How Colombia’s Most Popular Christian Artist Landed in Houston

Alex Campos has a new home in Texas and a new musical focus—Latin worship.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

Colombian cyclists often refer to themselves as escarabajos or “beetles,” drawing a comparison between the journeys of the small bugs across their varied terrain with those of bicyclists pedaling up and down their country’s mountainsides. For one of Latin America’s most popular Christian artists—a self-proclaimed escarabajo—a grueling ride can help generate a new song.

“There is no recipe. I don’t have anything special. While I’m riding my bike, there’s a melody, a theme going around in my head,” said Alex Campos, who hails from Bogotá, a city that sits at more than a mile and a half high. “It’s about being connected, meditating not only on the Word but on the things that God does in your life—the good and bad.”

It may be true that Campos has no secret recipe for a hit song, but he has won five Latin Grammys over the course of his career and is one of the most influential Latin American Christian artists in the industry. His most popular songs, like Al taller del Maestro (“To the Master’s Workshop”), have crossed from Christian to secular radio stations throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He averages 1.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify and has 2.55 million channel subscribers on YouTube.

According to Colombian Billboard journalist Luisa Calle, who highlighted Campos’s “Pan Duro” as one of the best Latin American Christian songs of 2023, persistence and musical versatility have sustained his long career.

“Campos does not think that he has already achieved everything. He continues to evolve; he continues to innovate; he continues pursuing new goals,” Calle told CT.

Campos’s ability to work in various Latin American folk and dance genres has allowed him to collaborate widely and produce music that draws on a different combination of styles and regional musical traditions, said Calle. Campos has worked with not only an array of Christian popular musicians but also mainstream vallenato (a Colombian folk genre) and ranchera (a traditional genre rooted in rural Mexico) artists, including Fonseca, Silvestre Dangond, Jorge Celedón, and Yeison Jiménez. “Pan Duro” is a bachata (a dance genre originating in the Dominican Republic) song that also draws on bolero (a Cuban poetic song style) and ballad sensibilities.

“Colombian artists are very versatile because there is great musical diversity in our country,” said Calle. “Alex has been able to make the most of that.”

These days, Campos has given up the mountains of Colombia for Houston, Texas, a city whose downtown is nearly at sea level. The Christian pop star is now releasing music as an independent artist and attends the Spanish-speaking congregation of Lakewood Church, a move that reflects some of the broader trends in global contemporary worship music and transnational evangelicalism in the Americas. His latest album, Esencia, released on August 23, has a new sound, combining conventions of contemporary worship music from the US and Australia with style elements of Latin pop and other regional Latin American genres.

With Esencia, Campos continues to lean into his versatility as he starts a new chapter of his career, turning his attention to music that serves church congregations and contributes to a growing body of contemporary worship music written in Spanish, for Spanish-speaking communities (rather than translated). Campos has served as a worship leader and preacher throughout his career (he was featured in Hillsong’s 2012 Global Project), but the album marks his entry into worship music as a songwriter.

“I have wanted to make a congregational album for a long time,” Campos told CT. “Esencia is an album of music that can be sung in churches. I’m very excited about that.”

In the Latin American Christian music industry, as in the US, worship music has become the dominant genre within the niche, and artists who have written radio hits are increasingly seeing worship music production as both a spiritually fulfilling endeavor and a strategic career move. This trend has made waves in Brazil, as popular secular artists are crossing over into the Christian sphere to release worship tracks.

Christian music is one of the fastest-growing musical genres in the US—growth that is fueled by the popularity of worship music. Artists like Brandon Lake are finding success straddling the boundary between Christian pop or rock and contemporary worship. And as that boundary has become fainter, Christian artists are increasingly creating music for congregations and Christian radio.

Campos has been navigating the changing Christian music industry for years, but now he’s doing so from a home in a new country.

“It is difficult to let go of your culture, food, and family. We did not come because we wanted to, but out of obedience to God. It took me a year to understand his purpose for us here,” said Campos. “I feel like I’m starting my career all over again.”

Although he isn’t typically outspoken about his politics, Campos said that political changes in Colombia contributed to his decision to leave the country.

In 2022, former guerrilla leader Gustavo Petro, a leftist leader with an unfriendly relationship with the country’s evangelical churches, was elected president of Colombia. When he was mayor of Bogotá, Petro’s office refused to allow Góspel al Parque, the largest free Christian music festival in Latin America, to take place as planned in 2013. Some have perceived Petro’s election to the presidency as a sign that the country is becoming more and more politically fraught for Colombian evangelicals.

During a 2019 television interview, Campos was asked what he thought of then presidential candidate Petro. “If that man is elected president, I will leave the country,” he said.

Reflecting on the interview, Campos said, “I think I was expressing what many Colombians were feeling—that if a leftist government came to power, it was necessary to go out and look for other horizons.”

Campos moved to the Houston suburbs with his family in April 2022. He has found new career opportunities in Texas, but the transition has come with personal challenges. The musician struggled with depression during his first months in the US, a painful experience he says helped him empathize with other immigrants. It also spurred him to double down on his faith.

“Many of the Latinos who come here end up getting absorbed in work, and they move away from the church,” he said. “But we know that if God brought us here, it is because this country needs to be passionate about the Lord again, and Latino Christians are part of his plan to rekindle that flame.”

Campos speaks openly about his belief in God’s ability to heal and work miracles. In 2002, he was diagnosed with a tumor in his throat and lost his voice just days after beginning the tour to launch his first album. Doctors warned that his singing ability would be affected by the surgery to remove it, cutting his vocal capacity in half. According to Campos, when he went in for a consultation before his surgery, the tumor was gone.

“When I understood that God didn’t want my voice but my heart, I was healed.”

After that health scare, Campos embarked on a decades-long career that has made him arguably the most recognized Colombian Christian artist in Latin America.

Now he is expanding his reach in the US market, writing and recording songs in English and in Spanish. Campos’s 2023 album, Vida, included a song with English and Spanish lyrics. “Libre,” the single from his new album, also has lyrics in both languages and features popular American Christian artist Tauren Wells. The song, released on June 21 of this year, has over 1 million views on YouTube.

After a decade of being signed to major record labels such as CanZion or Essential Records (Sony Music), Campos is pursuing his career as an independent artist, an increasingly popular path for artists who can leverage social media to promote their music without the oversight (or overreach) of a major label. Last year, Campos managed and produced his own 13-concert tour around the US.

Lakewood Church in Houston, Campos’s new home church, is led by Joel Osteen and is one of the largest in the US. Costa Rican musician and preacher Danilo Montero is the pastor of Lakewood’s large Spanish-speaking congregation. Before Montero, the congregation was pastored by influential worship artist Marcos Witt.

The stability and support of Lakewood have allowed Campos to pursue his career as an independent artist and participate in worship music production and leadership in both English and Spanish. Although Campos is not on staff at Lakewood, he is an occasional collaborator with Lakewood Music. Campos said that Houston has been a good place to build relationships with other Christian artists and worship leaders.

“Recently the guys from Miel San Marcos [a Dove Award–winning Guatemalan Christian band] were at my house,” Campos said. “Bani Muñoz, Harold and Elena, Ingrid Rosario, or Thalles Roberto … There are a lot of people here to share coffee, lunch, a good chat. We are edified by living near so many fellow Christian musicians who have blessed us.”

As Campos has turned toward worship music as a songwriter, he has had to adapt his poetic lyricism and gift for imagery.

“His lyrics are quite complex; they are not the simple or conventional lyrics we generally see within Christian music,” Billboard’s Calle told CT. “I think the personal stories he describes in his songs—stories of struggle and faith—and his vulnerability help him to connect with people.”

Although Escencia is clearly a foray into contemporary worship music, Campos has not abandoned his interest in blending Latin American genres. As the album’s subtitle, “Latin Worship,” suggests, Campos is bringing those genres into conversation with the style and aesthetic characteristics of popular worship. Songs like “Libre,” “Gracias Cristo,” or “Te Amo” fit the canons of modern worship. But others like “Rumbo Pa la Iglesia” boldly mix musical styles as different as regional Mexican and joropo (a genre originating in the eastern Colombian plains). “Veo Tu Gloria” oscillates between Argentine tango and Puerto Rican salsa.

These days, Campos writes for the church as he navigates life in a new country and in the context of a new faith community, away from familiar landscapes. Last month, Hurricane Beryl brought huge pine trees down onto their house and car.

“Just as nature recovers over time, we too can find within ourselves the strength to overcome challenges,” Campos wrote on Instagram. “This incident is not the end, but a new beginning. It teaches us to value what we have, to be resilient and to trust that we can always rebuild and flourish again.”

Campos isn’t building a career from scratch, but he sees this season of his life and career as distinct, marked by writing music for the global church and helping define the evolving genre of Latin worship. He is still an escarabajo at heart, steadily and persistently moving along, traversing difficult terrain and finding ways to keep momentum.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m building a new career,” said Campos. “He has taken me out of my comfort zone, which just makes me more dependent on faith in Jesus.”

Hernán Restrepo is a Colombian journalist living in Bogotá. Since 2021, he has been managing Christianity Today’s social media accounts in Spanish.

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News

Bethany Sues Michigan for Denying State Contracts Due to Faith-Based Hiring

Kate Shellnutt

The Christian ministry says it is being blocked from helping hundreds of refugee children and families, despite its decades-long history of service.

Mike Kline (notkalvin) / Getty Images

After decades of resettling refugee families and placing unaccompanied refugee children in foster homes, Bethany Christian Services announced Tuesday that it is suing the state of Michigan for denying its contracts due to long-standing faith-based hiring practices.

Bethany—the country’s largest Christian adoption and foster agency and one of ten refugee resettlement agencies in the US—says Michigan’s requirement that partners must hire from across faith traditions is discriminatory and violates the free exercise clause as well as exemptions for religious nonprofits in the Civil Rights Act.

Plus, leaders say that restricting Bethany’s involvement hinders urgent efforts to care for vulnerable children and families.

This case represents the latest First Amendment legal tussle around Christian social service agencies, as more ministries eager to offer services find their basic statements of faith clashing with nondiscrimination provisions in grant programs and other government partnerships. Courts are left to weigh Christian organizations’ religious freedom protections against state regulations.

“We’re committed to serving everybody, but this is about who we hire,” said Keith Cureton, Bethany’s president and CEO since last summer. “Hiring rights is an important religious liberty that not only impacts Bethany but affects thousands of faith-based nonprofits and ministries.”

Bethany has been contracted by the state of Michigan since 1981. Last year, the organization helped over 600 refugees and immigrants and placed around 300 unaccompanied minor refugees in foster families in the state, according to its own tallies.

But in 2024, the Office of Global Michigan (OGM), the government agency that enlists local partners for immigrant outreach and services, began denying contracts to Bethany. According to Nhung Hurst, Bethany’s general counsel, the state indicated it had a new requirement that contracted organizations hire individuals of all religions.

“None of our contracts stretching back multiple decades with the state government have included such a requirement,” Hurst said. And no other organizations were affected by the new provision.

Bethany’s leaders said that before moving forward with the lawsuit they reached out to OGM 19 times and prayed fervently for resolution. Bethany is headquartered in Grand Rapids and serves more refugees in its home state than any of the other 27 states where it operates.

Christian organizations like Bethany play a huge role in refugee resettlement and foster care services, both areas that rely on contracts with the government. Even after a 2021 Supreme Court ruling sided with a Catholic foster agency that was denied a government contract in Philadelphia, the justices didn’t override a precedent involving the general applicability of state laws (Employment Division v. Smith), so cases continue to emerge around faith-based providers seeking government funding.

Bethany has been in a deadlock with the state before. When Michigan declared in 2019 that foster agencies couldn’t turn away LGBTQ families, the organization opted to change its policies in the state and then across the country. Leaders at the time argued that it was the only way for Christians to continue to care for kids in the system.

As the state of Michigan began challenging Bethany’s faith statement requirement, there were reported rumblings over the policy internally. In January 2024, a local TV news station in Grand Rapids reported on a “culture clash” at Bethany, with unnamed staff describing a stricter enforcement of the Christian hiring policy under Cureton and tensions as the refugee branch moved into the organization’s main headquarters.

When asked about the claims, Hurst said, “Like any organization, sometimes you have differences in implementation, but we are unwavering in our mission and our values and our statement of faith.”

Bethany asks its new hires to affirm the Apostles’ Creed. (Back in 2019, Bethany’s statement of faith was based on the evangelical Lausanne Covenant.) Cureton did not directly respond to questions from CT about whether it has additional faith directives for employees, such as around sexuality, but did say that no employees have been fired over the past year due to such requirements.

Among Christian nonprofits, Bethany’s requirements aren’t unusual. (World Relief, another refugee resettlement agency, asks that employees align with an evangelical faith statement. A note on its hiring page also references the “protections afforded World Relief as a faith-based employer.”)

Bethany’s lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity and the OGM has been filed in the federal district court in Grand Rapids. Hurst said she is unaware of any instances where Bethany has lost contracts in other states due to its hiring practices.

The exemption for faith-based hiring has faced challenges over the years, lately over whether Christian nonprofits can require employees to live according to conduct standards and “whether the state can discriminatorily disqualify from government benefits those religious agencies that stay religious by exercising their Title VII and First Amendment rights to hire those who share their faith,” according to Steven McFarland.

McFarland is director of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom at the Christian Legal Society, co-counsel of record for Bethany’s case. Over his career specializing in religious freedom cases, he defended Seattle Pacific University in a lawsuit over its evangelical faith statement back in 1984, only to see similar legal challenges continue to arise.

Currently, the Alliance Defending Freedom is suing Oregon for rescinding a state grant from a youth ministry over its Christian hiring practices. Last month, a circuit court decided that the ministry could receive the state funding as the appeal continues.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act has protected faith-based organizations from the government interfering with their hiring practices for six decades now, McFarland said. “For Congress in 1964, the First Amendment was clear enough, not to mention common sense, that what makes religious organizations religious is what they believe, communicate, and exercise through their staff.”

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Ideas

China’s New Adoption Policy Leaves Children in the Balance

Chelsea Sobolik

Suspending international adoptions hurts children who already have waiting families.

Blackstation / Getty

On September 4, the US state department informed adoption service providers and waiting families that the People’s Republic of China (PRC), would “no longer carry out foreign adoption work,” except in a few narrow cases.

Several hundred American families have been matched with children in China. Many families were scheduled to bring their children home in January 2020, the same month that China closed down due to its zero-COVID policy and have been waiting for over four and a half years to bring their children home.

Aimee Welch was about to travel to China in March 2020 to finalize the adoption of a 6-year-old girl. After an agonizing past few years, Welch reflected on China’s announcement, saying, “It’s a closed door with no closure. And to think about this little girl, we promised to come for her. As a 6-year-old, how could she process the reason why we weren’t coming when we said we could?”

For years, China was “a leading country of origin” for adoptions and had one of the smoothest and most efficient programs. According to state department data between 1999 and 2023, more than 80,000 children from China were adopted into the US.

The landscape of intercountry adoption has changed over the past twenty years, and there’s been a steep decline in the number of such adoptions. In 2004, adoption across foreign borders peaked at 22,988. In 2023, only 1,275 children were welcomed into families through intercountry adoption.

The reasons for the global decline range from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, sending countries halting their programs, and countries and cultures becoming more open to domestic foster care and adoption.

Another shift is that many of the children available for international adoption are older children and children with moderate to severe medical special needs. The waiting children are some of the most vulnerable, and for many, their only chance to grow up in a safe, loving, permanent home is having the option of intercountry adoption.

China’s announcement is devastating because it means that thousands of children will likely grow up in institutions and won’t have access to families around the world who would be willing to give them loving homes. It remains unclear and unlikely that China will allow the waiting families to finalize their adoptions.

The waiting Chinese children range in age from 5 to 16, and all have moderate medical needs. In addition to being separated from the families pursuing them, most of these children have gone without medical care and educational opportunities.

Christians should care about this announcement because God designed children to flourish in the safety and love of families. Each of these children is made in God’s image, and our hearts should be attuned to the suffering of the vulnerable.

Adoption is complex because it involves loss and sacrifice for all parties involved—birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. Even though adoption is intricate, it must remain viable for children around the world who long to be raised in families where they are known and loved, not in impersonal institutions.

Although many orphanages in China seek to care well for children, institutions aren’t able to offer a child the same benefits, love, and safety as a permanent family. Children flourish to their greatest potential when their physical and emotional needs are being met in individualized ways.

Research has shown that the longer children remain in institutions, the more developmentally behind they can fall in comparison to their peers who are not in institutionalized settings. While we have great respect for professionals caring for children, there is no substitute for permanent families. One of the positive shifts over the past few years has been from Christians who understand and support local family-based care and deinstitutionalization.

Beijing’s termination of intercountry adoptions officially began on August 28, one day before US national security advisor Jake Sullivan met with Chinese president Xi Jinping. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and top US government officials should swiftly urge China to allow the waiting families who’ve been matched to complete their adoptions.

It is crucial that our government use all mechanisms available to seek a resolution that allows these families to complete their long-pending adoptions and ensure that the rights and well-being of children remain at the forefront of any diplomatic efforts.

My own life was forever transformed because of international adoption. I’m an adoptee from Romania. My five siblings and a cousin were all adopted internationally from Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. I remember helplessly watching President Vladimir Putin sign a law that prohibited the adoption of Russian children by US citizens beginning in 2013. It struck me that had the timing of my own family’s adoption story been different, my very own Russian siblings might never have joined our family.

My husband and I welcomed our son home through international adoption from India last year. I have the unique vantage point of being both an adoptee and an adoptive mother. My son and I, though our stories are distinct, both know what it’s like to join a family through international adoption.

When we said yes to our son’s file, we gleefully texted friends and family, joyfully showed his picture to anyone who’d pay attention, decorated his room, prayed fervently for him, and achingly counted down the days until we could be with our son.

The same was true for many of the waiting families who’ve held space in their hearts, homes, and lives for the children in China they were pursuing. Their grief and uncertainty of waiting an additional four and a half years only to hear this announcement is truly heartbreaking.

Scripture reminds us that “the king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord” (Prov. 21:1, ESV). May we boldly ask the Lord to soften the heart of President Xi so that he might allow the waiting children to join their families. May we remember the adoptees from China, families who’ve adopted children from China, the waiting families, and the waiting children.

Christians must be at the forefront of fighting for what is right and just. We should use our voices to advocate for these children to be brought home into the permanency of loving families. Jesus loves the little children of the world, and so should we.

Chelsea Sobolik serves as director of government relations for World Relief and is the former director of public policy for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). She is the author of Called to Cultivate: A Gospel Vision for Women and Work and Longing for Motherhood: Holding on to Hope in the Midst of Childlessness.

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Theology

Joseph and the Unintended Authoritarian Politics

Carmen Joy Imes

Contributor

His economic policies were later used by Pharoah to oppress the Hebrews in Exodus. What can this teach us about politics today?

Joseph Explains Pharaoh's Dream by Adrien Guignet

WikiMedia Commons

As an Old Testament scholar, I’ve been spending much of my time writing a commentary on Exodus. And as I worked through the first chapter, considering the predicament of the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, it hit me: The exploitation of the Israelites was made possible by the drastic administrative policies Joseph implemented during the years of famine. The descendants of Jacob had arrived in Egypt under the (somewhat) mutually beneficial arrangements Joseph had made with the support of the previous Pharaoh.

The curtain of Exodus opens on this scene: A new Pharaoh who despised the Hebrews arose and exploited their labor for his own ends, using Joseph’s own crisis-era economic policies. To me, this story offers a cautionary tale about why the personal integrity and character of our political leaders may matter just as much as their platforms or policies—a principle we should keep in mind as we cast our ballots this November.

Joseph is often cast by interpreters as one of the few Old Testament leaders characterized by integrity, along with Daniel, Deborah, Joshua, and Josiah. Arguably, Joseph lacked emotional intelligence in his younger years—reporting to his brothers the dreams he had of his future glory and their obeisance. As the eldest son of his father’s favorite wife, Joseph was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a colorful cloak to prove it.

Jealous of Joseph, his brothers attacked and sold him into slavery in Egypt. Yet Joseph’s abilities in household management resulted in him running his master’s entire household. You know the story: After his master’s wife tried to seduce Joseph, she falsely accused him of assault, and he landed in prison. Again, he won the trust of the prison warden, who offered him more responsibilities.

Joseph’s spiritual discernment aided his fellow prisoners, and eventually he found himself standing before a troubled Pharaoh to interpret his dream. He offered shrewd advice on how to navigate an impending food crisis, so Pharaoh put him in charge.

In the first year of the famine, people spent all their money buying grain from the Egyptian government (Gen. 47:14–15). Joseph had stockpiled it through a mandatory 20 percent tax during the years of plenty (41:34–36). During the next year of famine, people traded their livestock for grain (47:16–17).

And by the final year of famine, people began offering themselves and their land in exchange for food (vv. 18–19). Pharaoh provided seed for planting that year and laid claim to 20 percent of the harvest going forward (vv. 23–26).

Through these emergency measures, Pharaoh ended up owning almost all the land, and heavy taxation became a regular feature of Egyptian life. Although the Egyptians were grateful to Joseph for saving their lives (v. 25), according to Genesis, he “reduced the people to servitude, from one end of Egypt to the other” (v. 21).

Joseph became a powerful man. His brothers were terrified of the authority he wielded (50:15–18). Yet Joseph’s forgiveness allowed them all to live at peace (vv. 19–21). In other words, his integrity made the difference between benevolence or exploitation at the hands of the government.

That is, until the new Pharaoh arose, one who had no connection to Joseph and felt the Hebrew population was a threat to Egypt’s national security (Ex. 1:6–10). Building on the foundation Joseph had unwittingly laid, this new Pharaoh exploited the Israelites’ labor and “made their lives bitter” (v. 14).

The narrator’s signals encourage us to see the connections. Exodus begins with a list, borrowed from Genesis, of Jacob’s sons, who had moved to Egypt with their 70 descendants (Gen. 46:8–27; Ex. 1:1–5). The new Pharaoh’s attempt to “deal wisely” with the Hebrew people (Ex. 1:10, KJV) is a verbal echo of the wisdom Joseph had demonstrated (Gen. 41:39). And finally, his concern that the Hebrews would be “added to” (yasaf) their enemies (Ex. 1:10) echoes Joseph’s own name (Yosef), which means “added to” (Gen. 30:24).

Read in the most charitable way possible, Joseph’s policies were neutral—a shrewd path to survival for a country facing a large-scale humanitarian crisis. Yet those same policies wielded by another leader—one marred by prejudice and lacking a commitment to human flourishing—spelled disaster.

In this light, we might ask ourselves: Does it matter how our political leaders conduct themselves in private? Should we be concerned about issues of character? Or should we prioritize platform and policy over personal integrity?

Growing up, the answers to these questions were obvious. I came of age during Clinton’s presidency, when the adults in my Christian community insisted that spurious sexual behavior was a political deal-breaker. (To be clear, they already opposed him, citing, among other things, that he was a “ladies’ man” with a history of dubious business deals.) Yet today, many of these same people are planning to vote for former president Donald Trump for the third time—a man whose sexual and financial history makes former president Clinton’s indiscretions sound amateurish.

I’m not the only one wondering, What changed? When did we decide that character no longer matters in our nation’s leaders? What justifies our acceptance of public officials whose personal lives lack ethical standards? Why is criminal behavior no longer a disqualification for public office?

CT’s editor in chief Russell Moore notes that Gen Xers and millennials are leaving the church at an alarming rate. However, he explains, “We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.” Many young people are losing faith in the evangelical legacy.

Until recently, many conservative Christians said that a pro-life party platform justified their vote for a man whose personal life was deeply problematic. But things have changed even on this front, as the Republican Party appears to distance itself from its former approach to pro-life issues. As their presidential nominee and former president Trump recently stated, “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

Since former president Trump’s Supreme Court appointments secured the end of Roe v. Wade, this announcement feels like a bait and switch. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, since Trump supported abortion before his presidential bid. This is the kind of betrayal that can happen time and again whenever we vote for candidates who have a checkered history with integrity—and it happens on both sides of the political aisle.

For instance, evangelicals like myself have also expressed disappointment with President Biden’s broken promises on refugee resettlement and immigration. As I saw for myself on a trip to the Mexican border with World Relief, his administration tolerated detention of asylum seekers in unsanitary conditions for days awaiting processing. Instead of receiving a more humane and efficient approach to border security, asylum seekers released into the US often face a wait of more than five years for a court date.

As a registered independent, I’m looking to support leaders who model a consistent character and make decisions that lead to the long-term flourishing of our nation. And as a Bible scholar, I find passages throughout the Bible that support both personal piety and social responsibility—in ways that do not fit neatly into either major political party.

It may be too soon to tell whether the American Solidarity Party offers a path forward for voters like me, but I’m encouraged by how their platform seeks to honor the values I hold dear. No doubt many believe a third-party vote is wasted at best and dangerous at worst. Such pragmatism is understandable, and I respect those who have carefully weighed their options and decided to vote for what they believe to be the lesser of two evils.

But my point is that we must not turn a blind eye to the character flaws in any political candidate—or worse, feel the need to defend them simply to justify our vote. The Joseph story reminds us that integrity matters universally, especially in politics. A platform is only as good as the person it elevates. Likewise, voting for policies alone is not enough if the next person in office can simply reverse their precepts or apply benefits unevenly.

It matters how our public officials conduct themselves in private, because eventually their true colors will show in public whenever it is no longer politically expedient for them to stay hidden. No governmental system or political party is perfect—which is precisely why the person we vote into the Oval Office can make all the difference.

Joseph’s story is also one example among many in history where a government’s response to crisis paved the way for later abuses of power. Joseph worked within the political system to save his family and an entire nation, unaware of how his policies would eventually be abused. This is why we must place guardrails on government authority—as well as business and labor practices—to protect future generations from unscrupulous leaders tempted to use the system to their advantage.

At the end of the day, as N. T. Wright said in a recent interview with CT, faithful Christian engagement with politics doesn’t mean “that the church should be running the world, but that the church has a vital role to play in speaking truth to power—in holding up a mirror to power and in modeling what God’s new creation should look like.”

Let’s not forget that people take their whole selves into political office. Character matters, for our candidates and for ourselves.

Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and author of Bearing God’s Name and Being God’s Image. She’s currently writing her next book, Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters.

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Culture

I Had a Horrific Childhood. I’m Glad I Exist.

Randi Bianchi

The prospect of a rough upbringing, even one as traumatic as mine, should never be “remedied” by abortion.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash

It is midnight, and my phone is ringing. Blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I roll over to see my older sister’s name flashing across the screen.

“Hello?”

My sister says nothing at first. She is crying. The sound jolts me awake.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Finally, she speaks: “I killed my baby.”

Shock lodges itself in my throat. My sister’s pain is suddenly in my chest, crushing my heart against my rib cage. I scramble down the bunk bed ladder, my feet slipping on the rungs, and tiptoe past my sleeping roommate. “Just a second,” I whisper, holding my hand over the phone’s speaker until I’ve left the dorm.

“He made me do it,” she says, sobbing. “I didn’t think it would be a big deal.” The pavement grits against my bare feet. “I killed my daughter. I’m going to hell.”

Eventually, I discerned what had happened. My sister had been pregnant. And then, at 12 weeks, she’d had an abortion. She was pressured by her boyfriend, who said that he couldn’t afford to take care of the children he’d already had with other women, let alone another one.

I am not equipped. I have no words to offer.

I clutch the phone to my ear and I stand in the wind and I listen.

When we were young, my sister and I had many late-night talks about our determination to be better parents than our own. The abuse we braved as children in the years before we were adopted is almost too heavy to express, too horrible to justify with language. Our parents were addicted to drugs. They bloodied and bruised us; they admired the whip marks their belts left on our skin, and put their cigarettes out on our elbows and knees. Until the age of eight, I ate only baby food.

My sister and I survived together. And yet as we grew, my sister began to shut me out. She left home suddenly, with no way to contact her; she entered a relationship with an abusive man. After a while, I stopped fighting to keep a connection. The door between us stayed closed, and I stopped knocking—until it cracked open that chilly spring night.

That desperate call was more than five years ago, but my sister’s words still ring in my ears. She thought she was doing the right thing. The father was abusive and money was tight. But her grief was a confirmation: Every human life has intrinsic value, no matter the poverty or cruelty or chaos that life is born into. My sister had discovered this the hard way, the same way she had learned most of her lessons.

“Every child, a wanted child.” The 1923 Planned Parenthood slogan has a horrific subtext; if a woman believes that she’s ill-equipped to be a mother, or that her partner is ill-equipped to be a father, or that her home will be an unhappy one, then abortion is encouraged. It’s not just an option; it’s a solution. It’s responsible. It’s the right thing to do.

Pro-abortion advocates have long suggested that abortion access improves future outcomes for women and children. In June of 1978, the National Abortion Rights Action League published Legal Abortion: A Speaker’s and Debater’s Notebook. Among other talking points, it asserted that “a policy that makes contraception and abortion freely available will greatly reduce the number of unwanted children, and thereby curb the tragic rise of child abuse in our great country.”

These arguments have persisted into the 21st century. In 2002, an article in the American Economic Reviewclaimed that “unwanted children may be more subject to child abuse and neglect by their parents or care-takers than are desired children. … Abortion availability may reduce the number of unwanted children … leading to lower rates of child abuse and neglect.”

“There’s a lot to be said for preventing babies from being born who are going to be unwelcome and therefore have a rotten childhood,” argued a Guardian columnist in 2016. “A few years ago the crime figures of New York were suddenly much lower than they had been, and researchers linked the fact to high numbers of abortions in the year when the potential criminals would otherwise have been born.”

“Unwanted” children are less likely to succeed in school and make money, wrote a trio of psychology professors around the time of the Dobbs leak: “We are focused on preventing the transmission of risk factors for poor economic, social, physical and mental well-being for parents and children.”

“Every child, a wanted child.” By this formulation, a child’s dignity is determined not by the fact of their existence but by the extent of their parents’ desire and their likelihood of future “success.” A child’s personhood is contingent. It would be better for suffering children, children like me and my sister, to have never been born at all than to experience those cigarette burns and baby-food lunches.

But the prospect of a rough upbringing, even one as traumatic as mine, should never be remedied by removing a child’s opportunity to live at all. Abortion discounts the redemptive power of God—and the “wantedness” inherent in our creation.

Genesis tells us that we are sanctified, set apart, created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27). Psalm 139 elucidates the intrinsic value that God places on every person, value that comes only from the Father, not from any earthly parents. We are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” knit together, our days ordained.

Mark 8:36 shows that one human soul alone has more worth than the entire world of material possessions: “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Even in the direst circumstances—even if a child is born with a deformity, even if a child will go hungry, even if a child will be hurt—God imparts boundless value on their life. My sister should have kept her daughter, even given her boyfriend, her instability, her past. In spite of the pain, I’m glad that my parents kept us.

God’s hand is evident in my life, especially after my adoption by two wonderful people. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and with highest honors. God gave me gifts in writing and music. Now, I lead worship for youth and young adult programs at my church. My participation in youth ministry is an outlet for me to ensure all children are shown love.

“Every child, a wanted child” implies that the goodness of my life today isn’t worth my bad beginning. But I know that’s not true.

My sister April is a mother now. She has two beautiful sons, Edward and Justin. April learned she was pregnant with Edward only a month after she lost her daughter. “When I got pregnant again a month later,” she reflects, “it was almost like God was saying, ‘Did you think I didn’t know what I was doing?’”

Randi Bianchi is a church administrator and writer.

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Ideas

The Acceptance Stage of Lost Evangelical Influence

Matthew Kaemingk

Five pathways toward breaking the cycle of political outrage, depression, and lament without settling for passivity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

American Christianity is in cultural and political decline. In 1937, 70 percent of Americans reported that they belonged to a church. These numbers held relatively steady through much of the 20th century. But in the past 25 years, an estimated 40 million Americans have stopped attending church. As Ernest Hemingway said, bankruptcy comes gradually and then suddenly.

The American public square, previously white and Protestant, is quickly becoming a pluralistic bazaar of diverse cultures, religions, ideologies, and lifestyles. Once dominant and uncontested, Christianity is increasingly one moral vision among many.

How are evangelicals responding to the decline of Christianity’s cultural and political power?

Contrary to media caricatures, evangelicals are not a monolith. We’re responding to this decline in a wide variety of ways. The classical stages of grief can offer an insightful tool for understanding the ways evangelicals are processing their cultural and political decline (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance).

It is quite possible to meet an evangelical at any stage in this grieving process. But of course, this scheme does not fit everyone. Some evangelicals are not grieving at all. They actually celebrate Christianity’s loss of power. This group believes it would be fundamentally good and healthy for Christians to take a moratorium on political engagement, seeing it as beneficial for both America and the church.

While I sympathize with their sentiments, I must object. I believe that Christians are called by God to engage in political life. We must actively seek public justice and mercy. We must vigorously work for the flourishing for our neighbors. This requires us to be involved in politics and exert some level of political power and influence toward these ends. Privileged Christians who wish to politically disengage are abandoning the very neighbors they’re commanded to protect, serve, and love.

No, I believe it is entirely appropriate for evangelicals to grieve their loss of cultural and political power. That said, as any counselor will tell you, there are productive and unproductive forms of grief. The bereft are not permitted to remain in denial, anger, depression, or bargaining forever. Nor are they allowed to hurt others as they wail.

Here’s how we might interact with these stages. The first stage of grief is denial. While some evangelicals are still in denial over the decline of Christianity, their numbers are dwindling by the day. It is becoming harder and harder to ignore Christianity’s marginalization in the media, the academy, the marketplace, arts, and politics. For those still in denial, there is not much to say.

The second stage is anger. Evangelical rage makes for great TV; infantile evangelical leaders coming unhinged attract a lot of clicks. It is thus no surprise that the bulk of media attention has been trained on evangelical fits of outrage, victimhood, and lament over the emergence of a post-Christian America.

The third stage is bargaining. Quite a few articles and books have explored the disastrous ways in which evangelical leaders are increasingly willing to make a devil’s bargain for a few scraps of political power and access.

While much ink has been spilled on these forms of evangelical denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, the final stage has received precious little attention. What might look like for American evangelicals to step into a state of acceptance?

I’m not a neutral observer on this issue. I’m an evangelical who believes that American Christianity should adopt a form of non-passive acceptance. To be clear, acceptance is not acquiescence. By non-passive, I hope to indicate my fervent support for ardent Christian engagement in public life. Accepting America’s ideological diversity is not a sign of my resignation from American public life. As an evangelical, I still intend to advocate for a biblical approach to justice, peace, and flourishing in our nation.

With this clear, let’s return to the question before us: How might evangelicals progress through their grieving process and emerge from various states of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression? As far as I can tell, at least five things are needed.

The first is a change in theology. All political philosophy begins with a rather simple question: “Who’s in charge?” Academics call this the question of sovereignty. For Christian political philosophers, the answer, of course, is Jesus. Christ alone is ultimately the one in charge, not kings, politicians, or ideologies. There is one throne, and it belongs to Christ.

Unfortunately, many American evangelicals suffer from a weak Christology when it comes to politics. They seem to imagine that Jesus is either absent or weak in American public life, that he is not strong enough—not tough enough—to take America “back.” Given this apparent weakness, evangelicals cast about looking for a strong politician who can do Christ’s job for him. After all, if Jesus is not up to the task, we need someone who can do it for him.

Carrie Underwood’s music is good for everyone, but evangelicals in particular should work “Jesus Take the Wheel” back into their playlists. Too many American evangelicals are trying to white-knuckle a political wheel that does not belong to them, that they do not, cannot, and should not control. If Christ is in the driver’s seat, that means Christians are not. We must learn to place our trust in the political sovereignty of Jesus.

The second change is tactical. As evangelicals accept their status as a political minority, they will need to learn how to play with others. They will need to build tactical partnerships with other “moral sub-cultures.” Rather than demonizing Catholics, Mormons, and Muslims, evangelicals will need to learn to collaborate on mutually agreed upon political goals. Tactically speaking, evangelical leaders are too weak to go it alone. To succeed, we need to make friends.

Evangelicals in the Netherlands offer an interesting path forward in this regard. They’ve been a minority political voice for decades. In a recent effort to curtail the practice of prostitution in the Netherlands, local evangelicals formed a common political effort with left-wing feminist groups. Despite their deep ideological differences, they agreed on three things: Women have profound value, their bodies should not be commodified, and they are worthy of protection from the moral privations of the sexual marketplace.

Dutch evangelical leaders did not bargain away their Christian principles to make this political deal. And, importantly, evangelicals did not attack their leaders for collaborating with left-wing feminists. These Christian brothers and sisters have accepted that if they wish to seek public justice in the Netherlands, they need to partner with diverse groups.

The third change is one of posture. Some evangelicals are acting like martyrs hunched over in a state of depression about their loss of power. Others are desperately grasping about for what little power they can grab before it slips through their fingers. If we’re in anger, we may have a fighting posture—head down, fists up. If we’re bargaining, we prostrate ourselves before politicians who promise political scraps in return. None of these postures serves us well.

Like a basketball player who can only dribble to the right, evangelical voters have become predictable. Politically speaking, this makes them easy to manipulate, pigeonhole, use, and ignore—a politician’s dream. Whether crouching, bowing, or fighting, evangelicals lack the posture necessary to adapt and respond to a dynamic and pluralistic political landscape.

One of the first lessons a basketball player learns is the power of the three-point stance. With one foot forward and the ball in front of his chest, the player becomes a “triple threat” and can in an instant pass, shoot, or dribble. The defender doesn’t know where he’s going next, so he has options. The three-point stance enables the player to use creativity, imagination, and skill to improvise, adapt, and overcome.

Evangelicals need a new posture that will enable them to collaborate and contest, fight and forgive, persuade and listen. Our game is in desperate need of some new moves.

This need leads us to the fourth change. The future of evangelical political engagement is going to require a profound renewal of the evangelical imagination. Any artist will tell you that things like creativity and inspiration are tricky to come by. They can be fickle friends, here one day and gone the next. There is no three-step process to “becoming politically imaginative.” But there are a few practices that could certainly help.

Evangelicals will need to shift from a life of political consumption to one of cultural creativity. Rather than consuming endless hours of political vitriol via cable news, talk radio, and social media, we need to focus on—to put it frankly—becoming more interesting human beings. It may seem an odd political prescription, but evangelicals need to throw more dinner parties, attend more poetry classes, take up woodworking, and start book clubs or bowling leagues. We should serve refugee families or learn a new language, learn to cook or throw a neighborhood picnic.

The mindless consumption of political rage will never produce an evangelical political witness marked by creativity, imagination, or wisdom. A life filled with play, beauty, learning, and love offers fertile soil for a much healthier political culture.

Extracting oneself from the clatter of the 24/7 news cycle and investing one’s hands and heart in life-giving practices can do a great deal for one’s political posture and practices. The iron grip of political outrage, depression, and bitterness must be broken. Embodied activities can liberate evangelicals to navigate a polarized world of deep differences with a renewed and open-hearted imagination.

The final change for American evangelicalism brings us back to the heart of the gospel. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). The center of evangelical politics must be the Good News.

If this is true, ours should be a politics of gratitude, not grief. The global evangelical movement, regardless of culture or context, has always agreed that the gospel is central. The evangelical life begins with an experience of grace and gratitude—not fear, anger, or resentment. This personal experience of grace in Christ has public consequences for evangelicals who claim to follow him. The hospitality we’ve experienced in Christ is a hospitality that must be demonstrated before a watching world.

America is an increasingly pluralistic marketplace of diverse religions, ideologies, and lifestyles. How should evangelicals politically respond to this diversity? When should we listen and learn? When should we stand and fight? When do we collaborate? When do we contest?

Dynamic political environments call for dynamic political postures and practices. On this side of eternity, the boundary lines are not always clear. This should not concern us as long as we remain clear on our center.

Matthew Kaemingk is the Richard John Mouw Associate Professor of Faith and Public Life at Fuller Theological Seminary. His podcast on faith and politics is called Zealots at the Gate. His recent books include Reformed Public Theology and Work and Worship.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

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Ideas

How to Talk About God and Politics in Polarized Times

Seth Freeman

My work in conflict management helped me develop an effective way to navigate sensitive topics. Here’s what I found.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

How do we talk about Big Things when it seems so risky? It feels hard these days to even mention Jesus in conversation when we are faced with hostility toward Christianity. As faith is declining in the West, how will people find Christ if we can’t talk about him with nonbelieving friends and family? Our churches, families, and communities often feel so polarized we can’t talk about politics or values either.

So we’re understandably wary of talking about God or Christ or politics with anyone outside our close circles, and sometimes even within them. We fear it will just lead to arguments or damage our relationships. We don’t have the answers to tough questions. We can’t even agree on the facts. Loved ones seem uninterested or resentful about views different from their own. Small wonder we avoid evangelism and political conversation with friends and family, never mind strangers.

But I am confident there’s an effective, enjoyable, and winsome way to talk with people about Christ that also works well in discussions about any sensitive issue, even in heated times.

For years now, my students have used a simple method to have excellent “hot topic” conversations with friends they strongly disagree with—conversations about every conceivable political issue around the world. “It went so well,” they often report, “my friend and I feel closer now, and we want to have more conversations like that.”

I’ve seen the power of this method firsthand. For example, when I used this method a few months ago in a conversation with a secular friend, he said as we parted, “That was the best conversation I’ve ever had.” We’d been talking about God for two hours. This method has also equipped me to talk with people I disagree with about highly charged political issues in lengthy conversations that leave us feeling energized and warm toward each other.

Knowing how to discuss important and sensitive topics can make you a better friend, family member, and follower of Jesus. It’s not about winning an argument; it’s about being more loving and connecting more deeply and joyfully with someone you care about. It may also be the best way to help gradually change someone’s heart. The Barna Group found that an approach like this is the most effective way to reach nonbelievers. Best of all, it’s a method that’s surprisingly learnable.

The key is three words: paraphrase, praise, and probe. The method: Privately, over coffee or a meal, nudge the conversation into a Big Topic and ask your friend what they think about it. Then:

Paraphrase: Repeat the gist of your friend’s thoughts so well they say, “Exactly!”
Praise: Highlight anything they said that you can sincerely honor.
Probe: Ask about your concerns, curiosities, and confusions as a co-seeker of truth.

Do this two or three times. Then, share your own perspective and let the conversation unfold from there, returning to paraphrase, praise, probe whenever there’s tension. When you want to exit the conversation, simply express gratitude and change the subject: “Thank you. I’ve enjoyed this. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Let’s talk more about it another time. How’s your weekend looking?”

Here’s an example of how it works. You mention to your friend, “I see X died the other day. What do you think happens when we die?” She replies, and you paraphrase back to her, “So you’re saying death really is the end, and the afterlife is just wishful thinking. And believing a fantasy like that is a distraction from the important work of caring for people here and now. Am I getting that right?”

“Exactly!”

Then you add, “I appreciate your concern about this life and your worry that someone might focus on the afterlife too much and stop caring about this one. I so appreciate your commitment to taking care of people here and now. I share it.” She breathes a sigh of relief.

Then you probe: “So let me hear more. How do we get to that conclusion that this is all there is?” Whatever she replies is useful. You paraphrase, praise, and probe again, delving more deeply into her thoughts, feelings and, perhaps, her story (which may be particularly illuminating).

Eventually, the conversation generally becomes safe and rich enough that your friend is open to and interested in hearing your own perspective: “I do find a faith in an afterlife makes me more focused on this one. For example …” And you’ve begun a rich and often eye-opening conversation.

Though they usually do quite well with it, students sometimes struggle with this method when they use it spontaneously. Some casually turn to it in the middle of an argument, after things have gotten testy. Not good. Others try to use it in a group setting where others can chime in, interrupt, and argue. One tried it at a bar. Ugh.

I’ve seen most of my students do better when they plan ahead for a private conversation and choose a quiet, comfortable setting. They might invite a friend to talk about a topic or simply watch for an occasion to use this method during a conversation. For a conversation about Christ, it may be better to take an indirect approach, looking for a topic that touches on spiritual matters, like an event that raises the problem of evil or a movie that raises a philosophical question.

Why is Paraphrase, Praise, Probe so effective? First, because it’s grounded in humility, a quality that’s so winsome that the most admired people are renowned for it—Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, and far more importantly, Christ himself.

This approach also adds safety and lowers defensiveness because it validates and respects the other person without requiring you to agree with their conclusions. People feel safe and relax when they sense you deeply respect them, and they trust you more. The approach also slows the conversation down, making you both less reactive.

Also, it gives you a chance to learn and frees you from having to rebut points you don’t have answers for. (“That’s an intriguing point. I have more to learn about that.”) Barna found that Christians who listen generously like this are markedly more winsome; nonbelievers say they’re much more open to further conversation and learning about Christ from someone who listens to them than from someone who tries a hard-sell approach.

Paraphrase, Praise, Probe also lets us emulate the apostle Paul’s approach to evangelism. In Acts 17, we see Paul at the Areopagus reasoning with the Athenians, demonstrating he deeply understands their beliefs then praising them for their religiosity before speaking about Christ.

As Tim Keller observed, if Christians just monologue and argue, we’ll get nowhere with unbelievers. Paul, he notes, is not preaching in that passage of Acts. Rather, Paul is “entering into dialogue … a Socratic method.” That means, Keller explains, that you should come inside the other person’s perspective and listen sympathetically. Then and only then do you challenge their view from its own standards. In other words, you probe.

In fact, knowing how to talk about Big Things with our perceived opponents or true enemies can transform us and them. Daryl Davis, an African American R & B musician, dialogued with KKK leaders and, in the process, led dozens of them out of the Klan, moving them to repent of their racism. Yet he never asked them to do so—he just had generous and inquisitive conversations with them. The ability to talk across chasms of thought can make us peacemakers and agents for change.

Here, then, are two safe, easy ways to practice using Paraphrase, Praise, Probe:

Watch a YouTube interview of someone you strongly disagree with. Stop the video, practice Paraphrase, Praise, Probe, resume the video, and then repeat. Perhaps get feedback from a friend who’s watching you.

Or, try it with a friend this week. Choose someone you usually agree with and pick a nonreligious topic you each care about somewhat but not passionately (Minimum wage? Greatest basketball player?). Invite your friend to talk about this topic with you for 15 minutes. Intentionally use Paraphrase, Praise, Probe. See what effect it has, get some feedback afterwards, and then try it again the following week with someone else, perhaps nudging a conversation toward God, salvation, or another Big Thing.

We change the world by the way we listen and talk. Paraphrase, Praise, Probe can help us be that change, living out more fully on Monday what we pray to become on Sunday, helping us act more like the God we want others to know. It can help us gently, safely start conversations that could one day lead a person to Christ. Additionally, it can help us build bridges across political and ideological divides. What could be better?

Seth Freeman is a professor of conflict management and negotiation at the NYU Stern School of Business and Columbia University and the author of 15 Tools to Turn the Tide: A Step-By-Step Playbook for Empowered Negotiating. He has given talks to The Veritas Forum, InterVarsity Fellowship, and Christian college groups.

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News

Died: Andar Ismail, Prolific Writer Who Made Theology Simple

Hendro Suwito

With his Selamat series, the Indonesian pastor wrote more than 1,000 short stories illuminating Jesus’ life and teachings.

Edits by Christianity Today / Source Image: Courtesy of Sunoko Samiadji

Andar Ismail, a prolific Christian writer who distilled theological truths into short stories accessible to ordinary Indonesians, died of congestive heart failure on August 25. He was 84.

From 1981 to 2022, the pastor and seminary professor wrote 33 books, each containing 33 short stories, for his Selamat series. Ismail described his literary style as gado-gado (“hodgepodge”)—after an Indonesian dish with mixed vegetables and peanut sauce—because the stories were an amalgamation of genres: Bible exposition, stories of Jesus or characters of the Bible, church history, biographies of Christian figures, comments on books or art, humorous anecdotes, and personal reflections.

While other Indonesian Christian authors wrote for the educated class, Ismail’s books were entertaining and simple enough for lay Christians—as well as nonbelievers and people of other faiths—to grasp. And the readers abound: His books have sold tens of thousands of copies, a rare feat in Indonesia, where interest in reading is low.

Even after finishing the Selamat series, he published two more collections of short stories. In addition to his literary contributions, he also pastored Indonesian Christian Church (GKI) Samanhudi in Jakarta for 40 years and taught theology and Christian education at Jakarta Theological Seminary, the oldest seminary in the country.

The 33 books of the Selamat series, and the 33 stories in each one, honor the number of years Jesus lived on earth, Ismail once told Validnews Indonesia. (Selamat is the Indonesian word for “greetings, congratulations, and salvation.”)

“I was mesmerized … by the 33 years of Jesus’ life,” Ismail said. “How he was still so young, yet he had done so much. A short yet very impactful life.”

Born as Siem Hong An in 1940, Ismail was raised in a poor Christian Chinese-Indonesian family in Bandung, West Java. When Ismail was a child, his father, who owned a small factory, suffered from a prolonged lung illness that left him unable to work, forcing Ismail’s mother to support the family by selling homemade cakes. The fourth of six children, Ismail recalled his family receiving food and payment for school fees from their local church.

Yet despite what they lacked financially, Ismail’s mother nurtured her son’s imagination through telling stories and encouraging him to make up his own. Even though he only had leaves and branches to play with, he created his own imaginary world.

Beginning at age four, his mother brought him to Sunday school, where he loved to listen to Bible stories. He recalls in his book Tukang Ngantar Selamat (Courier of Salvation) how, one time, his Sunday School teacher, Sioe Bing, enthusiastically told the story of Jesus quieting the storm on the Lake of Galilee. As he waved his arms to portray the raging seas, he accidentally slapped Ismail’s face.

Yet Ismail looked back at that moment fondly, because it awoke in him a new dream. When the “waves of Galilee” landed right in his face, the seed for his future was planted. It then blossomed several years later when he wrote, “I want to walk along the same path as Uncle Sioe Bing. I want to be the storyteller of the Bible.”

Ismail nourished that love of stories by frequenting the Bandung library, where he read books by Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens, as well as a local Christian bookstore, where he read Dutch theologians Johannes Verkuyl and Hendrik Kraemer. At a young age, he saw the power of writing. While delivering newspapers, he realized that people would wait eagerly for him to bring them the latest issue and that this anticipation made him feel important. Ismail reasoned that if the deliverer of the newspaper was indispensable, how much more was the writer of the newspaper? “Since then, I wanted to be a writer,” Ismail told Validnews.

At 18, Ismail studied at Balewijoto Theological School in Malang, East Java, to become a pastor. Once again, his church rallied around him to help him pay for schooling. At times, he found his teachers difficult to understand, as they used words that felt esoteric and gave long-winded lectures. But this challenge only further motivated him to become a writer and teacher. “I wrote, driven by the desire to explain something difficult easily, not long but brief, not boring but captivating, and with humor,” Ismail told Validnews.

After graduation in 1963, he began serving at GKI Samanhudi, a Presbyterian church. Two years later, he was ordained and married his wife, Constance (Stans) Budihalim, a Sunday school teacher. He served at GKI Samanhudi for 40 years, occasionally studying abroad. Among others, he studied at a university in Utrecht, Netherlands; Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul; and Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond.

In order to equip the next generation of Indonesian pastors, Ismail started teaching theology and Christian education at Jakarta Theological Seminary as a part-time lecturer in 1978. He went on to become a full professor and taught at the seminary until 2005.

During Ismail’s funeral, one of his students, Nanang (who only goes by this one name), shared that he was once called into Ismail’s office after a pedagogy writing class. “My heart was beating fast because he was known as a very strict lecturer,” Nanang said. When Nanang entered the room, Ismail was holding the paper he had turned in. His anxiety faded as Ismail asked for his permission to share Nanang’s writing as an example for his younger students.

“I considered this as his way of appreciating my writing,” Nanang said. Now a pastor of GKI Mangga Dua Church in Jakarta, he often shares his writing on social media.

Ismail’s childhood dream of becoming a writer first came to fruition in 1981 while he studied in Seoul. There, he wrote his first collection of 33 short stories, entitled Selamat Natal (Merry Christmas). It included biographies of John the Baptist and King Herod, a story entitled “If Jesus was born in Jakarta,” and an essay on how Christmas is only meaningful if we accept Jesus’ death on the cross for our sins.His second book, Selamat Paskah (Happy Easter), was published a year later, in 1982.

The books received a positive response from readers. Yet it would be another decade before Ismail published more books in the series, as he was busy teaching and then pursuing his PhD in the US. When he returned to Jakarta to become a full-time lecturer at Jakarta Theological Seminary, his publisher, BPK Gunung Mulia, asked him to continue the series.

It took him a few more years, but in 1992, he wrote the third book in the series, Selamat Pagi Tuhan! (“Good Morning, Lord!”), and then started to write one book a year until he finished all 33 books in 2022. Ismail wrote each book by hand, and his close friend Sunoko Nugroho Samiadji then transcribed it on the computer. Samiadji, who viewed Ismail as his spiritual father, was inspired by Ismail’s discipline and perseverance to keep writing when he was ill.

“He had even completed ten story drafts for his next books, although his health had substantially been deteriorating these last four months,” Samiadji said after Ismail’s passing.

Ismail’s Selamat stories focus on the life, teachings, and practices of Jesus, including prayer, ministry, teaching, work, integrity, and love. By using down-to-earth language, Ismail hoped to help readers examine their lives and faith.

To connect with people of other faiths, some of his stories describe how Muslim poets and artists viewed Jesus.

One famous journalist and writer, Sobron Aidit, said on the back cover of one of Ismail’s books that while he was a Communist and exposed to Islam in his earlier years, he was “often confused, looking for a handle on various problems.” Friends sent him the Selamat series, and he said his “heart was touched, and the more I loved Andar’s writing. From year to year, I continued to examine his books. Finally at the age of 66, I confessed Christ as my Savior.”

For two decades, the Selamat books were BPK Gunung Mulia’s bestsellers. For his contributions to the Indonesian church, Ismail won the Christian Art and Literature Festival’s Tokoh Inspiratif (Inspirational Figure) award in August 2018.

The Christian Conference of Asia called Ismail and fellow author Eka Darmaputera “undoubtedly the most prolific Christian authors in this archipelago” on the back of a Selamat book. “Their writings are based on thoughtful theological scholarship, yet easily consumed by the average parishioner. Both Eka and Andar have been a substantial asset for the churches in Indonesia … in communicating the heart of the Gospel to the heart of the people.”

Binsen Samuel Sidjabat, lecturer at Tyranus Bible Seminary, largely praised Ismail’s work, yet he noted a theological shift in two of Ismail’s later stories. While his early works stress salvation only through Jesus, his later works seem to question John 14:6, which says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” His story “The Only Way?” says this verse merely points to the early church’s high respect for Jesus, and his story “Is Christ the Only Way?” says it explains Jesus’ relationship with the Father.

Ismail’s children remember their father continually pointing them to Christ.

His daughter, Atikah, recalled that when she was about 12 and her brother Syarif was 10, her father came home one night and said he had a gift for them. He handed them his Bible, and the children wondered if the gift was hidden inside. Atikah said, “We searched and searched from the front to the last pages, but we could not find any envelope or other things.” Later, she realized that her father wanted to teach them that the most precious gift a father could give his children was the Word of God.

Near the end of Ismail’s life, Samiadji moved in to help take care of Ismail, who had prostate surgery in April, and his wife. As Ismail’s health deteriorated in late August, Samiadji said that he had prayed, “Dear Lord, you have given me so much. But, with your consent, I ask you that I will not get sick for long, which will make others’ lives miserable from taking care of me.” Samiadji said he was concerned about burdening his wife.

Not long afterward, Ismail passed away peacefully. Ismail is survived by his wife, two children, and two grandchildren.

- More from Hendro Suwito

News

Wire Story

China Ends International Adoptions, Leaving Hundreds of Cases in Limbo

Diana Chandler - Baptist Press

The decision shocked dozens of evangelical families in the US who had been in the process since before the pandemic.

Chris Hondros / Getty Images

The Chinese government has officially ended its international adoption program, foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning announced Thursday, ending hopes for hundreds of US families who were matched with children before the COVID-19 pandemic but had adoptions put on hold in 2020.

Karla Thrasher, senior director of international adoptions at Lifeline Children’s Services based in Birmingham, said the announcement was shocking to the adoption agency and to its 48 families who were matched with Chinese orphans before the pandemic.

“They were definitely in shock. This came very suddenly,” Thrasher told Baptist Press. “We actually had thought things were moving in a more positive direction over the past couple of weeks, and then received this email out of the blue regarding China no longer carrying out the foreign adoptions.”

Lifeline was serving more than 100 matched families when China suspended adoptions in 2020, Thrasher said, but the number dwindled due to various family circumstances.

The remaining 48 families waited with anticipation and suffered a range of emotions including anger, sadness and disbelief at the news, Thrasher said.

“Some of them were just a couple of pieces of paperwork away from traveling to meet their children and finalizing their adoption,” Thrasher said. “That’s how close many of these families were.”

Some of the children had participated in Lifeline’s hosting program.

“Several of these families had actually met their children and spent time with them through a program that we have where we host children here in the United States,” Thrasher said. “Several of these children had been a part of that hosting program where they had come to the US, actually spent time in the family’s home, so these families knew these children.”

China’s announcement ends a 30-year program, with exceptions for international residents adopting blood relatives or stepchildren, Ming said in her announcement during a press briefing. The program officially ended August 28.

Before China suspended the program during the COVID pandemic, 202 US adoptions were finalized from China in fiscal 2020, which spans October 2019 through September 2020, according to the US State Department’s Annual Report on Intercountry Adoption.

China was a robust country for adoptions by US parents in the years it remained a destination, generating 819 adoptions in 2019, 1,475 in 2018 and 2,036 10 years prior in 2008, the State Department reported.

After the suspension in 2020, no additional adoptions were seen from China until 2023, when 16 adoptions were finalized, the State Department reported. Those adoptions included families who were already approved for travel to China, a final stage in the adoption process. Some of those families were served by Lifeline, Thrasher said.

“Those are families that when the suspension happened in January 2020 due to COVID, they at the very last step of the process,” Thrasher said. “They had a document called travel approval, and China honored that document and allowed those families to travel last year.

“Even yesterday, amidst all of the sadness, the Lord reminded us of those families that did get to travel,” Thrasher said, “and those children that did have homes. It’s important to celebrate that as well.”

Lifeline Children’s Services, the largest evangelical adoption organization in the US, will pray with and for the 48 families as they grieve and process their loss, and work with them as they consider their options, Thrasher said.

The children left behind in China face lives in orphanages with limited medical care, limited education and limited opportunities. They will age out of orphan care at 16 with no resources and few options, she said, other than low wage work. Some may be relegated to lives of begging or crime.

She encouraged Southern Baptists to pray for the children left behind, for the families grieving the loss and still hoping to adopt children, and for adoption agencies working to place children with families across the nation.

- More from Diana Chandler - Baptist Press

Ideas

Public School Can Be a Training Ground for Faith

Stefani McDade

My daughter will wrestle with worldliness in her education, just as I did. That’s why I want to be around to help.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Depending on your circles, mentioning “public school” may elicit strong reactions. Many Christians in America avidly allege its degeneracy, while many others fiercely defend its merits. And although this debate isn’t new, it has come back to the foreground of our public life in recent years.

Last month, for example, a video went around in which actor Kirk Cameron described Christian parents who send their children to public school as “subcontract[ing their] parenting and discipleship out to the government,” warning them to expect “little Marxists, little statists, little atheists, drag queens, strippers, drug dealers … you name it.”

By contrast, writer Jen Wilkin has made faith-led arguments in favor of public education, citing benefits for children including a more diverse socialization, a healthy exposure to different worldviews, and fulfilling the call of being a Christian witness in the world. “Our participation in the public school system was directly related to loving our neighbors,” she said in a Gospel Coalition debate on the issue.

As a new school year starts with an election underway, I think the Christian case for public schooling is worth revisiting—not only because it’s a pressing conversation right now but because it prompts us to examine how we think about education, discipleship, and the faithfulness of God.

First, though, I want to recognize this is a practical question as much as a theoretical one. We ultimately make our decisions based on the actual situation, options, and children before us. That means we’re not talking about “public school” in general, but the specific public schools in our districts—and the specific private, Christian, and/or homeschool resources in our areas. And we’re not talking about kids in general, but our specific kids—and we all know that every child has different needs. So, take all that follows with the recognition that it may not be possible for you to make the same decision I would.

Our daughter is just a toddler, so she’s not in school yet, and it’s possible something in the next few years will lead us to change our minds. But, for now, my husband and I have decided to send her to public school.

One of the most important considerations for me in making that choice is that studies show there are more important elements for building and safeguarding our kids’ faith than the school they attend. As I’ve previously reported for CT, research suggests that taking children to church regularly matters more than finding the “right” school.

In fact, as I discovered two years ago in my interview with Christian public health expert Tyler VanderWeele, director of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, childhood church attendance is one of the highest predictors of overall wellbeing as an adult. Though homeschooling provided some unique benefits, researchers found, there was very little difference, across a host of outcomes, between public and private school kids.

Another major consideration is that I would rather most of my child’s first close encounters of the worldly kind happen while she’s still under my roof, not after she leaves home. That preference is informed by my own unique educational background.

Growing up, my parents’ ministry positions moved our family around a lot. I started in public school for kindergarten and first grade, switched to a private Christian school for second and third grade, was homeschooled from fourth through sixth grade, and then returned to public school for middle and high school. Then I chose to attend the private Christian university where my parents worked at the time.

While researching this piece, I asked my parents how they had made their schooling decisions each time they moved. They said they’d weighed the quality of available education against the influence of the local atmosphere—pretty much as most parents do. And it wasn’t until I was approaching high school, they said, that warnings against the “dangers” of public education really started to influence their Christian circles.

Looking back, my experience at Christian school was mediocre, whereas I enjoyed homeschooling and saw its benefits. That said, it set me up for a massive culture shock when I went from homeschooling in Miami to public school in Washington State. We moved halfway through my sixth grade—possibly the worst time to transition from one end of the country to the other, from a Christian homeschool bubble to a secular outpost, from a setting of urban diversity to suburban homogeneity. Most of my time in middle school was spent figuring out how to fit in.

By the time we moved to Northern California, where I began high school, I was faring far better socially, culturally, and academically. But, there, a new obstacle arose, one I’d only gotten a taste of in middle school: I was bullied for my faith at school.

There was a group of boys, and even a couple teachers, who often teased me for my faith. Once in class, for example, we were reading a passage from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and came to this line: “Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds.” My teacher interrupted to say, “Like you, Stefani.” The same teacher signed my yearbook, “You have a great brain. Don’t be hindered by dogma.”

Now, I know I did myself no favors in how I responded—due to my strong personality, deeply ingrained convictions, and ministry upbringing—but it was bullying all the same. It was, at times, rather miserable. But it was also motivating.

I look back on that time now as pivotal for my spiritual formation. Until then, I’d mostly been living under my parents’ faith; it was something I just took for granted. I didn’t know how to articulate my beliefs because I’d never had to defend them.

Once I was regularly provoked at school, I had to learn why I believed what I believed. I had to make my faith my own. With my parents’ guidance, I began reading apologetics books so I would know how to respond when someone attacked my views. That decision began a trajectory that led to who and where I am today, serving as theology editor at CT.

It’s worth noting that I attended high school from 2003 to 2007, near the height of fervor around New Atheism. That context, especially in California, made it socially acceptable in my school to openly mock Christianity and anyone who identified with it. But children in most public schools probably wouldn’t have the same experience today. New Atheism has fallen out of style, and some recent research has shown that vitriol toward religion generally and Christians specifically has significantly declined over the last decade or so.

And though bullying is terrible, and no parent wants their children to experience it, keeping children out of public school doesn’t guarantee they’ll never be bullied—while putting them in public school may give you the opportunity to guide them through this and other early challenges to their faith. You can remind them of what is true about themselves and what God says about them.

Think of it like strength training: Your children need to build muscles of faith, and public school can provide weight to lift while you’re around to spot them. Let them wrestle with worldly counternarratives to God’s truth while they’re still under your care. That may feel risky, but the alternative—keeping them sheltered, then letting them be exposed to everything all at once when they leave home for work or college—is risky too.

Christians are called to be “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation” (Phil. 2:15), and we also know how seriously Jesus takes harm against children and how gravely he judges those who fail to treat them with the proper dignity. Anyone who despises a child or causes one to stumble is better off drowning in the depths of the sea (Matt. 18:1–6) than facing the wrath of God for their actions.

As parents, we can’t permanently protect our children from the world and its influences; and at the very least, they’ll encounter the worldliness of our own sin. Nor can we protect them from the inevitable and necessary struggle to truly understand and claim their faith for their own. The only question is when they’ll face that challenge and who will be around them when they do. As a mother, I want to be there—in person, every day—when those questions first come up for my kid.

That presence isn’t just about talking apologetics or exploring Scripture together, which we could do over phone or email after my daughter leaves home. It includes many other things we as parents can do to help our kids and their faith flourish: maintain a good marriage, attend to their physical and emotional needs, raise them in a healthy church environment, and practice the faith we preach.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still worried about what could happen to my daughter at public school. But my worries are more about her physical safety (especially when school shootings happen an hour away) than her exposure to people and ideas that might cause her to wrestle with her faith, values, or sense of self—even at a young age. And that’s not only because I know I’ll be there to guide her through the pitfalls of our fallen world. It’s because I trust God’s sovereignty far more than my control over my daughter’s future.

Much of the rhetoric urging Christian disengagement from public education in America has to do with the larger question of how Christians should interact with the broader culture—with what it means to be “in the world but not of it.”

That saying is a paraphrase from Jesus’ high priestly prayer at the Last Supper: “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15). It comes after his warning to his followers that “in this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (16:33). And it’s not the only time he said the world would be hostile to Christians. “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves,” he said when commissioning his 12 disciples for ministry. “Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard” (Matt. 10:16–17).

That hostility is the reality in which we parent as Christians, and that tension of witness and holiness, shrewdness and innocence is what we must faithfully navigate, whatever schooling decision we make. It’s a dance of both entrusting our kids to God and knowing that God has entrusted them to us. And it’s a dance we don’t undertake lightly, for at the end of all days, we will be held accountable for how we performed.

Stefani McDade is the theology editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Stefani McDade

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