Evangelical Broadcasters Sue Over IRS Ban on Political Endorsements

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Now that some nonprofit newspapers have begun to back candidates, a new lawsuit asks why Christian charities can’t take sides.

National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville

Bob Smietana / RNS

A group of evangelical broadcasters who hosted Donald Trump at their national conference earlier this year are suing the Internal Revenue Service over the so-called Johnson Amendment, a tax law that bars nonprofits from supporting political candidates.

Lawyers for the National Religious Broadcasters, along with two Baptist churches and a conservative group called Intercessors for America, argue in their suit that the ban on engaging in politics restricts their freedom of speech and freedom of religion. They further argue that the IRS ignores the politicking of some charities, while threatening to punish others.

In particular, lawyers for the groups claim that newspapers and other news outlets that have become nonprofits in recent years, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, endorse candidates. Why can’t churches or other Christian groups, they want to know, do the same?

“Plaintiffs believe that nonprofit newspapers have a clear constitutional right to make such endorsements or statements,” read the complaint filed Wednesday in the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division. “Plaintiffs simply contend that they should also have the same freedom of speech.”

The lawsuit is the latest challenge to the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law that has long been the bane of conservative groups and, in particular, preachers seeking to become more involved in politics. The ban on taking sides in campaigns—including endorsements or campaign contributions—applies to nonprofits that fall under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code.

For years Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group, organized “pulpit freedom” Sundays designed to have preachers violate IRS rules by endorsing candidates from the pulpit. As president, Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to give more leeway under IRS rules.

The current lawsuit pitches its argument toward similar religious freedom principles. “For too long, churches have been instructed to remain silent on pressing matters of conscience and conviction during election season or risk their 501(c)(3) status,” said NRB President Troy A. Miller in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

But the growing number of nonprofit newsrooms has added a new twist to the arguments over the Johnson Amendment that has to do with fairness. Those newsrooms, the complaint argues, should be required to abide by the same rules as other charities.

“Hundreds of newspapers are organized under § 501(c)(3), and yet many openly endorse political candidates,” lawyers for NRB and its co-plaintiff argued in their complaint. “Others make statements about political candidates that constitute forbidden statements under the IRS’ interpretation of the statutory prohibition against supporting or opposing candidates.

The Institute for Nonprofit News, with about 450 member organizations, including RNS, does not accept members that endorse candidates.

“Nonprofit news organizations do not endorse candidates and, under IRS guidelines, should not favor any candidate for public office in coverage or other action,” the INN’s guidelines for members state.

Karen Rundlet, the CEO and executive director of the INN, told RNS in an email that grants made to nonprofits often bar those funds from being used for political activity.

The complaint points specifically to the Inquirer’s candidate endorsements, as well as articles critical of candidates in other nonprofit publications from 2012 to the present, claiming all violated IRS rules with impunity.

While nonprofit newspapers such as the Salt Lake Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times no longer make political endorsements, the Inquirer does, in part because it has a different ownership structure.

“The Philadelphia Inquirer is owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, but the newspaper remains a for-profit public-benefit corporation,” Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, told RNS in an email. “As a for-profit entity, The Philadelphia Inquirer is permitted to publish political endorsements, as it has for decades. It does so following thoughtful research on candidate policy positions, qualifications, integrity, and track record.”

In their complaint, lawyers for the NRB and its fellow plaintiffs said that, despite the Inquirer’s structure, dollars from a nonprofit are funding political endorsements.

A spokesman for the IRS declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. The NRB did not respond to a series of questions from RNS about the lawsuit.

Darryll K. Jones, a professor of law at Florida A&M University who blogs about nonprofit law, agrees that the IRS is allowing the Lenfest Institute to “have its cake and eat it too,” he said by email.

“Other exempt charities can farm out their political speech to subsidiary organizations without diminishing their tax-exempt efforts,” he said. “Churches cannot do so because farming out political activity necessarily diminishes or even precludes the accomplishment of the church’s tax-exempt and (oh, by the way) constitutionally protected effort.”

If the IRS refused to bite on ADF’s pulpit actions, said Jones, it is because the IRS likely knows the Johnson Amendment would not hold up on constitutional grounds. On their part, many nonprofits appreciate the rule, Jones said, because the restriction keeps them out of politics.

“They can say, look, we’re not going to be involved in that. We’re not going to be involved in politics. We are out here to do our charitable deeds, and we don’t want to be on one side or the other,” Jones said.

Jones believes courts are likely to dismiss most of the NRB’s claims, especially its due process and equal protection assertions, which he said obscure the main point of their lawsuit.

But, he said, “Once you get through all the unnecessary weeds, the complaint makes a legally irresistible argument, the logic of which can’t possibly be avoided.”

He added that politicking by nonprofits would likely have negative outcomes. “Everybody’s going to do it, and then there’ll be sort of a race to the bottom,” he said.

A 2019 survey from Pew Research found that Americans would prefer to keep religion and politics separate. Nearly two-thirds (63%) want houses of worship to stay out of politics, while three-quarters (76%) say churches and other congregations should not endorse candidates.

The NRB hosted Donald Trump at its annual convention in Nashville this past February, where the former president promised to return Christians to power if elected for a second term. Before Trump spoke, Miller told those in the audience that the group was hosting a presidential forum and that the speakers did not represent the official views of the NRB.

The former president appealed to religious broadcasters to join his side.

“If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told a gathering of National Religious Broadcasters at Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center.

- More from Bob Smietana

Books

Excerpt

Being a Church of Good Repute

J. A. Medders and Doug Logan Jr.

We reach our neighbors by both demonstrating and declaring the Good News.

Edits by CT / Source Image: Unsplash

The church desperately needs both good gospel works and good gospel workers for the Good News message. The apostle in his letter to Titus makes a clear connection between faith and practice. Why is this so important? Our faithful obedience to God’s word ensures that “in everything,” we can “adorn the doctrine of God our Savior” (Titus 2:10, ESV throughout).

Evangelistic churches know the place of good works in Good News proclamation. Because Jesus has cleansed us and made us his own, we’re to be “zealous for good works” (2:14). There should be a zeal and longing for Christians to do good in their communities.

Jesus wants his churches to be people who “learn to devote themselves to good works” (3:14). Paul uses the word learn because it’s not natural for us to do good works. Our nature is selfish, cynical, and judgmental. Even in our new born-again nature, we have to learn how to be good-works-doing people. The only way we learn is to look to God’s word and to God’s Word—to the Scriptures and, supremely, to the Son of God whom they reveal.

When we read the Gospels, we see Jesus’ humility, patience, and urgency to spread his kingdom. He does this by word and works.

It is striking that right after the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), Jesus demonstrates the power of the gospel through good deeds connected to the Good News. Jesus wrapped up this sermon and immediately showed compassion to a leper and healed him (8:1–4). When a Roman soldier asked Jesus to heal his servant, he did (v. 5–13). He fed thousands, healed hundreds, raised people from the dead, and gave time to those whom police officers today classify as “living a high-risk lifestyle.” Jesus demonstrated the kingdom of God even as he declared it.

There are two dangers to avoid when it comes to mercy ministry and evangelism. First, we must not treat mercy ministry as the same as, or as a valid alternative to, evangelism. People need to hear about Jesus crucified and risen to be saved. We pray people will say, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”—it is not enough for them to say, “Lord, your people are good people and make an impact on this community” (though that is a good start).

But second, we must not treat mercy ministry as optional or as a distraction from the real work of the church. It was vital to Jesus’ ministry, and must be to us. If it weren’t, he would have just preached about repentance and salvation and would never have taken time to tell us a parable about a good Samaritan helping his dying enemy as instructive for loving our neighbors.

Yes, the accomplishment of redemption and the proclamation of the gospel are the major notes of Christ’s ministry. He came to destroy the devil’s works, give himself as a ransom for many, and proclaim good news to the captives. But the minor keys—essential to his music—are his works of mercy. These acts of mercy flow from the heart of Jesus for people. We must maintain that doing good works is itself good.

The fourth-century Roman emperor Julian, who was pagan and vehemently opposed to Christianity, “became fearful that Christianity might take over the Roman Empire … as a result of the good works of Christians,” writes David Gustafson. Christians in Rome were supporting thousands of needy people per day. They established hospitals, food programs, and orphanages. Their love for the community was clear and tangible.

Many people in our communities are averse to going to church or even talking about Christianity—and, often, their reticence is because of Christians. Public scandals involving people who claim to be Christians have soured unbelievers toward us. Media outlets and Hollywood often give a poor representation of the church. Social media adds fuel to the fire. We’re misrepresented by celebrities and best-selling authors who claim to be for Jesus but are clearly self-focused. And, let’s be honest, we ourselves are sometimes guilty of leaving people with a very wrong impression of what Jesus wants his church to be.

That’s why it’s crucial for local churches to prepare the ground around them—to do good works so that people might be ready to receive the Good News. And good works are a commentary on the transforming effects of the true gospel.

Seventeen centuries after Julian wrote of the power of good works, I saw this happen on the block in Philadelphia.

I was serving at a church in the Kensington section of the city, and we had set up a street clean-up outreach for our neighbors. Early in the day, a lady walked by, looking noticeably sad, troubled, and exhausted. My wife, Angel, approached her, asking, “Are you okay, ma’am?” She was clearly annoyed and answered (with a profanity added for emphasis), “No!” Angel still engaged her in conversation, seeking to care for her. She asked her if she needed food or water. Her response was telling:

“What do I gotta do to get it?”

I stepped in and told her, “Nothing—it’s free.”

I explained what we were doing. This angered her further, because she realized we were part of a church. She’d been deeply wounded by a church in the past and clearly wanted nothing to do with us. She suggested that we would make her join our church before she could get our help. I made it clear this wasn’t the case—that our offering was genuinely free.

She left that conversation with food and clothing. We thought we’d seen the last of her, but after about half an hour she appeared again. Her posture was different this time. She had come back to thank us.

She told us that a few hours before she had walked past us that morning, her father (who lived with her) had stolen all her money and food stamps. She was 22 years old, and she had four hungry kids at home. When she had met us earlier that day, she’d actually been on her way to sell her body for money to feed her kids. Now she would not do so.

We prayed with her and cried with her, offering a tangible expression of the gospel.

Our church helped this young woman and, by God’s providence, kept her from trouble that day. I don’t know if she ever obeyed the gospel and came to faith, but we did hear around the neighborhood that she’d been talking about us, saying, “They love people who don’t even go to their church and aren’t Christians.”

A lady in Philly and a Roman emperor saw the same thing. Good works make an impression.

How about your community? What do people living around you think about your church? What does your mayor, police chief, or city council think of your church? Redeem the rumors. Win a hearing for Christ by showing people in what you do what he is like.

Here are five practical steps to help prepare your neighborhood for gospel growth.

Cultivate prayerfulness.

This is where it starts. Pray corporately and individually for the lost people in your city, and for the Holy Spirit to open their ears to hear the Good News.

Cultivate the people of God.

It isn’t enough to encourage the people of your church to do good in the community. They have to understand why their good works are an essential part of evangelism. Without proper biblical preaching, teaching, and training, people will be wandering around with a misplaced sense of purpose.

Consider doing a sermon series, class, or seminar looking at the relationship between good works, loving our neighbor, and sharing the gospel. Make these points regular applications in your sermons, classes, or lessons. Make sure people understand that good works and the Good News are mandatory, both for individuals and for the church.

Cultivate a plan.

Research your city. Study the people and the culture. Find out what motivates them. Find out what troubles them. Communicate this to your church. Create opportunities for the people of your church to regularly engage with the lost and the least in your community. Don’t fall into the well-meaning trap of seeing evangelism as an isolated singular event. Mix it in with good works, year-round, around the clock. Talk with community leaders, neighbors, and police officers who can give you a sense of the social and spiritual climate of your community. And then talk together as a church, or as a leadership, and plan on how to engage.

As you do this, consider collaborating with others. You want to feed the homeless? Partner with your local homeless shelter. Find ways to come alongside the work they’re already doing, and seek to be a gospel presence while meeting a tangible need. Want to serve underprivileged kids in your neighborhood? Connect with a local school and get a list of supplies they need. When you value the work of others, you’re making connections and building trust.

Get going—and be patient.

After praying, learning, observing, brainstorming, and planning—get to work. Put the diaper drive and the delivery for the pregnancy center on the calendar and in the announcements, and make it happen. Recruit the teachers and mentors needed for the free financial class or resumé-building seminar you will host for the community. Do lawn care for older neighbors near your church’s building, open a clothes closet for foster and adoption families, minister in prisons. Whatever it is, get going.

And then be patient.

People will be excited about these ventures. But people will also need to have their expectations adjusted. There is a reason our Lord used agricultural analogies for the spread of the gospel. Planting, tending, watering, growing fruit, and harvesting take lots of time. Amid the initial excitement, prepare people (including yourself) for the plodding nature of kingdom work.

Leaders, all of this begins with you. Initiative and endurance are the qualities needed here. Be the first to sign up, first to show up, and last to leave. While you cannot neglect the ministry of word and prayer, you can also be like the apostle Paul, who did not need to be told to remember the poor by the apostles in Jerusalem, for it was “the very thing [he] was eager to do” (Gal. 2:10).

There was zero doctrinal or internal conflict for Paul between the ministry of the word and the ministries of mercy. Your eagerness for good works should flow from a primary point: your discipleship with Jesus.

We have the power and promise of Christ, so why wouldn’t we do all we can to ensure the people around us see it clearly too? It’s time to let our light shine. Your community needs to see a church shining bright and offering real help to those in need—practical and temporal help, spiritual and eternal help. Truly evangelistic churches are zealous to do good works out

of love for people and to win a hearing for the gospel that saves people.

J. A. Medders is director of theology and content for Send Network and a preacher, podcaster, and author.

Doug Logan Jr. is the president and dean of Grimké School of Urban Ministry and pastor of church planting at Remnant Church in Richmond, Virginia.

This article is an excerpt from The Soul-Winning Church: Six Keys to Fostering a Genuine Evangelistic Culture by Doug Logan Jr. and J. A. Medders. Learn more at thegoodbook.com/soul-winning.

- More from Doug Logan Jr.

Ideas

Triumphalism After Dobbs Was a Mistake

Marvin Olasky

Guest Columnist

The pro-life movement has forgotten its roots. We need to get back to basics.

Bloomberg / Getty

I’ve been in the pro-life movement for 40 years. My wife founded the Austin Crisis Pregnancy Center (ACPC) in 1984 and later chaired the national umbrella group for such centers, Care Net. I chaired the ACPC for a while and later chaired meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington, DC.

We’ve also personally helped unmarried women unhappily surprised by pregnancy. One lived with us for nine months, during which time she gave birth. Another got married in our living room and also gave birth, although happily not in our living room. In 1988, 1992, 2021, and 2023, I produced four pro-life books on the history of abortion.

That personal history is why I don’t lightly say that much of the pro-life movement has lost its way. First Things recently opined, “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was a great victory for the pro-life cause.” No, it wasn’t: The number of abortions is apparently rising. Dobbs was a great opportunity for the pro-life movement to show our recognition that unwanted pregnancies are hard.

They are especially hard the small percentage of the time that rape or incest are involved, but they are hard all the time. A truly compassionate pro-life perspective shows that children need protection and their parents need support. But instead of emphasizing both, some politicians have talked so tough that it seemed pro-lifers might treat miscarriages as crime scenes.

Many pro-lifers failed to understand the mourning on the other side: 50 years of reproductive rights down the tubes. Some women had come to believe that the only way they could prosper in our society was through unfettered access to abortion. It was hard for many to imagine how they could flourish without it.

Pro-lifers had an opportunity to help women imagine meaningful lives even with unexpected babies. Our side should have acknowledged that Dobbs was scary to many women. We could have built a movement to support more generous family policies. Instead, many pro-lifers went for force first.

With Dobbs liberating states to legislate as they saw fit, some pro-life advocates competed to see who could back the toughest laws. Some pro-lifers in Oklahoma and elsewhere wanted women who had abortions to be charged with murder. The result was a transformation of popular narrative from concern for the unborn and their mothers to a thirst for power and control.

Some politicians used harsh language and aimed their scorn at abortion-minded women. Specific hard cases cast pro-life activists as hard-hearted. A half-century of pro-life understanding—you can’t save babies unless you love their mothers—evaporated. I sympathize with the desire to win big, but I’m also a reporter willing to acknowledge uncomfortable technological and political realities.

Today’s technological reality is that two-thirds of abortions occur via abortion pills, often ingested at home rather than in abortion centers. Closing down those centers is more and more like shuttering pornography stores rendered irrelevant by streaming services. Stopping pills by law would require opening mail, frisking visitors, and going after senders based in states (like New York and Massachusetts) that offer them legal immunity. Convincing parents, one by one and two by two, not to kill their unborn babies, is more important than ever.

The political reality is of two kinds. The obvious problem is that the identification of pro-life belief with former president Donald Trump and the Republican Party remade in his image has been a public opinion disaster. Some can write off polls as irrelevant when lives are at stake, but Abraham Lincoln wisely said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

The problem of pledging allegiance to an unethical leader doubled in my state of Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton, impeached following allegations of corruption and bribery, is the best-known pro-life spokesman. He fought Kate Cox, then the 31-year-old mother of two who sought an undesired abortion in an exceptionally hard case. Chasing her out of Texas was only a pro-life win in the style of an ancient saying, “One more victory and we are undone.”

The second problem, more complex than individual nastiness, is the denial of the reality that although God does not judge by appearances, most Americans do. The closer unborn children are to birth—the more they look like born children—the more their protection has broad support. Most Americans support abortion early in pregnancy, but only 22 percent nationally support its legality during the third trimester.

Instead of thinking like Lincoln and building off where pro-life support is greatest, some pro-life leaders are campaigning against in vitro fertilization, which produces the very earliest unborn children. The tiny ones deserve protection, but that’s the hardest case to make in terms of public opinion, especially since many couples turn to IVF over their inability to have children otherwise.

The overarching mistake is a default position of compelling rather than convincing. We’ve seen the results of that before. In the early 1990s, after Operation Rescue physically kept women from entering abortion centers, the willingness to identify as “pro-life” cratered in public opinion polls, and the number of US abortions was at an all-time high: 1.6 million.

The meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington that I chaired during that period featured fierce debates and some rethinking. On one side were “all or nothing” advocates. On the other were “all or something” proponents, who supported legislation to protect as many unborn children as possible, given public opinion, but emphasized helping to change hearts.

Many groups came to embrace the all-or-something approach. With technological help through an increased use of ultrasound, with much prayer, with God’s mercy, the number of abortions fell during Bill Clinton’s second term, throughout George Bush’s two terms, and throughout Barack Obama’s two terms.

The number apparently increased during the Trump term. Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, the number of abortions has decreased in some states but has evidently increased overall, with abortion pills leading the way.

That brings us to the current dilemma many pro-life voters face. Donald Trump has now sidelined the pro-life convictions he opportunistically expressed. He returned to his earlier acceptance of abortion and told his Truth Social audience that he favors “reproductive rights.”

And the Democratic Party is no haven for jilted pro-lifers.

While Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in her acceptance speech moved to the center on many questions, she moved to the left on abortion. Much as Dobbs fueled a triumphalism on the pro-life side, seven straight victories on state referenda concerning abortion have excited abortion supporters—and more referenda are on the ballot two months from now. As The New York Times reported, Democrats have “recast Republicans as the party of control and theirs as the party of freedom.”

So the final hard reality is that American pro-lifers do not have a party. But we can still remind both parties of what the Democrats’ 1968 presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, said: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”

For Democrats, that will require a reminder of what could have been. Until the Roe decision in 1973, leading Democrats included unborn children within Humphrey’s moral test. When my friend Nellie Gray started in 1974 what began the annual March for Life in Washington, she knocked on the doors of Ted Kennedy and others and initially expected to receive support. They demurred, but at first did so with words like those that became the title of the best book on abortion by a pro-choice writer, Magda Denes’s In Necessity and Sorrow.

Democrats did not always link abortion with virtue and opportunity. They could return to the Clinton mantra of the 1990s: Instead of seeing abortion as victory, they could defend its legality but work to make it “rare.” If they want to be a “party of freedom,” they could strive to reduce the sense of “necessity.” Part of that means working with pro-life pregnancy resource centers, not harassing them.

For Republicans, many of whom still consider themselves pro-life, a recognition of “sorrow” leads to greater moral sympathy and economic creativity. They should advocate cultural and economic changes that make more women and men feel it possible to have and raise a baby well.

One of my favorite pro-life leaders in American history, Mary Gould Hood, graduated 150 years ago from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She moved to Minneapolis and became a founding doctor at the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers. She also practiced at the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children, staffed by female physicians with an all-woman board of 50 directors.

Hood and many other late-19th century pro-life doctors, including Elizabeth Blackwell, Rachel Brooks Gleason, Alice Bunker Stockham, Prudence Saur, Jennie Oreman, and Mary Melendy, labored for decades to do exactly what we need to do now: show how it’s possible to have and raise a baby well, whether the mother is married (a great positive) or not.

Hood eventually moved to Boston and joined the executive committees of New England Baptist Hospital and Vincent Memorial Hospital. She culminated her 40 years in pro-life work by publishing in 1914 For Girls and the Mothers of Girls: A Book for the Home and the School Concerning the Beginnings of Life.

“What experience can be more sacred, or more marvelous, than that of the mother who understands that a new human has begun within her,” she wrote. “Motherhood brings with it cares and responsibilities, but it also brings the greatest of earthly joys.”

That’s what today’s pro-life movement needs to convey, not by might but by light that can illuminate an inner and outer glow.

Marvin Olasky is a writer and columnist for the Discovery Institute, Acton Institute, Current, and Religion Unplugged. He coauthored The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022.

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News

Deep in the Heart of Megachurch Country, Dallas Mourns a Summer of Pastor Scandals

Emily Belz in Dallas

One leadership failing after another has affected more than 50,000 congregants in North Texas. Will the hurt they’ve experienced lead them out of the church?

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Facebook

On a recent Sunday morning, Gateway Church, one of the largest nondenominational megachurches in the United States, sprang to life.

Golf carts ferried people from distant parking spaces to the front door. The airport-terminal-sized campus in Southlake, just outside of Dallas, filled with people.

They purchased coffees from the café in the lobby, and children played in the two-story indoor playground. In the service, cameras on booms dipped to grab shots over the crowd as the worship band led the congregation in Gateway Worship’s top single, “Who Else.”

They sang out, “Who else is worthy? Who else is worthy? There is no one, only You, Jesus.”

The words that are universally true for Christians may seem especially true in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, as the area is called, which has seen a string of at least eight pastors step down from megachurches in the past few months over moral failings, mostly sexual in nature. The leaders oversee at least 50,000 in-person churchgoers.

In June, Gateway’s founder and senior pastor, Robert Morris, resigned following a report of his repeatedly molesting a 12-year-old in the 1980s. Other Gateway leaders have also left in the aftermath, including Morris’s son James Morris, who was planning to succeed his father as leader of the megachurch.

The week of this particular worship service, there was more fallout: Gateway asked another one of its executive pastors, Kemtal Glasgow, to resign after an undisclosed “moral failing” that the church said was not related to Morris’s alleged abuse.

The eight departed pastors include prominent names like Morris and popular preacher and Bible study author Tony Evans, and in three other cases, pastors were arrested for sexual crimes. The size of the churches magnifies the damage to local congregants, North Texas churchgoers told CT, and the series of failings hangs over everyday conversations about church.

Attendees were hesitant to go on the record, but several told CT how they felt hurt, angry, and unsure whether to stay at their churches. Meanwhile, remaining pastors, some of whom CT interviewed, were angry and shocked themselves. They sought to counsel distraught congregants, fill the leadership voids, navigate communicating developments in investigations, and figure out how to restore trust between churchgoers and church leaders.

Megachurches often describe themselves as a “refuge” from bad church experiences, according to Hartford Institute for Religion Research director Scott Thumma, who has researched megachurches for decades. The founder of the Vineyard movement, John Wimber, described his church as “a second-marriage church” of “refugees from various religious systems.”

On this Sunday morning in late August, Gateway acknowledged that the thousands of worshipers might be upset, triggered, and questioning whether to leave the church or even their faith.

In early August, Gateway entered 40 days of prayer and fasting, including praying for anyone “wounded by any form of abuse … that God would bring his comfort.” Author and pastor Max Lucado has taken over as the interim pastor of Gateway, although he remains a preaching pastor at his longtime church in San Antonio, Oak Hills Church. On Sunday at Gateway, he prayed for the congregation processing abuse from its leadership.

“Do not allow the evil one to lead anyone away,” he prayed. “Protect that precious heart that is already fragile … protect these young people … protect those souls who have been triggered, whose memories have been stirred. May they hear you say, ‘I am with you, I am with you to the end of the age.’”

“I beg your blessing on the metroplex,” he added, praying against the “principalities and powers” that have “darkened the clouds over this region.”

The list of local churches with leaders failing over the summer is long.

In June, Evans resigned from the megachurch he founded, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, after admitting to an undisclosed sin.

“While I have committed no crime, I did not use righteous judgment in my actions,” he told Oak Cliff. Since his resignation, Evans has not shared further details of what happened.

Stonebriar Community Church, founded by Chuck Swindoll, fired one of its longtime associate pastors in July after an undisclosed “moral failure.”

Three other pastors of large churches were arrested. The senior pastor of North Dallas Community Bible Fellowship, Terren Dames, was arrested in May for soliciting a prostitute, and the church fired him. The founding pastor of Koinonia Christian Church, Ronnie Goines, was arrested for sexual assault in late July. Lakeside Baptist Church’s youth pastor, Luke Cunningham, was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a child after church leaders learned he had been accused of abuse at a previous church and reported him to police.

In late July, Josiah Anthony, lead pastor of the megachurch Cross Timbers Church, resigned for actions that were “inappropriate and hurtful” to church staff, elders of the megachurch said in a statement. They later added that they learned he had a pattern of inappropriate communication—sometimes sexual—with women in the church and on staff.

Executive pastor Byron Copeland took over as interim lead pastor at Cross Timbers but then, a few weeks later, he abruptly resigned. Copeland was a former pastor at Gateway, and a staffer there had previously accused him of pressuring her to drop her complaints of a hostile work environment under a different pastor.

It feels like an avalanche to Dallas churchgoers.

“It’s strangely localized and time-bound. I don’t know how to account for that,” said Rob Collingsworth at Criswell College in Dallas, who is plugged into Baptist church circles through his work with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. The churches involved in these scandals are either nondenominational or part of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Some locals have talked about the rapid spate of pastor removals as a spiritual attack, but Collingsworth said that could lead to the perception that victims reporting abuses are the source of the evil. He sees the cascade of events as a “righteous pulling back of the curtain. … [Would we] be better off with Robert Morris still in the pulpit?”

Still, Collingsworth knows that these pastoral failings could shake faith in the church as an institution. He and his wife have friends at Gateway who are considering finding a new church, but the friends don’t know where to go because they “don’t know who to trust.”

Because megachurches are such a feature of evangelicalism in Dallas, with their massive campuses visible when driving around many parts of the city, a crisis can affect a large segment of the Christian community. It’s like if Ford has a crisis in Detroit, “everybody is affected,” said Dustin Messer, the vicar of All Saints Dallas, an Anglican congregation downtown.

“We get folks coming from other churches who have been wounded,” he said. “Every week.”

For the fall, All Saints is planning a course for people who are coming to their church from church hurt.

“This is happening at a high tide of institutional distrust in American culture, anyway, and a low tide of measured social capital,” said Nathaniel Strenger, a psychologist in Dallas who has a theology degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. When people are detaching from churches because they don’t feel safe, he added, “you’ve got more and more isolated individuals.” Then those individuals turn to mental health professionals for emotional support instead of their churches, he said.

One local megachurch pastor who wished not to be named, to protect the privacy of people coming to his church, said his church had received “hurt people” from these other churches after the crises.

“They are a little more skeptical about me, the leadership at our church, than they were before,” he said. “And I don’t blame them a bit.”

The pastor also said he felt like everyone had some culpability for a church culture that embraces leaders who are focused on “fame instead of faithfulness. … It’s setting people up for failure.”

After the lead pastor of Cross Timbers resigned, Toby Slough, the founding pastor, came back to the church to preach. He thanked the people who had the “courage … grace and integrity” to bring their concerns to the elders about the pastor: “I know that wasn’t easy.”

Slough acknowledged that the congregation was probably feeling sadness, shock, and anger. He said he was sad too.

“I’m grateful the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, aren’t you?” he said. “My prayer is that we would let unchanging truth be our guiding light, even when it doesn’t feel that way.”

And he said he understood the tendency to want to find another place to go to church.

“That would be easier,” he said. “I’m just asking you to hang with us in the months ahead. … We’re not going to act like this didn’t happen and move on. We’re going to give everybody time to grieve.” He read from Lamentations 3: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed.”

While the fallout for congregations is significant—not to mention those directly mistreated and abused—churchgoers said they often feel relationally distant from the big personalities leading their churches.

Jim Denison was the senior pastor of Park Cities Baptist Church, a Dallas megachurch of about 10,000, until he left in 2009. He referred to himself as a “face up on the screen” and compared it to being a mayor of a small town or a president of a university.

The congregation didn’t have a close relationship with him, and he feels that, at some level, these senior pastors are replaceable.

And Dallas megachurches operate like large businesses, said Denison, who now leads the Denison Forum in Dallas. He sees church responses, which often include quick resignations and little explanation, as “fiduciary protection of the institution.”

“Dallas is only here because of banking during the frontier era and now oil,” he said. “It’s a very business-centric sort of context. As a result, everything is run in a business sense.”

That means these churches have resources and a sort of professionalism when it comes to dealing with a crisis. That could be used to cover up wrongdoing to protect the institution, but it also could be an asset, Denison said.

But when allegations are revealed in a slow drip, or multiple staff have moral failings, that creates a trust issue that “snowballs so fast,” he added.

When Denison was a megachurch pastor, his church discovered a staff member had embezzled a large sum of money, he said. Within a day, the church had a forensic accountant on the scene, a meeting with trustees and the finance committee, and a game plan. The church had a $14 million budget and a large staff, so it could handle the situation as a large business would.

“I was so grateful for the business sense that they brought, in terms of how to manage this crisis,” he said. “They realized far before I did that what we really would have would be a crisis of confidence. Can the church members trust us with their money?”

He said by “God’s grace” that attendance and giving didn’t drop as a result. But the church leadership also realized they couldn’t let it happen again.

“We had to bring in all new [financial] controls, and pray and ask God to keep us from having another failure in the same direction,” he said. “The mistake churches often make is they promise the same people will do it differently this time. … You have to bring in a different set of people who already bring their credibility into the room.”

But there’s a balance: Denison thinks that megachurches must do a better job of making sure a business culture doesn’t overwhelm a ministry culture, and that they have pastors who can keep the focus on the life of the church.

The bottom line is that the way a megachurch handles a crisis matters, and a congregation could respond with more unity after a crisis rather than with distrust.

Lakeside Baptist Church has about 1,400 in attendance on a Sunday, a little smaller than the 2,000 that researchers consider a megachurch. The news of abuse allegations against Lakeside’s youth pastor “blindsided” the church staff, said Malcolm Yarnell, a teaching pastor there and a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“It was, to say the least, the most difficult month or two of any of the church staff’s experience,” Yarnell said. The church is a member of MinistrySafe, an abuse prevention training program, but Yarnell said they are planning to beef up their policies. The church also stated that if the SBC had a working database for abuse offenders, “we would likely have never been exposed to Mr. Cunningham.”

The Sunday after alerting police about Cunningham, Lakeside gave a report to the congregation on what happened. A few days later, leaders met with youth and their parents.

They had pastors and professional counselors present to answer questions and talk through trauma, related to this incident or not. Yarnell said the response was positive, even though everyone was shocked.

It helped that Cunningham’s alleged crime happened at another church, and no one had reported abuse at Lakeside. But Yarnell said the church would be prepared to address that openly if it did come up.

“What hurts the congregation is when the church leadership doesn’t come forward and put everything on the table,” said Yarnell. “Healing begins with the truth. It cannot begin any other way than with the truth. … True pastors must protect the flock even at cost to their own lives.”

- More from Emily Belz

Church Life

Christian Formation for the ‘Toolbelt Generation’ 

Jen Hemphill

I always assumed my sons would go to college. When they chose the trades, it reframed my view of higher ed—and church community.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

I always assumed my sons would go to college. My husband and I were indelibly formed by our own college years of deep reading, endless discussion, and applying what we’d learned in the classroom to our faith and the world. University life helped us grow toward being “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16), renewed for the service of God (Rom. 12:2). I expected my children would begin adulthood the same way.

But in his junior year of high school, our oldest son announced his plan to work in the trades. It caught me off guard, and my husband and I needed more than a few discussions to come around. My husband is the first member of his immediate family to have earned a college degree. After one generation, I thought, were we already going backward?

Our son didn’t see his decision that way. Being at home during the pandemic had meant seeing his parents working on their computers while he did school on his, and the experience made him rethink college.

The more we talked, it became clear that he was serious—and so were his plans. That year, he worked with a professional carpenter to build docks for his rowing team. The next summer, he started working for a local renovation company where, three years later, he’s a full-time carpenter himself. By the time our younger son made the same announcement as a high school sophomore, we rolled with it.

So I’ve become the mother of two members of what The Wall Street Journal dubbed the “toolbelt generation,” and I’ve come to see why this path makes sense for Gen Z. Lately, it’s seemed like all the news about college has been negative: The price tag is too high. Graduates leave with debt it’ll take decades to repay—and they might not even find a job in their field of study. Enrollment is declining. Many of the kids who are in school aren’t sure why. And many campuses have been hijacked by over-politicized rhetoric, if not outright violence.

In that context, it’s unsurprising that more and more high school graduates are deciding the university is not for them. But what about the spiritual needs of young people going into the trades? While skilled labor itself can be spiritually and morally formational, my sons want Christian discipleship that acknowledges the importance of their vocational path—and I believe churches need to meet the unique spiritual needs of this growing population in their congregations.

My younger son plans to do HVAC work for at least a year, but he may still go to college because he wants to go to seminary someday. We’ve started looking into schools that offer some sort of liberal arts education alongside training in the trades, and we’ve learned that Christian options are multiplying.

In fact, as Nathaniel Marshall—a plumber by trade who writes on Substack at The Blue Scholar—has detailed, there’s a new wealth of Christian trades programs. Marshall maintains a list of high school and post–high school educational options, many of which come with the promise that by the time a student graduates, they will have learned how to think, paid back some or all of their minimal debt, and settled in a full-time job where they earn a living wage. Some of these schools are so new that they have their first cohort of students this coming fall or even next year.

That pairing of a liberal arts education in a Christian worldview with trades training or a heavy work-study program makes sense because, as Marshall argues, “blue collar work is not just the work of bodies: It is the work of whole persons.” It is, or at least can be, work “that recruits and forms my interior world,” “that orders the physical and social architecture around me,” “that has the potential to make me a better person by its dutiful practice,” and “that places me in God’s presence such that my work becomes prayer.”

One school on Marshall’s list particularly caught our attention for our younger son: the College of Saint Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio. Its founder, Jacob Imam, believes that study of our faith and skilled labor are meant to be joined. “A deep love of study and work emerged from the heart of the Church; from the person of Jesus, the Word become carpenter,” he wrote this summer. “Our society cannot enjoy the goods of Christ without Christ himself.”

But what about our oldest, who’s still disinclined to pursue any higher education? My husband and I don’t want him to miss the spiritual formation that college offered us as young adults. We want him to “be transformed by the renewing of [his] mind,” and to “be able to test and approve what God’s … good, pleasing and perfect will” is (Rom. 12:2). Could this happen without college?

“The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake,” author Matthew B. Crawford said in a 2009 New York Times essay: “Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid.”

To an extent, I’ve realized my question about spiritual formation outside of college is based in the same kind of mistake. I need to repent of being an education snob.

My oldest son is developing critical thinking in a community of like-minded people even though he’s not reading and discussing great literature or philosophy or history in the classroom. He’s renewing his mind while integrating his body in his work, and perhaps this is part of what it means to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1). He isn’t discussing books with his coworkers, but they are having what Crawford calls “a sort of conversation in deed.”

As Marshall writes, such skilled labor “has the distinct capacity for integrating your entire being; its dutiful practice can (and will) train your morals, emotions, and intellect along with your senses and spirit; it makes you a dependable member of your family and wider community.”

A certain intelligence is born from paying close attention while doing work alongside others. Whether or not he can articulate it now, my son is learning to solve problems as he builds stairs, lays tile, and makes repairs both adeptly and efficiently. My son’s work community shows him the beauty of a neatly framed window. He learns the necessity of taking care—perhaps especially when he’s required to redo a task done wrong the first time. In many ways, his work helps him grow “in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52).

Yet for all that, my concern about spiritual formation is not only educational snobbery, and Marshall’s vision of skilled work as a source of spiritual training may be an illusion if trades workers are left to figure it out alone, outside of Christian community. Unfortunately, churches full of people who assume—as I once did—that college is the default after high school may find it all too easy to overlook the toolbelt generation in favor of college-oriented ministry.

Growing from small tykes until they graduated high school, our sons received teaching and mentorship in our church’s children’s ministry program and youth group. But since he became a bona fide adult in the workforce, our oldest hasn’t had the same dedicated support. He found he didn’t fit into the church’s “college-aged” bucket because he wasn’t in school. Young adults who don’t go to college, who live on their own and support themselves, navigate the world and their faith very differently from their student peers.

Thankfully, our oldest stumbled into the community he needed in one of our church’s small groups made up of 25- to 30-somethings. Though he’s younger than the rest, they quickly pulled him in for the kind of discipleship and mentorship, even friendship, we’d been praying he’d find. Congregations with Zoomers entering the trades should intentionally pursue this model for discipling a cohort of young people who otherwise might drift out of a church that seems to have no place for them.

As Gen Z increasingly takes up the toolbelt over the textbook, the church must be ready for that shift. While there’s potential for healthy formation in our oldest son’s work community, our prayer is that he will remain connected to the body of Christ. He needs not just skills and knowledge but the knowledge that comes from the love of God (1 Cor. 8:1–2). He needs a distinctly Christian community to speak into his life and work. He needs the church.

Jen Hemphill is a writer from Pittsburgh finishing up a memoir about rock climbing and motherhood. She writes at Pull-ups in the Basement on Substack.

- More from Jen Hemphill

News

German Pastor to Pay for Anti-LGBTQ Statements

Ken Chitwood in Germany

Years of court cases come to an end with settlement agreement.

Pastor Olaf Latzel Appears in court in 2020.

Sina Schuldt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Nearly five years after a German pastor sparked controversy with comments about homosexuality, the legal dispute appears to be over with a settlement of 5,000 euros (about $5,550 USD).

Olaf Latzel, pastor of a conservative congregation in the state-privileged Protestant Church, called homosexuality “degenerative” and “demonic.” He condemned what he called the “homolobby” and slammed “these criminals” at a Berlin LGBTQ pride celebration, “running around everywhere.” Latzel made the comments during a 2019 marriage seminar. Only about 30 couples attended, but the seminar was later shared on YouTube.

He was charged with incitement of hate against a people group and found guilty in 2020 in the Bremen District Court. Latzel was ordered to pay a fine of 90 euros per day for 90 days—the equivalent of nearly $9,000 USD.

Latzel appealed and won in regional court. The judge ruled that, while offensive, the pastor’s comments were nonetheless protected by the constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

Prosecutors appealed that decision, and, in February 2023, the Higher Regional Court deemed the case “incomplete” and sent it back to Bremen.

Now, the Bremen Regional Court has suspended the proceedings, with one condition: The pastor must give 5,000 euros to the nonprofit Rat & Tat-Zentrum für Queeres Leben (Advice and Action Center for Queer Life) in Bremen.

Latzel has six months to transfer the funds. With that, the case against him will be dropped completely.

In court in August, Latzel apologized in a statement, admitting grave mistakes while at the same time saying he had been misunderstood. He said he “made statements that hurt people” and distanced himself from what he called a “linguistic slip-up that should not have happened.”

Latzel has previously said he condemns homosexuality based on his interpretation of the Bible but has nothing against LGBTQ people.

The judge said she found Latzel’s apology “authentic.” Frauke Wesemüller noted that the pastor’s words were “not good” but offered no ruling of the legal questions of whether the remarks in the marriage seminar violated human dignity or were inflammatory. Defining criminal insults to human dignity is “controversial among jurists,” the judge said.

Latzel—who had intimated he was willing to appeal a guilty verdict, taking the case all the way to the German Federal Constitutional Court—has agreed to pay the money. He told German reporters he was “grateful” for the outcome but did not want to comment further.

This is not the first time Latzel’s words have landed him in hot water. In 2015, he was investigated for comments about Buddhists, Catholics, and Muslims.

Latzel may also face discipline from Protestant authorities. The regional body of the church, where Latzel has served as a pastor since 2007, initiated disciplinary proceedings in 2020, but put them on hold pending the outcome of the criminal case. Church officials said in a statement that leadership will respond to the court decision “promptly,” once the case is formally closed.

- More from Ken Chitwood

News

Should Christians Across Denominations Be Singing the Same Songs?

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Some traditions work to refocus on theological distinctives in their music as worship megahits take over.

Keagan Henman / Unsplash

If you feel like it’s hard to keep up with the cascade of new worship music, you’re not alone. The industry is producing new releases at a quicker clip, and the typical lifespan of a worship song—the time a song remains in regular rotation for church worship teams—has shortened.

Faced with a seemingly endless supply of new music, worship leaders are looking for ways to incorporate new music without skipping over the process of discerning whether the style and message of a particular song is right for their church.

For some, the ecumenicism of contemporary worship music is both a strength and a weakness, and they fear that not enough has been done to make sure that musical worship within their churches still reflects the theological commitments that bind them to a historical or denominational strand of Christianity.

Denominations are stepping in to help by offering new resources as guidance, or, in the case of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), holding on to their old ones. Last year, the SBC’s Lifeway Worship scrapped plans to shut down its online media database after an outcry from church musicians who trusted the site’s musical offerings.

“Leaders rely on us to provide some guardrails,” Brian Brown, director of Lifeway Worship, told CT. “If it’s been vetted by Lifeway, they have an added layer of confidence.”

Lifeway’s online resource isn’t as tech-forward but functions similarly to SongSelect, the popular Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) platform, and PraiseCharts. CCLI was formed to offer churches protection from copyright litigation, and PraiseCharts was founded by a worship pastor who wanted to create an alternative to mail-order music for church musicians, so they could have quicker access to arrangements of new worship songs like “Shout to the Lord.”

As the ecumenical digital songbook of new worship music has grown, the influence that denominations used to exert through their curated hymnals has weakened. Some leaders are concerned that the dominance of popular music produced by a handful of megachurches and artists—think Hillsong, Bethel, and Elevation—is washing away some of the elements of musical worship that reflect the doctrines and historical practices of their traditions.

In 2015, the United Methodist Church (UMC) launched its CCLI Top 100 Project, which resulted in “green” and “yellow” lists of popular songs and a set of downloadable criteria. Nelson Cowan, who now oversees the project, told CT in 2021 that sung doctrine is more than just an affirmation of the “right” words, “it’s doctrine we are learning and inhabiting and feeling and processing through song.”

Last year, the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians (ALCM) released its first list of vetted songs from the CCLI Top 100 list in its journal CrossAccent. Clayton Faulkner, dean of the chapel at Wartburg Theological Seminary and editor of CrossAccent, oversaw the pan-Lutheran vetting project.

“Theology was the main focus,” Faulkner told CT. “If a song isn’t theologically sound, it doesn’t matter if it’s singable.”

Faulkner and his team adapted the UMC’s criteria to reflect a Lutheran theological lens, emphasizing the centrality of the Trinity, sacramentalism, and liturgical time. Previously, Sundays and Seasons, an online and print resource for Lutheran churches, had suggested songs based on the liturgical calendar that aligned with Lutheran doctrine, but there was no centralized collection of evaluated contemporary songs.

Earlier this year, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) released its CCLI Vetting Project. Historically, the singing of Scripture has been central in the Reformed tradition, stretching back to Calvin’s preference for unaccompanied metered psalms, unencumbered by ornamentation and focused solely on the singing of Scripture.

“The Christian Reformed tradition has a history of being theologically mindful about what we sing,” said Katie Ritsema-Roelofs, who led the CRC project. “The denomination started with psalm-singing, and that deeply informs how we think about congregational singing.”

Keith Getty, cowriter of the popular song “In Christ Alone,” grew up singing metrical psalms in his Irish Presbyterian church. Getty has persistently spoken about the need for greater attention to theological depth and care in the writing of contemporary worship music.

He and his wife, Kristyn, emphasize “modern hymns” and are in the process of producing a hymnal with Crossway, scheduled to be released next year.

For this year’s annual Sing! conference, hosted by Getty Music in Nashville, the Gettys selected the theme “The Songs of the Bible,” reflecting their ongoing commitment to cultivating the practice of singing Scripture-focused music within the modern worship landscape.

“God is hugely concerned with what we sing,” Keith Getty told CT. “God has made us to understand him through what we sing.”

Kristyn Getty sees a return to a more Bible-centered mode of congregational singing as a way out of worship war skirmishes and conflicts over trends.

“Singing Scripture is a timeless call on our lives, throughout generations. To sing Scripture is to sing lyrics that have been around for thousands of years, not written in America or Europe. It’s a way to lift our song beyond the moment, toward something more timeless.”

The Gettys aren’t the only prominent figures in the contemporary praise and worship scene advocating for renewed attention to theological content in song lyrics.

Songwriter and worship artist Matt Redman recently wrote for CT that church musicians need input from pastors and theologians to enrich the worship of their congregations. Redman will appear alongside other songwriters and theologians at the upcoming WOR/TH conferences—convenings that aim to cultivate cooperation between artists and theologians. The responsibility of overseeing the singing of doctrine, he says, is too great for one person:

Many of us, myself included, admit we need assistance in that area. We likely didn’t come into this via seminary or intense theological training; we came in through the avenue of loving music and being able to play or sing.

We humbly recognize we cannot do this on our own. We need help from thinkers, theologians, and pastors. We need to be sharpened by fellow songwriters and worship leaders too.

Redman and the Gettys see a need to reanimate the global church’s commitment to singing songs with theological depth.

Neither Redman nor the Gettys write music for a particular Christian denomination; their songs are among the most widely sung contemporary songs in the global church, and their ecumenical appeal is what makes them so popular and powerful.

But some denominational leaders fear that there is a downside to primarily singing music that is theologically general enough to be sung by Baptists, Lutherans, Mennonites, Methodists, and Pentecostals. Vetting existing music isn’t enough to correct what they see as doctrinal vagueness; they want to instead support the creation of new music within their traditions.

In 2020, a group of songwriters and creatives in the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) gathered to write new songs that more explicitly reflect the denomination’s commitment to missions and the global church.

Alliance Worship grew out of that gathering and continues to write, record, and release new music, including “Yesterday, Today, and Forevermore,” a reimagined version of the hymn “Yesterday, Today, Forever,” by the CMA’s founder, A. B. Simpson.

“There are thousands of worship songs being released every year that are nebulous, kind of a catchall,” Tim Meier, vice president for development at the CMA, told CT in 2023. “What would it look like to sing our theology again?”

Most of the individuals involved in vetting projects find a lot to love about popular worship music and recognize that many of their congregants have developed deep spiritual and emotional ties to particular songs, even songs that might have a theologically murky line or two. Ritsema-Roelofs pointed out that the hymn “I’ll Fly Away” doesn’t reflect a particularly Reformed view of heaven, but it holds a special power and taps into something for some (especially older) congregants that is more than just nostalgia and sentimentality.

“I’ve served in congregations where they sing a song with questionable or poor theology, but it’s a heart song,” said Ritsema-Roelofs. “Pastorally, you can’t take that away. There is soul work that happens when people sing a heart song, and it’s deeper than just making us feel good.”

In the list of CRC-vetted songs, the team includes notes about their strengths and “opportunities” (generally, for improvement or adaptation) and potential liturgical uses.

There are a few songs that get the equivalent of a warning label, such as Charity Gayle’s “I Speak Jesus,” for its “concerning association of depression with spiritual warfare” and treatment of Jesus’ name as an “incantation,” and Bethel Music’s “Raise a Hallelujah,” for its “overemphasis on human agency and human responsibility.”

Even though there are songs that get a “red light” from the CRC’s vetting team, the list isn’t meant to be a set of rules. Ritsema-Roelofs says she hopes that the list and the principles used to compile it will serve a denomination that already has a history of prioritizing the careful selection of congregational songs.

“We talk a lot about ‘song diet,’” said Ritsema-Roelofs. “Is the diet of songs in the church balanced? Are you singing psalms? Are you singing Scripture? Are you singing laments? Are you playing favorites with the members of the Trinity?”

One concern articulated by the CRC team was that the amount of individualistic language in popular worship songs is out of balance.

“When our primary language week after week is individualistic, it gradually forms us to contain worship to MY service, MY relationship with God, MY, MY, MY,” they wrote in an introductory note. “When we worship corporately we experience both the joy and the responsibility of living in community.”

In addition, the vetting team noted that popular songs tend to be songs of praise and celebration—an important part of any balanced song diet for a body of believers—and that making space for songs of lament will require intention and effort. “A continual barrage of ‘Be happy—God’s got this!’ minimizes pain and presents a problematic long-term understanding of God’s presence or absence in human suffering,” they wrote.

Despite different theological lenses and priorities, the vetting teams from both the CRC and the ALCM categorized the songs “Raise a Hallelujah” and “Battle Belongs” (by Phil Wickham) as “not recommended” or in the “red light” category.

Both groups noted the triumphalism in each song, as well as the use of battle/warfare language.

“Much care should be taken when singing about spiritual warfare. It is too easy to slip into making our neighbors our enemies,” the Lutheran team wrote in the comments on “Battle Belongs.”

Although lyrical content is the primary focus of these vetting initiatives, singability and playability are important aspects of song selection, especially in small churches.

“We looked at chord progressions and considered whether they are achievable for amateur musicians,” said Faulkner. “We also thought about whether a song can stand on its own when played and sung with just a piano and voices.”

When questions arise about the ethics of promoting or using the music associated with a particular megachurch or leader involved in a public scandal, local churches are entrusted with those decisions.

“Our goal in this process was not to give a stamp of CRC approval. Our primary goal here was formational,” said Ritsema-Roelofs. “We wanted to help people think about what their congregations are singing, because over time, it forms you. It forms your theology and faith. This was never meant to bring experts into a room to tell people what they should and shouldn’t do.”

As of now, the CRC doesn’t plan to keep vetting every new CCLI Top 100 (which is updated twice a year), nor does the ALCM. The UMC published an updated list of vetted songs in 2024. Alliance Worship will continue to write and record new music for the CMA, and the Gettys will launch the Sing! hymnal next year, offering their “vetted” collection of songs old and new.

Keith Getty says that the process of cultivating a body of theologically rich, musically accessible songs for the church is not a quest for perfection, and that getting lost in the minutiae can mean missing the beauty of the gospel.

“The gospel story is our strength and our song. I would warn against trying to take every single song and make sure it’s right,” he said. “It’s not about getting everything right, it’s about understanding the big picture and getting most of it right.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

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Rwanda Explains Why It Closed Thousands of Churches. Again.

Morgan Lee

The East African nation has shuttered 9,800 “prayer houses” because it wants safe buildings and well-trained pastors. Is that too much to ask?

narvikk / Getty

Rwanda has shut down almost 10,000 places of worship in the past two months, and now its president has proposed making churches pay taxes on their income.

The country’s crackdown on houses of worship comes as part of an ongoing push to protect Rwandans from church corruption and fraud and to ensure that their buildings meet certain physical standards.

Just weeks after winning his fourth term, President Paul Kagame condemned “mushrooming churches” that “squeeze even the last penny from poor Rwandans.”

“These unscrupulous people who use religion and churches to manipulate and fleece people of their money and other things will force us to introduce a tax,” he said in his first remarks since taking his oath of office on August 11.

The Rwanda Governance Board (RGB), which oversees the country’s places of worship, found that thousands of churches—many of them rural, Pentecostal congregations—failed to meet legal requirements around theological education, building codes, and sanitation regulations.

The RGB delineates between churches, which are officially registered with the government, and “prayer houses,” or places where Christians worship and which exist under churches.

In a statement to CT, the RGB confirmed that it had inspected 14,000 prayer houses in July and closed 70 percent of them “for non-compliance with established regulations including registration, building codes, safety, hygiene/sanitation, and financial or other exploitation of followers.”

“It should be noted that the closure of a prayer house does not necessarily entail the closure of the church the prayer house is affiliated with,” the statement added.

The board began shutting down houses of worship in July and stated that “relevant authorities will continue to collaborate with religious leaders” to ensure that the legal standards, ranging from degree requirements to garbage cans and parking lots, are met. Places of worship that have been closed can reopen if they demonstrate that the violations have been fixed.

This isn’t the first time Rwanda has taken action against churches for being out of compliance with government regulations. The country closed more than 7,000 churches in 2018 over health, safety, and noise issues. That year, it added further regulations, including banning church leaders from encouraging long fasts and requiring certain financial disclosures from churches and prayer houses.

It also introduced a requirement that each church must have a legal representative who holds a theology degree. Churches had five years, until September 2023, to comply with the law, and after a grace period, the RGB began enforcing the new standard.

Churches registering with the government must submit an organizational chart. Leaders in national positions, as well as those who supervise groups of local churches or regional parishes, must have a university degree with a certificate in theology or a theology degree, according to the board’s former CEO, Usta Kaitesi. (Kaitesi recently left after five years as the RGB’s leader and was replaced on August 16 by Doris Uwicyeza Picard, who formerly worked at the Ministry of Justice.)

Kaitesi emphasized that the education requirement does not apply directly to the leader of each church—a demand that would make it cost-prohibitive for most religious organizations.

“This structure allows the parish pastor to be accountable for what happens at the local church level,” Kaitesi told CT in March. “It doesn’t take our responsibility from the local church pastor, but you want them to know that if this is the doctrine of the church, and the church has told us this is the doctrine, they should have somebody with the capacity for supervising the implementation of the doctrine.”

Kaitesi believes that national umbrella groups—the Protestant Council of Rwanda, the Evangelical Alliance of Rwanda, the Forum of Born Again Churches for Rwanda, and Association of Pentecostal Churches of Rwanda—have a critical role to play in implementation.

“We encourage [all church legal entities] to belong to an umbrella, because we believe that umbrellas can do a lot of self-regulation, more than us doing too much regulation,” she said.

The government’s legal standards have largely worked well for historic denominations.

“What was introduced—not today but five years ago—is good for the church. The government gave us five years to comply and kept giving us reminders. That ended last year in September,” Anglican Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda told Religion News Service. “I think this was enough time to comply. We need to look at this from a positive side.”

It’s been much tougher for independent churches and congregations founded by a single person, many of which are smaller Pentecostal churches in rural areas.

Traditionally, Pentecostals and independent charismatic churches have said the Holy Spirit and the Bible equip them fully for ministry and that formal training is unnecessary, according to Reuben van Rensburg, a project manager with Re-Forma, a South African-based ministry that educates and trains church leaders.

These pastors “would have to have the right entry requirements if they were going to study at a tertiary institution,” he said. “They would have to pay for it, which most of them can’t, and they would have to leave their ministry or their family for an extended period of time, which they’re not willing to do.”

The legal crackdown has also spurred efforts to make theological education more accessible. The RGB announced a collaboration with Re-Forma last year, agreeing to accept the ministry’s certification as evidence that a pastor has obtained suitable theological training.

After a meeting in June, 31 denominations in Rwanda committed to participating in Re-Forma’s training programs, and RGB officials agreed to honor Re-Forma certification. With the change in RGB leadership, however, Re-Forma is uncertain whether this agreement will be upheld.

Many churches that meet the theological requirements have found it challenging to fulfill all the building-related requirements, which include regulations about the distance of toilets from the church entrance, paved access roads, and painted and plastered inside walls and ceilings. When the pandemic hit and the government closed all churches, it required them to install handwashing stations before reopening.

One Kigali church was closed at the end of July because it lacked a fire extinguisher, two garbage bins, and a lightning protector. The pastor, who noted that his congregation was previously closed for four months in 2018 because it was not soundproof, said they have since addressed the government’s most recent concerns. However, they are currently meeting only on Zoom and don’t have a sense of when the government will allow them to reopen.

Other churches were closed because they were not built on the minimum area of land required or lacked a proper waste management system, security cameras, or painted walls, said one denominational leader who asked not to be named for security reasons.

Fulfilling these requirements can seem arbitrary and spurious to some. In addition to the parking requirements, the government also requires greenery.

“Remember, we are in the dry season,” the denomination leader said. “Even if you plant the greening, it will not grow the same day.”

The government wants churches with air conditioning, high-quality sound systems, and accommodations for people with disabilities, seemingly on a par with the US and Canada, he said. Maybe that’s possible for Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches, which have operated in the country for more than a century and have their own revenue-generating projects, or for those with connections to outside funders like World Vision, which has implemented handwashing stations at some churches.

But for churches fully dependent on tithes, “You can’t expect it to be done in Africa in a short period,” he said.

The leader’s denomination is currently asking the churches that have not been closed to contribute to a fund to help reopen the closed places of worship. It is reaching out to contacts who can help them make their case to the government.

“We need serious prayers. It’s a movement that intends to limit the freedom of worship. And you know the consequences—if people don’t go to church, they will do other things,” he said.

Though many find the government oversight overwhelming, some Christians still see it as important.

“Churches are growing rapidly in many countries and such growth should not be at the expense of the safety of the congregants,” said Wissam al-Saliby, the president of the religious freedom advocacy group 21Wilberforce. “At the same time, the Rwandan government needs to make available a pathway for closed churches to meet requirements and to re-open. The possibility of redress and appealing closure decisions helps guarantee the right to freedom of religion or belief.”

Al-Saliby said he felt that the church leadership educational requirements were “disproportionate to the legitimate objectives the government is seeking.”

But he acknowledged the need for the Rwandan church to scale up and improve leadership formation. “Evangelicals grow through house churches and organic community efforts,” he said. “More often than not, theological education for church leaders follows growth rather than precedes it.”

Harvesters Church in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, was shut down on August 4 because the government was missing verification that its pastor had finished his bachelor’s degree in theology and leadership.

The pastor, Fred Kayitare, is optimistic that his congregation of around 500 will soon reopen and said he “totally agreed” with the theology training requirements. He described them as “for the goodness of the congregation.”

“I am the living example. I planted a church before I attended theological college. I can witness the change and transformation I acquired from school,” he said. “I’m another person now. And everyone at our church who knew me before can witness that. I even sent four other ministers from our church to the Bible college. We’re now five theology graduates from the same church.”

- More from Morgan Lee

News

Activist Lila Rose Under Fire for Suggesting Trump Hasn’t Earned the Pro-Life Vote

Harvest Prude

As conservatives see bigger shifts and divides over abortion, Live Action founder says she’ll keep speaking up for stronger policies.

Live Action founder Lila Rose

Courtesy of Lila Rose

“If you don’t stand for pro-life principles, you don’t get pro-life votes.”

That’s what Lila Rose, a leading pro-life activist, posted Monday on social media, in response to the latest move from Donald Trump’s campaign to moderate its stance on abortion.

It’s the line that put her at the center of controversy this week, with Trump supporters blaming her for jeopardizing the GOP ticket and calling her a grifter. The clash spurred further debate over what committed pro-lifers should do as they become increasingly sidelined by the Republican Party.

The online infighting comes at a moment when the pro-life movement is recalibrating after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and as national Republican leaders have backed away from making abortion central to the GOP’s 2024 campaign message.

“We represent a constituency that has no voice, who can’t speak for themselves, and so it’s our job to speak for them,” Rose, founder of the pro-life nonprofit Live Action, told Christianity Today. “We’re being told, You have to shut up and sit down, and you should just be grateful for whatever we give you. And if we play politics that way, the pro-life movement will become completely defunct.”

Rose, a former evangelical who converted to Catholicism, stands by her convictions without compromise: She doesn’t support exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother, and wants a federal abortion ban.

Republicans went back and forth on X over Rose’s implication that pro-lifers should withhold votes from Trump. The self-proclaimed “most pro-life president in history” appointed the justices who overturned Roe two years ago. But more recently, he’s leaned toward leaving abortion up to the states and even mentioned backing women’s “reproductive rights,” often used to reference abortion.

The stakes are high for voters who reject Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and her campaign’s emphasis on protecting the right to abortion. Liz Wheeler, a conservative political commentator, wrote that “refusing to vote for Trump is a vote for Kamala Harris, the most gruesome pro-abortion politician in our country.”

Conservative commentator Ashley St. Clair was among Rose’s most vocal critics, telling nearly one million followers on X that it was “evil” for Rose to try to suppress pro-life voters “in the most consequential election in US history.”

St. Clair, operations manager at The Babylon Bee and the author of a Christian children’s book on gender identity, has described herself as “rather libertarian on the abortion issue.”

She accused Rose of using millions of dollars from pro-lifers wastefully, such as hosting an event at a Ritz Carlton, while others said Live Action should spend more on donations to pregnancy resource centers or ads in states with abortion ballot initiatives.

Rose founded Live Action as a teenager, gaining national prominence 15 years ago through undercover videos at Planned Parenthood. The nonprofit has grown what it says is the largest social following among pro-life organizations. In an interview Wednesday with CT, Rose shrugged off the criticism.

“My job is to advocate for people who are in danger of being murdered, and they are little babies,” she said. “People angry with me on Twitter is a small price to pay for advocating for the interest of children in danger of abortion, who currently, foolishly, are being thrown under the bus by not just the RNC platform but by the latest statements from the Trump campaign.”

Several major pro-life voices came to Rose’s defense, saying the accusations were a “misrepresentation” of Live Action’s mission and clarifying that most of the expenses on Live Action’s 990 form went toward employee salaries and producing video content.

2 things are true: 1) @LilaGraceRose's work to change hearts & minds and expose the lies of the abortion industry is unrivaled 2) Harris & Walz are abortion fanatics & must be defeated. If they win they will abolish the filibuster & force abortion without limit on all 50 states
— Marjorie Dannenfelser (@marjoriesba) August 27, 2024

They also respected Rose’s position.

Trump supporters “want to destroy her because she’s not bending at the knee,” wrote Bethany Mandel, a conservative Jewish author. “Lila is verbalizing something I’m hearing *a lot* from pro-life voters: Their votes should not be taken for granted.”

John Shelton, policy director for former vice president Mike Pence’s foundation, Advancing American Freedom, said he believes the attacks on Rose are misguided. For voters who have abortion as their main motivating issue, Shelton said it’s reasonable that they would want to lobby for (or against) their preferred policies.

“She’s a winnable voter,” Shelton said of Rose. “All Trump would probably need to say is, Yeah, I take that back. Somebody told me to do that. … But I’m going to be the pro-life candidate. I’m going to find something that we can pass, and we’ll reduce abortions. And this conversation wouldn’t be happening.”

My personal message to the Trump campaign on abortion: pic.twitter.com/TrjQI2BQqE
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) August 28, 2024

While there have always been factions that have disagreed on political strategy, the recent fight highlights fractures in the pro-life movement that have been more on display since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Over the course of the presidential campaign, Trump has taken care to distance himself from stances like the ones Rose holds and to move to the political center on abortion. The evolution has come as some on the political right have viewed the Dobbs decision as an electoral liability that has cost Republicans at the ballot box.

On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” a phrase typically used to describe access to abortion. Also over the weekend, his vice presidential pick, Vance, said that Trump would veto abortion ban legislation.

Trump has also overseen an overhaul of the Republican Party platform on the issue of abortion. In July, the platform watered down its long-held stance seeking nationwide limits on abortion and moved to a position that opposes late term abortion, suggesting the issue is best left to the states.

While a small minority of conservative evangelicals have put their support behind Harris, Rose and others who are pushing for a more rigorous stance from the GOP don’t see Democrats as a viable alternative.

“I don’t want Kamala Harris in office,” Rose told CT. “And I also don’t want the Republican Party to increasingly become pro-abortion.” Rose has devoted episodes of her podcast to talking about the Democrats’ embrace of abortion as part of the 2024 campaign. The Democratic party platform includes a section affirming that they believe “every woman should be able to access … safe and legal abortion” and states the party opposes restrictions on the procedure, including on abortion pills.

White evangelicals are the only religious group with a majority opposed to abortion, with 73 percent saying it should be illegal in all or most cases. Public support on the issue has moved up and down, but currently 63 percent of Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, Pew Research Center found.

Since Dobbs, Trump has articulated a more hands-off approach to abortion, holding that abortion policy should be left to the discretion of voters in each state. He’s also suggested he wouldn’t seek to restrict abortion medication.

Last September, Trump criticized Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing a Florida bill to prohibit abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, saying it was a “terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” At the time, he added that he wouldn’t sign federal legislation banning abortion at 15 weeks.

In previous races, Trump had to work against concerns that he would be too squishy on life: In 2016, he named conservative Supreme Court nominees and picked Mike Pence for vice president, who sponsored at least seven measures to defund Planned Parenthood in his time in Congress and signed every pro-life bill that reached the governor’s mansion during his tenure in Indiana.

At the time, that was key to Trump’s courting the evangelical vote. But in 2024, it’s unclear whether the majority of evangelicals will require Trump to articulate a pro-life position to earn their support. Instead, single-issue pro-life voters who question supporting Trump seem to be the ones on the defensive.

“Increasingly, his platform and his rhetoric is pro-abortion, and that should disturb and concern the pro-life movement,” Rose told Fox News.

Rose addressed the controversy on her podcast Tuesday. The episode title was “Trump Might Lose If He Keeps This Up.” She played a clip of Trump speaking at the 2020 March for Life, in which he pledged support for legislation that would prohibit abortion.

“Look at the departure. I mean, that was a great Trump right there. I remember the electricity in the pro-life movement,” she commented.

Given Trump’s current positions, Rose said she won’t vote for Trump. But she hopes he reverses course, telling CT she would be “happy to talk with Trump” or his team. Katelyn Walls Shelton, a fellow with the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, said she isn’t seeing defections toward the Democrat side but rather hearing pro-lifers question whether they will “vote at all.”

“I definitely hope that [Trump’s team] is listening. Because I think that if Trump changes course on this, he could be very inspiring,” Rose said.

After the episode aired, she tagged the Republican Party and Donald Trump in a post, essentially pleading with him to return to his previous positions on abortion. The message was clear: The ball is now in their court.“People say, Well, you’re suppressing the vote if you call out Trump for this. I’m not suppressing the vote if Trump does this—Trump’s suppressing his own vote,” Rose told CT. “The responsibility is on Trump to get people to vote for him and to win the pro-life vote.”

- More from Harvest Prude

Ideas

More Christian Colleges Will Close. Can They Finish Well?

Nadya Williams

Contributor

The “demographic cliff” will force schools to cut jobs or shut down—but how they do it matters.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

On June 25, 2024, Eastern Nazarene College announced that it will close at the end of the year. I specify the date because it matters: The news came well after faculty members had begun planning syllabi and courses for the fall semester. To say this was a bombshell for them and their students is an understatement. Six months’ notice might be long in other contexts, but in academia, it’s scandalously brief.

This story is not unique among Christian colleges, and it raises an increasingly pressing question: What does it look like to navigate closures ethically and compassionately?

Christian institutions should be particularly committed to shutting down or downsizing in a way that treats faculty, staff, and students with love. Ending things well is an essential part of bearing witness and displaying good fruit for Christian colleges and universities, but, unfortunately, Eastern Nazarene’s behavior is far from exceptional.

Last summer, for example, conflicting announcements were coming out of The King’s College in New York City. The school laid off a number of faculty and ultimately canceled all fall classes, yet its board refused to take the final step to closure. It’s easy to imagine why they hesitated, but this proved to be a heartbreaking approach that raised warrantless hopes and left scholars scrambling to find new work.

The last few years have also seen closures by Christian institutions including programs at Trinity International University, Alliance University (formerly Nyack College), Goddard College, and Clarks Summit University. Even longer is the list of institutions that haven’t closed yet have ruthlessly cut programs, often in the humanities, in a desperate attempt to reinvent themselves and remain afloat. Some of the institutions on both lists have been struggling for years, and, in many cases, the pandemic accelerated their troubles.

This is all depressing, especially if you are a professor or a student or one of the alumni of the affected institutions—or an ex-professor like me. CT’s Emily Belz recently highlighted the challenge involved in records keeping for alumni of shuttered institutions. But what we’re seeing now is only the beginning; we should expect much more of these closures over the decade to come.

The single biggest reason for this is not unique to Christian schools. It’s the long-predicted “demographic cliff.” US birthrates dropped to an all-time low during the Great Recession and never bounced back. Next year, in 2025, we’ll be 18 years past that initial plunge, and our national birthrate remains below replacement level.

All things being equal, this means that every year for the foreseeable future, the entering freshman class in colleges nationwide will decline. Harvard will probably be just fine. Tiny Christian colleges without a national reputation, not so much. Even Wheaton College, the “evangelical Harvard,” had to make adjustments for this reality in late 2022.

Going forward, nearly all Christian colleges will have to plan to shrink, merge, or close. These difficult choices will be unavoidable and necessary. But, to get back to the question I posed at the outset, how college leadership approaches these decisions matters, and how Christian college leadership does it should be recognizably shaped by Christian ethics.

The biggest part of that how is when. The boards and other leadership of schools headed for cuts and closure must give faculty and staff the earliest possible notice that job loss is a possibility. For faculty, I’d argue that one year’s advance notice is the minimum that compassion requires.

True, in many other workplaces, a two-week notice is customary and sufficient. But higher education works differently because of its quirky annual hiring cycle. With very few exceptions, academic jobs are posted in the fall and early spring. Hires are concluded by late spring, and new positions begin in August. That means faculty need at least a full school year to have any chance of continuing to work in their field—not to mention to place a house on the market or finish out a lease and make plans for required relocation without losing a lot of money in the process.

There’s an obvious counterargument that can be made to such early advance notice of potential closure: It will prompt faculty to leave early, and such a loss of talent in short order could only make things worse for the institution’s reputation and fate. Maybe keeping quiet would buy leadership time to work behind the scenes to resolve the crisis.

But this counterargument ignores how university budgets work. Colleges typically set their budgets at least two years in advance, which means leadership likely knows closure is coming a year or more ahead of time. At that point, a miracle in the form of a massive influx of major donations is possible, perhaps, but it’s unlikely. Keeping quiet almost certainly can’t save the school—and certainly can’t justify playing with people’s lives (or, at least, their livelihoods).

Faculty layoffs at Cornerstone University, also this past June, were reportedly even worse by this measure of timeliness and transparency: “Several former Cornerstone faculty told [Religion News Service] that all six of those who left were tenured and had already signed contracts for the forthcoming school year when they were informed in June that their roles were being ended—likely too late to be able to obtain a similar spot elsewhere.” Even one year out of academia can be career-ending in our dismal higher-ed job market, so those lost jobs may well be these faculty members’ last university roles.

This timing is also devastating for students. Sure, some will transfer to other colleges—there are plenty out there, in this climate, that are eager to welcome more students, and closing schools, including Eastern Nazarene, have arranged transfer agreements with comparable institutions. But in practice, just over half of students who go through college closures never re-enroll. They’re probably demoralized and in debt and definitely left without a degree.

College and program closures affect real people, disrupting their lives and plans, and the shorter the notice, the more extreme the disruption. Christian university boards and administrators owe their employees and students more honesty and love.

In theory, of course, financial information about all private Christian schools is public per IRS rules. Institutional leadership might want to claim this absolves them from the charge of covering up dire financial straits. But the repeated shock that faculty and students express whenever they learn that their beloved institution is closing shows that they are not in the habit of looking up those forms on their own. Of course, why should they? That is not their duty.

If institutions that need to re-evaluate their finances in the future need a model, Wheaton has showed what it looks like to communicate genuine compassion for faculty, staff, and students. Two years ago, the college announced “a reduction of approximately 10 percent of the academic division, which includes faculty and academic staff, over the next three years to avoid a projected financial deficit.”

The striking part was the timing: “Ten faculty members, about 5 percent of the college’s 213 tenured, tenure-track faculty and permanent lecturers, were notified that their positions would end in June 2024 or June 2025.” The announcement was made on November 17, 2022, giving affected faculty notice of at least a year and a half.

That good practice needn’t be unusual. Considering how far ahead universities make budget projections, this kind of timeline is realistic for other institutions facing serious financial constraints. Furthermore, Wheaton’s case shows that such transparency need not result in a damaging loss of talent.

As we say about parenting, so much of faith and ethics are “caught, not taught.” Christian witness in difficult situations matters immensely, and in an age when we so often hear of cruel and unethical leadership, Christian college leaders could stand apart. Compassion may not keep college doors open, but it will make a difference in the lives of God’s image-bearers.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).

Correction: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Cornerstone University’s program changes. We regret the error.

- More from Nadya Williams

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Cultivate prayerfulness.

Cultivate the people of God.

Cultivate a plan.

Get going—and be patient.

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