Readers Praise Print Magazines and Local Churches

Responses to our July/August issue.

Photography by Abigail Erickson for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Lucky
senior editor, culture and engagement

Why Print Still Matters

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

Warren A. Dick, Wooster, OH

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

Donna Cooley, Vancouver, WA

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

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

Dave Smith, Gainesville, GA

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

Owen Panner Jr. , Riddle, OR

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

Merle Yoder, Gladys, VA

Why Both Parties Want Hispanic Evangelicals in 2024

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

Rich Rodriguez (via Facebook)

He Told Richard Nixon to Confess

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

Mark A. Jumper, Virginia Beach, VA

Is Sexuality a Matter of First Importance?

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

Rob Moorlach, Groton, SD

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

Thomas Keogh, Highlands County, FL

Behind the Scenes

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

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

- More from Kate Lucky

Theology

The Incarnation Is More than the Manger

Jeremy Treat

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

Illustration by Jocelyn O’Leary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WikiMedia Commons

Saint Athanasius by Peter Paul Rubens

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Jeremy Treat

News

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

Angela Lu Fulton in Hanoi

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Ngo woke up.

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

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

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography by Tim Gerard Barker for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angela Lu Fulton is Southeast Asia editor for Christianity Today.

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

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Testimony

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

Joshua Broome

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

Photography by JerSean Golat for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

Photography by JerSean Golat for Christianity Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Books

Review

The Black Church Has Five Theological Anchors

Claude Atcho

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

Illustration by Diana Ejaita

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Books

Review

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

Christopher Gehrz

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

Illustration by Tim Bouckley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- More from Christopher Gehrz

Books

Review

New & Noteworthy Books

Matt Reynolds

Chosen by Matt Reynolds, CT senior books editor.

Illustrations by Tara Anand

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

Benjamin B. Saunders (Lexham Press)

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

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

Mark Vroegop (Crossway)

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

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

Diane Langberg (Brazos Press)

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

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

- More from Matt Reynolds

News

Recovery Ministries Try to Help Portland Get Clean

Maria Baer in Portland

After an attempt to decriminalize drugs made the addiction crisis in Oregon even worse, local Christians are pleading with the sick—and the state—to let them help.

Jordan Gale

The litter in Portland is different. Every city has its share of trash, food wrappers, and cigarette butts ground into the sidewalks. But in Portland, particularly in Old Town just west of the Burnside Bridge, the trash is clothing. A wet shirt, crumpled on the street. A trail of grimy socks and underwear at the bus stop.

This is the epicenter of Oregon’s addiction crisis, where drug overdoses have quadrupled in the past five years. More than 3,500 people have died from overdoses in the state since 2020. That was the year voters overwhelmingly approved Measure 110, a law decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Supporters believed it would neutralize an unfair stigma around drug addiction and reduce over-incarceration.

After nearly three years of spiking overdose rates, state lawmakers recently reversed course. Health officials, however, said they expect the number of overdose deaths to keep growing. Decriminalization didn’t encourage more people into recovery, and it didn’t improve Oregon’s addiction recovery infrastructure. In fact, many Christian recovery programs saw a drop in the number of people seeking their help.

Why didn’t decriminalization work? What can be done now, with overdose deaths rising?

After the state enacted a bill to recriminalize hard drug possession in September, ministry leaders in Portland are asking these questions and hoping the government will let them be a part of the solution.

When I visited Portland earlier this year, drug recriminalization had yet to take effect. I watched a man on the sidewalk light up methamphetamine in a glass tube in the middle of the afternoon. Others smoked what sources told me was likely fentanyl out of aluminum foil.

During the decriminalization under Measure 110, Oregonians caught with these substances could either accept a $100 citation or call a state-run hotline designed to connect them to recovery resources. They didn’t have to follow through with recovery to avoid the fine.

By late 2023, police had stopped issuing the citations, which proved unenforceable. Among the roughly 8,700 tickets they issued over three years, only 300 people cited ever called the recovery hotline. There’s no data tracking whether any of them ultimately sought treatment.

“Our streets went from typical Portland to a disaster almost overnight,” said Lance Orton, executive director of CityTeam, a ministry to people struggling with addiction and homelessness downtown. “We just started seeing overdoses like crazy.”

Orton said Portlanders began carrying around Narcan (a brand name of naloxone), a nasal spray that can counteract an overdose, in case they came upon someone who needed reviving. Open drug use skyrocketed, he said, and people who’d heard drugs were now legal in Oregon began moving in from out of state. Measure 110 was successful in one regard: The social stigma against hard drugs was disappearing.

Jordan Gale

First responders check a man’s vitals after he received Narcan to counteract a suspected fentanyl overdose in Portland.

While the latest national figures show that the overall uptick in drug deaths is finally beginning to reverse course, Oregon remains an exception to the trend. Overdose deaths in the state were up 22 percent last year.

When Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek signed the bill to recriminalize drugs last April, she said Measure 110 failed because it was underfunded and badly implemented. It was also poorly timed, right around the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and during massive protests over the death of George Floyd. That same year, fentanyl—a cheap, synthetic opioid that the Centers for Disease Control says is 50 times more potent than heroin—was just reaching the streets of Oregon.

Officials blamed a lack of recovery and treatment options. A state report released this year cited a shortage of 3,000 beds. But ministry leaders say at least a few hundred recovery beds aren’t included in the state’s official tally: the ones housed in their own ministries.

Union Gospel Mission (UGM), a homeless shelter and addiction recovery ministry located in Portland’s Old Town, houses up to 40 men in its residential substance-use recovery program. Within a two-mile radius are three others: the Catholic-founded Blanchet House (50 beds) as well as two other Protestant ministries, CityTeam (64 beds) and Portland Rescue Mission (42 beds). Separate locations house additional women in recovery.

Some of these groups’ leaders have gone through recovery themselves. They can attest to how important it can be for recovery to include spiritual components such as Bible studies and Christian fellowship. But these religious requirements have made them hesitant to apply for state licensure—they don’t want strings attached to their work—which means the state doesn’t count their vacancies in its official tally of available beds.

As the state’s addiction crisis worsens, that may be changing.

In an old, slanted building on Portland’s East Side, a group of men sit at rows of long tables and read from open workbooks in a makeshift classroom. Some are clearly more into the discussion than others. A few ceiling fans feebly push around the musty air.

The group has come across a word they don’t recognize and are debating its meaning: hedonism.

“Is that like Hinduism?” one guy says. Someone else asks Siri. “The philosophy that pleasure is the highest good and the proper aim of human life,” he reads from the response. “It’s like, self-gratifying conduct.”

Jordan Gale

An encampment near Portland’s downtown waterfront is commonly referred to as “The Pit.”

This is CityTeam’s apologetics class, where roughly 40 residents at the center are studying biblical philosophy and the neuroscience of addiction. They’re using a Christian addiction recovery curriculum called The Genesis Process.

Roughly 90 percent of the men here came from the court system. They call it being “on paper”: Most of the guys have long rap sheets, reflecting a revolving door of handcuffs, county jail stays, detox facilities, and then returns to the street until a judge finally threatens serious prison time if they don’t commit to a recovery program.

Orton and the leaders at fellow recovery ministries say the prospect of prison time is often a key motivator to get clean—a motivator Measure 110 removed. “So that deterrent, the stick in the whole carrot-and-stick thing, is important,” Orton said. “Because it does drive people to recovery, even if they don’t know that they want it yet.”

Advocates for decriminalizing hard drugs argued that it was unethical and inhumane to punish people for addiction, a mental health issue. Their presumption was that everyone battling addiction wants to get clean but can’t access the treatment they need.

Orton sees it differently. Even if you believe addiction is a mental health problem and you recognize the state doesn’t have enough treatment options, “criminalizing the actual substances is very different from criminalizing addiction itself,” he said.

When Orton first came to CityTeam in 2018, he wasn’t looking for a job; he was looking for a bed. He was addicted to heroin, and the car he was living in had just been stolen. He detoxed over several weeks, sleeping on a mat on CityTeam’s first floor, which transforms into an emergency shelter every night.

“I wanted to die,” he said. “You’re feeling pins and needles, you’re freezing cold yet sweating hot at the same time, there’s a complete reversal of all your bodily functions … it’s really not a pretty sight.”

Jordan Gale

A man constructed a shelter for himself off an Interstate 84 entrance ramp in Portland.

He said it was the most emotionally and physically painful experience of his life.

Just as Paul lamented, “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Rom. 7:19), many Christians working in recovery understand it’s possible to want to get clean but not want it badly enough to seek treatment.

Anyone who has been in the throes of addiction knows that the physical and mental pull often doesn’t leave space for rational decision-making. And while having treatment options available is critical, it’s not all that’s needed.

Jake Becker is a 32-year-old CityTeam resident with a boyish face and a chinstrap beard. He tells me he came here six months ago after he attempted suicide in a dark bathroom and somehow woke up from his overdose.

He’d sought treatment before but didn’t stick it out. After Becker’s 20th arrest, when a judge told him he could either go into treatment or face serious prison time, he came to CityTeam.

Orton says he used to be skeptical that men like Becker, “forced” into recovery by the courts, could really find sobriety—or Jesus. “I was like, Gosh, I don’t want a whole bunch of people in this house, culturally, just trying to avoid a prison sentence,” he says. “I was so wrong about that, because those people that come here … they see the culture of those that found the Lord here … and that jailhouse mentality quickly changes to Wow, I want some of that.”

Whether or not people enter recovery to avoid incarceration, most addiction recovery experts acknowledge the need for people struggling to get clean to surrender their self-will. It’s why 12-step programs famously encourage belief in a higher power—and why many Christian recovery ministries say the Bible is central to their work.

People “need a really healthy, clean, and sober community with a spiritual component, and without that, it’s a revolving door,” says Paul Schramm, aftercare director at Union Gospel Mission.

But adding Bible studies, church services, and a Christian “culture” doesn’t necessarily make recovery easier. After his suicide attempt, which he believes was thwarted by God, Becker says he knew he wanted a Christian recovery program.

Still, he balked when he walked through the doors at CityTeam. Here, the men bunk two to a room in small dorms with creaking floors. They share a communal bathroom. “I was just like, What did I get myself into?” Becker says.

Life at CityTeam is rigid. The men have appointed mealtimes, during which a rotating group serves the food to each other. They have Bible study and apologetics classes. They take a financial literacy course. They have chores. For the first several weeks, they can only go out with an escort. In keeping with the recovery adage that those who want to get clean must surrender the “people, places, and things” that filled their former lives, CityTeam doesn’t allow cellphones.

The leaders here, and at UGM, say the structure of their programs probably scares some people away. But it’s also what they believe makes their programs work.

At lunch and dinner, CityTeam opens its front doors to anyone who’s hungry. A line of tired people, with their shopping carts and their sleeping bags and usually their drugs, starts forming every day on the sidewalk about an hour before each mealtime.

For CityTeam, it’s an act of compassion. It’s also akin to marketing. “We see the same people every day, and they all know about the program we have here,” Becker says. “A lot of them just choose to come in and get their meal services, because at the end of the day, the easiest thing for me or anybody in this facility to do is to just walk out that door. It’s easier to live without the structure. It’s easier to live free and do what we want.”

It’s easier in part, he says, because Oregon has made it easier. Zack King, also a resident in CityTeam’s recovery program, says that with all the free resources for Oregon’s homeless population, it’s possible to live in relative comfort and support a drug habit simply by recycling aluminum cans.

“But we know what the tradeoff is,” Becker says. “And the tradeoff is misery.”

Recovery Ministries Try to Help Portland Get Clean

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Oregon’s speaker of the House of Representatives, Dan Rayfield, talks about his mother’s past with addiction during the state legislative session in Salem, Oregon, last February.

Jordan Gale

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The Central City Concern outreach team distributes Narcan in the Old Town district of Portland.

Jordan Gale

In the Old Town neighborhood, I come across workers in bright yellow vests huddled near a doorway on a Saturday afternoon. In the doorway is a blanket with two socked feet poking out and a woman moaning beneath it. The workers have a wheelchair, but they don’t seem to know how to get her into it.

This is the Portland Street Response team. The city program, launched in 2021, sends behavioral health workers rather than police officers to address “mental or behavioral health” crises suffered by people living on the streets.

Oregon has the third-highest rate of homelessness in the US. Every state saw an increase after the pandemic, but Oregon’s rise was one of the sharpest. In Portland, homelessness jumped 20 percent in 2023 alone.

The vast majority of the homeless people in Oregon are struggling with addiction. Some local leaders believe the state’s plenitude of services has exacerbated that problem.

Union Gospel Mission operates a five-story building with tall windows that sits squarely in the middle of Old Town. Like Portland Rescue Mission across the street, it serves free meals in a first-floor cafeteria every day. The men in its two-year LifeChange recovery program live on the third floor.

Clint Sams, director of LifeChange, says for a few months during the pandemic, he could barely navigate the streets to work. “All of a sudden, there were tents everywhere,” he says. “You had to walk on the street because the city just fell apart.”

The UGM team says Measure 110’s impact on the ministry was less about the loss of the legal “stick” to motivate recovery. Instead, it destigmatized drug use at the same time as the increase in government services made it easier to live on the streets.

“Talk to 100 people on the streets … 99 percent of them are going to say food is not a problem,” Schramm says. “The vast majority of people know exactly how to get food, how to get clothing, how to get drugs, how to get shelter, how to get cigarettes… . They can have all this stuff accessible to them and they don’t have to get clean and sober, so why would they?”

In all, 354 nonprofits currently serve Portland’s homeless population, according to Orton at CityTeam. Along with the daily meals, free showers, and emergency nightly shelter beds, those living on the street have an open invitation to gather under the Burnside Bridge every Thursday night for NightStrike, a decades-old city initiative that was taken over by CityTeam a couple years ago.

At NightStrike, visitors mill around various stations set up on plastic tables. They can find food, coffee, and pet food. They can get a haircut, get their feet washed, choose a novel from a collection of donated books, and shop for clothes at a pop-up makeshift closet. The point isn’t to proselytize recovery; it’s to offer help, to build trust, and to communicate that CityTeam is here and ready—when they’re ready.

I meet Patricio at a table during NightStrike. He is eating a paper-plateful of macaroni and cheese as the sun slowly sets over the Willamette River.

It’s loud, someone is playing music, and Patricio speaks low and fast. He leans in to ask me if I can tell that he’s high on meth. He grins when I say no. It’s hard to follow Patricio’s scattered conversation, but he tells me he’s been living on the streets for decades. He sleeps in a tent, given to him by Multnomah County Services. But he recently qualified for Oregon’s Permanent Supportive Housing program, so he’s on the waitlist for a free apartment, for which the state will pay his rent indefinitely. He’ll be under no requirement to stay clean.

Ten minutes into my conversation with Patricio, I feel bold enough to ask, “Don’t you want to get clean?” He tried it before, he says, but relapsed. He’s 50 years old, diabetic, and figures he’s going to die soon anyway. I press further: Wouldn’t he like to work and buy his own things? He points to the new shoes he just picked up at the pop-up clothing station. “I can just get clothes here,” he says.

Orton, CityTeam’s director, says he wrestles with the tension between helping and enabling, between meeting people’s immediate needs and changing people’s lives. A woman moaning under a blanket needs a wheelchair, and probably more, right now. Jesus modeled compassion to the needy often by meeting their physical needs as well as their spiritual hunger.

“It’s compassionate, I get that,” Orton says. “But what if that means they can spend one more night on the street getting drugs and getting high and they die? … The real hard part as a Christian is to say, ‘Okay, we’re here when you’re ready.’”

Union Gospel Mission used to have a strong relationship with local officials. Over 35 years in ministry, Sams had cultivated relationships with several local judges, who would often redirect drug offenders to LifeChange instead of prison. But in recent decades, the relationship between Portland’s faith-based recovery community and government officials has chilled.

The county recently awarded CityTeam a $400,000 one-time grant to purchase a new building for its women’s residential recovery program. Even when the county or city does set aside funds for addiction recovery efforts, leaders say they’ve been wary of applying for grants for ongoing support from Oregon’s progressive government. They’re afraid they might be asked to drop the Christian commitments they believe help make their programs effective. And the government seems wary of partnering with Christian groups. I heard from the Oregon Health Authority a few times for this story, but when I asked whether the state might consider working with Christian recovery centers, they stopped responding.

Jordan Gale

Friends embrace after the death of a mutual acquaintance on NE 82nd Avenue in Portland.

“We’re not counted,” says Schramm at UGM, who adds that even leaders at a recent neighborhood association meeting were shocked to learn that his ministry and others had open beds. “We’re not only not counted as in we’re not considered a solution to the problem; we’re not counted literally. Our beds are not counted as available.”

While Oregon’s new drug law, HB 4002, reinstates drug possession as a criminal misdemeanor, it also encourages law enforcement to consider “deflection” in lieu of arresting or incarcerating someone caught with drugs. Each county must decide whether to offer deflection and, if so, to design and implement its own version of it.

In Portland’s Multnomah County, Matt Stein says county leaders are planning to open “drop-off centers,” hubs where police can bring suspected drug offenders who may then be sent to a detox center, a hospital, a recovery program, or jail. Stein has lobbied to include faith-based recovery programs as an option at these drop-off centers.

Christians have also made inroads with Multnomah County’s homelessness task force. Imago Dei, a nondenominational church on Portland’s east side, sends a staff member to its meetings and opens its building for a county-operated warming shelter. On a hill near the church, a slew of tents are set up beside a painted sign that reads “Stop the Sweeps” in opposition to the police practice of forcibly removing homeless camps. With the US Supreme Court decision allowing local governments to regulate camping on public property, the “sweeps” are likely to continue.

Inside Imago Dei, there are few reminders of the city’s crisis. The congregation skews young and diverse in age and ethnicity. Pastor Seth King says church members routinely volunteer with CityTeam and the congregation hears about “marginalized groups from the pulpit every week.”

The church also has a budget line item that most churches don’t: broken window repair. “Every couple months, we have a broken window,” King says. “But when we moved to this location, we knew where we were moving … . We’re a church that’s very much here on purpose and wants to stay here on purpose.”

Nearly every person I interview in Portland eventually asks me if the city is as bad as I expected, as bad as the national news reports say. They want to hear that it’s better than I thought. They want to believe it’s better than it used to be.

I say no, it’s not as bad, and I’m mostly telling the truth. The bridges and gardens and mountains are beautiful. The people I’ve met are patient and kind, and they’re still worried for their city, which means they still have hope.

Stein, who works at UGM, says his motivation to help grows as he gets to know more people in the recovery program. Watching and praying alongside men and women as they struggle against their addictions make the sweeping generalizations about drug users seem fatally shallow. “You start to see … this is Neil. This is Cody,” he says.

When Jesus met the woman at the well and offered her “living water,” she ran back to her neighbors with a non sequitur: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did” (John 4:29). Her shock wasn’t just that she may have met the Jewish Messiah. It was also that Jesus had known her.

Addiction recovery and medical detox centers are all over Portland. But the programs run by Christians work to really know the people to whom they are ministering. It takes longer, and it’s harder. But they believe—for each man and woman living on sidewalks, sleeping in tents, eating under bridges, brushing their teeth over paper bags—it is what’s required.

Maria Baer is a reporter based in Columbus, Ohio.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Oregon’s Relapse".

- More from Maria Baer

Ideas

I’m Estranged from My Parents. I Still Love Them.

Carrie McKean

Even when family ties are severed, God does not cut off his care.

Illustration by Jennifer Sampson

The box was a fire I could not touch.

It arrived at our house one summer evening, handed off to me by my in-laws. I stuck it in the garage, thinking that if I ignored it, it would disappear. With each passing day, it became buried under a thin layer of West Texas dust and the stuff of life—stray cups from the car, pool floats, my daughter’s viola. Months passed. Yet I could still see my father’s distinct handwriting peeking out, the thick black lines scrawled across the top in Sharpie: “GIVE TO CARRIE.”

Ten years had passed since I last spoke to my parents. But each time I walked by the box, I’d hold my breath—as though my father’s anger might bleed out of the letters of my name and back into my life.

There were things I longed to find in the box, like my treasured collection of Nancy Drew books, which I imagined arranging on my daughter’s shelves. But there was likely a darker inheritance lurking inside too, so I put off unpacking it.

Across the US today, there are maybe 68 million boxes like mine hiding in garages—one for each of the 1 in 4 Americans who reports being estranged from a relative. The estrangement between my parents and me is the most difficult kind to reconcile: the kind rising out of trauma, abusive parenting, and mental illness in the family system.

The outside world may look at my situation and say that I had every right to walk away. Others, like my parents, think estrangement is never the answer. But I have spent more than a decade somewhere in between, asking myself how I can remain a faithful follower of Jesus while denying my parents access to my life. I am convinced that cutting off ties was my only escape hatch, but my desire to follow Jesus keeps me wrestling with persisting questions of obedience and grace.

How can I honor my father and mother if I refuse to see them? If I say I take Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness and reconciliation seriously, does being estranged mean I’m a hypocrite—bitter and unforgiving?

I am both estranged from my parents and alarmed by the casual way the topic is discussed in Western culture today.

“It’s better to become an orphan than remain a hostage” is a catch-phrase of licensed therapist Patrick Teahan, who has built a successful career around supporting those who decide to cut off their families. Going “no contact” with parents and relatives, what one New Yorker article calls “the process by which family members become strangers to one another,” is normalized in some circles.

Teahan’s advice on writing a no-contact letter epitomizes our current cultural stance toward estrangement: “Short, to the point. Don’t tell them why. ‘You’re toxic’ is all you need to say.”

Cultural observers worry that, in particular, estrangements caused by significant differences in core values, like political convictions, are experiencing an uptick. As our society grows more polarized, especially in brutal election seasons, advice like Teahan’s is becoming increasingly acceptable. But what are we left with when we cut the ties that bind?

After ten heartbreaking Thanksgivings, here’s what I have learned: Empty chairs always take up the most space. Empty chairs always shout the loudest.

One day on the social platform X, I read the story of James Merritt and his son Jonathan. By contemporary American cultural standards, there’s every reason for them to be estranged. Jonathan is a self-described “progressive gay man” living in New York City and writing about faith and culture. James is a pastor and the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention; he describes himself as “to the right of Ronald Reagan.” And yet, according to the post, the two “maintain a close relationship.” Intrigued, I messaged Jonathan, and we set up a time to talk with his father.

I learned that after Jonathan’s homosexuality was made public in 2012, forging a new relational path forward wasn’t easy for either of them. Jonathan, in particular, understood well the enticing pull to sever relationships with those with whom we disagree. Cutting off a primary relationship due to disagreements—even profound ones—might feel like it will reduce one’s emotional distress, Jonathan said, but it’s only sending conflict underground, where it “gets exported to other relationships, which start to suffer.”

Jonathan’s mentors helped him process his pain and discern that his father’s disagreements with him were not a rejection of him. Meanwhile, James refused to go after his son publicly over views opposed to his own, even when his silence made other people angry.

In spite of their differences, the two Merritts have been able to stay in relationship because they both subscribe to the same principle: It is almost impossible to love someone if you are consumed with trying to change them.

“The bottom line is this: When we stand before the Lord, each one of us is going to give an account for his own heart and his own life,” James said. “I can’t change Jonathan even if I wanted to, and vice versa is true too. … That’s God’s job.”

James and Jonathan are not cut off from each other the way I am from my parents, and talking to the father and son left me longing for my relationship to look more like theirs. But our conversation also helped me understand that the Merritts and I, estranged or not, have come to know how very little is within our control.

“Can we please clean out the garage?” my husband finally asked last fall, after we’d stepped around the box for at least six months.

So, one afternoon when the house was empty, I unpacked it. Sitting on the dusty floor, I sifted artifacts from my childhood into piles around me: pictures of first crushes, favorite teachers, and cousins at Christmas; my high school graduation cap; stuffed animals; countless trinkets whose importance had been lost to the decades.

Ten years ago, on the day of my sister-in-law’s baptism, I watched my parents walk out of the church and to their car. I didn’t know it was goodbye; I only knew I couldn’t bear to see them the next day. I never dreamed that I’d stack day upon day until I’d built a life apart from them, with little more than the contents of a box to prove I’d once lived as their daughter.

Leading up to that Sunday, I’d done everything I could to find a different way. I navigated every encounter like a game of chess, plotting three moves ahead, attempting to keep us far from the terrifying terrain of my father’s unmanaged, self-treated mental illness, with its delusions and increasing unpredictability.

I chose alcohol-free restaurants, keenly aware of how booze unleashed my alcoholic father’s poisonous tongue. I listed out safe conversation topics in advance—the weather, funny things the kids did, a recipe I tried and liked—keeping a wide berth around the minefields of politics and theology. But every encounter, at best, left my father mollified, my mother pretending all was okay, and me anxious and knotted up.

It worked until it didn’t. That Sunday afternoon, my plotting failed. I was in checkmate, clutching the hand of my toddler as I realized that no matter how I contorted myself, it was never going to be enough. Decades of manipulation and verbal abuse had proven my father had room in his life for only one version of me, fashioned in his own image, faded and blurred until I existed only as a reflection of his own thoughts and beliefs.

As I listened to a fresh round of his accusations, blame, and defensiveness, the truth settled over me with clarity: He would never stop trying to control my every thought, and I, if I remained, would never stop trying to manage our every interaction.

In the aftermath of my decision, I learned there are few people who understand that you can love someone and still walk away—and even fewer people in the church. Even my most supportive friends and family weren’t quite sure how to support me through this sort of loss. Their confusion echoed my own: Was my sadness evidence that I’d made a grave mistake?

When my parents sold and cleaned out my childhood home, they sent me the box. In the garage that afternoon, a wave of grief hit me as I neared the bottom. The Nancy Drew books weren’t there. I pictured myself, ten years old, all knees and elbows, lying on the floor of my bedroom as I disappeared into a world where mystery, fear, and uncertainty were safely resolved by the last chapter.

I reached for the final item in the box: a blue Bible with a tattered cover. See, it wasn’t all terrible, I reminded myself. I could still picture the day Brother Eddie at First Baptist Church in White Deer, Texas, placed it in my hands on the occasion of my baptism.

Was I seven or eight years old? I opened the cover to search for a date and was caught off guard by a new message, scrawled in my father’s heavy hand: “If God does call you into the kingdom in this life, you will start living the fifth commandment and repent and call your mother!”

Shame—estrangement’s close friend—rose up like bile in my throat. You are a terribly cruel daughter. And just like that, the inheritance of my life blackened, turned to ashes by my father’s words.

In the early years of my estrangement, I’d sometimes wake up at night panicked, dreaming I had lost my parents in a crowded street, an endless forest, or a stormy sea. Even now, I feel the visceral heaviness of their absence, like a phantom pain. At Christmas, I imagine my parents sitting in their home, bereft of grandchildren, our memories as an extended family permanently stunted.

But I cannot go back to the way things were. It is as simple and as infinitely complex as that. And it has taken me a long time to accept that God’s grace covers this too, for he is no stranger to messy families.

The Bible itself is full of estrangement stories. Esau, enraged by his father’s favoritism and his brother’s trickery, vows to kill Jacob (Gen. 27). Absalom, David’s favorite son, is driven into banishment (2 Sam. 13). The prodigal son, in Jesus’ well-known parable, takes his father’s wealth and disappears (Luke 15).

In other parts of the Gospels, Jesus speaks about human relationships plagued not just by rank sin and selfish ambition but by disordered loves and misplaced priorities. He tells his followers to let the dead bury their dead (Luke 9:60) and redraws the boundary lines of family around those who do his will (Matt. 12:48–50). These are difficult teachings that reiterate the importance of letting nothing come between us and Christ—not even our families or communities.

These biblical examples show that estrangement is not only a cutting off but also a letting go. One person gives up control over the actions and life choices of the other. Jacob flees; David turns away and weeps; the father hands over the inheritance and waits. And over and over again, the letting go in Scripture comes with a promise: Even when family ties are severed, God does not cut off his care.

The two ways our society tends to deal with ruptured relationships pale when we take God’s care out of the picture.

If the box in my garage is a metaphor for the process of estrangement, some people take the whole of it to the dumpster. This is the wisdom of the contemporary age: Everything is disposable and replaceable—especially people whose views rub us the wrong way—and life’s purpose is to “live your truth” with a mantra of “you do you.”

Others go to the opposite extreme. We take the whole box into the heart of our home and unpack it there. “Forgive and forget,” we tell ourselves, even while cutting our fingers on fractured vases. In many churches, people are told that the proper response to strife is either to ignore it or to reconcile at all costs. But sometimes it’s more complicated than that.

The Bible’s take on estrangement offers a third way for those of us living with severed relationships, one that neither gives in to the pull toward easy estrangement in an age of contempt nor allows the false, uneasy peace of pretending nothing is wrong.

Instead, the gospel equips us to navigate the complicated landscape of broken human relationships. It teaches us to seek biblical reconciliation with the long view in mind. Like the prodigal’s father, we learn to watch the horizon for signs of restoration and return. Like Moses, far from his Egyptian family and shunned by the Israelites, we wait in the wilderness as the unapproachable fire becomes holy ground.

In my garage that day, sitting with my defaced childhood Bible in my lap, the sharp edges of my father’s handwriting were suddenly softened by the tenderness of my heavenly Father’s voice: You are my beloved child, and you are already part of my kingdom.

It was up to God to intervene in their lives, not me. His only request for me was to let go of them and cling to his hand.

This side of Eden, human family systems can be dangerous and dishonoring. Estrangement can be a necessary step because to remain embedded in such families is a degradation of the imago Dei present in each of us. God does not delight in our suffering or our abuse.

Even less corrosive situations, like stark differences in political views, can expand into insurmountable relational rifts. Sometimes difficult choices must be made. But choose estrangement carefully, knowing its costs, only after every other avenue has been tried. Ten years on this path has taught me the road is rocky and difficult—you will not emerge without a limp.

“If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone,” the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 12:18. “As far as it depends on you” calls us to radical humility, forgiveness, and forbearance, but it also calls us to honesty.

There are relational circumstances—choices made by other fallen humans—that remain outside our influence, no matter how much we long otherwise. There are limits to how far our imperfect love can go, walls beyond which we cannot see. In such moments, Romans 12:18 makes way for us to say, “This is as far as I can go,” looking to the one who can take things from there.

Not every fraught relationship can be like James and Jonathan Merritt’s; some will end like mine. Yet even here in the wilderness of estrangement, there are valuable gifts.

In the absence of my parents, I have found Christian community that has been my surrogate family these last ten years. I have found wisdom and counsel in spiritual shepherds who have helped me discern my way forward. I have leaned on the love of my husband, friends, and extended family, who remind me of my worth even when I cannot see it myself. God has been constantly present in every big and small moment of my grief, restoring my identity in him, tenderly healing my wounds.

The enemy wants me to see my childhood Bible as a symbol of bitterness, grief, and fracturing—to wear it, and all that it represents, like a shackle around my neck. But I, like Joseph, can instead say, What was intended to harm me is being used for good (Gen. 50:20). What was meant to wound me now instead trains my eyes toward the horizon, and I long for my parents to experience the same grace.

That Bible is now on a shelf in my house—not the inheritance I imagined, but a good and beautiful one nonetheless.

Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine.

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

- More from Carrie McKean

Theology

Let Heaven and Nature Wail

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

In this season, a baby’s cry can say more than a simple “Merry Christmas.”

Illustration by James Walton

To see how much we really want to peer into the mystery of the Incarnation, go to a Christmas pageant and note whether there’s a plastic doll in the manger or a live baby.

The doll makes more sense, of course, because babies aren’t predictable. A director can’t give notes as to when a cry might drown out a shepherd’s lines or when loud wailing might ruin the mood leading into the singing of “Silent Night.” In the crying, though, we hear a better echo of Bethlehem.

Our life histories start with our own “nativity scenes”—usually, these days, under fluorescent hospital lights. We don’t remember any of that about ourselves, of course, but some of us get to see that origin story of a child. The moment leaves some people, such as writer Carlos Fuentes, silent with awe.

“I cannot explain it. Nor can I imagine it. I can only bear witness to it,” Fuentes wrote of watching the birth of his first child. “The moment Cecilia emerged and cried out for the first time, I knew that I was hearing a proclamation of nature, the newest, but also the most ancient.”

He continued,

To hear the voice of a human being coming into the world is to hear the echo of the origin of all things. To hear an impassioned song. When a little girl is born she doesn’t cry out simply because it’s the most natural thing to do. Her true nature is asserting itself at that moment, through her voice, the conduit that carries her toward society, culture, love. The miracle of birth is nothing more than that.

Human babies cry. In those cries we hear pleas to be fed, to be held or changed, or to be sheltered from loud noises or bright lights. Sometimes we don’t know how to decipher what’s behind those yells and tears.

Literary scholar Jonathan Rogers once noted that the English word infant is rooted in language for one who is “too young to speak.” The cry, and the response to that cry, is part of how an infant learns to attach to parents.

“In responding to the child’s needs for food, for relief from pain, for loving contact, the parent is helping her identify her wants, and how they can be fulfilled,” writes philosopher Charles Taylor. “What could otherwise turn into emotional storms of frustration are given a definite purpose and a recognizable remedy.” It’s from this interchange, which Taylor calls “communion,” that language emerges and a life is given shape.

Sigmund Freud saw in the state of the demanding, crying infant a kind of “limitless narcissism,” and he saw the longing to return to that state as being part of the motivation for spirituality. “The origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness,” he wrote. “There may be something further behind that, but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity.”

The words something further behind that are carrying a lot of weight there. As in many areas, Freud’s reductionism doesn’t fare well in further study.

Ariel Dorfman notes that psychologists have discovered an infant cries louder when hearing the distressed cries of other infants. That’s true even compared to playing back an audio recording of the baby’s own cries. Dorfman said,

Think about it: a baby is more upset by the voice of someone else’s agony than by her own troubles. The baby intensifies the cries in solidarity with the other, shares the pain, signals to the other child that he is not alone. For me, this is proof, if we ever required it, that compassion is ingrained in our species, coded inside the circuits of our brain. This is how we managed to become human, by creating the conditions for a social network where the suffering of others is intolerable, where we need to pity and comfort the afflicted.

But, as with other matters of human motivation, Freud is partly right. A cry does reveal the baby’s utter dependence and vulnerability before powers out of the baby’s control, powers that Freud labels “fate.”

The apostle Paul called such uncontrollable forces the “elementary principles of the world,” to which we were once enslaved (Gal. 4:9, ESV throughout). That slavery is to what Paul labeled “the flesh”—our chaotic desires and needs severed from the God who loves us. The interruption of that slavery does not start with heroic action or even with disciplined maturity but with a cry, as if from a baby: “Abba! Father!” (Rom. 8:15).

That cry isn’t a fully articulated or articulatable expression of needs but rather the vulnerable dependence sometimes conveyed as “groanings too deep for words” (v. 26). That’s because we, like a newborn, cannot verbalize or conceptualize what we want, much less what we need.

Jesus taught us that we did not need to approach God with “many words” or “empty phrases,” since our Father knows what we need before we ask him (Matt. 6:7–8). Our prayer, then, isn’t an advance into spiritual mastery but a falling back into something so primal that it’s what we were trying to do when we still had our umbilical cords. We learn to say “our Father” before we even learn to ask for “our daily bread” (vv. 9, 11).

It is only to be expected that what the Spirit does in us immediately after our second birth is what the Word that called us into existence primed us to do: cry out. And in the second birth, as in the first, we sometimes thrash around, alarmed by what seems to be chaos. Only later do we see that what seemed to be a crisis was the entrance into life.

One of the mysteries of the Incarnation is that the Word who called the heavens and earth into being became flesh—beginning right where we did, as a baby whose words were only wails. Those crying baby sounds say more than a cheery “Merry Christmas” ever could. And when they interrupt our pageants or carols, let’s stop, just for a moment, in awe.

Let heaven and nature scream. In those cries, we just might hear a familiar voice.

Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Incarnation of Jesus Lets Heaven and Nature Scream".

The kingdom of God is near.

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