‘I Want to Give Where the Voice of Truth Is Loud’

Sandra Anderson trusts Christianity Today to navigate cultural challenges—and invests to ensure its voice continues.

Brianna Peterson

For Sandra Anderson—and so many like her—recent years have been shocking, confusing, and challenging. From political polarization and division to Christian nationalism and a fractured church, she has tried to navigate a world that often feels unstable and increasingly distant from Scripture and the teachings of Jesus.

In response, Sandra has returned to the Word, studying Scripture deeply so she can understand and explain her faith. Through it all, Christianity Today has been an indispensable companion, offering insight, encouragement, and thoughtful challenge.

“CT’s assessment of the theological, sociological, and political is always through a biblical lens—not a selective biblical lens—it’s very true to Scripture,” says Sandra. “I trust CT. I don’t have to read it with a cautious eye, wondering if it sounds right; it feels on mission.”

That trust is why Sandra has chosen to support CT financially. “I feel like we’re in a time where we need to put our money where our mouth is,” she explains. “There are so many causes I care about, but what I can give, I want to give where the impact is strong, and the voice of truth is loud. CT is exactly that.”

For Sandra, the combination of biblical clarity, cultural insight, and trustworthy reporting makes CT not just a magazine or website, but a companion for her faith journey. It helps her process complicated social issues, engage difficult conversations, and stay rooted in Scripture—while also affirming that she is not alone in thinking deeply about these challenges.

“CT means validation,” she adds. “It means staying biblically solid and coming back to the roots of Scripture—not bending the message to suit the times or a few loud voices. I feel like CT is not afraid to stand in the face of Christian nationalism and say, ‘No, this isn’t biblical.’ To be that voice in the wilderness is risky—you could lose an audience—but it’s the truth.”

A Faith That Began Early

Sandra describes her faith journey as fairly typical, accepting Christ at age 4 when her mother invited her to lay her anxieties at the feet of Jesus. She eagerly did—and that changed her life forever.

But like all lives lived in pursuit of Christ, hers has not been free of challenge, loss, or difficulty. An unexpected divorce left her raising her children as a single mom, one of whom is on the autism spectrum. Fifteen years ago, during the economic downturn, she lost her job, forcing her to rebuild her career while supporting her family.

Yet through it all, her abiding faith has been an anchor, leading her to declare again and again, “Look what the Lord has done.” God’s faithfulness has punctuated her life in staccatos of presence and provision.

She recounts one vivid moment: Her son’s expensive preschool tuition, essential for his development after the autism diagnosis, had become impossible to cover. Then, an anonymous donor stepped in to pay the full year’s tuition.

“It felt almost biblical,” Sandra says. “Moments where you just say, ‘Look what the Lord has done.’”

Among these markers of God’s presence was Christianity Today. She discovered the magazine in her church library and took an issue home. She found the content to be “meaty,” but she liked it—and soon became a subscriber. In the years that followed, financial pressures forced her to let the subscription lapse, but when life stabilized, she returned to CT.

“It’s a great lens to look at all things through a strong Christian perspective,” Sandra says. “The articles always resonated with me.”

Making Sense of the Moment

Today, Sandra engages with CT across multiple platforms—from the print magazine to digital articles and podcasts. One series that particularly impacted her was The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. The story felt personal: Sandra lives just blocks away from the original site of Mars Hill Church and knows people who attended or worked there.

“CT actually introduced me to podcasts,” she says.

Another favorite is The Bulletin.

“I love The Bulletin,” Sandra says. “It’s so affirming to hear something from Russell Moore and think, ‘Oh my goodness—we’re not crazy.’ They’re validating that our concerns and questions are real.”

For Sandra, those moments matter deeply.

“We’ll talk about things at home and have theories,” she explains. “Then we read an article and say, ‘Look, this is what we were saying.’ Sometimes it validates our thoughts. Other times, it challenges me and makes me rethink something. Either way, CT helps me process complicated cultural questions through a biblical lens.”

Investing in a Voice That Matters

Over time, Sandra’s appreciation for Christianity Today grew into something more—her subscription eventually led her to become a financial partner supporting the ministry’s work.

“I really can’t imagine not having a voice like CT,” she says. “If you believe in something like this, you want to help make sure it continues.”

She believes the publication is doing important work by expanding its reach while remaining faithful to its mission.

“I love the magazine,” she says. “But I also love that CT is staying relevant while diversifying its reach—reaching its core audience while also reaching new audiences, maybe even people who don’t yet believe.”

In a moment when division within the church often feels overwhelming, Sandra sees CT as a rare place where Christians can engage difficult issues thoughtfully and faithfully.

“Sometimes the divisiveness feels stark,” she says. “But CT is trying to bridge that in fantastic and relevant ways. A voice like this matters—and I want to make sure it continues.”

Books

Review

An Arthurian Epic for the Dark Age of the Bright Screen

Haley Byrd Wilt

Galahad and the Grail “is about a light that wasn’t extinguished,” says author Malcolm Guite. “And we kind of need it again.”

Photo by Patrick Shen / Courtesy of The Rabbit Room / Edits by CT

Malcolm Guite was looking for a place to sit.

The poet wandered between branches and over tangled roots, through a British wood, with a few loyal companions. They were filming a documentary about his new epic ballad, Galahad and the Grail, and they wanted to feature a grove of oak, ash, and thorn trees—three significant characters in the poem. But they couldn’t seem to find a good spot with those trees close together, and they’d forgotten a stool for Guite.

“Not to worry,” Guite told his friends as they searched, according to his illustrator, Stephen Crotts, who was there that day. “In the poem, there is a fallen log by the oak. The woods will know the poem. There will be an oak. There will be a log.”

Sure enough, just as Crotts happened upon the three species of trees growing close together, Guite spied the perfect log, nestled beneath an oak. “He goes, ‘Oh, very well, there it is,’” Crotts recalled. “He just sat down and started puffing on his pipe.”

Crotts wasn’t surprised. “There’s a level of coincidence that follows him around,” he told me of Guite in an interview last month, smoking his own pipe on a wooden porch just outside Nashville, spring peeking out around us after a long, icy winter. Crotts hesitated, his voice dropping to an almost conspiratorial register: “Magic things happen.”

Guite’s new book, at least, does seem magical. Galahad and the Grail rollicks and captivates with a rhythm that feels as if Guite is casting a long-forgotten spell. It’s the story of Camelot and the grail quest, old and familiar but still delightfully strange. It’s also apt for our time, particularly in its vision of knighthood.

Some false knights, Guite laments in the beginning of the book,

Lust for might and mastery,
they only prate of courtesy,
and keep a code of chivalry
they scarcely understand.

Galahad, the perfect knight at the heart of the story, offers a different standard: one of gentleness and courage, faith and boldness, and the vision to see where, with God’s help, broken things can be restored.

“We’re effectively entering a new dark age,” Guite told me in an interview. “This story is about a light that wasn’t extinguished in the Dark Age. And we kind of need it again.”

A poet-musician-priest, Guite believes the old stories about King Arthur and his knights still hold power—and ultimately point to hope in Jesus Christ.

Galahad and the Grail is the first of a four-volume Arthurian epic, written in the nearly singing, rhyming style of an English ballad, which Guite advises readers to experience aloud. Guite himself is given to quoting lines in conversation. If you’re lucky, he’ll share the whole introduction to the poem, where he describes hearing a voice urging him to “take up the tale” as he walked outside one summer morning a few years back. (That’s not a metaphor or a mere poetic device, he told me: He really did hear the voice.)

Guite looks every bit the author of an epic ballad—or, yes, the kind of person who would expect a forest to know a poem. Imagine Father Christmas on a long sojourn to the Shire, often in colorful vests, hands never too far from a pipe to puff. While Crotts made him a cup of tea and we settled in for a conversation about the book, Guite’s white hair and beard shook with fervor as he recited his lines. His hands tried to do the story justice, waving about in the air.

And when Guite talks about myth and poetry, diving into Christ’s true and better fulfillment of old folklore, his sentences stop only when he runs out of breath, the words crammed together as close as possible. A great gulp of air, and he’s at it again.

“There’s this meeting of the Christian and the possibly pre-Christian, and how do you interpret that?” he said of the Arthurian legends. “The fashionable thing became to say that this is all pagan material which was still remembered but kind of banned by the church. The idea is that it was given a light Christian gloss to make it acceptable to a 12th-century audience.”

“I don’t think that’s the case,” he told me. “My view is that it’s not that an essentially pagan story was given a light Christian gloss. It’s that the Christian story, when it’s told in the midst of the cultural memory of these pagan stories, suddenly brings new life to them and makes sense of them.”

“Once you get Christ, once you know who the Messiah really is, suddenly it lights a backward path through all the old stories,” he said.

Arthurian legends can be tricky to market, for the very reason Guite loves them so much: These stories can be far too religious for many non-Christians, yet they feel too pagan for some Christian readers.

Guite also knew, even as he started writing Galahad and the Grail, that to print these books with any kind of institutional publishing support might be a long shot in an era of minuscule attention spans and ubiquitous screens. Many publishers, trying to convince people to pick up books instead of their phones, are gravitating toward sex-addled stories, tropes they can sell on TikTok, and books with so many subheadings that each new bold-faced summary is almost insulting.

Image courtesy of Haley Byrd Wilt

Guite’s poem is the polar opposite of those trends. His regular publisher was at first “not enthusiastic” about his pitch, he told me. Two larger presses in the UK weren’t interested either, with one suggesting he write a much shorter book about T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets instead. “They just weren’t willing to go there,” he said of an original epic ballad.

In many ways, Guite seems a man from a different time. Was this a tale for a different time, too? He quietly resolved that even if it were, and even if he never found a publisher, he’d take up the tale anyway.

The book finally did find a home with Rabbit Room Press. It’s the publishing arm of a nonprofit faith-and-arts organization founded 20 years ago by the singer and author Andrew Peterson. The Rabbit Room’s willingness to take on Galahad and the Grail, Guite said, helped convince his UK publisher, Canterbury Press, to publish the poem in Britain too.

The Rabbit Room’s book-filled North Wind Manor, a farmhouse outside Nashville, has the air of a modern monastery, where people with ink-stained hands scribble away to preserve old texts. In a way, that’s exactly what Guite’s poem aims to do: to reclaim and pass on an almost-forgotten story by telling it again for a new audience. Crotts, who really does have ink-stained hands, emphasized that the poem points to Christ in a time when many are looking for him, even if they do not know he’s the object of their search.

“We don’t want to hear about a story. We want to be in the story,” he said. “And the Eucharist is the place where we step into it. Jesus really is pulling up a seat at his table for us.”

Crotts told me that illustrating the Lord’s Supper upon Galahad’s completion of the grail quest was the image he “had the most fear of approaching.”

Image courtesy of Stephen Crotts

“It’s like, ‘Oh, all I have to do is, in one image, sum up the story of the universe,’” he said. (I think he did a stunning job.)

For the illustrator, the poem is a daunting project with a fast timeline. Guite hopes to release the second book, The Coming of Arthur, later this year, the third volume in 2027, and the fourth in early 2028. Guite seems unbothered by the pace, but Crotts is striving to keep up.

“My blood pressure went up so high that I started going blind,” he said of illustrating Guite’s work. That’s partly due to the ambitious timeline, he told me, but mostly because he feels a burden to do the story justice. The Rabbit Room’s support has helped, Crotts said. “I was just laboring in obscurity and frustration until I met these people.”

Pete Peterson, publisher of Rabbit Room Press and brother to Andrew Peterson, told me that when he heard of Guite’s work through mutual friends, he prepared to fight it out with all the major publishing houses to win the rights to Guite’s epic. In the end, he didn’t have to. “The Rabbit Room and Rabbit Room Press are just kind of weird enough,” he said, “that we maybe understood it in a way that other people didn’t.”

“I feel really blessed,” Guite said of publishing a book that requires attention from modern readers. But he added, “I hope this is actually not an exception but a presentiment of things to come.”

“I think we want the real thing and the real deal,” he said. “We want deep nourishment of mind and soul and heart.”

I came to Galahad and the Grail already a fan of Guite and his publisher. In fact, journalistic integrity demands I disclose: I’m so taken with the Rabbit Room’s mission that I sent a sad little email to Andrew Peterson last summer begging for an editing gig after I became fed up with reporting on the US Congress. (I did not get the imaginary job I’d tried to wish into existence.)

But I don’t think that sort of affection is a prerequisite for enjoying Galahad and the Grail. Guite writes of dryads and naiads of trees and streams with all the whimsy of those old Oxford dons, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. He handles his characters, even those who stray from God, with a balm-like tenderness. One moment in the story centering on the knight Lancelot was so beautifully done it brought me to tears. Even when Arthur’s knights face darkness and evil, Guite doesn’t revel in it, and he carefully preserves a sense of innocence—sometimes lost, yes, but never too far from being found again.

Newcomers to poetry may take a little while to warm up to the style, but Guite’s work is deliberately accessible. He describes the ballad form as “a not-very-distant cousin” of the nursery rhyme, designed for all kinds of people to be able to remember and recite through the ages if only they’ll give it their attention.

“It’s not like weird, arcane, academic free verse,” he said of ballads. “They’re meant to be lucid. They’re meant to tell a story. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t also be profound and beautiful.”

Pete Peterson said he won’t mind, though, if the poem doesn’t go viral. “We’ve had, especially in publishing, a real mission of wanting to publish things that we feel like are in danger of falling between the cracks,” he told me. “Maybe it’s a little too Christian for the secular market, too secular for the Christian market, or maybe it’s just a little too weird and people don’t know what to do with it.”

“Andrew and I used to joke that we wanted to look back in 30 years and realize we had published a whole bunch of books that nobody bought,” he continued. “Which is—you know, I’m kidding. I want people to buy them. But we’re interested in things that just have a hard time finding a home.”

He thinks Guite’s epic already belongs in the canon of great literature beside the likes of Homer and John Milton. But even if this new Arthuriad is hardly noticed, if it’s only—“only”!—an admirable effort at beauty in a slop-soaked world, the mere fact of that effort hews to the greatest and most Christlike virtues of Camelot.

“Before Arthur takes the sword from the Lady of the Lake, she asks him, ‘Are you prepared to do the right thing and make a kingdom and then see everything you’ve done unmade?’” Guite told me. “‘To know that what you’re doing is right but may not win?’”

The tale of Arthur and his knights is “not about being on the winning side,” Guite said. “It’s about being on the right side.” Galahad and the Grail sure feels right.

Haley Byrd Wilt is a writer based in the DC area. Her reporting has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and NOTUS, among others. Her poetry has been published in Mere Orthodoxy.

- More from Haley Byrd Wilt

News

Some Christians Risk Persecution if They’re Honest in India’s Census

Vikram Mukka

Publicly identifying their faith can lead to consequences for lower-caste Christians and those in religiously hostile states.

An awareness board for the 2027 Census in India.

NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty

Ravi Kishore, a third-generation Christian from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, is caught in a bind. When census officials knock on his door, he must choose between two identities that dictate his life: his Dalit caste or his Christian faith.

Although his family has practiced Christianity for generations, they prefer being listed as Scheduled Caste (SC) Hindus in government records. The SC status, which is given to marginalized castes including Dalits, has allowed Kishore’s grandfather and father to access education and employment opportunities previously unavailable to the caste due to historic and ongoing discrimination. By identifying as Christians, they would lose that protection.

“I know I am not being honest by hiding my Christian identity,” Kishore said. “But do I have an option? Is the government being fair to Dalit Christians?”

Hundreds of kilometers away, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Suraj Kumar is caught in different dilemma.

Kumar has been a Christian for about a year and a half, worshiping quietly with seven other families at a house church in his village. He works as an electrician to earn a living. His Christian identity, he felt, could come in his way of cultivating local networks and securing government contracts, which are necessary for his work and income flow.

“In my work, relationships matter,” he said. “If people know I am a Christian, it could change how they see me.”

In a state with an anti-conversion law in force and hostility towards Christians at its peak, Kumar is wary of identifying as a Christian in the census. “Tomorrow, they could charge me in some case just because I am a Christian,” he said.

As India embarks on counting its estimated population of 1.4 billion this month, Christians are forced to make difficult choices that can impact their safety, identity, and belonging. The last census held in 2011 found that Christians make up 2.3 percent of the Indian population, which many believe to be undercounted due to the dilemmas believers like Kishore and Kumar face.

Originally scheduled for 2021, the government delayed the census due to the COVID-19 pandemic and administrative challenges. More than 3 million officials have been deployed to enumerate the world’s most populous country. The exercise will stretch over a year, with final data expected to be available at the end of 2027.

For the first time since India’s independence in 1947, the census will record caste along with religion. Intense political debate preceded this decision, and the change is expected to have wider implications for welfare delivery, public policy, and representation of various communities.

For Christians, particularly those from Dalit backgrounds or those living in regions steeped in religious hostility, the act of speaking openly about faith comes with its own consequences.

Christians in the 13 Indian states where anti-conversion laws are being enforced fear that their disclosure could invite unnecessary trouble from the government, leading to false charges against them. Police can make arrests without a warrant, and obtaining bail is extremely difficult. Convictions can result in jail terms ranging from one year to life imprisonment, along with hefty fines. In Uttar Pradesh, police made 1,682 arrests under the law between November 2020 and July 2024.

Hindu nationalists often justify violence toward Christians by claiming “conversion mafia” are leading large numbers of Hindus to Christ. While anecdotal evidence by church leaders reveals a growth in house churches across India’s urban and rural areas, there is no reliable data to capture the trend. According to census data, the percentage of Christians has remained largely stable between 1979 and 2011, making up 2.6 percent and 2.3 percent of the population, respectively.

“The very fact that the Christian population is less than 3 percent even after 79 years of independence shows that mass conversions are a bogey,” said Joshua Kalapati, associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of South Asian Christianity.

Similarly, a 2021 report by the Pew Research Center found that religious conversion in India is “rare.” Yet the narrative of mass conversion continues to shape public discourse, deepening the vulnerability Indian Christians face. As a result, Christians and Hindus will be watching the results from the 2026 census closely.

In the case of Dalit Christians, the census raises a far more complex question.

Under Indian law, SC status and the reservation benefits linked to it are restricted to Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists. Dalit converts to Christianity and Islam are excluded, under the assumption that caste does not exist in these religions.

Numerous government-appointed commissions found that in Indian society, caste transcends religion, and Dalit Christians face double the discrimination as Indian society looks down on both identities.

As a result, many of those believers are faced with a difficult choice: Declare Christian faith openly and risk forgoing job prospects and entrance to universities, or remain Hindu on paper and practice Christianity in private. Over the generations, many Christians have chosen the latter.

“Dalit Christians should be allowed to record both their identities,” said Asir Ebenezer, general secretary of the National Council of Churches in India. “Denying that choice amounts to discrimination.”

At a deeper level, the census also raises a fundamental question of who the government qualifies to be called a Christian.

“Is it someone formally affiliated with a church and holding a baptism certificate? Or someone who quietly attends a house church, believes in Christ, but has no official documentation?” asked A. C. Michael, national coordinator of the United Christian Forum. “It is a gray area.”

For some, safety and security take precedence over the question of identity. “There is no need for bravado,” said John Dayal, a Christian human rights activist. “Take your call on how you want to be identified by the state.”

But when the census data is finally released, the numbers still will not represent a true picture of the community as it will likely undercount Christians. Still, many are excited to see the results.

“The upcoming census, since it includes caste enumeration, will surely unravel more layers of Christian identities,” Kalapati said. “The census will generate more discussion and debate around the social status of the Christian community.”

- More from Vikram Mukka

News

The 18-Hour Road Trip to Bring a Detained Refugee Home

Emily Belz in Minnesota

After an ICE arrest in Minnesota, churchgoers scoured a city for their friend’s abandoned car and mobilized a mission to bring him home.

Border Patrol agents conduct a traffic stop in Minnesota in January.

Getty / Edits by CT

In early January, an African refugee named Aboradea called his family to say he was on his way home from work after his night shift. But the young man never showed up. Calls to his phone went to voicemail.

Aboradea’s family—his full name is being withheld for his protection—was frantic.

Across town, Michael Forbes was settling into a movie night with his wife and kids. A friend from church, Tim Fletcher, called and told him Aboradea hadn’t come home that day. The two of them immediately drove to the refugee family’s house.

Fletcher and Forbes had befriended the family through a program called Good Neighbor, where teams of churchgoers help refugees resettle over the course of a year. Fletcher and Forbes had been planning to go bowling with the refugee family before their son disappeared.

“This whole experience changed my life,” Forbes said. Now, “this family is family.”

US Christians have come alongside refugees since they began arriving from Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Church communities tied to World Relief, a Christian organization that is also a federal resettlement agency, helped resettle Vietnamese refugees even before the passage of the federal refugee program in 1980.

Those church relationships were formalized into the Good Neighbor program about 25 years ago, with the goal of surrounding new refugees with a community to help get them on their feet more quickly.

A local Christian resettlement agency, Arrive Ministries, runs a Good Neighbor program in the Twin Cities. The group says its teams have served 554 refugee families in the Twin Cities since it began Good Neighbor in 2001.

After Aboradea’s disappearance, Fletcher, Forbes, and Aboradea’s family obsessively checked the government immigration system that tracks refugees via what’s called an A-number. Nothing showed up to indicate he had been detained.

That night Fletcher, a retired engineer, and Forbes, a middle school teacher, became detectives, sitting with the refugee family in their living room and making phone call after phone call. They checked with area police stations and local hospitals. They called car impound lots.

Forbes was struck by a sense of his privilege—that he could call large institutions and simply ask to speak with a manager and often succeed at getting through, whereas a refugee with limited English likely would not. He and Fletcher depended on children in the refugee family to translate between them and the adults.

When the clock ticked past 11 p.m. and the two men still had no answers, Fletcher and Forbes told the family they would come back in the morning to continue the search. Aboradea’s father had tears running down his face, Forbes said.

Neither Fletcher nor Forbes slept much. The next morning, they picked up some of the family members and drove around looking for Aboradea’s car, retracing his path from work to home.

As they drove, another family member called them—Aboradea had called from the Whipple Building in St. Paul, a federal facility where ICE held immigrants. Over the phone, Aboradea had asked the family member to send Fletcher and Forbes to the detention center. He knew it wasn’t safe for his family, who were also at risk of detention.

Aboradea later recounted to CT that ICE agents had stopped him on his way home from work and asked if he was a citizen. He showed them his refugee papers, his work permit, and a form that showed his pending green card application. The officers still cuffed him.

“I wasn’t afraid,” Aboradea said, but he doesn’t understand why he was arrested. “I had everything.” He said they wouldn’t allow him to make a phone call. They wouldn’t tell him why he was being arrested.

In the car with Forbes, Aboradea’s father heard the news of his son’s arrest and celebrated that the young man was alive.

Forbes, however, thought, This is not good.

The month prior, Fletcher and Forbes had helped the family make photocopies of all their documents, so they could carry them in a packet and show them to officials like Aboradea did. The Americans thought the documents would protect family members from being detained, but this was a new era.

Aboradea was one of the first refugees arrested as part of the Trump administration’s effort to detain refugees in Minnesota—called Operation PARRIS. CT confirmed the arrest through interviews with the young man, his friends, family, and bystander video of the arrest.

A federal judge, John R. Tunheim, said in a recent ruling that the refugee arrests in Minnesota this year are “a sharp break from more than four decades of agency practice.” Refugees are legal immigrants who generally have waited years, often in camps outside the United States, for vetting and an invitation from the US government to come.

Refugees are eligible to receive a green card about a year after their arrival, but the Trump administration has halted the application process for many. The arrests, according to the Trump administration, are necessary so that officials can re-interview refugees who don’t yet have green cards. But refugee testimonies and court records show that the interviews have been carried out inconsistently or not at all after arrest.

Tunheim temporarily blocked the arrest of refugees, saying the United States had made a “solemn promise” to protect these refugees fleeing persecution: “We assured them that they could care for their families, earn a living, contribute to their communities, and live in peace here in the United States,” he wrote.

Another federal judge in Massachusetts more recently issued a national injunction on refugee detentions, protecting about 100,000 refugees awaiting green cards who are at risk of arrest. But a higher court could overturn these rulings.

Fletcher and Forbes’s church, First Presbyterian Church of White Bear Lake, has a Good Neighbor team of six people connected to Aboradea’s family. It’s a modest church of about 80 people, but they wanted to help immigrants however they could.

“God said … ‘Welcome the foreigner.’ It doesn’t mean Well, that would be kind of a good thing to do. You need to do it, and you may not know what it looks like,” Fletcher said. “God equips people to do God’s work when it’s needed, and that can give you courage.”

Over the previous the year, the church had helped the family with various crises, like when pests invaded their home or they found lead in the windows. Now Fletcher saw those as small preparations for this crisis.

Fletcher, Forbes, and Aboradea’s family members returned to the family’s home after their unsuccessful car search. When they pulled up, neighbors were telling them to hurry into the house: ICE agents had just been there and tried to get inside, but the children refused to open the door.

Forbes and Fletcher told the family they needed to stay indoors. The two Minnesotans drove to Whipple—confidently pulling into the parking lot, slipping between yelling protestors, barricades, and armed agents, and informing federal agents they were there to pick up a refugee who was going to be released.

The agents allowed them in, which was unusual. But after a wait, officers told them Aboradea would not be released that day.

The third day after his disappearance, Aboradea finally showed up in the immigration database: He was in a detention center in El Paso, Texas. His despondent family thought he was about to be deported, an outcome they had never imagined.

Fletcher and Forbes now had multiple missions. They needed to find Aboradea a lawyer to help win his release—a tall order when immigration lawyers were in high demand. They still needed to find Aboradea’s car. And they needed to help the family survive staying home without their breadwinner.

A lead on an attorney appeared quickly, a man connected with the lawyer son of someone in the church, whom Fletcher once taught in youth group. Fletcher called the lawyer and retained him on the spot. We’ll figure out the whole money thing later, he said to himself. The lawyer began filing a case in Texas courts.

Meanwhile, Aboradea’s car had finally been located near a mechanic shop, the keys still inside—along with the family’s EBT card, which they needed for groceries. One of the Good Neighbor team members told Forbes he had “sticky fingers” and could break in (with the family’s permission).

“He said to me, ‘I watched a cop do this a couple weeks ago, I’m pretty sure I can do it,’” recounted Forbes, laughing. While the sticky-fingered church member assessed the car, Forbes went inside to ask the mechanics if they had seen the arrest. They had, and they had recorded video—which they shared with Forbes.

In the footage, which has not been released publicly but which CT reviewed, Aboradea is standing calmly by his car pulled to the side of the road, surrounded by at least eight agents and multiple SUVs. He complies as they place handcuffs on him and put him in an SUV.

As Forbes watched the video, the church member sprung the car open. Forbes drove the car back to the family’s house.

At the home, Fletcher spent hours on the phone with county offices, explaining the situation and trying to find aid for the family that was now without Aboradea’s paycheck.

School was another challenge. Stuck at home, the family’s children could not attend their normal classes. Forbes, whose teaching job is part-time, came every day after work and did schoolwork with the kids before picking up his own children from school.

Two days after Aboradea popped up in the government database in El Paso, he disappeared again. Forbes called detention centers across Texas and New Mexico, trying to locate him. Transfers between ICE detention centers can take days to show up in the system. A family friend tried to visit Aboradea in El Paso but was refused access.

“We don’t know what’s going on,” Forbes remembered.

A day later, the database showed Aboradea in a Houston detention center. Aboradea later recounted to CT that he had been shackled by his hands and feet and put on a bus for the 14-hour drive from El Paso to Houston. They had no breaks until they got to Houston, he said. He felt sick.

The Houston transfer meant the lawyer had to refile all the petitions in Houston and cancel the El Paso case.

But the Houston facility was better than El Paso, Aboradea said later. ICE’s own inspector general has documented the bad conditions at the El Paso facility, Camp East Montana, where three detainees have died since December. According to Aboradea, refugees were housed in the same spaces with criminals; someone told him to stay away from any detainee in a red uniform. (At some ICE detention facilities, detainees are issued color-coded uniforms based on their criminal histories.)

In Houston, Aboradea was able to play soccer to pass the time. The food at both facilities was bad, he said, and he would get freezing cold at night. With no information from authorities, he thought he was about to be deported.

Back in Minnesota, friends and family waited. For ten days, Fletcher and Forbes visited the family’s house every day, helping with logistics and the kids’ schooling.

They prepared for the possibility that Aboradea might be released onto the Houston streets at any moment. Forbes connected with a pastor in Texas, Chris Seay, who leads Ecclesia Houston, a large nondenominational church. Seay said he would be ready to pick up Aboradea if he were released.

“If churches work together, we’ve got quite a network,” Seay said later. “We can get almost anything done.”

The day after that conversation, Aboradea was released—he doesn’t know why but was told that the center needed more space. He was on the street with little more than his cellphone and its dying battery. He managed to get in touch with his family, who alerted the Minnesotans, who alerted Seay, who at that moment was an hour and a half away in Houston’s sprawling rush-hour traffic. Seay called an Uber and sent the driver to the facility, promising a big tip. The driver found Aboradea and brought him to Seay’s home that evening.

Seay ordered a bunch of food from Aboradea’s home country, and they ate. Aboradea did laundry. He figured out some friends from his home country lived nearby, and he invited them over late in the evening for ice cream.

“It turned into a little party,” Seay said.

One of Aboradea’s countrymen asked Seay why Aboradea was arrested.

“I said, ‘I don’t understand either,” Seay said. “It’s so traumatic and so needless.”

Aboradea’s family in Minnesota were anxious to get him back, and Fletcher and Forbes were fired up to go get him. The night of his release, they threw clothes into bags, talked to their spouses, and were on a flight to Houston within roughly three hours.

They called the lawyer to see if Aboradea could fly with them; the lawyer thought not. So Fletcher and Forbes booked a rental car to drive back—from the bottom of the country to the top.

After Fletcher and Forbes arrived in Houston around midnight, they slept just four hours at a hotel, waking at 4 a.m. to get an early start on the 18-hour drive. The hotel front desk staffer, hearing their situation, had bagged up breakfast and had it ready for them on their way out the door.

They rolled up to Seay’s home at 5 a.m. Forbes hugged Aboradea and lifted him off the ground. They thanked Seay and got on the road.

Aboradea fell into a deep sleep for much of the road trip home. In Iowa, they ran into an ice storm, slowing to a snail’s pace.

They made it to Aboradea’s home at 1 a.m. the next day.

Aboradea hesitated getting out of the car, wondering if ICE would arrest people at night. But Forbes and Fletcher accompanied him inside to the happy arms of his family. The family invited the two exhausted men to eat, but they declined.

Though it was a celebration, the ordeal felt like it wasn’t over. What would keep the young man from being detained again? Would the family get their green cards?

“I feel not safe,” Aboradea told CT.

Although the government’s rationale for arresting refugees was to vet them anew, Aboradea told CT he was never interviewed while he was detained. Some Minnesota refugees were, he said, and others weren’t.

“For 11 days, no one even talked to me,” he said.

Before his arrest, Aboradea had been interviewing for a second job. His detention cost him that opportunity. Upon his return, though refugees were still sheltering at home, Aboradea’s original job told him he needed to come back to keep his position. So he went back to work.

The Good Neighbor team organized a volunteer schedule to drive him to and from his night shift for his first week or two back. As he grew more comfortable, he returned to driving himself, and the kids returned to school.

A few days after Aboradea’s return, masked ICE agents came by his house again while he was outside, and he ran inside. A family member texted Forbes a photo. After about 15 minutes, they left.

Aboradea’s family sewed more curtains for their home, for extra privacy.

About Fletcher and Forbes, Aboradea says, “They came to visit my family every day when I was detained, also when I came back. Every day they came here, they bring food, water, and everything. They did a good job.”

Fletcher and Forbes don’t see themselves as heroes.

“We did the normal thing that someone would do for a neighbor in need,” Forbes said. “What’s not normal is what happened to them.”

Now Aboradea is taking online classes on top of working his job, and more family members have gotten jobs to help pay their bills. Fletcher and Forbes hope they can keep building their friendship for years to come.

“I can’t imagine not being connected to that family,” Fletcher said. “I want to take them fishing.”

Forbes added: “I want to be there when they get their citizenship.”

- More from Emily Belz

News

An Unsung Iran Peace Initiative Grapples with Failure

Jayson Casper

For 20 years, Mennonites fostered dialogue between North America and the Islamic republic. Their conversations couldn’t stop the bombs.

Portraits of victims are displayed in the rubble of the residential building where they were reportedly killed in a US-Israeli airstrike in Tehran on April 13, 2026.

AFP / Getty Images

Early in the morning on February 28, Ed Martin awoke in his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, rolled over in bed to check his phone, and let out a slow sigh. The United States and Israel had attacked Iran. With a sense of resignation, the 78-year-old went to the computer in his bedroom office to learn more. Following weeks of negotiation and military buildup, in the first 24 hours the allied nations dropped at least 1,200 bombs on hundreds of targets across the country.

Martin worried about his friends in Iran.

“I felt awful,” he said. “But I wasn’t surprised.”

Most grandfathers in rural Pennsylvania do not have friends in Tehran. But Martin has spent more than two decades seeking peace between the geopolitical enemies. As Mennonites who know the pain of religious violence—he traces his ancestry to Swiss Christians fleeing persecution in the 17th century—he and his Anabaptist brethren have tried to promote interfaith relationships between North America and the Islamic republic.

Their efforts have gone mostly ignored and sometimes criticized. That morning, they found out they had failed.

They had made a last-ditch overture for peace just three weeks earlier. An interfaith group Martin cofounded, called the Luke 10 Foundation, issued an antiwar statement in early February. Fourteen Americans, including the director of Churches for Middle East Peace, three Muslim imams, and three Jewish rabbis, joined seven Iranian leaders, including an ayatollah, to “implore” their governments to seek reconciliation.

Short on specific criticisms, they called on politicians to oppose tyranny and “to uphold universal human rights.” Luke 10, which is based in the United States and was founded during COVID-19 to aid Iranians hit hard by economic sanctions, sent the statement to the American and Iranian governments one day before officials met in Oman for indirect negotiations. It made hardly a blip in US media but was published in English and Farsi by the official Islamic Republic News Agency, perhaps to show that some Americans were also against the war.

“Governments will do what they do in terms of propaganda,” said John Hartley, an early evangelical participant in Luke 10, which takes its name from the biblical passage containing the parable of the Good Samaritan. “We must seek the human good, not a political agenda.”

Mennonites have rarely put their trust in princes. They originate from a 16th-century reform movement in Europe attempting to model the early Christian community. The church developed three core religious commitments, according to Doug Hostetter, cofounder of Luke 10: First, faith is not inherited but must be chosen freely as an adult. Second, believers must take literally Jesus’ command to love their enemies. And third, allegiance to God overrides any government order to go to war on behalf of the state. In 2019, he outlined these convictions to professors at the University of Tehran.

Yet some in the Iranian diaspora, as well as Christians and Jewish groups, have criticized the Mennonites’ interactions with Iran, claiming they are justifying a repressive regime that uses dialogue to polish its image. Amnesty International cites the widespread use of torture, unjust trials, and the denial of education to women who refuse to veil. Open Doors ranks Iran No. 10 on its World Watch List for Christian persecution, primarily for its jailing of converts from Islam.

The Mennonites’ engagement with Iran was born from tragedy. In June 1990, an earthquake originating 125 miles northwest of Tehran killed an estimated 40,000-50,000 Iranians. At the time, Martin was director of the central and southern Asia program at the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the denomination’s humanitarian arm.

Since the United States ended diplomatic relations with Iran in 1980, Martin turned to the MCC’s office in Canada, which enabled him to work through the Iranian Red Crescent Society (the Muslim world partner to the Red Cross) to provide aid. Six months later, in January 1991, he took his first of 34 trips to Iran. Together the Mennonites funded construction of 15 health clinics and subsequently assisted with aid for floods, droughts, and the influx of refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan until the MCC’s program ended in 2013.

Yet Martin sought to address more than Iranians’ physical needs.

As the Cold War ended, he and colleagues sensed that political Islam had replaced communism as the perceived enemy of the West, with Tehran displacing Moscow as the center of antagonism. Earlier, in 1979, the Islamic Revolution installed a theocratic government that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. And in 1983, Iranian-linked attacks on the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut killed 290 Americans. President Donald Trump recently mentioned this history as part of his rationale for war, saying, “The Iranian regime seeks to kill.”

Martin believed MCC could not only help suffering people but also build bridges of understanding between US and Iran. Through MCC’s consistent service, Martin developed a network in Tehran, which led to significant opportunities.

He proposed a student-exchange program, and in 1997 MCC negotiated an agreement between the Toronto School of Theology and the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute, located in the holy Shiite city of Qom, Iran. Four Mennonite couples studied in Iran, and two Iranians completed their PhDs in the philosophy of religion.

Other exchanges followed, and in 2002, Toronto hosted the first of eight Mennonite-Shiite conferences. Two years later, Qom received an Anabaptist delegation for their second gathering, with countries rotating roughly every two to four years. Topics have included revelation and authority, peace and justice, and religious spirituality.

Martin advised Mennonite students to return home if they felt drawn to Islam. It takes a strong Christian, he said, to engage in true dialogue. Yet while the academic exchange was formal and rigorous, over tea breaks and meals participants got to know each other—even as Iranian authorities filmed most interactions.

Surveillance was tight. Interrogation was frequent. And on Martin’s last visit in 2023, authorities sent him home. They were afraid, he gathered from their questions, that the US was using interfaith dialogue to soften the ground for eventual regime change.

I asked Martin if the dialogue was genuine.

“For the scholars it is,” he said.

“And for the government?” I followed. He paused, folding his hands under his chin for several seconds.

“I never really thought about it,” he replied.

Yet Martin spoke warmly of Shiite students he brought to US peace-building trainings who later rose in diplomatic service. He described curious Iranians wanting to learn about America and Christianity. And he revealed how his own theoretical love for a supposed enemy became authentic in real friendship. He had only one regret.

“Had I known I would spend so much time in Iran,” Martin said, “I would have learned Farsi.”

Both Martin and Hostetter were shaped by living in Asia—Nepal and Vietnam respectively—while doing alternative service as conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War. This led to further service overseas, where they befriended Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. They both say that while they consider themselves disciples of Jesus, they do not believe in the exclusivity of Christianity.

“I’m not very orthodox,” Hostetter said. “But I am very Mennonite.”

Such theological openness makes many evangelicals uncomfortable in interfaith-dialogue circles. Even those who might question the wisdom of the Iran war might not be able to sign the Luke 10 statement, which encourages all to follow the shared Golden Rule that it says came “from God speaking directly to Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.”

Yet the seeds sown from Mennonite academic engagement led also to high-level political interactions. In 2000, an Iranian professor arranged for a student to study at Eastern Mennonite University’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute. Six years later, the student was an adviser to the Iranian president. When the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asked him who he should meet with during the upcoming United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York, the former student suggested Mennonites. Hostetter, then director of MCC’s UN advocacy office, coordinated arrangements.

Hostetter drew in Quakers and other Christians open to dialogue. Often these meetings were quiet and behind-the-scenes. But some encounters drew protest from Iranian diaspora academics, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, and the National Council of Churches, which accused Mennonites of extending legitimacy to a repressive regime. In 2008, Richard Land, then-president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called participants “useful idiots who help [Ahmadinejad’s] evil causes by their witless complicity in meeting with him.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Martin and Hostetter started the Luke 10 Foundation to provide Iranians with vaccines, ventilators, and other emergency relief. They partnered with Moms Against Poverty, one of the few organizations that had an Office of Foreign Assets Control license given by the State Department for sanctions exemptions.

Recognizing the polarized religious and political environment, Hostetter wanted to involve evangelicals in Luke 10, as “they are closer to Republicans than most of us,” he said. In 2020, Martin found Hartley, who at the time was leading the World Evangelical Alliance’s task force on nuclear nonproliferation.

Hartley lived in Isfahan, Iran, from 2003 to 2007, where he founded Pathways for Mutual Respect, which sought to strengthen interfaith relations in more than 30 countries from Nigeria to Malaysia.

As a doctoral student at Yale supervised by Miroslav Volf, Hartley wrote his dissertation on how believers with an exclusive theology of salvation—Christian or Muslim—can nonetheless nurture inclusive social relations. Drawn to Luke 10’s focus on relief for Iranians, Hartley sought to ensure that the diverse initiative would not blur faith distinctions to appear as “one big happy religious family.”

Still, according to Hartley, all were united in humanitarian purpose.

“I’m not a pacifist, and I don’t know if this war is warranted,” Hartley said. “But we must always be serious about the human cost.”

During his time in Iran, he learned that many were afraid of US militarism. One day he entered his neighborhood money-exchange shop, and a middle-class Iranian couple asked, “Aren’t you afraid to be here?” While Hartley was prepared to give his stock answer about Iranian hospitality, the husband spoke first. “We are,” he said, explaining that they were buying dollars to travel abroad. “The Americans in Iraq are about to invade.”

Interrogated often by the authorities, Hartley kept his distance from Iranian Christians. The intelligence services assumed he had an evangelistic agenda, and they wanted him to lead them to underground churches. And while he was aware of the Mennonite dialogue efforts with Iran, he was never involved.

Yet Hartley said it was “beautiful” how Mennonites’ commitment to separate their love of people from politics created a ground for peace—and Christian witness. In one conference, an Anabaptist participant preached the gospel in a friendly, nonpolemic way. Though it made some on both sides uncomfortable, the opportunity came from Iranian trust in the Mennonite community.

Hartley related this to the Farsi word ashna, the “known people” who must be involved for an Iranian to feel comfortable in a complicated situation.

Hartley, formerly president of the Luke 10 board of directors, ended his participation in 2023 as its original humanitarian purpose waned. He commends its ongoing interfaith commitment while lamenting the “muddy waters” of this war. He has no desire for his Iranian friends to endure a military attack, but he wonders if the negotiations were earnest and if attacking Iran would actually stop the regime.

Both Mennonites wished former president Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran had held. Trust must begin somewhere, they said, with each side addressing its gaps over time. Although both Iran and the US view the other as their enemy, they could at least keep talking.

God is disappointed in the actions of both sides, Martin believes: “They are fighting, not negotiating. Love your enemy.”

On the morning of February 28, Martin eventually rose from the computer in his bedroom. He went on a long drive with his daughter, enjoying the Amish beauty of Lancaster County. Returning home, he did what he could. He wrote a letter to his congressman, a graduate of the local Mennonite high school, who had issued a statement in support of the war.

- More from Jayson Casper

Books

Review

A Map Through Natural Theology

Andrew Wilson

Three theology books on natural theology, the transfiguration of Christ, and a classic must-read.

Illustration by Christianity Today

This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.

Christopher R. Brewer, Understanding Natural Theology: Mapping the Terrain of Recent Approaches (Zondervan Academic, 2026)

Works of academic theology often proceed in two parts. Part one clears the ground: It defines key terms, narrates the history of the subject, offers a survey of contemporary debates, and enters into dialogue with a handful of influential interpreters. Part two, which may or may not come in a separate volume, offers the author’s constructive proposal. If done well, the two parts fit neatly together and move seamlessly from problem to solution.

The tragedy of Understanding Natural Theology is that Christopher R. Brewer was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at the end of part one. As a result, we have his critical appraisal but not his constructive proposal. This leaves us, as the subtitle makes clear, with a map of the current terrain but without a recommended path through it.

The map is detailed and thoughtfully presented. Brewer outlines five views on natural theology in two chapters each: natural theology (1) as informed by natural religion, (2) as proof or argument for God, (3) as a signal of transcendence, (4) as Christian natural theology, and (5) as a theology of nature. The key modern thinkers are all there, from Alvin Plantinga and Stephen Evans to Thomas Torrance and Karl Barth. But after sifting through all the definitions, debates, jargon (including “Realdialektik,” “metaxological”), and throat-clearing (“There is, in an important sense, no such thing as ‘natural theology’ but instead only ‘natural theologies’”), the reader wants a path, or at least a guide. Brewer’s untimely death leaves us without it.

Happily, however, we are given a sketch of one. In a brief afterword, Brewer suggests replacing Augustine’s famous “two books” analogy—God reveals himself through his Word and his world—with Gérard Genette’s metaphor of text and paratext. The book of nature is paratextual, like the hallway or vestibule through which we enter the “house” of God’s Word. It “precedes, accompanies, and mediates the text” of Scripture. It would be fascinating to see another theologian pick up this metaphor and write the equivalent of Brewer’s part two.

Patrick Schreiner, The Transfiguration of Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Reading (Baker Academic, 2024)

At its best, exegetical theology is thrilling. If the subject matter is captivating, the exegesis faithful, and the theology both fresh and orthodox, then the results can be exhilarating, fueling worship and wonder in the reader. All of those things are true of The Transfiguration of Christ. Few scenes in Scripture are more theologically weighty than the Transfiguration, and in few cases are the details more suggestive and the interpreter’s work more intriguing. Patrick Schreiner makes the most of this.

Structurally, the book is simply laid out. The central three chapters consider the setting of the Transfiguration (the timing, location, and witnesses to it); the signs that occur (Jesus’ shining face and clothes, the cloud, the appearance of Moses and Elijah); and the saying (“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased. Listen to him!”—Matthew 17:5) By engaging with the text extensively, as well with as the numerous Old Testament allusions it contains and the interpretations of the church fathers in particular, Schreiner illuminates the story in dozens of fascinating ways. Yet because the book is relatively short, at just over 150 pages, and is frequently punctuated and clarified with tables and summary paragraphs, it keeps moving without getting bogged down in endless detail.

At the heart of the book is the theological claim that the Transfiguration reveals Christ simultaneously as the fully human messianic Son and the fully divine eternal Son. These categories are not merely introduced centuries later, as the early church wrestled with how to express Jesus’ unique identity; they are latent in Scripture itself, especially (and perhaps supremely) in passages like these. By reading these stories on their own terms, and in dialogue with the descriptions of Christ’s baptism and crucifixion, Schreiner has shed fresh light on each of them. This is a wonderful book.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Christian Classics, 1981)

There is something faintly ridiculous about introducing the Summa Theologica (1265–1274) in a couple of paragraphs. It is a mighty work of systematic theology by one of the greatest theologians in the history of the church, a watershed in the development of Catholic doctrine, a bold and brilliant attempt to integrate Christian thought and the best of Aristotelian philosophy, a pioneering work of apologetics that is still studied in universities today, and one of the most influential books ever written in any field. Superlatives abound, and rightly so.

Yet for all those reasons, it can also be very intimidating, and so intimidating that most of us never read any of it. I did not get around to reading Aquinas until I was in my late 30s (and even then, I read an abridged version in the form of Peter Kreeft’s excellent Summa of the Summa). What surprised me when finally I did was how readable he was. His arguments are lucid; his structure is clear; his method is illuminating; he states objections fairly and reasons diligently through them; and his conclusions are always worth wrestling with, even when we totally disagree with them (as Protestants sometimes will).

Most remarkably, he frames issues that would later become highly controversial in ways that reflect a wise and thoughtful balance between biblical truths. On the relationship between divine sovereignty and human agency, for example, he beats John Calvin at his own game two and a half centuries before him. Aquinas’s chapters on providence (I:22) and predestination (I:23) pull no punches on scriptural teachings like absolute sovereignty, unconditional election, and reprobation.

Yet his chapter on free will (I:83) is equally emphatic: “Man has free will, otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain.” In this and in numerous other ways, the Summa Theologica is a masterpiece.

Andrew Wilson is teaching pastor at King’s Church London and author of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Follow him on Twitter @AJWTheology.

- More from Andrew Wilson

Ideas

Black Immigrants Are Diversifying the American Church

Jessica Janvier

African Americans have long ministered to Black people abroad. Those communities are now increasingly migrating to the US.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons, New York Public Library

This is the fourth in a series. Here are the first, second, and third articles.

About 300 ago, enslavers captured a group of Black Catholics from Central Africa and the Kingdom of Kongo and brought them to low-country South Carolina.

The group’s captivity was a violation of previously established tradition within Western Christianity that Christians should not enslave other Christians. Based on that tradition, the Africans should not have been taken or at least should have been freed when their faith was discovered. But none of that happened. As the slave trade grew, colonial governments implemented laws that severed the relationship between Christianity and freedom. The Catholics remained in the US, and some of the earliest historical records we have about Black Christians in America trace back to them.

The story of the Kongolese and other African Christians adds to the history of the nation’s diverse tapestry of Black Christianity. It also underscores a part that is often overlooked: The story of Black Christianity in America is not merely about people who shed their local religions and become Christians in the US. It is also about those who brought their faith with them to America, whether through enslavement or immigration. The latter will mostly be my focus here.

Historians say the presence of the African Catholics in South Carolina played a significant part in the first mass conversion of slaves, which took place during the Great Awakening. At the time, Black Christians were participating in evangelical revivals sweeping through England, its island territories, and the American colonies. As white preachers and missionaries were connecting believers across borders, the first Black evangelicals were also doing the same.

Take George Liele, the founder of one of the first Black Baptist churches. He left America after he secured his freedom from slavery and planted the first Baptist church in Jamaica. He named it the Ethiopian Baptist Church, referencing the East African nation as a signifier for all things Black.

During his missionary work, Liele helped convert people who became influential preachers and contributed to historically Black churches across Jamaica, the American South, Canada, and West Africa. Around that time, other African Americans—including Zilpha Elaw, Alexander Crummell, and Joseph Harden—were also ministering to the broader African diaspora by spreading the gospel, planting churches and schools, and launching a wave of Black missionaries around the world.

As African Americans ministered overseas, Black immigrants were also arriving on America’s shores. In the 18th and 19th centuries, people from the West Indies came to America and became integrated within the Black church. Among them was Denmark Vesey, who helped establish Charleston’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church (famously known as Mother Emanuel), and led a revolt against slavery.

Others cropped up as time went on. In the early 20th century, B. M. Nottage, a Black immigrant from the Bahamas, became one of the most prominent evangelists and church planters in America and worked with his two brothers to minister to Black communities across the country.

Although Black immigration did occur during this time, it was fairly small. Immigrants from Africa—as well as Asia—were essentially barred from entering the US, while those from southern and eastern Europe were restricted under discriminatory policies that favored migration from western and northern Europe.

Still, the relatively small number of Black immigrations who did manage to come cultivated their own churches. The family story of Vincent Harding, a Barbadian American who drafted some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches and became a known voice in the Civil Rights Movement, was emblematic of the growing sub-group. Harding’s mother immigrated from Barbados to the US shortly after the First World War. The family was Seventh-day Adventists, which was led by white leaders. But eventually, Harding’s family joined with other Black immigrants who formed their own branch, called the Seventh-Day Christian Church.

In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement helped create the political atmosphere for changes in immigration law. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation that removed the ethnicity-based quota policy and opened the door for immigrants across the board.

Today, more than 5 million Black immigrants live in America. That essentially means about one in ten Black people in the US were born abroad, and about a quarter of Black Americans are immigrants or the child of at least one migrant.

African immigrants are the fastest-growing Black immigrant group in the country. They are also the most religiously inclined population in America, and the Christian communities they form tend to be theologically conservative, Bible-centered, and missional.

But like most African American Christians, they don’t typically self-identify as evangelical. Instead, they often use denominational language, like Pentecostal—a pattern also found among Caribbean immigrants, who tend to add adjectives in front of traditional evangelical denominations, such as Haitian Baptist Church.

As immigrants and their children integrate, they become more likely to join and lead congregations that swim within the culture of American evangelicalism, such as Atlanta’s prominent 2819 Church, a multiethnic congregation pastored by Philip Anthony Mitchell, a first-generation Trinidadian American.

But many are also found within traditional Black church denominations, and their presence is expected to grow in the coming decades. By 2060, there will be an estimated 9.5 million Black immigrants in America, which means denominations like the Church of God in Christ and AME Zion will experience more ethnic diversity not only overseas (where many Black denominations already have churches), but also in the homeland.

My own family is part of that future. My husband is Haitian American, I’m African American and in New York, which we have long considered home, it’s common to see couples who are part of the same racial group but have different ethnic and cultural roots.

The churches my husband and I have attended reflect our family’s blended roots, whether a Haitian Baptist congregation with Creole liturgy or a Methodist church I helped pastor in the Bronx with African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Black European congregants.

Both of us have also experienced the beauty of churches that identify as evangelical and have members across various racial groups. Nevertheless, as a Black couple in America, a good life for us now includes the comfort and security of being members of an ethnically diverse Black church.

Beyond our faith, what has glued our church together is the shared experience of being Black in America. The Black church that nurtures our faith is also what reaffirms our understanding of God’s love for the stranger, pursues societal justice, pushes back against an America-centered view of the gospel, and reminds us that the image of God also comes in Black.

In a country that has a history of being hostile to Black people, this is no small gift. We needed a church that faithfully applies the gospel to the challenges we face as a household, and for us, the Black church is still the strongest in doing so.

But the part of the Black church that I often see, the kind populated by immigrants with evangelical convictions, remains relatively unknown among many Americans. Nonetheless, as immigrants and their children continue to multiply, it will be more visible and shake up the popular notion of what it means to be an evangelical in America.

Jessica Janvier is an academic whose focus crosses the intersections of African American religious history and church history. She teaches at Meachum School of Haymanot and works in the Intercultural Studies Department at Columbia International University.

- More from Jessica Janvier

Ideas

Artemis II Showed Us What Integrity Looks Like

Ashley Hales

Staff Editor

Four astronauts remind us that our humanity is both a gift from God and a joy.

The Artemis astronauts hug as they are welcomed back to Houston at Ellington Airport on Saturday, April 11, 2026.

Houston Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers / Contributor / Getty

On April 10 at 5:07 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, Integrity, the crew-named Artemis II spacecraft, splashed down off the coast of San Diego after its ten-day mission around the moon and back. Driving on a freeway a few hundred miles north of their landing spot, I listened live to NASA’s radio broadcast. The crew—which is the first to return to the moon since 1972’s Apollo 17 mission—splashed down after their 694,481-mile journey, concluding Artemis II.

I honked my horn in celebration, wondering if other drivers were similarly glued to the mission. After entering Earth’s atmosphere at approximately 24,000 miles per hour, its heat shield enduring up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the capsule splashed into the Pacific Ocean at just 19 miles per hour.

Some had questioned the heat shield’s efficacy, so after six minutes of radio silence (as the capsule was engulfed in plasma), I exhaled in relief the same way I do when one of my teenagers who has been out of cell-service range makes it home. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen were home. My tears fell unexpectedly.

Some of the trepidation is familiar for Gen Xers. I am a bit too young to remember what many older Gen Xers remember—how teachers rolled TVs into students’ elementary school classrooms so they could watch history on January 28, 1986. But that day proved disastrous as, 73 seconds into the flight, the Challenger shuttle exploded, killing all seven passengers (one of whom was a teacher under the Teacher in Space Project).

In the days since the Artemis II astronauts’ safe arrival, I’ve wondered about my sudden emotion and the proliferation of chatter on social media under #moonjoy. From doing group hugs and working while a floating jar of Nutella stole the spotlight to wearing eclipse sunglasses like ’80s kids and recreating the Full House TV show intro, the four astronauts were full of joy.

While NASA’s social media team made their updates fun and effective—like by producing a video of the crew’s playfulness, smiles, group hugs, and joy in their work as evidence of “moon joy [noun]”—I think it’s more than marketing prowess or Saturday Night Live sketches that have people still talking about the mission. It’s also more than the crew’s scientific discoveries, the stunning photographs from the back of the moon, or even the mission’s historic firsts.

What has kept us following Artemis II is simple: It has been a constant reminder that being human is a gift and being human together is a joy.

During the week of the Artemis II mission, what was happening around the moon and what was happening in our earth-bound politics was a study in contrasts. President Donald Trump threatened to wipe out a civilization—threats from which he has since backed away for at least a time—while Glover, a Christian and Integrity’s pilot, told those back on earth, “I can really see Earth as one thing.” He continued, “When I read the Bible and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us, who were created … You are special in all of this emptiness. … We are the same thing, and … we’ve got to get through this together.”

About a week before Trump posted both an AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus (since deleted) and a diatribe against Pope Leo, Glover reminded us that the globe is a sort of spacecraft—that we’re on mission together in the middle of the cosmos. Glover’s message is far more compelling and rarer in our moment of mudslinging.

Glover’s words are also a message of integrity—in keeping with the crew’s character. The astronauts, after all, named their craft Integrity for the “trust, respect, candor, and humility” they shared with the engineers, planners, and others involved with the mission, and they recognized how many people they needed for success. The word integrity at its core also means “wholeness.” We act in accordance with who we are. Four people at the pinnacle of their careers, rather than being puffed up with pride, felt their own smallness and pointed us back to one another.

Every small decision places us on a path toward either pride or humility. Luke’s gospel tells us, “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (6:45).

With their giddy awe and humility in space’s vastness, the astronauts modeled we are more than tribal infighting, wars, an unstable economy, and the countless daily burdens of life in a fallen world. No matter our circumstances, it is a gift to be on earth, and it is a gift to be human together.

It’s tempting to think the only world is one defined by a harsh law of survival of the fittest. It’s easy to believe that the vileness of political rhetoric is all there is. It can even be intoxicating to believe ugliness is how we get things done. But these four astronauts reminded us there is a better way.

Christians especially live by a new narrative: For those who are in Christ, the utter goodness and beauty of Jesus will snuff out blinding pride in ourselves and others that leads to death and destruction. Even now God invites us to live out this better story together.

In much the same way age brings perspective—we see that the things that upset us decades ago are much smaller than they appeared—space brings perspective too. In the astronauts’ first press conference, Koch spoke about her vantage point from space and how her understanding of a crew had grown: “A crew is a group that is in it all the time no matter what, that is stroking together … with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable. A crew has the same cares and the same needs, and a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked.”

She noted, observing our planet, “Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe. … There’s one new thing I know, and that is, Planet Earth, you are a crew.” May the church lead the way, modeling being a crew for the sake of our neighbors.

Glover has already started. Back on the ground, the pilot gathered with his neighbors and told them from his driveway, “Some of us have never met before. And you know whose fault that is? Ours. So let’s choose to do this. … Let’s be neighbors. I don’t know if you heard me say it, but God told us to love him with all that we are and love our neighbors as ourselves. I love you.”

Ashley Hales is editorial director of features at Christianity Today.

- More from Ashley Hales

Culture

Church-Crisis Content Didn’t Help Me

Yi Ning Chiu

Contributor

It offered the certitude of a pat narrative when what I needed was music and literature to interrogate myself.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

The year after my church dissolved, I listened to SZA’s “Good Days” on repeat. Lyrically, the song is about SZA cutting her losses after a relationship that has amounted to nothing: She wants to deliberately forget the past, “get right,” and keep it “always sunny inside.” But her declarations of resolve feel uneasy, and the track ends with a thickly layered instrumental outro suggestive of emotions she cannot bring herself to name. Looping beneath the instrumentation, low and barely distinguishable, is a voice murmuring “always in my mind, always in my mind.”

At the peak of my obsession with “Good Days,” I was trying to stanch my grief for a church I loved, an evangelical congregation that had tasked me with leading a racial justice ministry before abruptly ending its racial justice commitments. The pain of having the ministry dismantled was compounded by rumors that I had purposefully aggravated the church’s racial tensions to seed division in the community. After the congregation’s fractures finally led to its dissolution, I spent months scrolling through online content about church crises and their aftermaths.

The stories were plentiful. Podcasts, memoirs, reported accounts, and dedicated video channels have proliferated to allege and document the failures of evangelical institutions—and to promise guidance through the existential wilderness that rises up before you once you leave church or a church leaves you. I compiled a library’s worth of content, trying to find something that could tell me what to do.

Most of what I found seemed useless. Regardless of the medium, the narrative was basically the same: An origin story demonstrates the content creator’s familiarity with religious institutions. The content creator then encounters some variety of racism, misogyny, political extremism, or corruption embedded in the church community in question. Eventually, the content creator leaves behind the point of origin and arrives at a state of disillusionment, becoming—ostensibly—the church’s clear-eyed, objective critic, newly qualified to prescribe a remedy for its dysfunctions.

The church should never be exempt from critique, but popular exvangelical discourse seems extremely limited in its value. For those of us who are already aware of the church’s complicity with racism and systemic injustice, what is the use of proving, again and again, what we’ve long known to be true? For those of us who have personally watched church communities undertake the slow, painful work of repentance—only to be halted by the unpredictable frictions of real life—what good are arguments from content creators who evaluate our circumstances from a distance?

And it must be said: For those of us who have worked for racial justice and reconciliation as minorities within the majority-white evangelical church, why should we absorb recommendations from an exvangelical genre that remains, by all appearances, overwhelmingly and impenetrably white?

When I review this content now, I think of what theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “indispensable and inadequate” dimensions of social reckoning: While we ought to examine our surroundings and try to make sense of what has befallen us, we should also consider the limited scope of our perspective and the vastness of what we are trying to appraise. And so as much as I think it is good for the church to be subject to criticism, I’m mistrustful of critique delivered via these popular forms, which often trade in certitude when I’m looking for engagement with complexity.

This is why I found “Good Days” so arresting. Having already considered my own disappointing relationship with the church, I had little use for content that confirmed what I already knew. The ambiguity at the end of SZA’s song came as a relief. Rather than allowing herself closure, SZA tries to excavate the questions she has not yet asked. Listening to her, I realized I was seeking not absolution in my relationship with the church, but interrogation.

I found my interrogator in Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations. The novel is oriented around David, a young man mourning the loss of his father and his pastor. He’s recruited to work for a charismatic Black politician from Illinois referred to as “the Senator.” Given the title of the book and the institutions it deals with—family, church, government—Great Expectations seems positioned to indict all varieties of systemic failure.

Yet Cunningham never offers the conclusions that I, and anyone fed on internet exvangelical content, have been trained to anticipate. This is particularly jarring because he seems to fit the profile of other content creators grappling with their experiences in the church. He has written prolifically about his Christian upbringing and has also discussed his work on the Obama campaign, as well as his experiences of family and parenthood. Consequently, for anyone who has been wounded by the church, the novel’s most compelling drama lies in its relationship to Cunningham’s life: How will he judge the organizations and people who shaped him?

Great Expectations shows the difficulty of answering these questions, for Cunningham and his readers alike: David becomes a careful observer of the Senator and his campaign—only to realize he’ll never be able to view the man clearly. The Senator is occluded by a miasma of public opinion, by the historically laden anticipation of his victory. Those who suppose they’re interacting with the Senator are often meeting only a projection of their own desire.

“People half-heartedly tried to engage him in deep policy discussions or rounds of pontification about the mood of the country,” observes David, “but in the end they did treat him like a sign.”

By the end of the novel, David suspects his understandings of his father and his pastor are similarly distorted. These kinds of men, he thinks, occupy such symbolically fraught roles that they can only be“ciphers, names that survived in our minds because of how deftly they evaded stable meaning.”

In the book’s final pages, David senses that he is on the verge of becoming the same kind of looming, influential figure other men have been for him. His life is changing. The Senator has won the presidency, foreordaining David’s own ascendance, and David is growing into his role as father to a young daughter. All this brings him to question how he will appear to the people who will one day look to him with expectation. He wants to be “real” for them in a way that other leaders have not been for him, but he doesn’t “yet know how, couldn’t fathom where to begin.”

This is why I read Great Expectations as a book about church: It is about believing yourself ready to indict a person or institution, ready to do better than those who have gone before, only to find yourself subject to the same vortex of desire, insecurity, and inherited circumstances that you imagined you had escaped.

Cunningham easily could have produced an insider’s critique of politics and religion. He could have demanded only the reader’s indignation and self-congratulatory assent. Instead, Great Expectations says something that is virtually unsayable in shallower works of direct criticism. When we are confronted with the institutions and people who raised us and harmed us, nurtured us and disappointed us, Cunningham suggests none of us are as clear-eyed as we think.

Should that limited perspective keep us from openly discussing the church’s flaws? I don’t think so.

SZA and Cunningham aren’t making an argument for ignoring the painful fissures running through our relationships and communities. Like the creators of exvangelical church-crisis content, they’ve generated their work out of disappointment with things they found sacred. But what makes their approach interesting to me is their willingness to consider human subjectivity and the ways it ought to complicate every story we tell.

Journalist Eliza Griswold also takes this approach in Circle of Hope, her reported account of a Philadelphia congregation’s total collapse. Consequently, her book does not offer the predictable conclusiveness of popular church-failure content.

Griswold is forthcoming about the congregation’s problems: Succession challenges, theological conflicts, racist power dynamics, and generational differences tore the community apart. She writes clearly about these institutional failings but blurs the resulting portrait by asking us to consider how these weaknesses were linked to people who loved the church earnestly yet inadequately.

The men and women who hired one of the church’s few Black leaders were both “the kindest people [she’d] ever met,” Griswold writes, and the most foolishly obstinate when confronted with the implications of racial difference. The church’s most zealously welcoming evangelist, with his charisma and ambition, became its most divisive figure. The congregation is easiest to understand when viewed at a distance, framed in terms of its enormous, intractable problems. It is nearly incomprehensible when examined at an intimate scale.

These people in Circle of Hope were at once tenderhearted and calculating, well-intentioned and catastrophically unwise. It is hard to reconcile their conflicting stories, harder still to form a coherent theory about what they meant to each other as a community of believers. Griswold examines the church through their competing perspectives, pushing us to recognize the fundamental questions animating virtually every piece of church criticism: What do people actually think a church should do? How, in the end, is the church supposed to function?

Maybe, Griswold says, the people of this church “humbled each other, or perhaps ‘harrowed’ is the better word: raking one another’s souls, like fields.” At the end of their time together, this mutual harrowing was what the congregation finally achieved.

Christ calls the Father a pruning gardener (John 15:1–2), so the image of the church as a harrowed field is evocative. It implies that the church is, among other things, a site of denuding and exposure. Perhaps one of its fundamental roles is to offer us a confrontation with ourselves—with our finitude, our vulnerability, our internally fragmented state. Part of the church’s work, Griswold’s reporting suggests, is showing us the magnitude of our own need.

Since my own church crisis, I’ve joined a different local congregation, this time with the assumption that I cannot predict what will happen between us, but I can expect an encounter with my frailty. If SZA, Cunningham, and Griswold are correct, there’s often a great distance between what we say and what we believe, what we intend and what we produce, what we aspire to do and what we accomplish—and we will see proof of this in every human relationship and institution. The church, in this view, primes us to yearn for a God whose redemptive power meets our insufficiency (1 Cor. 1:26–31), whose Spirit reaches depths within us that we cannot plumb on our own.

Cunningham seems to intuit this idea in a sequence of Great Expectations that has David mulling over the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. David is agitated by Christ’s strangely phrased responses to Nicodemus’s questions. But he begins to understand Christ’s seeming indirectness as a necessity, a form of artful, oblique engagement that leads us to consider truths we would otherwise find unthinkable.

Jesus’ rhetorical feints, his provocations, his assertion that we must be born again, come to sound to David “like something from a sonata—a restatement by way of deepening, distortion, distention, modulation. The sentence isn’t necessarily easier to understand, but it is somehow, by way of image, more precise.”

Yi Ning Chiu writes Please Don’t Go, a newsletter about the pain and indispensability of communal life. Previously, she was a columnist for Inkwell, Christianity Today’s creative Next Gen Initiative project.

- More from Yi Ning Chiu

News

Strait of Hormuz Closure Is Hurting Global Aid

Jill Nelson

Christian aviation and relief groups say increased fuel costs and shipping disruptions make it difficult for them to help the world’s most vulnerable.

Johnny Reeves, a JAARS Pilot in Papua New Guinea, bringing in supplies.

Image courtesy of JAARS

When Iran began severely restricting access to the Strait of Hormuz in early March, Jungle Aviation and Relay Service (JAARS) felt the impact almost immediately. The Christian nonprofit has 48 aircraft and 75 pilots in its alliance and flies missionaries to every major rainforest on the globe.

During the past few weeks, the organization has weathered an “astronomical increase” in aviation fuel costs, according to Steve Russell, president and CEO of JAARS. It’s one of the most significant increases he can recall.

Now, instead of spending $600 an hour on fuel for a turboprop aircraft, JAARS is paying 25 percent more on average—an extra $150 per hour—and facing increased costs for parts and labor due to supply chain disruptions.

“You budget for 2.5 percent or 3 percent for inflation maybe in a year, but not 25 percent. That’s huge,” Russell told Christianity Today.

That’s in addition to the overall increase in operational costs in the aviation industry since 2019 and the tariff challenges JAARS faced last summer. “There are huge impacts that people don’t even imagine would affect missions,” Russell said.

JAARS transports missionary translators into some of the world’s most remote villages where they learn local languages, translate Scripture, and promote literacy. Several weeks ago, Russell sent a memorandum to members of the alliance to begin thinking through, as he said, “an awful lot of issues that normally we might take for granted in times of peace.”

So far, JAARS has not been forced to cut flights, but it is considering asking fuel companies for price breaks and may also reach out to Christians for additional donations.

JAARS isn’t the only Christian ministry facing increased costs related to disruptions in the strait. CT spoke with another aviation ministry and four Christian relief organizations concerned about rising operational costs and how their trickle-down effects could disproportionately affect the world’s most vulnerable people.

Iranian and US negotiators agreed to a two-week cease-fire on April 7 yet failed to negotiate a deal during peace talks in Pakistan over the weekend. On Monday, the US imposed a blockade on Iranian ports in an attempt to choke off Tehran’s oil revenues—raising concerns of renewed fighting.

The war began at the end of February after decades of Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile expansion and deadly attacks by Iranian proxy groups on US forces, Israel, and other regional allies. The joint US-Israeli operation has destroyed most of Iran’s navy, air defense system, naval mines, and nuclear industrial base, according to General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It has also “devastated” Tehran’s command and control networks.

Iran responded by attacking oil tankers and cargo ships, laying mines, and charging tolls as high as $2 million for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, creating a backlog of ships in the crucial waterway—including 425 oil and fuel tankers and around 20 vessels carrying liquefied natural gas.

Around 20 percent of the world’s oil—sourced from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq—transits through the strait during normal operations.

The conflict has dealt a serious blow to global economies. Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association, told The New York Times it will take months for global jet fuel supplies to stabilize—even if traffic in the strait returns to normal levels in the coming weeks—due to disruptions to refineries.

That’s difficult news for mission organizations already feeling the hit to their pocketbooks.

“There are acts of God, and you can budget for those a little bit, but this kind of an issue has a systemic impact, raising costs significantly,” said Chris Palombo, CEO and president of Medicine for All People (MAP) International, a Christian organization that provides medicine and medical supplies to people in 100 countries around the world. “So when will we feel it? We’re feeling it now.”

Palombo said fuel prices have increased 25 to 35 percent, and shipping quotes that were once good for 30 days are now only good for five. Shipments are delayed one to three months—a significant setback for donated medicine with expiration dates or refrigeration requirements.

“We are constantly fighting the clock,” Palombo said. “If you lose a couple of months going from a port to a warehouse to a clinic to a mass unit clinic at the far edges of some country, nine months of usable life just became six or five.”

Much of the medicine MAP receives is donated because of looming expiration dates, he added, noting that MAP hasn’t been able to calculate the future impact of the delays and rising fuel costs. “It’s one of those things we’re going to know retrospectively, and the challenge with that is it’s very hard to plan,” Palombo said.

MAP was already feeling the increased global need for medical care in the wake of USAID cuts, delivering more than $1 billion in medical supplies and medicine last year against an $860 million budget. Increased donations bridged the gap.

Now Palombo is praying for the crisis to end quickly because “the poor suffer disproportionately.” As global conflicts ignite, the needs of the vulnerable increase—but so do shipping costs. Meanwhile, air shipments are not only less efficient because of smaller containers, but also more expensive due to increased demand.

Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) also began to feel the impact of Iran’s waterway disruptions in recent weeks. According to Brock Larson, MAF’s vice president of global operations, since April 1, MAF has faced a 67 percent increase in jet fuel in Indonesia, where it has the greatest number of flight operations. In Africa, MAF has observed a 40–43 percent increase in fuel costs.

Larson said fuel costs are MAF’s second or third highest expense behind labor and sometimes maintenance. MAF and its sister organizations operate a fleet of 135 airplanes that serve 1,500 churches, nonprofits, and humanitarian organizations in 37 countries. MAF is currently under budget and able to pay the extra costs, Larson said, but may need to send an appeal to donors if the conflict continues another three to six months.

Compassion International is also seeing rising flight costs and is exercising caution with its travel budget. Yet one of the organization’s primary concerns is the current instability in marketplaces, said Matt Ellingson, Compassion’s principal humanitarian advisor.

“Right off the bat, vendors are going to raise the cost of the things they have on the shelves because they’re not sure when they’re going to be able to be restocked,” Ellingson added.

For instance, delayed fertilizer deliveries could limit future harvests since each planting season requires a different type of fertilizer. This compounds the suffering in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia where people are already very vulnerable. Countries dependent upon Middle Eastern oil are also highly vulnerable, including the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, he added.

“Fuel rations mean expensive fuel at the pump, but it actually means that day laborers will have less opportunity to work, and they will have to spend more money for their basic needs for their families, and so they’re the ones that will experience the hardship first,” Ellingson said.

Parents could soon be making some difficult decisions between consuming what they have and hoping for a future resolution or withholding food to try to survive a long-term shortage. “I’m a dad, and it always rips me apart,” Ellingson said.

Hannah Chargin, World Vision’s director of advocacy, said many regions of the world are close to entering their planting season. Within 6–12 months, reduced fertilizer application could result in a 5–15 percent decline in harvest yields, triggering sustained price increases, Chargin said.

In Sudan, the crisis could impact access to water. “The country is heavily reliant on borehole drills, and these drills are run by diesel generators that suck the water into tanks,” Chargin said. “And currently, it’s the hot season in Sudan, so when diesel prices rise, that means the price of water increases.”

Adula Gemta, regional director of international programs for World Relief, said the Hormuz crisis has not yet significantly affected his organization, but he anticipates greater consequences if it continues for several more weeks. World Relief’s programs are concentrated in Africa, which relies on Middle Eastern supply routes. His organization maintains some stocks of fuel in warehouses since they use fuel for lighting and transportation.

Fragile countries have limited fuel stock, so a larger fuel shortage may be visible within two months, Gemta added. These countries have increased vulnerability because suppliers can drive up prices. Some parts of Sudan have already seen a 60 percent increase in fuel costs, he said.

Amid the uncertainty around fuel prices, changing shipping lanes, and the rising cost of food, Russell of JAARS finds encouragement in Paul’s teaching in Acts 17:26 about God determining the boundaries of nations.

“These events don’t escape God’s notice,” Russell said. “And if he wants his kingdom to advance, and he wants to use us in the ministry of reconciliation to be ambassadors for Christ, then he will resource his work through his people.”

- More from Jill Nelson

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Christopher R. Brewer, Understanding Natural Theology: Mapping the Terrain of Recent Approaches (Zondervan Academic, 2026)

Patrick Schreiner, The Transfiguration of Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Reading (Baker Academic, 2024)

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Christian Classics, 1981)

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