As Malibu Burns, Pepperdine Withstands the Fire

Kate Shellnutt

University president praises the community’s “calm resilience” as students and staff shelter in place in fireproof buildings.

The Phillips Theme Tower at Pepperdine University was surrounded by fire on Tuesday.

Jae C. Hong / AP

The sky glowed orange and smoky through the floor-to-ceiling library windows at Pepperdine University, where students spent two nights in a row as flames licked over the hilltops along the Malibu campus.

During the final days before winter break, a 2,800-acre wildfire forced the Christian university to issue shelter-in-place orders Monday night and again Tuesday.

Around 3,000 people—undergrads in backpacks, hoodies, and N-95 masks, along with other members of the university community—waited out the blaze in fireproofed campus buildings, including Payson Library, the Tyler Campus Center, and the dining facility, Waves Café.

Student reporter Gabrielle Salgado told The New York Times that it was hard to sleep in the library on Monday. Some students played games or studied. By morning, the rest of the week’s exams had been canceled.

Before they were ordered to take shelter Monday night, some students with cars and faculty members had rushed to evacuate on their own, and some were able to navigate road closures to make their way out on Tuesday morning.

But by Tuesday afternoon, the university reported that the fire had returned. It burned down a ridge to the road along campus’s perimeter, though officials hadn’t seen any significant damage to buildings.

The iconic tower displaying a cross at the school’s entrance also glowed as the land around it burned.

University president Jim Gash moved between emergency operations meetings and the shelter areas, where he said students were “supporting each other and lifting one another up in prayer.” He praised the “calm resilience” of the Pepperdine community.

“When we are tested, we lean on our faith, rely upon our planning, and rally alongside one another,” Gash said in a statement.

Due to the frequency of wildfires in the region and the congestion along the nearby Pacific Coast Highway, Pepperdine’s campus was built to withstand such blazes. The school developed an extensive emergency plan, including stocking meals and supplies, to allow the Malibu campus to shelter in place.

The chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said that 1,500 firefighters were battling the Franklin fire, which remained 0 percent contained as of Tuesday night. He estimated that 15 structures in the area had been damaged or destroyed, but there were no reports of fatalities.

“Fire activity around Pepperdine’s Malibu campus has greatly diminished as the Franklin Fire has burned through most of the fuel immediately surrounding campus, but some flames are still visible in small pockets of campus,” the university wrote late Tuesday, as the shelter-in-place order remained overnight. “Firefighters continue to respond to and put out lingering hot spots and protect structures.”

Onlookers following the spread—seeing pictures of the blaze approaching Pepperdine and the students inside buildings on the news—have wondered why the university community is allowed to stay while thousands of neighbors evacuate.

Curbed Los Angeles reported on the school’s fire preparedness in 2018, during the last major wildfire to threaten the area, writing that “Fire is such a way of life at Pepperdine that students and faculty can measure their time at the school in the number of times they’ve participated in the shelter-in-place exercise.” The school’s emergency plans were developed alongside the fire department and are audited by officials.

The plan went into action once again this week. According to the Associated Press, resident assistants heard word of the shelter-in-place orders on Monday and began knocking on dorm room doors in the middle of the night, with no power, to usher students to refuge.

Pepperdine’s executive vice president, Phil Phillips, said in the Curbed piece that “many of our employees are alumni who actually sheltered in place during a fire.” He’s now been through seven.

“What you don’t want is to be stuck,” he told the AP on Tuesday. “Protecting our students, providing for their safety is a moral obligation for us, so we take it really, really seriously.”

As the university posted updates on its Facebook page Tuesday night, commenters offered prayers and recalled the school’s record with wildfires.

“You have always handled these fires with the utmost care. I can attest to that from my experience in the 1985 fire as a new student,” one alumna wrote. Another said that the pictures looked exactly like what he saw while sheltering in place a decade ago.

Curbed pointed out the building design and placement on the 830-acre campus, which was built in the early ’70s: Pepperdine relied on fireproof materials like steel, concrete, stucco, glass, and tile—no exposed wood. The architect’s “Mediterranean modern” style was inspired by the Greek island of Patmos.

The school also clears away dry brush that can accelerate wildfires and collects runoff waste water in a pond, which helicopters used to fight the Franklin fire.

Faculty who evacuated on-campus housing, including humanities professor Jessica Hooten Wilson and law professor Joel Johnson, shared dispatches and asked for prayers.

Jeff Baker, an associate dean at Pepperdine’s law school, offered an update on Tuesday night.

“Long day in Malibu. We remain safely off campus. #FranklinFire returned to Pepperdine tonight from a different angle & burned through the part of campus where our neighborhood is,” he wrote on the social media platform Bluesky. “Pepp reports no structures suffered significant damage. Heroic firefighters have saved our homes again.”

Baker told followers, “We’ve walked this road before,” and that the law clinic was planning to set up pro bono disaster response “right away.”

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News

The Door Is Now Open to Churches in Nepal

Surendra Bajracharya

Seventeen years after the former Hindu kingdom became a secular state, Christians have a pathway to legal recognition.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Prakash Karki had every reason to be despondent. He had opened a 25-bed hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, financed by contributions to a local cooperative. But now he was in jail.

Some of the shareholders had insisted that Karki install pictures of Hindu deities in the hospital, but he wished to run the hospital on Christian principles and felt that displaying Hindu gods would go against his faith. As a result, unhappy shareholders turned against Karki, spreading rumors about financial instability at the hospital and prompting other depositors to demand their money back. Unable to repay those amounts immediately, he was hauled into court and received a four-year prison sentence.

Karki was initially discouraged, but after attending a church service in the prison and hearing a message on Job’s faithfulness despite suffering, he found new purpose. He began studying law, assisting inmates with their legal cases, and sharing the gospel. Over 50 of his fellow prisoners came to Christ.

Karki never imagined how God would use his legal studies after his release from prison. Thanks largely to his perseverance and advocacy, Christian churches in Nepal—which was officially a Hindu state until 2007—have gained legal recognition for the first time.

In Nepal, known to tourists for its stunning natural landscapes, towering mountains, and gracious hospitality, Hindu and Buddhist traditions are deeply woven into the culture. Christian missions first reached the area in the 17th century, but 18th-century king Prithvi Narayan Shah, famous for his declaration that Nepal is a garden of 4 castes and 36 tribes, expelled the missionaries. Nepal would remain closed to all foreigners for nearly 200 years.

In the 1950s, following changes in foreign policy, Nepal began allowing international mission agencies to enter for social and charitable work. The government’s 1961 census counted 458 Christians in the country. By the 2001 census, there were over 100,000. The next two decades saw incredible growth, to 375,700 as of 2011 and 512,000 in 2021, or about 1.8 percent of Nepal’s nearly 30 million people.

Today, Christianity is a prominent faith in Nepal, with churches established in nearly every district, including about 300 congregations in the valley surrounding the capital of Kathmandu. However, activist groups seeking to restore the Hindu monarchy to power have pushed back against the growth of Christianity, sometimes even attacking churches.

Although Nepal’s 2015 constitution guaranteed religious freedom, it still left Nepal’s churches in a precarious legal situation because they had no way to register officially with the government. For years, they had operated under the guise of nongovernmental organizations or remained unregistered. But without formal recognition, the churches had no legal authorization to conduct religious activities. Even the congregations registered as nonprofit entities faced the constant threat of having their assets and properties confiscated during government scrutiny.

The National Civil Code of 2017 included provisions to permit various religious entities to register as Guthi, or religious trusts. However, churches faced persistent discrimination due to the dominance of Hindu extremists in government offices. Efforts to persuade government ministers to apply the 2017 provisions to churches were to no avail. On paper, the category of religious trust was open to all faiths; in practice, it was available only to Hindus.

This was the situation into which Karki, newly equipped with legal skills, entered after his release from prison in 2015.

Karki had already experienced one miraculous turnaround in his life. In 1989, abandoned by his family at age 10 and begging for money near a temple in Kathmandu, he was rescued by Joe Collins, a Baptist missionary operating a home for orphaned children in that city.

Collins and his family died in a plane crash in 1992, but the home continued to operate, and Karki grew up receiving Christian training.

By his teenage years, Karki recounted, he felt called to be an evangelist. He began traveling to remote villages of Nepal to share the gospel. In doing so, he observed the dire health care conditions in these villages, which led him to start health camps for rural residents. He then opened the small private hospital in Kathmandu that he managed until he was imprisoned. As with Joseph in the Book of Genesis, the injustice he experienced would prove to be a blessing in disguise.

After his release from prison, Karki rejoined his home church, House of Faith. Like most churches in Nepal, it was officially registered as a nonprofit since there was no process for legal registration of churches. But that year, without a clear explanation, the government denied House of Faith its annual renewal.

Relying on his newly developed legal knowledge, Karki began approaching various experts for help. All of them warned him that obtaining religious trust status for churches would be nearly impossible, as there were no established guidelines for such registrations.

For four years, Karki and two colleagues pursued registration, visiting ward offices and navigating the complex bureaucratic landscape. Their church’s file moved through various departments and ministries. Repeatedly, Karki was told that religious trust status was reserved exclusively for Hindus, to preserve their culture and heritage. One government official said he would rather cut off his own hand than issue a religious trust registration for a church. Karki regularly faced condescending and belittling remarks.

But Karki’s patience was ultimately rewarded. In 2019, by ministerial directive, a three-member committee was formed to draft guidelines for the registration of religious trusts. The guidelines were completed in 2020, and all district land-registration officers were instructed to accept applications. Later that year, House of Faith became the first church in Nepal to receive religious trust status.

During the celebration of this achievement, pastor Phurpu Bhote of Himali Fellowship Church declared that the names of Karki and his fellow advocates “should be recorded in the Christian history of Nepal.”

Karki himself reflected, “I have learned from the Bible that God often works through individuals who are deemed unworthy by society and the nation. This registration was not accomplished through my strength, wisdom, knowledge, skills, or any connections. It is the great grace of God and the answer to the prayers of saints and pastors.”

Now that the battle had been won once, the next step was to replicate the process. The organization SAF Nepal, which rehabilitates girls rescued from trafficking and produces gospel recordings in tribal languages, became the next applicant.

The Social Welfare Council (SWC), which oversees the activities of nonprofits in Nepal, had blocked SAF Nepal from receiving foreign funds due to opposition to its distribution of gospel recordings. The SWC then denied SAF Nepal’s request for renewal as a civic organization. At this point, SAF turned to Karki for help.

The process was just as arduous as in House of Faith’s case, requiring multiple visits to government offices and occasionally heated discussions with officials, but SAF Nepal ultimately succeeded in registering as a trust, enabling the organization to expand its work without fear of a shutdown.

As word of these successes spread and more churches and Christian organizations sought registration assistance, Karki recruited Nhuchhe Narayan Shrestha, who had drafted the incorporation letter for House of Faith, to help expedite the process. Shrestha is the founder of Chinari Legal Service, a Nepalese law firm that has handled over 4,800 legal cases.

Despite continued resistance at government offices staffed by Hindu employees, Karki and Shrestha have assisted numerous other churches and Christian ministries in pursuing registration. As guidance on how to register was disseminated nationwide, churches in rural areas also began achieving trust status, sometimes with fewer challenges than their counterparts in urban settings. As of this writing, 15 denominations representing about 1,000 local congregations have been approved, and many others have entered the process.

“We had prayed for years for a breakthrough like this,” said Ram Sharan Bhandari, pastor of Grace Church in Kathmandu. “For the first time, we can legally own land and conduct ministry work without fear of government interference.”

Pastor Rajan Malla of the Nehemiah Trust added, “The battles we faced in the past, with threats of losing our properties or being shut down, are no longer hanging over us. This is truly a new chapter for Christians in Nepal.”

Though many in Nepal’s government have remained reluctant to support recognition of Christians, two key officials have played crucial roles in creating a fairer regulatory environment. Devi Bahadur Bhandari, the chief land registration officer who registered Grace Church as a religious trust, commented, “I’ve worked in almost every government sector in Nepal and found that Christians, as a minority, contribute selflessly. We should support them, as they abide by the law and are not involved in crime.”

Similarly, Kamal Prasad Gautam, an administration officer and trust expert, said of Karki, “Thanks to one man’s efforts, the 2020 trust registration guidelines have paved the way for all Christians. We are grateful for this.”

Unfortunately, these successes have also unleashed some internal squabbles. Because of churches’ historically murky legal status, many of them had their properties registered under the names of individual believers. In some cases, when a church secured religious trust status, the landowners refused to transfer the property to the church, leading to sharp conflicts.

Most of these disputes have been resolved. But one prominent congregation, which had been praying for a path to legal recognition for two decades, has not yet taken advantage of the opportunity because of ongoing disagreements with the individuals who are the official owners of the church property.

Although Nepal’s constitution permits all religious groups to operate facilities, inequities remain. Priya Hari Bhandari, who worked with Shrestha and Karki on the original team of advocates for religious trust status, said, “Nepal’s constitution is still discriminatory. The definition of secularism in Nepal is flawed, as the state continues to protect Hinduism while denying basic rights to Christians.”

Despite these challenges, Karki remains “prayerfully hopeful” that with continued advocacy, Christians will ultimately secure full legal rights. On his current agenda are pursuing access to land for national cemeteries, tax-free land registration, and the establishment of a commission to safeguard the rights and privileges of Christians. Since the government allocates funds for the operation of Hindu temples, Karki hopes that it will eventually give proportional support to Christian churches.

The recognition of Nepali churches as religious trusts heralds a new era for Christianity in Nepal. Yet the legal battles are far from over, with both ongoing challenges from government authorities and internal church disputes threatening to undermine progress. The future of Christianity in Nepal is bright, but the sustained efforts of believers will be needed to bring full religious freedom for Christians and for all people in Nepal.

Surendra Bajracharya is a freelance writer and translator of Christian materials who lives in Kathmandu, Nepal.

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Ideas

The Holy Family and Mine

Nadya Williams

Contributor

Nativity scenes show us the loving parents we all need—and remind me that my own parents estranged me over my faith.

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

“So what are your holiday plans?”

I hear that a lot in polite conversations this time of year. And invariably, after I explain that we’ll visit my husband’s parents in another state, the follow-up question is whether we’ll visit my parents too. That’s when the conversation gets awkward.

I’ve had a full decade to master the art of demurring without much detail, but it’s still difficult to explain even a vague version of the truth—namely, that my parents will not receive me in their home because of my faith.

The story of my estrangement, to which I’ll return in a moment, is somewhat unusual. But estrangement itself is increasingly common. One recent study found that “as many as one in four people are estranged from at least one family member.”

After a decade, my estrangement leaves me numb rather than in full-fledged pain. But as I prepare to celebrate Christmas, it adds another dimension of longing for the promises that Christ’s birth holds out for us all. This is a season in which we speak often of reconciliation and decorate our homes and churches with images of a perfect family—the holy family, with a doting Mary and Joseph leaning over the baby in the manger, as if they don’t have a care in the world.

Our Nativity scenes may lean saccharine, but they tell an important truth about family. They depict a love and togetherness we all want and need. We all long for others to look at us as Jesus’ earthly parents looked at him, and the absence of that affection, the inability to reconcile (Rom. 12:18), is particularly hard at Christmas.

I was born in the Soviet Union, back when there was such a thing. In 1991, shortly before the collapse of the USSR, my secular Jewish family took advantage of temporarily opened borders and moved to Israel. Then, in 1996, when I was in high school, we moved to the United States.

It was supposed to be for only a year, but here I still am, almost 30 years later. I deferred military service in the Israeli army to attend college in the US, then deferred it again to go to graduate school. At some point, I received a polite letter informing me that the Israeli military forces would not need my (undoubtedly valuable) services after all and I was free to finish my PhD and pursue an academic career here. So I did.

A few years later, after a bizarre series of events in a year of compounding crises that upended my life and thought, I came to realize that the promises of Christianity were true. I started attending church. At Thanksgiving that fall, around the table with several families from church, I talked with a lifelong missionary about the theology of family. “Isn’t it remarkable,” I said, “that because of Christ, we’re all related?” He laughed with delight.

I was struggling then with my worthiness—or, more precisely, unworthiness. Was I ready to be baptized? He assured me that if I was asking that question, it was time. I was baptized a few weeks later, during the Wednesday night service the week before Christmas. My Thanksgiving conversationalist emailed me after hearing the news and wished me happy holidays celebrating with all my families, both the new one in Christ and the original one.

To be honest, I didn’t expect my secular Jewish mother and atheist Russian father to have any significant feelings about my conversion. Surely, I reasoned, for people who had spent their lives not thinking about God, it wouldn’t matter one way or another if their daughter now did.

I was wrong. “Don’t you know that it was Christians who killed Jews, including your relatives, in the Holocaust?” my mom queried in anger mixed with shock and dismay. She later mailed me a New Age book as an example of something more acceptable for me to explore, if I was so bent on finding some sort of supernatural presence in my life. After that, our conversations about faith ground to a halt.

The estrangement was not instantaneous. But by the time I married a fellow Christian three years later, it was complete. My parents refused to attend my wedding. And so, over the past decade, when I pick up the phone a couple of times a year and call the familiar number, it rings for a while and goes unanswered. Occasionally, my husband will email family photos, trying to keep the communication channels open—but to no avail.

I understand now Christ’s surprising statements on the loss of earthly family as one of the costs of discipleship, such as in Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”

I don’t hate my parents, nor was Christ calling for animosity. And yet it is a simple fact that my conversion was the reason for our estrangement. It sounds dramatic to say it came down to such a choice—parents or Christ—but it did. After so many years, it has dawned on me this fall that perhaps this estrangement will not end in this life.

But didn’t Jesus foresee this very possibility? It seems that he was expecting such scenarios to be the default rather than the exception—why else list all immediate family members among those one might have to lose to follow him?

The cost of discipleship for most of us in America doesn’t involve martyrdom of the sort Jesus’ earliest disciples faced. But estrangement is a very real cost too. This loneliness and division is not what God intended for family, and this is not what the fully redeemed world will be like. But it is the world we inhabit now.

Those questions about Christmastime plans remind me every year of that tension of already and not yet. For now, to follow Christ can mean severing bonds we never wished to sever. It can mean conflicts we never wanted, division from our closest kin. We long for a peace that we cannot create, a peace “the world cannot give” (John 14:27, NLT).

A few years ago, my husband and I took our children to a local live Nativity put on by another church. Sheep, goats, bunnies, llamas, and alpacas were joined by a very bored-looking angel, watching over Mary, Joseph, and the (plastic) sleeping babe.

At first glance, I wanted to laugh at the incongruous mix, which included animals that certainly were not in attendance at Jesus’ birth. But what a glorious promise we can see in this scene. God’s family makes no sense in earthly terms. But sometimes the alpacas remind us something the familiar witness of Bethlehem sheep cannot.

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

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Church Life

China’s Churches Go Deep Rather than Wide at Christmas

Eva Chou in Shanghai

In place of large evangelism outreaches, churches try to be more intentional in the face of religious restrictions and theological changes.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, AP

Editor’s note: All the names in the article except for Ezra Pan have been changed, as house churches are unregistered in China and Christians can face reprisals for speaking to media.

During an Advent service last December, a family walked in front of the congregation to read a line of Scripture and light a candle on the Advent wreath, set on a table draped with purple cloth. As the candlelight flickered to life, the congregation responded with “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

It’s a scene playing out all over the world this time of year, yet this church was meeting not in a historic brick church in the US but in an office building in Shanghai.

For Robert Wang, observing Advent is a new Christmas tradition. In the past, his house church would hold large Christmas gatherings with around 60 first-time visitors in attendance. Because the Chinese government passed tighter religious regulations in 2018, the 150-member church has split into several smaller churches, one of which is pastored by Wang.

Today, Wang has changed how the congregation celebrates Christmas, not because of government restrictions but out of a desire to better integrate Christmas into the life of the church. Instead focusing on of one isolated event, he wants church members to walk through the Advent season and make evangelism part of their weekly rhythm.

“Through meditative reflection during Advent, learning Christmas hymns, prayer, and worship, the preparation for the season has become the most anticipated and exciting time of the year for our church,” Wang said.

The changes at Wang’s church are happening all over the country. Traditionally, churches in China would rent hotel conference rooms to host elaborate evangelism outreaches on Christmas, filled with choir singing, Nativity plays, testimonies, and gospel presentations. They aim to use the holiday as an opportunity to invite their non-Christian friends and introduce them to Jesus.

Some churches have moved away from this tradition due to tighter religious regulations that make it difficult to gather, fatigue in planning large events, failure in seeing new converts return to church, or changes in theology.

Yet amid the disillusionment, many pastors say they are rediscovering the beauty of the holiday through holding smaller Christmas celebrations, adopting traditions like Advent, and emphasizing the hope of the Incarnation. Those who continue holding large evangelistic events take care to focus on authentic relationships rather than the numbers.

“In the past, we viewed Christmas as merely an evangelistic outreach,” said Justin Xing, a minister in Shenyang who has also downsized his church’s gatherings. “Now we realize that Christmas is also an opportunity to equip believers to understand the gospel better.”

A turn toward liturgy

Wang, who became a Christian through college ministry, said that traditional Christmas events often felt obligatory, with little thought given to the message presented. Often, preparations were rushed, and the performances were not well rehearsed.

After becoming a pastor in 2018, Wang introduced his church to Advent material created by Redeemer City to City and encouraged congregational reading and group discussions. He also started teaching his congregation traditional Western Christmas hymns translated into Mandarin, like “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus.” In 2022, he began the practice of lighting Advent candles.

Unlike evangelical Western churches that have returned to high liturgical practices to resonate with younger generations’ desire for sacredness, Wang said he seeks to incorporate these elements to help Chinese house churches cultivate a lasting Christian culture in a country where such traditions are scarce.

“Our focus is no longer solely on a Christmas party but on the message of Christ’s birth from multiple angles,” Wang said. He found that even as COVID-19 forced churches to stop meeting in person, the congregation could still go through Advent devotions together online.

Meanwhile, Daniel Han’s house church in Shanghai began observing Advent in 2020. The pastor said the congregation stopped holding large Christmas outreaches after he realized that the congregation relied on it as the church’s primary evangelistic activity.

He noted that for the early church, evangelism often happened through everyday interactions, citing Acts 5:42: “Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.”

Now, instead of focusing on one big Christmas event, the church views every Sunday service as an evangelism opportunity.

“From a pastoral perspective, we should focus on how to creatively and proactively engage in smaller-scale ministries that allow for personal evangelism and stronger interactions,” Han said.

Questioning Christmas’ pagan roots

At Rebecca Xiao’s house church in Linyi, Shandong province, Christmas was once a lively affair. In 2006, her church held a Christmas party at a community center for more than 400 attendees. Church leaders preached about Jesus’ birth, couples dressed in wedding attire and sang Christian songs to renew their vows, and new members shared their testimonies. But in 2014, church elders stopped their Christmas celebrations based on their new conviction that Christmas was a pagan holiday.

The elders had been influenced by Reformed Chinese leaders who pointed to accusations of paganism by Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries that led to a ban on Christmas celebrations. Some elders went as far as deeming outreach efforts unnecessary due to their understanding of predestination.

Courtesy of Rebecca Xiao

A large Christmas service at Rebecca Xiao’s church in Shandong in 2006.

Xiao believes halting the celebrations overlooked the powerful ways God used those events. “The believers who went on stage all experienced dramatic transformations in their marriages and their family relationships because of their faith in Christ,” Xiao said. “The testimonies were especially powerful because everyone knows each other in this small community.”

Last year, Xiao’s church resumed its Christmas gatherings after those elders left, although they now hold the events in their church rather than renting out larger venues so they don’t attract government attention. Though fewer than 100 people attended, she felt joy in reconnecting with her community.

“Our previous approach may not have been wrong, but we unconsciously diluted the significance of Christ’s birth,” Xiao said. “Now, we are renewing our Christmas evangelism because Christmas is a time when people of all ages are willing to come to church.”

Continued Christmas celebrations

Even churches that continue to hold Christmas evangelism events have shifted the mission of their events over time. Ezra Pan, who pastors a house church in the suburbs of Hangzhou, first started seeing Christmas as a “window of opportunity for evangelism” in 1994 when he was 15.

At the time, he joined an evangelism team that trekked through the hills of rural Wenzhou, visiting different families to share the message of Jesus and help them with farm work. Every night, they would invite their new friends to evening Christmas services, where many decided to follow Jesus.

Today Pan continues to evangelize and unite the body of Christ during the Christmas season. For the past five years, his church has held Christmas parties that draw about 500 people.

Although the church faces constant government pressure and often needs to change the location of the event, they haven’t skipped a single year, even during the pandemic. To skirt notice, they typically hold the parties on the weekends around Christmas instead of on Christmas Eve and choose venues in the remote suburbs.

They bring friends who may never otherwise step inside a church and even invite them to participate in the program. Pan said that one year, the young man asked to play Jesus in a skit initially said that he didn’t believe his character was the Savior of the world. Yet after the performance, he became a Christian. Pan has also seen unbelieving spouses join the church after watching their children’s Christmas performances.

“Christmas has become an integral part of our pastoral care and evangelism; it is no longer an isolated event,” Pan said, pointing to the opportunities it provides for his church members to serve together and invite others to join their church body.

Christmas canceled

During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the Chinese government banned religion, and Christmas became a museum artifact, Pan said. Yet even then, Chinese Christians kept meeting and celebrating Christmas, at times in caves, in cemeteries, or privately in homes with their windows drawn and doors shut.

Some churches, like Lydia Xu’s house church in Chengdu, are experiencing a return of this type of “gray Christmas.”

Since her church joined Early Rain Covenant Church and pastor Wang Yi in creating the Western China Presbytery in 2013, it has become more difficult for Xu’s church to rent venues for Christmas celebrations. As Wang’s influence grew and his outspokenness drew the ire of the government, local officials began to more closely monitor all the churches in the presbytery.

So Xu’s church started to hold Christmas activities only at their own building and stopped inviting as many nonbelievers. When authorities shut down Early Rain and threw Wang in prison in 2018, her church stopped Christmas celebrations altogether.

Today, Sunday services in December are no different from the rest of the year. Xu is disappointed that they can’t witness on Christmas anymore but says the church now thinks more intentionally about evangelizing regularly.

“The message of Christianity doesn’t have to necessarily be delivered through Christmas,” Xu said. “We use weddings and funerals to show that Christians have a different understanding of life and death.”

Government-sanctioned Three-Self churches face even tighter restrictions, as authorities banned Christmas celebrations in many areas in 2019 and do not allow anyone under 18 to attend church.

Yet for Luke Zhu, who serves at a Three-Self church in Anhui province, Christmas has held a deeper meaning since the restrictions went into effect. “Christmas is not merely about celebrating Jesus’ birth; it reminds us that Christ came into a dark world, bringing hope and light,” he said. “Jesus’ humble birth in a stable reflects God’s will to bring comfort and redemption amid worldly challenges.”

Local believers have learned to navigate these restrictions by discreetly organizing Christmas activities for children and teaching them the significance of the holiday.

Although Zhu misses the freedom of inviting friends to Christmas gatherings during his early days of faith, he noted that “since Christ was born amidst crisis and persecution, the worldly powers will always oppose the true King. Regardless of external circumstances, Christ’s life has brought salvation, and God’s kingdom will endure and ultimately triumph over all secular authorities.”

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Theology

Why Christians Oppose Euthanasia

Brad East

Contributor

The immorality of killing the old and ill has never been in question for Christians. Nor is our duty to care for those the world devalues.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Advent is a time for the church to prepare to celebrate the gift of new life: Jesus, God made flesh, born of a virgin, laid in a manger. In a gruesome twist of timing, however, this Advent season has begun with euthanasia once more in the news.

At the end of November, British lawmakers approved the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to move forward, albeit by a relatively slim margin: 330 in favor, 275 against. Australia and some US states already have similar laws in place, while Canada’s MAID program (Medical Assistance in Dying) has become the country’s fifth leading cause of death. In Canada, as in the Netherlands, those who seek, select, or acquiesce to “assisted dying” need not be old, nor their illness terminal. Even young people with mental maladies have been killed this way.

These programs raise moral, theological, and political questions for believers, but many of them are quite easily answered: Christians oppose euthanasia.

The church’s moral teaching has always held that murder—defined as the intentional taking of innocent life—is intrinsically evil. It follows that actively intending the death of an elderly or sick human being and then deliberately bringing about that death through some positive action, such as the administration of drugs, is always and everywhere morally wrong.

This ethical argument is very similar to the one Christians make about abortion. We could modify the oft-quoted line from Dr. Seuss—“A person’s a person no matter how small”—by substituting old or ill for “small.” (Other substitutions also suggest themselves: smart, abled, sexed, or hued.) To be sure, there are relevant differences between active euthanasia and, for example, removing a brain-dead person from life support. There are none, however, between administering fatal drugs and offering or prescribing them: Both directly facilitate the intended death of a patient under a doctor’s medical care.

Christians are not alone in valuing life; many Jews, Muslims, and other people of goodwill also affirm the intrinsic goodness of human life. But there is a distinctly Christian conviction at work here, and it is bedrock to our faith: Every human being, from conception to death, is created by God, loved by him, and stands under his protection.

The claim that innocent human life is inviolable is not primarily a claim about us humans, then, but about our Creator. To murder (or torture or enslave, as the church father Gregory of Nyssa saw as early as the fourth century) is to trespass without authority, to assert rights where one has none. It is to unsay God’s “very good” spoken over a fellow creature, to reject and despise a man or woman whom the Lord has brought into being and for whom Christ died. Inviolability is the upshot of our creation in the divine image.

Unlike many topics in theology and ethics, this is not an issue on which the church has ever been ambiguous. There were no early church councils to debate the taking of innocent life. It didn’t take centuries of conflict to adjudicate. On the contrary, Christians were known from the start for their adamant rejection of pagan disrespect for those unwanted by their families or deemed socially useless—the unborn and newborn, disabled and elderly.

Neighbors noticed immediately: In refusing to classify any human being as worthless, Christians were strange. They didn’t expose their baby girls. They cared for the orphan and the widow. And they applied this principle across the board, not only to others but also to themselves, which meant rejecting suicide, too, as a kind of murder.

Which brings us back to euthanasia, where the dominant story in countries like Canada is not forcible killing but death at the patient’s own request. Our culture’s instinct is to say that this kind of suicide is not the same as murder, that “death with dignity” is the right of the autonomous self. While understandable, this instinct is wrong.

My life is no more my own to take than is the life of another. True—in any number of ways, my life is “mine.” But in one crucial sense—the most important sense—it does not belong to me. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, to the Lord who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20). In Paul’s words, I was bought with a price (1 Cor. 6:20), and I cannot repay it except with thanks, obedience, and reciprocated love.

For Christians, therefore, autonomy as our culture understands it is not a relevant variable in the moral equation of euthanasia. This remains true even when the life in question is painful or likely to be brief. We simply lack the authority to put anyone, including ourselves, “out of their misery”—a phrase we reserve for animals for a reason. This authority belongs to God alone. There are legal, cultural, and political reasons to resist the logic of euthanasia, but above all, Christians are called to persevere in hardship by uniting our suffering to the passion of Christ, who bore our sins on the tree, thereby leaving us an example, that we might follow in his steps (1 Pet. 2:21, 24).

In Christ and in the lives of all the poor and hurting to whom he ministered, we see that every human life, no matter its relative health or condition, is precious to the Lord. We honor his love by honoring all lives, precisely in their suffering.

To be sure, Christians want to ameliorate suffering. But if we know anything, we know that no policy, no discovery, no technology can conquer death. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to say, there is no getting out of life alive. Choosing the hour and means of our death is one particularly seductive counterfeit defeat of death. But Christ alone is the victor over that “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26).

If, however, the ethical question of euthanasia is clear within the church, it becomes more complicated when we turn to law and public policy. Christian votes and advocacy can influence laws governing medical practice, but we also live in a pluralistic, secular society in which our beliefs and practices are not the only or even the most dominant influence. Though our ethics may not prove persuasive to those who don’t share our faith, we should nevertheless fight to keep euthanasia from being legally permitted or socially approved. Why?

The two—laws and norms—are related. Even with “right-to-die” laws passing across the Western world, few would defend them through bald appeal to the valuelessness of incapacitated or aging lives. No one wants to say out loud that old or very sick people should get on with it and just die already. But that is the message of these laws.

Besides the outrage of tasking doctors with violating the Hippocratic oath—or, what’s worse, the Orwellian twist that describes killing patients as “helping” them by relieving their pain—the social implications are undeniable. If I am unwell and a doctor presents me with three options, one of which is my own termination, suddenly suicide becomes a real option in a way it probably wasn’t before.

This is one reason we as Christians are right to stand up for the vulnerable even if we fail to persuade the majority. That task will continue whether or not such laws pass where we live. The church rejects the Scandinavian vision of a world “cured” of children with Down syndrome. We equally reject a world “freed” of the aged, the hurting, or the lonely. We want these people to live.

We owe no one an apology for saying so, but we do owe those the world devalues our sustained, costly care. With medicalized suicide on the table, the vulnerable are bound to wonder, Would the world be better off without me? Am I a burden to my family, or perhaps to society? Would my sacrifice benefit a welfare system already stretched to the brink? After all, some victims of MAID have reportedly “chosen” it because they lacked the funds for housing or adequate treatment. (Christian approaches to medicine, insurance, and markets are relevant here. Let the reader understand.)

In a word, we serve the world best when we not only model lives that accept the fact of death—though not its finality—but also encourage others to live to the full until their time runs out. We do this via norms and laws, but above all we do it by serving and loving the hurting and vulnerable, by showing them, through word and deed, that their lives have value and are worth living to the end. A person’s a person no matter how old, no matter how ill, no matter how pained.

And if such persons are burdens, we must bear them and bear with them (Gal. 6:2, Eph. 4:2). As Christian ethicist Gilbert Meilaender put it in the title of a 2010 essay, “I want to burden my loves ones.”

The truth is, we are burdens, from the moment we are born. There’s no getting around it. There is no burden-free life. To seek to engineer one is to rid the world of people who burden. It isn’t ending suffering so much as ending people who suffer.

That’s not kind or beautiful, dignified or selfless. At Christmastime it’s aptly labeled Scroogian. It was, you’ll recall, that “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” Ebenezer Scrooge who, regarding the needy in London who’d rather die than go to the poorhouse, said: “If they would rather die … they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Humbug! The church knows better. The yoke of Christ’s law bids us to invite the world’s burdens into our midst and there find life, joy, and solidarity. To quote Hauerwas again, “in a hundred years, if Christians are identified as people who do not kill their children or the elderly, we will have done well.”

The onus here isn’t on those who die by legalized euthanasia. Even if they request this kind of death, they are victims of a system. The problem is a regime, downstream from an entire cultural complex. In other words, the onus for change is on the rest of us. The church must, by the Spirit’s power, be a community of care for the sick, the depressed, the lonely, the elderly. Laws are but a stopgap. What we need is a culture of life to confound the culture of death. We say yes to life tomorrow by saying no to death today.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

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Wire Story

Study: Evangelical Churches Aren’t Particularly Political

Fiona André - Religion News Service

Even if members are politically active and many leaders are often outspoken about issues and candidates they support, most congregations make great efforts to keep politics out of the church when they gather.

Church attendees pray at Clayton Baptist Church in Clayton, Georgia

Elijah Nouvelage / AFP via Getty Images

Despite the incessant tracking of evangelical Christian, Latino Catholic, Muslim and other religious groups through the recently ended election season, a study released by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research shows that most congregations are politically inactive, with nearly half actively avoiding discussing politics at their gatherings.

The Hartford report, “Politics in the Pews? Analyzing Congregational Political Engagement,” focused on how congregations as a whole deal with politics, not religious individuals or their clergy alone. “Congregations often get left out of conversations about religion and politics but are inferred to be influential,” reads the report.

Even if members are politically active and many leaders are often outspoken about issues and candidates they support, most congregations make great efforts to keep politics out of the church.

“When they come together as a spiritual community, they don’t want politics directly involved. There’s a lot of pushback from the people in the pews,” said Scott Thumma, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, who co-wrote the report with Charissa Mikoski, an assistant research professor.

The study’s data was drawn from a larger project developed by the institute to track congregational change, Faith Communities Today. It relies on surveys of 15,278 congregations conducted in early 2020. Responses were given by congregation leaders on behalf of their assemblies. (The project is funded by the Lilly Endowment, which also is a financial supporter of RNS.)

According to the report, 23 percent of congregation leaders identified their congregation as politically active, but only 40 percent engaged in what the report calls “overtly political activities” over 12 months, mostly infrequently.

The report measured congregations’ level of political engagement by looking at seven categories of political activities, including distributing voter guides, organizing protests in support or opposition of a policy, and inviting a candidate to address the congregation. A minority of congregations engage in any of the above; 22 percent handed out voter guides; 7 percent asked a candidate to speak to the congregations; and 10 percent lobbied for elected officials.

In nearly half of congregations — 45 percent — their leaders thought most participants didn’t share the same political views, making politics a sometimes treacherous topic. Discussing politics is also tricky for pastors, the report found, as they risk offending members whose views don’t align.

Not surprisingly, “purple congregations,” in which both political parties are represented in the pews, were more likely to avoid political discussion than politically homogenous ones, per the report. Congregations where politics had previously spurred conflicts, the case in 10% of the congregations surveyed, were less likely to engage in any of these activities again.

The results clash with the general narrative about Christians’ political engagement, especially stories of evangelicals’ avid political engagement. According to Hartford’s report, however, Catholic and Orthodox parishes are more engaged than Protestant churches.

“Further, the congregations who are engaged in these kinds of political activities do not fit the broader narrative of Evangelical Protestants being more politically active,” the report said. “While these connections are present at the individual level, it does not appear to be happening at the organizational (congregational) level.”

Instead of directly addressing political issues, the closest most congregations get to political discussion tends to be sermons that uphold specific values associated with particular political issues, such as immigration or abortion.

Congregations whose membership is more than 50 percent Black or African-American are more likely to be politically active, reflecting Black churches’ historical political involvement, especially in the fight for racial justice. “It’s almost built into the DNA of an African American congregation to have that kind of activism approach,” said Thumma.

Since these congregations are more homogenous, members may also feel more comfortable addressing politics, assuming other congregants have the same politics.

The survey sample included 2,000 multi-ethnic congregations and churches, where 20 percent of participants were not of the dominant race. Their results were similar to those of non-multiracial churches, with 60 percent reporting having no involvement in politics.

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Investigation to Look at 82 Years of Missionary School Abuse

Rebecca Hopkins

Adult alumni “commanded a seat at the table” to negotiate for full inquiry.

Hillcrest School in Jos, Nigeria

Hillcrest School in Jos, Nigeria.

By the time Barbara Jo Jones went away to a missionary boarding school at age six, she could speak two languages. But as a missionary kid born and raised in Nigeria, she didn’t have the words to describe the ordeal of a school employee sexually abusing her. And if she did tell someone, she knew she would get in trouble and risk her parents’ ministry.

So she stayed silent.

Now, 60 years later, that silence around the abuse at Hillcrest School in Jos, Nigeria, may be finally, fully broken. Eight Christian organizations have agreed to fund a third-party investigation of all the allegations against the school from its founding in 1942 to the present. Victor Vieth of the Minnesota-based Zero Abuse Project will lead the inquiry.

“It feels hopeful,” Jones said. “It’s in the open. There’s no pretending that it didn’t happen.”

Former Hillcrest students spent three years pushing for a trauma-informed investigation with a firm the alumni trusted. They negotiated with Hillcrest and the faith groups that sent students there. The eight that agreed to fund the investigation are the Church of the Brethren’s Global Mission, SIM Nigeria, the North American Baptist Conference, Pioneers UK, Resonate Global Mission, the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada, Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

“We commanded a seat at the table,” Hillcrest alumna Letta Cartlidge told CT.

The alumni’s efforts started in 2021 when a group of 1,500 former Hillcrest students were reliving the good old days from Nigeria in a Facebook group. Jones’s brother, Dale Gilliland, knew a secret about frequent poster James McDowell, a former Hillcrest principal. Gilliland pressured McDowell to publicly confess on Facebook to molesting students. Soon other alumni shared their own stories of being abused.

Alumni formed the Hillcrest Survivors Steering Committee (HSSC). The group estimates that there were at least 50 abusers at the school and that hundreds of the 6,000 missionary kids, Nigerians, and expat kids from 40 countries were abused.

“They all deserve to be validated,” said Cartlidge, who is HSSC’s president and also an abuse survivor. “They all deserve to understand and let go of the shame they have carried and understand that the shame was not theirs. The shame is with the church. The shame is with the school. The shame is with the perpetrator. It had nothing to do with them. In no world does a child ask to be abused.”

Most of the children sent to Hillcrest had no say in their attendance at the school. Their parents felt they had a call from God to serve abroad. Missionary organizations arranged—and in many cases required—that children be sent to the boarding school, starting as young as age five.

“We were immersed in a culture,” Cartlidge said, “that gave no credence to the voice and choice of children.”

The results of the investigation remain to be seen. Survivors do not know what justice they can reasonably expect after so many years and after many of the people they accused of abuse have died. But they are already celebrating what their advocacy has accomplished.

“We are given agency,” Cartlidge said.

HSSC played a big part in determining the investigation’s scope. And HSSC members have negotiated for ongoing involvement as the investigation begins. If Zero Abuse Project sends out a survey, Hillcrest alumni can give input, Cartlidge said. HSSC also got the missionary agencies to agree to pay Accord—an advocacy, training, and coaching agency—for the services of a victim advocate. HSSC chose the specific advocate to support survivors, Grace Stewart, who has 16 years’ experience, including some in Africa.

All told, HSSC spent 15,000 hours on their efforts, Cartlidge said.

The alumni did not convince every group with historic connection to Hillcrest to fund the investigation, however. HSSC identified a number of additional mission organizations that sent students to the Nigerian boarding school, including SIM USA, SIM International, SIM Australia, Assemblies of God World Missions, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board (IMB).

Those groups say they did not have oversight of Hillcrest.

“All people deserve our unrelenting commitment to protection and compassionate care,” Somer Nowak, IMB spokeswoman, told CT in an email. “We have read the first-hand accounts of the abuses that were reported to have been committed by those in authority at Hillcrest Academy. We are not aware of any IMB personnel who have been accused of abuse at Hillcrest Academy or were serving on its leadership team at the time of the abuses.”

The investigation will also examine allegations of abuse at the school and look at how reports were handled by missionary organizations that sent children to Hillcrest, Zero Abuse Project reported. Cartlidge said investigators estimated the investigation would take nine months but the organizations are open to extending, if necessary. Zero Abuse will make a final report available to the public. It has also committed to working with law enforcement if investigators learn of crimes that could still be prosecuted.

While HSSC is encouraged by the terms set at the start of the investigation, some alumni say they’re struggling to believe that justice is still possible. Jones told CT she almost decided not to participate. It felt too hard to hope again after she tried and failed to get SIM USA to take action three years ago.

Jones, her brother, and four other adult missionary kids from Hillcrest School and Kent Academy in Miango, Nigeria, sued North Carolina–based SIM USA. The lawsuit argued that SIM USA, formerly Sudan Interior Mission, was one of the organizations that helped operate Hillcrest. The mission organization said it didn’t have oversight.

North Carolina superior court judge Robert C. Ervin dismissed the case in 2022. He ruled that a state law lifting the statute of limitations on sexual abuse cases for a two-year period did not apply to sexual abuse that happened outside the state.

Two of the plaintiffs were able to continue the case in North Carolina because plaintiffs’ attorneys argued the statute of limitations froze in Nigeria when they left the country before turning 18. They ultimately reached a settlement with SIM USA. But four plaintiffs—including Jones—had to drop out of the case.

For Jones, it felt like being silenced again.

The lawyers were able to put some of her allegations in the court document: how a male employee of Hillcrest “inspected” her private parts during showers and took her to his apartment at night to beat her with a stick.

But there was more it didn’t say: what happened in the dorms at night, how harshly the teachers disciplined her, and how her suffering didn’t end when she left the school, carrying with her all the things she couldn’t say.

“There was no escape,” Jones told CT. “It was devastating.”

But she decided, in the end, she would participate in the current investigation. The fact that so many mission organizations are on board makes accountability seem within reach, Jones said.

“It’s with the missions,” she said. “I just wish that we all hadn’t had to wait so long.”

Anyone with information about abuse at Hillcrest can contact Zero Abuse at Hillcrest@zeroabuseproject.org.

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Theology

Have Yourself an Enchanted Little Advent

AJ Sherrill

Angels are everywhere in the Bible. The Christmas season reminds us to take them seriously.

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

Long ago, Jacob confessed, “The Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it” (Gen. 28:16). Declarations like this haunt me, in the best of ways. It makes me wonder if the world is charged with far more spiritual activity than we notice. Borrowing a word from the philosopher Charles Taylor, what if the earth is enchanted with heaven? Like Jacob, perhaps once we die we will discover that many things—visible and invisible—were ever-present and we were unaware.

The inclusion of angels throughout the biblical narrative is evidence of this, and the season of Advent can help us to reclaim the place these enchanted beings hold in our faith. Angels saturate the Christmas story and are seen as extensions of God’s indwelling presence. Angels, not humans, were first to announce the good news of Christ’s birth. And their proclamation was made to poor shepherds, not the wealthy and powerful elite. In the Bible, angels were seen as help from heaven (Psalm 91:11-12).

If you’ve ever received insight into a problem, felt oddly protected from harm, or sensed a vague spiritual nudge toward a specific direction, maybe the Lord’s angelic emissaries were at work and you were unaware.

In her book Walking on Water, the great writer Madeleine L’Engle observed, “We lose our ability to see angels as we grow up.” By this, she meant we live in a culture that encourages us to suppress our imaginations as we age. We do this in the name of cultural sophistication. We think it is charming to believe in (and claim to see) angels as little children. But as we grow, we are encouraged to put this enchanted nonsense behind us.

For all the gifts of the Enlightenment, its greatest liability was limiting any possibilities beyond what we can see through a microscope. Jesus once said that adults would do well to become like children if they are to enter the kingdom (Matt. 18:3). Maybe Jesus wasn’t talking about a future kingdom that will one day manifest but the kingdom that is now in our midst, which most adults no longer have eyes to see.

No wonder God sent Gabriel to a young girl (Luke 1:26–38)—a virgin would believe and receive the angel’s good news. Notice that when Gabriel visited the religious old man named Zechariah, he had a more difficult time believing and receiving the good news (vv. 11–20). As we age, we can lose our ability to spiritually see. We can close our souls to everything that cannot be scientifically explained. For instance, if an angel visited you today (in a dream or in a stranger or in a vision), would you be open to believing? Or would you explain it away?

From Genesis to Revelation, angels saturate the biblical narrative. Gabriel’s angelic presence on earth was not an outlier but perhaps the unseen norm made manifest. According to the Scriptures, angels could be anywhere. And in the Bible, we see them everywhere.

In the story of Abraham, angels became his guests (Gen. 18:2). Jacob wrestled with an angel all night (32:24). Through an angel, Daniel was given political wisdom (Dan. 10:10–14). John the Revelator fell prostrate after an angel visited him on the island of Patmos (Rev. 1:1). Angels gave directions to lowly shepherds under the evening sky (Luke 2:8–9). Angels ministered to Jesus in the desert after he vanquished Satan, an angel of darkness (Matt. 4:11).

Jesus said he could have called more than twelve legions of angels to his aid on the cross if he so desired (Matt. 26:53). And, of course, there is the mysterious line in the Book of Hebrews that encourages all of us to practice hospitality because those we serve may, in fact, be angels (Heb. 13:2).

In Matthew’s gospel alone, angels appear through dreams at least six times (1:20; 2:12, 13, 19, 22; 27:19). How profound that angels spoke not only to Jewish men such as Joseph but also, perhaps, to pagan women such as Pilate’s wife! God is everywhere (including in our sleep) and is desirous to speak with anyone open to listening, even those who are outside the faith.

A plain reading of Scripture reveals that angels fill the whole earth. As L’Engle reflects,

All the angelic host as they are described in Scripture, have a wild and radiant power that often takes us by surprise. They are not always gentle. They bar the entrance to Eden so that we may never return home. They send plagues upon the Egyptians. They are messengers of God. They are winds. They are flames of fire. They are young men dressed in white.

Perhaps it’s God’s provision that we are not yet fully aware of his omnipresence. Maybe, like with Wi-Fi, the overall input would crush us in our current physical state. When Gabriel appeared to the prophet Daniel while he was in a deep sleep, Daniel was terrified and afterward was “worn out [and] lay exhausted for several days” (8:27). It is no wonder that a glimpse of Gabriel sent shivers up Mary’s spine!

Not only do angels speak to humans, but also what their listeners choose to do with their instruction bears tremendous impact on our lives.

Consider the similarities and differences between Gabriel’s visits with Zechariah and his ones with Mary, for instance. After Gabriel spoke, both Zechariah and Mary asked follow-up questions. We should never interpret from Scripture that God is opposed to our questions. He knows we are finite beings. He is, however, opposed to a posture of narrow-mindedness. When we limit the possibilities of God’s revelation, our hearts close in.

Recall how Zechariah was silenced after he responded in unbelief to Gabriel’s prophesy about his aging wife Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist. Yet we might not see this as a punishment so much as an invitation for him to be still and open to new possibilities—his nine-month silencing was meant to expand his capacity for spiritual imagination. Mary, in stark contrast, immediately replied to Gabriel in a posture of openness: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38, ESV).

In short, to believe the Bible is to believe in angels. Sorry, secular humanism, but the world is enchanted with divine presence, chock-full of God stuff. Just as Jacob’s ladder found angels ascending and descending (Gen. 28:12), the realms of the heavens and of earth intricately overlap.

Do we live as if this is true? I don’t. I could rightfully be accused of living as if the world were devoid of divine presence and angelic activity. We occasionally hear testimonies of spiritual visitations, God moments, or the Holy Spirit moving in a worship gathering. But experiencing God’s presence occasionally on earth is not the biblical worldview.

The writer of Hebrews means to encourage us with the fact that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses (that is, dead saints; see 12:1). So why not angels too? Maybe angels surround us every second of the day but exist in other frequencies or hidden dimensions just beyond our noticing. Angels are like ladders from God, connecting heaven and earth, and we should always live with the possibility of their presence in mind.

The possibility of enchantment might explain why fantasy authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and J. K. Rowling grip us with their stories. Even some of the staunchest of atheists long to believe that there is more to the world than meets the eye. I think most people would like to believe that earth’s atmosphere is permeated with a presence greater than us.

The truth is, we inhabit a God-saturated earth. One of the divine names is Immanuel, meaning that God is with us. Despite the way we may feel at times, we have never been alone, we never are, and we never will be. God’s presence saturates the entire cosmos. Yet what Jacob said is true for us: The Lord is here, and we are often unaware. How might an increase of spiritual awareness to the presence of God—through angels or otherwise—affect our daily lives? Perhaps we, too, (like Mary) might become full of God’s empowering grace if our posture became that of surrendered servants.

In this spirit, perhaps Christians might add one additional verse to the iconic song of the late and great Louis Armstrong:

I see angels sing,
Miracles too.
The earth is imbued
And being renewed.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.

What a wonderful, enchanted world, indeed!

Adapted from Rediscovering Christmas by AJ Sherrill. Copyright © 2024 by AJ Sherrill. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. Used by permission. ISBN: 9780593445532. Excerpted from pages 83-94.

AJ Sherrill is the pastor of Saint Peter’s Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and also teaches doctoral courses on preaching and the Enneagram at Fuller Theological Seminary.

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In Italy, Evangelicals Wage a Quiet War on Christmas

Ken Chitwood

Born-again Christians say the holiday is too Catholic and the celebration of Jesus’ birth isn’t based on the Bible.

Antonio Masiello/Getty Images

Donato Trovarelli doesn’t celebrate Christmas.

The charismatic Christian author from Pescara, Italy, rejects the holiday and all its trappings. To him, the traditions and celebrations associated with the birth of Jesus are actually antithetical to his faith. They have nothing to do with Jesus. They’re just empty rituals.

He’s not alone in hating the holiday. Many evangelicals in Italy are staunchly opposed to Christmas.

“We drive out of our places of worship all the traditions of the tree, the Nativity scene, the figure of Santa Claus, Jesus as a child, and every other popular tradition,” Trovarelli said.

For the Italian Christians who identify as born again, rejecting Christmas is a way to distinguish them from Catholics. They assert their identity through opposition to the status quo.

According to a 2023 survey by Ipsos, more than 60 percent of Italians say they are Catholic. Just 4 percent identify as Protestant, with another 3 percent identifying as “other Christian.” Some say the evangelical community in Italy is probably just 1 percent of the population.

For that religious minority, their Christian identity has been largely defined not by who they are but by who they are not. They are not Roman Catholic, not theologically liberal, not culturally secular.

“In such a situation, evangelicals feel a need to better assert their identity based on core gospel essentials rather than on cultural features,” J. D. Gilmore, a church planter in Palermo and coordinator of Impatto (Acts 29 in Italy), told CT. “Any kind of traditional religious festivity is usually abhorred by evangelicals in Italy.”

Some younger evangelicals are not so opposed to the holiday, according to Gilmore. He celebrates it, personally, finding significant value in “its warmth, its focus on time with family, and the chance it gives Christians in Italy to celebrate with our neighbors.” But he knows older generations often view the acceptance of Christmas traditions as a betrayal.

“Any of us who give a hint of accepting the validity and value of Christmas are regarded as quite liberal,” Gilmore said, “and not evangelical.”

For Vincenzo Russo, an evangelical in Naples, there are two big issues with Christmas celebrations. The first is that it invites hypocrisy. People pretend to be devoted Christians who care a lot about Christ’s birth, when they really don’t.

“Many people use this period as a pretext to give a polish to their religiosity, to dust off their Christian uniform,” he said. “It’s a good opportunity to get on stage and act out, once a year, the good part.”

The second is that the traditions and celebrations are not biblical.

“Let’s ask ourselves, is this something that God likes?” Russo said. “Or is it maybe because they like to binge on panettone and swallow rivers of sparkling wine and get moved by hearing the bagpipe-playing shepherds (zampognari)?”

Opposition to Christmas is enough of a hallmark among Italian evangelicalism that many websites for churches around the country address the question, Gli evangelici festeggiano il Natale e le Pasqua? (Do evangelicals celebrate Christmas and Easter?) The short answer is no.

The slightly longer answer on the website of the Chiesa Cristiana Evangelica Pentecostale ADI de Parma (Christian Evangelical Pentecostal Church of Parma), in northern Italy, takes a whole page. The church explains to potential visitors that it does not “recognize the liturgical feast of the nativity of Jesus.” It points out that the date of Jesus’ birth is not mentioned in the Bible and that modern traditions, including the Christmas tree and live Nativities, cannot be found in Scripture either. According to the website, the church’s rejection of the holiday is “objectively the result of our consistent adherence to the Gospel.”

Italian evangelicals are not the first Christians to oppose Christmas, according to historian Gerry Bowler, author of Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday. In fact, a war on Christmas is itself a Christmas tradition.

Christians in the first and second centuries debated whether the Nativity should be celebrated, Bowler said, and early Gnostics challenged the notion of the Incarnation, arguing that Jesus did not have a physical body. Since then, everyone from Catholics to Puritans to Jehovah’s Witnesses to Oneness Pentecostals have denounced the accretion of “non-Christian” elements, deeming the holiday idolatrous and unbiblical.

“There have been all kinds of battles being fought around Christmas, both within and outside Christianity,” Bowler said. “And despite their particular objections, these Italians fit within a broad stream of believers who have objected to Christmas celebrations for one reason or another.”

Evangelical expats in Italy are often surprised to discover their fellow believers’ antipathy toward Christmas. Jess Cowell, who serves with the Church Missionary Society in Bari along with her husband, Simon, said it took some time to adjust.

“At first we found it really bizarre,” said Cowell, who is from Australia.

Evangelicals invited her to something called a “Tuesday lunch” held on December 25, but with no references to Christmas at all. The gathering was completely “de-Christmasized,” she said. Cowell learned that some of her friends would pull their children out of school to keep them from participating in a pageant.

Slowly, Cowell has come to appreciate the Italian evangelical approach to the season.

“It is to clearly say, ‘We are not the same,’ to prompt a question and provoke a conversation,” she said.

Cowell and her family still celebrate in their home, but they’ve also worked to “reinvent” the holiday and think about how it can be more intentionally evangelistic. She feels her Italian brothers and sisters have pointed out a “blind spot” that she and maybe many other evangelicals have had when it comes to Christmas.

“There’s a danger in not teaching the Good News, the gift, of Jesus coming as a baby,” she said.

For other evangelicals living in Italy, the evangelistic opportunities of Christmas outweigh any concerns about association with Catholicism and cultural practices not found in Scripture.

René Breuel, a Brazilian missionary, decided to embrace Christmas when he planted Hopera church in Rome in 2012. Now, Breuel and his team dedicate two or three services to Christmas, have special performances and songs for the kids in their community, and host a special Christmas party with games and crafts. Church members make Christmas decorations to give to friends and neighbors.

Breuel said he appreciates why other evangelicals in Italy might object to Christmas celebrations. But for him, the only real question is whether it’s an opportunity for more outreach.

“For us, to celebrate Christmas is uncontroversial,” he said.

He has noticed, though, that the Christmas celebrations have been especially effective at bringing in Italian evangelicals who are committed to their faith but also want to join in the season’s festivities.

“They appreciate the permission we give them to celebrate,” Breuel said. “They discover a church that embraces it, and they don’t have to feel guilty if they like Christmas, because we do too.”

- More from Ken Chitwood

News

Western North Carolina’s Weary Hearts Rejoice for Christmas

Emily Belz

The holiday isn’t the same with flooded tree farms and damaged churches from Helene, but locals find cheer in recovery.

Items outside the home of Nora and Robert Ramseur, who were killed by Hurricane Helene in Swannanoa, North Carolina.

Matt McClain / The Washington Post via Getty Images

After Hurricane Helene, the deadliest and most damaging storm to ever hit North Carolina, local churches, musicians, professional Santas, and even tree farms are finding holiday cheer despite destruction still surrounding them.

The devastated region is one of the nation’s largest producers of Christmas trees. Flooding forced Avery Farms in Western North Carolina to remove all 60,000 of its Christmas trees, but it is selling “hurricane trees,” where the damaged branches on the bottom halves of the trees were removed, leaving long, exposed trunks with bulbs of surviving evergreen on top.

The Christmas season in North Carolina is like those hurricane trees: celebrating the birth of Jesus, but with a lot of branches missing.

Churches in the mountainous region are helping people find homes in time for the holidays, providing presents to parents who may not be able to buy gifts for their children, connecting campers to septic systems, and acquiring Christmas trees for those in need.

Some congregations that lost their church buildings have moved in with other churches across denominational lines and are planning blended Christmas services.

Local Christians see some parallels between Mary and Joseph having no shelter at Jesus’ birth and many in their congregations being without homes after the storm.

“All of these things are small metaphors at Christmas,” said Scott Rogers, the executive director of Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry (ABCCM), a longtime Christian shelter and recovery ministry.

One of the older ministries in Asheville, ABCCM is helping coordinate recovery efforts from national groups and churches from other parts of the US. “There is room at the inn for our modern-day Mary and Josephs and families,” Rogers said.

The loss is ever-present. When Jeff Dowdy drives to the church he pastors, First Baptist Church Swannanoa, he still sees overturned trucks, houses shoved off their foundations, and piles of debris. His church has been a hub for recovery efforts in Swannanoa, a working-class community near Asheville that experienced some of the worst of Helene’s destruction.

Five families in Dowdy’s church lost their homes, while other homes had heavy damage. Some families are living out of campers or with family members elsewhere. At the holidays, he said, families are together “but not in the way you thought it was going to be.”

But the church is preparing some holiday cheer of its own, hosting a Christmas boutique where parents can “shop” for free gifts for their kids, paying in the form of donations if they wish. The boutique is by appointment only to manage demand (two of the days in December were already completely booked), and the church provides guidance in English and Spanish.

Each person visiting the boutique sits down with a pastor and shares what their needs are—whether physical or spiritual—and then the church assesses what it can do to help. The guests can also leave with handmade quilts. Someone dropped off 400 handmade quilts at the church, and the church members wrapped each one.

“They’re beautiful,” Dowdy said.

Dowdy’s church also bought 40 Christmas trees from two local tree farms damaged from Helene, including Avery Farms, to give away to community members in need.

The family-owned farm, which also goes by Trinity Tree Company, said on its website that the owners lost their home in addition to the entire farm: “Throughout the years we have faced many hardships, but the Lord has always made a way for us, just as He will do this time.”

“The area has been decimated economically,” said Todd Royal, the pastor of Fairview Baptist Church, another hard-hit community near Asheville, the state’s most populous city to experience Helene’s destruction. Many businesses were destroyed and are discovering that insurers won’t cover damage from floods or mudslides.

Right after the storm, Fairview Baptist, like so many churches in the area, became a way station for emergency supplies. But now people who are without a paycheck because of the storm are coming to the church for diapers, baby formula, coats, and food.

Dozens of families lost homes in the church’s small community. Eleven members of one extended family died in an area near Fairview known as Craigtown. One of the surviving family members came to volunteer at the church after the storm, Royal said.

As some people have moved into campers, Fairview Baptist has also helped about a half dozen of them connect the hard piping from their new camper homes to a septic system.

Despite the storm, the 65-member church continued its Operation Christmas Child program through Samaritan’s Purse, putting together more than 1,500 shoeboxes full of gifts over the course of three “packing parties” at the church.

“The building was full of excitement and life. … It was just a sweetness to it that I’ve not seen thus far, that’s different than other years,” said Royal. “I’m grateful the Lord has loved on us and given us some good work to do, and I hope it’ll lead to a great moving of the Lord in our community that has been needed for a while.”

The Asheville Symphony Orchestra had its first concert since the storm in late November, performing George Friderich Handel’s Messiah.

The run of three Messiah performances was sold out. The symphony’s music director, Darko Butorac, told CT that at one evening performance the audience was so enthusiastic that the musicians did an encore of the “Hallelujah” chorus and the audience joined in singing.

“It was a very special moment, the community coming together through the beauty of this incredible piece of music,” Butorac said.

Considering the loss the region had experienced, Butorac personally found the beginning of the Messiah moving. The first sung words of Handel’s piece are from Isaiah 40: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.”

Dowdy in Swannanoa is also focusing on Isaiah in his preaching this Christmas season. He noted the Old Testament prophecies are full of expectation and longing for the Messiah. He thinks about that with the slow years of recovery ahead.

“It does make us long for better days, expecting Jesus,” he said. “That’s what we’re offering to people, is that hope.”

A Mountain Pastor-and-Santa Rebuilds His Church

Methodist pastor Mike Marcela is in his tenth year working a side job as a professional Santa Claus in Western North Carolina.

But this Christmas season he is also working to rebuild the church he leads, Valle Crucis United Methodist Church, after Hurricane Helene’s destruction. Many in the region are welcoming Christmas as a time that captures both darkness and great light—a longing for a coming Savior, renewal, and recovery.

As Santa, he works at the Tweetsie Railroad theme park and other places in the area near Boone, North Carolina—alongside his wife, who plays Mrs. Claus.

Marcela, who sports a long white beard, has already talked to thousands of children in the region in his role as Santa. He expected children to come to him asking for presents to replace things they lost in Helene. But the children haven’t brought up the storm to him.

“They’re just excited about Christmas,” he said in an interview. “It’s good to hear kids are focused on … being kids and having fun.”

Valle Crucis United Methodist Church, in the mountains near Boone, is starting its third debris pile from the wreckage of its building.

The church was founded in 1862 and has seen floods before, but nothing like Helene. Several feet of water ripped into the church building, requiring about $400,000 of repairs, which the local Methodist district and regional conference are planning to cover.

“We’re all disheartened by the building, but no one is so disheartened [that] we retreated to a corner,” Marcela said.

With some help from volunteer groups like Samaritan’s Purse, Baptists on Mission, and the United Methodist Committee on Relief, the Methodist congregation is now in the middle of ripping up all the church’s floors, removing mud from underneath everything, and fixing its newly sinking foundation. The church fellowship hall is mucked out and awaiting mold remediation. Soon the church’s stained-glass windows will be removed while the foundation is fixed.

“I’ve learned a lot about old church renovation that I never really wanted to know,” Marcela said.

The congregation is a close-knit group of about 23 people who have lived in the community their whole lives. Some of the men in the congregation are farmers and contractors, and after the storm they gassed up excavators and bulldozers to help clear the way for people trapped in their driveways and houses.

No one in the church lost their homes, but some had damage, and farmers in the church lost all their fencing and are rebuilding. One congregant’s driveway is still blocked with storm debris.

The church carried on its usual outreach ministries without a building: Members did a coat drive at a local school, and they’re helping put on a “cookies with Santa” event for students at another, with Marcela working as the Santa. They usually do the cookie event at the public elementary school across the street from the church, but the school was flooded too.

“Our congregation realizes that a church is not a building but the church is a congregation,” Marcela said.

The church has been sharing a sanctuary with Holy Cross Episcopal Church up the road. Now, the Methodists worship at 9 a.m., and the Episcopalians worship at 11 a.m. The Episcopal sanctuary has an organ, which the Methodist church’s pianist is enjoying but which has been an adjustment for the Methodist congregation—“a little more formal sounding,” Marcela said.

The Episcopal priest told Marcela the Methodists could use their Advent wreath to light candles on Sundays, but Marcela decided to put up a Nativity set instead to try something new.

Each week, instead of lighting the candle, the church is bringing different characters to the manger—animals one week, shepherds another. Marcela does an Advent reading connected to the service’s Scripture as they do the Nativity.

The two congregations have shared meals together since the storm, and they’re planning to do a Christmas Eve service together. The Episcopal youth group is leading lessons and carols at the service, and then Marcela will lead Communion.

“A storm is a storm, but it’s not ever going to be bigger than God,” Marcela said. “We’ve seen God moving everywhere. That makes this time a little more special.”

- More from Emily Belz

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A Mountain Pastor-and-Santa Rebuilds His Church

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