New & Noteworthy Books

Chosen by Matt Reynolds, CT senior books editor.

Illustrations by Tara Anand

The Crisis of Civil Law: What the Bible Teaches about Law and What It Means Today

Benjamin B. Saunders (Lexham Press)

Across the Western world, the concept of law is highly contested. What makes the law worthy of respect? How do we apply it without corruption or favoritism? Christians, whose own divisions on law and politics often mirror those in surrounding society, approach these questions with added burdens, argues Australian law professor Benjamin B. Saunders. They know, for instance, that secular laws can conflict with Christian morality or, in extreme cases, be wielded as tools of persecution. Moreover, they know they answer to a higher law. In The Crisis of Civil Law, Saunders clarifies the thorny relationship between rival decrees of God and earthly governments.

Waiting Isn’t a Waste: The Surprising Comfort of Trusting God in the Uncertainties of Life

Mark Vroegop (Crossway)

Some forms of waiting look like nothing more than minor inconveniences: a jammed-up highway, for instance, or a slow-moving checkout lane. Other forms are weightier, such as extended seasons of sorrow, pain, relational rupture, or existential despair. In all these cases, waiting can test our patience and steal our joy. In his book Waiting Isn’t a Waste, pastor and author Mark Vroegop asks how we can experience life’s numerous “gaps” as occasions for trusting in God’s fatherly care rather than marinating in frustration or futility. As he affirms, “Waiting on God is living on what I know to be true about God when I don’t know what’s true about my life.”

When the Church Harms God’s People: Becoming Faith Communities That Resist Abuse, Pursue Truth, and Care for the Wounded

Diane Langberg (Brazos Press)

As a psychologist, Diane Langberg has done extensive counseling with trauma survivors, many of whom suffered under abusive church leaders. In her latest book, When the Church Harms God’s People, Langberg distills lessons from her long career, examining why churches promote and protect predatory figures. She also explores how local congregations can reform their cultures to better ensure safe, flourishing flocks. Writing of her love for the church, Langberg notes that God “has entrusted his lambs to shepherds who would guard them well… The church is to be a place where sheep can safely graze. To fail the sheep is to fail our Lord.”

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "New & Noteworthy".

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Books

Review

Tending and Keeping the Christian Past in an ‘Ahistoric Age’

Christopher Gehrz

Why the work of historical stewardship isn’t just for historians.

Illustration by Tim Bouckley

You may have heard this story before: While studying the past at Oxford, an atheist scholar converts to Christianity.

But this isn’t the story of C. S. Lewis. This is the tale of Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, an Australian historian who was appointed as a research fellow at Oxford after earning her doctorate at Cambridge. There, she experienced “a discomforting realisation,” as she recalls in her new book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. “Every achievement merely landed me at the bottom of another ladder.”

Lacking “a larger narrative that might give me a normative vision of human flourishing, a transcendent grounding for morality, or even a means of addressing life’s ultimate concerns,” Irving-Stonebraker began to read theology and attend church as her academic career continued. While teaching in Florida, she observed Christians take Communion one Sunday morning to the sounds of a hymn whose “words and music took me out of Tallahassee, out of myself, and into a much larger story. . . . There seemed to be a purpose to human history and to time, after all.”

Her conversion overcame not only an atheistic worldview but also a larger sense of living “an ahistorical life.” Though she studied the past professionally, she hadn’t learned to see herself “as a part of any enduring historical communities that might help frame a deeper purpose for my life.” Instead, she had been formed by what she calls the “Ahistoric Age,” whose residents are unwilling to “think of ourselves as historical beings” and are virtually unable “to engage meaningfully with the past.”

As Irving-Stonebraker observes, becoming a Christian offered her “the ultimate story about a God who . . . pursued us by inhabiting time,” a story that “seemed to make sense of human history.” But it also carried a divine calling: “to tend and keep time, including the past. In short, we are to be a witness to the past, cultivate it, and keep uncovering the stories and ideas that comprise the history of the world.”

Tending the past (“uncovering the historical stories of people sometimes overlooked, bringing historical injustices to light, and recognising the sins of the past, including our own,” as Irving-Stonebraker puts it) and keeping it (“protecting and passing down historical knowledge and our heritage as Christians”) is not just the work of historians. Irving-Stonebraker describes stewardship of the past as the responsibility of all members of God’s common priesthood—which is to say, all believers.

This requires a broader definition of “history” than academic historians may find comfortable, but she suggests specific ways that professors, pastors, and parents alike can tend and keep the past.

Irving-Stonebraker brings to her book the skills of a gifted scholar. Her seamless integration of examples from history, theology, and literature testifies to the many ways that stewarding the past can further intellectual formation. Her particular studies in the history of science inform her larger project. In one instance, she cites Robert Boyle, a 17th-century Irish chemistry pioneer, whose notion of the scientist as “priest of nature” inspires her conception of Christians as “priests of history.” And her research into Francis Bacon’s views on colonial expansion illustrates how we can avoid reducing history to “ideological simplicity.”

Irving-Stonebraker is at her best when sharing stories—not just those of long-dead scientists and theologians but those of family and friends practicing stewardship of the past today. Hearing from someone with her background, an Australian Anglican who studies early modern Europe, broadens our view of the Christian story and reminds American readers that theirs is not the only nation that struggles with its complicated past.

Moreover, such anecdotes underscore Irving-Stonebraker’s argument that “we embed our identity in stories.” To postmodern people who feel adrift from the currents of history, storytelling about the past offers a powerful way to understand who we are—and whose we are.

Alas, Irving-Stonebraker waits until the very last pages of Priests of History to fully tell her best story: that of her own journey from atheism to Christianity. It was jarring, for one thing, to have the conversion narrative that began the book continue only in occasional snippets. Had she prioritized her story at the outset, Irving-Stonebraker could have given readers a more vivid impression of our modern alienation from history.

Instead, she opens with loud condemnations of a secular worldview that stresses creating our own identities by liberating ourselves from inherited traditions. If one problem with the Ahistoric Age is its tendency to reduce the past to sweeping generalizations, then the solution is not to make similarly unsubtle claims about the present. But Irving-Stonebraker falls into that trap when she issues broad-brush statements like this: “We believe that the past is merely a source of shame and oppression from which we must free ourselves. . . . We do not believe history has a narrative or a purpose.”

I don’t doubt that many people nowadays—as in previous eras—do find the past irrelevant, if they aren’t ignoring it altogether or looking at it through the lens of ideology. But early on in Priests of History, there’s far too little of the nuance, empathy, humility, and comfort with complexity that Irving-Stonebraker rightly associates with historical study at its finest.

Take, for instance, how she presents the global phenomenon of “protests about and tearing down of statues.” While Irving-Stonebraker acknowledges that these actions take place “against the backdrop of genuine injustices in the present, particularly the ongoing issues of racism,” she unfairly presents such protests as “a highly politicised approach to history in which people appear to care passionately about history’s symbols and what they represent” (italics mine).

The most famous example of this theme in the American context, debates over Confederate commemoration, is far more complicated. As historian Karen Cox has documented in her book No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, “Lost Cause” memorials were themselves meant to impose a vision of white supremacy on African Americans who have protested such structures since they were erected. When activists promote counter-commemoration of the Civil Rights Movement—as when a bronze statue of John Lewis replaced a Confederate memorial in Decatur, Georgia, this summer—they are tending and keeping the past, not dismissing or distorting it.

Fortunately, most of the book’s later chapters warmed my historian’s heart. Here, Irving-Stonebraker strikes a good balance between revealing the problem of ahistoricism and pointing to its solution, showing how Christians can tell multifaceted stories of a complicated past. She shows, moreover, how to mine that past for religious practices that attest to our status as “historical beings” participating in God’s larger story of redemption.

While the overly broad claims of the book’s opening section left me wanting to make counterarguments and point out counterexamples, the more subtle details of the second and (especially) third sections convicted me of ways that I too am a historian living ahistorically.

But if Irving-Stonebraker’s critique of the Ahistoric Age is mostly persuasive, it’s also incomplete, leaving unexamined or underexamined two versions of ahistoricism that are particularly influential among some groups of Christians.

First, she doesn’t seem to realize the wide popularity of providential history within certain evangelical circles. Plenty of American believers are convinced that God has specially called and blessed the United States and continues to superintend its unfolding history.

This is certainly a way of finding identity in a story that claims transcendent meaning, but as many other Christian historians have long argued, such an interpretation of the past is deeply problematic on both historical and theological grounds.

Second, it’s dismaying that Irving-Stonebraker has so little to say about the ahistorical thinking that undergirds promises to “make America great again.” Perhaps this is less of a problem in Australia than it is in the US, but what CT editor in chief Russell Moore wrote in a 2016 New York Times piece remains true in 2024: “White American Christians who respond to cultural tumult with nostalgia . . . are blinding themselves to the injustices faced by their black and brown brothers and sisters in the supposedly idyllic Mayberry of white Christian America.”

To her credit, Irving-Stonebraker doesn’t want us to look at the past “through rose-tinted sentimentality.” Nor would she have us look away from “the horrific wrongs of history.” Chapter 7 introduces abolitionists like Mary Prince, Anne Hart Gilbert, and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites. And chapter 8 presents Frederick Douglass as “a model of how to engage with the sin of the past,” someone who called out the sources of injustice while holding out hope for redemption.

However, Irving-Stonebraker would rather celebrate Christian opposition to evils like white supremacy than examine Christian complicity in them. On balance, she spends far more time suggesting how Christians can keep or “guard” the past (holding to historic orthodoxy, retrieving past practices for discipleship, telling inspirational stories of Christian witness) than how they can tend it, which includes reckoning with noble and ignoble legacies alike.

Thankfully, many of today’s Christ-ian historians are modeling these virtues in their work. Sean McGever’s recent book Ownership, a nuanced account of slavery and 18th-century evangelicalism, is one example. Another is Malcolm Foley’s The Anti-Greed Gospel, an examination of “racial capitalism” due out in February 2025. So while I do recommend Priests of History as making a case for the Christian stewardship of the past, I would encourage readers to put Irving-Stonebraker’s writing in conversation with that of Christian historians more focused on tending to the parts of our past we might prefer to forget.

Christopher Gehrz is professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He writes about Christianity, history, and education at his Substack, The Pietist Schoolman.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Past Tense".

- More from Christopher Gehrz

Books

Review

The Black Church Has Five Theological Anchors

Claude Atcho

Walter Strickland’s sweeping narrative of African American Christianity portrays a big God who is strong to deliver.

Illustration by Diana Ejaita

Within evangelical circles, we are currently enjoying what might be called a “retrieval revival.” Many believers are working to retrieve parts of our Christian heritage for the sake of enjoying a richer relationship with God and a deeper fellowship with his people.

For some, this looks like rediscovering older traditions of liturgical worship. Others are reading books like John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way, which introduces ancient spiritual formation practices to a new generation. And Christian publishers are pumping out titles about the value of early church and medieval theology for God’s people today.

When we give a fresh hearing to forgotten or silenced voices, we honor the past while expanding possibilities for the future. Just as the church is “always reforming,” as the Reformation adage says, there is a sense in which it should always be retrieving. These are shared synapses, meant to fire together.

In the American context, perhaps the most urgent work of retrieval relates to African American Christianity. Even many well-read believers—regardless of ethnicity—have too little knowledge of this tradition. African American Christianity is a significant story within the singular story of church history. When we lack familiarity with its contours, we know less of God’s faithfulness. In retrieving it, however, we allow it to reform our faith and practice.

This is part of the gift Walter R. Strickland II presents to readers in Swing Low, his massive new treatment of the Black church in America. Strickland’s groundbreaking book amplifies a story we have tended to ignore or, at best, grant a selective hearing to.

Strickland, a theology professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, unfolds his account over two volumes: one subtitled A History of Black Christianity in the United States and the other An Anthology of Black Christianity in the United States (which gathers a wealth of primary source writings). Taken together, the two volumes immerse readers in the grand narrative of the Black church experience, educating and edifying as they magnify the God who makes a way out of no way (Isa. 43:19).

Many writers and scholars have tackled the story of African American Christianity, taking a variety of approaches. Previous efforts have applied the lenses of historical survey (Paul Harvey’s Through the Story, Through the Night), denominational development (C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya’s The Black Church in the African American Experience), African and cultural origins (Albert J. Raboteau’s Slave Religion), and pastoral lament (Thabiti M. Anyabwile’s The Decline of African American Theology).

For its part, Swing Low takes a comprehensive approach, blending history, theology, and firsthand testimony from prominent Black church figures. Surveying events from 1619 to the present, Strickland proposes five theological “anchors” of Black Christianity—core commitments that “emerged from the nascent days of African American faith” and endure to this day.

The first anchor is “Big God.” As Strickland describes it, the Black church tradition stresses God’s sovereignty as Lord over all, emphasizing his capacity to “do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20).

The second is “Jesus,” portrayed as the Man of Sorrows, friend of sinners, and Savior of the world. The suffering of Christ and the atoning power of his blood are vital to any understanding of Black Christian faith.

Third, Strickland notes the importance of “Conversion and Walking in the Spirit.” Here, he highlights Black Christianity’s early roots in the revivals of the First Great Awakening, which infused it with a passion for conversion and sanctification.

Fourth, Strickland highlights “The Good Book,” emphasizing the Bible’s centrality to Black faith, from its oral rehearsal in slave songs to the insistence on “telling the story” that pervades Black preaching.

Last, and crucially, Strickland cites the theme of “Deliverance.” This fifth anchor is rooted, he writes, in the fact that “God is a liberator.” Deliverance, Strickland argues, has a multifaceted meaning. The theme originates in the Old Testament, with Israel’s rescue from Egypt and the observance of Jubilee years, when slaves are freed and debts forgiven. But it reaches a climax in Christ’s atonement, which frees his people from sin and death and assures their victory in “God’s eschatological kingdom.”

Throughout Strickland’s narrative, the five anchors give readers handles by which to grasp, appreciate, and evaluate the trials and triumphs of Black faith in America. They offer a framework for seeing the development of this faith across historical eras, illustrating both where Black Christians speak with one voice and where elements of diversity remain.

As Strickland shows, various Black Christian leaders have sought to revise our understanding of certain anchors, prioritize one over the others, or integrate them in different ways. In one example, he argues that modern Black liberation theology reflects a desire to heighten themes of deliverance while departing from widely held conceptions of the role of Scripture and the work of Christ.

A picture emerges, then, of Black Christianity beginning mainly as a single trunk, from which various branches and limbs have grown in response to scholarly trends, the ravages of systematic racism, and major shifts in Black and American life. Swing Low is valuable for understanding, historically and intellectually, the “birth story” of Black Christianity and the beauty and diversity that marks its development. Even as that diversity, at times, stretches beyond the bounds of historic orthodoxy, Strickland commendably tells the full story, giving space to even dissenting writers in his anthology.

The African American Christian tradition is never merely intellectual. It is inherently celebratory and participatory, its doctrines culminating in praise and action. Likewise, Swing Low embodies the very theological tendencies it describes, which is perhaps its greatest strength. Beyond telling the story of African American Christianity, the book offers a vivid encounter with the Lord at its center. It radiates God’s faithfulness to his church, no matter the oppression or obstacles it faced.

In particular, Strickland’s narrative demonstrates the enduring witness and gift of Black faith on American soil. Early on, American colonists were frequently hesitant, if not outright unwilling, to evangelize Black slaves. One missionary, Francis Le Jau, insisted that slaves sign a pledge, wherein they promised not to “ask for holy baptism out of any design to free [themselves] … but merely for the good of [their souls].”

This form of Christianity, to borrow the language of Strickland’s fifth anchor, was purposefully devoid of deliverance. Out of this truncated gospel, however, African American Christians recovered the deliverance motif that runs through Scripture, setting “trajectories for African American Christianity that are evident among Black Christians today.” In refusing to accept a slaveholder’s gospel, Black believers cultivated a more biblical expression of Christian faith on American soil, one rooted in the love of God and neighbor. They advanced a gospel that touches body and soul.

In such ways, the advent of Black Christianity played a pivotal role in fusing orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right practice). In a famed second-century apologetic for Christianity, the Epistle to Diognetus, the anonymous author states that “the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body.” Reading Strickland’s account, one can hardly help concluding that God, in his providence, appointed the Black church as a corrective conscience to its white counterpart—a cleansing ecclesial soul to a compromised ecclesial body.

As Strickland puts it, African American Christianity is not impressed with an orthodoxy severed from orthopraxy, for “the simple affirmation of biblical concepts is not the goal of a doctrinal statement.” Statements like these help explain why Swing Low covers the robust yet forgotten history of African American missions. Strickland highlights the neglected stories of Betsey Stockton (a missionary to Hawaii), John Marrant (who witnessed to Native Americans in the 1770s), and Lott Carey, “the first recorded American missionary to West Africa.” For these and like-minded figures, knowing the gospel meant doing something with it for the good of others.

The thematic throughline of Swing Low is Strickland’s portrait of African American Christians as “a determined people driven by faith to pursue spiritual and social uplift for themselves and others to God’s glory.” I found his account of this drive for spiritual and social uplift in the modern era (1969 and onward) particularly riveting.

Strickland wisely devotes multiple chapters to narrating the development of Black evangelical theology in response to racists, riots, and other 1960s-era tumult. He then offers multiple chapters recounting the development of modern Black liberation theology, which occurred along a similar timeline. Strickland’s meticulous yet concise retrieval introduces readers to overlooked figures like Tom Skinner, William Pannell, and William H. Bentley. Broadly speaking, these figures sought to free themselves “from uncritical dependence upon White evangelical theologians who would attempt to tell us what the content of our efforts at liberation should be.”

Movements like the National Black Evangelical Association worked to emphasize the anchor of deliverance, attempting to counter Black liberation theology with a socially conscious evangelical alternative. Strickland observes that this movement “started strong but did not persist,” in part because “many of its primary proponents were ministry practitioners, not academics.” Since academics can focus more attention on writing than ministers, Strickland observes, Black evangelical theology couldn’t produce a body of written work to compete with the Black liberationists.

As he ranges across the modern evangelical landscape, Strickland’s narration and analysis are trenchant—and painfully relevant. Readers see how efforts to seek distance from white evangelical institutions in the 1970s foreshadow more contemporary dynamics, such as those considered in a 2018 New York Times article titled “A Quiet Exodus: Why Black Believers Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches.”

I have only a few minor quibbles with Swing Low. Because Strickland’s occasional moments of prescriptive analysis are so insightful, readers might benefit from more of them, especially in the form of a longer concluding word or epilogue.

In the final chapter of volume 1, “Into the Twenty-First Century,” Strickland gives a brief assessment of where Black Christianity is headed. Strickland sees three major movements: “the anchored, conscious, and culturally liberated Christians,” “Black liberationists,” and “Black evangelicals.” The final chapter centers on the first group. As Strickland notes, believers in this category worship and serve in a range of church contexts, but they have largely broken away from white evangelicalism. Today, you can find them returning to Black churches or other ecclesial contexts that are “socially conscious and celebrate Black cultural expression,” even as they remain rooted in the five anchors.

Strickland briefly hypothesizes that this movement will develop in contrast to liberationists and “adjacent” to Black evangelicals. He suggests that “the major question for their future is not regarding doctrinal commitments,” but instead “where these believers will find their homes in terms of local churches, established Christian ministries, and institutions and church-planting movements.” This is fascinating terrain, and I’d like more of Strickland’s thoughts on it.

My other critique pertains to volume 2, Strickland’s anthology. It is, to be sure, remarkable in its depth and breadth, with genre headings that include “Sermons and Oratory,” “Theological Treatises,” “Worship and Liturgy,” and “Personal Correspondence and Autobiography.”

I was enthused to see such a wonderful range of voices and texts but surprised that Strickland omitted the fiery Jeremiah Wright sermon that caused campaign trouble for Barack Obama in 2008. Wright, Obama’s former pastor, sparked great controversy for his “God damn America” refrain decrying American militarism. For many American Christians, though, this sermon represented their first encounter with a certain strand of Black prophetic Christianity or liberation theology.

Missing as well are the contributions of African American Roman Catholics, whom the scholar Raboteau once called “a minority within the minority.” Strickland notes in the opening pages why Black Catholicism is beyond the scope of his project, but one can hope that his work will spur others to retrieve the story of Black belief in all its ecumenical dimensions.

These small constructive notes aside, Swing Low is poised to become a standard guide to the history of African American Christianity. Strickland has blessed the church with a thorough and much-needed work of retrieval. With this book’s inspiration, we can give ourselves more passionately to the reforming work of orthodoxy and orthopraxy for the spiritual and social uplift of all, to the glory of God.

Claude Atcho is pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Black Church's Big God".

- More from Claude Atcho

Testimony

I Made Millions as a Porn Star. It Nearly Cost Me Everything.

Joshua Broome

My adult-film career destroyed my sense of self-worth, but God wouldn’t let it define me.

Photography by JerSean Golat for Christianity Today

I grew up in a South Carolina town of fewer than 3,000 people. My mother had me at age 16, and my father, also 16, lived in the same town, but he was conspicuously absent from my life.

In a small town like mine, it only took one person knowing one thing about your life for everyone to know that thing. And the thing people knew about me was that I was fatherless, even though my dad lived right down the street.

Despite this—or perhaps in some way because of it—I was driven to achieve, to make something of myself. My work ethic turned me into a great student, a standout athlete, and eventually a well-trained actor and model. This pursuit of “enough” was relentless, and before long, it landed me in Hollywood to pursue acting and modeling full-time.

Early in my career, I had an agent and was working with some regularity. But no amount of success could satisfy. After a few years in Hollywood, some women recruiting for the porn industry asked if I would be interested in doing a film.

For context, I was exposed to pornography at age 13. Having grown up without any example of healthy relationships between men and women, I quickly fell into consuming pornography and living a promiscuous lifestyle. Nine years later, when I was invited to enter the world I first encountered in magazines as a teenager, I had no good reason to refuse.

Photography by JerSean Golat for Christianity Today

That choice cost me more than I could have imagined. Soon after my first adult film, my mainstream agent stopped representing me. The sting of shattered dreams remained fresh when my mom learned about my first foray into pornography. I shudder to recall the humiliating conversation we had.

Despite my reservations about doing adult entertainment, I truly believed this was my only viable career path. Trapped in a downward spiral of shame, I allowed my initial bad choice to redefine my entire identity, convincing myself I was without options.

Six years later, I had starred in many award-winning films, and I’d even tried my hand at writing and directing porn. During that period, I pocketed millions of dollars. But no money, fame, or accolades could overcome the inferiority complex that stemmed from my father’s absence. If anything, my career success only amplified my anxiety and deepened my depression.

Early in 2013, I resolved to take my life. Before carrying it out, I wanted to hear someone confirm that I was as worthless and disgusting as I felt. So I walked into a bank to deposit a check from a porn film, hoping the teller would notice the memo on the check indicating where the money came from. On some level, I wanted the teller to gasp; it would give me permission to kill myself. It would seal my shame and self-loathing.

I also had not heard my real name uttered in over a year. In the porn industry, you typically choose a pseudonym to conceal your identity and suppress the shame associated with your line of work. So over the last six years, I’d deposited checks at ATMs or with mobile phone apps to avoid interacting with an actual person.

As I slid the check across the counter, I locked eyes with the teller and waited for a dismissive headshake, a judgmental under-the-breath muttering, or maybe, if I was lucky, an antagonistic remark made directly to my face. Instead, she said nothing until I was about to walk away. Then, as my eyes watered and I started shaking, she said, “Joshua, can I please help you? Joshua, are you okay?”

Her compassion pierced through my numbness, and my instinctive reaction was to run home, have a long cry, and call my mom. When my mom picked up the phone, she told me she loved me and I would always be her son. She begged me to leave the porn industry and come home. I moved back that very day.

Looking to make a fresh start, I got a job at a gym in Raleigh, North Carolina. For two years, I tried doing enough good to cover up my bad deeds to compensate for my feelings of worthlessness. I had great mentors and a community that cared about me as an individual. And even though my prior career in pornography surfaced before long—it was, after all, only an internet click away—I didn’t experience any rejection because of it.

One day, I met a beautiful, athletic, and incredibly smart but very reserved young lady whom I asked out on many dates. She turned me down at first but eventually agreed to go on a run with me. As I waited for her to arrive, I decided not to withhold my past from her. I told her that I was a former porn star and someone unwanted by his own father.

Her response changed my life. After pausing for what seemed like forever, she assured me that I was not defined by the worst thing I’d ever done—or by the greatest thing I would ever do. God, she told me, was the creator of heaven and earth and everyone on the earth—and he alone determines who you are.

She asked if I knew God. I told her I knew about God, but clearly I didn’t have the kind of personal relationship she enjoyed through Jesus. We walked and talked, and eventually she invited me to church.

I went along with her, believing I had no business there but also knowing I wanted to be wherever she was. On that day, I heard the gospel for the first time from an older Baptist pastor. Dressed in jeans and sporting tattoos on his arms, he shared his own imperfections, measuring them against the ultimate perfection of Jesus. He preached from 2 Samuel 9, where King David shows grace to a man named Mephibosheth, a grandson of Saul.

Mephibosheth, unable to walk after a childhood accident, wonders why the king would extend mercy to a “dead dog” like himself (v. 8). As I sat there, hearing about the grace of God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, I likewise wondered why God would show any favor to me, given all the wrongs I had done and how worthless I felt.

Then the pastor read Hebrews 12:2, which says how Jesus “endured the cross, scorning its shame” for the sake of “the joy set before him.” Right away, I understood why Jesus had given his life: because he loved sinners like me. In that moment, I surrendered my life to Christ, letting the blood he shed on the cross wash over my shame. I stood up weeping, knowing I was now a son of my Father in heaven.

My story gets better. That incredible woman, Hope, has been my wife for nearly a decade, and we have four incredible sons. What a joyous reversal from the day I thought would be my last, when I remember writing down the reasons I no longer wanted to live. I knew I wanted to become a father (to make up for my own father’s absence) and a husband (who could give someone the kind of love my father never gave my mother). And I thought my porn career had disqualified me from ever fulfilling these roles. Yet God stood ready to do abundantly more than I could have imagined.

And he continues to use me for his glory. After years of discipleship and a theological education from Liberty University, I have preached hundreds of sermons; given talks at events, universities, and conferences; and appeared on major podcasts. Currently, I serve as director of operations for a nonprofit called Momentum, which helps people find purpose and heal from sexual brokenness.

My story is an example of the grace of God that is available to all, no matter what you have done or what pain you have experienced. Because of what Jesus did on the cross, you can experience the healing, wholeness, and purpose he offers to anyone who will surrender their life to him.

Joshua Broome is the author of 7 Lies That Will Ruin Your Life: What My Journey from Porn Star to Preacher Taught Me About the Truth That Sets Us Free.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Testimony".

- More from Joshua Broome

News

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

Angela Lu Fulton in Hanoi

The country’s church-run addiction centers are so effective that communist officials are taking notice.

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

In March 2013, the government-run drug rehab center in Hanoi released Hung Quang Pham early.

They didn’t want the bone-thin heroin user with AIDS to die in their facility.

But before Hung left, friends helped carry him to a Bible class held inside the rehab facility, and Christians told Hung about Jesus. He remembers a room full of jumping and singing, where men and women freed from their addictions praised God. Jesus offered joy, they said, and they told Hung how Jesus could rescue him from drugs—how he could heal his body and save his soul.

After Hung left rehab, he went home, laid in bed, and waited to die. Not long afterward, a pastor’s wife visited him and handed him a Bible. Hung started praying what he felt were impossible prayers, and God answered them, one after another. Hung got out of bed, suddenly able to walk. His body was healed.

Given a new lease on life, Hung volunteered with a Christian drug ministry, returning to the government rehab center to share his story. He found a wife, a woman who also had struggled with addiction. He was miraculously cured of HIV. And in 2021, despite being told they would never have children, Hung’s wife gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl.

Early last year, I drank bitter green tea with a healthy and grinning Hung under a gazebo in the yard of a small Christian drug rehab he was running. When we met, his ministry was helping 11 men who struggled with drug addiction and 6 orphaned boys.

“A hundred percent of the people who come here come in desperation,” Hung said. “The same way God healed and saved us, we are helping other brothers, directing them to trust God and introducing them to a relationship with Jesus.”(Hung has since relocated to Hanoi, and another Christian has taken over the rehab center.)

Each of the approximately 60 Christian drug rehab centers in Vietnam has miraculous stories like Hung’s—walking corpses rising into new life. The approach at these recovery centers is simple: Abstain from substances, read the Bible, and pray. But rehab leaders say their programs, infused with the love of the Christian staff and the power of the Holy Spirit, have helped thousands shed their addictions and become pastors, husbands, fathers, and contributing members of society. They say a revival is breaking out among the outcasts of Vietnamese society.

Even Vietnam’s communist government has noticed the transformation, especially as it struggles to curb drug use and rehabilitate users. As in many Southeast Asian countries, Vietnamese government-run compulsory treatment centers are rife with human rights abuses, including forced labor and torture. Almost everyone who completes treatment ends up back on drugs.

In contrast, the success of voluntary Christian rehabs, none of which are registered due to their religious affiliation, has the government curious: What are these Christians doing? And can they learn from them?

“God chose those people who are already rejected by society, those people who are nothing in man’s eyes, to reveal his glory,” said Nam Quoc Trung, Hung’s pastor and the founder of the Aquila Rescue Center, one of the largest Christian rehabs in Vietnam. “Right now, my life is sweeter than any billionaire’s life.”

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents eat Mi noodles and Banh Cuon (steamed rice rolls) for breakfast in an open area between the kitchen and the dorms where longer term residents reside.

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An Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents uses chop sticks on Banh Cuon (steamed rice rolls) from a shared plate at a breakfast table above the dorms for recent arrivals.

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Staff member Hoang Viet Bao (center) leads morning worship outside the dorms for longer term residents at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Rehab residents rest on a hammock while others play Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) in the spatious retreat-like setting of the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents Nguyen Viet Huyen and Hoang Tien Manh play Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) outside the rehab dorms for new arrivals whilst other residents watch on.

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Since the 1950s, the mountainous region north of Vietnam where Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos meet, known as the Golden Triangle, has been one of the world’s top producers of opium and heroin. Much of it flows south through Vietnam on its way to other parts of the world. Much of it also stays in Vietnam.

All that supply made cheap heroin widely available in most Southeast Asian countries, triggering addiction epidemics there beginning in the 1960s and ’70s.

In the past two decades, drug syndicates have taken advantage of destabilized governments in the Golden Triangle, fueling production of synthetic drugs—principally methamphetamine. In 2021, authorities in Southeast and East Asia seized more than a billion methamphetamine pills.

To combat the narcotics crisis, many Southeast Asian countries have imposed stiff consequences for drug possession, including potential life imprisonment. In Singapore, people convicted of trafficking more than 15 grams of heroin can face the death penalty. In the Philippines, former president Rodrigo Duterte’s vicious war on drugs beginning in 2016 led to the deaths of more than 6,000 drug suspects as he encouraged extrajudicial killings.

Gloria Lai, Asia regional director of the International Drug Policy Consortium, said governments often politicize the issue of drugs to win elections. People also stigmatize all drug users as criminals or dangerous.

“Drugs are framed as a social evil, and it’s blamed as the root cause of a lot of the problems that people see in society … crime, poverty, disorder, and chaos,” Lai said. “I think it’s a scapegoat, and it’s very easy to gain a political win.”

As a result, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam send suspected users to compulsory drug detention centers without their consent and often without due process or clinical evaluations.

Vietnam’s centers, established in 1992, are some of the harshest in the region, detaining children as young as 12.

A 2011 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report found that in such treatment centers, known as 06 centers, forced labor, torture, and abuse were common. Those suspected of addiction were often detained by police and then sent to detention centers. They were unable to leave and were required to perform “labor therapy,” often working in agricultural production, garment manufacturing, or construction work for meager pay. Over the years, hundreds of detainees have escaped the centers during mass breakouts.

One former detainee, Que Phong, said he was required to husk cashews for six or seven hours a day, his hands burning from the resin on the nuts. If he refused, he would be slapped, beaten, or sent to a “punishment room.” Although he had initially volunteered to be at the center for one year, he was unable to leave for five.

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

Rehab resident, Bui Minh Quan (30 years old), does push ups at the outdoor gym at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center. While many rehab residents have problems with Methamphetamine, Quan is in rehab to address his problem with Marijuana. Having recently returned to Vietnam after a number of years spent abroad in New Zealand, Quan’s parents asked him to enter the rehab program so that he could get over his Marijuana dependence.

After his release, he returned to smoking and injecting heroin. “The time and work in the center didn’t help me,” he told HRW, which noted that the relapse rate in Vietnam’s compulsory centers was between 80 and 97 percent. Lai told me that the drug treatment centers have little incentive to actually get people clean, as they would then lose their cheap labor.

Besides perpetrating human rights abuses, the overcrowded centers have also spread HIV. In 2005, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, 40 percent of detainees were HIV positive and many had tuberculosis, according to the US State Department. Few centers have appropriate medical care for these diseases.

In 2012, the United Nations cited such concerns when it called for the closure of Vietnam’s more than 100 compulsory drug detention and rehabilitation centers. Vietnam’s government vowed to reduce the use of 06 centers and increase the number of community-based voluntary treatment centers.

But within a few years, faced with skyrocketing methamphetamine use and one of the highest rates of opioid-related deaths in East and Southeast Asia, the country backpedaled on its commitment. The government doubled down on the use of 06 centers, opening or reopening dozens of them between 2014 and 2018.

Jim and Kathie Lowans, the Asia Pacific regional directors of Global Teen Challenge, said that while participants in their Christian drug rehabilitation program do have to work, the work is accompanied by discipleship, life-skills training, counseling, prayer, and Bible study. Studies of Teen Challenge programs in the United States have found them to have a 67–86 percent success rate in keeping graduates clean. Teen Challenge staff and participants often call it “the Jesus factor.”

In Southeast Asia, Teen Challenge opened its first program in Singapore in 1976, then another program in the Philippines in 1988. A partner asked the Lowanses to help start a rehab center in Cambodia in 2005. Since then, Teen Challenge has opened 12 more programs in the region.

Kathie Lowans believes voluntary Christian drug rehabs work better than mandatory centers because they make theological sense. “God gave us a choice: Choose this day whom you will serve and Today I am giving you a choice between life and death. We must give others a choice,” she said. “The desire to change must come from within, not from someone’s mandate. Following his model gives a better and lasting result.”

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

75 year old, Nguyen Dinh Ha, reads the bible in his dorm room. Ha is the oldest member of the Born Again Family Rescue Center community and he came to the center to address his addiction to alcohol. He first came to the center in 2021 but after graduating in 2023 he had difficulty staying away from alcohol on return to his home town so he has returned.

The founding father of Christian drug treatment in Vietnam is arguably pastor Ngo Tan Si.

Amid Vietnam’s drug problem—and lack of good solutions—Ngo felt God call him in 1996 to minister to those caught in the cycle of drug addiction. He said that God spoke to him, saying, “The things man cannot do, God
can do.”

The son of a pastor, Ngo had left the Christian faith as a teen after seeing how religion had left his family impoverished and kept him from going to university. (A teacher had warned him that, because the Vietnamese government viewed pastors like his father with suspicion, he would not be admitted to a public university.)

Depressed, Ngo started drinking, smoking, and doing drugs. Soon he was spending all his time and money searching for his next high. His distraught father considered resigning from the pastorate. His mother would cry all night. “My family looked like they were at a funeral,” Ngo told me.

In 1984, Ngo was returning home after a night of drinking when he started feeling ill. He collapsed on the road, unconscious. Friends found him hours later and brought him home, unable to wake him. Ngo’s father, who was also a doctor, checked his vitals; Ngo was almost dead. His mother pleaded with God for his life, convinced that if he died, he would go to hell.

Then Ngo woke up.

Ngo remembers sensing his end was near and, for the first time, fearing death. He recalled his father’s preaching and prayed that if God would save him, he would follow him the rest of his life. Two days later, Ngo says, he had an encounter with Jesus in his room where Jesus showed him all the sin in his life. Ngo knelt and cried, seeing his desperate need for salvation.

A few days later, when his old friends came by offering a cigarette and a drink, he felt God telling him to say he didn’t know how to smoke or drink. His friends thought he was crazy and left.

Ngo considers that experience to be the moment of his conversion. “I feel that I had overcome sin and since then I’ve been a Christian,” he said.

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

Pastor Ngo Tan Si sits on one of the bunks in a small room behind the church they they call the delivery room. When addicts arrive at the center they spend their first 7-10 days in this room while they endure withdrawal symptoms. During their time in the room, 2 staff members stay with them 24 hours a day.

For the next 12 years, Ngo wondered why God had allowed him to go through such a painful experience. Then he heard the call to start a drug ministry, he says, and he began to understand God’s plan. He reached out to those using drugs who had HIV. His friend, who worked in the government fighting HIV, invited Ngo to teach the Bible to around 80 men struggling with addiction.

At first, his audience seemed more interested in taking smoke breaks or getting coffee than listening to his preaching. But on the third day, as he preached, he was shocked when they began crying and praying. Twenty men accepted the Lord that day, Ngo says, and his addiction-deliverance ministry was born.

Working with his church, Ngo tried housing some men in Ho Chi Minh City. But the urban environment offered too powerful a temptation to return to drugs. A Christian offered his home two hours outside the city, so Ngo moved 15 men there, opening a new center in Bình Long now called the Born Again Family Rescue Center. When they lost the church’s funding, Ngo turned to the men’s families to pay for their rehabilitation. Today, most of Vietnam’s Christian drug rehabs rely on fees paid by families.

In the 1990s, before Vietnam had access to antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV, many of the men Ngo served, whom he called his students, passed away. He remembers one month when five men in his ministry died.

Still, Ngo pressed on. Some students found deliverance from their addictions, became Christians, and went on to start their own rehab ministries. Others got clean and then relapsed. Some went through his program multiple times. Some left and never returned.

One student, angry about some relationship advice Ngo had given him, followed Ngo into the center’s chapel with a knife, threatening to “chop [him] into three pieces.” The man tripped and fell about 10 feet from him, the knife clattering to the sanctuary floor. Later, during a worship service, the tearful student asked Ngo and God for forgiveness.

Ngo said the differences between public rehab centers and his are vast. Nearly everyone who came through his doors had been in government-run rehabs or prison; some had been sentenced to up to 30 years. I asked Ngo what portion of his students stay clean after finishing the program. He said about 30 percent are “solid and strong” now.

“The Christian rehab is all about love,” he said. “It has the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth that is the Word of God, and also the preaching of the changing of the mind. But in the government-run rehabs, there’s always [people] fighting, hating each other, and filling their minds with desires of the flesh. They feel revenge, bitterness, and unhealed wounds.”

Once a new arrival to Ngo’s rehab detoxes from drugs and acclimates to the schedule, the staff prays for deliverance in areas where the person is struggling. It’s about finding healing not only from their drug addiction, Ngo says, but also in other areas of bondage, such as unforgiveness, anger, sexual sin, or unclean spirits.

Unlike compulsory centers, Vietnam’s Christian rehabs have no barbed wire fences or locked gates to keep people in. Students can walk away if they choose. “There is [only] a fence in your mind,” Ngo said. He wants participants to know “that the center of God is not a prison.”

Students are told the rehab center is run as a Christ-ian ministry and they’re welcome whether or not they become Christians.

“We very much respect their free choice,” Ngo said. “We want to let them receive and see the presence of the Lord through older members in the rehab by the way they talk, deal with new members, and especially their love for one another.”

Transformation doesn’t stop with the men who join the center. Many parents, after suffering for years watching their children waste away from addiction, witness their sons’ transformations and put their faith in Jesus. Ngo, who often connects churches with students’ families, found that if a student’s relatives come to faith, there is a much higher likelihood the student will stay clean after finishing the program.

This is part of Ngo’s larger goal of sending students out with a vision: God changed me. God changed you. God can change anybody. Go save other drug addicts.

Of Vietnam’s 60 Christian drug rehabs, which range in size from a handful of participants to more than 100, Ngo estimates that half were started by his former students.

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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Nguyen Tri An and other Born Again Family Rescue Center members read the bible in their dorms at dawn.

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Hoang Cao Nguyen Vu stands in front of the church at the Born Again Family Rescue Center. The church is often overcrowded so the long term goal is build a bigger church that can seat up to 500 people.

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Born Again Family Rescue Center members wash their dishes in an open area at the rear of the center.

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Pastor Ngo Tan Si (left) sings during morning worship in the church at Born Again Family Rescue Center.

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Ngo’s vision has spread not only in southern Vietnam, where Christianity long been centered, but also in the north, the country’s historic seat of atheistic communism. Ngo says Christian drug rehabs are reaching families of government workers in and around the capital of Hanoi. After communist Vietnamese forces won the Vietnam War in 1975, the divided country was reunified and political power consolidated in Hanoi. As Ngo tells it, many in the north were given high-paying government jobs that allowed their kids to live carefree postwar lives. Children took up cheap and easily accessible recreational drugs. Many became addicted, and their parents grew desperate.

“God allowed this to happen to let the love of God enter [northern Vietnam],” Ngo said. “Only through the children who are addicts and in gangs and only through the deliverance from drug addictions through the power of Jesus’ blood … have a lot of government workers become saved.”

One of these wayward children was Nam, the founder of the Aquila Center and a former student of Ngo’s. As a young man, Nam’s single-minded pursuit of heroin led him to theft. He stole and sold his parents’ assets. Once, he held his month-old daughter hostage until his wife and mother gave him money for drugs.

“I was like an animal,” Nam said. He did more than a dozen stints in government treatment centers, relapsing each time.

Then in 2006, Nam ran into a friend he used to shoot up with. The man was happy and sober. He told Nam that he had gone to a Christian drug rehab and that the love of Jesus had rescued him. Nam decided to check himself into Ngo’s Bình Long center. Soon he found himself devouring the Bible and asking God for forgiveness. For the first time, he was free.

It was a new beginning. All his family soon came to Christ. Nam became a pastor and started a Christian drug rehab of his own. His parents pooled money to build a six-story building in Hanoi for churches to use and to house women addicted to drugs (the building was later sold to build a separate women’s rehab facility). Local government persecution forced Nam to shutter the rehab’s first location, but he soon gained the confidence of Hanoi officials and found himself invited back to the government treatment centers where he was once detained to share how Jesus set him free from addiction. Over a four-year period, Nam shared the gospel with 20,000 people in the rehab centers—including Hung—and launched Bible classes in several centers.

In 2015, Nam also built a new drug rehab center in Quôc Oai, a district of verdant hills an hour west of Hanoi. Today, the Aquila Center is a spacious, retreat-like property that sits beside a lake. It has a K–12 Christian boarding school, worship hall, kitchen, soccer field, swimming pool, and dormitories for 200 staff, students, and rehab clients—who call each other “brothers” and “sisters.”

On a cool January morning, the Aquila Center was bustling with the sounds of guitar strumming, chatter, and the chirping of pet birds. High school students, winter coats over their uniforms, trudged up the steps at Aquila Dream Academy, an unregistered Christian school. Their days begin with student-led worship, a short message, and testimonies. Then they sit at workspaces and leaf through self-paced lesson books, with teachers stopping by to assist when they get stuck.

Down a hill, worship music flowed from a chapel where about 100 men were swaying, clapping, and raising their hands as they sang. It was Wednesday, the day the brothers spend entirely in chapel sessions and Bible classes taught by visiting missionaries. Some brothers seclude themselves for the morning in personal “prayer caves” under the outdoor gym, where they bend over their Bibles at low tables.

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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The sun rises above the surrounding verdent hills to strike the spatious retreat-like setting of the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center and a neighbouring construction site.

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Pastor Nam Quoc Trung at the entrance of a rehab dorm where the most recent arrivals reside at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Rehab residents at Aquila Addiction Treatment Center partake in a mixture of activities in the dorms for new arrivals as some discuss and study the Bible while others practice guitar or sit in prayer or reflection.

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Former rehab resident, Vang Thi Lam Cam, chats with current rehab resident Luu Thi Thuan in the dorm that she slept in when she was a resident at Priscilla. Cam has recently found a job in Hanoi and is now living in the city with her husband, another former addict whom she met through the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center.

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Priscilla rehab resident, Nong Thi Tap, worships during a youth conference at the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center chapel.

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Pastor Nam Quoc Trung sounds a shofar during worship at a youth conference at the Aquila Addiction Treatment Center chapel.

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A short motorbike ride from the men’s rehab is the newly built Priscilla Center, a purple-and-white building housing roughly 30 women struggling with addiction. It’s one of the few Christian facilities that serve women. In Vietnam’s patriarchal society, parents often fight to help a son overcome drugs but may simply give up on a daughter who becomes addicted, Nam said. Many such women turn to prostitution.

It took Vang Thi Lam Cam six years to graduate from the Priscilla Center. Born into a poor family in central Vietnam, Vang told me her life started to fall apart after her parents divorced and her mother remarried a violent, abusive man. Eager to leave her home life behind, Vang moved away and studied to become a teacher. She started partying, drinking heavily, and earning extra income singing at bars. Then she fell in love.

She moved with her boyfriend to Hanoi. There, she learned that he and his friends were smoking heroin. Curious, she tried it herself and began using regularly. When a few friends confronted her, telling her that she had a drug problem, she pushed back at first. Then she realized they were right.

“I was so disappointed,” Vang said. “I felt so fearful and I didn’t want to live anymore. In my mind, if you’re an addict, the only way out is to die.”

Thin, weak, and exhausted, Vang tried to kill herself by overdosing. Then she started selling. She cycled in and out of government rehabs. There, in 2013, she heard Nam preach for the first time.

“I was so desperate and disappointed at myself, but at the same time I still wanted to live a good life,” Vang said. “From that moment on, hope started racing in my heart and I began to pray.”

She knew she had to cut ties with her old life, so upon release from government rehab in 2016, Vang immediately called Nam and joined the women’s program at the Aquila Center. Despite challenges—she had a fiery temper and clashed with the other women—Vang persevered. Now sober for 11 years, Vang said she’s grown and matured in her faith. “I don’t think about drugs,” she said.

Today, she’s married to a man who went through the Aquila Center’s program, and she mentors incoming women. She said she sees her younger self in them and listens patiently to their stories. As she develops more of a relationship with them, she encourages them through the Word of God.

At Aquila, stories like Vang’s are more the rule than the exception. In a government study, 100 percent of surveyed program graduates reported they had stopped using drugs. The large majority said they had found purpose in their lives, were more in control of themselves, and had more confidence. “People are amazed,” Nam said. “They can’t deny we are walking with God and what we are doing is working.”

Finding Sobriety—and Jesus—in Vietnam’s Christian Drug Rehabs

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab residents participate in an early morning worship session outside the rehab dorms for new arrivals.

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab resident Do Van Hung cuts the hair of Ho David outside the rehab dorms for new arrivals.

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Aquila Addiction Treatment Center rehab resident, Nguyen Truong Giang, with his eyes on the shuttlecock during a game of badminton with Aquila Dream Academy students.

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Those stats have Vietnamese officials coming to visit the Aquila Center and meeting with Nam. Police officers and government workers have sent their children to Aquila’s school and referred their relatives to Aquila instead of compulsory treatment centers.

“Personally, they know for sure the differences [between the two] and the effectiveness of Christian rehab centers,” Nam said. He is often invited to speak to police groups and share how he’s rehabilitated many people addicted to drugs. In every meeting, he says, he speaks about the root of their success: the power of Jesus.

Despite their track records, Aquila and other Vietnamese Christian rehabs are still not recognized by the government as legal treatment centers because of their openness about their faith. They operate instead as unregistered church ministries, which bars them from receiving grants or donations from businesses. That status also limits how they can market themselves. When Vietnamese media cover the Aquila Center, they edit out any mention of God in interviews.

There are signs, though, that government attitudes may be changing. Two denominations, including the Pentecostal group that sponsors Aquila and 13 other Christian drug rehabs, received legal status in 2023. Nam believes these developments will make it easier for the centers to receive their own government recognition.

In December 2023, officials invited Nam and members of Aquila to Quang Tri, a district along the Laos border and a hotspot for drug trafficking. During a gathering where Nam shared about the ministry, he said, 100 people came forward to receive Christ. And 40 from the district have come to Aquila to get clean.

“We see the big need for people in that area,” he said. “When I came to the area, God spoke to me that he’s going to use the weak to put shame on the strong in this world. And in that place that is full of darkness, God will show his glory.”

Angela Lu Fulton is Southeast Asia editor for Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Rehab Revival".

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

Theology

The Incarnation is More than the Manger

Jeremy Treat

How an ancient African bishop championed the incarnation’s redemptive arc.

Illustration by Jocelyn O’Leary

Advent celebrates the most joyous news in the world, but it can feel cheapened by the holiday commercialization and the busyness of the season. That’s why I read one book every year, beyond the Bible itself, that cuts through the veneer of cultural spirituality and takes me deeper into the meaning of Christmas.

The brief yet famous book On the Incarnation—which unpacks the person and work of Christ—was written 1,700 years ago by Athanasius of Alexandria, an Egyptian bishop who profoundly shaped the early church. I believe his writings can renew the contemporary church as well.

While many agree that the Incarnation is key to the Christian faith, most Christians only think of it as representing the birth of Christ. For Athanasius, however, the doctrine includes the whole of Christ’s work, including assuming human nature and his life,death, and resurrection. In short, Athanasius teaches us to plumb the depths of Christmas by reflecting on the whole Christ who brings salvation to the whole creation and renewal to our whole lives.

Before we let Athanasius take us to the heart of the Christmas story, let’s briefly get acquainted with our guide and how he first entered the scene of church history.

As a young man, Athanasius attended the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, where hundreds of local church leaders came together to address the increasingly popular Arian teaching that Jesus had not always existed as God. The council affirmed the eternal divinity of Jesus—as summarized in the Nicene Creed, which says Jesus is “true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father.

Yet this consensus unraveled soon after, and Christ’s deity became a con-tested doctrine for the next 50 years.

Faithful Christianity needed a champion, and Athanasius rose to the occasion, devoting his life to seeing the truth that had been established at Nicaea worked into the life of the church throughout the Christian world.

After the council, Athanasius returned to Africa, where he was born and raised, and became the bishop of Alexandria—at a time when, as fellow church father Gregory of Nazianzus once said, “the bishop of Alexandria was the bishop of the whole world.”

For 45 years, Athanasius stood unwavering in his commitment to Christ and the church. Yet his life was anything but stable. His enemies branded him the “black dwarf,” for his short stature and dark complexion, and he was exiled five times for a total of 17 years for various political or theological reasons. It was during these years, often spent in the desert, that Athanasius did much of his writing.

What can modern Christians learn from this ancient African bishop who pleaded with a Christian world teetering on the brink of grave heresy?

First, to proclaim the whole Christ, Athanasius focused on the deity of Christ. Though this doctrine may seem elementary to most Christians today, its emphasis may be more urgently needed than we realize.

A 2022 survey showed that 43 percent of US evangelicals agree with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher,but he was not God.” Athanasius would be rolling over in his grave if he heard that. And the apostle John would’ve liked a word with that 43 percent—reminding them that “in the beginning was the Word [Jesus], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

The full humanity and divinity of Jesus is essential for biblical Christianity. But for Athanasius, advocating for Christ’s deity was not merely about upholding sound doctrine for the sake of biblical orthodoxy. His beliefs about the person of Christ were always in service to the work of Christ. In other words, without the full divinity and humanity of Jesus, he argued, the gospel is powerless to save: an empty announcement.

How, then, does the Son of God becoming a son of man bring salvation to humanity?

For Athanasius, the logic of salvation begins with God creating humanity to share in his incorruptible life and to cultivate his beautiful creation. When sin entered the world, however, death began to reign, and a process of de-creation derailed God’s good purposes.

According to Athanasius, God had a dilemma: Leaving sin unpunished would go against his character; but it would be unfitting to create humanity only to have them fall into corruption. “What then was God, being good, to do?” he asked. The only way for God to rescue humanity and uphold his character was to send his Son in the flesh to take on the sins of the world. God must become man. So, in solidarity with humanity, the divine Son assumed a human nature.

Becoming human, however, was not enough: Jesus came to die. As Athanasius says, Christ “assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all.” As the God-man, when Jesus encountered death, his humanity gave him the ability to die but his divinity gave him the power to overcome death. In this way, his crucifixion paid the debt of death so that we could have eternal life.

Gregory of Nazianzus reiterated the importance of Christ’s divine-human sacrifice, writing that Jesus had to take on flesh to save our flesh: “That which He has not assumed He has not healed, but what is united to His Godhead is also saved.”

Further, according to Athanasius, the Resurrection is a pledge of the Cross’s victory, since it reveals and inaugurates Christ’s salvation. In fact, the resurrection of Jesus provides the grounds for our resurrection, that we might experience the eternal, incorruptible life of God—which we had lost access to at the Garden of Eden.

So this Christmas, may we reflect on the paradoxical glory of our King becoming a servant, the infinite becoming an infant. But may we also remember that the manger is not the end of the story. The one born king would grow up and usher in his kingdom through the counterintuitive means of self-giving love on the cross—and then fling wide the gates of eternal life by rising from the dead.

During Christmas, we celebrate the silent night when “Christ the Savior is born.” For many American Christians, though, salvation has become an abstract and spiritual idea, as if Jesus came only to save our souls, forgive our sins, and promise us an eternity in heaven. Athanasius would see that idea is correct but not complete. Jesus came to ransom our souls but also to renew the world.

Athanasius makes this argument by appealing to the bookends of creation and re-creation in the story line of Scripture. Just as the world was created through the Word, so the world will be re-created by the Word. And by saving a fallen earth from the corruption of sin—which undoes God’s purposes by setting the world on a trajectory of de-creation and death—Jesus takes what is broken and restores it in love.

The church, as the body of Christ, also finds its place within the story of God’s grand re-creation project. We are ushered into God’s presence, invited to delight in God’s goodness, and called to participate in God’s work of renewal. Even now, God is recreating the world by grace—and he will do so until Christ returns to fully and eternally renew all things.

This message is refreshing, especially in a Western context, where our understanding of Christ’s work has often been marked by pendulum-swinging reductionism—as if Christ came to either forgive our sins & conquer the Devil. And while Athanasius prioritizes the restoration of incorruptible life (2 Tim. 1:10), being renewed in God’s image (Col. 3:10), and participating in God’s nature (2 Pet. 1:4), he embraces a comprehensive understanding of Christ’s work on our behalf. Like him, we can celebrate the many facets of salvation—such as victory, forgiveness, and reconciliation—within the broader framework of God re-creating the world through Christ.

WikiMedia Commons

Saint Athanasius by Peter Paul Rubens

For Athanasius, the biblical vision of Christ’s salvation begins with the human heart, will one day reach to the ends of creation, and touches every aspect of life in between. “So many are the Savior’s achievements that follow from His Incarnation,” Athanasius writes, “that to try to number them is like gazing at the open sea and trying to count the waves.”

Just as God is renewing creation through his Son, the Christian life is one of renewal into the image of Christ, by the Spirit, and to the glory of the Father: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”(2 Cor. 5:17). We are given a new heart, a new spirit (Ezek. 36:26), a new mind (Rom. 12:2), a new identity, a new family (Mark 3:31–35), and the hope of living in a new world (Matt. 19:28).

Athanasius was a theologian, but he was also a pastor who loved people as much as he loved truth. He believed that our theology of the gospel applies to not only our “spirituality” or our time spent at church but also to our daily lives. Just as the apostle Paul told Timothy to watch both his doctrine and his life closely (1 Tim. 4:16), Athanasius concludes his book by exhorting his readers that biblical truth must go hand in hand with a godly life.

Christmas is a time when we receive undeserved gifts as a reflection of the greatest unearned gift—God’s grace in Christ. Yet it is also a reminder that the gospel both saves us and propels us into a life of uprooting sin, confronting injustice, and seeking God’s kingdom. Athanasius helps us understand that, within the larger narrative of Scripture, Christ’s salvation does not mean escape from creation but rather renewal of creation.
Athanasius challenges us to breakthrough the surface of simplistic spirituality of Christmas and experience the multilayered depth of its meaning. The Alexandrian bishop pleads with us to embrace the whole Christ who came to bring salvation to the whole creation and renewal to our whole lives. This Christmas, when we cry out, “Let heaven and nature sing!” may we remember that both of these are being renewed and brought together by our Savior King.

Jeremy Treat is pastor for preaching and vision at Reality LA in Los Angeles and adjunct professor of theology at Biola University. He is the author of Renewal in Christ: Athanasius on the Christian Wikimedia Commons Life and The Atonement.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "More than a Manger".

- More from Jeremy Treat

Readers Praise Print Magazines and Local Churches

Kate Lucky

Responses to our July/August issue.

Photography by Abigail Erickson for Christianity Today

Three issues into the redesigned Christianity Today, feedback on the magazine has been encouraging. “It looks substantial, and it reads as substantial,” wrote a pastor on the social platform Threads. Readers have praised the larger font size, thicker paper, revised logotype, curated art, and judicious use of white space. One subscriber told us, “I cannot put it down. Began reading two hours ago, taking a break now at page 92.” Even the reduction in ads drew praise: “I was just about ready to cancel my subscription,” wrote Anita Ramlo of Oakland, California. But instead, she reported, “I have thoroughly enjoyed reading and sharing from the July/August edition!”

Many people shared feedback on a personal essay by Sophia Lee, “Confessions of a Loner.” Some shared struggles finding Christian community as single people, returned missionaries, grieving parents, or older adults. Others expressed gratitude for their churches.

“My husband and I live away from family due to his job, and with four kids you NEED family nearby,” wrote one mom. “Our church has been that family.”

A recently divorced woman said, “In my church, fortunately, I have a vocal friend who told the deaconess I needed food. The deaconess said, ‘She’s one of our own’; people gave me food, veggies from the garden, took a collection; and the deacons paid a few bills.”

When Christian community fails, it’s devastating. But when the body of Christ serves each other as it should, its members can flourish together.

Kate Lucky
senior editor, culture and engagement

Why Print Still Matters

I spend much of each day with my eyes on screens. It is refreshing to spend some time in my comfortable chair with a hot cup of coffee and the print version of Christianity Today in my hands.

Warren A. Dick, Wooster, OH

I’m grateful our library has good magazines like CT. I’m on disability and can’t afford internet or print subscriptions. It is nice to be able to take them home to read with my morning coffee or before bed instead of having to spend every day at the library to read them. Please keep printing!

Donna Cooley, Vancouver, WA

What Hath Jerusalem to Do with Mar-a-Lago?

Russell Moore’s recent editorials reflect an unbecoming and unnecessary political bias. While the editorials have raised important alarms for us concerning the importance of Christian character to our culture and politics, he consistently buries the lead in moral judgments against one candidate, Donald Trump. [Moore] claims his personal views “are beside the point,” which then begs the question as to the purpose of including them. I have no desire to be the former president’s apologist or defender. I also have no desire to read Moore’s personal political views in CT.

Dave Smith, Gainesville, GA

The commentary expressed well my own sorrow at how our politics have been corrupted, but it seemed to express anger toward the former president. There was no encouragement to pray for him, only anger.

Owen Panner Jr. , Riddle, OR

It felt good to know that I’m not the only voice crying in the wilderness that something is far amiss in evangelical circles. As an Anabaptist myself, let me recommend our traditional belief of total separation of church and state, or put another way, the “two kingdom concept,” with the church not taking part in politics at all. It’s freeing!

Merle Yoder, Gladys, VA

Why Both Parties Want Hispanic Evangelicals in 2024

Hispanic Christians are not a monolith. Like the rest of the church and nation, we are politically all over the spectrum.

Rich Rodriguez (via Facebook)

He Told Richard Nixon to Confess

As a Navy chaplain, I was assigned as district chaplain for the Seventh Coast Guard District in Miami, Florida, from 1997 to 2001. I came to know during that time a senior Coast Guard officer—a captain—who had a fascinating tale to tell of his earlier life. Before joining the Coast Guard, he was a Secret Service agent regularly assigned to President Nixon’s detail. In this capacity, his duties took him several times to guard the president inside the Key Biscayne church’s sanctuary during the worship service. Over time, he began to listen to Huffman’s sermons and, due primarily to that input, came to receive Christ! He remained an active, faithful Christian throughout his life.

Mark A. Jumper, Virginia Beach, VA

Is Sexuality a Matter of First Importance?

Allberry’s point on the danger of focusing only on one sin reminds us we are all in need of God’s grace and forgiveness.

Rob Moorlach, Groton, SD

When assigning equal gravity to same-sex sin and greed, you question why the former receives more vehement condemnation than the latter in evangelical circles. Perhaps the pushback has to do with the fierceness with which the practitioners of same-sex attraction defend their sin. Another thing: The line where [same-sex] attraction deviates from heterosexual attraction is clear, immediate, and definable, whereas the moment when the normal desire to acquire crosses the line to greed seems more blurred.

Thomas Keogh, Highlands County, FL

Behind the Scenes

Our July/August article about Eric Liddell was sports historian Paul Emory Putz’s first appearance in a CT print magazine, though he writes often for the online edition. On Threads, he shared a reflection about it:
“I grew up in small-town Nebraska, a pastor’s kid. But not a typical PK. My dad was a full-time UPS truck driver, delivering packages while also starting and pastoring a church. He had no seminary degree or even a bachelor’s degree. But he was curious about the world. He was constantly reading Christian books and literature, and Christianity Today was one of those sources.
“In my own faith journey, having CT around the house was formative. It modeled a way of encountering the world that fed my desire to follow Jesus and my intellectual curiosity. It helped set me, a first-gen college grad, on a trajectory to my work as an educator, historian, and author.
“High school me never would have thought I’d get to contribute my own words to the pages of a magazine that has meant so much to my life.”

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Responses to Our July/August Issue".

- More from Kate Lucky

Church Life

A Solution for Seasonal Overwhelm

Steve Cuss

Guest Columnist

Focusing on the few in front of us makes a tangible difference in our local communities.

Illustration by Keith Negley

The world has been profoundly broken for some time—really since the beginning of time—but doesn’t it feel particularly broken right now?

Social media and 24-hour news ensure our amygdalae and nervous systems get little relief before the next injustice or tragedy arises. These passing issues are serious and real, but they come at us like kindling. They burn quickly and turn to ash before we can grasp them, and the next issue lights the next fire.

Now, at the end of 2024, we find ourselves on the heels of another divisive presidential election and its side effect: the brink of permanent overwhelm. The culture wars and infighting distract us from long-term, complex issues like child poverty, trafficking, and the foster care crisis, to name just a few.

If we’re not careful, this barrage of news becomes the wrong constant companion. David reminds us in Psalm 139 that God is with us no matter where we go, but sometimes the brokenness and overwhelm become an accidental substitute for his presence. We might end up rewriting David’s words:

Where can I go from your problems? Where can I flee from the issues? If I go to social media, you are there; if I turn on cable news, you are there. If I make my bed on the far side of the sea, even there you hold me fast.

Some people solve this overload by adopting a permanent state of outrage. Even if it’s justified, it risks putting us into a spiral of self-righteousness. It feels good, but it often doesn’t change anything. It gives us someone to blame, someone we feel we can treat without nuance. It turns humans into two-dimensional caricatures.

Other people cope with the onslaught of brokenness through ignorance. They stay uninvolved, like the man in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:26–37) who asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” and did not like the reply of the person in need. Both approaches are what we call “attempted solutions” in my field. They either change nothing or make the problem worse.

But there is another path forward, and the Advent season is a good time to walk it. When we first think of Advent, many of our minds go to anticipation. We anticipate the coming hope of Jesus—the already and the not yet. I’ve always appreciated and reflected on John 1:5 during the Advent season: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

But Advent provides something else: a reminder on bleak, overwhelming days that the gospel is local. Jesus was born into a specific zip code, and that place was soaked in systemic injustice and downward-trending statistics.

Herod was so unhinged that the whole city’s mood had become enmeshed with his. “[Herod] was troubled,” writes Matthew, “and all Jerusalem with him” (2:3, ESV). The people were on edge because their well-being was linked to Herod’s whims. Rome was no picnic: It wielded its sword right next to extreme taxation, offered peace at the threat of death, and was conquering and enslaving as much as it was innovating and building. The place where Jesus was born was profoundly marginalized, poverty-stricken, and traumatized.

It helps me in these anxious times to remember that Jesus came to save the world—of course—but he focused on his particular place. His hyperlocal ministry began the astonishing spread of a kingdom that is still spreading in 2024. Jesus’ ministry thrived in a broken locale. People came to faith, they were healed, and they were deployed to make a difference.

When I focus on the people and events around me locally, I find much evidence of God’s goodness. In my own church, rather than getting bogged down by every single issue, we’ve focused on two efforts: care for foster and adopted children and affordable housing. Both are complex and long-term needs. We’ve encountered significant setback and discouragement in our efforts, but we’ve kept it local and have seen remarkable progress. Other congregations work with prisoners or unhoused people or domestic violence survivors. We’ll help anyone who comes through our door—in fact, we’re known for that in our city—but we focus our efforts on those two primary systemic issues. We cannot tackle every injustice, but we can move the needle on a couple in a meaningful way.

What about problems on the other side of the world? Should we stay just in our zip code? Not at all! If we travel the globe to share the gospel, we know that when we arrive, we will focus on a particular place and people, just like we do at home. We collaborate with those who live there long-term and join what God has been doing well before we arrived.

Focusing on outrage-causing issues, reading the statistics, and ranting on social media won’t feed a child or rescue a trafficked person or help a teen who’s aged out of the foster system. But efforts rooted in a hyperlocal gospel can accomplish these things, and God is pleased to use his global church as we attend to the few in front of us.

Madeleine L’Engle once wrote,

[Someone] passionately interested in the cause of the … leper, very carefully avoids speaking to the leper in his path, in order to get on with the cause. And it occurs to me that Jesus couldn’t have cared less about the cause or rights of the leper. … Jesus stopped. And healed. And loved. Not causes, but people.

I am grateful for those who are called to policy work and focus on larger systemic issues. We need those people. But for most of us, the path is local.

In the Gospels, we discover that Jesus really didn’t speak about systemic issues, and he didn’t tackle Herod or Rome. Born into a highly anxious and broken culture, Jesus submitted to his own creation. He kept his ministry hyperlocal, to the person in front of him. As we enter the Advent season, let’s cast our eyes away from the beckoning of outrage and instead on the one who is coming as we focus on the few in front of us.

Steve Cuss is the host of CT’s podcast also called Being Human.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Few in Front of Us".

Being Human: A column by Being Human’s host, Steve Cuss.

- More from Steve, Cuss

News

Vets in Ministry Won’t Retreat from the Military’s Suicide Crisis

Maria Baer

Christians say the epidemic is about more than PTSD.

Veterans Day

Jewel Samad / AFP via Getty Images

Pastor Josh Holler says his US Marine Corps regiment had a saying: Suffer in silence.

Holler, who deployed twice to Iraq, served with men who had the phrase tattooed into their skin. It was a useful aphorism in battle, where soldiers stake their lives on each other’s strength and perseverance.

But suffering in silence once they return home can be disastrous.

“If you take that idea with you when you leave the military … It’s not too long to plot out a time period where that person’s going to take their life,” Holler said.

The US veteran community has suffered a suicide epidemic for decades, and it’s getting worse. According to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, 6,392 veterans took their lives in 2021 (the most recent year that data is available)—which comes to about 17 veteran suicides every day. The veteran suicide rate is about twice that of the non-veteran US adult population.

Of the roughly 2,100 members of the 7th Marine Regiment—Holler’s unit—11 have died by suicide since his return from Iraq in 2013.

For Christian civilians, including pastors, the prospect of ministering to military vets can seem daunting. Leaders who’ve never experienced war may feel ill-equipped to tackle veterans’ unique pain and challenges. Asking about their experience in the service could seem invasive or accusatory; not asking could seem neglectful or ungrateful.

Expressing public support for the US military has also become politically loaded. Holler says a friend and fellow vet was frustrated when his Colorado Springs church moved into a new building and chose to take down the American flag inside the sanctuary, which Holler’s friend took as a personal slight.

A recent Pew Research poll found that while 60 percent of all US adults have a positive view of the military, a majority of those between ages 18 and 29 believe the military “has a negative effect” on the country.

But as the suicide crisis among US veterans worsens, particularly among younger men, some Christians are calling for more support—and not just for veterans suffering from clinical PTSD after war.

In fact, the connection between combat-induced PTSD and veteran suicide may not be as strong as previously believed. A 2014 study found that the veteran suicide rate is actually higher among those who were never deployed; and veteran suicides have continued to rise even as US involvement in foreign wars has diminished.

Holler says his regiment witnessed some harrowing violence in Iraq but “comparatively little” to veterans’ experiences in Vietnam or World War II. He was grieved and confused when so many men he’d served alongside died by suicide after returning home.

A few years ago, he started interviewing their family members and conducting his own research, which he turned into a book in 2020. He writes that veteran suicide “is not primarily a problem born out of exposure to combat and PTSD but out of a broken relationship between people and God.”

The US Department of Veterans Affairs has long dedicated the vast majority of its mental health resources toward treating PTSD, according to The Heritage Foundation. But the overall veteran suicide rate has steadily increased since 2001 and exponentially in the last ten years among veterans aged 18–34.

Holler attended seminary after leaving the military and pastors a Baptist church in St. Louis. He says faith is a necessary component of veterans’ healing after war. Damon Friedman, a Christian and special operations combat veteran, agrees.

Friedman survived multiple violent deployments with the Marine Corps and then the US Air Force and struggled with suicidal thoughts when he returned home. He spent a full year receiving treatment from medical doctors (for his mild traumatic brain injury), from psychologists (for his PTSD), and, ultimately, from pastors.

Friedman says it was this spiritual component, along with the physical and psychological treatment he received, that saved him. “My mind, it was so dark and so black,” he says, “and God radically changed and transformed me.”

That’s why in 2011 he started Shield of Faith (SOF) Missions to offer a “one-stop shop” of comprehensive care—including a strong emphasis on the gospel—to veterans struggling with their mental health.

The Florida-based SOF Missions invites veterans from around the country to weeklong Be Resilient Clinics, where they have access to 20–30 health care practitioners, including psychologists, medical doctors, physical therapists, acupuncturists, massage therapists, nutritionists, sleep specialists, and mental health counselors.

The practitioners spend the week getting to know the vets individually and developing each one’s treatment plan for the next year.

It’s all done at a Florida resort—“That’s our hospital,” Friedman says—at SOF Missions’ expense. Ten vets are invited to each clinic, after which they receive free follow-up care for a full year.

The vets also meet with pastors and study the Bible at the clinics. “We spend just as much time on the spiritual component as we do on the physical pillar, the social pillar, and the psychological pillar,” Friedman says. “I would say eight out of ten that come through our program will walk away literally confessing Jesus as Lord and Savior of their life.”

The organization’s name, Shield of Faith, is a reference to Paul’s exhortation to Ephesians 6 to “put on the whole armor of God” (Eph. 6:11).

“Many people associate the shield as a defensive measure,” Friedman said. “It’s true, but it’s also used offensively. When the enemy would get close, a thrust, a blow would literally shatter the ankles and the wrist … it is also a symbol that God is your shield.”

Like Holler, Friedman is convinced that what plagues suicidal veterans is more than the psychological residue of wartime violence.

He says most of the veterans who seek help from SOF Missions are also suffering from what he calls “moral injury.” He’s seen vets struggling with the knowledge that they’ve killed others. Some struggle to find meaning and purpose back at home after spending a year or more performing high-stakes jobs amid life-or-death circumstances.

At SOF Missions’ female-only Be Resilient Clinics, Friedman says almost every woman who signs up is dealing with another kind of moral injury: sexual assault by fellow service members.

For these vets, treating just their psychological and physical symptoms won’t be enough. “Moral injuries are spiritual in nature,” Friedman says.

Holler says he found the same connection between veterans’ spiritual and mental health as he researched the deaths of his fellow servicemen.

“The military is such an honor/shame culture,” Holler says, but with inverted virtues—many habits that are “shamed” back home are “honored” on deployment, such as excessive drinking and porn use.

He found that men he knew who’d died by suicide after deployment had often struggled to kick one or more of those habits upon returning home, thereby alienating friends and family, sinking deeper into isolation, and losing a broader sense of purpose.

But there’s an even deeper kind of moral injury. Along with the entreaty to “suffer in silence,” Holler says his fellow Marines were taught another saying: “Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

“It was drilled into you,” Holler said. “It’s not meant to look at people in a demeaning way. … There was restraint there. But it was an essential part of the combat mindset, meant in both a defensive and offensive sense.”

It’s a dark paradox of active duty: The military needs men to think like machines when they’re overseas but return home as people. Holler says mentally preparing to kill others in combat can bring soldiers across a threshold into dangerous ideation.

“If you have considered killing another person as part of your job … I firmly believe that lowers the threshold to then translate to killing yourself,” he said.

Holler and Friedman have different ideas about how the church can best serve veterans more broadly. Friedman says he wishes more churches included specific ministries and support groups for vets, while Holler says what the vets really need is deep, durable relationships with fellow believers.

Serving vets can get awkward. Holler has a sore spot for half-hearted shows of support, like “free meals for vets” or a Memorial Day sale at a mattress company. For his part, Friedman can’t stand when someone approaches him just to share that they “almost served in the military.”

Nevertheless, Friedman and Holler agree the worst way to minister to veterans—even those struggling with clinical PTSD, who may need more intervention besides friendship and community—is to ignore them.

- More from Maria Baer

Books

Excerpt

When Deities Promise Answers to Dating and Money Woes

Tony Chuang

Until the gospel starts explicitly addressing daily needs, most Taiwanese non-Christians will likely remain uninterested.

People pay their respects to the sea goddess, Mazu, at a temple in Taiwan during the first day of the 2023 Dajia Mazu Pilgrimage.

Chris McGrath / Getty

As a first grader, I had the same daily after-school routine. I had a five-minute walk past bustling skyscrapers and scooters crowding the streets of downtown Taipei, Taiwan, to my family’s apartment, where my grandparents would greet me. My grandma would remind me to greet the ancestors before I could play with my Transformer robots. I’d pick up a stick of incense, clamp my palms together, and pray a simple prayer to the ancestral shrine in the middle of the living room.

I asked for health, wealth, and good grades. Then I’d snack on the crackers that had been offered to the ancestors and deities in the shrine. Life was good. My hardworking parents provided for me, my grandparents watched me, and my ancestors blessed and protected me.

At the time, I had never heard the gospel, and what I did hear about Christianity from my grandparents was negative: Christians were out to get my money, and Christianity simply was “not our way.” Our way was Chinese folk religion, which mixed elements of Confucianism and Daoism (Taoism) with a plethora of deities, ancestors, and shamanistic rituals.

My mother always taught me about the efficacy of prayer to a deity called Jesus, so I prayed to him along with the others. It was not until high school that a classmate told me the gospel and I gave my life to this Christian God.

About 30 years later, I wrote Religiosity and Gospel Transmission: Insights from Folk Religion in Taipei to explore how folk religion shapes the worldview of Taiwanese people so that Christians can share the gospel effectively. Today, Christians only make up 6 percent of Taiwan’s population, while adherents to folk religion compose 44 percent, according to Pew Research Center. Taiwan has the third-highest percentage of folk religion followers in the world.

While my research focused on my home of Taiwan, Chinese folk religion is a widely held belief system among ethnic Han Chinese around the world. The specific practices may differ across geographic contexts, but the ideas and religiosity, such as feng shui or the unseen realm, of the people are quite similar.

Through interviews with 25 people in the streets and temples of Taipei on their thoughts on religiosity, I began to see two key questions that Christianity needed to answer for Taiwanese people enmeshed in the world of folk religion, whether they believe it deeply or not. How does Christianity engage with the spiritual realm? And how does it help the everyday life of the Taiwanese?

The gospel to believers in the spirit world

Chinese American sociologist C. K. Yang noted that Chinese folk religion is a diffused religion—meaning that it pervades everyday life, intruding secular spaces in a way that institutional religion does not often do. For instance, in ethnic Chinese communities around the world, it is common practice for stores to offer up food and incense to certain deities at their grand openings to ask for blessing and prosperity.

This means that instead of disenchanting folk religion like it has the rest of the world, modernity has had a vastly different effect on Chinese religiosity. Folk religion ensures that secular institutions and social groups are “imbued with a rich folklore of a supernatural character,” Yang wrote in Religion in Chinese Society. “The social environment as a whole had a sacred atmosphere which inspired the feeling that the gods and spirits, as well as man, participated in molding the established ways of life in the traditional world.”

The pervasiveness of folk religion in everyday life and social institutions—including government offices and schools—has made it a key part of Taiwanese consciousness, as much so as modern-day politics. This does not mean that all Taiwanese are still “enchanted by the supernatural,” as philosopher Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age, but that the “supernatural” has become part of an accepted experience of the people.

In this context, a presentation of the gospel should directly address the forces of ghosts, spirits, local deities, and ancestors that make up Taiwanese people’s lived realities.

For instance, on certain days of the year, the streets of Taipei are crowded as people carrying statues of local deities parade from one temple to the next. Mao-Hsien Lin, a leading expert on folk religion in Taiwan, explained that the parades are spiritually analogous to the patrol of police officers, as their purpose is to “get rid of evil [spirits] and calm the people’s hearts.”

If the gospel fails to do the same, it would be perceived as useless in Taiwan. Based on the interviews I did, demons and evil spirits are a real concern today in many parts of Taiwan. So the church needs a better theology and practice of exorcism. The gospel must be seen not just as insurance for the afterlife but as protection in this life against real or perceived spiritual forces.

One practical example is telling non-Christians about the power of Jesus’s name to drive back demons that may be attacking one’s house or the power of prayer to do things that no spirits or deities could do.

Taiwan’s charismatic churches are already known for doing this. Because the unseen realm is normal in Taiwan, most churches in Taiwan “have always understood the supernatural aspect of faith as recorded in the Scripture in a literal sense—which can be tasted and seen in the present day,” according to Judith C. P. Lin in The Charismatic Movement in Taiwan from 1945 to 1995. It’s what led the charismatic movement to grow so successfully on the island, she argued, noting that an estimated one-third of Taiwanese Christians have lean charismatic.

In both charismatic and noncharismatic groups, Taiwanese Christians regularly pray for deliverance, miraculous healings, and protection amid demonic warfare. These gospel practices reveal to Taiwanese people the power of God, ways to pray, the danger of spirit-mediums, and other issues are related to their everyday life.

This approach has been taught in churches, especially since the 1980s. Yet in my interviews, few people mentioned Christians speaking to them about the unseen realm. Perhaps this approach could be used more frequently for initial gospel encounters, as a gospel that adequately addresses the spiritual realm will see more responses in Taiwan.

The gospel’s implications on daily life

Another important aspect to consider when reaching Taiwanese nonbelievers is what they are seeking when they approach the gods and deities of folk religion. While gospel presentations in the West focus on more abstract concepts like how Christianity provides forgiveness of sins, new life, and hope for eternity, Taiwanese people are more interested in practical, everyday concerns.

For instance, they ask the god Guan Sheng DI Jun to help them get promoted. They ask the earth God to protect their home from thieves. They beseech Yue Lao to bring them a romantic partner.

Gospel presentations to Taiwanese people need to address how or if the gospel can help them in these practical ways. Today, many Christian teachers exhort us to gospel living—how we as Christians can live according to the grace and responsibilities given to us—but what about the gospel in daily life?

When your business is not doing well, what is the gospel’s answer to that? When you live in a crime-ridden neighborhood, how does the gospel protect you? When you are 38 years old and unable to find a spouse, where does the gospel come in? The easy answers of “have more faith” and “turn to Jesus” are not concrete enough to address the real concerns that people have.

Some Christians who have attended church for a while start to understand how the gospel can apply in specific situations. But non-Christians are not aware of this. In my interviews, I found that many Taiwanese non-Christians viewed the abstract gospel as “irrelevant,” “stupid,” or “arrogant.” Some even mistook it for another mystic chant. Until the gospel starts explicitly addressing situations in daily life, most Taiwanese non-Christians will likely remain uninterested and unconvinced.

Folk religion provides answers and concrete rituals for situations that people encounter in everyday life. Through customs, rituals, and special holidays like Tomb Sweeping Festival, folk religion in Taiwan provides a sense of security and situation-specific assurances. It does not have complicated doctrines for people to grasp—all they need to do is visit the temple and pray to the deity.

Therefore, an abstract gospel does little for most Taiwanese. What many Taiwanese need is a more down-to-earth gospel that addresses the same things that folk religion deities address: daily lives and felt needs. These needs are not a side project for the deities but their sole purpose.

A contextual approach to gospel presentations in Taiwan should frame the Lord as better than the goddess Mazu in her protection of fishermen, better than the earth God in his protection of land, better than Guanyin in her compassion for people, better than Lord Superior Wen Chang in his concern for academia, and better than Yue Lao in his understanding of love.

That doesn’t mean Christians should water down the gospel or make it only about fulfilling daily needs. The gospel has eternal significance and brings a person into a relationship with the Lord. The gospel is also not about fulfilling one’s desires; rather, it is about fulfilling the desires of God. Taken to the extreme, this kind of prosperity gospel robs Jesus’ focus on the kingdom, John’s call to love, and Paul’s admonition to live a life worthy of the calling we have received.

In Jesus’ ministry, he encountered people and provided for both their external and spiritual needs. Jesus spoke about how to deal with a Roman soldier asking a civilian to carry luggage or other items (Matt. 5:41). He spoke about paying taxes (Mark 12:17) and how often to forgive people (Matt. 18:21–22). Abstract truth sometimes came with the fulfillment of daily needs and sometimes did not. Even in large-scale public meetings like the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught people how to act in daily life.

When evangelizing to Taiwanese people, it is important to discuss the challenging issues they are facing. Christians could ask adherents of folk religion about the last deity they visited and what they were seeking. Knowing the answers to these questions can help Christians explain how the gospel speaks directly to their concerns, how God can solve their problems, and how God can do more than any deity.

Sometimes God does not fulfill every felt need. But that does not mean the gospel does not speak on a given subject. For instance, the gospel teaches people not to worry about money or promotions but to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33). On the question of protection, the gospel teaches that God “will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways” (Ps. 91:11). For someone seeking a romantic partner, the gospel teaches us about love itself (1 Cor. 13).

To show that the gospel of Jesus Christ is necessary and vital amid a culture seeped in folk religion, Christians need to show that God is more powerful than the spirits and deities that threaten the Taiwanese people and that he is a better answer to the daily needs of their lives.

The result is a gospel that is truly “good news” for Taiwanese people and an appeal that can take root in this culture.

Tony Chuang is a pastor, conference speaker, adjunct lecturer, and business director from Taiwan who is currently living in Penang, Malaysia. He received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

This excerpt was adapted from Religiosity and Gospel Transmission: Insights from Folk Religion in Taipei by Tony Chuang. Copyright © 2024 Langham Academic. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

- More from Tony Chuang

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Why Print Still Matters

Behind the Scenes

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The gospel to believers in the spirit world

The gospel’s implications on daily life

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