranoid prophecy to a church group last year: “There is an effort by these dark forces … to rewrite the Bible. … They are going to do it using AI!”

In that same talk, Flynn urged his pastor-filled audience to “put aside the Bible and read the Constitution” in some of their sermons. As if such overtures weren’t revealing enough, a source who advises Trump’s legal team told Vanity Fair, “It’s kind of a Jesus Christ thing.” Trump, in fact, likens himself to the crucified Christ. According to the same adviser, Trump’s pitch is, essentially, “I’m absorbing all this pain from all around from everywhere so you don’t have to” and “If they can do this to me they can do this to you.”

Looper makes no call to vote for Kamala Harris. He argues, instead, that Donald Trump and his evangelical acolytes are guilty of the primal evil, the idolatry expressly forbidden in the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.”

Ralph C. Wood spent 50 years in the collegiate classroom at Wake Forest, Samford, and Baylor. He has written extensively on Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton.

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Ideas

Emptying the Nest in Hope, not Fear

Gretchen Ronnevik

When Christian kids leave home, we worry about deconversion. But our trust and hope are in Christ, not well-practiced apologetics.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Pexels

If you’re in the midst of launching a child into adulthood, preparing them to keep the faith as they grow up, you’ve probably already begun to train them in apologetics.

It might not be formal apologetics, though that’s what comes to mind for me: debates, arguments, refuting other people’s beliefs point by point. That kind of apologetics can be helpful for people legitimately wrestling with faith and Scripture. For teenagers especially, it can be a wonderful tool—evidence that Christianity is not illogical, that there are answers to their questions.

But as my own children become adults, I’m also realizing apologetics has its limits. Some doctrines, like the Trinity, are beyond our capacity for total logical understanding. Some apologists work without humility, and that is an ugly thing. And not all challenges in the life of faith involve apologetics’ target, the intellect, for faith is a gift from God that pierces the heart.

More than these limitations, though, I find myself reconsidering the assumption that our proper task as parents is to teach young adults to “defend their faith.”

It’s an interesting turn of phrase—“defend the faith” or “defend your faith”—and not one found in the Bible. (Jude 1:3-4 speaking of “contend[ing] for the faith,” but the interest there is preserving orthodoxy within the church.) The closely related term “defender of the faith” doesn’t come from Jesus or Paul but Reformation history. It’s a title Pope Leo X gave Britain’s king Henry VIII for his writing against the Reformer Martin Luther (and it remains a title of British monarchs today). In that twisted and bloody time, the phrase very much meant defense in a legal and military sense. Henry would wield swords alongside arguments.

Instead of defending our faith, the Bible speaks of defending our hope. This comes from 1 Peter 3:13–17 (CSV):

Who then will harm you if you are devoted to what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness, you are blessed. Do not fear them or be intimidated, but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. Yet do this with gentleness and reverence, keeping a clear conscience, so that when you are accused, those who disparage your good conduct in Christ will be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil.

The word translated here as “give a defense” (or, in other translations, “an answer”) is apologia in Greek, and it’s where we get our word apologetics. But the passage presents a rather different scenario than the one we tend to teach young people as we train and encourage them to defend their faith.

Peter teaches that Christians don’t need to be afraid, nor do we need to go looking for arguments. On the contrary, he envisions other people noticing our hope and asking us about it, then us giving an explanation in gentleness and reverence. The best apologia to teach young Christians, in other words, is to give them a solid hope in Christ the Lord.

To do this, we must first address our own fears and lack of hope. After launching two of our six kids into adulthood, I’ve been astounded at the things other adult Christians have said to my children as they left our house to pursue the vocations God had prepared for them. There’s a consistent theme of fear and discouragement: If you go to that college or move to this place or aren’t super careful, you’ll lose your faith.

These statements come from a place of genuine and justified concern. Many young Christians go to college and never return to church. We’ve all heard of a young person who’s moved out of the house, begun dating an unbeliever, and rejected their faith to live a different life. We know the data. We know the stories. And we are filled with fear. So we impress that fear on our children, urging them to draw their apologetic swords.

But however good the intent, these warnings communicated something more to my kids: Have fear, not hope. Your faith is delicate. It’s fragile. It’s glass. At any moment, it could shatter forever.

Talking with my kids, I found I had to push back on that implicit teaching—because it pushed them toward a false and lesser understanding of God, his mission for each of them, and his role in preserving their faith. “God will never leave you or forsake you,” I told them (Deut. 31:6). “There’s nothing you could ever do that would make God stop loving you” (Psalm 139; Rom. 8:35–39).

And my husband and I talked about our continued role in discipling our children, even in adulthood. “No matter what happens or what you’ve done, you can always come home,” we said. “Going through dark seasons and enduring suffering in various ways is normal. Remember you are never alone. Pray. And reach out to us, and we’ll pray. We’ve all been there.”

If my children develop a passion for apologetics, wonderful. But what the Bible calls all Christians to do is to defend our hope. I tell my kids they don’t have to enter every argument they encounter. Not all questions are asked in good faith, and some of us don’t think on our feet as well as others. But when people ask us about our hope in Christ, that is the surest thing we know, and we can be ready with an answer. We can be ready to explain our hope—our confidence that Jesus will never leave us or forsake us, our trust that we can’t be separated from his love.

I don’t ignore the data about loss of faith in young adulthood, but instead of speaking fear and doubt to our kids as they leave home, we equip them by speaking hope and assurance over them. I want to speak that same hope and assurance to other parents and Christians in youth ministries too.

Don’t be afraid. Your children’s salvation does not rest in their own hands; it rests in the hands of Jesus. It always has, and it always will. Their hope—and ours—is not in having the most articulate answer or the government leaders we want, getting into the right school, having our professors’ or bosses’ approval, or leading a suffering-free, easy life.

Our hope comes from Christ, and Christ alone. Our hope is not in the strength of our faith but the object of our faith. There is nothing more certain we can give our kids.

Gretchen Ronnevik is the author of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted and cohost of the Freely Given podcast.

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Theology

The Cross in an Age of ‘Spiritual Derangement’

J. D. Peabody

Twentieth century theologian P.T. Forsyth’s work reminds Christians today to put the cross before and the world behind.

Trophim Lapteff / Unsplash

I love the church, but I can’t say I always understand or even like it. And in my more than half a century inside it, I can’t remember a time when the American church seemed less clear about its identity and purpose.

The Lord decreed love as our signature characteristic (John 13:35), yet Christians have earned a reputation for hatefulness and even raunchiness. From our epidemic of leadership failures to the steady hemorrhaging of the disillusioned, it feels as if we’ve lost our moorings.

“It is an age of very great spiritual derangement and moral dissolution,” the Scottish preacher and theologian P. T. Forsyth shrewdly observed in his time. “The peril of the hour,” he believed in his time, was “a religious subjectiveness which is gliding down into a religious decadence.”

Forsyth wrote these words over a century ago, just before World War I, when modernist theologians were severely eroding trust in the Bible and orthodox traditionalists hunkered down in rigid defensiveness to stem the tide. Like today, the church of Forsyth’s time found itself in crisis and severely divided—and he felt a burden to help it recenter and regain its bearings.

“No religion can survive which does not know where it is,” Forsyth mused. “And current religion does not know where it is, and it hates to be made to ask.”

I first picked up his slim volume The Cruciality of the Cross back in seminary. And for more than two decades of pastoring, I’ve leaned heavily on Forsyth’s teaching to navigate a path across the treacherous terrain of cultural change, political division, and the ethical complexities of our technological world.

The core of his message to a beleaguered church is straightforward: Center on the Cross of Christ. That’s it. Forsyth’s writing unapologetically calls us back to our source of grace and meaning. Like the apostle Paul, he determined to know nothing but “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

But let’s all be honest: That’s not our natural go-to for addressing our most pressing concerns. Placing the Cross at the center of our faith and daily lives might sound either (1) incredibly basic and too obvious to highlight or (2) narrow and imbalanced, elevating the death of Christ over his life. And it certainly doesn’t strike us as the cure for what ails the church today.

Yet Forsyth was insistent. “Christ’s supreme eternal work is in His cross,” he wrote, “which contains, along with the power, the principle which solves the problem of every age.”

Forsyth was neither simplistic nor myopic in calling us back to Calvary. Far from merely tacking “Jesus died for our sins” to the end of every sermon, he went much deeper into the everyday implications of the Cross, which alone anchors us to God’s action as opposed to our own.

“It is the Gospel of the achieved more than the call to achieve,” he declared. “It bids us not to make, so much as to rest in something we find made.”

“To rest in something we find made” requires us to stop trying to manufacture it for ourselves. Truly nothing else has the capacity to unburden our spirits more than the thoroughness and finality of Jesus’ words on the cross: “It is finished.”

Yet how easily we relegate Christ’s death and resurrection to the margins, even in our efforts to serve him. Too often, we treat the Cross as merely the starting point for our faith journey—but then we take over the reins, striving for a sense of control over our spiritual growth and seeing our efforts as a supplement to Christ’s work.

“The Kingdom as a reality exists outside of us since Christ finished His work of establishing it,” Forsyth observed. “And it makes a great difference in the agents of the Kingdom whether they think they are making it or bringing in what is already made.”

It is easy to lose sight of that distinction. Back in seminary, one of my theology professors asked everyone in the class why we were there. One aspiring pastor replied, “I just want to breathe a little life into the Word.” As if the God-breathed text needed his CPR to save it! That student articulated blatantly what we all do in more subtle ways whenever we overestimate the value of our contribution—inserting our endeavors in a place that belongs to God alone.

We may accept the Cross as the crucial center of the Christian faith in theory, but what does that look like on a practical level? How exactly does it change the way we approach the very real challenges facing the church today and keep us from the “religious decadence” Forsyth decried?

First, it calls us to read and interpret Scripture through a relentlessly cruciform lens. Since Jesus was the “Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Rev. 13:8), the gospel itself existed prior to the Bible being written—it was action before it became words. That eternal truth enabled Jesus to show the disciples on the road to Emmaus how the entire Old Testament pointed specifically to him (Luke 24:27).

If the Cross came first in a “superhistoric” sense (as Forsyth would phrase it), then Scripture itself serves that gospel. The written word derives its true authority and unity through the way it bears witness to Christ and his work. Forsyth pointed out that “The Bible is not a compendium of facts, historic or theological, but the channel of redeeming grace.”

This principle serves as a litmus test for our own interpretation of Scripture. No matter the text, I try to begin my study with the question, What does this passage show me of redemption? How does this take me to the Cross? Instead of merely hunting for a life application or broad spiritual theme of a passage, I seek to be attentive to the very presence of Christ.

Some texts remain stubbornly opaque, but more often than not, I find myself surprised by fresh encounters with the living Christ that leap off the page and show me anew the vast dimensions of God’s love. Without fail, this posture—approaching Scripture with the Cross in mind—drastically alters my assumptions about a text. And it filters out many of my competing ideologies that might otherwise hijack the Scripture for their own ends.

Author and pastor Rich Villodas recently summed up this idea well: “Unless we read Scripture through the lens of the crucified Christ, with others, our exegesis is dangerously subject to personal preferences and political allegiances.”

A Cross-centered theology also recasts the way we think about the deep divides polarizing our culture and churches today. As Billy Graham once stated, “the ground is level at the foot of the cross” because it puts everyone on equal standing in our shared need for redemption.

There are nuances in every debate raging today, requiring us to hold certain truths in tension, and we find no better space for doing that than the Cross. Think of the paradoxes of our faith that sit unflinchingly side by side there: The giver of life facing death. Perfection becoming sin. Exclusive holiness offering inclusive love. The judge personally bearing all judgment.

The more attuned I am to the enormity of Christ’s mercy toward me, the more humbled I am and the more room I allow others to receive the same mercy. The Cross of Calvary demands a continual mindset of reconciliation and readiness to forgive as Christ has forgiven us (Eph. 4:32).

What’s more, as we grow in our appreciation of the Cross, it changes the way we experience and make sense of our own suffering. Reflecting on Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Forsyth noted, “It is a greater thing to pray for pain’s conversion than for its removal. It is more of [a] grace to pray that God would make a sacrament of it.”

When I was walking through my own deep valley of mental and emotional anguish, I first came across those words, and they became a balm for my weary heart and mind. Rather than simply asking God to eradicate my pain (as I had been doing), I began to view the pain itself as a vehicle for meeting the one who understands my suffering better than anyone.

The crucified Jesus personifies the love and character of God in ways we don’t find anywhere else. His death is a rugged, shocking display of his glory. In his physical body on the cross, the entire spectrum of human experience is given voice.

As theologian Jürgen Moltmann, author of The Crucified God, once wrote, “It can be summed up by saying that suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds. … Therefore the suffering of abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love, which is not afraid of what is sick and ugly, but accepts it and takes it to itself in order to heal it.”

Christ’s death says all the horrors of this broken world deeply matter to God. We matter to God, to an infinite degree. And isn’t that what everyone longs to know for certain—that we matter?

At the Cross, all our uncertainties and hurts, our questions and feelings, our hatred and judgment, our longings and fears—all of it is converted into prayer. All of it. The Cross is where Christ uplifts humanity’s aching plea, “Why have you forsaken me?” and prays it on our behalf until it gives way to the complete trust of his final words, “Into your hands I commit my Spirit.”

Forsyth understood that the death and resurrection of Jesus didn’t just address human sin but also all the suffering produced by the Fall. It’s this prophetic insight that has repeatedly drawn me to him as an author, and through him to Christ himself.

One of Forsyth’s biographies bears the Latin title Per Crucem Ad Lucem—through the Cross to the light. That was his endless pursuit. “We must clear and lighten the Gospel for action,” he wrote. “We must scrape off the barnacles that reduce its speed.”

More than a century later, P. T. Forsyth’s work continues to do just that. And if we let them, his words provide a trustworthy compass for a church eager to refocus on its true north.

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

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News

Fourth Lausanne Congress Embraces Younger Leaders, ‘Marketplace’ Christians, and Technology

Morgan Lee in South Korea

More than 5,000 evangelicals from more than 200 countries gather in South Korea to celebrate and strategize about evangelism.

Panelists share about the influence that the Lausanne Movement has had on their ministries on September 24, 2024.

GOY

Steve Oh can trace his family’s Christian heritage back to the Protestant missionaries who arrived in Korea in the 1800s.

“My family has been blessed by the global missionary movement,” said Oh, a Korean Australian pastor who leads Sydney Living Hope Community Church.

This week, Oh is one of 5,200 Christians from more than 200 countries in Incheon, South Korea, for the fourth Lausanne Congress. The gathering comes as a “full circle moment,” commemorating both the personal and corporate fruit of global evangelism in the past half-century.

Fifty years after Billy Graham and John Stott made history by convening 2,700 evangelicals from 150 countries, the movement’s leaders believe this collaboration can go even further.

“The four most dangerous words in the global church today are, ‘I don’t need you,’” said Lausanne Movement global executive director and CEO Michael Oh (no relation to Steve Oh). A fellow member of the Korean diaspora, Oh wore a traditional hanbok during his opening remarks on Sunday.

In the 15 years since Lausanne convened its last Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, the movement has sought to broaden whom it includes as essential partners in the Great Commission. It organized events for leaders under age 40 in Jakarta in 2016, and for “marketplace” Christians, or those not working in professional ministry, in Manila in 2019.

Since its inaugural event in 1974, Lausanne has deepened cooperation among evangelicals around the world, say the leaders CT interviewed on site during Lausanne 4. As the movement pays attention to developing younger leaders and extending its networks, it has released a massive State of the Great Commission report and the Seoul Statement, two documents reaffirming the movement’s commitment to serving as a thought leader on evangelism and theology.

In the leadup to the event, Lausanne began to challenge local churches to adopt a posture of cooperation.

Many Korean congregations have historically struggled to get along; in 2014, the World Evangelical Alliance canceled its general assembly scheduled for the South Korean capital because of divisions among the country’s evangelicals.

Early on in the planning process for this year’s Lausanne Congress, Onnuri Church, one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in Korea, brought more than 430 churches together to pray. Around 200 congregations began to preach collectively through the book of Acts. Many raised funds to cover conference costs. Around 4,000 local Christians are currently praying for the event.

The Korean church significantly contributed financially to the convention center, meals, transportation, and production costs.

Forging trust among Korean Christian leaders hasn’t been easy, according to Yoo Kisung, a local organizer who leads Good Shepherd Church in Seoul. But he recognizes the preparation as an opportunity for reflection and for inspiring the next generation: “Young people who worked with Lausanne are the future leaders in the Korean church.”

Lausanne’s leaders who traveled for the event, such as Menchit Wong, a board member from the Philippines, also emphasized the generational impact.

“Now that I am much, much senior, my task is to see younger and younger leaders take their place in bringing children to Jesus,” she said.

The Seoul Congress features an all-time high percentage of female delegates (29%) and of delegates under 40 (16%). More than 1,450 attendees work outside of full-time ministry. On Tuesday, it held a dinner for younger leaders who packed a massive convention center ballroom, and later this week Lausanne will have a commissioning ceremony for its marketplace attendees (28%).

Though the Lausanne 4 organizers had originally sought to have North Americans make up around 5 percent of the overall in-person delegate population, delegates living in that region ultimately represented 25.5 percent of total participants in the end. (Lausanne’s statistics are based on the delegate’s place of residence.) Together with Europeans (13%), Westerners make up 38.5% of total delegates.

About one-third (36.9%) of delegates reside in Asian countries, compared to 12.8 percent in Africa and 7.7 percent in Latin America. Representatives living in Oceania make up 3 percent and those in the Caribbean make up 1.1 percent.

Spending the week with this diverse and disparate population reminds US-based Ghanaian Casely B. Essamuah, secretary of the Global Christian Forum, that “the church is greater and bigger and larger than any of our denominations or any of our enclaves.”

“When you come here, you cannot but be inspired to see what God is doing around the world,” he said. “Your heart is also broken by the persecution that others are going through, and it informs your prayer life. You see people and are able to network with them for the greater good of the global church.”

Hearing Christians from around the world tell firsthand stories of persecution and of God’s grace is a one-of-a-kind experience, says Christian Maureira, director and professor at Martin Bucer Seminary in Chile. “Hearing what God is doing in Pakistan, Malaysia, Europe, in the Muslim world … it’s very impactful.”

For Claudia Charlot, dean of business at Université Emmaüs in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, the conference has enabled her to connect with Asian missionaries from the One Mission Society, the organization that founded the school she works at.

“I never would have met those folks without Lausanne,” she said.

Each of Lausanne’s previous congresses has released a landmark evangelical document: the Lausanne Covenant (1974), the Manila Manifesto (1989), and the Cape Town Commitment (2010). Keeping with the alliterative trend of the two most recent publications, Lausanne announced on Sunday that it had released the Seoul Statement, a seven-part treatise that states theological positions on the gospel, the Bible, the church, the “human person,” discipleship, the “family of nations,” and technology.

The Seoul Statement "was designed to fill in some gaps, to be a supplement in seven key topics that we have not thought enough about or haven't reflected or written enough about within the Lausanne Movement," said David Bennett, Lausanne’s global associate director.

“We were not trying to create a fourth document which would then replace or make obsolete those earlier three documents,” he added.

The statement—a 97-point, 13,000-word text—was issued on Sunday. Its release surprised some delegates, who anticipated the chance to offer input, since previous congresses had collectively hammered out statements over the course of a week.

“Building on a rich & diverse history, this @LausanneMovement statement has so much good, & I'm thankful for the theological clarity for this moment,” wrote Ed Stetzer, Lausanne’s regional director for North America on Instagram. “Yet, I wish it had a greater call to prioritize evangelism.”

At least one group, the Korean Evangelicals Embracing Integral Mission (KEEIM), organized a meeting on Tuesday for delegates to compile their concerns.

Portions of the Seoul Statement on the topic of homosexuality were amended after its release, a report by Christian Daily International observed.

Korean Christian leaders voiced objections to the original versions, particularly in how they may have portrayed that "many local churches and Christian communities did wrong, even though most local churches and Christian communities did not."

In paragraph 69, instead of describing how Christians who are same-sex attracted face challenges “in many local churches due to ignorance and prejudice,” it now states that this occurs “even in Christian communities.” Instead of saying the church repents for its “failures,” the line now says it repents of “our lack of love.”

The word “faithful,” which was used to describe believers who experience same-sex attraction, was also removed in the subsequent paragraph. These edits were intended to be made prior to the Seoul Statement’s publication, said Lausanne spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Ivor Poobalan, principal of Colombo Theological Seminary in Sri Lanka, and Victor Nakah, international director for sub-Saharan Africa with Mission to the World, jointly led Lausanne’s theology working group, which spent around 18 months on the statement.

According to Bennett, those drafting the document were asking themselves:

What needs to be done?
Are there areas of the fullness of God's desire for the nations, his desire for his church, areas where we have not listened carefully enough, or where our changing world is raising new questions that were not answered fully enough in our three foundational documents?

This document followed on the heels of the State of the Great Commission report, released several weeks ago. The 500-page report explored the current status of world evangelization through data and research, and it offered ideas and opportunities for leaders in various regions to continue ministering effectively.

“There are hundreds of thousands of church congregations with hundreds of millions of followers of Jesus Christ,” Poobalan and Nakah, who also worked on this report, wrote in its introduction. “But to successfully execute the Great Commission, we need a fitting church with Great Commission hearts and minds.”

This commitment to deep theological work appeals to Tom Lin, the president of US-based InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

“It could be just one concept that comes out of a Lausanne that kind of trickles down over many years to many places around the world,” he said.

Kim Jongho of KEEIM learned about Lausanne’s documents as a college freshman. “Their commitment to integral mission inspired me that I could be a Christian in a responsible way in society,” he said. “They were a sign of hope for me.”

Although Lausanne has demonstrated this extent of influence on the evangelical world for 50 years, a movement like this one has to be careful not to just rest on its own history, says Ruslan Maliuta, director of collaborative engagement for OneHope in Ukraine.

“In the ’70s, to gather [thousands of] people from all around the world, that, in itself, was an amazing, huge achievement,” he said. “It still is an achievement, but a megachurch network can do that. While it's still a big endeavor, it's not something that stands out.”

Instead, in a changing world, organizations with the ability to convene at this level ought to reflect on the type of gatherings they organize.

“Every significant global group, including Lausanne, needs to be very intentional about reimagining itself in this time and age,” said Maliuta.

To that end, Lausanne has set up a Digital Discovery Center, a series of interactive exhibits to help attendees learn more about where evangelism and technology are colliding. Afternoon sessions deal with topics such as artificial intelligence and transhumanism.

And Michael Oh, during his speech on Tuesday evening, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of Lausanne, reminded delegates that the movement was “passionately committed to three Ds: disciple-making in the world, disciple-maturing of the church, and digital.”

“We are at a watershed moment in the body of Christ,” said Paul Okumu of the Kenya Center for Biblical Transformation. “On the one hand, there's a lot of excitement and a lot of celebration about what God is doing. But on the other hand, there is exceptional concern because of the persecution and religious intolerance that are coming.”

“I am here to stand in solidarity with the global evangelical church—embracing both her beauty and resilience, as well as her imperfections and messiness,” said Lisman Komaladi, who serves in Singapore as IFES East Asia’s regional secretary. “I trust that together, we can become a more faithful witness of Christ to the world, wherever we are.”

- More from Morgan Lee

News

Who’s the Christian Candidate? Americans Say Neither

Harvest Prude

White evangelicals and white Catholics are the only groups to see Donald Trump as “religious.”

Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris

Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images

Most Americans don’t see either of this year’s presidential candidates as particularly religious or Christian.

In a new survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs, 64 percent of adults said they don’t consider former president Donald Trump religious and 53 percent said they don’t consider Kamala Harris religious. A majority also agreed that they wouldn’t describe either as “Christian.”

A plurality of Americans—41 percent—say neither Trump nor Harris represents their religious views.

Despite both candidates identifying as Christian, Trump and Harris have only glancingly discussed their own faith on the campaign trail. The topic didn’t come up at all during the recent presidential debate, which may fuel perceptions of their religiosity—or lack thereof.

A majority of white evangelicals have backed Trump for the past three presidential races, yet few associate him with their faith.

Among white evangelicals, only around 2 in 10 say the word Christian describes Trump “extremely or very well,” the survey found. Trump was raised mainline Presbyterian and later came to identify as nondenominational. During his time at the White House, he made a point to surround himself with evangelical faith advisers.

There are stark divides between white and Black Christians on perceptions of the candidates.

A majority of Black Protestants believe Harris best represents their religious views; however, only around 4 in 10 say the descriptor “Christian” describes Harris very or extremely well.

Harris belongs to a historically Black Protestant church in San Francisco, and her longtime pastor was among the first people she called when she decided to make her bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Her husband is Jewish, and she also grew up in an interfaith family, attending both Hindu temples and a Black Baptist church.

Conversely, half of white evangelicals say Trump represents their religious beliefs or views better than Harris.

Voters were also reluctant to ascribe terms like honest and moral to either candidate. About a third of respondents said descriptors like “honest” or “moral” fit Harris extremely or very well, and only 15 percent described Trump as honest or moral.

Hispanic Protestants were largely split in the survey. A slight majority did not think the words Christian or religious described Trump. About half of Hispanic Protestants described Harris as Christian, and less than half described her as religious.

Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, told Axios that this presidential election is the first he remembers where faith hasn’t been a key emphasis in a candidate's stories. “You usually hear a faith component. But take the debate … God wasn’t mentioned once,” he said.

Earlier this month, the Trump campaign announced it had brought on Ben Carson, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, as its National Faith Chairman. Carson is Seventh-day Adventist.

“There is only one candidate in this race that has defended religious liberty and supported Americans of faith. That candidate is Donald J. Trump,” Carson said in the announcement of his hiring statement.

Though Trump rarely speaks about a personal faith, he has invoked God at times when talking about the attempted assassinations. In one interview after the shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania saying he had been spared “by luck or by God.” Another post on his social media platform thanked supporters for their “thoughts and prayers” and added that “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”

In August, the Harris campaign hired Jennifer Butler, a progressive Presbyterian minister and founder of the nonprofit Faith in Public Life, to be national faith engagement director. Butler has been in touch with a grassroots group, Evangelicals for Harris, that also formed this summer to boost turnout among Christians for Harris.

“We want to turn out our base, and we think we have some real potential here to reach folks who have voted Republican in the past,” she told the Associated Press.

At her Democratic convention speech, Harris touched on faith as a value passed on from her family and other adults, including her downstairs neighbor. She’s previously spoken about the importance of that same neighbor, Regina Shelton, who often took Harris on Sunday mornings to church.

Pew Research Center found in a survey released this month that majorities of white evangelicals, white Catholics, and white mainline Protestants support Trump. Harris, meanwhile, has two-thirds or more support among Black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, and Jewish voters.

- More from Harvest Prude

Ideas

The United Nations Is a Mission Field

Chris Rice

Contributor

What I have learned representing my Christian organization to diplomats from 193 countries.

I flash my United Nations (UN) access badge to the police officer, and he waves me through the security barrier. As I approach the plaza, I see snipers with rifles on the roof and hear a dozen different languages. Black limousines are everywhere as presidents and prime ministers converge in New York City, preparing their speeches for the UN General Assembly, which kicked off earlier this month.

It’s been five years since I became Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) representative to the UN and first gained access to this community of politicians, humanitarians, and activists from around the world. I’ve observed the inefficiencies of this bureaucracy—its challenges in acting decisively and emphatically. I’ve seen many inside push for policies I fundamentally oppose because of my Christian convictions.

But through my role with MCC, I’ve also realized that my workplace is a mission field where I have daily opportunities to bear witness as Christ’s disciple to the world of political power. For instance, I know a UN ambassador on the Security Council who told a small group of Christian agencies that we inspired her to be true to her own Christian faith as she navigated the challenges of violence in Israel and Palestine.

I’ve watched the UN ambassador from Albania, who while serving on the Security Council, tell a group of 40 Christian college students that his calling was to keep exposing Russia’s lies to the world about their military invasion of Ukraine and that documenting the truth will matter one day. I’ve stopped at the statue in the UN building dedicated to Michael “MJ” Sharp, a former MCC worker who later served with the UN. After years of working with local Congolese mentors, MJ and his UN colleague Zaida Catalán of Sweden were ambushed and executed by an armed group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), with their interpreter and three motorbike drivers still missing.

Over 6,000 nongovernmental agencies have applied for and been granted UN consultative status, permitting them to officially engage UN diplomats and staff, enter the complex, and participate in UN activities. Through Caritas, the Catholic church has a presence here, as well as the Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. But of the most prominent US evangelical international agencies, including Compassion International, Hope International, International Justice Mission, Samaritan’s Purse, and World Relief, only World Vision has a dedicated UN office and everyday presence in New York like MCC does.

But what if followers of Christ saw this community of 5,000 diplomatic staff and 8,000 UN employees as an unreached people group? What if they realized that influencing the political power in these halls had an outsize impact of compassion and justice on the people whom so many Christians serve in international ministries? What if we befriended and were inspired here by the public servants with moral courage from many faiths and nations?

A Rare Voice to Political Power

In a number of the 45 countries where MCC has relief, development, and peacemaking ministries, it has become crystal clear that political power often stands in the way of our mission.

The 2021 military coup in Myanmar sent many of our local Christian partners on the run, fleeing for their lives and continuing to help others while internally displaced themselves. When gangs in Haiti took control after the government’s collapse, it became nearly impossible to carry health and agricultural programs forward. Thirteen years of war in Syria have razed the country, created millions of refugees, and dramatically harmed the lives and work of our church partners.

For Christian ministries working across the world, it is local partners, living in such places of suffering and hope, who know what is happening in real time on the ground and who carry the expertise for solutions. That incarnational knowledge can become precious and persuasive at the UN.

After Myanmar’s military coup, we, working with a UN body, provided a secure UN channel for a partner to document a firsthand report of a chemical weapons attack on civilians. In meetings with US diplomats, we testified how the 2017 US travel ban to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) for people from the US in humanitarian agencies stopped our 25 years of work there. Working with other agencies, we persuaded the US to grant travel waivers that allowed teams to enter North Korea and ensure that food and clean-water kits made their way to children’s hospitals.

In a meeting with an ambassador from an influential European nation, my 26-year-old colleague Victoria Alexander shared how our on-the-ground partners in Gaza faced significant obstacles getting food and household supplies to families even as our partners were fleeing bombs and suffering the loss of loved ones. Victoria also shared how our US staff in Jerusalem was forced to leave when the Israeli government stopped visa renewals for humanitarian workers.

“Information is the currency of the UN,” a Christian diplomat from a Western nation told me. “Christian groups have a connection to and trust with the community and local church level that even a lot of elite diplomats from those countries don’t have. It gives [these] organizations credibility.”

Learning Healthy Political Engagement

In Christianity in the Twentieth Century, historian Brian Stanley argues that the failures of churches to publicly speak out in Germany during the rise of Nazism and in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide reminds us that “effective prophetic speech depends on a paradoxical balance between maintaining access to the sources of political power and preserving sufficient distance from those sources to enable moral independence to be safeguarded.”

Sadly, this temptation to either control or retreat from political power is something Christians still struggle with. Yet because Christian groups don’t have political representatives at the UN and because UN diplomats have no obligation to listen to us, being at the UN helps Christians learn to be a minority whose moral power is in persuasion and building relationships. We engage not to seize power but to bear witness to the values of the kingdom of God. Further, an audience of all nations presses us to think and speak beyond any single nation’s interests, grounded in our relationships with the powerless and the overlooked throughout the world.

In a time when politics is often loud and angry, one avenue for healthy engagement is the way of quiet persuasion. When a group of ministry colleagues visited our UN office in New York this spring, we met with a US diplomat. Over lunch, I told him about challenges MCC was facing in Gaza and the Korean Peninsula and the harm we believed certain US policies were causing those on the ground. He listened patiently. After the diplomat left, Clair Good, a development worker who served with MCC in DR Congo and Kenya, said, “Chris, you brought up some tough things with him, but over a very nice lunch, and by showing interest in him as a person. That helped us see how relationships of respect matter in our work engaging the political world.”

Other moments call for speaking up publicly in unexpected ways. Last spring, MCC and other groups carried signs saying, “a pilgrimage of mourning all trauma, loss of life, and suffering in Palestine-Israel,” and silently walked 25 circles in the blocks around the UN to represent the 25 miles of the Gaza strip. Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, 50 UN diplomats attended our service for remembrance and peace. If not for that event, organized by MCC and other faith-based groups, no UN event would have marked 70 years of a still-divided Korean people.

That same Christian diplomat from a Western nation told me that negotiations at the UN are long and frustrating, and progress is slow. “But I bring a Christian view of everyone being welcome at the table and listening to those who are in the worst situation. As well as people I deeply disagree with.”

Every year we hold a UN seminar for Christian college students from Canada and the US. Despite our best attempts to be honest about the UN’s limits and failures, the students leave testifying to greater hope, talking about ambassadors and diplomats they met who elevate the political vocation.

Growing in Biblical Peacemaking

As popularized by the Left Behind book series, many US evangelicals have historically expressed a deep suspicion of a “one world government” that is a secular threat to national independence, religious freedom, and the rule of Christ. At times, the UN is depicted as the center of that threat.

But rest assured that most days, highlighted by bitter Security Council battles between the US and China, the UN is more the “Divided Nations.” MCC’s partners in DR Congo and Myanmar have often reminded me that in their countries the UN is known as “United for Nothing.” And as the Christian diplomat from the Western nation told me, “The UN is a huge institution. There’s a tendency for this huge bureaucracy to think that money can solve issues. There’s not enough soul-searching here about UN failures, from Haiti to Afghanistan.”

It shouldn’t be surprising to find that the good, bad, and ugly of our world is fully represented in New York or that the UN is limited in its power—for all of humanity is here, both created in the image of God and estranged from God, fallen and fragile. Yes, there is moral courage and excellence here. Also waste, timidity, and powerful officials who stall, lie, obstruct, and abuse.

Yet this moral turbulence is more reason for disciples of Christ to be present.

“It’s the only room in the world where you see Ukrainians speaking with Russians, Israelis with Palestinians, Americans with Iranians,” said the New York diplomat, who can’t be named because of sensitivities related to her job. The headlines are about the issues where nations disagree. “But we can’t avoid each other here,” she said. “We have to sit and listen to each other and put our differences aside to find areas where we do agree, from clean water to artificial intelligence. I’ve got the WhatsApp for diplomats from other countries we don’t get along with. Even when we disagree, we text.”

In a time when we increasingly avoid those we disagree with, moving into church and neighborhood silos of “people like us,” being daily face to face with both friends and foes on these UN streets and hallways can create frustration and anger. But this context can become ground to grow in the virtues of biblical peacemaking.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas believes the UN is a necessary community of conversation Christians shouldn’t want to do without.

“The UN is not going to prevent war, but it provides a place to delay wars, and that’s not to be discounted,” he told me. “It’s good to have diplomats who are committed to making war less likely and then are frustrated when it doesn’t work. But that frustration is a source of energy that hopefully would have results after some time. Because peace takes time, and you have to learn patience. Because you have to listen to people you despise.”

To the Ends of the Earth

When I leave the UN General Assembly and pass the 193 flags outside, I approach the Church Center building where I work and see the piece of art on the chapel, which hosts weekly Christian worship services, open to all. The artwork, built into the wall of the building, is part sculpture, part stained glass. Called Man’s Search for Peace, it features human shapes around a large eye-like form, gazing both inside the sanctuary and outside across the street at the UN. I see this eye as representing the Lord’s.

Every time I pass work, this art reminds me that our living God, the Lord of all nations, keeps an eye both on the powers speaking across the street and on the church, urging us to bear witness among the powers to the Lord who “secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy” (Ps. 140:12).

In Acts, Jesus sent his disciples to the “ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). In our time, every day, members of all those parts gather at the UN. One day they return home, scattering back to all the nations. Inside those blocks in New York City, Christian witness can touch the whole world.

Chris Rice is director of the Mennonite Central Committee United Nations Office in New York City, and was previously co-founding director of the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation. His latest book is From Pandemic to Renewal: Practices for a World Shaken by Crisis (InterVarsity Press).

- More from Chris Rice

News

With Drug Abuse Raging, Zimbabwe’s Churches Turn from Punishment to Mercy

Deogracias Kalima in Zimbabwe

Christian leaders can no longer defer the widespread addiction crisis to schools and prisons.

A poster warning of the dangers of crystal meth goes up in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Jekesai Njikizana / AFP via Getty Images

A drug abuse crisis is raging in Zimbabwe, with experts and medics warning that a staggering 57 percent of Zimbabwe’s youth are involved with illicit drugs, from cocaine and ecstasy to tainted cough syrup and illegally brewed beers.

The church hasn’t been spared, and many leaders say they’re unsure how to respond.

“At first, ten years ago, we would suspend church youths dabbling in cocaine or ecstasy pills or illicit whiskies, intimidating them with Bible verses,” said Benny Guyo, a pastor with the United Baptist Church of Zimbabwe in Harare. “Now, we try to dialogue with them and get them help. If not, we will lose half the congregation.”

There’s a sense of hopelessness among Zimbabwe’s young people. They struggle to see prospects in a country with the highest inflation in the world and staggering unemployment.

Most of the population is under 25, and 41 percent of them are looking for a job, according to an Afrobarometer survey released in late 2023. Trade unionists say this is a conservative figure; real unemployment could be double that.

In this cultural climate, drugs have taken off. Transnational networks, shipping contraband from Asia or South America, are supplying Zimbabwe’s streets, taking with them lucrative profits but leaving behind public health issues and societal devastation.

“It’s mayhem: illicit powders, drinks, pills, or cigarettes,” said Tynos Magombedze, a retired Adventist pastor and now an anti-corruption activist in Bulawayo, the country’s second-largest city.

When the illicit drugs problem began around 2013, schools and prisons tried to suppress it. “Headmasters were empowered to beat errant youths as some sort of discipline,” said Magombedze. “Prison officers would round up street dealers and users of cannabis or ecstasy.”

Churches in Zimbabwe tend to be quite conservative, so they watched from the sidelines, deferring the drug abuse issue to other institutions. In a few circumstances when drug users were identified in churches, the default option was to rebuke, suspend, or expel worshipers who were battling addictions.

“We were acting holier-than-thou, closing our eyes, pretending drugs don’t exist in churches,” said Guyo.

But over the past decade, the crisis has overpowered police, prisons, and schools and has overflowed into churches.

“The drug menace has landed at our pulpits,” said church elder Josini Moyo.

It may have been there all along. Churches had largely failed to see that their youth, and in some instances their pastors too, had been battling addictions.

In townships and affluent suburbs, churches from large denominations, such as Anglican and Catholic churches, typically displayed inspirational Christian verses or Sunday service times. Now, they have signs on or near their churches with messages like “Drugs Kill All Dreams,” “Resist the Scourge of Drugs,” and even “Drugs Are the Antichrist.”

“A new urgency has arrived,” said Moyo, who serves at Zion Christian Church (ZCC) in Zimbabwe. The biggest African-initiated church in the country, ZCC doesn’t belong to the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe or the Zimbabwe Council of Churches.

Across traditions and denominations, Zimbabwe’s churches have been thrust into unfamiliar territory by the drug crisis.

In addition to erecting antidrug billboards on church gates, they’re tweaking some youth worship meetings and repurposing them as drug counseling workshops, introducing drug messaging in Sunday services, and welcoming back suspended members who are battling addictions or have undergone recovery.

“I thank the church for making a U-turn,” said Ashlee Gutu, 33, pastor of the Jekenisheni Church in Zimbabwe.

Five years ago, Gutu lost his marriage, finances, and job as a pastor when his addiction to ecstasy pills and crystal methamphetamine (called mutoriro in Zimbabwe) threw him off course. The church suspended him for one year.

Jekenisheni Church began informally in the 1920s and is one of the oldest indigenous Apostolic churches across the country and in neighboring Mozambique. It has been largely detached from older Western denominations as well as Zimbabwe’s urban, post-colonial evangelicals.

But while battling addiction on the sidelines, Gutu says he met several elders of his church and other denominations who secretly confided in him that they too were fighting addictions to cannabis or alcohol.

“They were Anglicans, Adventists, Pentecostals, Methodists, everyone you can think of,” he added.

When Gutu agreed to go to a trial rehab program that the Jekenisheni Church had established in alliance with private medical counselors and therapists, Gutu’s life improved.

His church started refer congregants and pastors who were battling addictions to therapy, with the church paying the participating counselors and doctors. The in-house therapy program has worked with 40 congregants battling addictions in the past two years, and 25 of them have beat their problems, he said.

Other Christian networks are also active against the country’s drug abuse epidemic. For example, in May in Chitungwiza (the most populous township of the capital), the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabw e (EFZ), together with Teen Rescue Mission (TRM), hosted community outreach meetings and anti-drug prayer weeks as a way of confronting the pandemic.

“We have instructed pastors in our networks to visit schools and public markets and teach teenagers about the linked troubles of drug abuse, teen pregnancies, and school dropout. We are meeting troubled youths who want to be directed to accessible rehabilitation programs. In a few years, our efforts should bear fruit in the antidrug fight,” said Dino Matsika, a youth outreach coordinator with the EFZ.

Despite the surge in illicit drug abuse, the country’s struggling public health care system simply has no money for therapy. Compared to urgent issues of infectious diseases (tuberculosis, HIV, malaria), the illicit drug abuse menace is seen as a lesser priority. It doesn’t help that, according to a Lancet medical survey, Zimbabwe only has 17 registered psychiatrists in a country with a population of 15 million.

“A realistic way to beat this is for churches to stand loud on the pulpit and band together with police, schools, NGOs, government, and parents, and steer youths from drugs,” said Guyo. “We must not work in silos.”

- More from Deogracias Kalima

Church Life

Brenna Blain: ‘Suffering Clarified My Theology’

Ericka Andersen

Gnarly and honest, the rising author and teacher ditches small talk and Christian platitudes to share from Scripture and her own suffering.

Courtesy of Brenna Blain

The first thing you notice about Brenna Blain is probably her tattoos, a patchwork of ink stretching from her shoulders to her hands. A death’s-head hawkmoth spreads its wings around her neck, with a marking at its center that resembles a human skull.

For this 28-year-old Christian speaker and teacher in the Pacific Northwest, her brazen ink isn’t a liability—it’s an invitation. The neck tattoo opens unlikely conversations with those she says “would never choose to talk to a Christian willingly.”

“It’s one of the best outreach tools I’ve ever had,” Blain told CT. “I’ve been invited into spaces I wouldn’t typically expect to be invited into because people have been more willing to hear me out just simply based on my physical appearance.”

Her look is bold and trendy: combat boots with shorts, soft knit hats, oversized glasses. But her voice and daring message are what have grabbed the attention of young millennial and Gen Z Christians, as she shares hard and beautiful stories of trusting in God.

On her podcast and Instagram feed, Blain’s discussions of issues like eating disorders, sexuality, and mental illness have shaken up a polished evangelical online space. She describes herself as “gnarly” and admits to hating things like “overly mushy and emotional moments at women’s conferences,” so her style draws a certain kind of seeker—those tired of Christian platitudes and ripe for honest wrestling.

This raw vulnerability evolved out of a traumatic childhood that led Blain to question God’s love. After her parents separated when she was 12, Blain was molested, discovered she was same-sex attracted, developed an eating disorder, began self-harming, and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Unlike Christian teachers who share lessons from difficult seasons long ago, Blain is young enough that these struggles are still with her—she was hospitalized just last year for suicidal ideation—and yet she continues to open up and point to God amid them.

Blain began her podcast in 2019, the start of a modest public career as a self-proclaimed contemporary theologian. Blain’s reach has grown steadily with speaking engagements, podcast invitations (she recently appeared on With the Perrys with Preston and Jackie Hill Perry), and conference keynotes (she was a featured speaker at Preston Sprinkle’s 2024 Exiles in Babylon conference). Her debut book, Can I Say That?, released last month.

Blain has become an unofficial spokeswoman for Christian women who have struggled with same-sex attraction and want to remain obedient to the biblical call for sexual morality. She didn’t want to be pigeonholed or make that her whole persona.

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A post shared by With The Perrys (@withtheperrys)

As she gained a following, she felt led to share how God was moving during the painful parts of her life. Instead of waiting for healing from depression or peace about her childhood sexual abuse, she wondered if she could simply share her brokenness and utter dependence on God right now with her audience. She felt God affirm that conviction, and her witness grew.

Jackie Hill Perry called her “the kind of theologian this generation has been asking for,” saying that through her stories and spiritual insights, “we may not find every question answered but at the very least, we will have important truths to carry us when everything is confusing.”

Gen Z suffers from distinctively poor rates of mental health, and Blain speaks to those circumstances. She has over 44,000 Instagram followers—many say they see her authenticity and honesty as a refreshing reprieve from polished leaders who seem to have it all together.

Blain embraces a tough theology that doesn’t always, or often, have closure here on earth. Complete healing is possible, but for many people, it comes only in the New Jerusalem. “If you are wrestling or trying to decide if you will wrestle or walk away, my encouragement is that you wrestle and that you wrestle well,” she wrote in an Instagram post.

She goes where God calls, despite the imperfect circumstances of mental illness, a lingering eating disorder, and occasional suicidal ideation. In the past five years, he’s called her to the microphone, the stage, the altar, the delivery room, and the book publishing house.

None of this was the plan back when she was a closeted 14-year-old reeling from the pain of abuse.

Even though Blain attended a conservative church and was homeschooled by a mom who made dinner every night, her upbringing wasn’t strict. Her parents gave her autonomy, like when they allowed her to dye her hair blue.

As a teen, though, Blain felt rudderless. She began sharing her attractions in secret online. She was terrified of others knowing, thinking of the hateful signs and slogans from Westboro Baptist Church, whose protests were in the news. The anxiety and depression pushed her toward despair.

When she opened up to her youth pastor, he thanked her for sharing and told her many people struggle with same-sex attraction. Despite her church’s biblically orthodox stance on sexuality, the condemnation she expected never came. This compassionate response was deeply formative.

After high school, Blain signed up for a trip with Youth with a Mission (YWAM), mostly as a way to get to Hawaii, where the team would be training for six months. She knew how to “play a Christian,” and the trip was merely a ticket out of her hometown.

She started off “so bored out of my gourd from listening to typical church kids’ stories that I might as well have been on Ambien.” But halfway through that trip, Blain had what she said was an undeniable encounter with God after witnessing a supernatural moment with a friend. After that, she felt called to become a wholehearted servant on a mission for the kingdom.

The transition was “rough.” As she continued to struggle with an eating disorder that nearly toppled her ability to finish the trip, Blain learned to trust God in uncertainty. “I told myself, even if I do get sent home … he has been faithful in all these things,” she said. “Even in this brokenness, he’s still here.”

Her struggle with same-sex attraction remained as well. She thought she’d remain celibate for life.

While on mission, she received a six-page letter from Austin Blain, a friend she barely knew from back home. She saw the connection as God’s perfect timing, changing her heart, drawing Austin near, and ultimately setting her up for what would come next—which was marriage, ministry, and motherhood.

The two remained platonic friends, exchanging long letters and phone calls for more than a year as they each completed their missions with YWAM (Austin went on his own trip just as Brenna returned). “By the time I got back, I think we already knew we wanted to get married before we even started dating,” Austin said in an interview with CT.

Despite still feeling same-sex attraction, Brenna believed God had orchestrated their relationship. Her sexual orientation was a “non-issue” for Austin.

“I felt like, if the Lord was who the Lord was, that he could do anything,” Austin told CT. “From my point of view, it was like, this is not bigger than the Lord.”

The two were soon married and now have two little boys, with whom Blain stays home while managing her ministry responsibilities in early mornings, naptimes, stolen moments, and evenings when Austin is home. Blain said staying “wildly scheduled” (she wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to run, sans headphones) keeps her mental health in check, but her days can range from writing sermons to “washing my 3-year-old’s poop off the back patio.”

Even among evangelicals who uphold a traditional view of marriage, there’s a range of approaches to same-sex attraction and identity, and Blain doesn’t fall neatly into one particular camp. She said she resonates with aspects of both Side B (which says same-sex orientation is not a sin but acting on it is) and Side Y (which says people shouldn’t identify themselves by their sexual orientation), but doesn’t label herself as either.

Blain believes she’ll always be same-sex attracted, which clashes with some Christian viewpoints that say such attraction is itself sinful. Blain sees same-sex attraction as a result of the Fall and, therefore, unwanted.

“While I do not believe it is sinful to have the temptation, I am not comfortable with the idea of ‘being okay with the temptation’ either,” she said. “James 1:14–15 is very clear on the implications of being apathetic towards our currently existing temptations.”

Abiding by Scripture, Blain said she works to put temptation “to death” through confession and accountability. Same-sex attraction, she said, should not disqualify believers from leadership or Christian commitment, even if it never subsides.

Blain leads a small group for high school girls at her church and stays in touch with her mentor from when she was around that age. The two women text daily, meet monthly, and practice confession regularly; her mentor even comes along on speaking trips when her husband can’t.

Blain counts veteran theologian and pastor Gerry Breshears as a mentor, calling him a “pastor to pastors”; she meets with him quarterly for prayer and consultation. Beyond that, Blain sees a Christian counselor monthly and names female teachers Phylicia Masonheimer, Lisa Bevere, and Jackie Hill Perry as role models and mentors of wisdom and encouragement over the past four years of her public ministry.

Blain also calls out churches that expect people to “live by the standards of Christ before getting to know the person of Christ” as homophobic. Blain referenced 1 Corinthians 2:14, which says those without the Spirit “cannot understand” or “discern” the truth.

She might use someone’s preferred pronouns as a modicum of respect since others aren’t yet in a relationship with God as she is—a controversial take for a theologically conservative believer.

On an episode of the Theology in the Raw podcast, Blain said she’s often been told that she’s “the reason LGBTQ teens commit suicide” and that her mixed-orientation marriage is destined for divorce. She takes it in stride, saying she’s confident in the truth of the Bible and convictions of her heart.

“When I get comments like that, I remember that most people are just responding out of fear and that is a very real thing, especially if they don’t know the peace of Jesus,” she said.

And not everyone loves her image. Blain said, for example, that some Christians find her skull tattoos “demonic” or “evil.” But she said they help others feel more comfortable opening up and sharing their stories with her.

“God created a moth out of nature that has a design that looks like a skull on it. Witches didn’t create it; God did,” Blain said in response to her critics. “The skull is a reminder that all face death, and what will it serve as a doorway for?”

This kind of sobering question is regular fodder for Blain’s platform. Small talk isn’t really in her wheelhouse. She’s here for the real thing, nobly serious about ideas that lead people in her community to say they “feel seen”—maybe for the first time—by her work.

“I feel everything [Blain] was saying as someone who has too attempted suicide many times,” said one commenter after seeing her story online.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Brenna Blain (@bunonmyhead)

She has also shared some of her darkest moments with her audience. In 2023, Blain posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and monitors, huddled beneath a blanket in the aftermath of an earlier suicide attempt.

“Suffering has clarified my theology,” she wrote in her new book. Blain claims saving grace in Jesus while living through sometimes debilitating mental illness, and she thinks Christians should be open and honest about that.

“People are starving to see real testimonies of what it means to live in the ‘now and not yet’ of this broken world,” she said.

“As someone struggling with an incurable disease and a history of mental illness, I feel seen and encouraged,” said one commentor on Instagram.

Nearly two years out from her last hospitalization, Blain is publicly discussing the harsh realities of mental illness, bucking stereotypical Christian talking points that advocate assured healing. “God is here with us, but He doesn’t always heal, He doesn’t always intervene, and He doesn’t always promise earthly rescue,” she wrote. “For most of us we live life by managing it. Remission isn’t a term used in regards to mental health.”

When well-known pastor John MacArthur recently claimed there is “no such thing” as mental illnesses like PTSD, OCD, or ADHD, calling them “noble lies” that “give the excuse to … medicate people,” Blain had harsh words in response.

“It’s as harmful as telling someone that their brain cancer does not exist,” Blain said. “Approximately 8 million deaths each year are attributable to mental disorders, whereas 17,200 people die from a malignant brain tumor.”

Blain knows some will be wary of her ministry considering her publicly known suicide attempt, but she doesn’t believe a mental illness should disqualify one from ministry. Such a condition, she said, shows others how to live out a process of surrender, suffering, and doubt while still clinging to God.

“The Bible is not a list of rules,” she wrote in Can I Say That? “It is a shovel that uncovers the sinful condition of our hearts, uproots us from our sinful selves, and replants us within God’s will and safety.”

- More from Ericka Andersen

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