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.

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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 as (1) informed by natural religion, (2) as proof or argument for God, (3) as 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Theology

What Is Godly Resistance?

Carmen Joy Imes

Contributor

Exodus’s midwives can teach us a lot about how to fear God more than the king.

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

Judging by current public discourse, one might think the Bible only addresses politics once, in Romans 13. “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established,” the apostle Paul wrote (v. 1). But are we to understand this as the only model for Christian political witness? Is Paul’s instruction a universal mandate for believers, even in situations where earthly rulers indeed terrorize “those who do right” (v. 3)?

Peter seems to support this approach when he says, “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority. … Honor the emperor” (1 Pet. 2:13–17). However, he goes on to emphasize that we should be willing to endure unjust suffering ourselves. Inflicting injustice on others is another question altogether.

One of my heroes is Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman who resisted the Nazi regime by hiding Jews in her home and falsifying ration cards to feed them. I read her memoir, The Hiding Place, several times as I was growing up. Keeping the Jews safe required daily deception—a vigilant disobedience to the governing authorities. Her choice to resist the regime resulted in her capture and imprisonment at a concentration camp, where she suffered much. But mercifully, she survived the war and went on to write and speak about the power of forgiving her enemies.

Perhaps her story meant so much to me because my own grandmother, Barbara Brinkman (later Barbara Camfferman), a contemporary of ten Boom, worked for the Dutch Underground. She and her brothers attended clandestine meetings where, with fellow Christians, they devised ways to undermine the Nazis. They kept radios even though Hitler had banned them. They blew up bridges, stole equipment, and forged ID cards. My grandmother broke curfew to deliver messages, rolled up in the handlebars of her bicycle, for Allied soldiers. Once she was detained and nearly arrested.

An American fighter jet was shot down out of the sky above their farm, and the pilot parachuted into their back field. She and her brothers hid him and helped him escape. One of her younger brothers spent the war hiding in the attic of a kind family some distance from home to avoid conscription. For several long years, they all held their breath and did what they could. Miraculously, my grandmother and her siblings all survived the occupation.

They did not submit to the governing authorities. My grandmother resisted repeatedly. Was she wrong to do so? Should Corrie ten Boom have surrendered her Jewish friends to the Third Reich?

I think not. And the Bible offers strong precedent for their resistance—defiant behavior that earned God’s approval. Rahab hid the Israelite spies from local government officials (Joshua 2). Jael violated a clan allegiance by offering hospitality and then murdering an army general for Israel’s sake (Judges 4). Obadiah—a government official himself!—hid prophets of Yahweh in a cave and provided them food and water so the queen couldn’t kill them (1 Kings 18).

Isaiah and Jeremiah wouldn’t toe the party line when it would have been politically safer to say what itching ears wanted to hear. Isaiah was put in stocks and Jeremiah thrown in a cistern—they indeed suffered for doing and saying what was right. Daniel refused to stop praying to Yahweh, and his friends refused to bow down to a state-sponsored idol (Dan. 6:13; 3:18).

But the women who have captured my heart more than any other defiant Bible characters are the Hebrew midwives in Exodus. Pharaoh tried to enlist their help to eliminate his rivals: “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him, but if it is a girl, let her live” (Ex. 1:16). Pharaoh also stoked fear in his nation until the Egyptians felt disgust toward the Hebrew foreigners.

The women refused to comply. At great risk to themselves, they spared the baby boys. Exodus tells us why: “The midwives, however, feared God, and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live” (v. 17).

Were the women afraid of the consequences of their defiance? Perhaps, but their fear of God outweighed their fear of Pharaoh. They understood that the judgment that mattered most was God’s. Their obstinance saved a generation. The text makes clear that God rewarded them for their work (vv. 20–21).

We don’t know much about these women, other than their names, Shiphrah and Puah. But in a story where the villain is never named (“Pharaoh” is a title, not a name), these named women stand out as significant and worth remembering. Scholars debate whether or not they were Hebrew themselves, whether they were the only midwives or the chief midwives, and whether they lied to Pharaoh about the early deliveries or told the truth.

Their retort to Pharaoh exhibits a cleverness worthy of Brer Rabbit or High John the Conqueror: “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive” (Ex. 1:19). The word vigorous is related to the Hebrew word that means animal. Pharaoh treated the Hebrews like beasts, and their strength made them impervious to his plan.

The midwives, Moses’ mother and sister, the daughter of Pharaoh, and her servants, each conspired to defy the king and his orders. Each one worked within her sphere of influence to birth, nurture, and rescue a child under threat of death.

Imagine if they had looked at one another and said, “What choice do we have? The king says we must put him to death.” We would have no Moses, no deliverance from slavery, no trip to Sinai, no Ten Commandments, no Tabernacle. In short, we would have no covenant and no Messiah and no blessing for all nations—at least not in the way the Scripture describes.

Later in Exodus, we discover that the actions of Pharaoh’s daughter anticipated what God would do. He saw the Hebrews, heard their cries, had compassion on them, and sent someone to draw them out of Egypt (2:23–25; 3:7–8). And Moses is like his sister Miriam. He takes his stand on the banks of the Nile to confront Pharaoh on his way to the river and request that he “let my people go” (7:15–16). We can find the same vocabulary in the story of the young girl who negotiated the deliverance of her baby brother (2:3–4, 7). If you want to learn about God in Exodus, watch the women—they behave most like him.

The ethical dilemmas of our own day are no less complex. Do we employ undocumented immigrants? Do we educate them? Do we assist those lawfully present in our country to avoid ICE raids because we are not confident that they will be treated lawfully? Do we vote for a candidate who has pledged to support gender transition surgery for minors without parental approval? Do we take a stance on the wars in Gaza and Iran?

Do we vote for candidates of either major party when both are committed to making abortion more accessible? Do we comply with government regulations that require us to offer services that violate our consciences? Do we align with our president in condemning the pope?

We must develop the moral discernment to know when to invoke Exodus 1 as our model and when to lean into Romans 13—whether the governing authorities are requiring us to disobey God’s commands or to keep them. Knowing good from evil is the most urgent need of our age and of any age.

But as in the beginning, we must seek the Lord for this wisdom and not attempt to define it for ourselves (or let government leaders define it for us) in the spirit of the times. The Scriptures are the most powerful material gift we have—the self-revelation of God that shows us how to embody his character in our worship, in our work, and in our witness. Parroting one verse without reading the whole counsel of God can result in the malformation of our ethics.

Sadly, our collective knowledge of the Scriptures has faltered. We’ve fixated on vague memories from Sunday school or isolated passages that seem relevant for the current moment. We’ve allowed ourselves to be swayed by leaders who cite Bible verses to justify their actions. But we’ve lost the moral discernment that arises from seeing the bigger picture and understanding how the stories are meant to fit together.

Today, we need the courage of the midwives, who feared God more than the king and knew that what Pharaoh was asking was entirely immoral. We’re in desperate need of a renewed scriptural vision and a fresh commitment to participate in work that honors God’s character and God’s mission, no matter what it may cost.

Carmen Joy Imes is an associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and an author. Her latest book is Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters.

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Theology

Trump’s AI Jesus Might Be the Messiah We’ve Been Looking For

Russell Moore

Columnist

Perhaps this blasphemous image can expose what we’ve become—and, ironically, lead the way back to what’s real.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Google

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

In the past few weeks, the president has posted an Easter message that used profanity and threatened civilizational genocide, has issued threats to the pope, and has posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus. (He now says he was portraying himself as a doctor.) After all this, even some of the president’s supporters feel humiliated and angry. I think it’s worth asking what exactly is coming to light in this moment and whether it could disrupt a means-to-an-end cultural Christianity.

For years, some evangelicals have told us Donald Trump might be the disruptor we need to bring us back to Jesus. For the first time, I think they might be right—just not in the way they thought. Maybe “Trump AI Jesus” is what we’ve been waiting for to show us what we’ve become. And oddly, that just might be a point of hope.

After all, the now-deleted Truth Social post was not some break from the usual pattern. Just two weeks before, the senior adviser of the White House Faith Office compared the president to Jesus Christ, with specific references to his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. If that’s not blasphemy, the word has no meaning. But her comments were met with applause in the East Room and yawns most other places. A week or so before that, the president posted images of his proposed presidential library in Miami, including a gold statue of himself pictured before a crowd of attendees.

But the Trump-as-Jesus (excuse me, as Florence Nightingale) post was so tawdry and public that it was humiliating. The humiliation it caused was not about Trump. Who did not already know his high view of himself? It was about us: The president is so confident in evangelical and white Catholic support that he is willing to stand on Fifth Avenue and point the metaphorical gun at the first commandment, confident he will not lose any support.

Many times over the past decade, I’ve quoted an editorial in The Guardian, published shortly after the 2016 presidential election, that explains American evangelicalism to a secular British audience. “A religion that is responsive to the pressures of the market will end up profoundly fractured, with each denomination finding most hateful to God the sins that least tempt its members, while those sins that are most popular become redefined and even sanctified,” the editors wrote. “In the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth, and this development ultimately eviscerated conservative Christianity in the US and left it the possession of hypocrites and hucksters.”

Two thousand years of Christian history should have taught us the church needs to be both an institution and a movement, or else it becomes unmoored. During the Reformation, institutionalization was the problem. The church’s authority was so unquestioned it could use people’s fear of pain in purgatory to enrich itself with the selling of indulgences. That problem could not be corrected from the inside—it needed some theses nailed to the door.

We need reformations and revivals to keep the church from becoming just one more institution. But we need institutions to keep the church from becoming an entrepreneurial populist mob tossed to and fro by the passions of the moment.

When the problem is ossified institutionalism, only an outsider—a Martin Luther or a Roger Williams—can address the problem, because those on the outside cannot be bought with position or power. But when the problem is market-driven populism, the opposite is sometimes the case: We need an institution to call out our wrongs.

Perhaps this is why Pope Leo has been able to speak in ways that don’t fit the “movements” of the moment—he’s pro-life on abortion and euthanasia, solid on the traditional Christian emphases on marriage and family, unflinching in opposition to the mistreatment of migrants and to unjust war-making and war crimes, and—perhaps most counterculturally—against the idolatry of politics. Maybe what enables him to hold all these views is that he knows he represents a 2,000-year-old structure that predates and will postdate all these political movements, including the American republic.

Quests for institution without renewal or for movements without structure ultimately lead to the same place: back toward whatever we already want, now reimagined as the gospel itself. And there will always be people who want to commandeer that kind of gospel, to mobilize voters or to sell products.

The problem is not that Trump can’t tell the difference between himself and Jesus. It’s that too many of us can’t. That’s why many people’s test of loyalty right now is not whether you hold to the gospel or to the mission or to the creeds or to the transformed life but whether you are sufficiently “in line” on politics. And almost every leader, in government and the church, knows that any show of ambiguity summons an angry mob of outrage.

But we’ve seen all this before.

In the Book of Acts, Paul went into Ephesus preaching the gospel, and that became a problem. He said handmade gods were no gods at all. The guild of silversmiths who made miniature shrines to the goddess Artemis—led by a man named Demetrius—saw their revenue stream was about to dry up. But Demetrius was savvy enough to know that “our profit margins are suffering” wasn’t going to fill the streets. So he reframed it, saying Paul was disrespecting and threatening the great goddess Artemis and the city’s identity as her dwelling place, the center of one of the most powerful cults of the ancient world (Acts 19:27). That framing worked. He mobilized the crowd.

The people were in the streets, chanting, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (v. 28, ESV throughout) for hours. Acts notes that most of the people didn’t even know why they were there or why they were so impassioned (v. 32). They just knew what side they were on. The economic grifters counted on the tribalistic mob, and they knew the way to get at them was nationalist frenzy. These were not three separate things—they were one system, each element feeding the others, all of it needing an identity large enough to die for and an enemy visible enough to hate.

But the moment ended. A town clerk came to himself and said the frenzy had gone on too long and would destroy the city. This low-level Roman bureaucrat looked at what his city had become and flinched.

More importantly, Paul would later write to the city’s little, seemingly irrelevant church to tell them they were at the epicenter of the new thing God was doing: gathering all things together in Christ (Eph. 1:10), who is before all things and in whom all things hold together. Paul told them “the course of this world” and “the prince of the power of the air” and “the passions of our flesh” (2:1–3) are what Jesus came to undo.

Paul wrote that the dividing wall, the thing that makes tests of loyalty and tribal identity feel ultimate, has been broken down by a body, not a better politics (v. 14). He showed them that the real battle is against principalities and powers, not flesh and blood—which means chanting the name of any earthly figure, however loudly and however long, is fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons.

The mystery of Christ—hidden for ages, now made known—is that the answer to every Ephesus in every century is not a counter-mob or a reformed silversmith guild or a smarter political coalition. It is the same thing it always was: something that looks too small for the moment. Sometimes that starts with people who, while polishing silver, look into the dead eyes of an idol and ask, Is this what we’ve become? To see it close-up is humiliating. Sometimes the humiliation leads people to double down. But sometimes it leads back to what’s real.

Maybe we’re in that kind of moment. I don’t know. But perhaps the craziness and grossness of this blasphemous time will cause us to look at the Jesus images we’ve made for ourselves—to really look at them—and ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”

Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.

History

Changing Times and Technology

Daniel Silliman

In 1981, CT helped evangelicals navigate debates over Ronald Reagan, genetic engineering, television, and male headship.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, CT Archives

Was Billy Graham out of step with evangelicalism? In the article “Candid Conversation with the Evangelist,” CT asked the magazine’s founder if he had drifted to the left while the grassroots movement was moving toward the Religious Right. Graham had a different view of what was happening:

I do not agree with that observation. … There are, perhaps, some differences on social and political questions that are more evident today because of our visibility. The pendulum swings back and forth on some of the social, economic, and political issues. But most evangelicals recognize they have responsibilities in these areas in certain contexts. I have been called “liberal” in some areas because of my stand on certain social issues; I have been called “conservative” theologically. I accept both labels, and believe that I stand in the mainstream of evangelicalism.

CT also profiled Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, asking whether he was “bandit or crusader.” The magazine noted that, as a fundamentalist, Falwell would not cooperate with Graham on evangelistic events, and asked Falwell whether the Moral Majority was fundamentalist. He said:

The most aggressive leaders in Moral Majority are fundamentalist pastors. That isn’t necessary, because Moral Majority is not a religious organization; it’s political. There is no theological agreement in Moral Majority. At the same time, fundamentalists like me were taught to fight before we were taught to read and write. There is no lack of courage among fundamentalists. Fortunately, fundamentalists like me have been growing up over the past 20 years. We have been finding we can fellowship only in truth, but that we can have friendship in many other affinities. …

My definition of a fundamentalist is one who, first, believes in the inerrancy of Scripture, and second, is committed to biblical separation in the world and to the lordship of Christ. …

What we’ve said from the beginning is that the Moral Majority is a political organization. You’re not going to hear doctrine there. We are not going to try to witness to you there. You come as an American who shares the moral views of the membership, and to fight together on a prolife, profamily, promoral, pro-American position.

Pro-life Christians faced political setbacks in 1981. Elected leaders told them banning abortion was politically impossible.

That route requires two-thirds approval of each house of Congress and ratification by 38 states. Advocates of a constitutional amendment have been unable to agree on wording or strategy, and none of the many versions has been reported out of committee.

Ardent antiabortion activists themselves are hopelessly split: some want exceptions for such reasons as rape and incest included in the wording; others are holding out resolutely for no exceptions. And some Catholics among them have blended their opposition to unnatural contraception with their antiabortion views, further clouding the amendment cause. …

Proabortionists generally see little chance of an amendment being passed in the near future, but a statute is conceivably within easy reach since both houses are ruled by a conservative majority. Some antiabortionists fear that debate over a statute, whose continued existence would be subject to the ideological whims of future congresses, will distract from efforts to win an amendment. Others—including some stalwart antiabortionists on Capitol Hill—believe [North Carolina Jesse Helm’s proposed legislation defining an unborn child as a person] is unconstitutional.

Then, President Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. She had long called abortion a right that should be legally protected. CT reported the response of Christian activists who had mobilized pro-life support for Reagan.

Prolife leaders gathered in Dallas … a week before Senate confirmation hearings were to begin in Washington on O’Connor’s nomination, to proclaim their chagrin and do what little they could to fight the confirmation. It became clear during the long day of speeches and sermonizing that whatever their hopes for defeating O’Connor, the prolifers were not yet ready to give up on Ronald Reagan. It was the day’s most surprising development.

“Ronald Reagan is the greatest president we’ve had in my lifetime, and history may record that he’s the greatest president ever,” declared evangelist Jerry Falwell. Falwell promised Reagan he would withhold all comment on O’Connor until after the confirmation hearings. He turned down repeated opportunities provided by the press to denounce Reagan because of O’Connor.

When Carolyn Gerster, an Arizona physician and long-time leader in the prolife movement, met with candidate Reagan early in his campaign, he convinced her of his commitment against abortion. The interview led her organization, the National Right to Life Committee, to endorse him for president. During the Dallas rally, she spoke heatedly against the O’Connor nomination, but she was steadfast in her belief in Reagan. She believes Reagan was misinformed about O’Connor’s abortion record, either by O’Connor herself, or by a Justice Department staff member who researched her record.

In 1981, CT looked at another way Christians could demonstrate commitment to the value of life, publishing multiple articles on the need to include disabled people in church. A pediatrician wrote about why churches should welcome children with Down syndrome.

In my work with developmentally delayed children, I have seen and attended creative and innovative church school programs where there was an environment of love and acceptance. But in many churches, which find themselves faced with children like Jason for whom they have no program and whose very presence evokes strong feelings, rejection results. …

The act of rejection … is based on the notion that because of his retardation, Jason could not comprehend “church,” and, therefore, could not benefit from it. That is a very dangerous attitude, yet it is one that pervades our society and characterizes many of the attitudes toward retarded individuals. …

But the church has not only a commitment to accept, but the opportunity to provide a specific ministry. It is the ideal place to establish the fact that functional and intellectual abilities are not synonymous with acceptability as a person—nor, most certainly, acceptance into the kingdom of God.

CT called attention to a “new area of responsibility” in 1981 with an editorial on “genetic engineering.”

Having witnessed how Congress has handled, or mishandled, abortion, the energy crisis, the post office, Amtrak, and the economy, one is not given to much optimism about how our legislators will do with biotechnology and a definition of what constitutes “life.” There is no doubt that the lines of battle are already being drawn. Those who were not alarmed by the Supreme Court’s decision played down fears by noting that the oil-eating bacterium was not life, but matter. The invention was a manipulation of matter, not the creation of life in a godlike sense, they explained.

On the other hand, a strong cry of protest arose from others in both science and philosophy (not necessarily Christians, by the way), who warned against a dangerous “foot in the door” situation. Their argument is that genetic engineering makes no distinction between life and matter. They warn that the ultimate conclusion is that all of life’s properties can be reduced to the “physico-chemical.” …

What to do about splicing genes, it seems to us, will be decided on the same basis as abortion and euthanasia. If “life” is purely material, then anything goes; there are no moral boundaries. The trend in public policy in recent decades decidedly has been away from a definition of life as something special and sacred and toward a definition that is “physico-chemical.” We agree with the alarmists on this point.

Evangelicals embraced another kind of activism in the early 1980s: boycotts. CT noted one apparently successful effort to convince television networks to stop airing offensive material.

If you want to do something to rid television of profanity, sex, and violence, switch off your set, write protest letters to network officials, or join a PTA lobby. But if you really want to do something, pull together a large group of people (three to five million will do), get backing from the Moral Majority, and plan a boycott. Threaten to stop buying products of companies that sponsor offending programs—and watch the fur fly.

That’s just what Donald B. Wildmon, founder of the Coalition for Better Television, did. He proposed a one-year boycott of products from sponsors of television shows marked offensive by 4,000 volunteer monitors during a three-month period. … The monitors produced a list of sponsors—but Wildmon never used it to effect his boycott. One week before the scheduled announcement of his list, Wildmon met with advertisers in Memphis and made an eleventh-hour decision to hold off on the boycott.

Justifying the boycott, Wildmon, a United Methodist clergyman, had said, “Our values, our principles, our morals—those things which are very dear and meaningful to us—have been ridiculed, belittled, mocked, and insulted by the networks. We feel the boycott will be criticized very loudly by the networks and the companies, but that’s nothing new to us. The only thing that matters to them is money and we’re ready to see the boycott through to prove our point.”

Christians concerned about the quality and morals of television in 1981 were also exploring the use of a new technology, the video cassette recorder, or VCR. CT said it might be the “key to taming the TV monster.”

Our family decided it was time to stop talking about television’s potential for harm and do something about it. … We looked for a workable alternative that would let our preteens feel privileged, not punished. For us the answer is a video cassette recorder (VCR). We play what we judge the very best programs. Add an occasional rented videotape, and a birthday party or slumber party becomes special. …

Saturday morning cartoons, often called TV’s most violent hours, once kept our children entranced. Now they usually give way to a replay of Sound of Music, “Little House on the Prairie,” “Star Trek,” or “Those Amazing Animals.” …

Taping costs are not unreasonable. We record six hours of material on a $15 videotape. We paid $850 for a fully portable A.C./battery-operated, 11-pound VCR. Used standard table-top models go for $350 and up. As a result of our new control over TV, we watch it less and we watch it constructively.

CT told readers their churches should also consider VCRs.

Video—specifically, prerecorded videocassette programming—could become the church’s “now and future” audio-visual tool. … While newer, lighter, portable VCR units are becoming increasingly available (remember those ads?), even carting an older machine to the home of a shut-in, plugging it into the TV, and turning on, say, John Stott, would add a new dimension to home visitation.

If you start thinking about the possibilities that exist when you possess your own VCR camera, the sky is suddenly the limit. Now you can take last Sunday morning’s service or the Sunday school Christmas program to that shut-in. Or, add a five-foot projection screen to the TV set at church: John Stott or Chuck Colson or John Mac Arthur or Oswald C. J. Hoffmann or a host of others can teach your congregation—almost in person—for a relatively small tape rental fee.

Evangelical media had its own big controversy in 1981 after CT investigated the story behind Jack Chick’s Christian comic book Alberto.

It purports to be the true story of a Jesuit priest named Alberto Rivera, who was raised and trained in a Spanish Jesuit seminary, and whose job was to infiltrate and destroy Protestant churches. … A year ago, Alberto Rivera himself issued a sworn statement defending the allegations. He declared in part that, “Alberto is a true and actual account and I will face a court of law to prove the events actually took place.” …

This reporter’s investigation shows that not only was Rivera not a Jesuit priest, but also that he had two children during the time he claimed to be living a celibate life as a Jesuit. Neither, it seems, does he have a sister in England who was a nun. Rivera has been sought by police for writing bad checks in Hoboken, New Jersey, and for stealing a credit card in Florida. Those revelations taint the credibility of the fantastic stories Rivera tells in the comic books.

Evangelicals were also debating the issue of male headship in the home in 1981. CT published multiple female authors sharing personal stories of how they submitted to their husbands. A woman in Pennsylvania wrote about how she navigated a difference of preference in holiday decor.

Hale and I have varying tastes in music, literature, hobbies, home decorating—and even in Christmas trees. He doesn’t like Christmas trees, and wouldn’t care if we never put one up. My family always had real trees that scraped the ceiling and filled the house with their fragrance. The conflict came when we were given an artificial tree as a wedding present.

For the first several years we had more than just a “discussion” on real versus artificial trees. Finally, my husband said he didn’t want to hear about it any more. So, during some years when the children were temptable babes, we didn’t put up any tree; the rest of the time I have had to be satisfied with an artificial tree, with no mention of a real one at all. … I know there is no substitute for the peace and security of having a biblically ordered home.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Ideas

My Family Resisted Iran’s Regime. My Hope Is Not in Foreign Intervention.

Sara Afshari

Jesus spoke peace to his disciples as they hid. Iranian Christians modeled for me that same resistance with grace.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, WikiMedia Commons

On Saturday, February 28, just a few hours after the start of the US–Israel war against Iran and before the internet went dark, my sister called from Yazd in central Iran. Her voice was calm.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We have supplies. We’ll stay home. We’ll lock the doors.”

Then the line went silent.

By the next evening, reports emerged that her area had been bombed. After that, nothing. No messages. No calls. No confirmation. Just silence.

Days later, she managed to call again briefly, just long enough to say the family was alive. Alive—but still behind locked doors.

In recent weeks, Iran has been plunged deeper into war. Airstrikes have hit cities, energy infrastructure, and residential areas. Reports—fragmented and difficult to verify—suggest widespread destruction of homes, hospitals, and public spaces. Communication blackouts have made it nearly impossible to know what is happening on the ground.

For those inside—and for those of us with family there—fear, uncertainty, and waiting are a lived reality.

And in the middle of that waiting, I found myself returning to a familiar passage: “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’” (John 20:19).

John’s gospel does not hide the fear of the disciples. After the Crucifixion, they are not bold or triumphant. They are hiding. Their fear is a reasonable response to violence. They have seen what power can do, so they lock the doors.

That image, behind locked doors, has followed me in the weeks since the war began. It is one Iranians are familiar with. In societies shaped by prolonged authoritarian rule, closing the door is not simply retreat; it is learned wisdom. Private space becomes a fragile shield against surveillance, detention, and violence. And yet even locked doors do not—and did not—always protect us.

My childhood unfolded in the shadow of prison. Visiting my siblings in prison was part of ordinary life. I remember one visit when my brother was weeping. He had tried to save a prostitute sentenced to execution by asking to marry her, hoping to spare her life, but his request came too late.

“I couldn’t save her,” he said. The system was swift and unforgiving.

Yet even within prison, there were signs of dignity. I remember the handbags and handicrafts prisoners made, which we bought to support them. As a child, I loved those heavy handbags: their stitching, their colors, their weight. Only later did I understand that they were more than objects. They were quiet acts of resistance, beauty created under constraint.

Our home was never entirely private. At least once a month, we burned books in our backyard tanur—the bread-baking oven—after warnings that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was coming to search the house. A neighbor, both a friend and an informant, would give us a narrow window of time. We burned books to protect ourselves, then slowly bought them again. Buying and burning, concealing and reclaiming.

Even home was negotiated space, never fully secure.

My journey adds another layer. As a young student leader, I identified as a Communist and atheist. I believed structural injustice required structural change. When I once told my mother that I might be arrested, she said, “If it is for your ideology, I will be proud of you. But if it is for immorality, I won’t forgive you.” That distinction shaped me deeply. When I later became a Christian, my concern for justice was reoriented. Faith did not silence political awareness; it deepened its grounding.

As older teenagers, my friend, my brother, and I searched for the unmarked graves of dissidents executed in the early 1980s. We found two beneath a large tree. We sat there in silence then read a poem to them.

These memories shape how I respond to the present geopolitical moment. As a family, we did not support the Iranian regime. My story is marked by resistance to its coercive practices. Yet opposing domestic authoritarianism does not automatically mean embracing foreign intervention. Sovereignty, even when misused by regimes, remains a serious moral concern. The history of the region reminds us that external military action often fractures societies rather than restores them.

When Jesus appears in John 20, Rome has not fallen. The empire remains intact. The disciples remain vulnerable. And the risen Christ shows them the scars in his hands and side. The scars remain visible, a reminder of the violence. Yet resurrection carries it forward in transformed form.

I too have seen scars caused by interrogation and torture, even more vividly after I became a Christian. I have seen cigarette burns on a friend’s side, leaving small holes in his flesh because of his faith. I have seen another friend’s shoulders damaged simply because he believed in Christ. I have seen my brother’s back torn by lashes. I have also known detention and questioning myself.

John’s narrative resists two temptations: It does not deny fear. (The doors remain locked.) Nor does it promote retaliation. Instead, Christ speaks peace into a room shaped by fear. This peace is an invitation to a different way of being present. “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (v. 21). The disciples are commissioned to embody power rather than taking it.

Today, responsibility cannot be reduced to simple alignment with a regime or foreign power. It calls for discernment. As part of the Iranian diaspora, I am conscious that those inside the country have endured sustained repression in ways many of us outside have not. Our voices must therefore be careful: How do we speak responsibly about a country we no longer live in—but still belong to?

Iran today feels like a locked room, a place filled with the sounds of aircraft, explosions, ambulance sirens, fear, rumors, and unanswered questions. Perhaps my own heart feels like that room too. I now know that my family are alive. But many others have died, and many more have been made homeless. New scars are forming—on bodies, on cities, on memory.

Part of me wonders, Could this mean change? Could I return? Another part asks, What will be the cost? Will sovereignty be lost? Will Iran become another fractured country in the Middle East?

When Jesus says, “Peace be with you” (v. 19), it is not the peace of empire. It is not the peace of silence. It is the peace of wounded hands that did not retaliate.

I am Iranian. I am Christian. I carry scars.

John 20 also speaks of breath. Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (v. 22). Breath recalls creation: a new beginning. It suggests that renewal begins with interior transformation and shared vocation rather than dominion. Applied to Iran, it suggests that lasting change emerges from dignity, accountability, and resistance. It resists the reduction of our future to pure power calculations.

Christ enters the locked room without dismantling the door. He does not rebuke the disciples for their caution. He neither glorifies fear nor demands reckless exposure. He stands among them, shows his scars, and speaks peace.

I do not know how Iran’s political future will unfold. Power will shift. Narratives will compete. Nearly five decades of accumulated scars will not disappear overnight.

What remains is a posture shaped by memory and faith, resistance and grace—resistance without cruelty, critique without surrender to empire, hope without romanticizing collapse. The inheritance of my childhood—prison corridors, burned books, hidden fugitives, unmarked graves—does not demand vengeance. It calls for moral seriousness and responsibility.

The passage in John does not offer escape from uncertainty. Peace is spoken into fear, not after fear is gone. Scars are acknowledged. Commission follows encounter. The locked room becomes not only a place of confinement but also a place from which vocation begins.

Behind locked doors, the gospel reminds us, Christ is present.

A version of this article was published on the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies’ website.

- More from Sara Afshari

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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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