I Grew Up Serving the Church in the Middle East. Coming ‘Home’ Was Hard.

My return to the United States brought grief and loneliness as I realized I was different from my peers.

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

On an early morning flight out of the country, I claimed the window seat. Alongside the usual anticipation that accompanies travel, I felt joy and fear and sadness. I don’t remember if I cried. What I do remember are the mountains, the wobbly takeoff in the rundown plane, and the small comfort of knowing that I didn’t forget anything. Everything we owned sat in the belly of the plane, packed neatly into a dozen trunks and a few suitcases.

That was almost four years ago.

Most people would never guess now that I spent my childhood as a homeschooler in northern Iraq. Our family moved to the country to serve the Kurdish church when I was six; we moved back just before I turned 18. And when we returned, I did my best to erase every trace of those years from myself.

But their impact, of course, has remained. I still blank when someone asks where I’m from. I have struggled to find an identity outside of “the girl who lived in Iraq.”

I have a tattoo of the mountains on my right forearm now, and a reference to Joshua 1:9 in Kurdish: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” The tattoo is a tether to the place that was both home and foreign, the place that I love and hate, fear and miss; the place that elicits just about every possible emotion.

That first fall back in the United States, after I graduated from high school, I moved to the Northwoods of Wisconsin for nine months to attend a gap year program. It was one of the worst years of my life. I know now that no matter where in the United States I’d been, this season would have been a dark one. I was anxious, depressed, and lost, overwhelmed by the differences between the place I’d left and the place I found myself now.

As a young girl who grew up in a Muslim world, I had never experienced independence. Instead of slowly working my way into freedom, though, I rebelled in as many ways as I could. I praise God now that my choices didn’t lead to greater consequences.

In Iraq, dating wasn’t an option, and I had internalized many broken messages about myself and men. Instead of talking through those messages with a trusted advisor, I started dating someone who didn’t understand the baggage I was carrying.

My parents had always guided my faith; I lived at home, I went to school at home, and we were a close-knit family, often each other’s only Christian community. I never had the chance to learn what my own faith looked like. During my gap year, I didn’t open my Bible or pray for months. I felt myself pulling away from my faith and my parents, deeper into confusion, grief, and insecurity.

Starting college in Indiana brought a fresh start. I explored my relationship with God through Bible classes and chapel and in my own times of praying and journaling; I started calling home more.

But the culture shock wasn’t over. I wasn’t just getting used to living in America; I was getting used to being part of “Gen Z,” with its fast-paced chaos of micro-trends, social media, and nostalgia. In a new context, on the cusp of adulthood, I was immediately overwhelmed by the memes and inside jokes familiar to my peers.

When we first moved back, I’d tried to ignore all the references. How could I stay on track with God and schoolwork while also keeping track of fashion and slang and jokes?

But despite my efforts to ignore my feelings, I was terrified and embarrassed by my lack of knowledge. I didn’t know every Disney Channel theme song (or any, for that matter). I didn’t have a pair of dirty Air Force 1s. (I had a pair of faded Nike tennis shoes I got at the secondhand market in Iraq.) I had never listened to Kanye or Taylor Swift. My idea of fun was exploring a mountainside that might have a couple unmarked landmines, not running to Starbucks to grab an overpriced drink. I didn’t understand what it meant to be “normal.”

It took time and effort to learn my peers’ culture: Years of study, years of mimicking everyone around me. Next year, I’ll be a senior in college, but from time to time, I’m still haunted by imposter syndrome. I’m supposed to belong here, but I don’t—not fully, anyways. I still like sitting on the floor more than I like sitting at a desk. I know what it’s like to live in a world where peace is a privilege, not an expectation. I miss pushing my way through crowded, sweaty markets, haggling with vendors in a different language. That tattoo will remain on my forearm.

These challenges aren’t unique to me. Missionary kids returning from long stints overseas—“third-culture kids,” as American sociologist Ruth Useem described us—often have difficulty returning to our sending cultures. We suffer from the loss of well-known sights and smells, food and language—while, at the same time, we are expected to love being “back home.” Sometimes, we’re haunted by the poverty, suffering, and oppression we saw abroad. Some of us feel that our needs were neglected in the shadow of the mission. These are all familiar feelings to me.

A pair of 2009 studies from Mental Health, Religion & Culture showed that college-age missionary kids score lower than their peers in both physical well-being and sociocultural adaptation. Surveyed missionary kids said one of their biggest struggles upon returning “home” was knowing how to fit in and understanding the references their peers were making. They all expressed frustration that there hadn’t been more support.

I certainly needed a support system when I returned to the United States. I was told I would grieve, but I needed more than a warning. I needed someone to tell me what that grief would be for, exactly, and to reassure me that it was okay if my grief didn’t look the same as anyone else’s. I needed a reminder that I was not alone in my pain. I wish there had been someone—a friend, a mentor—who had understood where I was at and checked in on me, someone who could have shared their own process, however messy and disorganized.

If I could speak to my 18-year-old self now, I’d tell her to take it slow; there’s no shame in learning to walk before you try to run. But I didn’t have an older version of myself looking out for me. In order to adapt to the new, I just tried to get rid of everything old. I tried to throw away the shaping that God had done in me during my time overseas. I wanted to be the same as everyone around me. It has taken me a long time to accept that Iraq has forever made me a little different.

Some part of me will always be the girl who grew up in Iraq. That part of my story, the leaving and the longing and the adjusting, has come with suffering—which has also produced in me perseverance, character, and hope (Rom. 5:3–5). Obviously, that process has been far from perfect. I am stubborn and adverse to change. But I have learned the grace of God; I am learning to trust that he will use me in a way I might not see yet.

Today, I can say with certainty that I wouldn’t give up my time overseas for anything. We only saw one person give his life to Christ during our years there, but my heart for the nations was forever changed by the Kurds. I carry with me the burden of lost hearts, the children who will never see outside of their city, the memories of the most authentic, frustrating, and hospitable people I’ve known. Instead of denying the difficult gifts of my past, I can say with sincerity, “Here I am, Lord: Send me!”—with all my sadness and fear, my joy and anticipation.

Annie Meldrum is an intern at Christianity Today.

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News

Wire Story

Some Churches Lose Coverage as Insurers Hit by a Wave of Storm Claims

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Natural disaster costs have overwhelmed the market for carriers, which are raising rates or dropping policies for congregations in high-risk areas.

Scott Olson / Getty Images

John Parks was taking his first sabbatical in 40 years of ministry when he got a call from his church’s accountant with some bad news.

Church Mutual, the church’s insurance company, had dropped them.

“This does not make sense,” Parks, the pastor of Ashford Community Church in Houston, recalls thinking at the time. “We’ve never filed a claim.”

Five months and 13 insurance companies later, the church finally found replacement coverage for $80,000 per year, up from the $23,000 they had been paying.

“It’s been an adventure,” said the 69-year-old Parks from his home in Houston, where the power was out after Hurricane Beryl. “That’s putting it politely.”

Parks and his congregation are not alone. An ongoing wave of disasters—Gulf Coast hurricanes, wildfires in California, severe thunderstorms and flooding in the Midwest—along with skyrocketing construction costs post-COVID have left the insurance industry reeling.

As a result, companies such as Church Mutual, GuideOne and Brotherhood Mutual, which specialize in insuring churches, have seen their reserves shrink. That’s led them to drop churches they consider high risk in order to cut their losses.

Hundreds of United Methodist churches in the Rio Texas Annual Conference learned they’d lost property insurance in November last year, leaving church officials scrambling. More than six months later, some churches have found new insurance, often at a steep increase. Others still have none, said Kevin Reed, president of the conference board of trustees.

Reed said the conference had about a month’s notice that its property insurance policy, which local congregations could buy into, was being canceled. That wasn’t enough time to find new coverage before the policy expired. It also left local churches on their own.

We have not found a good solution,” said Reed. “It continues to be a significant problem for our churches.”

United Methodist churches in Iowa have also lost insurance, according to the Iowa Annual Conference, in the aftermath of severe weather in the area. The Rev. Ron Carlson, treasurer of the Iowa conference, said that both small rural churches and larger churches have been affected. Carlson said the conference reminded churches earlier this year to be proactive in checking on their insurance and not waiting for a renewal offer.

The UMC’s Book of Discipline requires churches to carry insurance for the full replacement cost of their buildings as well as liability insurance. For some churches, said Carlson, that’s just not possible. He said the conference is trying to sort out what happens to those churches.

For struggling churches dealing with declining membership and giving, he said, rising insurance may be the last straw.

“There have been some that have said we can’t do this anymore,” he said.

For churches that lost their insurance, finding replacement coverage is difficult. That’s in part because churches are a niche market that’s difficult to insure and full of risk, say experts. They are open to the public, work with everyone from infants to senior citizens, sometimes house social service programs, are run by volunteers and often have large and expensive buildings.

Churches also operate with little oversight, said Charles Cutler, president of ChurchWest Insurance Services, which works with about 4,000 churches and other Christian ministries.

“Because of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state, ministries are largely unregulated,” said Cutler. “And unregulated businesses are difficult to underwrite.”

The church insurance market, like the insurance industry overall, has been hit with a perfect storm in recent years. Supply chain shortages for construction materials that began during the pandemic have driven up the cost of rebuilding after a disaster. When the cost of rebuilding goes up, so does the size of claims, said Cutler. That led insurance companies to raise their rates in order to cover those claims.

Then a series of natural disasters hit the industry hard—including hurricanes, wildfires and what are known as “severe convective storms”—thunderstorms with extreme rain and wind that caused billions in damage last year, according to the Insurance Journal. Claims from those disasters have stressed the reserves that insurance companies use to pay claims.

Pam Rushing, the chief underwriting officer for Church Mutual, said that the company is still renewing policies and accepting new business in every state. However, the company no longer offers property coverage in Louisiana. Church Mutual did not give details of how many policies have been canceled.

“We do not take nonrenewal decisions lightly and it represents a small percentage of our overall portfolio,” Rushing said in an email. “For us to remain financially strong, viable and best able to serve our mission, we need to mitigate the severe impact catastrophic weather has had—and will continue to have—on our bottom line and our ability to serve customers nationwide.”

Brad Hedberg, executive vice president of The Rockwood Co., a Chicago-based agency, said church insurers are facing pressure from the reinsurers—large companies such as Lloyd’s of London that provide insurance to insurance companies so catastrophic claims don’t overwhelm them. Those companies are looking to reduce their exposure to certain types of claims—meaning church insurers can’t offer as much coverage as they did in the past.

Hedberg, who works with churches and other ministries, said he spends a lot of time helping clients keep the insurance they already have and reduce their risk of filing claims. That means making sure churches have policies in place for everything from abuse prevention to who gets to drive the church van, as well as being proactive with building maintenance and safety projects. It also means being strategic in when to file a claim—and when to pay for a loss out of pocket. Churches should only tap their insurance for large losses—not small claims, he added.

“If small claims get filed, your coverage could be nonrenewed or your premium could go through the roof,” he said. “The market is just that bad.”

Once a church loses coverage, it may face higher prices for years. That’s likely the case for Bethany Covenant Church in Berlin, Connecticut, said Greg Pihl, who chairs the church’s finance committee.

The church had been paying $12,500 for insurance and had made a claim for flooding damage due to a faulty sprinkler. Pihl said the church learned this past spring that its insurance had been canceled. Now Bethany will pay about $73,000 for less coverage, said Pihl.

That made for a difficult conversation at a church business meeting and midyear changes to the church’s budget. The church was able to tap some reserves to cover the increased premium this year. But it’ll likely be paying higher rates for the next three to five years, said Pihl. And those reserves, meant to pay for things like a new roof, still have to be built back up.

Pihl said that before the church’s policy was canceled, he expected rates to go up, perhaps by 10 percent or 20 percent. But that proved overly optimistic.

“It’s just a terrible market,” he said.

Nathan Creitz, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Bay Shore, New York, a congregation of about 100 people on Long Island, said that in the past, getting insurance hadn’t been a worry. The total annual cost for all the church’s insurance—the church building, a parsonage, liability—was less than $4,000.

“We got lucky,” he said. “We were grandfathered into some really low rates.”

Things changed last summer after Calvary’s insurance carrier dropped the church, deciding not to renew the policy. With the help of a broker, the church found new insurance for about $14,000. Since most of the costs of running a church, such as paying staff and keeping the lights on, are already fixed, that meant cutting programs. The church also had to put off capital improvements to the building, which ironically are the kinds of things that would make them easier to insure.

“It’s not ideal but that’s what happened,” Creitz said.

For Ashford Community Church in Houston, finding the funds to cover the increased insurance has also been a challenge, especially post-COVID, when church attendance and giving are down.

Higher insurance costs also mean less money for ministry at the church, which Parks described as a mission-focused congregation.

The church’s 40,000-square-foot facility is currently home to about a dozen congregations, through a partnership called Kingdom City Houston. Parks said he came to the church about a decade ago after hopes of starting a church overseas fell apart. At the time, the church was struggling and was using only a quarter of the space in its building.

Today about 1,200 people worship every weekend in the building—which holds multiple services in its three sanctuaries. Parks said worshippers come from more than 60 countries. The churches each have their pastors but share some back-office staff.

The idea is to show that Christians from different backgrounds can still be united. “We can walk side by side, even if we don’t always see eye to eye,” he said.

Parks said Ashford’s building has been largely untouched by recent storms. After Hurricane Harvey caused massive flooding in 2017, the church hosted volunteers from around the country who helped residents recover.

“It was a good time of serving the community,” he said.

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Theology

Homeschooling for the Common Good

Myles Werntz

I never thought I’d be a homeschool parent, not least because I support public education. An improbable shift changed my perspective.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

I am an educator. I believe in the good of education for everyone and that public schools should be amply funded and resourced. I believe in contributing to the common good even when it doesn’t directly benefit me. And in the summer of 2020, my wife and I found ourselves in what I’d once have called a most improbable situation: We became homeschool parents.

Let me explain.

One of the attractive parts about moving to Abilene, Texas, five years prior was the well-loved public school system. We bought our house near one of the many excellent elementary schools and expected an ordinary educational path for our two children. We’ve long known public school teachers, happily paid taxes for schools our children didn’t attend, and looked back fondly on our own days of bus rides, locker conversations, and school cafeterias.

Then COVID-19 came. Suddenly, we realized our our oldest would be going to kindergarten masked, unable to see his teacher’s face, distanced from other children—or else staring at a screen for hours a day in virtual kindergarten. Guidance from the school board was minimal, and the deadline to register our child for COVID kindergarten ticked ever closer.

We couldn’t do it—but we realized we could handle homeschooling, at least for a while. Both my wife and I could do some of our work remotely, and we could convert part of our living room into a classroom. It would be hard, but we could make it work.

“One year,” we said. “We can do one year.”

Let me say, now, that making this decision was not a brave one. It was simply the only one we felt was available to us. Had COVID not forced our hand, I’m not sure we’d ever have gone the direction we did. That first year required an upheaval in our lives, and not only because of COVID. We never thought we’d be teaching someone how to read and do basic math without help.

But gradually, we quit making jokes about homeschoolers and dropped our unease over being the only homeschool family we knew. We began to embrace the freedom to take long weekends for camping. We found we enjoyed introducing our kids to literature, music, history, and philosophy. We found a rhythm of work and instruction that meshed with our family’s goals. When the most intense COVID era eased, we began to connect with other homeschool families. We enrolled our children in a three-day-a-week co-op run by licensed educators. We even attended a homeschool convention.

Many times, I’ve wondered who we are becoming. But one year turned into two, and, four years later, I can’t see us turning back.

Still, the one lingering question for me is that of the common good. Here in Texas, property taxes are used, in part, to fund the schools, but each school’s enrollment also affects its funding. The lower enrollment drops, the less funding a school gets. By choosing to not enroll our children in the public school around the corner, in other words, we’ve taken money out of that school’s coffers—more money than my school supply donations will ever replace.

By homeschooling, then, maybe I’ve taken away from the common good. But money is not the only measure, and not all of what public schools offer as common is necessarily good.

As an educator, I think standardized testing is a bad way to organize instruction. As a parent, I have concerns with how much time my kids are away from home, how many hours rote homework takes from play and individual interests.

One need not be a Christian to share these concerns. But as a theologian and ethicist, I have other questions too: Is participating in common rites like voting and public education the only or best way for a Christian to contribute to the good of society? And is it possible that in saying no to the concrete, flawed version of a public good, we may say yes to the common good it aims to serve?

In the first century, Justin Martyr offered this account of Christian participation in the common good:

And more than all other men are we your helpers and allies in promoting peace, seeing that we hold this view, that it is alike impossible for the wicked, the covetous, the conspirator, and for the virtuous, to escape the notice of God, and that each man goes to everlasting punishment or salvation according to the value of his actions.

Justin is one in a long line of Christians taking this approach, a line that runs through Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the Reformation, and into the present. To support the peace of the city is not, Justin argued, the same as using the means of the city: By pursuing the common good in a uniquely Christian way, he said, Christians bear witness to what cities are meant to be.

Today, we can hold with the apostle Paul that it’s good to live at peace with all people as far as we are able (Rom. 12:18), and with Jeremiah that we should seek the welfare of the city (29:7). But that doesn’t require us to pursue these ends only through the means provided by the state. It doesn’t mean people of good will can’t disagree about the form of the common good while agreeing on its value.

At its best, homeschooling orders education around the common life of the family first and, from there, the life of the world. For Christians, it brings education, vocation, family, and spiritual formation into an integrated whole.

Homeschooling certainly can be—and often is—done in a spirit of resentment, as its detractors tend to charge. But it can also be an opportunity for Christians to help children pursue a vision of wisdom, citizenship, and goodness differently.

What if homeschooling offered an alternate vision of education that might even have resonance in the public school system?

What if homeschooling illuminates what Christians should desire for all families: time to educate, freedom to make choices about what is good for our children, and civic resources that help our citizens grow in charity and goodness?

What if, as my family has found, it is possible to homeschool for the common good?

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision of Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics in the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

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The Olympics’ Most Iconic Photo Has a Christian Message

Franco Iacomini

The raised index finger of levitating surfer Gabriel Medina is the latest sign that sports success has made Brazilian evangelicals less marginalized and more confident.

Brazil's Gabriel Medina reacts after getting a large wave in men's surfing during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

Jerome Brouillet / Contributor / Getty

There’s a hidden Christian message behind what may be the most celebrated image of the 2024 Olympics.

On July 29, in round three of the shortboard surfing competition, Brazil’s Gabriel Medina faced off against Japan’s Kanoa Igarashi, who eliminated Medina in the last Olympics. In his second wave, Medina emerged from a tube exuberant, with both palms open, suggesting that the judges should offer him a 10 for his performance. (Two of the five judges agreed; his final score was 9.9).

Medina then pivoted left, toward the surf, and jumped off his board, raising his right hand and pointing his index finger upward. This was the image that Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet captured.

Brazilian evangelicals recognized the sign immediately.

“It's like he’s saying, ‘It's not me you should be looking at, it’s God. This moment of glory is not mine, but his,’” said João Guilherme Züge, a resident historian of religion at Museu Paranaense, in Curitiba.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdNDuAy-Bfo&t

In contrast to the United States, where baseball players often point to the sky after hitting home runs for different reasons—some to express gratitude to God, others to honor late loved ones—the gesture among Brazilian athletes has become closely associated with Christian players.

The raised finger, pointing to the sky, has been the trademark of Brazilian evangelical athletes for more than 40 years, one of numerous public displays of faith following competitive glory that have helped to affirm and establish evangelical identity, especially when the movement was still in its infancy.

No one seems to remember who initially created the gesture, but it gained popularity in the 1990s, primarily through soccer players, such as Kaka, who raised their index fingers after on-field heroics, knowing that the camera would be trained on them after they scored a goal.

Despite its ubiquitousness, the spiritual intent of the message hasn’t necessarily made its way outside of evangelical circles. “[Medina] really has the right and authority to consider himself number one,” Renata Vasconcellos, an anchor with Jornal Nacional on TV Globo, Brazil’s most-watched news program, commented on air last week, giving the raised finger a very different interpretation.

But its low-key, almost generic nature has also helped to make it so popular. Like the World Cup and other international competitions, the Olympics forbids any “kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda … in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

These regulations have forced athletes seeking a platform to share their faith to do so discreetly, or to express their gratitude to God in interviews or social media posts. For his part, Medina uploaded Brouillet’s photo accompanied by the text from Philippians 4:13: “I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”

Evangelical Brazilian athletes have been creative in their expressions of faith during this year’s Olympics. Skateboarder bronze medalist Rayssa Leal and silver medalist Caio Bonfim used sign language to refer to Jesus.

Medina, after losing in the semifinals to Australian Jack Robinson, shared a black-and-white photo of himself captioned “Josué 1”—referring to the chapter of the Bible in which Joshua admonishes the Israelites to be “strong and courageous” no less than four times—accompanied by the song “Ousado Amor,” a Portuguese version of Cory Asbury’s “Reckless Love.” On August 7, he uploaded a picture of himself outside the Louvre recreating his iconic photo, once again holding up his index finger.

Back in the 1980s, when evangelicals represented only 6.5 percent of Brazil’s population, “God’s goalkeeper” João Leite and striker Baltazar began Atletas de Cristo, a ministry with the goal of mobilizing athletes to share the gospel around the world. From the beginning—and spontaneously, says Züge—the finger pointing to the sky in goal celebrations became a mark for the movement.

Atletas de Cristo equipped athletes to see themselves as an ambassador for their faith and encouraged them to preach and share their testimonies wherever they went. (One fruit of this strategy: Brazilian goalkeeper Alisson Becker baptizing his Liverpool teammate Roberto Firmino in 2020.)

Atletas de Cristo was also enormously successful in raising Brazilian evangelicals’ self-esteem. A key moment came during the Brazil-Italy final in the 1994 FIFA World Cup. When neither team scored during regulation or overtime, the game went to a shootout. Brazil won on the final kick.

“The greatest image of that World Cup was when Italian star player Roberto Baggio missed his kick and Brazilian goalkeeper Taffarel, who had saved a previous shot, fell to his knees in prayer, pointing to the sky,” said Züge.

Brazilian goalkeeper Taffarel (right) celebrates after Roberto Baggio of Italy (left) misses his kick at the FIFA World Cup.

Such testimonies had an impact on Brazilian evangelicals.

“When Christians were watching the player make a beautiful move, score a goal in an important match and then celebrate with his finger pointing to the sky, they felt represented,” said Reinaldo Olécio Aguiar, sociologist and pastor of the Primeira Igreja Presbiteriana Unida de Vitória. “Even knowing they were part of a minority [at that time], they could see themselves as victorious.”

Taffarel had likely received some instruction on how to use this achievement of athletic triumph as a missional moment.

“From the start, Atletas de Cristo knew how to use the media,” said Züge. “Athletes were trained in how to give a testimony in 30 seconds and to take advantage of a live TV interview.”

This moment also changed how evangelical athletes were perceived by their fellow teammates.

“Before that, everybody mocked us,” said Anselmo Reichardt Alves, a former player who became a pastor and Brazilian team chaplain. “They used to say that we were babies, because we didn’t drink with them. Our masculinity was also questioned because we didn't date several women at the same time.”

Watching superstars express their faith openly also inspired evangelicals who faced criticism for trying to live out their own faith and eschewing popular traditions like Carnival.

“Our actions were like a mirror to other Christians; by watching the games they also learned to demonstrate their faith fearlessly,” said Züge. “People became more open to talk about God. If the players can do it, why not me?”

This boldness also may have inspired contemporary athletes to be bold in their faith.

“Sportspeople thanking God for their wins is nothing new, but the sheer number doing so at this Olympics is noteworthy—especially so in France, which has insisted on its own athletes upholding the country’s secularist laws,” wrote The Guardian commentator Emma John.

Atletas de Cristo has received criticism at times for encouraging victorious athletes to share their faith in ways that can insinuate that their achievements are a result of having more faith than others. Some have noted that they may tend to overlook the stories of losers, many of whom also often have personal relationships with God.

“What would I say when there are faithful Christians on both sides?” said Aguiar.

This was the case at the Paris Olympics during a bronze-medal match in 52-kilogram women’s judo between Brazil’s Larissa Pimenta and Italy’s Odette Giuffrida. (CT highlighted their story in its coverage of Olympic highlights.)

After Pimenta won the fight and clinched the bronze, she stayed on the mat crying. Giuffrida approached and hugged her. “Get up,” she said to Pimenta, as both athletes recounted later.“All honor and all glory you have to give to him.”

Giuffrida later shared on social media that she remembered the night Pimenta first took her to a church service after they began training together. “From that day on, our lives have changed. And today, here we are, regardless of what happened on that tatami, regardless of victory or defeat, thanking him in an Olympic final, in front of the world, for everything,” she wrote.

“And that is the beauty of it. I can feel sincere, I can feel myself with Him by my side.”

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Watching the Olympics as a French Christian

Interview by Morgan Lee

Evangelical leader Erwan Cloarec shares his reactions to the opening ceremony, why he is enjoying the games, and how he hopes the church is seizing the moment to live out its faith.

The Eiffel Tower with the Olympic Rings

David Ramos / Staff / Getty

On Sunday, at the start of the second week of the Olympics, France won its 44th medal, surpassing its previous record total for a modern Olympics. Few might have predicted either the country’s extraordinary athletic success or the this national joy, which seemed in short supply after contentious snap national elections in June and July.

But for some French Christians, negative feelings emerged again following the controversial opening ceremony. Erwan Cloarec, president of the Conseil National des Évangéliques de France (CNEF), noted this “distress” last week in a statement, adding that he and the director general of CNEF would be meeting with the Central Office of Religious Affairs at the Ministry of the Interior that day to advocate for a “secularism which makes room for everyone” and for “state guarantees that all, believers or not, will be respected in their essential convictions.”

Cloarec pointed out that many Christian ministries had spent months anticipating that the Olympics would offer them an opportunity to live out their faith to the thousands descending upon the city. Through Ensemble2024, evangelical congregations and ministries have organized community tournaments, a K-Pop worship service, an exhibition examining the intersections of body, sport, and spirituality, a day of surfing, and a praise festival, as well as handing out water bottles and hygienic products. They have also provided chaplains to athletes and offered opportunities for Christian athletes to share their testimonies.

“Let us see in the situation that has arisen a real opportunity to bear witness to our faith while the person of Christ has just been placed at the center of these games,” Cloraec stated. “Let us hear the cries of the heart and the need for reconciliation of our contemporaries, their quest for identity and belonging. They cry out in a pluralistic society; let us show them how to cry out louder to the one who invites them all to his table and offers true reconciliation, true identity and belonging.”

CT asked Cloarec to discuss French evangelical reaction to the opening ceremony, what he wants people to know about laïcité, and what he has loved about the Olympics this year.

How have you personally been a part of expressions of faith around the Olympics?

Ensemble2024 is really an evangelical Protestant initiative, but because of the spirit of the Olympic Games, we have connected with stakeholders of other faiths. There was an interfaith opening celebration in which I participated at the very beginning of the games. CNEF also attended another event that wasn’t an interreligious celebration, in that we didn’t have any type of religious service or acts but instead showcased the numerous religions in the city acting in service of the common good.

How did French evangelicals react to the Olympics’ opening ceremony?

People felt hurt and had a sense of being humiliated. I know that for many outside of France, the scene of the Lord’s Supper was wounding. There was this feeling that through this parody, this mockery of the Lord’s Supper, we were being targeted for our faith and that our faith was being mocked in a way, even if this wasn’t necessarily the real intention.

As the ceremony’s artistic director has explained—and we can accept—this wasn’t his intended meaning. But in any case, in the portrayal of this scene and the subversion of the Lord’s Supper in a contemporary and inclusive version, it felt as if certain symbols were being played with and Christianity was being targeted. So we reacted by acknowledging this feeling of humiliation that people felt and by denouncing the fact that in this ceremony there was an agenda to promote an ideology. Ideological propaganda wasn’t really appropriate during this ceremony.

How have any previous events informed the way in which French evangelicals responded to this one?

Obviously, this ceremony was quite unique. On the other hand, religious leaders and evangelical leaders in particular have been aware of what is referred to as the anti-separatism law of 2021 (renamed the Law to Uphold Republican Principles and the Fight Against Separatism). This law tightened the regulations for our churches and shifted France’s policy of laïcité [a distinctly French form of separation of church and state that has historically been viewed positively by French evangelicals] from a laïcité of freedom to a laïcité of surveillance.

This law brought new rules and regulations that make church organization more administratively complex, with new financial and legal constraints. So in this current moment, it’s possible that evangelicals, at least, are also expressing this larger, built-up feeling of despair that churches are being mistreated.

For our non-French readers, what is laïcité? Why did it come about?

What we call French-style secularism is indeed a specific system and one unfamiliar to those outside of France. The great fight we are waging is to ensure that secularism serves the objectives that it is called to serve—that is, freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, and freedom of religion.

To that end, French secularism should be at the service of religion. It is not there to repress it. It is there to allow everyone to believe freely or not to believe, to live as they wish according to their own values and according to their faith, with the possibility of sharing one's faith or one's atheism or whatever you want. The law guarantees it and has done so since the 1905 Law of Separation of Church and State.

This is the form of secularism that should prevail, but frequently, we have another reading of secularism that is sometimes used by the media or certain politicians. This other version would claim that secularism exists to return the exercise of worship to the private sphere, and ultimately to ensure that religion is seen as little as possible and is either hidden or silenced. So our fight is about the true system of secularism. Secularism is there to allow faith to express itself, including in the public space, without having to apologize for believing what we believe.

On a positive note, we appreciate the great freedom to express our faith that we evangelicals have experienced around the Olympics.

Are there aspects of secularism that we appreciate?

Basically, secularism is good if it is in the service of the fundamental freedom of worship.

One of the things that displeased us about the opening ceremony was that it had the blessing of the head of state and represented the Republic of France, which meant that it had to ensure that no citizen felt excluded or singled out. Secularism, which guarantees the neutrality of the state, is a strong value in France of the government. And yet, we had the feeling in this opening ceremony that the republic did not respect this principle of neutrality but instead targeted one religion in particular, notably by evoking the Last Supper.

If we defend the liberty of all, this includes artistic freedom, freedom of thought, and freedom to criticize Christianity. Demanding that believers should be free to defend their faith is consistent with affirming that non-believers can say what they think. They can criticize Christianity, Islam, or anything they want to in society.

This is a freedom that must be protected—to believe or not believe, to defend your faith or criticize faith. These are all necessary guarantees. But the opening ceremony of the Olympics is something different—it’s a ceremony representing the Republic of France, and in the name of the principle of neutrality, they need to be careful in this context to respect each person.

What have you loved about the games?

Outside of this unfortunate episode in the opening ceremony, by all other measures it was a creative success, and the Olympic Games, according to what I hear in the media, seem to be a success. So, as French people, we are proud that the games are running smoothly. In Paris, so many well-organized venues have been integrated among the city’s historic monuments. This is beautiful and remarkable. It is a well-oiled machine. We can be proud that the first week of these games has been a success for France.

We are proud and enthusiastic for swimmer Léon Marchand and judoka Teddy Riner. [Marchand won four individual gold medals and one relay bronze, and Riner earned gold medals in both individual and team judo.] We had a great first week!

Finally, all the Ensemble2024 stakeholders and participants are grateful for everything that is happening, the contacts we have made, the expressions of the gospel throughout the games, and the hope we have for beyond the Olympics.

With additional help by Kami Rice and Landry Ndikumasabo.

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News

Died: Doris Brougham, Missionary Who Taught English to Taiwan

Yiting Tsai

For more than 70 years, Brougham used Studio Classroom and her trumpet to introduce Taiwan to Jesus.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Doris Brougham, an American missionary, who for 70 years used English and music to share Christ with millions of Taiwanese people, died Tuesday at the age of 98. Through radio, television, magazines, live performances, and in-person classes, Brougham’s organization Overseas Radio & Television (ORTV) taught everyone from dignitaries to middle school students how to speak English. At the same time, she held weekly English Bible studies and started a popular Christian singing group called Heavenly Melody.

Brougham’s contributions to Taiwan led her to receive its highest civilian award, the Order of the Brilliant Star with Violet Grand Cordon, in 2002. Last year, then-president Tsai Ing-wen made an appearance on ORTV’s show Studio Classroom to hand-deliver Brougham a Taiwanese passport, a special honor given 72 years after she first arrived in Taiwan.

“Her story brings tears to [my] eyes,” wrote former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou in the preface of the 1998 Chinese-language biography on Brougham. “She is the English teacher of 20 million people [the population of Taiwan], cultivating countless professionals in the English education field. … How many people have listened to her broadcasts and read her articles? Surely more than 20 million.” While, today, Brougham is the most well-known American in Taiwan—where Christians make up 7 percent of the population—she never planned to come to Taiwan in the first place. The missionary’s initial aim was to minister to mainland China, but the Chinese Civil War forced her to change plans and move to Taiwan (then called Formosa). Her love of music led her to start the first Christian radio station, the beginning of what became a popular media ministry.

“I was just here to serve because God led me here,” Brougham told CNA in 2023. “I just thought about doing that each day. Then days became months and then years, and, wow, here I am 72 years later!"

Doris Brougham was born in 1926 in Seattle, the sixth of eight children. Her father was a mechanic, while her mother stayed at home. Despite living through the Great Depression, her mother taught her and her siblings to think of ways to help the less fortunate, according to the biography.

Brougham’s parents passed down to her a love of music. One time, when Brougham was a child, her father’s client could not afford to pay for car repairs and begged to use his saxophone as payment. After her father gave the saxophone to Doris, she began practicing every day and joined her school orchestra. Later, she learned how to play the trumpet and the French horn, instruments that would accompany her the rest of her life. Even into her 90s, Brougham would play her trumpet onstage at rallies around Taiwan. The call to China came at a summer Bible camp when Brougham was 12. Chinese evangelist Ji Zhiwen asked the crowd of Americans, “Who would like to go to China and help the people there in their need?” As Brougham raised her hand, the adults around her laughed, thinking that she had no idea what she was signing up for, Brougham recalled in her biography.

Five years later, while debating whether to take a full-ride scholarship to the Eastman School of Music, Brougham remembered her promise to go to China. Psalm 2:8 came to mind: “Ask me, and I will make the nations your heritage, the ends of the earth your possession.” Brougham responded to God, “If you need me, I would go to the farthest ends of the earth for you.” After finishing Bible school, Brougham joined the Evangelical Alliance Mission and boarded a steamer for China in the spring of 1948. Shortly after arriving in China, the civil war intensified. Brougham and other missionaries made their way from Shanghai to Lanzhou to Hong Kong to escape the fighting. Along the way, she dressed soldiers’ wounds, led Bible studies in refugee camps, and preached to ethnic Tanka people. Eventually, the missionaries were forced to leave mainland China, so in 1951, Brougham moved to Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had established the Republic of China.

Unlike most missionaries who resided in the more populous western half of the island, Brougham chose to go to Hualien on the eastern coast. She soon found that her Mandarin was no help, as the aboriginals she ministered to spoke either local languages or Japanese, due to Japanese colonization. Still, she built friendships with local children by playing the trumpet and teaching them to sing, and slowly learned the language. During her time there, she taught music at Yu-Shan Theological College, trained Sunday school teachers, and started a small church.

Brougham learned that to reach people, “you had to do something to get their attention,” she told World magazine. “You have to connect, not just communicate.” She decided to start Taiwan’s first Christian radio program in 1951 to reach more people with the gospel. The show included choir singing, preaching, skits, and, of course, her trumpet playing.

Brougham told World that, at the time, she liked to ride her bike while the program was on and hear people on the streets and in the temples listening to it (at the time, Taiwan was about 99 percent Buddhist). Once, Brougham said a Buddhist nun called her over and secretly asked where she could find a Bible. Seeing her success, Far Eastern Broadcasting Company asked her to develop more Mandarin programs that were broadcast into mainland China. In a time when English resources were scarce, leaders in Taiwan, including then-president Chiang Kai-shek, asked Brougham to teach government officials. At one point, her students included members of Chiang’s cabinet.

In 1962, the Ministry of Education asked the state-run radio station to produce a radio program to teach English. The company asked Brougham to lead it, and Studio Classroom was born. Listeners asked for the show to print its on-air dialogues so they could follow along at home, which gave rise to the Studio Classroom magazine.

When the first TVs came to Taiwan that same year, Taiwan had only one station, and Brougham needed to compete with Buddhist and Catholic groups to clinch the solo slot available for religious programming. Because her show had music, producers chose it. She remembers people crowding around the rare television inside temples to watch sermons and choirs singing hymns. “How often can you preach in a Buddhist temple?” Brougham told World. “God had a plan for that to happen.”

Yet the new gospel broadcasting ministry, ORTV, lacked funds. Brougham considered selling the saxophone her father had given her in childhood. With a heavy heart, she thought, If I can’t part with my own belongings, how can I expect others to help us? She ended up selling it. To raise money, Doris returned to the US several times, sharing her vision with churches and Christian business owners. She encouraged her introverted self by saying, This is not for myself; it’s for God.

Her TV program featured a choir called Heavenly Melody Singers, which became the first Christian singing group in Taiwan. Heavenly Melody has since recorded more than 30 albums and toured in 36 countries.

Over the decades, the music and English teaching ministries continued to grow. Studio Classroom’s programs and magazines expanded to include Let’s Talk in English for younger students and Advanced. Today, the Studio Classroom TV show incorporates puppets, music, and on-the-ground travelogues in its English teaching, while its teachers travel around Taiwan holding rallies at public schools. ORTV also continues to hold English classes for government officials, as well as weekly Bible studies for students across Taipei. The late Christian artist Sun Yue stated that, in Taiwan, almost everyone under the age of 60 who can speak English grew up listening to Studio Classroom, especially as schools used the magazine and radio program to build up their students’ English skills. He said Doris’s life was “legendary,” because she held on to convictions she made at the age of 12 and maintained them throughout her life. “Everyone needs to learn about Teacher Doris’s life and her choices, which are completely different from the values of this society,” he added.

In 2001, heavy rains and flooding from Typhoon Nari severely damaged ORTV’s expensive production equipment and building. But Brougham encouraged the staff by saying, “Don’t be sad about what we’ve lost; these are just tools. The most important thing is that we are all here and can continue to serve God.”

Through the years, Brougham, who never married, worked tirelessly. She once recalled a conversation with Billy Graham, where she asked the evangelist whether she should retire at 65. He responded by saying, “Doris, [retirement] is not in the Bible.” Brougham took that advice to heart as she continued to work at the ORTV office until the age of 97, even as she relied on a wheelchair to get around.

During a Christmas concert last December, Doris shared with the audience: “I’ve been in Asia for more than 70 years, and I’ve always told people that God loves everyone so much that he sent his only son, Jesus, into the world to die on the cross for our sins, so that we could be forgiven of our sins and spend eternity with him.”

According to her will, she plans to donate everything she had and will be buried in Taipei.

With additional reporting by Angela Lu Fulton.

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News

Walz’s Brand Is More Left than Lutheran Among Minnesota Evangelicals

Harvest Prude

Despite his folksy Midwestern dad persona, conservative Christians say the governor has alienated the Right with his policies on abortion, transgender youth, and COVID restrictions.

Tim Walz

Stephen Maturen / Getty Images

Some Minnesotans don’t recognize Gov. Tim Walz in the vaunted coverage he’s received since becoming Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s pick for vice president this week.

Walz, 60, is a self-described “Minnesota Lutheran,” belonging to the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), according to Religion News Service. Profiles of the former teacher turned politician are punctuated with descriptors like folksy and avuncular.

“He’s touting himself as the everyday Midwestern dad,” but his administration has been far more polarizing in the state, according to Julie Johnson, a fourth-generation Minnesotan and a member of an Evangelical Free congregation in a Minneapolis suburb. She said that, under his leadership, Walz has swung the state to the left on basically every issue, alienating religious conservatives along the way.

Walz won the governor’s mansion in 2018. But rather than sticking to the moderate “One Minnesota” approach that he promised on the campaign trail and that characterized his time in the House of Representatives, Walz’s priority has been “more of a war on our culture,” Johnson said.

Johnson, an advocate for a Christian nonprofit, pointed to a host of progressive policies his administration enacted: signing a law that makes abortion a right in the state at any point in a pregnancy, legalizing marijuana, giving driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, and making the state a “refuge” for those seeking gender transitions.

His COVID-19 era policies also earned chagrin from conservatives as he restricted church gatherings and set up a hotline for people to report those who breached social distancing policies.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, on behalf of the Minnesota Catholic Conference and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS, the more conservative Lutheran denomination), negotiated with the Walz administration after it initially prevented houses of worship from having services of more than ten people while allowing retailers to resume operating at 50 percent capacity. There was a lawsuit before the state allowed church services to be less restricted.

Other Christians in Minnesota said that while Walz could shore up Democratic enthusiasm for left-leaning voters, he wasn’t the kind of politician who could appeal to conservatives.

Walz’s parents were Catholic, according to the Star Tribune, and he has periodically posted about attending worship services, sometimes at Pilgrim Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation in St. Paul. In Minnesota, 20 percent of the population identifies as mainline Lutheran, compared to just 2.1 percent of Americans overall, according to Pew Research Center polling.

While the denomination is progressive, the politics in the pews of ELCA churches present a more mixed picture. In 2020, a slight majority of ELCA Lutherans voted for Trump, noted researcher Ryan Burge.

Among the ELCA, around 43 percent identified as or leaned Republican, and 47 percent identified as or leaned Democrat, Pew found. Around 24 percent identified as liberal, 41 percent as moderate, and 32 percent as conservative.

The LCMS, meanwhile, identified as or leaned Republican by nearly 60 percent, with 27 percent identifying as or leaning Democrat. A much higher percentage (52%) identified as conservative, compared to only 33 percent as moderate and 10 percent as liberal.

Here's Trump's vote share in the 20 largest majority white Protestant denominations in 2020.

He earned at least 55% of the vote in 12 of them.
He earned at least 47% in 19 of them.

There's only one denomination that was strongly for Biden – the Episcopal Church. pic.twitter.com/wo33GLkA8w
— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) April 21, 2024

If elected, Walz would be the second vice president to both hail from Minnesota and identify with Lutheranism: Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was raised Lutheran.

“His name does not come to mind when I think of a faith leader,” Julie Johnson said.

Lutherans who hail from the evangelical LCMS denomination don’t see Walz’s candidacy as a boon for more representation of their faith.

“For the average Missouri Synod member, both pastor and lay member, [Walz] absolutely will not be seen as one of us,” Hans Fiene, a Lutheran pastor in Missouri and creator of Lutheran Satire, a multimedia project to teach about the Lutheran faith, told CT. “So there won’t be any kind of situation like with Biden being a Catholic, where Catholics go, Well, he doesn’t really represent us, but he’s still a Catholic.”

“He’s really not representing our worldview,” Greg Seltz, director of the Lutheran Center for Religious Liberty in Washington, DC, an advocacy arm of the LCMS, told CT. “I’m not judging him by the official teachings of the ELCA, you know, I’m judging him by his policies, which is the way I think we should judge a candidate.”

Seltz mentioned Walz’s positions on abortion as disqualifying. He said that while Walz wasn’t a familiar figure to him initially, since the announcement, he’s heard numerous concerns from pro-life Lutheran groups and other conservative Christians.

“The whole way he’s being presented to us is that he’s just a moderate country boy from Minnesota,” Seltz said. “He’s a very, very progressive, very, very left-wing governor.”

It’s likely, though, that faith—and denominational schisms—will not be a focus for Walz as he goes about introducing himself to the public.

At a talk earlier this year, Walz hinted at his understated approach to religion: “Because we’re good Minnesota Lutherans, we have a rule: If you do something good and talk about it, it no longer counts.”

“So what you have to do is to get someone else to talk about you,” he added.

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Books

Review

What Churches Lose When They Fight like the World Fights

Kate Lucky

A journalist counts the cost of prolonged cultural conflict in the life of one fractured congregation.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels

By now, you’ve seen the statistics. In the United States, churches are shrinking. Christian belief is waning. “Nones” comprise a greater share of the population than Protestants or Catholics. And the trendlines don’t look good.

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

Eliza Griswold (Author)

352 pages

$22.49

By now, you’ve also seen the explanations—many of them published in the pages of Christianity Today. Leadership crises, denominational tussles, and sexual-abuse scandals have depleted the trust congregants have in their pastors. Congregations have split over political candidates and masks and vaccines and critical race theory and LGBTQ inclusion and women in leadership.

These explanations are right. But to me at least, they increasingly feel like a set of abstractions. They’ve been repeated so many times over the past several years as to have lost their meaning—so rote, by now, as to obscure particularities.

In her new book Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Eliza Griswold offers no such obfuscation. Through painstaking observation of one church over many years—Circle of Hope, a progressive evangelical community with “cells” across New Jersey and Pennsylvania—she reveals how the histories, gifts, and besetting sins of particular Christians in specific circumstances react to monolithic cultural pressures. Through her reporting—rigorous, expertly paced, never polemical—she also reveals what’s at stake.

Utter estrangement

Circle of Hope was founded in 1996 by former Jesus Freaks Rod and Gwen White. From the very beginning, the Anabaptist congregation ran counter to the predominant political and cultural conservatism of the Religious Right. Rod wore jeans and used a music stand as a lectern; congregants interrupted and asked him questions. An alternative music scene thrummed. In the years to come, the pacifist Christians at Circle would protest drone strikes and illegal gun sales; the church made reparations to its Black members, raised money for a bail fund, and lobbied for affordable housing.

These activities notwithstanding, Circle wasn’t meant to be a political project. Rod “considered himself an activist,” as Griswold reports, “but he also taught the risks of not keeping Jesus at the center of one’s life.” Circle read Scripture together, marked Easter with a sunrise service and cross-marked cookies, and baptized people in the filthy Delaware River. “Battling the forces of evil didn’t mean simply backing progressive political causes,” writes Griswold. “Jesus was calling for a far more radical transformation of society”—not just new policies but new creation.

But what’s the difference between a stance and a Spirit-led truth? Where can the church “agree to disagree,” and where must it dig in its heels? What’s woke—and what’s the gospel?

Over time, disagreement on the answers to these questions caused Circle of Hope to shut down. (No spoilers there; Griswold makes clear from the introduction where the 2020s are headed.) She documents the dissolution through the stories of four pastors: Ben, Julie, Rachel, and Jonny, as well as Bethany, a prominent Black member of the congregation.

The five of them disagree about plenty. In particular, they fight over race and racism, power and authority. Eventually, factions form. Members start leaving. Members stop giving. The church leaves its denomination over the decision to become LGBTQ affirming. The pastors disentangle themselves. “Both sides cast the other as the reason people were fleeing from Circle,” writes Griswold. “Jonny explained the emptying out as a result of the legacy of whiteness and abuse.” Those aligned with the founding family, the Whites, “saw people fed up with fighting, and with Jonny.”

In the hands of a lesser writer, the breakup’s bureaucracy—statements, Zooms, masked meetings, emails, a consultant—would be tedious. But Griswold sustains a lively narrative. This is a story not of hijacked agendas and out-of-line reply-alls but of utter estrangement. It’s riveting, and it’s painful.

It’s also actually inclusive. In Circle of Hope, Griswold manages to enact what her observed church could not, allowing different points of view to coexist in its pages. She brings equal parts scrutiny and grace to her flawed characters, offering their backstories not as an excuse for their often troublesome behavior but as context for understanding them as whole people. Ben, one of the White sons, yells at his colleagues in meetings. He’s also a hospital chaplain, a father taking his sons to look at the stars. Jonny sends bitter tweets and draws hard lines. He’s also a skilled chef, the child of evangelicals who fled persecution in Egypt.

But all the context in the world isn’t enough for the pastors and their congregants to find common ground. What’s wrong with church, it seems, is what’s wrong with the rest of American life: We’re angry. We’re stressed out. We’re lonely. Our polarization mirrors the divides elsewhere, across politics and geography and socioeconomic class. We’re no better, it seems. If this is how Christian brothers and sisters treat each other—with skepticism and rage and sneering—well, then … what’s the loss when a church closes down?

The work persists

Of course, there’s the loss of communal worship, which at Circle is admittedly hard to pin down. In the years since its founding, in ways obvious and subtle, it seems to have strayed from historic orthodoxy. It’s often hard to tell where “creative” ends and woo-woo begins. Griswold doesn’t try to make the distinction, merely describing the scriptural exegesis, “Creative Play,” and meditation practices she observes.

Ultimately, those splintering questions listed above boil down to spiritual ones. Is Jonny’s conviction just crass opportunism? Is Julie an ally out of cowardice or conviction? Is Ben really trying his best? Does “love your neighbor” mean calling them out, flipping the temple tables? Though Griswold can observe the fruit of the Spirit—who’s humble, who’s kind—it’s impossible for even the sharpest journalist to know the depths of a human heart. She can’t assess the sincerity of a prayer or the closeness of an individual’s relationship with Christ.

Easier to document is the loss of hands and feet, the absence of the body of Christ working together to make the kingdom come. Even where the Circle’s theology or polity is flawed, this loss is evident.

For years, members watched each other’s children and paid down each other’s debt. They ran community thrift stores and donated the proceeds. They served spaghetti to people on the street, inviting them into the warmth.

“There was an absolute kindness in this community, a living example of being ‘in the world but not of it.’ The depth of their devotion was inspiring,” writes Griswold. “And then the world banged its fist against the glass door.”

Even when Circle ends, its individual Christians persist. As the church comes apart, Rachel picks up a relapsed addict and delivers him to an emergency room. Once he’s no longer a pastor, Ben, in his capacity as a hospital chaplain, holds a dying baby and tells him to “Go into the arms of the Lord.”

The church, after all, isn’t a collection of buildings, a sheaf of paperwork, a name. As long as its people persist, its work goes on.

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

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Theology

You Cannot Lie Your Way to the Truth

Russell Moore

Falsehoods are easy to tell in politics, and they can even creep into the church. But nothing takes us farther from the Truth himself.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

When Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate this week, some people took to social media to contrast him with his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance. Lots of those contrasts were fair game—that of a former high school coach versus a Yale venture capitalist, for instance. Some people framed the contrast this way, though—Walz is a normal guy, while Vance is a weirdo who has sex with couches.

The past several years have required sentences I never imagined I would write. Here’s another: J. D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. I believe the proposition I just wrote to be true, and my opinion of the politics or personality of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has nothing whatsoever to do with that belief.

Some might stop me at this point to note that everybody knows that J. D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. It’s a joke; a social media meme, started when someone posted a parody, allegedly from Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. These people know, however, that most people don’t follow the genealogy of memes back to their origins. Many people just start to think, “J. D. Vance is sort of a freak; people say he did something with a couch one time.”

The Vance couch meme-posters can have it both ways. They can kind of do what the Bible describes as deceiving one’s neighbor and then say, “I was only joking!” (Prov. 26:19). Beyond that, they can say, “Well, of course, Vance did not literally have sex with a couch. The point is that Vance is kind of weird; the couch just makes the point.”

If this were just this momentary meme, it could be passed over and forgotten. But it happens all the time. Sarah Palin never actually said, “I can see Russia from my house.” Barack Obama never advocated for death panels for grandma. That’s what happens in politics, especially in a social media era. And, after all, most people don’t really believe the Vance couch memes; it just helps with morale. It won’t actually hurt Vance.

The problem for those who belong to Christ, though, is when the fallenness of a fallen world starts to feel normal. The problem is when you start to think your lies can serve the truth as long as the vibes feel right and the outcome is what you want.

In her new book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum discusses the tactics employed by authoritarian regimes such as that of the Chinese Communist Party. These regimes have learned, Applebaum argues, the power of pro-freedom dissidents of the past, such as Václav Havel, who refused to symbolically lie (think of his famous example of the greengrocer who refuses to put the “Workers of the world, unite!” sign up in his store). To undermine such truth-telling, they employ social media “to spread false rumors and conspiracy theories” so as to “turn the language of human rights, freedom and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal.”

Applebaum cites Freedom House’s description of this kind of propaganda pressure as “civil death,” meant to sever those who do not lie the way the party commands from their communities, to inundate them with lies so that even their friends and families start to think, “Well, there must be something to some of this, since these controversies are always there.”

This does not have to happen in matters of big life-and-death political dissent and repression. I’ve seen it happen to countless pastors—especially those who dare to preach what the Bible has to say about racial hatred. It doesn’t matter that “He’s a Marxist” or “He’s a liberal” are absurd charges. The game is just to say them long enough that the people who know they are lies get tired of the truth—so that they will, if not embrace the lie, at least fear the liars enough to get quiet.

On the geopolitical level, the metaphor of “civil death” is appropriate—even when it doesn’t work—because the Bible ties lying so closely to murder. Of the devil, Jesus said: “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44, ESV throughout).

The first lie recorded in Scripture is that of the Serpent saying to the woman, “You will not surely die,” telling her the forbidden tree would grant her godlike powers (Gen. 3:4–5). This deception severed her first from the Word of God and thus from the Tree of Life (v. 24).

I suppose a (literal) devil’s advocate could try to say that the Serpent’s lie was for a good goal. After all, does not God, ultimately, want human beings to be able to discern good from evil (Heb. 5:14)? Even those too scared to give such justifications to the Devil’s lies are often able to make similar arguments for their own. This is why the apostle Paul denounces the one who might say, “But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?” (Rom. 3:7–8).

Jesus is not just the one telling us the truth; he is the truth (John 14:6). To distort the truth into a half-truth or a quarter-truth to advance a lie is a personal assault not just on the person you are lying about, or the issue you claim to support, but on Jesus Christ himself.

The problem, then, is not just what that does to whoever you’re lying about; the problem is what the lying does to you. Outside the gates of the kingdom, John tells us, are “everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Rev. 22:15). The grace of God is amazing, and can redeem into truth those who lie, but it doesn’t do so by leaving liars to their lies. Those who would tell us that evil can be overcome by evil are not just lying to you but to themselves (Rom. 12:21; 1 John 1:8).

In a politically idolatrous age, simply refusing to lie about one’s opponents will be viewed as an act of betrayal. It will make you vulnerable to suspicion that you are not really “one of us,” whoever “us” is defined to be. Lying, then, is easy. It fits with the pattern of the world, and it will protect you from the mob. Sometimes, the pressure is even stronger where the church takes a welcoming and affirming posture toward liars, as long as they lie about the right people.

But what if God is telling us the truth that there’s a judgment seat? In that case, it becomes far more consequential to stand on the other side of it and ask, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). After all, we already know the answer from the voice—once on the dock, now on the throne. His answer is what it always was: “I Am.”

News

Gordon College Loses Religious Liberty Argument for Loan Forgiveness

Daniel Silliman

Evangelical school sees discrimination in COVID-19 relief fund’s employee-counting rules.

Elizabeth Thomsen / Flickr

Gordon College could be on the hook to repay $7 million of COVID-19 relief funds. A federal court rejected eight of the evangelical school’s arguments that it should be eligible for loan forgiveness.

Gordon’s lawyers made the case that the religious liberty protections in the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act should allow the institution to count employees in a different way than the US Small Business Administration (SBA) said they had to be counted. The US district court in Washington, DC, rejected the argument, citing a lack of evidence.

“Plaintiff alleges no facts connecting its number of employees to any religious practice,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote in a ruling handed down in July. “Plaintiff fails to identify any ‘exercise of religion’ that has been burdened, and thus plaintiff’s claims can be dismissed on this basis alone.”

According to the government, Gordon has 639 employees on its wooded campus on the North Shore of Boston. Some of those people only work part time, however. So the school calculated the full-time equivalent, which is a common way to track enrollment in higher education. If you don’t tally individual people working at the school, but instead count units of time worked, Gordon only has 495.67 employees.

Organizations with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for loan forgiveness.

The government gave out nearly $800 billion as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2020. The vast majority of recipients have since had their debt waived. Gordon is an exception.

“Gordon College followed the procedures given at the time of the loan application,” the school said in a statement, “and most importantly, used these funds completely in the manner in which they were presented by the SBA: to avoid layoffs of employees and continue to provide them with a paycheck even though the College was forced to shut down operations for months.”

In court filings, the law firm Gammon and Grange said the SBA’s decision not to forgive the school’s $7 million loan was “legally erroneous and arbitrary and capricious on the merits.” It was also, the attorneys claim, religious discrimination.

Gordon, which has about 1,300 students enrolled in undergraduate programs, requested a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan in April 2020. The application form asked for a count of employees, and Gordon gave the number: 495.67. The school’s lawyers say the method of counting the full-time equivalent was clearly indicated.

According to Gordon, more than 25 other colleges and universities also used the full-time equivalent to calculate loan eligibility. Most applicants, however, just counted people.

No one was sure if there was a “right” way, at the time.

“There was widespread confusion,” Gordon’s lawsuit says, “about what method to determine the number of employees should be used.”

At the end of April, the SBA put out a statement on its FAQ page about full-time equivalent counts. The government agency said the number of employees should be determined by a simple head count, treating full- and part-time employees equally. The SBA also clarified that the 500-employee cap only applied to loan forgiveness. Organizations with more employees than that would still be considered eligible for funding but would be required to pay the money back.

By that time, though, Gordon had already gotten its loan from Citizens Bank, a PPP partner, and was using the money to keep the 639 people who worked at the school employed.

Court records indicate that the school didn’t learn of the issue with its eligibility for loan forgiveness until November 2021, when Citizens Bank said in an email that the SBA needed an “employee count per location.” The school responded within a few days, giving the government a new number, based on a head count: 639.

In April 2022, the SBA notified Gordon that its application for loan forgiveness was denied.

Gordon appealed and then appealed again, taking the SBA to court.

The lawyers claimed that the “SBA Court refused to even consider an exemption or other relief from a cramped and unconstitutional interpretation of the ‘500 employee’ threshold.” Even worse, the SBA “discriminated against Plaintiff-Petitioner, an evangelical Christian college with religiously and socially conservative views, by treating other, similarly situated religious colleges better than it has Plaintiff-Petitioner.”

Gordon alleges that 25 other schools that counted employees the same way were forgiven loans of $5 to $10 million each.

Judge Howell ruled, however, that Gordon did not back up that claim with sufficient evidence. Many of the other schools that Gordon pointed to were, in fact, also Christian institutions. The lawyers mentioned Wheaton College, Trevecca Nazarene University, Drew University, and St. Mary’s College Notre Dame.

Gordon, Howell wrote, “offers no facts to support its conclusory allegation that these 25 other colleges are similarly situated—much less similarly situated in all respects except religious affiliation.”

Howell also found there wasn’t evidence to show that counting employees was connected to religion at all.

“No allegation is made that the 500-employee cap or SBA’s methods for counting employees were enacted to target or single out any religious conduct or institutions,” the judge wrote, “nor that the cap or employee-counting methodology employed have an adverse impact on religion.”

And according to Howell, there isn’t even evidence that SBA officials knew Gordon was a Christian school.

The Massachusetts college is not the only PPP loan recipient that has been told it will have to pay the money back. The SBA has manually audited about 2 percent of all PPP loans and denied forgiveness to about 0.2 percent. That works out to around 21,000 organizations that will have to pay back relief money.

According to some experts, the approval process was rushed in response to the fear of financial crisis brought on by the pandemic. That allowed for a lot of fraud—as well as many honest mistakes.

“A lot of the details were very unclear to businesses and banks,” Eric Lichatin, a commercial loan officer who handled PPP applications for a bank in Rhode Island, told NPR.

Steven Mnuchin, who was treasury secretary under Donald Trump and oversaw the program design, had said that the needs of small businesses were too urgent to set up a lengthy loan review process in 2020. But he assured a House oversight committee in 2020 that there would be more careful scrutiny when it came time to forgive loans.

“We are going to have a very robust process,” he said. “People will be required to provide much more data.”

One lawyer who advises PPP borrowers for a New Jersey law firm said that has happened, and now the SBA is “playing hardball” on loan forgiveness.

Some borrowers—including a car dealership in New Jersey and a fitness club in Missouri—are fighting back in court. Gordon appears to be the only one, however, making religious liberty claims for loan forgiveness.

Those arguments were rejected. The school’s other arguments will go forward, with lawyers arguing the decision to deny the loan was a legal error, “made in excess of SBA’s statutory authority, and constituted an abuse of discretion (to the extent it had discretion),” and that it was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.

“We believe those do provide sufficient grounds for the Court to reverse the SBA’s denial of forgiveness,” Gordon said in a statement, “and hope to see a favorable resolution of this issue in the future. “

This story was updated with quotes from a statement from Gordon that was unavailable at time of publicaiton.

- More from Daniel Silliman

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