Christ Our King, Come What May

Contributor

This Sunday is a yearly reminder that Christ is our only Lord—and that while governments rise and fall, he is Lord eternal.

Illustration Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

I didn’t grow up in liturgical churches, and for years, I dismissed their traditions as empty rituals unthinkingly observed by people who stand when they’re told to stand and kneel when they’re told to kneel. Since joining a liturgical church, I admit that sometimes the pomp and circumstance still strike me as ancient and stuffy. But I’ve learned these rituals are not empty—and some aren’t even ancient.

Take this coming Sunday, November 24. In many liturgical traditions, it’s Christ the King Sunday, the last day of the church calendar. Until a few weeks ago, I assumed it had been marked by the church for hundreds of years. But in fact, it’s a relatively new observance, instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925.

In a tumultuous time of upheaval, shortly after the First World War, worldly leaders promised earthly security and peace to people hungry for stability. Christ the King Sunday was introduced to make a contrasting offer: to call the church back to its first love, setting apart a day for Christians to remember that Christ must reign in our minds, wills, hearts, and bodies. This Sunday is a yearly reminder that Christ is our only King—and that while governments rise and fall, Christ is King Eternal.

Over the years, the practice was picked up by other traditions, including Presbyterian churches like mine. According to The Worship Sourcebook, used by our Presbyterian congregation, Christ the King Sunday invites Christians to proclaim that “everything in creation and culture must submit to Christ.” Its placement at the end of the liturgical year makes it the final word on what it means to follow Christ.

But since the year is a cycle, it also comes right before Advent, a time when we prepare for Christ to come. This timing should remind us of the steep call of our discipleship: that in welcoming that little baby Jesus into our hearts and homes, we receive something far more unruly than the gentle beauty our manger scenes suggest. We receive our one true Lord, the sovereign Christ who came to be the world’s Prince of Peace. He is a servant-king who disrupts our comfortable lives with his call to take up our crosses and follow him.

I realize that writing an article for a Christian magazine to argue that Jesus is our only King may seem like an exercise in stating the obvious. And it maybe would be if we weren’t all cut from the same cloth as the apostle Peter, who denied Jesus mere hours after confessing his unwavering loyalty (Luke 22:33, 57).

We need Christ the King Sunday because we are so prone to forget what it means to have a Lord over our lives—so quick to trade him for promises of security and power and privilege and cultural esteem. It’s a tale as old as time (1 Sam. 8), as visible today as in 1925.

Less than a decade after Christ the King Sunday was introduced, in May of 1934, a small band of German evangelicals gathered in Wuppertal, Germany, to sound the alarm to their fellow believers. This was about a year and a half after Adolf Hitler had ascended to power and begun consolidating the support of German church leaders in service of his social and political agenda.

The group in Wuppertal spoke to Christians who “took the union of Christianity, nationalism, and militarism for granted, and [for whom] patriotic sentiments were equated with Christian truth,” and they crafted the Barmen Declaration. The statement contained six theses, rooted in Scripture, which rejected doctrines and practices that made the majority of the German church subservient to the government, such as introducing Nazi ideology to congregations and flying the swastika in sanctuaries.

It’s easy to sit on this side of history and see the failures of those German Christians, to sit in judgement of the millions who apparently did not see the danger of giving loyalty due only to Christ to a worldly leader. But are we so very different?

At a basic human level, we have the same tendency as those German Christians, a tendency embodied for me by a flag in my neighborhood. It’s a few blocks from my house, wind tattered and idolatrous. “The world needs Jesus,” it says. “America needs Trump.”

To be clear, I am not comparing President-elect Donald Trump to Hitler. My point is not about the object of Christian idolatry but the practice of it—not about him but about us.

Indeed, the problem with the flag has very little to do with Trump himself. Criticisms of evangelical support for Trump often focus too much on his persona, as though the degree of enthusiasm this flag represents would be fine if Trump happened to be a nicer guy, a more faithful husband, a more honest businessman.

Those matters of personal character and morality are important, of course. But none of that changes the basic problem with what that flag expresses. The danger of misplaced loyalty is neither diluted nor exasperated by the nature of its object. It doesn’t matter whether our idol is saint or sinner. Substitute Trump’s name on that flag with the name of any worldly leader, and the idolatry remains. This kind of trust in any human is a failure to make Jesus Lord and King of our lives.

That flag is the most egregious example of this phenomenon in my everyday life, but it’s by no means unique. The same tendency exists on the political left as well.

The American left’s current idolatry is not about a single politician, like Trump. It’s about their own political self-conception as good and virtuous people. Some Christians in this group imagine themselves as “The Resistance,” deliberately echoing the name of anti-Nazi groups like the Christians who produced the Barmen Declaration, even as they go along with the whims of secular culture, particularly on gender and sexuality.

Like the Pharisee in Luke 18:11, their moral certitude—that at least they are not like those MAGA sinners—rings of self-righteous hubris. They’re blind to their own compromises, failing to see how their polished words and empty actions make them more like whitewashed tombs (Matt. 23:27) than messengers of Good News to a world hungry for hope.

The failure to keep Christ as King is a besetting sin to which followers of Jesus with any political leaning or place in history can be tempted. But for conservative evangelicals in this moment of the American experiment, with incoming Republican control across the federal government, I do see an especially severe temptation on the political right. In my deep red community and among the American right more broadly, I see an almost religious fervor right now, a sense that Trump’s reelection is ordained by God to bring a band of misfit Avengers to save the day in Washington and set all things right again.

Of course, I don’t know what’s in the hearts of my neighbors with the flags—or of everyone in my acquaintance sharing memes on Facebook that compare Trump to divinely upheld biblical leaders like David and Moses. But without making assumptions about any individual voter, the overall posture of near-messianic honor for Trump is impossible to miss.

And some have matched their posture to their words. Trump’s “mission, his goals and objectives—whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word,” Rep. Troy Nehls, a Republican Protestant from Texas, told reporters this month. “If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads, and that’s it.”

Embrace it. All of it. Every single word.

Nehls might argue he’s merely speaking of party discipline in Congress. But “the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45), and for Christians, there’s only one figure in all of human history to whom we are called to thus submit, only one figure whose every word deserves our full embrace, only one for whom we should have this unquestioning willingness to jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That is King Jesus.

History shows us how serious it is to be insufficiently serious about our allegiance to Jesus alone. Yes, we should be good citizens and respectful of authorities—but at the same time, we ought to be a little ungovernable. We obey our rulers for the sake of God, not for their own sake (1 Pet. 2:13), and when God and our rulers come into conflict, “We must obey God rather than human beings!” (Acts 5:29).

Caeser gets our respect, but Jesus gets our hearts. And we must keep this order clear even when we are thrilled with political outcomes. As Philip Yancey said in Rumors of Another World, “Perhaps the Christian’s most important role in modern times is to insist on a divided loyalty, for as history shows, the city of this world greedily seeks a monopoly on loyalty.”

The world does need Jesus, and America needs him too. America also needs Christians on the right and left alike who do not put our hope in political idols—whether politicians or ourselves and our allies—but in Christ alone. This is the antidote to the despair churning on the left, and this is the necessary check to the right’s growing sense that might equals right. Faithful Christians can prefer the policies and culture of the Republican Party and even be pleased with the 2024 election’s red wave without succumbing to the temptation of allegiance misplaced. We can be politically conservative and still insist that Christ alone is King. In fact, we must.

Christmas is just around the corner. Jesus is coming, tender and mild. But first, Christ the King Sunday reminds us of a different day in the life of Christ: the day he hung on the cross with a sign nailed above his head proclaiming him “King of the Jews” (Matt. 27:37).

It’s easy enough to proclaim our love for the baby in the manger, but loyalty to this King on the cross—to this Prince of Peace—upends all the ways of the world. Loyalty to this King upends our very lives and comes with no promise of earthly comfort, wealth, or power in return.

This is a difficult call to heed, but it is also a path Christ himself trod. Jesus used his power to cast out demons and calm storms, to heal the sick and raise the dead. But he didn’t use his power to take himself off the cross. He is the King of an upside-down kingdom who “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil. 2:7), who uses “the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” and “the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27).

This past summer, my church did a series on the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3–12), with sermons accompanied by watercolor paintings from artist Hannah Hammond. She painted a series of upside-down trees, one to accompany each beatitude, and wrote a blessing to remind us that Jesus upended our expectations of what it means to have a good life and our expectations of who will receive his kingdom.

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A post shared by Hannah Hammond | Art (@hanhammondart)

These trees are rooted in the kingdom of heaven, Hannah wrote in her artist statement. “Instead of growth as an endless race to the top,” she said, “Christ invites us to grow down in humility, generosity, and self-sacrificial love.” Our tender roots are exposed—even imperiled—by this way of growth. It is risky to thus reach for the heavens, to follow Jesus in his humility, generosity, and self-sacrifice, to be loyal to no one but Christ our King. And yet it is the call of Christ, echoing throughout Scripture.

Embrace it. All of it. Every single word.

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

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A Mother Tortured at Her Keyboard. A Donor Swindled. An Ambassador on Her Knees.

By Erin Foley in Mae Sot, Thailand

Meet the Christians ensnared by cyberscamming and the ministries trying to stop it.

Illustrations by Blake Cale

Brenda Kimuli typically worked 16 hours a day.

From her desk inside a walled compound in a mountainous region of Myanmar near the Thailand border, the single mom from Uganda tapped out messages on one of six smartphones. She wrote to lovesick online acquaintances around the world, trying to persuade them to invest in cryptocurrency.

When she succeeded, she directed her contacts to a website that would, unbeknownst to them, funnel their money into accounts belonging to the Chinese criminal organization that employed her.

But one day in March 2024, Kimuli, who had moved across a continent for what she thought was a job at a marketing firm, was not at her desk. She was instead trapped in what she and her coworkers called the “darkroom.”

As punishment for refusing to work, Kimuli sat with one wrist handcuffed above her head—cutting off her circulation—and the other cuffed to the ground. She tried shifting in her chair to get feeling back in her arm as the cuffs dug into her flesh.

For days she remained suspended, deprived of food and drink and forced to soil herself. Sometimes a soldier from a local military group shocked her with an electric baton. When she asked for water, he brought some of his own urine. When she refused to open her mouth, he touched the baton to her cheek and poured the urine down her throat.

It was her fourth time in the darkroom in six months.

“I prayed to God to die,” Kimuli said. “I hated myself so much. I was so tired.”

After three days in the darkroom, she was unable to walk and had lost all feeling in her right hand. Yet she agreed to return to her job in “pig butchering”: a form of cyberscamming named for the way perpetrators butter up targets with trust and love until it’s time for the slaughter—draining the victims’ bank accounts.

“If you rebel again,” Kimuli’s captors told her, “we’ll cut off your hands.”

Kimuli detailed her experiences to me six months later at an immigrant detention center in the Thai border city of Mae Sot. She rubbed her scarred wrists as she recounted how what had first seemed like an “unbelievable career opportunity” had quickly turned into a living hell.

In 2023, the United Nations estimated that at least 120,000 people might be trapped in cyberscamming compounds in Myanmar. An additional 100,000 may be forced to work in similar operations elsewhere in Southeast Asia as actors in fraudulent investment schemes, dating-app fronts, and cryptocurrency hustles.

The complex criminal organizations behind the scams create two different groups of victims: those swindled out of large sums of money after trusting fake online personas, and the real people behind those personas, who are often trafficked and forced against their will to deceive strangers.

Not long after pig butchering began coming into its own around 2020, coalitions of government officials, human rights groups, and Christian organizations—ranging from International Justice Mission (IJM) to Australia-based Global Advance Projects—began working to free enslaved scam workers.

“This is a global threat. It impacts every government on the earth,” said Amy Miller, Southeast Asia regional director of Acts of Mercy International, the relief and development arm of the Texas-based Antioch Movement of churches. “We all need to be in the game. We don’t have the luxury of sitting back and letting the enemy pillage and destroy.”

But combatting cyberfraud groups is not as simple as raising awareness. Asian authorities are often less than sympathetic toward escaped labor-trafficking victims, struggling to distinguish between those who were lured unwittingly and those who knowingly joined in criminal activities.

Cybercrime syndicates are also adept at eluding the law. Human rights advocates say the groups have powerful allies in local governments. And when authorities do crack down on illegal online businesses, as the Philippines did in the mid 2010s, the organizations move into countries with weaker or fractured governments.

None has been as promising a destination for criminal groups as conflict-stricken Myanmar.

A scamming compound in Myanmar.

I traveled to the Thailand-Myanmar border to see how antitrafficking groups there are faring. In Cambodia, where I used to live, forced scamming is a well-known menace.

The large-scale trafficking of unsuspecting foreigners into cyberscamming started in Cambodia during the COVID-19 pandemic. The global shutdown emptied Chinese-owned casinos located in special economic zones meant to attract Chinese investment. Those vacant casinos and hotels, already hotbeds of illegal activity before the pandemic, presented opportunities for Chinese criminal groups to innovate.

The syndicates, some of which had dabbled in pig-butchering schemes, began aggressively posting fraudulent job listings online. They lured in applicants, often from other parts of Southeast Asia. Once job candidates arrived in Cambodia, operatives seized their passports and electronic devices, locked them in hotels, and forced them in front of screens to begin scamming.

Workers were told that if they made a certain amount of money, they could earn back their freedom. As Kimuli experienced, disobedience often resulted in beatings and torture.

The scams initially targeted Chinese citizens. But as the criminal groups acquired foreign workers fluent in more languages, the scammers broadened their efforts and began snaring victims around the world.

Andrew Wasuwongse, IJM’s director in Thailand, called forced scamming a “humanitarian crisis” that has rapidly spread across Southeast Asia. “This is the fastest-growing form of modern-day slavery in the world,” he said.

The amounts of money involved are also enormous. Based on testimony IJM has collected from victims and witnesses in Cambodia, Wasuwongse said, a scammer can bring in $300 to $400 per day. Experts estimate that scamming revenues in Cambodia alone exceed $12 billion annually—the same amount American shoppers spent during Cyber Monday in 2023. Interpol said in early 2024 that Southeast Asia’s scamming industry brings in about $3 trillion a year.

Investigating and prosecuting cybertrafficking cases is not always straightforward. Forced-scamming workers do not all fit the popular profile of trafficking victims. Some are well educated, are well traveled, and speak multiple languages. Some have degrees in IT or engineering.

“Some people coming out of the compounds are not victims,” Wasuwongse said. “While many are completely trafficked and clueless about what they are getting into, some are in the middle. Those in the middle knew they would be committing fraud and scams, but they did not realize they would then be forced.”

In early 2021, Wasuwongse’s colleagues in Cambodia started tracking media reports about foreign workers forced to conduct scams in large, heavily guarded compounds there. They began receiving calls from these victims in April 2021, recording testimonies and compiling supporting evidence. They provided information to local law enforcement offices to help them pursue the most compelling cases and free victims. When victims made it out, IJM helped them file reports with their nations’ embassies.

So far, Wasuwongse said IJM has helped more than 100 individuals escape scam compounds in Cambodia, and nearly 400 across Southeast Asia.

Cambodian authorities began cracking down in August 2022. Since then, they say they have rescued more than 2,000 foreigners, shut down 5 companies, and arrested 95 people. Yet the illicit industry continues there, and powerful actors at the top operate with impunity. To date, the Cambodian government has not arrested, prosecuted, or convicted a single business owner accused of connections to forced scamming, despite wide-scale reporting on the crime, Wasuwongse said.

To evade accountability, many cyber-fraud organizations have moved their operations to Myanmar. Ongoing civil war there has left much of the borderland near Thailand, Laos, and China outside government control.

In mid-2022, IJM and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) noticed reports of people escaping these Myanmar compounds and arriving in the Thai border city of Mae Sot or in Bangkok. In immigration detention centers, some people accused of overstaying their visas were claiming to be victims of forced scamming.

Around that same time, Judah Tana, the founder of Global Advance Projects, a Christian group fighting child exploitation, was in Mae Sot, watching construction crews erect massive, mysterious compounds across the Moei River in Myanmar’s Kayin State.

One evening, Tana had a friend over who pointed out a surprising message on a Mae Sot Facebook group she monitored. A Kenyan woman was asking about visas and saying she had been trafficked into Thailand.

“Initially, we thought it was a scam,” Tana said. He messaged her with questions about her situation and how she had gotten to Thailand. Then his wife came across a tweet from the Kenyan government warning about cyberscam compounds.

Tana reached out to the Kenyan embassy in Bangkok. He kept communicating with the Kenyan woman and learned she was one of seven Kenyans in the same situation who were begging for help. As he reached out to different people in Thai law enforcement, the government, and foreign embassies, it seemed as if no one had a clue what was happening in the compounds.

Through his previous human rights work with refugees, immigrant children, and former child soldiers, Tana had developed connections with Myanmar’s ethnic-minority resistance groups, which hold sway in much of the country’s border regions. He contacted some of their leaders and asked for help freeing the Kenyans. They agreed to speak with the Chinese bosses of the local scam compounds.

In October 2022, the seven Kenyans were released. From then on, others trapped in the compounds began calling Tana from smuggled phones.

Tana and other like-minded groups formed a small coalition to focus their efforts on bringing workers out of the compounds. Miller, the Acts of Mercy director, soon relocated from Cambodia to Thailand to be closer to the border compounds.

One of them was where Kimuli was trapped.

Before coming to Thailand, Kimuli worked at a fast-food restaurant in Dubai, sending money to her parents in Uganda to pay for her son’s schooling.

In an interview with CT, she recounted how she had been trafficked and enslaved 3,000 miles from there.

In 2023, a friend at work told her about a promising marketing job in Bangkok with better hours and pay. Kimuli loved Thai television and thought living in Bangkok would be fun. Her coworker connected her with a recruiter named Joanna; soon Kimuli and her friend joined several others to meet the recruiter in Dubai.

The job-seekers asked questions about the position description, benefits, and hiring process. Joanna confidently answered each one. The company, Young An, required basic typing speeds and computer skills and promised on-the-job training. Joanna showed videos of staff sharing positive testimonies about their work environment. Impressed, Kimuli applied and was accepted after a round of interviews.

Kimuli and other hires were told to enter Thailand on tourist visas that would soon be converted to work visas, a process that is legal in Thailand. In September 2023, Kimuli and four others landed in Bangkok. A company driver met them at the airport to take them to their hotel.

Things quickly took a dark turn. The driver gestured for them to give him their passports. They grew nervous as the drive stretched into two hours. When they tried to ask questions, the driver said, “No English.” No one had a local phone, so they couldn’t call anyone.

When the driver stopped for gas and snacks, they found themselves locked in the vehicle. During the night, they passed several roadblocks guarded by armed soldiers.

“I cried out to God and prayed,” Kimuli said. “I thought I was going to die.”

The driver stopped in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, and a van arrived. They were forced into the new vehicle, which sped off into the dark. Then, at a river, an armed group of men loaded their luggage into a boat and told them to get in.

Eventually they arrived at the gates of a guarded compound. Soldiers took their phones and searched their luggage.

“I couldn’t think straight at this point,” Kimuli said. “I was so overwhelmed with fear and exhaustion. All of us women were locked in a room to sleep. I knew this was a dangerous place.”

After about three hours of sleep, a Chinese boss woke them. A Burmese man translated as the boss explained what their daily routine would be at the compound.

All of the bosses were Chinese, Kimuli said, but the soldiers who guarded the compound were from Myanmar—consistent with a UN report which found that “border guard forces under the authority of the Myanmar military or its proxies” provide protection for scam operations. Such arrangements help fund armed groups, Tana said.

Kimuli’s translator took her to another room, where she soon realized she and the other kidnapped foreigners would be scamming people. A boss gave her six phones, a long list of phone numbers, and a script to follow as she messaged people. When the scam victims asked to video-chat or see photos of Kimuli, the bosses would bring in models, who she learned were also held against their will.

To build trust with their marks, Kimuli and others often tried to forge romantic connections. They created Tinder profiles. Some told CT that if their dating-app profiles were reported as suspicious and shut down, bosses had them create X accounts and befriend supporters of President-elect Donald Trump. Using a script, they would discuss politics, then introduce victims to cryptocurrency investments or asking them to donate to fake right-wing causes.

Kimuli and her coworkers told CT they were forced to work 16 to 20 hours a day. They described conditions similar to what other trafficking victims have shared with media and human rights groups.

“There would be severe punishments if we took too long to answer the person we were scamming,” Kimuli recalled. “I couldn’t leave my keyboard.”

If she was slow or fell asleep, her captor would cane her or hold an electric cattle prod to her leg. The first time she was punished for responding too slowly, a guard beat the back of her legs so severely it was painful to sit for two weeks.

The worst punishment, however, was the darkroom.

When Kimuli lost a client she had been building a relationship with, her captors took her to the darkroom, handcuffed her, and hung her by her arms from an overhead pipe. Soldiers kicked, caned, and electrocuted her if she cried or fell asleep. They sprayed her face with water until she thought she would suffocate. She heard the screams from others also being tortured. Sometimes the Chinese bosses came in to help the soldiers.

One day in December, Kimuli and 20 other Ugandans refused to work and demanded their captors send them home. About 100 armed soldiers were called in to haul the protestors to the darkroom, where Kimuli said they were tortured and denied food or water for three days.

After that, Kimuli and a few others were moved to another compound. This location was similar, although now Kimuli was scamming Turkish and Pakistani citizens on Facebook and TikTok. Once she had reeled in a victim, a Chinese worker would take over to close the financial component of the scam.

About five months into this work, a boss told Kimuli to pack her bags: She was going home. But instead of going to the airport, she was brought back to the first compound. She was told, “I bought you. … I spent too much money on you. You need to work a long time to pay for this.”

Kimuli felt her resolve fade.

“I just laid down and gave up,” she said. That’s when she was taken to the darkroom for the fourth time.

Other rescued workers told CT they were made to do hundreds of squats in the hot sun for not meeting their quotas. They said their bosses withheld food if they underperformed. They were tortured for complaining about conditions or for making mistakes with their English.

One survivor took off his shirt to show his chest and back, covered in scars and bruises from canings and electrocution; some wounds were still healing. Like Kimuli, his arms and wrists also bore marks from handcuffs.

While Kimuli was living in her nightmare, government officials were working to free her. A few of the Ugandans had hidden phones; Kimuli used one to call home and was also put in touch with Tana and Miller. Around December, another Ugandan contacted Betty Oyella Bigombe, Uganda’s ambassador to several countries in Southeast Asia.

Appalled at what she heard, Bigombe began taking calls from the trapped Ugandans day and night, encouraging them to remain strong as she tried to do something. Bigombe had experience in dealmaking: In the 1990s and early 2000s, she was the chief negotiator during peace talks with Joseph Kony, the leader of the militant Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group.

Eventually, Bigombe was connected with Miller and Tana. Then she contacted the Border Guard Forces (BGF), a Myanmar militant group that controls the region where the compounds are located. Through the BGF, she negotiated with the crime bosses, who initially asked for a ransom of $10,000 per person, which Bigombe said she refused to pay.

On Easter weekend in 2024, the bosses woke Kimuli and 22 other Ugandans early. She said they forced some of the workers to record videos saying they’d had a good experience with the company; everyone was made to sign confessions that they had taken the job willingly and were treated well.

Then they were driven to a bridge at the Moei River, Thailand on the other side.

Kimuli realized she was truly being released when she spotted Tana and Miller on the Thai shore.

The Ugandans set foot in Thailand three months after their first phone call to Bigombe, who rushed to greet them in Mae Sot.

“There is no way this story would have happened without Jesus,” Miller said. “The ambassador was on her knees praying for them for months. We were constantly praying.”

In February 2024, while reporting for this story, I got a call from a friend named Heidi Boyd who lives in the northwestern United States.

As we caught up, I asked Heidi how her dating life was going. She is in her 40s and had been finding it difficult to meet single men her age. She had tried the dating app Bumble but was disappointed with the few dates she went on.

Heidi told me she was about to quit Bumble in 2023 when a man named Sim connected with her there. He was drawn to her profile, he had said, because she described herself as someone who was drawn to people who helped others.

Sim and Heidi began talking daily. Heidi had been to China several times, and Sim was a Hong Kong national who said he lived in Los Angeles, a city she had previously lived in. His profile and information checked out. He told her he was in Hong Kong taking care of his sick father, so it might be a while until they could meet in person.

Eventually, they felt it was time to become exclusive, and they moved their conversations off Bumble and onto WhatsApp. They chatted on video only a few times, as their time zones were difficult to navigate.

About three months into their deepening relationship, they began planning to travel the world together and serve others.

Around this time, Sim shared that he’d had some success in cryptocurrency investing. Heidi, who considers herself savvy about investing, grew interested. She thought the money she earned through trading could go to support global ministries.

“I am aware of my privilege and how I have a responsibility to help people with my resources,” Heidi said. She showed me screenshots of their chats. “I wanted to give away money to people who needed it.”

Sim recommended a crypto investment app. Heidi investigated the crypto platform and its website; they seemed legitimate. She downloaded it to her phone and began putting in funds. Some days she earned money, and other days she lost it. She could withdraw funds whenever she wanted to.

There were occasional hiccups when she tried to transfer money from her bank into her investment account. But Sim told her that that was normal, because big banks did not want to lose their customers.

Over the next few months, her investment grew. When it hit $150,000, the crypto platform suddenly flagged her account as suspicious, notifying her that it needed further proof of her identity. The platform imposed a new restriction: She couldn’t withdraw her funds unless she put down a 20 percent deposit.

Heidi borrowed money from her mother to make the deposit. She told me she was a day away from paying it when her sister sent her an article about something called pig butchering.

Heidi read the article and realized that she was living it.

“I think I’m being scammed,” she told me on the phone. She was slowly coming to recognize that Sim had been part of the scam.

Heidi told me she wanted to write him and tell him how horrible a person he was.

I suggested that Sim might be a victim himself—that in fact he might have been multiple people, some of whom could have been enslaved by criminal groups.

“I am 50 percent heartbroken over losing a relationship that felt real,” Heidi told me later. “I thought I had a future with someone. I shared so much of my life with them over five months. The other part of me is hurt because I lost my retirement.”

Both betrayals wounded her and caused incredible shame. She agreed to share her story, she said, because she hoped bringing that shame into the light would deprive it of its power—and also because of the possibility that her shame is shared by someone on the other side of the world.

“I feel mobilized to pray,” Heidi said. “God has given me such an assurance of his love and that he loves all of the trafficked people. God loves the Chinese crime lords. I’ve been praying for their hearts to be changed.”

Stories like Kimuli’s—where an entire group of workers is freed with the help of government officials—are inspiring. They are also rare.

More often, victims are released because they paid a ransom, or because they met their quota, or because they’re poor performers.

“Normally, they know they are coming out,” said Miller of Acts of Mercy. “They communicate, and we go pick them up. They’ve been through trauma; they need time to breathe and be given some choices or to walk around and experience freedom.”

When trapped workers do contact the outside world for help, it can take months of communication to coordinate a release—at great risk to the worker.

Occasionally, in dramatic instances, a victim will contact Tana and Miller and say they’re being moved or sold to another compound. Victims have alerted Tana and Miller to their location and then jumped from moving vehicles to escape.

Such approaches are dangerous: Victims flee without bags and passports and can suffer injuries.

“I’m not stupid or naive of the risks,” Tana said. “But I love Jesus so much, and I think, He would do it.”

Yet escaping compounds is only the beginning of what can be arduous journeys home.

Trafficked scam workers who were brought first to Thailand are often trapped in Myanmar as their visas expire. If they manage to get back to Thailand, they do so under a cloud of suspicion—having overstayed their visa, misplaced their passport, and engaged in criminal activities.

In such situations, freed workers can turn themselves in to Thai immigration and pay a 4,000 baht ($110 USD) fine. After a few days in jail, they’ll be sent to a detention center until they can find money to purchase a ticket home.

“The immigration detention center is a difficult place to be,” Miller said. “They get almost no food, and conditions can be worse than the compounds.”

Another option is to go through the National Referral Mechanism, an international program for recognizing victims of human trafficking and providing them housing and other assistance. Thai officials interview victims to vet their claims and gather evidence that could one day be used to prosecute labor traffickers.

All 23 Ugandans opted to try for government recognition as trafficking victims, with Bigombe at their side. On April 11, 2024, after two days of interviews, all 23 were granted it.

They were fortunate. Miller said only about 10 percent of applicants to the program receive recognition. “We try to help them know what the process will be like and what questions will be asked. But the government has its own burden of proof and what makes a victim a victim. It’s not always clear.”

A scamming compound in Myanmar.

Miller and Tana’s organization, as well as other Christian human rights groups, are pushing for greater global awareness of the uphill battle trafficking victims face even after they secure their freedom.

“There are still too many closed-door meetings about things, and only heads of state or major players get invited … so there is no information out to the layman,” Tana said. “The body of Christ globally needs to get the word out on this.”

Scam center workers return home traumatized, unable to talk about their experiences. Many are Muslim or Christian and feel deep shame for what they have done.

“What I did was haram,” one young Muslim man from South Asia told me soon after fleeing a compound, referring to practices forbidden by Islamic law. “My family can never know.”

At one point, he said, his captors offered him a prostitute for his good work, which he refused.

Miller and Tana say that Muslims who were forced to scam have told them that if people knew what they did, they would be forced to commit suicide out of shame.

While combatting trafficking is a favorite cause of evangelicals in the United States and other wealthy nations, antitrafficking ministries say that churches in Africa and Asia also have important roles to play.

For starters, they can raise awareness among the populations that are most susceptible to labor trafficking. One Ugandan victim told me he would like to see the church provide more education and skills training to keep people employed in their communities, making them less likely to chase misleading opportunities abroad.

Antitrafficking groups also want to see more churches become safe places for former scam workers to talk about their guilt and trauma. One of Miller and Tana’s goals is to create a global database of churches that provide counseling, aftercare, and employment services for repatriated forced scammers.

“They need church and NGO [nongovernmental organization] leaders to listen and understand where they are coming from,” Miller said. “Healing happens in presence and being with people in their suffering. Jesus is present with us in our suffering.”

Even after the Ugandans were officially recognized as trafficking victims, Kimuli remained in a government shelter in Mae Sot for another two months.

There was paperwork to process. There were the slow-moving logistics of securing UN funds for food, legal fees, shelter, and plane tickets. And there was a growing number of escaped workers like Kimuli across Southeast Asia, all taxing the small humanitarian programs trying to help them.

On May 23, the Ugandans finally boarded a plane to go home. Kimuli was dreaming of a simple meal of cassava and tea at her family’s kitchen table.

During that long wait, Kimuli thought a lot about God’s provision.

She had first answered the ad for the job in Asia because she had a son to provide for and she wanted to do more for him than she could with her fast-food job in Dubai.

But God was already looking after him.

While Kimuli was trapped for seven months in forced labor, she learned later that her son’s school had given him a scholarship to cover his tuition and food. “I disappeared, and God still took care of my son,” she said.

Money, it turned out, had conned everyone in that Myanmar compound: her bosses, her online victims—even herself.

“I was enticed by money,” Kimuli said. “God has shown me that money is not everything. I now know God can give me everything I need. I am going home with nothing but trusting God.”

Erin Foley lives in Thailand and works in communications for refugee and orphan-care ministries.

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Books

Review

Becoming Athletes of Attention in an Age of Distraction

Christopher Benson

Even without retreating to the desert, we can train our wandering minds with ancient monastic wisdom.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Pexels

In the final chapter of The Rule of Saint Benedict, the monastic author expresses a debt of influence not only to “every page and every word of divine authority in the Old and New Testaments,” but also to “the teachings of the holy fathers.” Together, he writes, they advance a consecrated person to “the heights of perfection.” He recommends two works, in particular, by John Cassian, a fifth-century monk and theologian, for equipping fellow monks to lead “a virtuous and obedient life.”

One of those works, known as The Conferences, has received a new translation from Jamie Kreiner, a professor of medieval history at UCLA and author of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. As part of an excellent series by Princeton University Press, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers, Kreiner offers an abridged edition of this translation, titled How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction.

“The question of focus,” argues Benedictine historian Columba Stewart, “is the single most important practical problem Cassian addresses in his monastic theology.” Accordingly, Kreiner’s translation emphasizes excerpts relevant to this question. How to Focus features seven of Cassian’s “conferences,” in which he and his friend Germanus, a novice monk, seek counsel from “the monastic pioneers in Egypt and the Levant” about how to improve their concentration.

Monks, “hurrying toward the heavenly country,” as Benedict put it, can show laypersons “the direct route to our creator” through their discipline (ascesis) of contemplative prayer, which aspires to develop clarity of mind by managing inattention.

From ancient Egyptian ascetics in the desert to modern American disciples in the city, all humans face the temptation of distraction. Kreiner’s translation tries to finesse “a cognitive culture that is both relatable and foreign to us today.” In my estimation, it veers toward modern more than premodern locutions. For example, I cringed when she had one of Cassian’s interlocutors, Abba Moses, describe the Christian monks of the late Roman Empire as “rednecks and hicks living in this desolate desert,” who strive to keep their hearts unharmed from “toxic pathologies.”

Notwithstanding a few such missteps, which lose the needful strangeness of monastic wisdom, Kreiner should be commended for her fresh and fluent rendering of an old book. I respect a secular scholar who generously befriends Cassian, a Christian “expert who has both succeeded and failed to focus,” offering advice that is “at once more sympathetic and more sophisticated” than our contemporary fare.

We all suffer from attention deficit, whether it rises to a disorder or not. In her 2023 book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity, psychologist Gloria Mark shares her empirical research. As summed up in a Wall Street Journal article, “Back in 2004, we found that people averaged 150 seconds on any screen before switching to another screen. By 2012, it had declined to 75 seconds, and between 2016 and 2021, it diminished to 47 seconds.”

Studies show that fast attention shifts result in higher anxiety and stress and lower productivity, along with increased errors and delays in completing tasks. “When we spend time switching attention and reorienting back to a task,” Mark writes, “we are draining our precious and limited cognitive resources. It’s like having a gas tank that leaks, leaving less fuel for the mission at hand.”

As a humanities teacher, I assign my students reading from great books in the Western canon, such as Homer’s Iliad or Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.They fight against distraction, struggling to maintain their attention from paragraph to paragraph when nearby screens offer small dopamine hits every time they text a friend, check Instagram posts, watch a TikTok video, or browse the internet.

Unlike my students, who are digital natives, I am a digital immigrant with memories of a simpler media ecology—a time when focus seemed easier to achieve. With the advent and integration of digital technology, I have assumed different roles in Aesop’s fable about a foot race between two animals: I once was “slow and steady” like the tortoise, who “plodded on straight toward the goal.” But now, more frequently, I reach “the midway mark” and begin to “nibble some juicy grass and amuse [myself] in different ways” like the hare, whose speed proves disadvantageous.

To become an athlete of attention, one must undergo rigorous training, because there is no quick fix to “the confused, dazed, scatter-brained state,” as 19th-century philosopher William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology. James defined attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”

Cassian’s Conferences is important reading if we care about attentional athleticism, especially in our obedience to the double command of loving God and neighbor. If love attends to the other, then frenetic distractibility will vitiate its quality.

More than a century ago, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed “the wild hurrying or noisy anesthetization of vain diversion” that characterizes so much of modern life. Our contemporary reflex, even when we acknowledge the truth of such a diagnosis, is to blame technology, as if tools are the problem rather than their users. By contrast, Cassian’s ancient Egyptian mentors practiced self-suspicion. To treat the symptom of absent-mindedness, they wisely reflect upon the condition of the postlapsarian mind, which is not immune from the hereditary disease of original sin.

In Paradise Lost, the poet John Milton captures the dysfunction of our cognitive equipment after “man’s first disobedience” in the garden of Eden. Of Adam and Eve, he writes, “Their inward state of mind, calm region once / And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent: / For understanding ruled not, and the will / Heard not her lore, both in subjection now / To sensual appetite, who from beneath / Usurping over sov’reign reason claimed / Superior sway.” When “sov’reign reason” bows to “sensual appetite,” we become more like animals than humans. So it is not for nothing that we compare the diminished attention span of humans to those of squirrels or goldfish.

Contemporary Christians, no less than their secular counterparts, are often beguiled by the conceits of science. However, we have much to learn from ancient monastic psychology, since “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc. 1:9). Modern psychology depends mainly on observations and interpretations of human thought patterns and behaviors, whereas premodern monks owe their “unusual knowledge of the human soul to solitary introspection and to innumerable confessions of the heart,” according to theologian Gabriel Bunge.

How to Focus shows how spelunking the soul can yield greater perspicacity than the scientific approach. The reader joins Cassian and Germanus, as if eavesdropping on a counseling session where the therapist illumines the workings of the mind.

I am arrested by the analogical imagination of the monks. To describe cognitive dysfunction, they employ varied analogies, including lukewarmness, sleepiness, intoxication (“the mind is always moving and meandering, and it’s torn apart in different directions like it’s drunk”), and thievery (“useless thoughts break in sneakily and secretly, without us even knowing, making it beyond difficult to notice and catch them, let alone kick them out”). Without the restraint of spiritual discipline, Germanus observes, the mind will move like a river, where “conscious perceptions … keep getting sucked in or spit out of this whirlpool.” Anxious thoughts are compared to “unbridled horses”: They wander from the stable of the mind unless an equine trainer disciplines them.

Alongside these negative analogies of the impaired mind, the monks offer positive analogies of the transformed mind. In their appraisal, it can become like the Ark of the Covenant, which holds the manna of “spiritual perceptions,” the stone tablets of divine law, and the rod of Aaron, “signifying the salvific banner of our true and highest priest, Jesus Christ.”

One monk, Abba Abraham of Diolkos, draws a comparison from fishing:

[Monks] should work like an expert fisherman with apostolic know-how, focusing on the shoals of thoughts swimming in the quiet deep of their heart, casting their gaze on their next meal, lying in wait without moving a muscle, peering into the depths like they’re perched on an overhanging ledge. And using their shrewd discernment they should differentiate which thoughts to hook and pull in, and which to disregard and release like bad and poisonous fish.

Elsewhere, he pictures monks as artisans who build “a domed vault” out of their minds; its “perfectly round structure” cannot be produced without taking the center into account, “making calculated adjustments to the inner and outer circumferences of the dome as they go.”

In every moment of our construction and demolition projects, [the mind] should revolve exclusively around the love of God as its fixed unchanging center. Using this reliable compass of love (as I might describe it), it should accommodate or curtail its thoughts, depending on the property of each one. Otherwise the mind will lack the real skills to construct that spiritual building of which Paul is the architect, and it won’t attain the beauty of the house that the blessed David wanted to offer in his heart to the Lord.

The above analogies are not only impressively creative accounts of our cognitive equipment in its fallen and redemptive states, but also practical ways to achieve focus with the mind’s eye—or imagination. I find it fascinating that these monks summon a faculty of the mind (imagination) to cure an ailment of the mind (distraction). Each analogy functions as a clearing in the forest, giving the Christian a better vision for her mental regress or progress.

These early Christian monks seem to meld the head and the heart. At the very least, it is nearly impossible to identify where the head ends and the heart begins, since their contents flow freely—back and forth. Against Greek dualism, which regards the human as a combination of related but disparate parts (heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit), they advance Hebrew holism, which regards the human as an indivisible whole.

Hebrew holism, however, does not preclude the New Testament dualism of flesh and spirit. Long before contemporary theologian John W. Cooper argued for “dualistic holism,” which holds to the compatibility of both views in the Bible, the monks intuited this biblical anthropology because they were nourished by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

A couple of examples can demonstrate the tacit concept of dualistic holism—or biblical common sense. Abba Moses of Scetis analogizes from the heart to the mind, positing that they both resemble “the workings of a millstone”:

[It] is set spinning when the rush of water propels the mechanism to rotate. There’s no way for the millstone to stop running as long as the water pressure is wheeling it around. But what the overseer can control is the choice of what to grind: wheat or barley or the dreaded darnel. This much is patently obvious: it has to mill whatever its operator pours into it.”

Responding to the frustrations of Germanus, who bemoans the “countless kidnappings” of his attention, Abba Serenus of Scetis reassures him that with “an extended period of training and habitual long-standing practice,” the goal of mental stability is achievable, albeit not permanently: “We have firm control here: we determine in our hearts both the ascents—thoughts that reach out to God—and the descents—thoughts that sink into earthly and physical matters.”

Notice how the elders assume that thoughts are not an exclusive property of the mind, as we currently maintain. “The heart,” to quote Blaise Pascal’s famous maxim in Pensées, “has its reasons which reason itself does not know.”

To troubleshoot distraction, we need a holistic, not reductionist, account of the human being as a complex unity. If we ignore the heart for the mind alone, or vice versa, the remedy for our distraction will be inadequate. Attention deficit is a disorder of the head and the heart; therefore, its treatment should consist not only of medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy, per the modern practice, but also of “fasts, vigils, meditating on the scriptures, nakedness, and total dispossession,” per the ancient practice of monks. “To pay attention,” poet Mary Oliver wrote, “this is our endless and proper work”—and it calls upon the entire human being, not merely one part cordoned off from other parts, as if we were machines rather than ensouled bodies.

Love is the highest expression of attention. To slight the geometry lesson, the potted flowers that need watering, the tasks of work, the dog that wags its tail at our feet upon returning home, the administration of medicine to a father after open-heart surgery, or the widow who sits by herself in church—all this is not only an attention deficit, but also a love deficit. Christian discipleship is apprenticeship in attention—loving attention to God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving attention to our neighbor, as much as we attend to ourselves (Mark 12:30–31).

A consideration of the analogical imagination and dualistic holism from ancient monks might seem remote from the exigencies of life in the 21st century. Yet their insights can aid believers of any era. These monastic pioneers are not experts of focus; they are beginners like the rest of us, or perhaps (to use an oxymoron) expert beginners. “The Christian church is agreed on one thing,” posits Reformed theologian Karl Barth, “that it consists purely of beginners—and that this is truly a good thing: to become small again, to begin from the beginning, and thus at no point to stand still.”

Kreiner’s selections from The Conferences repeatedly show that Cassian and Germanus are enrolled in a school that has no graduation date, making their quest for concentration a lifelong endeavor. Their teachers are realistic about the mental limitations confronting us, and modest, too, about what can be achieved. Abba Moses of Scetis illustrates this with a very subtle analogy, likening the mind to a fortress and the monk to a vigilant gatekeeper who controls access:

It’s truly impossible for the mind not to be interrupted by thoughts. But it is possible, for anyone who makes the effort, to welcome them in or kick them out. Their origin doesn’t have everything to do with us, but it’s up to us to reject or accept them. And yet, despite what we’ve said about the impossibility of the mind not being attacked by thoughts, we shouldn’t chalk everything up to assault and to the spirits who are trying to inflict these thoughts on us. That wouldn’t leave any room for the human will to be free, and we’d lose to the drive to improve ourselves.

Instead of succumbing to pessimistic fatalism about the practice of attention, Abba Moses admirably dignifies the exercise of our free will as an empowering gift from God. We are not victims of external stimuli, whether evil spirits or technology. Improvement can occur, even if the layman does not retreat to the desert, wear a sackcloth, and forgo baths.

Beyond the hermitage, is there an application of monastic wisdom to our maddening fight against distraction? All readers will benefit from inclining their ear to the desert dwellers, because their different approaches relieve us of searching for a silver bullet or 12-step program: Attentional athleticism requires perpetual vigilance and training. However, a person’s orientation to the sacred makes a significant difference, as the secular translator of How to Focus candidly admitted in an interview on The Medieval Podcast.

Following Abba Moses, a Christian is well-positioned to identify her immediate goal (“clarity and tranquility of the heart”) as a means to her ultimate goal (“the kingdom of the heavens”) because of biblical and ecclesial formation. By contrast, a non-Christian, absent such formation, may struggle to identify these goals. How does a secular person achieve “perfect roundness” as she builds a dome out of her mind without reference to the “fixed unchanging center” of the circle—the love of God? Training the attention will prove tricky if the center shifts.

How does a secular person choose a mantra to recite in “an unbroken cycle” for concentration when he experiences scattered thoughts while “sleeping and eating and going to the bathroom”? For the Christian, whether monk or not, “a lifesaving formula” is readily available, thanks to the Scriptures. Abba Isaac’s recommended mantra, which fulfills the apostle Paul’s exhortation to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17, ESV), comes from the distractible David: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me” (Psalm 69:2, Douay-Rheims version).

According to Abba Isaac, David’s cry for aid “encompasses every state of mind that can beset human beings, and it is neatly applicable to every situation and all onslaughts,” which he enumerates in detail, mentioning “demonic insomnia,” “physical arousal,” or “the pull of boredom, pretentiousness, and pride.”

What might be the equivalent text for a non-Christian? For Abba Isaac, his mantra

includes an invocation to God against every possible crisis. It includes the humility of a sincere confession. It includes the alertness that comes from care and constant anxiety. It includes a reflection on one’s own weakness, confidence in being heard, and trust that help is always close at hand—because whoever appeals to their bodyguard nonstop is certain that he’s always there. It includes the burning heat of love and compassion. It includes a cognizance of traps and a fear of enemies. And in perceiving that they are surrounded by them day and night, the speaker admits that they can’t be set free without the help of their protector.

If there is a secret to attentional athleticism, Abba Isaac has named it: “trust that help is always close at hand.” Because I cannot “earn my liberation from this mental degradation,” I call out to God as my bodyguard—or, more apropos, my mindguard. It is no accident that compline—the bedtime office of prayer in the Anglican tradition—deploys a verse from the prophet Isaiah, which recognizes that the Lord alone soothes an agitated mind at the end of the day: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you” (26:3, ESV).

Contemporary Christians often fare no better at focus than their secular neighbors, but we are without excuse for not making recourse to that “reliable compass of love” that refers the mind to God when it wanders from the center. For this reason, we should train with Cassian and company, not only to find mental stability for our own psychological upheaval but also to serve as an alluring witness for an age of distraction.

Christopher Benson is a humanities teacher and book reviewer. He blogs at Bensonian.

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Culture

Play Those Chocolate Sprinkles, Rend Collective!

Haley Byrd Wilt

The Irish band’s new album “FOLK!” proclaims joy after suffering.

Courtesy of Rend Collective

Rend Collective is known for its joy.

The Northern Irish folk band has spent much of the past decade on tour—singing worship songs with charming accents, playing eclectic instruments, and sharing its relentless commitment to celebration. By the end of each concert, Rend Collective’s crowds are encouraged. And covered in confetti.

But joy within the group had started to wane, especially since the coronavirus pandemic. A year ago, the band was facing a decision about its future.

Last autumn “could have been a moment where Rend Collective could have decided to dissolve,” the band’s lead singer and founding member, Chris Llewellyn, told Christianity Today during an interview in downtown Nashville.

At the time, Llewellyn was emerging from a painful season of doubt. He’d been asking deep theological questions while contending with grief after his son’s autism diagnosis. He’d also finally acknowledged his long-running depression instead of trying to “wrestle it to the ground.”

Llewellyn explored his questions about faith in a September 2023 solo album titled Honest. It was his first public foray into songwriting outside of Rend Collective, and far more personal than most of his prior work.

After Honest, Llewellyn considered what kind of music he wanted to make going forward. Adding to the uncertainty, Gareth Gilkeson, Llewellyn’s primary cowriter and a founding member of Rend Collective, would soon be stepping away from the band.

Llewellyn wondered, “Is this the natural end of things?”

Now 39, Llewellyn has spent most of his adult life in Rend Collective. He began attending Rend back when it was a Bible study for young adults in his Northern Irish hometown of Bangor. The group was named after a call for sincere repentance in the Old Testament Book of Joel: ‘Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God’ (2:13). After the band sprang up from that study, he helped lead it to international success with songs like “Build Your Kingdom Here,” “My Lighthouse,” and “Counting Every Blessing.”

Thinking about Rend Collective’s future while driving late last year, he found himself unintentionally writing yet another worship song. That moment reminded him of his purpose.

“No. This is what you do,” Llewellyn remembered deciding. “The only two options are you’re either going to do this for no audience, or you’re going to do this as your job still. It’s not that you’re ever going to stop doing this.”

That drive resulted in one of Rend Collective’s new songs, “What I Was Made For”—the first new music the band has released in more than two years. Its lyrics recognize the purpose of every human being, to worship and glorify God.

“What I Was Made For” appears on the group’s new album, simply titled FOLK! The project has been both a hopeful rebirth for the band and a return to its roots, with all of the earnestness, joy, and stringed instruments that drew in early fans.

It also drips with matured Christian faith. The joy and hope of FOLK! aren’t shallow or unconsidered. They’re the kind that come in the morning, after a night of weeping (or many nights of weeping).

Llewellyn’s pain is apparent across the album. Yet his words of worship and simple professions of faith are all the sweeter—and all the more genuine and encouraging—for acknowledging it.

He told CT that voicing his doubts in last year’s solo album allowed him to write these new songs. It was almost “like running the faucet and getting all of the dirty water out,” he said.

“I did my worst doubting there—a prayer life with vocabulary that is unprintable—but that’s where the confidence comes,” he said. “Just sitting on the other side of it and being like, well, that’s by no means resolved—all of the questions still hang there—but I just think God is good.”

The fact that God is still there after all of that, he told CT, has given him confidence in God’s character. “It’s relaxed into a place of knowing that God’s got this, that he likes me, and this relationship is going to survive, whatever comes,” he said.

The album’s first song, “Abide in Me,” is a tender, intimate portrait of that relationship. Written from Christ’s perspective, it calls his followers to “build a home here inside my love” and to rest in his sovereignty and grace.

Another song on the album, “Better Than I Ever Thought,” evokes imagery from the parable of the prodigal son.

“I love the particular turn of phrase that the father sees the son from a long way off,” Llewellyn said. For him, that detail speaks to God’s watchfulness. One lyric in the song prompted some pushback: “Never guessed you were desperate for me to come home.”

Rend Collective’s record label flagged that line to Llewellyn, arguing that God isn’t desperate.

“I was like, ‘I think he is,’” Llewellyn recalled.

The writing process for “Better Than I Ever Thought,” as well as others on the record, was a drastic shift for Rend Collective.

“Prior to this, we’ve never had a song that wasn’t cowritten to some degree,” Llewellyn told CT. But now, “we’ve worked out that sometimes when somebody writes something, letting their story be their story is actually the most powerful thing you can do.”

Llewellyn and his bandmates see FOLK! as a success already, simply for that commitment to authenticity.

Cowriter Stephen Mitchell, 31, said FOLK! came about because Rend Collective “stopped striving.”

“Let’s just do what we want to do with the music, and if it works commercially, successfully, then awesome,” said Mitchell, who has been in the group since 2013. “If it doesn’t, then we’re at least being authentic to what we want to do.”

“Holy Trouble,” another song on the album, is one of his favorites. It is an anthem about Christ’s radical compassion, heart for the oppressed, and embodiment of perfect justice—and a prayer for the Holy Spirit to accomplish the same through the modern church.

Llewellyn and Mitchell are proud that their new music doesn’t rely on samples—snippets or components of a song that an artist records separately and then splices together later. Most of FOLK! was recorded around one microphone, with the instruments played at the same time.

“If there is a weird sound of a little crinkly percussion thing, it’s because somebody crinkled something in the room,” Llewellyn said. “We made the decision that we were going to do it the hard way: ‘Set up that mic. Bring that saltshaker over here. Okay, you do the saltshaker. I’ll slap the wall.’ It’s all like that.”

“Silver Or Gold”—jokingly known to Llewellyn and Mitchell as “Irish Pirates” because of the song’s forceful vocals—“is very much people hitting guitars, people hitting the wall,” Llewellyn said.

The band’s members also used small boxes of chocolate sprinkles “quite a bit” as percussion after discovering them while on tour in Europe.

The album’s final song, “Reap That Joy,” is especially “chocolate forward,” according to Llewellyn.

That song draws from his and his wife’s grief over their son’s autism diagnosis, as well as the hope they’ve found in the years since. It weaves gardening metaphors throughout, a love letter to his wife’s recent obsession with plants.

“Resurrection is one of the things that would be impossible for me not to believe in, because it’s happening on a microscale,” he said of the song. “It’s just woven into the pattern of how things work.”

Rend Collective’s own resurrection won’t stop with this album. A single, “Fight of My Life,” is set to be released in January, and the band is planning a special release for St. Patrick’s Day, as well as a follow-up album to complete FOLK!

“I don’t think Rend will ever have a period where it lies fallow for two years again,” Llewellyn said.

Mitchell feels the same way. “I just refuse to believe that the best days are behind me or the best days for the band are behind us,” he said. “We’re just getting started again.”

There’s an Irish drinking toast, he added at the end of the interview: “May the best day of your past be the worst day of your future.”

Llewellyn, inspired, couldn’t help himself. He was already making new plans. “I’d write that song right now,” he told Mitchell as they stood to leave.

Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS, a nonprofit publication from The Allbritton Journalism Institute.

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Culture

The Still Small Voice in the Deer Stand

Brian Reisinger

Since childhood, each hunting season out in God’s creation has healed wounds and deepened my faith.

Ben Jessop / Pexels / Edits by CT

Each year, I walk into the quiet darkness to find those things I’ve lost.

The moment falls in late November, opening weekend of gun deer hunting in my native Wisconsin. Dressed in heavy clothing against the harsh cold, striding to the deer stand through the early morning darkness, I carry my rifle in careful wonder at what I’ll see.

Sometimes, as I reach my stand, there’s fog lingering even as soft gray light appears over the treetops. Other times it’s clear, and the great valley where my family and I hunt materializes before me all at once, with its gently rolling fields and curving wood line. Always the air is cold and clean, biting my face and creeping beneath my heavy coat, freshening my lungs and quieting my thoughts.

It’s here, in the high seat of my deer stand overlooking the past year, that I find those lost things—loved ones gone, feelings I’ve forgotten or lacked the courage to name, a sense of self known only to God and me. This time isn’t simply about finding a trophy deer. It’s about finding joy, pain, and renewal. My usual world is a whirlwind, but out in the woods I can hear God’s “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11–12, KJV).

As our country has become more divided, participation in hunting has declined, and I find critics tend to envision a reckless blood sport, not realizing the care and consideration a good hunter brings to the woods. I grew up with deer hunting as an honored tradition, one where we learned about respecting the animal with an ethical hunt, honoring our natural environment, and carrying on a way of life where faith is found in living close to the land.

My main memories of deer hunting are about my grandpa on my mom’s side, Roman Ripp, hunting on land that was in our family thanks to my grandpa on my dad’s side, Albert Reisinger.

Grandpa Ripp is almost mythical in my memories—smiling broadly, singing songs in idle moments, and telling big-buck stories over his morning coffee with the flair of a classic American showman. He wore bright red hunting pants and an old-fashioned hunting hat with ear flaps, jauntily tipped atop his head. I still marvel at his sharpshooter’s aim.

He may as well have been Buffalo Bill Cody to me, and the setting for his adventures—and those of my dad, my uncle, and eventually me and my sister and friends—could not have been more sacred. It was the rolling Wisconsin farmland where I grew up, which my Grandpa Albert had worked since he was a child, climbing out of the Depression into the middle class so that my dad and mom could farm it with us.

Not long after I was old enough to carry on the tradition, Grandpa Ripp declared himself too old to handle the hardship of another winter deer hunt. He passed his stand to me, and I hunted it each year, carefully harvesting deer when I got the chance, missing enough to leave me wondering if I would ever shoot and track and regale others with stories as he had. When I graduated high school—excited to pursue a writing career, worried I was letting my dad down by not farming—Grandpa Ripp became an important mentor, introducing me to a newspaper editor who became my first boss.

One year, the chance came to make him proud. In the early morning light, a buck stepped out from the tree line. He was so big I swore I could see the fog of his breath mingling with mine, though he was much too far away for that—and maybe too far for a young hunter like me to reach.

I got him. That deer was my first truly triumphant moment at my grandpa’s deer stand, but also my last great moment with my grandpa. He had been slipping for a few months. I brought the antlers to his assisted living apartment in town, expecting he’d leap to his feet like always to greet me at the door, hear my story, and tell it back to me as if it were one of his own.

Instead, I saw just how far gone he was. His face lit up, but he couldn’t rise from his chair. And though I told him the story as many times as he wanted, he couldn’t repeat it back to me, let alone add his own visions of it to help me treasure the memory. We took a picture to preserve the best of the moment, and I left.

Grandpa lived several months longer, and he and Grandma Ripp moved out to the farm for their final care, where I drove out to see them each week. But his memory—the happy times, and his decline—became so tied to the annual deer hunt that it took many years in the deer stand I’d inherited to process our loss.

It was only in my deer stand, in the dark slowly becoming light, that I could really think of him. There, the distractions of the world fell away. The things I told myself all year about how I was doing could finally be separated, wheat from chaff, to see the truth. I learned to pray about things I hadn’t realized were weighing on my heart.

God is never “far from any one of us,” of course, “for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28). But in the stillness of the deer stand, his presence is more noticeable for me. Prayer comes more easily. Surrounded by God’s creation, I remember to say with the psalmist:

All creatures look to you
    to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them,
    they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
    they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face,
    they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
    they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit,
    they are created,
    and you renew the face of the ground. (Ps. 104:27–30)

I remember to meditate on God’s work in the world and in my own life. Since that moment with Grandpa Ripp, hunting seasons have come with both triumph and defeat—not only in pursuit of the next buck but also in moves across the country, career defeats, relationships lost and gained, and the grief that has come with the passing of our remaining grandparents and other loved ones.

I’ve also been able to pass on the tradition, to introduce a new generation to the stillness of the deer stand. My 15-year-old nephew has already harvested as many big bucks as the adults who hunt on our land. My two younger nephews have watched me harvest deer for years, and this year they get to try it themselves for the first time. And my wife and I have a daughter, our first child of just 9 months—old enough to appear in big-buck photos with her daddy that she’ll see years from now, if I’m fortunate enough to live out another legend this year.

But no matter what I see, as the dark turns to light, I’ll know I’m where I need to be: with God, honoring his creation, finding those things lost. And those things yet to come.

Brian Reisinger is a writer and the author of Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer. He can be found at brian-reisinger.com and @BrianJReisinger.

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Church Life

The Black Women Missing from Our Pews

Sarita Lyons

America’s most churched demographic is slipping from religious life. We must go after them.

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

When I was four years old, I went missing for three hours. While it was a common occurrence for my parents to not be able to find me because I was hiding between the racks of clothes at the Strawbridge & Clothier department store, this wasn’t the case. No, I was taken. A neighbor who lived up the street asked my mother if she could take me “around the corner,” which is just a hood way of saying “not too far,” to buy me ice cream.

Up and back, it should have been a 30-minute trip, but after more than an hour passed, my mother knew something was wrong. There were no cellphones back then, so I can only imagine the horror, the guilt, and the fear my mother must have felt. The entire neighborhood was searching for me, including the woman’s own family members, who, my parents said, “had that uncomfortable look on their faces.” People were worried because everybody knew Sandy meant no harm but her mental disability at times prevented her from appreciating the gravity of her actions.

Eventually, I was found, grinning from ear to ear, with dried ice cream around my mouth and Sandy holding tightly to my hand. Sandy had done exactly what she told my mother she would do: She took me around the corner to get ice cream, but then she walked with me two more miles to the mall. I have no memory of this event, although I do remember Sandy. Praise God, I was found, and I was fine.

That’s the way you want all missing stories to end—missing, searched for, found, and with no memory of anything terrible happening in between. But that’s not how all missing stories end, especially for Black women.

Despite Black women historically being considered the backbone of the church and earning the distinction of outnumbering men in the pews, there is a disturbing trend that we must address. Though we as Black women are among the most religious groups in the United States, there is an exodus of Black women missing from churches for a variety of reasons, and some of us aren’t just leaving a specific congregation; we are leaving the faith completely.

Aswad Walker of the Defender wrote about the top reasons Black millennials say they are leaving the church: (1) The church is too judgmental, (2) they are choosing traditional African spiritual practices, (3) the church is too anti-intellectual or closed to new information, (4) the church is too apolitical, and (5) not enough of their peers attend. Others have included the impact of patriarchy in the church and Black women not being able to adequately see themselves as image bearers of the triune God.

Do these conclusions surprise you, or are you familiar with what is being sourced as the reason for Black women leaving our churches?

I believe our collective eyes, ears, and empathy are the tools we need to make sure Black women aren’t invisible, ignored in the church, or unnoticed and unfound when they depart. Whether you are in leadership or are a lay parishioner in the pews, we each have a part to play in helping one another stay rooted where God plants us so we can flourish in our lives and local churches. Here are some suggestions for how we can begin to better address the issue of missing Black women in the church.

Act like family

There are three relationships with women in the family of God that I believe will help protect Black women from leaving: sisters, friends, and spiritual mothers/aunties. We all should be occupying these roles over the course of our spiritual lives. One of the beautiful things about being a Christian is that you automatically get adopted into the family of God (Rom. 8:15). You get a family of siblings, spiritual parents, and friends. Through these relationships, we are called to grow with one another and influence one another’s growth from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity (Prov. 27:17; Gal. 6:10).

We get the benefits of protection, accountability, knowing and being known, spending time with like-minded people, discipleship, spiritual nurturing, prayer partners, and friends to worship and celebrate with in a community of diverse and intergenerational wisdom that helps us develop holistically as women.

Relationships, even among family members, require work. They won’t always be easy, feelings will get hurt, and undoubtedly, we will be closer to some than to others, but at the end of the day, we ride with one another. If we stick together, love one another, cheer for one another, lift one another, wipe one another’s tears, pray together, and tell one another truth, we can be an unstoppable force in God’s kingdom.

Reprove and restore Black women struggling with sin

Words like reprove or rebuke are often frowned on in our current climate, which quickly labels things as spiritually abusive when they are merely biblical correction and accountability. To reprove is to correct or criticize someone with the intent of amending some fault. It can also be defined as “to scold or correct usually gently or with kindly intent.”

God is shown in Scripture as a loving parent who brings discipline to instruct and correct his children. However, as Christians we don’t always do this well. We can pick people apart with constant rebuke that is crushing instead of redemptive, or we can avoid reproving our sisters because we don’t want them to get upset or run away. However, the psalmist said, “Let a righteous man strike me—that is a kindness; let him rebuke me—that is oil on my head. My head will not refuse it” (Ps. 141:5).

Many times, women go missing when they are led away by sin because no one had the courage to offer a word of correction or warning. God calls you to do this for your sisters in Christ. Proverbs 27:5–6 emphasizes this point: “Open rebuke is better than love carefully concealed. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (NKJV). We weaken the church when we don’t cooperate with God in confronting sin—after examining our own hearts first (Eph. 4:25), then gently correcting (Gal. 6:1) and, when necessary, rebuking sharply (Gal. 2:11–14).

As members of a local body, this is an act of love. Love isn’t punkish. Love isn’t politically correct; it’s biblically correct. Love isn’t silent when you run out in the street like a child playing in traffic. We need to tell one another, “Don’t go down this path,” “That’s not a good look,” and “You need to pray about this.” We need older church mothers to say, “Baby, that’s not wise; that’s not right. You need to repent.” The goal is not just to call women out but to call them up into Christ (Eph. 4:15).

Support Black women

Women are so often stereotyped as being highly relational that we can assume building healthy relationships comes easily and doesn’t have to be taught. That isn’t the case. We all need our understanding and practice of relationships upgraded by the gospel.

We need to take the lead in relationship building. Jesus’ mission was about initiating and restoring relationship with us (Matt. 4:19); therefore, we need to lead the way in initiating loving relationships with others (John 15:12). When Black women are new to the church, it’s important that we remember what it was like to be in their shoes.

As an established church member, it’s your responsibility to pursue relationship, start the conversation, and offer to connect. Be consistent in reaching out and following up to invite women to activities and events at the church. Certainly, new members can and should pursue relationships, but current members should take the lead. Everyone wants to be loved by being chosen. Jesus modeled choosing us, though we’re unworthy of his friendship, so let us also choose others (John 15:16).

Missing Black women deserve to be sought after. Jesus coming to earth was a literal rescue operation motivated by his love (John 3:16). Love must precede any seeking actions (Isa. 62:12).

But it’s also important to discern if missing women have deconstructed their faith or are having a faith crisis. I’ve heard countless stories of women who left churches because they had questions about Christianity that no one answered. If you know someone in this boat, if they are willing to share, ask them questions so you can understand where they are coming from. Has there been a life stressor that has caused anger or disappointment toward God (a death, unanswered prayers, job loss, etc.)? Are they willing to share about their recent curiosity about other religions or ideologies and who has captured their attention?

Additionally, we must be prepared to counter and truthfully respond to doubts such as “Is Christianity the white man’s religion?,” “Are God and the Bible sexist against women?,” and “Is Christianity a safe place for the flourishing of Black women?” Validate, empathize, and normalize that having questions is good and that God can handle our questions. You don’t have to know everything to help Black women who are questioning or drifting.

We have to prayerfully appraise the signs of depression, stress, grief, trauma response, or other psychological issues. Sometimes women go missing or disengage and they haven’t even processed why. Asking great questions, letting the person talk, showing care for their mental state, and normalizing the impact of mental distress are very helpful when someone feels overwhelmed or stuck emotionally.

There is a difference in how our law enforcement system responds to people who are labeled as missing versus those labeled as runaways—those who are believed to have willingly left home aren’t searched for the same. We should be honest if we struggle with the same biases in the church. Are we seeing Black women as runaways or as missing women? Do we see Black sisters in Christ with eyes of grace and love or with judgment, contempt, and dismissiveness? Or, even worse, do we not see them at all?

God lets us go when we want to walk away from him, and he is always willing to receive us with open arms when we return. Sometimes the return may be coming back to the church for membership, or it could be just coming back to visit, have a conversation, or repair a burned bridge. Even more exciting, it may be a return to Jesus.

I am a prodigal daughter. I didn’t just walk away from a church, but I walked away from Jesus. However, I remembered my Father and went back to him (Luke 15:17–18). Like Nebuchadnezzar, who lost his mind, when I looked up to God, my sanity returned to me, and I came back to the Lord (Dan. 4:34–37). By God’s grace, I was received with open arms, just like the prodigal son (Luke 15:28–32).

“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9, ESV). A vision for missing Black women is the heart of the gospel—a rescue mission. Jesus modeled that he will go to great lengths to come after his daughters, and he will often recruit you to be a part of his rescue plan.

Sarita Lyons is the author of Church Girl, as well as a is a wife, mother, speaker, Bible teacher, and psychotherapist. She is also the director of discipleship and women’s ministry at Epiphany Fellowship Church in Philadelphia.

This essay is adapted from Church Girl: A Gospel Vision to Encourage and Challenge Black Christian Women by Sarita Lyons. Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Sarita Lyons. Published by Waterbrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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News

Wall Street’s Most Famous Evangelical Sentenced in Unprecedented Fraud Case

Emily Belz in New York

Judge gives former billionaire Bill Hwang 18 years in prison for crimes that outweigh his “lifetime” of “charitable works.”

Bill Hwang at federal court in New York on Wednesday, November 20.

Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Christian philanthropist and one-time billionaire Bill Hwang was sentenced to 18 years on Wednesday for Wall Street fraud that amounted to $10 billion in losses.

“I don’t remember a case where I had to deal with billions of dollars,” said Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan federal court, comparing Hwang’s crimes to those of Sam Bankman-Fried and Bernie Madoff. “There’s no precedent here.”

Hwang, 60, was at one time one of the wealthiest evangelicals in the United States, with about $30 billion to his name through his investment firm Archegos Capital Management, named to refer to Jesus.

He also started a Christian foundation with about $600 million of his wealth, the Grace & Mercy Foundation, which supports ministries around the world.

The sentencing hearing was filled with religious references: from the judge quoting a psalm in his sentencing to the defense citing Hwang’s Christian faith and philanthropy.

Archegos collapsed in March 2021, leaving banks with billions in losses because of Hwang’s misrepresentations to his lenders, a jury found. Hwang was convicted in July of racketeering, securities fraud, market manipulation, and wire fraud.

Hwang’s previous hedge fund Tiger Asia pleaded guilty to a criminal fraud charge in 2012; Hwang entered a $44 million civil settlement related to that case without admitting fault. He converted Tiger Asia to Archegos.

Referencing the Tiger Asia fraud, US attorney Andrew Mark Thomas described Hwang as a “recidivist” and said the Archegos fraud was not a “temporary aberration” of an otherwise virtuous man.

“You see someone who doesn’t learn the lesson,” Thomas said.

Hwang’s defense had asked for no prison time, which the judge said was “ridiculous.”

In filings for the sentencing, Hwang’s lawyers focused on his Christian faith and life of service. They brought up his philanthropy to 450 organizations through the Grace & Mercy Foundation as well as his devotion to his family.

The filings talked about his humble beginnings as a Korean immigrant to the US, working at a McDonald’s. They mentioned how he learned about faith and service from his pastor father and missionary mother and how he helped his legally blind brother.

But the judge said Hwang’s good works were “not balanced” with the severity of the crime he committed, which made a “wreckage of individual lives who trusted Mr. Hwang.”

“Why do good people do bad things?” Hellerstein asked at the hearing packed with Hwang’s friends and family. “Here’s a man spending a lifetime on charitable works who commits a terrible crime.”

In his first comments on the case, Hwang gave a short statement at the hearing, apologizing to those he hurt without admitting to guilt. His lawyers indicated that he plans to appeal his conviction.

“I feel really terrible for what happened at Archegos,” Hwang said. “I feel deep pain for all Archegos employees, the banks, and people who worked at the banks and suffered.”

Addressing the judge, Hwang said he hoped his sentence “will allow me to serve as much as I can, given the circumstances.” He added that he is “grateful to God for so many blessings I’ve had in my life,” mentioning his family.

Friends and family of Hwang’s submitted more than 500 pages of letters of support, forming a large book that the judge held up in the hearing, saying, “Your book of letters are a strong advocate for the kind of person and character that you have.” Many of the letters came from Hwang’s Christian friends and other leaders, as well as Grace & Mercy employees.

Among the dozens of leaders of Christian ministries submitting letters was the recently retired president of Fuller Theological Seminary Mark Labberton, who mentioned Hwang’s generosity to the school as well as his service on the board. Several other Fuller trustees wrote in support too.

Hwang’s pastor in New Jersey contributed, as well as Wall Street investors and an Orthodox priest who all met Hwang through one of his main initiatives, the Public Reading of Scripture.

Letters also came from the former head of The Bowery Mission, Ed Morgan; the founder of prison ministry Defy Ventures, Catherine Jackson; the head of Defending Black Girlhood, Lilada Gee; and the CEO of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), Hannah Song—all organizations supported by Hwang. Kevin Palau, son of evangelist Luis Palau and now the leader of the Luis Palau Association, also wrote in support.

As during his trial, Hwang read a devotional at different points during the day-long hearing.

“Bill’s only hobbies are faith, food, philanthropy, and books, and the project of his life is sharing them with everyone he meets,” the defense lawyers wrote in a pre-sentencing memo. “He has always lived a modest lifestyle,” they added, saying he shops at outlet malls.

The judge questioned this narrative of Hwang’s thriftiness, noting that Hwang had rented out an apartment in the ritzy Hudson Yards development in Manhattan for the trial. In filings, Hwang’s lawyers said he now has $55 million left of his billions.

The prosecution also raised issues with Hwang’s use of his foundation, Grace & Mercy, which he has given $600 million according to defense filings.

Thomas said after Archegos’s collapse, Hwang gave Grace & Mercy jobs to many of the company’s top lieutenants. “People who might testify against him,” said Hellerstein, finishing the prosecution’s thought.

Defense attorney Dani James countered that Hwang also gave low-level Archegos employees jobs at Grace & Mercy—arguing he was helping people rather than scheming to protect himself.

Hellerstein also said that banks were clearly greedy to enjoy profits from Archegos by lending billions, but “when you cheat a fool, it’s nevertheless cheating.”

Each of the ten guilty counts carried a maximum 20-year sentence, meaning Hwang faced the possibility of 200 years. Prosecutors asked for a 21-year sentence, saying that took into account Hwang’s “age and good works in his life.”

Hellerstein sentenced him to 18 years, plus 3 years of supervised release. Hwang was not immediately taken into custody; the judge set an additional hearing for December to determine possible forfeiture and restitution to injured parties.

“There’s nothing more difficult than sentencing. … How do you measure a person’s life?” Hellerstein wondered aloud in the sentencing. “A sentence has to take into account the good and the bad, and it can’t be done. … Yet we have to do it.”

Hellerstein, who is Jewish, quoted Psalm 82, about God judging “among those who administer judgment,” and said he would be held accountable for his work as a judge.

He told Hwang he knew that relationship to God was important to him as a religious man, but so is “man to fellow man.” Though the victims in this case “were institutions, they were also fellow people,” he said. The heavy sentence, he added, was a “symbol to others that if you don’t live by the law, you could be punished very severely by the law.”

- More from Emily Belz

Theology

How a Dark Sense of Humor Can Save You from Cynicism

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

A bit of gallows humor can remind us that death does not have the final word.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

“A dark sense of humor can be an early sign of dementia.” I didn’t read that in a peer-reviewed medical study but on a social media meme, right before I left the platform formerly known as Twitter for bluer skies.

That means I have no idea whether the claim is true or false. But when I read it to my wife, she said, “Well, then, you’re in trouble. You think gallows humor is a fruit of the Spirit.”

I think she’s thinking of moments such as election night some weeks ago, when I raised my glass and said, “Next year in Guantanamo!” I don’t quite think dark humor is a virtue, but I do think it can be a blessing sometimes. And at least a little bit of it might be what we need to combat cynicism in a cynical time.

One of the hardest things for me to get used to as a young minister was the joking that would go on “backstage” at funerals. The funeral directors looked appropriately somber and sympathetic with the families, but the minute the elevator doors closed, they were telling jokes and one-upping each other with puns and anecdotes. Some of the most resonant laughter I’d ever heard was around a casket. I was unnerved.

I tried for a while to spiritually and psychologically diagnose this sense of humor: It was the result of routinization, perhaps. This had become a job for them, and with the familiarity of it, they had grown numb. That kind of dark humor is indeed a warning sign—maybe not of dementia, but certainly of cynicism. One can see this all over the place these days with the sort of “LOL, nothing matters” humor, a hyena-like quality of this twisted time, a way of signaling that one is not inhibited by the naive strictures of morality or sincerity or hope.

But not all of those funeral directors were cynical. For some of them, the humor, though dark, was a different kind of coping mechanism. The laughter was to keep them from normalizing the grim reality of their daily task. Laughing was a way of reminding themselves that death does not, in fact, have the final word.

In his book A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity, sociologist Peter Berger argues (rightly, in my view) that abstractions posing as “proofs of the existence of God” convince almost no one that God is there. Even if they do, they don’t settle the really important question: Which God is there? The God of the philosophers or the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The God who is the “Ground of Being” or the God who loves you?

Instead, Berger argued that for many people, the most compelling “evidence” for God comes in the unplanned moments of ordinary life, when “signals of transcendence” seem to break through the everydayness of it all.

None of these signposts, he wrote, are decisive and definitive on their own. A baby is born, and you are overwhelmed by a love that seems to be about far more than just mammalian biology. By morning you can convince yourself that that kind of gratitude and awe was really nothing. But these realities—when faced honestly—evoke a longing that points us to something beyond the ordinary. It takes a decision of faith to find in these moments signals of transcendence, Berger wrote, but “the faith in these signals is not baseless.”

“It takes my own experience seriously,” he argued, “and dares to suppose that what this experience intends is not a lie.”

Of all these signals, Berger wrote, the one that intrigued him most was humor, and, specifically, the kind of humor that emerges in dark times.

“There is something profoundly mysterious and puzzling about the comic, most of all its power to provoke, for an instant at least, what is suggestively called ‘redeeming laughter,’ even in moments of singular terror or grief,” he wrote. “We all know that these emotions will return once the moment of laughter has passed. But in that moment, all the fears and sorrows of existence have been banished; in that moment, if you will, my laughter intends eternity.”

Berger asked whether this is all just an illusion—and, without a frame of trust in some larger reality, it would seem to be nothing more. But for that one brief instant, the darkness actually is broken. The fear and nothingness is replaced with laughter.

Elsewhere, Berger wrote about why we find things funny and located a crucial part of it in incongruence, the difference between the way things are and the way they should be. The incongruence itself, he argued, ought to be something of a sign that we are not quite at home in the world as it is.

Frederick Buechner argued that the gospel simultaneously inhabits the worlds of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale (not meaning made-up fiction but the reality to which fairy tales point, in which the tragic gives way to the comic). The parables of Jesus, he suggested, work that way—they take ordinary reality and turn it upside-down in shocking, surprising, incongruous ways.

“Switching on the lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed be he,” Buechner writes. He continues,

The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn’t see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn’t see it, and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims also to see as the invisible presence of God in the world?

If all that you see is comedy, you are in denial. If all that you see is tragedy, then you are in despair. But if you see them both, you will learn how to both laugh and cry—and sometimes to do both at the same time. You will see that the darkness around you (and sometimes within you) is real. But you will also see that it is not ultimate.

A little bit of gallows humor can break the spell, just for a moment. It can remind us that even when we laugh, there is much that is broken—and that even when we cry, underneath it all, there is joy.

A moment of laughter in grave times can shake us out of the fear that can come when we look for signs of God’s presence in a fallen universe. It can remind us that the sign is the absence itself—and of the pain of longing that it evokes. A little bit of humor in a dark time can shake us to hear the words our mothers in the garden needed to hear 2,000 years ago: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you …” (Luke 24:5–6, ESV).

Not all of us will ever get dementia, but all of us tend to forget. We see the tragedy and forget to laugh. We see the triviality and we forget to cry. A lot of dark humor can make us cynical, but a little bit of it can help us remember that on the other side of the valley of the shadow of death is a wedding—a party so full of laughter that we will never again think of any gallows, other than the cross that made everything sad come untrue.

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

News

Died: Rina Seixas, Iconic Surfer Pastor Who Faced Domestic Violence Charges

Franco Iacomini

The Brazilian founder of Bola de Neve Church, which attracted celebrities and catalyzed 500 congregations on six continents, faced accusations from family members and a former colleague.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Courtesy of Bola de Neve Church

Rinaldo Seixas Pereira, the controversial founder of Bola de Neve Church, which grew into a movement of 500 congregations around the world, died in a motorcycle accident in Campinas, Brazil, on Sunday, November 17. He was 52.

Apostol Rina, as he was known to many Christians, was returning home on Sunday afternoon after speaking at Pregadores do Asfalto (Asphalt Preachers), a bikers’ Bible study at his church, when he fell off his motorcycle and suffered multiple fractures. He died in the hospital later that night.

Bola de Neve Church began in an upstairs room of a São Paulo surf shop called Hawaiian Dreams in 1999. Though the church grew exponentially in the next 25 years, Rina himself suffered personal scandal and controversy, most recently battling accusations of domestic violence that led the elders to remove him as board president in June. At the time of his death, his wife, Denise Seixas, had a restraining order against him after both she and her son (Rina’s stepson) reported that he had acted violently toward them.

Nevertheless, Rina was remembered as “a revolutionary who won many unlikely lives for Jesus, who mobilized the Christian youth of Brazil,” wrote Fred Arrais, a Christian singer and pastor of the Baptist church Igreja Angelim in the northern state of Piauí, on Threads.

“You were a world changer, and in many ways, you changed our world and helped make it possible for us to reach hundreds of thousands of people in Brazil,” wrote Mark Mohr, vocalist of Christian reggae band Christafari, on Instagram. “You were a church planter with hundreds of congregations in over 30 countries.”

Rina was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on April 15, 1972, the eldest son of a Baptist couple, Lídia Colomietz and Rinaldo Pereira. He was born after a complicated delivery, and doctors had to remove him with forceps from his mother’s womb. He had two siblings, Daniela and Priscila, who both went on to become pastors at Bola de Neve.

As a child, he attended Colégio Batista Brasileiro and he later studied advertising, a degree he would one day deploy as a megachurch pastor. But as a young person, Rina drifted away from Christianity, and by the time he was 20, he was addicted to drugs and had contracted hepatitis. After an encounter he later described as giving him a “sense of death,” he reengaged with his faith.

Shortly after this experience, Rina began attending Renascer em Cristo, São Paulo, a congregation squarely within the neo-Pentecostalism movement that first developed in the 1970s and was known for preaching the prosperity gospel and spiritual warfare and broadcasting these messages through their own mass media.

After serving for several years as the leader of the church’s evangelism ministry, in 1999, Rina began his own church with the blessing of Estevam Hernanders, the founder of Renascer em Cristo. The new community would be strongly influenced by what Rina had seen at his former church but would be simultaneously friendly to youth.

A longtime surfer, Rina asked his friends, the owners of Hawaiian Dreams, if he could start a church in their store. When they agreed, at least 130 people showed up to the first meeting. In a story that Rina would recount numerous times, the space held no pulpit or even a table where he could place the Bible. But he improvised, borrowing a longboard and placing it on two chairs, a setup that became a signature feature for the community.

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The church’s surf culture wasn’t the only thing that intrigued newcomers. Renascer em Cristo had been among the first to embrace contemporary music as a way to engage and connect with young people. Bola de Neve went further, holding worship services with loud music and strobe lights in bars and concert halls. In the walls, illuminated panels sport catchphrases like “In Jesus we trust” (in English).

The church’s name, which translates to snowball, came from a vision about its growth—“a snowball that, starting small, turned into an avalanche,” as Rina described on the church’s website. In contrast to many evangelical churches in the beginning of the 21st century, the church catered directly to young people through its emphasis on contemporary worship, informal language in preaching, acceptance of tattoos, and a casual dress code. (Bola de Neve’s success in turn influenced many evangelical congregations to employ similar strategies to court young people.)

From the beginning, the church attracted artists, athletes, and other celebrities and maintained its cool reputation over time, counting surfer Gabriel Medina, model Sasha Meneghel, and actresses Fernanda Vasconcellos and Danielle Winits among its more famous attendees. Many of the local Bola de Neve churches also organized “fight ministries,” where congregants attended jujitsu classes, and sometimes took part in church-sponsored competitions.

Rina’s preaching frequently invoked the imagery of everyday life and slang. “In God’s house there’s no spilled milk, no burnt beans, no mushy rice, amen?” the surfer-pastor once preached from the pulpit, as recounted by Eduardo Maranhão in his book A Grande Onda Vai te Pegar (A Big Wave Is Coming for You).

Behind this colloquial style was an attempt ro help Christians respond effectively to contemporary culture. “Jesus used a unique and innovative language,” Rina wrote. “While he preached the content of the scriptures with great accuracy, he also presented biblical teachings in a new and thought-provoking way, through parables, comparisons and metaphors.”

To him, contemporary Christianity had become mild and conforming. “One of the biggest problems facing the church today is the loss of its countercultural essence,” he wrote on his website. “If it is not based on trust in God, the search for the Lord can lead us to strange and dangerous destinations.”

Though the church never announced an intentional international church-planting strategy, the Brazilian diaspora organized and opened local Bola de Neves (with surfboard pulpits) in countries as diverse as the United States, Mozambique, Spain, India, Japan, and Australia, allowing it to claim that it had congregations on every inhabited continent.

As it grew, Bola de Neve avoided much of the negative press coverage that characterized many neo-Pentecostal congregations. That changed this year.

In May, former members of a congregation in Santa Catarina state accused the church of mismanaging donations to a project meant to support female entrepreneurs. (In court, the church denied any irregularities.)

Days later, Christian singer Rodolfo Abrantes issued a video in which he said that he and his wife had been emotionally abused while both were members at the same Bola de Neve congregation and that leaders had accused him of owing money to the church’s record label, Bola Music.

Rina did not publicly comment on these accusations.

Soon they came closer to home. This same month, Nathan Gouvea, Rina’s stepson, said he had been beaten by his stepfather and mentioned him as directly responsible for the abusive management practices that have been reported in Santa Catarina. He also claimed Bola de Neve was a cult. “Everyone is scared to death of the apostle,” he said.

In June, Rina’s wife, Denise Seixas, a fellow pastor at Bola de Neve and Christian singer, obtained a restraining order from the court against Rina, accusing him of physical and psychological violence.

In her statement to the police, she said Rina had punched her in the nose. In audio recordings and videos leaked on social media around that time, Rina was heard swearing and accusing his wife of “hearing demons.”

In that same week, the elders removed both Rina and Denise as president and vice president, respectively, of Bola de Neve. The board also announced the establishment of an ombudsman channel (an email address where people could send complaints to) to address “possible failures and misconduct” and the creation of an ethics council to investigate and deliberate about irregularities.

In June, a former church employee told police that Rina had sexually harassed her. In her testimony, she noted several situations of inappropriate behavior that occurred between 2012 and 2017, culminating in an attempt from Rina to grab her. When she left the scene, she said, she had visible bruises on her arm from the encounter.

Following these claims, in July, a court in São Paulo ordered Rina to hand over all weapons he owned to the police within 48 hours. He informed them that the guns were stored at a gun club and allowed the police to access them.

Following Rina’s death, it remains unclear how the authorities and the church’s leadership will address the allegations of mismanagement, abuse, and assault. In the statement announcing his passing, Bola de Neve Church said only that “in this moment of great sadness, we pray for his family, friends and the entire church that was so blessed by his ministry, leaving a legacy that will never be forgotten.”

- More from Franco Iacomini

Culture

‘Bonhoeffer’ Bears Little Resemblance to Reality

Myles Werntz

The new biopic from Angel Studios twists the theologian’s life and thought to make a political point.

Fifteen years ago, scholar Stephen Haynes mapped out the many interpretations of the life of 20th-century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a conservative who sought to restore Germany—or perhaps he was a progressive who wanted to move past stale dogmatism. Bonhoeffer was a closet Anabaptist, concerned with questions of the church first and society second. Or maybe he was the model of a theologian who cared primarily for social action here and now.

Figures as complex as Bonhoeffer are notoriously difficult to interpret well. Bonhoeffer left behind numerous monographs, sermons, correspondence, and theological writing, and since his death, there have been as many volumes of personal remembrances by friends and colleagues. All of this creates a complex and at times elusive figure, difficult to categorize within contemporary ideological movements. If we aren’t careful, situating Bonhoeffer in our own moment can be an exercise in wish fulfillment.

This is the trap into which the new film Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. falls. In the latest offering from Angel Studios, the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an empty container into which our own desires—in this case, desires for a faith that serves political ends—are poured.

In one sense, Bonhoeffer is straightforward biography and is to be commended for introducing us to influences on his life that are frequently underplayed in the popular imagination: his family, his friends in the United States, his contacts in church bodies across Europe.

We watch as Bonhoeffer is educated in the finest German universities and becomes deeply concerned with the political direction of the country. He teaches at a freestanding seminary in Finkenwalde amid the rise of Nazi influence on the German church. After the seminary closes, he joins the Abwehr, a German military intelligence agency. Viewers meet his brother-in-law, also involved in the Abwehr, who took part in a Hitler assassination plot. We see Bonhoeffer arrested and dying in the Flossenbürg concentration camp days before the prisoners there were liberated by the Allies.

These facts are uncontroversial. But Bonhoeffer is more speculative than circumspect. Atop the familiar scaffolding of the theologian’s life, the film constructs the story of a man who, from childhood, seems destined to leave behind prayer for conspiracy, Bible teaching for political espionage, and theology for activism.

Rather than depicting a man of deep theological convictions and subtle intellect, Bonhoeffer tells the story of a man for whom moral convictions are a flexible and useful tool, a man whose actions are determined not by concerns for the church’s witness but by perceived historical necessity.

It is the story of a Bonhoeffer willing to do anything—including disavow the teachings of Jesus as he understood them—to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Let us acknowledge that any biopic takes liberties with its subject. Screenwriters fill in gaps with imagined conversations and encounters not only to make a good film but also to demonstrate the individual’s character.

In this respect, Bonhoeffer is a typical film of its genre—even if the liberties it takes are a bit fanciful. For example, Bonhoeffer as a young man spent a year in New York at Union Theological Seminary, where he became acquainted with American racism and worshiped at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church.

The film stretches these facts, depicting Bonhoeffer as leading his own jazz combo at a Harlem nightclub, being beaten in a confrontation with a racist hotel owner, and becoming an impassioned advocate for the rights of African Americans. These embellishments, entertaining as they may be, are designed less to fill up airtime than to depict Bonhoeffer as a crusader developing an appetite for justice.

Theologian Bonhoeffer is further eclipsed by political agent Bonhoeffer as the movie unfolds. As the Nazis rise to power, he says things like “I can’t pretend that praying and teaching is enough,” and “My dirty hands are all I have left to offer.” His well-known underground seminary at Finkenwalde is treated not as a place to faithfully train ordinands in the Confessing Church but as a launching pad for a political counterattack on the Nazis. Toward the end of his life, he gives a sermon in which his famous “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die” quote is interspersed with footage of a conspirator planting a bomb.

In one howler of a scene, Bonhoeffer disavows his pacifist teaching in Discipleship, insisting “I was right … before Hitler.” His friend and student Eberhard Bethge immediately challenges his teacher, asking whether Hitler was the first evil leader since Scripture was written. Bonhoeffer replies ominously: “No. But he’s the first one I can stop.”

If this scene included fireworks and a montage of Dietrich doing calisthenics to prepare for the weeks ahead, it could not have been more perfectly written for a spy thriller.

At the heart of Bonhoeffer is the overconfident depiction of the theologian as a would-be assassin. We know that Bonhoeffer was initially arrested not for an assassination plot (as the film depicts) but for his involvement in Operation 7, a scheme to smuggle Jews into neighboring Switzerland. We know that his primary intrigue through the Abwehr was passing information about the Nazis to his ecumenical church contacts in England and elsewhere—not, as the film depicts, trying to convince the English to supply a bomb to kill a dictator.

And finally, while Bonhoeffer undoubtedly knew of plans (which included family members) to assassinate Hitler, evidence surrounding his direct involvement remains murky and contested.

Among historians, the theologian’s relationship to an assassination attempt is a hotly debated question—less a matter of Bonhoeffer’s own words than informed conjecture about what he knew of his brother-in-law’s activities. But for the Bonhoeffer movie, there’s no debate: Dietrich Bonhoeffer not only knew of a plot to kill Hitler but also was intimately involved, his earlier convictions about how to understand Christ’s teachings rendered irrelevant by the rise of the Nazis.

Bonhoeffer’s real-life words complicate this narrative. “To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way,” he wrote in Discipleship. Years later, awaiting his execution, he doubled down: “Today I can see the dangers of that book [Discipleship], though I still stand by what I wrote.”

It is likely that Bonhoeffer knew of a plot to kill Hitler. But based on his writings, it also seems that his own forms of Christian resistance—spreading information to international contacts, assisting with sending Jews to Switzerland—were consistent with his long-standing convictions.

Undermining the Nazis with paperwork and diplomacy is far less cinematic than explosives, and the makers of Bonhoeffer may have changed their main character’s worldview for mere dramatic effect. But the ideological thrust of the film feels too on the nose to be justified by drama alone. What kind of connection is the film making by suggesting that Bonhoeffer changed his mind about the “narrow way”?

Perhaps it’s suggesting that the audience should also lay down their political naiveté and take up arms. Perhaps it’s suggesting that the way of Jesus is too soft for the hard realities of modern conflict and should be replaced by a more “realistic” approach. Ironically, this is the very approach the Nazis themselves take—replacing crosses with swastikas and Bibles with copies of Mein Kampf, turning to a stronger version of church when the old ways, governed by Scripture and sacrament, no longer fit the bill.

Early reactions to the film, particularly by the Bonhoeffer family, have identified a distorted legacy. The source of some of these distortions seems easy to identify. Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. appears to play off the title of conservative pundit Eric Metaxas’ 2011 Bonhoeffer biography. (Metaxas’ website references the movie in the context of plans for a forthcoming Bonhoeffer streaming series, and he’s promoted it on X.)

The similarity between this rendering of Bonhoeffer’s life and Metaxas’ own trajectory is telling. Though Angel Studios has downplayed any connection between Metaxas and this project, consider the similarities (beyond the film’s subtitle). Both movie Bonhoeffer and Metaxas begin as religious thinkers, become primarily concerned with political life, and ultimately dally with the use of force in service to their ideals.

Early on in the film, Bonhoeffer’s Harlem friend says that sometimes a punch is necessary; in 2020, Eric Metaxas made news when he punched a DC protester. In his most recent book, Metaxas continues to marshal Bonhoeffer’s work toward his project of politics as the ultimate end of theology. His inflammatory rhetoric consistently equates the American left with the Nazis.

The portrait offered in Bonhoeffer does not square with the man who—even in the midst of the Confessing Church’s collapse—would speak of baptism as God’s way of creating a new kingdom, who desired “the resistance tasks of the church [to] terminate in word and discipleship.” In Bonhoeffer, we see an imprisoned Dietrich returning to preaching about Christ’s sacrifice and taking Communion only after his own attempts to save Germany’s soul through an assassination plot have failed.

Perhaps judgment of the film’s message should come from Bonhoeffer himself. From Ethics:

Radicalism always springs from a conscious or unconscious hatred of what is established. Christian radicalism, no matter whether it consists in withdrawing from the world or in improving the world, arises from hatred of creation. … On both sides it is a refusal of faith in the creation. But devils are to be cast out through Beelzebub.

Put differently, one cannot drive out evil with evil. Any attempt to bend the world through evil means is to refuse to believe that God is ultimately God, even in the age of Hitler.

The ultimate failure of Bonhoeffer is not just that it gets the history wrong. It also misunderstands how Bonhoeffer’s life was already an extraordinary example of Christian courage.

Especially in the aftermath of two assassination attempts on a former president, we do not need an argument for theologically motivated government overthrow; we do not need further justification for political violence. What we needed was a film about a man concerned with how God might be calling the church to be steadfast amid the great temptation to mold our faith to our politics.

Correction: An earlier version of this story overstated the relationship between the Bonhoeffer film and the similarly titled book by Eric Metaxas.

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

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