Chinese Christians Want the Church to Adopt Children with Disabilities

After China banned international adoptions, some believers want the Chinese church to step up.

A boy living in an orphanage for disabled children in China.

China Photos / Stringer / Getty

Xiaofei Wang, a pastor’s wife at a house church in the Chinese port city of Xiamen, had long heard of families overseas who would adopt children with special needs from China. Some of these adoptive parents had limited finances and other children to care for, yet they were eager to bring another child into their home. She began to wonder, “Why aren’t there families in China willing to adopt these children?”

In 2014, Wang began volunteering with a Christian nonprofit that cares for children with disabilities inside a state-run orphanage. She was moved by how the nonprofit’s staff lovingly comforted and played with the children—some of whom had Down syndrome, hydrocephalus (a buildup of fluid in the brain), or imperforate anus (a birth defect where the anus is missing)—while also spending countless hours researching treatments for them.

“I once thought these children would be better off in heaven, but these volunteers believed that as long as a child is in God’s hands, they must care for him or her every single day,” she said.

From then on, Wang and her husband began to sense a desire to adopt a child with special needs, even though both adoption and disabilities are stigmatized in traditional Chinese culture. In 2020, the couple, who had no children of their own, decided to adopt a boy with Down syndrome, whom they named Zhuci (meaning “gift”).

Since then, they’ve seen Zhuci not only bring joy into their lives but also change their church’s view of the value of all people, including those with disabilities.

Wang and other Christians in China believe the church can play a unique role in adopting children with special needs, especially after the Chinese government banned international adoptions in late August. The news came four years after China stopped processing adoptions—most of which involved children with disabilities—due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Without this pathway for children with medical needs, thousands of children may face a lifetime of institutionalization.

Some Chinese pro-life groups and foster-care homes are working to mobilize the church to step into that gap. Others, like Wang, lead by example, adopting children like Zhuci and sharing their adoption stories. Yet Wang believes the Chinese church has a long way to go in championing these children.

“Our faith hasn’t yet been deeply touched by God’s love; we tend to value life based on societal norms,” Wang said. “We often want only healthy, typical children. Very few consider adopting a child with special needs.”

China’s history of international adoption is closely tied to the government’s one-child policy, which was in effect from 1979 to 2015. At the time, many mothers who gave birth to daughters or children with disabilities would abandon their babies for a chance to have a healthy son, as a preference for male children is common in Chinese culture. Having more than one child would lead to harsh fines, job loss, or forced abortions and sterilizations.

The large number of abandoned children led the Chinese government to open up international adoptions in 1992. Since then, families around the world have adopted 160,000 Chinese children.

In the past decade, things have changed drastically. The Chinese government has ended the one-child policy and is instead encouraging couples to have more children, as the country’s population is aging at one of the fastest rates in the world.

The number of abandoned children has also dropped as fewer people are having babies. In addition, more remote villages have access to ultrasounds, leading parents to abort babies with genetic abnormalities, as a doctor who brought orphans with disabilities to Beijing for treatment told The Economist. Young couples are also less superstition about disabilities and less likely to abandon a child with medical needs, the doctor added.

The ban on international adoptions—except for foreigners adopting stepchildren or blood relatives—is in line with these demographic changes and the government’s desire to grow its population.

However, domestic adoptions face their own roadblocks. Before 2021, only childless couples could adopt, and even they could receive only one child. Today, beyond the typical requirements that adoptive parents must have the financial and mental capacity to care for a child, they must also be at least 30 years old and have no more than one child.

Jonny Fan, founder of the Chinese pro-life group Children’s Day for Life, stated that beyond regulatory difficulties, there are also persistent cultural ideas about adoption to overcome.

“Traditionally, adoption has been seen negatively, often associated with a family’s inability to bear children,” Fan said. “Adopted individuals are frequently viewed as laborers within the home, lacking inheritance rights and even the ability to be recorded in the family registry.”

Fan noted that adoptions typically happen quietly. Relationships that lack blood ties are considered less secure, as some fear that adopted children will eventually leave the family to seek their biological parents. “Blood relations hold a sacred status in Eastern culture,” Fan explained.

This mindset extends to the church as well. In fact, Fan said, the strong negative connotation around adoption even impacted how the Chinese Bible was translated. In English, verses like Ephesians 1:5 use the term “adoption” to refer to believers’ new status in God’s family, but Chinese translations say, “being given the status of sons.” When Fan mentioned to one Chinese Christian that believers are adopted by God, the man replied, “How can we be adopted? We are children of God.”

Adoption plays an important role in Children’s Day for Life. The organization, which started in 2012 as a ministry within Fan’s church, sets up banners and passes out flyers each June 1 (China’s Children’s Day) to encourage women to keep their babies. Christians with friends or families with crisis pregnancies began referring mothers to the group. Members met with the mothers, discussed the life growing inside of them, and offered support to help them carry their babies to term. At times, this meant connecting them with couples willing to adopt the babies.

In total, Children’s Day for Life has helped more than 500 mothers, saved more than 200 babies from abortion, and consulted 30 families seeking to adopt these babies informally, Fan said. (Informal adoption, or taking in a child without going through the official process, is a common practice in China.)

For the past five years, the group has held a weekly “Life Open Course” online, which attracts about three dozen participants to discuss issues of life, procreation, ethics, adoption, and marriage. Last year, they read Adopted for Life by Christianity Today editor in chief Russell Moore. For many, the book was “their first time hearing biblical teachings on adoption,” Fan said. “Some indicated that their perspectives on adoption have been transformed.”

After the study, one woman pledged to adopt the baby of another Christian couple, who had found out through genetic testing that their baby likely had Down syndrome. The couple was facing overwhelming pressure from family members and their doctor to abort the baby. Despite the woman’s offer, they yielded to the pressure and chose abortion.

“Defending life and opposing abortion have always been a marginalized ministry within the church, and adoption is even more so,” Fan said. “Even my mother struggles to understand why I would ‘interfere’ in others’ family matters.”

When Fan heard that China was banning international adoption, he began developing new courses around the theme of adopting children with special needs. He hopes that Chinese Christians can begin to accept a biblical view of adoption and step up to care for these children. “The work we’ve been doing over the past decade may have been a preparation for this moment,” he said.

Owen Wong has seen the needs surrounding orphan care in China change over the past few decades. He’s a board member of Shanghai’s Love Home, a Christian nonprofit that cares for abandoned children, many of whom have severe disabilities that government orphanages are ill-equipped to care for. Started in 2000, the home has taken in nearly 100 children.

Yet in the past few years, the government has invested in its orphanages, upgrading facilities and adding rehabilitation centers, Wong said. It asked groups like Love Home to send the children back to state-run orphanages. At the same time, the government made it easier for Chinese couples to adopt by allowing informally adopted children to register for identity cards.

In response, Love Home began to shift its focus toward providing vocational training for orphans who have left their care setting, along with financial, psychological, and medical support for families adopting children with special needs.

Wong is the father of three, including two adopted children with special needs. At the Christian school where he is the principal, several families have fostered or adopted children. Yet they often face grave challenges. Families are overwhelmed by the realities of caring for children with medical needs, lack community support, experience financial strain from the medical expenses, and don’t know how to deal with the trauma that the children bring with them from their time in the orphanage.

Wong found that about half of families who foster children with disabilities end up returning the children to the orphanage.

Yet Love Home has also seen success stories, such as Hannah Shi, a 19-year-old with severe spinal disabilities who graduated from Wong’s school, Wisdom Academy, and is now studying at Columbia International University in South Carolina. Shi aspires to become a special education teacher.

Wisdom Academy holds a Bible study group for adoptive families where they can share their struggles and joys. One family, on the brink of giving up efforts to adopt, found renewed strength to persevere as they took part in a year-long study of the Gospel of John with the group.

“For every orphan, having a home is the best outcome,” Wong said. “But for families preparing to adopt, the journey requires the support of the church, fellow believers, and society at large.”

The Wangs in Xiamen also faced various challenges on their adoption journey. In 2014, Wang cared for a six-month-old with a kidney cyst and an imperforate anus at the orphanage where she volunteered. Doctors didn’t think the baby would make it to his first birthday. Moved by compassion, Wang and her husband decided to foster the boy and give him a loving home for the remainder of his life.

The Wangs secured permission from the orphanage to take the baby home. They named him Benen, meaning “son of grace.” Despite the daily challenges of changing the colostomy bag attached to his abdomen, they found joy in caring for him. Yet after three months, the orphanage informed Wang that an overseas couple had decided to adopt Benen. Tearfully, they said goodbye to him.

In 2020, Wang and her husband sought to adopt a child with physical disabilities from the same orphanage. But at the time, all the children with normal cognitive abilities had been adopted, leaving only children with Down syndrome and cerebral palsy.

As they prayed and wrestled with this decision, the couple confronted their motivations. If we adopt a child with special needs, I must set aside all my ministry work to focus on this child, Wang thought. Am I doing this because I want to be seen as a pastor’s wife who does good things? Am I seeking praise from others? Or is it a genuine calling to love? Her husband grappled with concerns over other people’s reactions: What will people say? Will they think we wanted a baby so badly that we’d even adopt a baby with Down syndrome?

After more than six months of prayer and discussion, they decided to accept the first child recommended by the orphanage. It took four months to finalize the adoption, and they joyfully brought Zhuci home. At their church, many people were initially surprised that they would adopt a child with special needs. Yet getting to know Zhuci led church members to think differently when facing medical challenges in their own families.

For instance, in 2021, Ruth Wu finally became pregnant after she and her husband struggled with infertility for three years. Through prenatal tests, doctors suspected that the baby had trisomy 18, a chromosomal condition.

Despite their shock and sadness, the couple was inspired by Wang’s adoption of Zhuci and by John 9:3: “‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.’” To the doctors’ surprise, they decided to carry the child to term.

When their son was born, they found that the grim prognosis was accurate. The boy, named YoYo, had multiple deformities and was immediately admitted to the NICU. When the doctors deemed him beyond help, the parents brought him home and cared for him until he passed away after three months. “YoYo’s life was a miracle, a manifestation of God’s grace,” the couple wrote in a testimony posted on WeChat. “While many live long but burdened lives, YoYo fulfilled his beautiful mission in just a short time, shepherding God’s people and displaying His works.”

Today, Zhuci is ten years old. Although he speaks only simple words, Wang said her son fills their home with joy. He joins his parents in prayers and ends with a hearty “amen.” Wang has found that her pace of life has slowed down as she accompanies her son to the park or the beach, and she’s learned to rest in God’s presence. When frustrated or tired, she increasingly recognizes God’s compassion toward her.

In caring for Zhuci, Wang often remembers the Bible verses that she treasured while processing his adoption, such as Galatians 4:4–6, which reminds her that all Christian have been adopted into the family of God. “None of us were originally children of God, yet through faith in Christ Jesus, we are adopted as his children,” Wang said. “This divine love inspired us to make this extraordinary decision.”

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

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Global Methodist Bishops to Dance

Daniel Silliman in San José, Costa Rica

The new denomination tussles over its authority structure—but also finds surprising points of unity.

Global Methodist bishops sing at the first General Conference, where delegates debated the shape of episcopal authority.

Global Methodist bishops at the convening General Conference.

Questions of bishops stirred controversy in Costa Rica. Amid the joy of the convening General Conference of the Global Methodist Church as the new denomination ratified and modified the provisional decisions of its transitional leadership, the episcopacy emerged as the one issue that could rouse serious disagreement.

Who would be in charge of the new church? How many bishops would there be? How would they be elected, and how long would they serve? What would they do, specifically? How would the power and authority of the position be limited?

“There is a very collaborative spirit, but people have disagreements,” Asbury University professor Suzanne Nicholson told CT. “It’s always messy when you start something new.”

The Global Methodists debated the shape of the authority structure they would erect over themselves while they were in the process of figuring out and applying the lessons they learned from decades spent fighting in the United Methodist Church. There were, of course, theological and ideological reasons for their split. But for many of the people who left, the real problem, the deeper problem—the intractable, unresolvable, deeply frustrating, and hurtful problem—was the bishops.

The bishops didn’t defend orthodoxy, Global Methodist ministers told Christianity Today. They didn’t maintain order or unity. They didn’t seem to be in touch with the concerns of congregations or to care about small, struggling churches, and they used their power to punish ministers they saw as troublesome (or just conservative).

Many ministers have stories about being exiled. And far-flung rural churches with 20, 30, 50 people attending regularly recount with pain their realization that they were the places of exile—assigned only ministers who were being punished by the appointment.

United Methodist leaders see all this very differently, of course. And those who stayed in the denomination can offer alternative accounts of what happened.

But among those who left, there is a consensus: It was bad. And it was bad because of the bishops.

The new denomination, meeting for the first time, desperately wanted to avoid any possibility of repeating those mistakes. They debated the way to shape and structure the episcopacy to ensure better leadership.

The goal—everyone who spoke to CT agreed—was to set up an episcopal structure where the bishops are not bureaucrats responsible for administration of an institution, but shepherds fending off wolves and leading the church into green pastures.

“The main thing was an episcopacy that focused on teaching and preserving the faith,” said David Watson, New Testament professor at United Theological Seminary and lead editor at Firebrand. “We wanted to reshape the office for theology. If we don’t do that and there’s not something specific in Methodism we want to preserve, we’ve all wasted a lot of time and money.”

The Global Methodists built on other broad agreements as well. There was no debate about whether bishops ought to belong to a separate order of clergy, the way they do in the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican communion. The Methodists see bishops and other ministers filling distinct roles but sharing the same ordination.

The General Conference legislation stating the episcopacy is not a separate order passed 315 to 3.

There was also broad consensus that the role should be temporary. The Global Methodists don’t want people to be bishops for life. The delegates in Costa Rica decided instead that bishops would serve six-year terms and would be limited to two terms.

“The fail-safe is term limits,” Watson said. “That’s very popular.”

But delegates did disagree about other things. One group proposed that each region of Global Methodists, which is called an annual conference, should have its own bishop. Others objected that would give the bishops too many day-to-day administrative responsibilities and they’d end up running the denomination in their region. They suggested that job be given to a general superintendent hired by the region, while bishops took responsibility for preaching and teaching in four, five, or even six regions at once.

Responsibility for a broader area would also promote more connections between Global Methodists, advocates for that plan said.

One person proposed an itineracy system as another alternative: assigning bishops to one region at a time but then rotating assignments annually.

Matthew Sichel, a deacon from Maryland, pointed to the Methodist history of circuit riding. He said the new denomination should bring that model back in its episcopal structure.

“Itinerancy is a gift to Methodists,” he told the delegates during the debate. “It gives you a chance to see God work through leaders you would never have known.”

The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by delegates. The General Conference ultimately decided to support what they called the General Episcopacy Plan. Bishops will not be responsible for administration but will be tasked with spiritual leadership. They will be over the whole church but divvy up regions between themselves, each taking about five annual conferences.

Sichel said he didn’t like that plan, but losing the vote didn’t bother him at all.

“These are not essential issues,” he told CT. “I’m willing to trust the General Conference.”

Rob Renfroe, president and publisher of Good News, the leading evangelical Methodist magazine, said he heard that sentiment a lot at the Global Methodist gathering. People would articulate their preferences but acknowledge disagreements and submit the issue to the discernment of the delegates.

“This is holy conferencing,” he said. “We agree on the bedrock theological issues. Jesus is Lord, Scripture is authoritative, and we want to reclaim our Wesleyan heritage. So we can trust the General Conference.”

Delegates also said they knew that they would have the opportunity to tinker with the authority structure in the future. They worried about the unintended consequences of the decisions they were making in Costa Rica but took comfort in the wisdom of delegates to come.

“The bishop thing is a work in progress,” said Jeff Kelley, pastor of a church in Nebraska. “I don’t think that this conference will settle it. We have to wade in the water.”

Since it is still a work in progress, the General Conference decided not to elect bishops to six-year terms just yet. They started instead with interim bishops who will work part-time and serve for two years.

The delegates spent a lot of time debating the details of the interim episcopacy, wrestling over how those candidates would be nominated and whether or not someone elected to a two-year term could be reelected in 2026. Some expressed concern that if more groups join the Global Methodists in the next two years when all the bishop’s seats are filled, it will be harder for those people to elect a bishop who represented them. The delegates decided that 50 percent of the interim bishops could be reelected but each would have to receive a three-quarters majority vote.

The delegates then nominated more than 20 candidates, all present among the nearly 1,000 delegates and observers in Costa Rica, and started voting.

Delegates elected three candidates on the first ballot: Kimba Evariste from the Democratic Republic of Congo; Carolyn Moore from North Georgia, who preached about Acts 19 the first night of the General Conference; and Leah Hidde-Gregory from the Mid-Texas region. Then a fourth person won an episcopal position: John Pena Auta of Nigeria.

Balloting went on for multiple rounds after that without any names garnering enough votes to win. Ryan Barnett, pastor of First Methodist Church in Waco, Texas, went to a microphone and withdrew his name with praise for Hidde-Greggory, calling her the best Texas had to offer.

Then other candidates—mostly white men—started streaming forward to withdraw their names too.

“I thank God for the move of the Spirit,” said Stephen Martyn, professor of Christian spirituality at Asbury Theological Seminary, after seeing the vote totals for his name drop in three successive rounds of balloting. “It has been obvious. And it is a joy to withdraw my name.”

Other people in the room said they were pleased to not even be nominated. Some of the ministers at the convening General Conference had been accused of joining the Global Methodists just to grab power.

Johnwesley Yohanna, for example, has served as a bishop in Nigeria for 12 years. He had heard rumors that he was maneuvering for a leadership spot in the new denomination and joined not because he was trying to be faithful but because he wanted more authority and thought the new denomination would give him whatever he asked for. He said electing someone else as bishop allowed him to prove his integrity.

“It’s done. I’m done. I kept my word,” Yohanna told CT. “We praise God in everything.”

Delegates elected Jeff Greenway, who served as president pro tempore of the Global Methodist Church during its transition period, as their fifth interim bishop. Finally, Kenneth Livingston, a Black pastor in Houston, was chosen.

The six newly elected bishops joined two men already serving in the episcopal role: Scott Jones, a former United Methodist bishop from East Texas, and Mark Webb, a former United Methodist bishop from Upstate New York.

The final results were greeted by jubilant pandemonium in Costa Rica. The bishops-elect embraced family, friends, and each other, while the nearly 1,000 people in the room sang “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.”

Whatever disagreements they had about the authority structure seemed to melt with the joy as the six men and women filed onto the conference room stage with their spouses for a group photo.

A number of delegates said they were specifically encouraged by the diversity. They said the election showed that the “global” part of Global Methodism was not just a mask for conservative white Americans but a reality. And the new denomination also demonstrated its commitment to egalitarianism and the Wesleyan belief that the Spirit is poured out on “both men and women” (Acts 2:18).

“I’m proud of how that went today,” said Asbury seminary student Emily Allen. “Electing women—that meant a lot to me. And two Africans and a Black American—that sets us on a good path.”

As the Global Methodists rejoiced and praised their newly elected leaders, however, the delegates also found a surprising way to reassert the ultimate authority of the General Conference. Two pastors, Natalie Kay Faust from Nebraska and D. A. Bennett from Oklahoma, came forward with a motion that had not been discussed in any of the debates on episcopal authority, nor in any legislative committee.

“We would like to propose a Bennett-Faust motion, in the spirit of historicity of this celebration,” Bennett said. “Schedule time in the 2026 General Conference of the Global Methodist Church for bishops … to perform a liturgical dance to all 17 verses of ‘O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.’”

More than dozen delegates shouted, “Second.”

“Can we call them ‘out of order’?” Mark Webb asked Scott Jones.

But Faust pushed on, calling the motion a fitting recognition of the “spirit of honor for one another” among the Global Methodists.

“We have seen how the Spirit can move when we set our own personal pride and barriers aside and open ourselves up to new expressions of his leading,” Faust said. “This motion is encouraging our episcopal leaders to lead by example of Christian submission and connection to the movement of the Spirit.”

Webb said it was out of order, but everyone in the room just laughed at him. Jones said it should be referred to committee, but no one agreed. Delegates, instead, called for a vote.

“Do I have any friends to oppose?” Jones said.

He did not.

The delegates voted by show of hands and the motion passed by an overwhelming majority.

The new denomination will meet again in 2026 and hold its first full episcopal election, picking bishops for six-year terms that will focus on preaching, teaching, and spiritual leadership. And the first bishops of the Global Methodist Church will perform a dance to all 17 verses of the beloved Wesleyan hymn “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

- More from Daniel Silliman

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Evangelicals Struggle to Preach Life in the Top Country for Assisted Death

Meagan Gillmore in Ontario

Canadian pastors are lagging behind a national push to expand MAID to those with disabilities and mental health conditions.

Stockbusters / Getty

Canadian Christians increasingly find their pro-life values in conflict with their nation’s rapid acceptance of medical assistance in dying (MAID). Many say churches could be a refuge in Canada’s pro-MAID culture, reminding people of human dignity and providing community supports that can help them resist the lure of MAID.

But chances are, most Canadian Christians haven’t heard their pastors discuss MAID—and clergy, despite their pro-life convictions, are likely still learning about the laws that legalize the ending of life.

The few evangelical pastors who have addressed the issue directly have seen an almost immediate impact in their congregations. But most haven’t kept up with the legal landscape for MAID or have waited to speak out.

“I think one of the strongest reasons why MAID has a lot of traction generally in our society is that nobody wants to talk about death,” said Jeff Gullacher, a pastor in Alberta who began addressing the issue in his church earlier this year. “Everyone just wants to kind of sweep it under the rug and keep it as sterile and as short as possible.”

MAID was legalized in Canada in 2016. Amendments that passed in 2021 removed the criterion that a person’s death be “reasonably foreseeable” and allowed for the eventual legalization of MAID for individuals whose only medical condition is a mental illness.

The current law allows people who have “grievous and irremediable” illnesses, diseases, or disabilities and are experiencing what they consider to be unbearable physical or psychological suffering to be eligible for MAID—even if their death is not, in the law’s words, “reasonably foreseeable.” By the end of the month, Quebec will authorize patients to approve their own MAID requests in advance.

Heidi Janz, a specialist in disability ethics, has spent years lobbying against MAID laws because of the way they devalue people with disabilities. She is waiting for evangelical Canadians to join the fight.

“The silence has been deafening,” said Janz, who has multiple disabilities and uses a voice synthesizer to deliver public statements, including testimony before parliamentary committees.

Earlier this year, she spoke at a Christian conference in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, urging Christians to do more to support people with disabilities so they do not die by MAID.

Janz was hoping churches would call her afterward, inviting her to speak to their congregations. They haven’t. And she rarely sees churches publicly opposing MAID or being concerned about how it endangers already-vulnerable people.

“We’re just collectively shrugging our shoulders,” she told CT. “I think we’re going to have a lot to answer for.”

The use of MAID, sometimes called euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in other jurisdictions, has surged in Canada, where 44,958 people have died through the provision. The number increases each year. In 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 13,241 people died by MAID in Canada, accounting for 4 percent of the country’s deaths that year. Final numbers for 2023 will be released later this month, but projections put last year’s total around 17,000.

Canada is widely regarded as having some of the most permissive MAID laws in the world. For example, in American jurisdictions that have legalized the practice, patients cannot be prescribed lethal drugs to end their lives unless they have a terminal illness and a prognosis of six months or less. They also must take the drugs themselves.

Canada, however, has never required a time-based prognosis to determine someone’s eligibility for MAID. The drugs used in MAID are most often administered intravenously—in 2022, fewer than seven Canadians who died by MAID took the drugs themselves. In 2027, Canada plans to extend eligibility to people whose sole medical condition is a mental illness.

As MAID becomes more common, pastors are often at a loss to know how to address it with their congregations—whether during sermons or with individuals who are considering it or are grieving the loss of someone to MAID.

“The numbers are just now getting to the point where pastors are noticing that people in their flock are choosing this, and they’re really unsure how to deal with it,” said Larry Worthen, the executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Association (CMDA) of Canada. But he’s received more invitations to speak to pastors across the country recently.

Many denominations do not have clear guidance about how clergy should respond when their congregants are considering or opting for MAID, said Gloria Woodland, director of the chaplaincy program at ACTS Seminaries of Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia.

Woodland teaches an eight-week seminary course about MAID that is being offered to churches throughout Canada. She also speaks to pastors. She begins by reviewing the law and how it’s changed since it was first enacted.

She said pastors may not know, for example, that people who are approved for MAID in cases where their deaths are seen as reasonably foreseeable no longer have to wait ten days between when their requests are approved and when MAID is administered. This means it is legally possible for someone to die by MAID on the same day they are approved for it.

“What I’m finding is the majority have not gone any deeper than what they’re hearing on the news,” she said.

When pastor Deric Bartlett decided to preach two sermons about MAID last year, he readied himself for criticism. Between 800 and 1,000 people typically attend his Baptist church—City Centre Church in Mississauga, Ontario—and not all visitors are friendly to the church’s teachings, he said.

Instead, he received more positive feedback than usual, including from one attendee who said the teaching had convinced them not to pursue MAID.

Other pastors reported similar experiences. Last February, Trinity Baptist Church in Sherwood Park, a suburb east of Edmonton, Alberta, hosted a seminar by Margaret Cottle, a palliative care physician and pro-life advocate.

The seminar was originally intended for the congregation and anyone they wanted to invite, said the church’s lead pastor, Jeff Gullacher. But when leaders of the church’s denomination, Canadian Baptists of Western Canada, heard about it, they offered to help the church livestream the event and make it available to people outside the congregation.

Gullacher received positive feedback across the denomination, he said. He has also heard of people who no longer support MAID after hearing the presentation.

Gullacher has not preached a sermon directly on MAID, he said, but the church has offered a series of classes on topics related to death and dying, including wills, estate planning, and decluttering. They’re also planning to use the curriculum Dying with Christ – Living with Hope, which was developed by CMDA Canada to help churches discuss MAID in small groups.

But while pastors say they’ve received positive feedback on corporate teaching about MAID, knowing how to respond to people considering MAID or grieving a death caused by MAID can be more challenging.

Cottle, who speaks to churches regularly, has no doubt that MAID contradicts Scripture’s teaching. “There isn’t any nuance about whether or not we should be doing medical killing,” she told CT. “The nuance comes in, How do you live as a faithful Christian in a society that thinks that medical killing is a good idea?”

In her courses, Woodland has Christian chaplains and pastors consider how they would respond if one of their congregants chooses MAID or whether they would agree to be present if someone asks them to be there when MAID drugs are administered.

Regardless of what they decide about those situations, Woodland said they need to be available to families who are grieving after a MAID death. She encourages pastors and chaplains to seriously consider what it means to value the inherent, God-given dignity of people in the face of MAID.

“If you believe in the sanctity of life, then you believe in the sanctity of life regardless of the situation,” Woodland said. “As a pastoral worker, our role would be to hold the hope for that individual, to hold the hope for them while they can’t hold hope themselves.”

Evangelical leaders say faithful Christian witness in a society that celebrates MAID means being prepared to take care of people in vulnerable situations—and admitting where the church needs to improve.

According to Health Canada, the number one cause of suffering cited by people who died by MAID in 2022 was “the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities.” Eighty-six percent of people who died by MAID cited this as one of their underlying causes of suffering. Over one-third (35%) of people who died by MAID reported feeling that they were a burden to their friends, caregivers, or family; another 17 percent cited loneliness.

Churches and other Christian organizations are well equipped to offer answers and hope in the face of these existential concerns, said Julia Beazley, director of public policy for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, an organization that has publicly opposed MAID for years. Many pastors and churches have reached out to the group for information.

“We believe the proper response to the suffering of our neighbors is to respond with care and compassion, to journey alongside those who are struggling or who are nearing death with tangible support, relational support,” she said. “As Christians and as a society, we should do what we can to alleviate the suffering, not eliminate the one who suffers.”

But Beazley acknowledged churches still have a long way to go, particularly in responding to the needs of people with disabilities and in countering the ableist assumptions in MAID law, which says life with disability is not worth living. Many churches are grieving the fact that for people with disabilities, it’s often easier to find support to end their lives than the support they need to live their lives.

“We need to be teaching loudly and clearly that every person’s life has meaning, value, and dignity,” Beazley said.

At St. Hilda’s Anglican Church in Oakville, Ontario, Paul Charbonneau and his congregation are trying to practice valuing human life from conception to death. Members have sat with people who are dying at home, giving relief to their caregivers. They pray about MAID during worship services, and the church has hosted several seminars about the topic.

The church is part of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), which is itself part of the Anglican Church in North America. Along with being the rector of St. Hilda’s and a chaplain at a local hospital, Charbonneau is the executive archdeacon of ANiC. The denomination has told clergy that they cannot be present while MAID is being administered—even to pray for the dying person or their family.

Charbonneau agrees with this approach and also practices it in his capacity as a hospital chaplain. “I don’t want to be seen as complicit in any way,” he said.

What he does want to do is encourage Christians to speak out against MAID and to show people in vulnerable situations that lasting hope is found only through a relationship with Jesus.

He doesn’t see Canada’s acceptance of MAID waning any time soon. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle once this thing is let out,” he said. The speed at which MAID deaths have increased and laws have changed has left many pastors feeling ill-equipped about how to respond, he said.

But the more he watches acceptance of MAID grow in Canada and elsewhere, he said, “The more I’m convinced that Jesus is the only way that we’re going to be saved, and it’s the only way our culture can be saved.”

- More from Meagan Gillmore

Books

Excerpt

The Chinese Christian Who Helped Overcome Illiteracy in Asia

Stacey Bieler

Yan Yangchu taught thousands of peasants to read and write in the early 20th century.

Yan Yangchu (right)

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In 1918, Yan Yangchu (Y. C. James Yen) set sail from the United States for France despite the possible threat of submarine attacks during World War I.

The recent Yale University graduate, along with 40 other Chinese Christian students, had been invited by the YMCA to provide social activities for 30,000 Chinese laborers in France who were working in munitions plants, doing farm work, loading military supplies, and building or repairing roads.

The ship ahead of Yan sank, and the one behind was torpedoed, but his ship arrived safely. Reflecting on this event, he wrote:

They put their studies aside, and risked losing their lives to the enemy’s submarine attacks to come here to be servants of Chinese laborers … because their hearts have been treated and changed by the Doctor Christ; thus they all have high standards of social ethics, love their fellow countrymen, and want to serve them.

In the northern French city of Boulogne, Yan became so busy writing letters for dozens of homesick, illiterate men each night that he asked for volunteers who would be willing to learn 1,000 basic Chinese characters.

His eager students skipped their dinners so as not to miss class, even after digging trenches all day. Yan began writing and printing the Chinese Workers’ Weekly to give them practice reading.

After 35 of the 40 laborers passed the simple test of writing a letter home and reading the Weekly, Colonel G. H. Cole, who was head of the Chinese Labor Corps and had been with the Canadian YMCA in China for 12 years, ordered Yan to start literacy programs in other French cities.

Yan asked him to send the other Chinese YMCA students to Boulogne to observe his classes for a week. After they returned to their own camps, they started teaching the 30,000 Chinese laborers how to read.

Yan began to recognize the potential power of peasants to build a nation. He made a vow that upon his return to China, he would devote the rest of his life to the “release of the pent-up, God-given powers in the people” through mass education reform. Little did he know that his work would stretch beyond China and impact people around the world.

Yan was born on October 26, 1893, in Bazhong, a small town in northern Sichuan Province. His father, who was a scholar, poet, and writer, named his youngest son “Yangchu,” meaning “the start of the sunrise,” to convey the family’s desire to build a new China.

After his father accepted a job teaching Chinese to missionaries in the local China Inland Mission (CIM) station, the missionaries urged him to send ten-year-old Yan to a CIM school in Baoning, 90 miles from home. Founded by the English missionary Hudson Taylor, CIM is now known as OMF International.

The headmaster, William B. Aldis, did not lecture about the Bible to his students but set an example of a pious life for the 20 boys in the school. Although Aldis’s Chinese was difficult to understand, Aldis inspired Yan to become a follower of Christ.

After four years, Aldis encouraged Yan to attend a middle school run by American Methodists in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Afterward, Yan attended Hong Kong University, where he became friends with Fletcher Brockman, the national secretary of the YMCA in China from 1898 to 1915.

In the summer of 1916, Yan headed across the Pacific to Oberlin College in Ohio, but a Yale professor on the ship encouraged him to go instead to Yale because it had good teachers and libraries.

“The Christian tone here is high and inspiring—the chapel, the worship, the Christian professors, the Christian students make the whole Yale Christian in spirit and in practice,” Yan wrote to Brockman about his life at college.

After World War I and Yan’s time in France ended, Yan returned to the United States in 1919 to study history and politics at Princeton. Upon graduating with his master’s degree in 1920, Yan returned to China and married Alice Huie, daughter of a Dutch American woman and a Chinese pastor in New York City.

For several years, Yan co-led the National Association of Mass Education Movement (MEM), which organized literacy programs in several cities in China. One of the volunteer teachers who participated in this program was Mao Zedong, who later wrote his Thousand Character Primer that introduced Marx and attacked the militarists, bureaucrats, and capitalists.

Yan’s larger goal was to establish a comprehensive rural reconstruction program that would combine education, agriculture, public health, and self-government. In 1926, his family moved to Dingxian (now called Dingzhou), a county in Hebei Province south of Beijing. Yan began recruiting American-trained Chinese graduates in agriculture from Cornell or Ohio State University and convinced educators from Columbia University and a Harvard-trained political scientist to live in Dingxian despite offering small salaries.

When Yan and his colleagues first told the peasants in Dingxian that they had come to teach them how to read, the peasants laughed at them and said it was impossible.

But when the first class of peasants graduated, village heads asked for schools in their towns. By 1931, all 453 villages in Dingxian had their own schools, with 20,000 students taught by volunteer teachers.

Though Yan received many invitations to start literacy programs or county-wide experiments in other parts of China, he purposefully limited the program to Dingxian. He wanted to prove, by definite results, that they could advance the farmers’ education, health, agricultural output, and political participation there.

Life in Dingxian, however, soon went through a time of upheaval. The county was lost and regained seven times after Japan invaded northern China in 1937.

In 1940, MEM opened the National College of Rural Reconstruction near Chongqing, Nationalist China’s wartime capital. But relocating farther south did not solve the organization’s problems. Japan frequently bombed the city. Donors stopped offering grants. In the midst of this, 20 MEM families died when the boat carrying them—along with their personal items, MEM records, and equipment—capsized.

After the Pacific War ended in 1945, the Chinese Civil War escalated. Because of Yan’s success at rural work and his loose connection with the Nationalist Party, the Chinese Communist Party considered him a threat.

In December 1949, Yan and several family members moved to New York City. One year later, China’s Communist government dissolved the MEM office near Chongqing, two months after China entered the Korean War and the United States became an enemy country.

During this period, Yan was confronted with personal and political difficulties. His son, Fred, had remained in China and died during one of the anti-Western campaigns that followed the Korean War. The Chinese Communists accused Yan of being a slave to American imperialism and a conspirator with Chiang Kai-Shek, the Nationalist leader who had moved to Taiwan.

But Yan’s dedication to multifaceted rural reconstruction never faltered.

In the summer of 1952, he returned to Asia to establish the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), building its headquarters in Silang, Cavite, about 25 miles south of Manila. He chose the Southeast Asian country because he felt that it had a Christian heritage and abundant resources and that its president, Ramon Magsaysay, was close to the people.

PRRM improved rural health by cleaning up the villages, setting up garbage sites, and providing basic medical attention. They set up showcase farms that grew dual harvests and promoted rural credit cooperatives. They educated the rural people and trained the youth to become local leaders.

In 1960, Yan founded the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), which was headquartered in New York but operationally based in the Philippines. He spent the next 30 years encouraging rural reconstruction in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central America.

When he stepped down as chair of IIRR in 1988, Yan left the Philippines and settled in New York City, where he died in Manhattan at the age of 97. He is buried next to Alice, who died in the Philippines in 1980.

While Yan never lived in China again, he was able to visit the country in 1985 and 1987 during a period of greater openness to the West. In Dingxian, he found out that his home had been converted into a museum, with an exhibition of his work in China and around the world.

In the 1990s, the Central Educational Science Institute in Beijing established the James Yen Association. More than ten volumes on Yan’s thoughts and approaches to rural reconstruction and development were published in China.

How did Yan press on despite facing so many obstacles?

“To build his health, he kept a regular schedule and retired before 11 every night,” wrote Wei Chengtung in an essay for the book Y. C. James Yen’s Thought on Mass Education and Rural Reconstruction: China and Beyond. “To build his spirit, he prayed every morning and took time to think, to plan, and [to] do systematic research.”

He also enjoyed singing hymns that focused on the cross and found guidance from reading devotional literature, such as the writings of St. Catherine of Siena.

Yan’s love for Jesus and for the poor attracted others to join him in the vision that he felt God had given him. American missionary Gardner Tewksbury pointed to this attribute of Yan in a 1968 tribute titled “My Friend Jimmy Yen: A Glimpse into the Personal Life of One of the World’s Most Remarkable Christians.”

“The call is for those with the Christ spirit, who like the Good Shepherd know and love their sheep and stand ready to lay down their lives for them,” he wrote.

Alice also pointed to Yan’s faith as the motivation behind his work, according to Tewksbury’s tribute: “The driving force which has brought this movement through such difficulties and heavy odds stems from Jim’s deep conviction from the start that this work is not his, but God’s.”

Stacey Bieler is the author of “Patriots” or “Traitors”? A History of American-Educated Chinese Students and coeditor of three volumes of Salt and Light.

This excerpt was adapted from Salt and Light, Volume 1: Lives of Faith that Shaped Modern China, edited by Carol Lee Hamrin and Stacey Bieler. Copyright © 2009 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Books

Review

Modern ‘Technoculture’ Makes the World Feel Unnaturally Godless

Blake Adams

By changing our experience of reality, it tempts those who don’t perceive God to conclude that he doesn’t exist.

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

In his 1996 novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike has a fictional Reformed Presbyterian minister feel his faith abandon him like an exhale, leaving his “habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed.” For this minister, the experience was one of relief, “an immense strain of justification” lifted “at a blow.” Unbelief, in this sense, is not so much a choice of the will but the relaxation of the will, with the mind clicking into an atheist-materialist position that feels reassuringly natural.

Many Christians today feel the “immense strain of justification” when measuring our theological beliefs against our everyday experience. We might be convinced God exists, but this mental stance conflicts with our surface experience of the world as a secular place where God’s existence is not obvious. It’s not obvious, at least, in the same way the coffee in your hand and the national election are obvious. Instead, belief demands mental exertion.

How come we often find atheism plausible—as an account that strikes us as somehow aligned to reality at a basic, intuitive level—even if we think it is incorrect? In Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, Joseph Minich equips believers to grapple intelligently with the godless feel of the world around them.

Interpreting divine absence

In the book, Minich aims to bolster “persons motivated to maintain orthodox religious faith in our current context” by helping them “recognize the unique role that their will must take in the maintenance of their religion.” As he argues, this work of maintenance requires inhabiting our secular age theologically.

Minich makes his case in a refreshing way. In recent years, there has been a steady stream of books on secularism, modernity, and disenchantment, but the bulk of these adopt a “history of ideas” approach, attributing these developments to Marxism or feminism or Hegelianism or Puritanism or late-stage capitalism, to name a few. Minich counters that these accounts, while relatively valuable, don’t tell the whole story. Ideas are not the only driving force of history.

As Minich argues, the root cause of our divine-absence discourse is phenomenological rather than ideological. In other words, it derives more from how we perceive the world than our theories about it. Supplementing the work of Charles Taylor, author of the oft-cited study A Secular Age, Minich agrees that our tacit experience of modern life has altered our view of reality.

The triumph of the Industrial Revolution played a pivotal role in this shift, ensuring that machines and modern technology would fundamentally shape our perception of reality. Over time, the Industrial Revolution gave rise to what Minich calls the “bulwarks of unbelief”: the background features of modern “technoculture” that (both consciously and subconsciously) render belief in God implausible (though not impossible) and atheism plausible (though not inevitable).

Minich’s entry point into this problem is how modern people interpret divine absence. As a phenomenon, this is nothing new. Ancient and medieval peoples experienced it (just read the Psalms, particularly Psalm 88), but they interpreted it differently. God’s perceived absence could mean, perhaps, that he stood in judgment over a person or people for their sin. Or it could mean that, like a trainer, he was leaving us to be tested. At any rate, God’s absence called for interpretation.

Something happened in the hundred years spanning 1860 and 1960, Minich argues. In that period, the possible meanings of God’s absence shrunk down to one: God’s nonexistence.

In this regard, the ancients had the more logical approach. Minich asks, Why do modern people immediately and intuitively interpret God’s absence to mean he does not exist, when so many other explanations are available? Put another way, why is our first impulse to equate invisibility with unreality?

Part of the answer, Minich argues provocatively, is that our experience of what reality is has changed. As he sees it, modern technoculture mediates—and even distorts—our tacit sense of what is real. In consequence, God’s existence begins to seem (but only seem) less plausible than it really is.

Since the Industrial Revolution, our engagement with the world has been increasingly filtered through technology. What is more, as our tools have grown in refinement, we rely on them not only to engage the world but also to exert a level of control over the world.

In Minich’s observation, technoculture makes the world “entirely subject to” our own “agency or ends” (emphasis added). In turn, this dynamic informs our sense of what is real and cultivates a default posture toward the world:

To put it bluntly, the [technocultural] world is a world for me. I do not find myself in a big, mysterious world suffused with agencies to which I am subject and around which I must learn to co-navigate with my immediate community. I find myself in a world almost entirely tool-i-fied, a world of my own (agentless!) subjectivity before an increasingly silent cosmos.

In technoculture, then, the idea of a supreme agent, God, fails to comport with our everyday experience. It does not even seem relevant. “In my judgment,” writes Minich, “the modern technological order tacitly communicates to us, day in and day out, that reality (the sort that actually concerns us), belongs to the order of the manipulable.”

Within this order, we can govern our lives with rational, efficient control, as when we adjust the thermostat, block a Facebook profile, or select a movie from the heap of options. But everything outside this “manipulable” realm hardly registers as “real” to modern sensibilities. No wonder that minds formed in such an environment will naturally equate divine absence with divine nonexistence.

Comings and goings

I have attempted to outline Minich’s argument, but this task is difficult. His book progresses in centrifugal rather than linear fashion, building like an upward spiral in a series of excursions. Here, we read about Karl Marx’s theory of labor. There, about the signification of the city in ancient cosmogony. Now, we consider Jacques Ellul’s concept of technique, and now, Martin Luther’s anthropology of hearing.

Shifts in style exacerbate the mental whiplash. On one topic, Minich waxes lofty and lyrical. On the next, his prose turns mind-numbingly technical. The central idea of the book, that modern technoculture obscures (and even distorts) our experience of reality, is reinforced with each spin of the narrative wheel, but the number and interdisciplinary variety of his arguments can be dizzying.

This makes it difficult to hold Minich’s work together or consider it in comprehensive ways. The saving grace is his appeal to the reader’s lived experience in technoculture. Some of his observations will resonate while others will fall flat, but you may find yourself nodding in recognition more often than not.

Minich clarifies that he has not refuted atheism in some unanswerable way. At most, he has deflated it by showing how nonrational pressures make “atheist claims plausible” to modern minds.

But simply by raising the point that divine absence requires interpretation, Minich has accomplished something powerful. Beyond recommending some mental exercises to help us reattune ourselves to a reality that bolsters faith, Minich advances a particular theology of divine absence, which develops over the course of the book.

He reminds us that God often makes himself scarce. History is full of divine comings and goings: smoking mountains one day, then centuries without so much as a prophet. Even before the Fall, God’s presence was not constant; he appears to have walked with Adam in the cool of the day and then withdrawn. We relate to God through his absence, it seems, as much as through his presence.

In what would strike some readers as a twist, Minich reveals that he likes technology. The solution to the current crisis of divine absence, he thinks, is not reversing the clock and returning to a time when our engagement with nature and creation was more direct. Instead, he pushes us to inhabit our current moment theologically.

This involves a recognition, he writes, that “we are contingent creatures who develop. We mature. And we mature and change and are perfected by means of shifting circumstances and the trials that they bring.” Minich favors the analogy of child-rearing. For children to mature, parents must allow moments of controlled abandonment, permitting them to explore their world freely or be left alone with tasks. Understanding divine absence as one of God’s “parenting methods” helps us interpret this age of divine absence as a possible aid to spiritual maturity.

While I appreciate what Minich is getting at, the child-rearing analogy presents problems, as it could be taken to insinuate that Christian sanctification succeeds by maturing us beyond our need for God. Minich anticipates this reading and warns against it, but he must work against his own imagery.

Perhaps a more congenial image comes from the Song of Solomon, especially as we follow the ancient Christian habit of presenting it as a romantic allegory of the church’s union with Christ, its bridegroom. In this poem, the bride searches the garden for an absent lover. She catches a glimpse of him through the lattice. He again vanishes, which only inflames her longing.

Here, Scripture depicts the lover of our souls as both absent and present. As he deliberately, even playfully, eludes us, he induces an agony of love. By his absence, he teaches us how to long, and so to receive his presence (when we have it) as a gift, not a given.

In this way, trust in God sustains us in his absence, assuring us that the withdrawal of presence need not represent a withdrawal of love. God is absent, but as we say in the Nicene Creed, “He will come again.”

Blake Adams is a writer, editor, and trained historian.

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Church Life

Latino Churches’ Vibrant Testimony

Nicole Massie Martin

Hispanic American congregations tend to be young, vibrant, and intergenerational. The wider church has much to learn with and from them.

Israel Torres / Pexels / Edits by CT

The common language of worship has a way of capturing the heart even when the mind cannot understand. I remembered this as I wiped my tears while Spanish-speaking Christians sang passionately around me at The Sent Summit conference in Orlando last month.

Though my tourist-level Spanish could not bear the weight of references to the divine, I knew the meaning of the song in my soul. Voices rang to the glory of God. Words I couldn’t translate expressed the depth of our depravity encompassed by his unconditional love.

While we shared neither language nor ethnicity, my experience in worship with Latino pastors and leaders in America reminded me: This community, like every culture, is important to the kingdom of God. And the wider church has much to learn with and from these siblings in Christ about faith, community, and resilience.

First, while many American churches are suffering from an inability to reach younger generations, Latino churches are swimming against that tide. Aaron Earls of Lifeway Research has described Hispanic congregations as “newer, younger, and more effectively evangelistic than the average US Protestant church,” and he notes that “a majority conduct their services only in Spanish (53%), while 22 percent are bilingual.”

Young people in immigrant families in America often serve as teachers for their parents in a variety of ways, ranging from learning English to navigating the complexities of unfamiliar health care and educational systems. This dynamic makes younger people integral to the life of the church too. Latino congregations tend to be willing to embrace them not as passive recipients of the faith but as active participants in shaping it. Young Christians are called upon early to help lead worship, teach, and serve as translators.

This reverse intergenerational ministry, where young people tend to bring their families into the fold, demonstrates both the dynamism and complexity of faith that transcends age barriers. Having to navigate so many roles at young ages can uniquely equip Christians for ministry—but it’s also taxing and can be traumatic, marked by poverty, loss, and injustice.

“Gen Z doesn’t need to be reached; they need to be rescued,” one younger Latino leader told me during a gathering at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena in August. “It’s going to be messy.” This messy, beautiful process of integrating multiple generations is exactly what Latino Christian communities are willing to do.

Pastors Josh and Noemi Chavez talked to me about what this looks like in their intergenerational ministry in Long Beach, California. “When I started pastoring, I was in my 20s. Thinking about young people was easy. I had to intentionally consider the older generation,” Noemi reflected. “Now, in my 40s, I have to intentionally think about the younger and the older. If the Great Commission is at the center of the vision and mission of the church, then as leaders we can lovingly shepherd the hearts of each generation and find joy in the expression of the gospel message.”

When successful, that witness creates a rich tapestry of faith that honors tradition while embracing newness and innovation. And many Spanish-speaking congregations are a cultural tapestry, too, serving as a gathering place for people from multiple countries with real differences in thought, expression, and, notably, political views.

Contrary to popular US misconceptions, the Latino evangelical community is not a monolithic voting bloc. Hispanic voters in America hold a wide spectrum of political ideologies, including on immigration. Yet while many predominantly white churches are politically homogenous, Latino clergy told me they see a diversity of political views in their congregations.

This ability to maintain unity in worship is particularly striking and countercultural in today’s polarized climate, a valuable model of prioritizing faith and community over political disagreements. These Hispanic congregations are proof that it’s possible to debate politics and keep breaking bread together.

“The sent church is a diverse church,” Gabriel Salguero shared. “It is a reflection of the Kingdom of God.” With his wife, Jeannette, Salguero is the founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and The Gathering Place Church in Orlando. For decades, they have shepherded pastors and church members from nearly every continent and walk of life, and he sees ideological differences as a strength, not merely an obstacle to overcome.

“The church needs this diversity, even diversity of thought,” Salguero remarked at the summit in Orlando. “If we’re all thinking exactly the same, we’re not all thinking.”

With a tapestry of generations and a range of varying views, what could possibly hold these communities together in Christ? The short answer is the Holy Spirit—and coffee.

While the service provides inspiration, the coffee afterward provides communion. After-service conversations over a cafecito, a café con leche, or pan dulce provide crucial opportunities for relationship-building and community formation. This is the space where those new to the congregation can become known, the young can connect, the elders can reminisce, and the pastors can provide holistic care.

This commitment to being present with people in their everyday lives reflects a deep understanding of the familia cultural value, leading to profound care for others.

That model of care is ever more important as the broader church grapples with challenges of declining attendance, generational gaps, and cultural relevance. The Latino church in America reminds us that the gospel is not just a message to be preached but a life to be lived—in community, across generations, embracing diversity, overcoming challenges, and always open to the new things God is doing.

“Hispanic churches continue to be a driving force in the revitalization of faith in the US,” Enid Almanzar, chair of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, told me after the summit. No church or ethnicity is perfect, of course. No community is free from the scars of striving to be more like Christ.

Yet in these complex times, the Latino church provides a beacon of hope to believers in America and beyond as we seek to be the church that our world so desperately needs. Like Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the churches in Macedonia, I “want you to know about the grace that God has given” these fellow believers (2 Cor. 8:1) so you can benefit from their example of faith.

Nicole Massie Martin is the chief impact officer at Christianity Today.

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Books

Review

Safety Shouldn’t Come First

Bonnie Kristian

A theologian questions our habit of elevating this goal above all others.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

You may be tempted to read The Pursuit of Safety: A Theology of Danger, Risk, and Security with an eye toward determining whether and to what extent its author, Wheaton College theologian Jeremy Lundgren, agrees with your own risk assessments and safety measures.

Don’t.

Though Lundgren leaves some hints about where he lands on discrete safety questions—most controversially, COVID-era rules and parenting decisions—his interest here is the bigger picture. Pursuit is an expansive examination of how Western culture prioritizes safety above other values and barely questions certain methods of ensuring it.

Lundgren rightly draws our attention to assumptions about safety so familiar we often fail to notice them, let alone consider their moral implications. He issues a timely call to churches to develop theologies of safety before they’re needed. And he effectively indicts modern bureaucrats who fiddle with past safety accomplishments but don’t consider the consequences.

But Pursuit also leaves key matters insufficiently addressed. One, about our culpability for unintentional harms, gets only a brief mention even though it could have far-reaching implications for day-to-day life. Another, about violence and other deliberate human harms, is part of a strange silence throughout the text. Lundgren attends primarily to safety from accidents.

Noticing the scenery

“The world we inhabit is scattered with tokens of safety,” Lundgren observes early in the book, “the warnings, notices, slogans, and labels that have been so thoroughly incorporated into the modern landscape.” Safety is literally part of the scenery, and that makes it easy to miss how its pursuit shapes our lives and informs our moral judgments.

Of course, it is good to be safe. Lundgren affirms that repeatedly. But he also observes that safety is not the only—or, for the Christian, the paramount—good that exists in the world. His aim is not to steer readers away from safety but to warn against pursuing it uncritically and at the expense of other goods we ought to value more.

That’s a tall order in the 21st century. For decades now, safety has had “an elevated moral status” in Western culture, Lundgren argues:

In an era typified by the lack of a cohesive moral framework, safety is something of an unquestioned, and therefore unifying, virtue. Its unifying power can be seen in the pervasiveness and homogeneity of the tokens of safety across all spheres of life. Safety has an authoritative ethical place in our world, influencing how we make decisions, interact with creation, respond to hardship, and relate with each other. Declaring something unsafe is generally equivalent to declaring it wrong.

That wasn’t always the case. The human need for safety is a historical constant, but our society’s practices for pursuing it are novel. I can’t recount the linguistic, mathematical, religious, and technological history Lundgren relays, but it’s useful equipment for understanding how we think about safety today, how we thought differently in the past, and how our attitudes might change going forward.

This portion of Pursuit includes important exhortations to prudence in a procedure-dependent age. Don’t simply follow the rules of safety, Lundgren urges. Develop wise and humane judgment and shoulder the responsibility that comes with it. There’s also an admirable rejection of chronological snobbery here, as well as a sharp critique of how our safety apparatuses continue to grow even after major risks have been ameliorated and all that remains is relatively minor fine-tuning.

Alongside that broader discussion, Lundgren reliably returns to theological questions: whether, how, and why the church’s pursuit of safety should differ from the world’s. Safety, again, is a good thing—but it is not better than Christ, nor is it a good we can perfectly acquire and maintain before the full redemption of a fallen creation. “The resolution of humanity’s battle with danger,” Lundgren writes, “will not take place within the horizons of history.”

While that battle continues, though, he calls Christians to build a theology of safety before danger strikes. The contemporary Western church was caught flat-footed when COVID-19 and its containment policies appeared, Lundgren says, because we never had to think much about safety in the past. (How little of humanity can say the same!)

Lundgren never spells out his preferred pandemic policies, but even if you think he’s hinting in the wrong direction, his push for a more deliberate theology of safety is needful. Having one wouldn’t have guaranteed the same pandemic decisions from every local congregation. But I do think it could have encouraged choices grounded more in Christ-centered prudence, care, and courage than in partisanship or instinct.

COVID and culpability

On the subject of COVID, there’s a portion of The Pursuit of Safety concerned with unintentional sins. It’s part of a larger discussion of accidents—more on that in a moment—but here Lundgren’s focus narrows to the moral status of accidents that cause harm. The discussion is heavily informed by how the Mosaic Law deals with acts like unintentional killings, and much of Lundgren’s interest here is in forgiveness.

“All lawlessness is sin,” he writes, “whether intentional or unintentional. Accidents—such as dropping a rock, using a malfunctioning ax, or forgetting a boiling pot of water—may not, in themselves, be sins if they cause no harm. But they are frequently the result of other sins such as impatience, pride, or worry, and they may become sins if they lead to harm.”

Few would quibble, I expect, with the idea that a person who accidentally starts a fire by forgetting a boiling pot is responsible for that fire and must make amends. But if that accident isn’t the result of another sin (and it’s easy to imagine scenarios in which the forgetfulness is not sin-related), does responsible necessarily mean culpable? Is that forgetfulness necessarily sinful?

The question becomes even more pressing when Lundgren turns to the transmission of infectious diseases, like COVID-19 and the flu:

Sometimes a person’s actions set in motion a sequence of events that result in harm to others, but the person never knows. When the Covid virus first began to spread, efforts were made, with minimal success, to trace the web of its transmission. The actions of many, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, were part of that web with its sometimes harmful and occasionally fatal consequences. While a spotlight was put on the spread of this particular virus, human interactions and movements contribute to the spread of viruses constantly. The common flu is transmitted through seemingly innocuous movements and gestures, yet it is the cause of death for tens of thousands of people in America every year.

That is a complete paragraph, and it comes at the end of the section in which Lundgren says that “all lawlessness is sin” and unintentional killings are “transgressions, violations of the law and ‘an intrinsic offense’ against God.” While the next section doesn’t address infectious disease transmission, it reaffirms that “accidental harm is sin.” Yet it tempers that judgment by saying God “has not burdened us with a system of morality based on fate or chance in which people are responsible either for their part in an endless chain of unchangeable events or for the random and unknowable results of their actions.”

So does Lundgren think we sin when we unwittingly spread a flu bug? Are we culpable for that kind of accidental harm? I think that’s his implication. But if a virus mistaken for an allergy or a presymptomatic bus ride are sins, then surely Lundgren’s discussion of forgiveness and amends for known harms is not enough. You could reach “ZeroCovid” extremes with a view of sin like that.

Safety and security

The subtitle of Pursuit mentions “security,” and early on Lundgren briefly distinguishes between security and safety, linking security to intentional harm (“murder, war, abuse, theft, and sabotage”) and safety to unintentional harm (“accidents, crashes, injuries, and mishaps, occasions when harm comes about through carelessness, chaos, or unanticipated events”). But then he concedes that the two words are “synonyms, with a high degree of overlap in meaning and usage,” and he never places security and intentional harm outside the book’s scope.

Yet as The Pursuit of Safety proceeds, it overwhelmingly considers unintentional harm. Lundgren does mention school shootings and dangerous missionary work, but not at length. He doesn’t dwell on the modern state of security, even though its trappings—and especially visible post-9/11 changes like airport security and mass surveillance—will have shaped many readers’ thinking on safety. And though he gives attention to natural and spiritual evil, deliberate human evil is strangely neglected in favor of workplace and traffic accidents.

Some of that imbalance surely owes to the history Lundgren reviews. Much of it concerns the wildly unsafe workplaces of the early Industrial Revolution and the pro-safety activism and bureaucracy that emerged to tame them. But a century after the Progressive Era, the danger of workplace accidents doesn’t loom quite so largely for most of us.

Indeed, insofar as we manage any scrutiny of safety culture and its tradeoffs, we tend to apply the lens of intentional harms, not accidents. The pandemic is a recent exception to that pattern, but typically we have debates about things like the value of childhood freedom versus the risk of kidnapping, the value of civil liberties versus the risk of terrorism, or the value of digital free speech versus the risk of disinformation and verbal abuse.

Beyond that mismatch, Lundgren’s attention to accidents also allows him to avoid directly addressing whether Christians can ever resort to violence in our pursuit of safety. Much of his language—not to mention the extensive citations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—suggests Lundgren is commending some variant of Christian nonviolence.

“It is possible to anticipate and avoid certain types of danger,” he writes, “but to do so in an immoral way that exposes you to other types of dangers, a way that is not rightly formed by love of neighbor or love of God, but is based on anticipations that are not rightly formed by Scripture’s prophetic testimony regarding the future.” Lundgren warns against allowing the pursuit of safety to become “idolatrous, the strivings of the nations,” and emphasizes “the priority of keeping one’s way pure over keeping it safe.”

Life’s risks, he advises, should not stop us “from doing what is good and right.” He reminds readers that “Christ’s disciples are called to give up physical well-being, even to the point of death, for his sake. When the call of Christ conflicts with the pursuit of safety, the call of Christ prevails.” And, crucially, Lundgren describes enemy love as “quite reasonable to those whose lives are held secure by the love of God.”

None of this necessitates a Christian pacifist reading. But that’s a plausible interpretation, and the status of violence for Christians is an important element of any theology of safety. Is eschewing violence how we keep our way pure? Is nonviolence essential to following the example and call of Christ? At the end of Pursuit, I don’t know what Lundgren would say, but less on accidents and more on violence would have been clarifying.

Even with that imbalance, however, The Pursuit of Safety is a bracing and informative call to resilience and critical thinking, to trust in God and hope in the Resurrection, to notice unintended consequences, and to get on with a life of following Jesus instead of endlessly making sure.

Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.

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Culture

What Would Lecrae Do?

Christina Gonzalez Ho

Why Kendrick Lamar’s question matters.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

For the first few minutes of Kendrick Lamar’s new song, I only half listened, nodding in time to the hypnotic beat while responding to emails on my laptop. Then came the line that made me sit up and stare bug-eyed at my husband, who was listening beside me on the couch.

“Did he say Lecrae?” We kept listening. A few minutes later, Kendrick said the name again. My mouth dropped open. When the song ended, we played it from the top, this time listening carefully.

The untitled track, released on Instagram on September 11, expresses the acclaimed rapper’s weariness and disgust with the contemporary hip-hop world and the music industry at large. In the song, Kendrick feels jaded by the machinations of the very system in which he has found exceptional success. He has received 17 Grammys, 29 BET Hip Hop Awards, and a 2018 Pulitzer Prize. His Drake diss track “Not Like Us” broke multiple streaming records, becoming so popular that, earlier this year at a sold-out Los Angeles arena, he performed the song to roaring applause five times in a row. Kendrick was recently announced as the headliner for the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show.

But instead of celebrating any of these successes, Kendrick spends all five minutes and six seconds of his new song venting his contempt for an industry full of people who “parade in gluttony” and “glorify scamming.” He describes a “culture bred with carnivores,” rife with liars, mercenaries, and cowards whose money emboldens them to make “nasty decisions.” His lyrics are equal parts searching and vengeful. In a repeated refrain, Kendrick pleads for God to give him life, peace, and forgiveness—to “draw the line” between himself and the peers whose wickedness he despises.

Elsewhere, his words turn violent, calling for the “village” to burn down, for heads to crack, for “agony, assault, and battery.” “I think it’s time to watch the party die,” Kendrick repeats again and again. Things are so irredeemably corrupt that he suggests the only solution is destruction, Great Flood style.

The rapper doesn’t waver from his verdict until the final verse, where he asks the question that made me sit up and stare: “Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do.”

Lecrae, of course, is the Christian rapper Lecrae Devaughn Moore, whose career began in the early 2000s and whose frequent collaborators have included Andy Mineo, Trip Lee, Sho Baraka, and Jackie Hill Perry. Most of Lecrae’s early work is explicitly theological, with songs like “Don’t Waste Your Life” (“We’re created for him / Outta the dust he made us for him / Elects us and he saves us for him”) and “Tell the World” (“You hung there bleedin’/ And ya’ died for my lies and my cheatin’ / My lust and my greed, and / What is a man that you mindful of him?”) garnering him widespread acclaim in the evangelical world and ins with the likes of John Piper, Tim Keller, Tony Evans, and Judah Smith.

Later, with albums like Gravity (2012) and Anomaly (2014), Lecrae moved away from overtly theological lyrics, instead weaving his faith into songs about identity, relationships, race, and class. In more recent years, he’s written extensively about experiences with corruption, hypocrisy, and racism within the church that resulted in a severe crisis of both faith and mental health.

Still, the core of Lecrae’s music remains his relationship with God and the church. Although a highly successful artist in his own right—with BET Awards, Grammys, and several No. 1 Billboard hits—his audience has always been, perhaps always will be, much smaller than someone like Kendrick Lamar’s.

And yet—his influence matters. Lecrae and Kendrick struck up a friendship early in their careers after the latter released his theodicy-themed track, “Faith.” Kendrick has long been vocal about his relationship with Jesus, and though some have questioned his orthodoxy, his faith remains a central theme in his music.

“Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do / F— these n— up or show ’em just what prayer do?” Kendrick wonders. Faced with the same seemingly irredeemable industry, would Lecrae pursue some form of vigilante justice—visceral, instant, immediately satisfying—or the slow, patient route of prayer? Moments later, after a fresh round of denunciations, Kendrick repeats the question: “I mean—[I] wonder what Lecrae would do.”

Perhaps Kendrick has read Lecrae’s memoir, released in 2020, detailing the rapper’s struggles with childhood trauma, depression, and a crisis of faith after the evangelical church’s cold response to a string of police killings of unarmed Black men.

Or perhaps he’s listened to Lecrae’s 2022 track “Deconstruction,” in which the rapper describes hitting rock bottom until a midnight encounter with God broke through the fog of despair.

In both works, Lecrae details a process of healing marked by weakness and surrender, a slow, steady journey entirely dependent on the love of God and others. It’s a stark departure from the brute force and willpower Kendrick finds so attractive. And it’s clear that both Lecrae’s art and his life have been compelling enough to make Kendrick take notice.

As a writer whose work revolves around my Christian faith, I often find myself discouraged, imagining I am destined to obscurity. When peers publish bestsellers or have their books adapted into movies, I find myself wishing my work was more like theirs, addressing Zeitgeisty themes like race, sexuality, or climate anxiety from a primarily agnostic worldview.

Instead, I find myself compulsively writing about spirituality—specifically, the conundrum of being a rational person whose life trajectory has been shaped by supernatural experiences. Sometimes I even feel resentful at my religion, as though it’s a restriction on my art, relegating me to a lifetime of limited reach at best, and irrelevance at worst.

So to hear one of the most talented and decorated rappers alive name-check an artist whose work has revolved around Jesus was deeply heartening. What moves me is not the idea that someday my own work might be noticed by someone more famous. It’s the thought that a sincere, intelligent, and profound artist like Kendrick Lamar, someone who’s seen no end of good ideas and interesting art, might find something in straightforwardly Christian music that gives him pause, that makes him reconsider.

Art that gains this sort of traction must do more than present accurate theological facts or insist on the supremacy of a “Christian worldview.” It must be prophetic.

Prophetic art is art that reveals truths heretofore unrecognized, unseen, or inaccessible. To be recognized as prophetic is one of the highest forms of praise an artist can receive. It’s a word that’s been used to describe Kendrick Lamar, who cunningly folded a lament about toxic drinking culture into his “club-banger” track “Swimming Pools” and spares no one in his excoriating analysis of anti-Blackness in “The Blacker the Berry” (“You hate me, don’t you? / I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself” and “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang-banging make me kill a n— blacker than me? / Hypocrite!”)

I would argue that “prophetic” is a fitting description for Lecrae’s work as well. Throughout his career, Lecrae has used his music not only to preach the gospel but also to engage his audience with uncomfortable truths about everything from religious hypocrisy (“Bookstore pimpin’ them hope books / Like God don’t know how broke looks / And telling me that I’m gon’ reap a mil’ / If I sow into these low crooks”) to the entrenched racial biases that mar white America’s practice of Christianity (“Right before the fall of 2015, I was all off / It involved killing Michael Brown, had me feeling down / Tweeted ’bout it, Christians call me clown … spoke about my pain, I was met with blame / ‘Shame on you, ’Crae, stop crying, get back to Jesus’ name’”).

Prophetic work is more than just eloquent or insightful, and it doesn’t always find commercial success. It is born of an abiding connection to the Spirit of God—the type of connection that empowers us to create honestly and courageously, even at risk to our comfort and reputation. To make prophetic work is decidedly not to change ourselves to fit the Zeitgeist but to maintain fidelity to the unique questions, ideas, perspectives, and modes of expression God has placed within us—and to make our work unto the Lord, the source of all wisdom and prophecy.

Only then can we contribute something to culture that doesn’t already exist—something capable of causing the Kendrick Lamars of our own disciplines to wonder what we would do.

Christina Gonzalez Ho is the author of the audio series The Last Two Years and the cofounder of Estuaries.

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Ideas

No More Sundays on the Couch

Erica Bryand Ramirez

COVID got us used to staying home. But it’s the work of God’s people to lift up the name of Christ and receive God’s Word—together.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

It is Sunday morning and quiet throughout our house. The first morning light is slipping through our blinds, just enough for my husband to read his Bible and for me to write. The only thing I hear is our coffee percolating. Sunday mornings are easily the most peaceful time in our otherwise noisy, demanding schedule.

During the pandemic with churches closed, we learned to savor Sunday mornings as especially convivial and serene. After a couple quiet reading hours, my husband, Chris, would prepare breakfast. Our three children would tumble out of bed around 11 to pancakes or waffles, eggs, and bacon. Then Chris and I would head out for a walk around our neighborhood, waving at neighbors. On more ambitious weekends, we’d take to hiking trails.

When struck by convictions about missing church, Chris and I would wake the kids a bit earlier, around 10:30. Though they were only really losing 30 minutes’ sleep, they’d make a grumpy little show of it. We’d file into the living room, sit on our green couches, and take in some spirited preaching by a local megachurch pastor. Megachurches had an advantage during the pandemic, easily pivoting to sleek broadcasts while many smaller churches struggled to improvise.

After the pandemic faded away, though, we found our new routine difficult to break. Attending church in person now feels like a series of sacrifices. We have to wake the children at 9:30 to get them fed, dressed, and out the door on time. All this bustle means Chris and I get less peace, less quiet, less reading, and no leisurely morning walk. It’s 8:09 a.m. now, as I write this. To get to church this morning, I’ll have to stop writing in 30 minutes.

Reader, I don’t want to. I do not want to make these little sacrifices. Sunday mornings are restorative when they are quiet and leisurely. They are good for all of us.

Or so I once thought, but no longer.

The pandemic had far-reaching consequences in our society, especially for young people—including my children. My smallest had her kindergarten year disrupted so that when she finally returned to school in person, she struggled to make friends. My middle child’s online elementary school didn’t prepare her for the very different demands of middle school. And my high schooler spent too much time online, imbibing geopolitics and national news in ways that left him stressed and cynical.

Sundays at home did renew our individual energy and family life. But they also exacerbated our sense of disconnection from community life. Staying in meant we got more and more of our information from screens—which in turn presented the world as increasingly fractious.

By staying home as a family on Sundays, I realized, I was subtly and unintentionally telling my children that the world was too tiresome and too fraught to engage on the weekends. I was modeling the idea that we could retreat, even from life together with fellow Christians.

Our children took note. Initially, they complained that they saw less of our friends, but then they began to communicate a growing distress about public life. They told me their worries about school shootings, the prospect of a military draft, friends moving away, and disagreements within our extended family over politics. For a variety of reasons, each of my children grew more ambivalent about relationships in our family, church, and schools. Our withdrawal from church fed into other kinds of retreat. Looking back, this trajectory seems designed to produce a collective depression.

Upon reflection, the most spiritually formative time in my life bears some similarities to this one.

I was a couple of months shy of twelve years old when my littlest sister died from a heart condition. Shortly after she passed away, my dad built our family a new house. Moving into this house meant that I had to leave my school and church, which were too far from our new neighborhood. When I began seventh grade just a few months later, I was overwhelmed by grief and had no cousins, no church community, and no school friends around to help. I’d never been so profoundly alone before this experience and have never been so since.

Mercifully, we joined Westover Hills, a vibrant, 400-person congregation that embraced our family at the lowest point of our lives. Though our grief felt isolating, we still attended services every Sunday morning and night, and every Wednesday too. Soon, our family life was structured by our church participation. My dad joined the orchestra, my mom, the choir. I joined the youth group and my younger sister, children’s church.

When I look back now, I see my family was hobbling along, doing the best we could under the circumstances. But I also see choir members’ mauve robes with cranberry accents, their arms lifted and eyes closed in worship; deacons with broad shoulders and smiles; friends with cars, picking me up for a Friday youth game night. The people of Westover carried us through the most trying time of our lives with their faithfulness, their voluntary good cheer, their testimonies, and their prayers. They were not just our church but the church, helping us to keep our faith when our hearts were broken. I remain so grateful to them, and I always feel deep down that Westover Hills of the 1990s is the community I am truly from.

Westover came to mind when my husband recently announced that we really need to return to church, in person and for good. No more Sundays on the couch.

We committed to going to the same church we’d been watching online, at least for a while. We couldn’t risk losing momentum by going church shopping. We needed the structure, the regularity of church every Sunday in person. The megachurch would suffice.

This church is 22,000 strong, and in our service, there are about 5,000 people each week. This is a massive number of people. I feel like an ant when we walk in and even more so when we try to walk out, a process that brings the word “stampede” to mind. Two weeks ago, we waited 30 minutes to exit the parking lot.

There are so many little inconveniences in our Sunday mornings now, and they add up—to work. It is work to wrangle everyone, including myself, into the car, into the pew, and then back home again.

But we have a totally different experience of church in our actual pews. Our pastor preaches the same sermon in real time and online, so it isn’t the sermon that’s different. It’s the palpable participation of the congregation that makes the greatest difference.

In person, you can hear and see how the preaching lands with fellow believers. Three weeks ago, I heard a man say, “You better say that again”—emphatically, in a baritone staccato—when our pastor preached a salient point.

Another time, a person directly in front of me spent three minutes intermittently nodding her head in agreement during a section of preaching about surrender. She sat with her smallest girl right next to her, almost in her lap, and three boys right beside them. When our pastor landed a point, she nodded. He repeated or extended an idea, she nodded again. Later, the pastor asked, “How many people here have ever felt they are not worthy of a calling they feel God has placed on their lives?” Hands went up all around us.

A few weeks ago, more than 200 people were baptized. From our seats, we could see their bodies dipping into water on the main stage. We watched their faces in detail on the big screens, televised next to the words of the worship song we were all singing.Another person went down into the water; she came up smiling. She lifted her arms in triumph and the congregation swelled with cheers—a roar of celebration.

I would have seen none of this online: not the nodding, not the hands, not the vulnerability to say, I struggle with a sense of unworthiness. I might have seen the same person get baptized on my screen, but I wouldn’t have been there to raise my cheer with the congregation.

Now I realize, we make the event an event. The congregation, the laity, together, responds to ideas, to baptisms, to the need for prayer, and to the opportunity for praise. We model vulnerability and faithfulness for each other. Without our voices, our nodding heads, our cheers and encouragement, church does not happen. We don’t hear much about liturgy in a megachurch like this, but the word comes from a combination of Greek words for people and work. And it’s true, it takes work to get to church on Sunday and participate—but it is our work to do. Only we can do it.

Since recommitting to church in person, my children seem more sure of the world. They’re still aware of its troubles, but they have a visceral knowledge of what a life-giving community feels like and what it means to take heart, together, because Christ has overcome the world (John 16:33).

This is not knowledge I alone can give them. I can teach them, and a pastor can preach to them, but only a community of believers can cocreate the context in which our teaching and preaching make robust, embodied sense. Every time my children hear someone encourage the pastor, cheer on a fellow congregant, or lift their voices in earnest praise, they see that God has been faithful to real, live people. God grows more and more visible, more and more plausible, as they witness worship in real time.

As I look back on our season of withdrawal, I feel a new sense of responsibility. People go through trials, individually and as families. We reach breaking points. We sometimes weather grief and get stuck in sadness. It is the work of the laity to come together, to lift up the name of Christ, to receive God’s Word, to bear each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and foster each other’s faith as they—we—heal and grow closer to God.

I want to do my part.

Erica Bryand Ramirez is a sociologist of religion who teaches Christian History at Baylor’s Truett Seminary. She lives in San Antonio with Chris and their three children.

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Theology

A Hurricane Doesn’t Tell Us Who to Hate

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

What natural disasters reveal about God and neighbor.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

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

My family is from one of the most hurricane-prone places in the United States—our hometown was virtually wiped from the map by Hurricane Katrina. Because of this, we spend hurricane season tracking each tropical depression with dread and then, often, relief, when the storm moves somewhere out of the path of the people we love.

This time, though, with Hurricane Helene, we exhaled too soon. Instead of hitting the coast, the hurricane devastated inland places we never expected to be vulnerable—such as Asheville, North Carolina; Valdosta, Georgia; and countless other communities flooded nearly out of existence, with people stranded without food, electricity, or cell service.

After the storm passed through, I spent some time searching through social media, trying to determine the well-being of people I know and love. As I did, I saw—as we all have—image after image of human suffering and neighborhood devastation.

And, since it was social media, I also saw a lot of the usual types using the disaster to vindicate their own negative polarization. Some posted that the massive disaster befalling Asheville was due to that city’s well-known progressive culture and politics. Others countered by saying that most of the North Carolinians left homeless by the flood were in “red” counties, so maybe this was God’s judgment on MAGA. And on and on it went, as it always does.

In the past, after almost every hurricane, we could usually count the hours until Pat Robertson or some other television evangelist would blame it on God’s judgment on something—sometimes as specific as New Orleans’s annual “Southern Decadence” parade, and sometimes as general as “America’s turn away from God.”

Nor was this limited to the political right. While our families were crawling out of the rubble of Katrina, now almost 20 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (then on the left and well before his gadfly persona of today) quoted the prophet Hosea to suggest that the storm was retribution for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol for combating climate change: “For they that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”

The trivialized venue of modern social media is unique, but the underlying sarcasm about “What did they do to deserve this?” is not. And the much more serious, much more sober fears and questions beneath that are not unique either. What does it tell us about God when human beings have their entire lives wiped away?

Kris Kristofferson, the singer/songwriter who died this week, wrote a song, “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” based off of unbelieving philosopher Voltaire’s book Candide. Kristofferson’s song references police brutality, systemic racism, and unjust treatment of the poor with a tongue-in-cheek praise to living “in this best of all possible worlds.” Kristofferson laughed, but Voltaire mocked, pointing his satire at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s defense of God’s justice in a cosmos of suffering and evil, that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”

While I believe Voltaire was wrong, Kristofferson was right to point out the kind of fatalism the philosopher saw as coming along with many attempts to justify God. We can yield to a shrugging “that’s the way it is” mentality that sees in every evil a signpost as to what God actually wants. That can lead to a “eat, drink, and be merry” hedonism, with a passive acceptance of all sorts of things that should be, at least, mourned, and, at best, changed.

The way Voltaire points, though, leads to the same form of pessimistic resignation in the long run. If the universe around us is random, chaotic, and meaningless, then we ought to read in it what is most ultimate: suffering, pain, and death.

Christians, Jews, and other theists have wrestled with the so-called “problem of evil,” including the problem of “natural evil,” for millennia. Some give greater emphasis to God’s sovereignty, with good biblical backing. Others emphasize the freedom and responsibility of human beings, along with a rejection of the idea that God could ever be the author of sin—also with very good biblical backing.

The question abides: How could a good and powerful God allow a world such as this one to exist? Why could he not stop the dam from breaking to keep that North Carolinian family’s house from being washed away? Is it because God was angry at them?

This is not just about hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis. Often, even in the quieter, less visible manifestations of very personal suffering, someone will wonder—even if they don’t say it—What has that person done to deserve this?

The Bible doesn’t ignore this question. God does not tell Job why, ultimately, he was allowed to suffer—nor does he give Job an answer as to why the universe is so seemingly filled with chaos and danger. God does, however, reject the easy answers of Job’s counselors, some of whom seek to read backward from the suffering an oracle about what God wants.

Jesus, likewise, condemns the suggestion that those who suffer at the hand of other people’s evil intentions or in the throes of some natural calamity are to blame for their calamity (Luke 13:1–5). He repudiates the religious leaders’ suggestion that a man’s congenital blindness was his or his parents’ fault (John 9:3). The chaotic natural forces around Jesus—whether wild animals or unclean spirits or boat-threatening storms—were calmed and redirected by the presence and voice of Jesus, the one who puts heaven and nature back together again.

When Christians speak of the existence of natural evil as a mystery, some balk that this is a way of evading the question. And yet every attempt—from that of nihilists to hyper-Calvinists to everyone in between—to answer the meaning of suffering bumps upon a mystery of some sort. The question is, what kind of mystery?

The mystery we see in the way of Jesus is one in which we hold together a tension: that of a God for whom not a sparrow falls apart from his awareness (Matt. 10:29–31) and for whom the death of a friend is received with weeping by Jesus himself (John 11:35).

Without a sense of the mystery of the wildness and fallenness of this present universe, the danger is that we come to see it as “normal.” Even worse is the danger that we would see in the bloodiness and violence of nature some picture of the way that God is. As Reinhold Niebuhr warned in the last century, “Our obsession with the physical sciences and with the physical world has enthroned the brute and blind forces of nature, and we follow the God of the earthquake and the fire rather than the God of the still small voice.”

The fact that we view the world around us with simultaneous awe, wonder, terror, and grieving is itself a signpost that there’s something missing from the merely natural. Jesus told us that earthquakes and other natural disasters would happen. He did not picture these as good but as the “birth pains” (Matt. 24:7–8, ESV throughout) of an old order that will be passing away, yielding to a new order beyond imagination.

The Bible itself tells us that these birth pangs are a creation in upheaval, “groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Rom. 8:22). Our response is not to solve that nature-in-crisis the way we would an algebra equation. Our response is to groan right along with it as we wait, with a hope we cannot see, for all things to be where they belong: under the feet of a resurrected Christ and his joint heirs.

In the meantime, we do exactly what numerous people are doing right now: Clearing away the trees in front of people’s homes. Sitting alongside grieving families who have lost the ones they love. Serving food to those whose pantries are empty and whose local grocery stores are under water.

A hurricane doesn’t tell us who to hate. It reminds us who to love.

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

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