There’s No Shame in Talking About Pregnancy Loss

Staff Editor

Eli and Hannah’s conversation in 1 Samuel holds wisdom for Christians on how to care for people who have lost babies or experience infertility.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Two days after Christmas, I found out that my first baby had died in my womb.

The sidewalks were thick with snow and the streets felt eerily calm as my husband and I drove to the emergency department at a nearby hospital. I shivered uncontrollably in a cold ultrasound room as the technician smeared goo on my stomach and took image after image in silence. Later, in a cramped hospital room, a harried doctor burst in, announced that there was no heartbeat, and told us to go home and wait for “it” to pass naturally—all within the span of a few minutes.

The shock and grief at receiving these four words—there is no heartbeat—have not diminished over time. Since then, we have gone on to experience two more pregnancy losses. In the aftermath of these precious, premature deaths, I have had to reckon with dashed dreams, unrelenting grief, fist-shaking anger, and, on top of it all, the stigma and shame surrounding miscarriage and infertility.

Questions would float unbidden into my mind: Was it my fault? Could I have done something to avoid these outcomes? Why did this have to happen to me, again and again? Is there something wrong with me?

Experiences of pregnancy loss and infertility are more prevalent than we might realize. Where I live in Canada, one in six people experience difficulty conceiving, and around a quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage.

These experiences often reflect an inability to have biological children or a failure to live up to traditional expectations of womanhood and motherhood. Some may even think that they are not “real” women until they give birth to or raise their own children.

Women in both developed and developing countries bear the brunt of the blame for being infertile and childless, leading to depression, anxiety, stress, guilt, and an overall decrease in their sense of well-being, a 2021 study in the International Journal of Fertility and Sterility observed. Some women also experience secondary infertility, a quieter grief, when a woman has children and desires more but is unable to get pregnant or carry a baby to term.

Well-meaning comments from fellow Christians can also inadvertently induce shame and guilt rather than provide comfort. We refrain from discussions about these topics because it can feel awkward, and tend toward privileging stories that celebrate victory over infertility. We honor families with large numbers of children without also comforting those who are silently suffering.

But Christians can be more proactive in eradicating stigma around infertility and pregnancy loss in the church. Hannah and Eli’s exchange in 1 Samuel 1 gives us insights into a more compassionate conversational ethic that encourages us to share or welcome such stories without shame.

Hannah is one of two wives to Elkanah of the tribe of Ephraim. She experiences great anguish at her prolonged season of barrenness, weeping and refusing to eat whenever she goes up to Shiloh to worship God with Elkanah and his other wife, Peninnah (vv. 6–8).

In ancient Israel, people viewed children as assets to ensure a family lineage’s survival, and women commonly experienced the pressure to bear children in a time when infant mortality rates were high and lifespans were short, notes Megan Klint at The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity.

The Bible’s reference to barrenness as one of the curses for disobedience in Deuteronomy 28:18 also led to perspectives that often attributed the cause of the condition to “sinfulness or simply a lack of blessing from God,” Klint wrote.

These social expectations of women, coupled with perceptions of childlessness as divine punishment, may have contributed to why Hannah is so despondent. She brings her agony to God, weeping bitterly and making a vow that she would dedicate her son to him if only he would give her a child (vv. 10–11).

As Hannah prays, however, Eli the priest mistakenly thinks she is drunk and tells her to put away her wine (vv. 12–14). His negative assessment of Hannah praying in her heart and moving her lips without making a sound (v. 13) makes it seem as if her grief and pain are unwelcome in God’s presence. He shames her for her purportedly distasteful behavior when all Hannah is doing is beseeching God for help.

The attitudes that we bring into the church, and into our conversations with people who are suffering and grieving their babies’ deaths, may sometimes perpetuate shame and stigma like Eli’s actions did.

Brittany Lee Allen lost multiple children in utero and wrote for CT that she received comments from fellow believers like “At least it was early” or “You’ll have another baby.” My friend’s mom once asked her after she experienced a loss, “Why do so many women have miscarriages now?”

Comments and questions like these can inadvertently convey that a woman’s body has failed to do a good enough job in preserving her baby’s life. They can implicitly blame a woman for doing something wrong or not doing enough to ensure a healthy pregnancy.

Ultimately, they reinforce shame by placing the blame for infertility and pregnancy loss on a woman’s body or a woman’s decisions—akin to the kind of dismissive judgment that Eli makes of Hannah.

But Hannah is not ashamed of how she acts in God’s presence. Her reply to Eli’s remark tears her torment wide open for him to witness. She tells him that she is deeply troubled and that she is “pouring out” her soul to the Lord. She goes on to divulge the state of her heart to him: “I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief” (vv. 15–16).

Hannah’s prayers, while not recorded in Scripture, are likely raw, honest, and unfiltered—the kind of prayers that those of us who have experienced infertility and pregnancy loss are intimately acquainted with. She does not shame herself for acting in a supposedly unsavory fashion. Neither does she accept Eli’s shaming of her.

For those of us who have experienced infertility and pregnancy loss and wrestle with negative assumptions and sentiments about our experiences, Hannah’s response is helpful.

Being vulnerable about barrenness and loss in a Christian environment that celebrates victory and overcoming life’s obstacles may seem daunting and shame-inducing. Yet Hannah’s example shows us that there is no shame in articulating our distress and desires before the Lord and his people.

Like Hannah, we can be unafraid to share our stories of loss and grief in the church, even if they may invite discomfort and judgment. Doing so enables us to break these cycles of stigma and humiliation, for we know that God does not turn away from these soul-deep expressions of sorrow. We can remember the ways that God is loving and kind to all who experience these issues, recognizing that he hears Hannah and remembers her pleas (v. 19). We can place our hope in Christ, a firm and secure anchor for our souls (Heb. 6:19).

The end of Eli and Hannah’s exchange offers a shame-free vision for Christian conversations around infertility and pregnancy loss. After Hannah tells Eli her reasons for her behavior, Eli says: “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him” (1 Sam. 1:17).

These three words—go in peace—may seem ordinary, but they hold a wealth of meaning. In Hebrew, the phrase means to “walk in shalom.” The idea of walking here references a continuation of Hannah’s spiritual journey: All may not be well yet, and her prayers may still be unanswered, but she can live with the confidence that God’s shalom goes with her, surrounds her, and leads her.

The shalom of God breaks the destructive patterns of shame that take up space in our minds, bodies, and churches. It makes room for grief and loss to be expressed and acknowledged without condemnation. It is freeing and empowering: As Hannah departs, her face is “no longer downcast” (v. 18).

“In a broken world, trauma—and the attending shame—will continue to be with us,” pastor Rich Villodas writes. “But, by the grace of God, it doesn’t have to consume us. It can be redeemed.”

The winter after I received the gut-wrenching pronouncements that my baby’s heart was no longer beating, I longed to stay curled up in bed for the foreseeable future, hidden from the world and its horrendous realities. Everything around me lost its shine and luster; nothing seemed right in the world anymore.

But I got out of bed eventually. I hugged my bleeding, healing body. I went for counseling. I wept. I groaned. I spoke regularly about my baby—and later, the others I have lost since then—in conversations with family, friends at church, and strangers on social media. My husband mentioned them in sermons he preached from the pulpit.

We also picked names for them. For our first, God led us toward the name Shiloh, as it means “the peaceful one” in Hebrew. The name Shiloh reminds us that God’s shalom goes with us and carries us. But I still long to hear from my Christian family the words that dismantle stigma and shame, that welcome and accept my grief in its untamable wildness: Go in peace.

Isabel Ong is the Asia editor at Christianity Today.

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Books

Review

Our Weary World Needs a Sigh of Relief

Sara Billups

David Zahl explores the underappreciated power of God’s grace to lift our earthly burdens.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Baker Publishing

In the early 1980s, when Bob Dylan embraced Gospel music shaped by a newfound Christian faith, he famously sang, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” In less poetic terms, that means we’re all held captive to something.

It’s tricky, this captivity. It may be that having money—or its inverse, living simply—becomes what identifies Christians more than Christ. We could be held captive to self-disgust as we age—or to its inverse, the cult of skin serums and neck lifts that promise youth for a little while longer.

As David Zahl puts it in his latest book, The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World, “The great question is not if we are captives, but how we approach our captivity.”

I, for one, was reading so much news around last year’s presidential election and in the first months of the new administration that I thought I was held captive by the next headline. I gave up news for Lent and filled the void by looking for vintage T-shirts on Facebook Marketplace and making trip wish lists to Morocco on Airbnb. It turns out I, maybe like you, am held captive by distraction.

We’re captive to this or that habit or obsession because we’re bored, maybe, or numbed out. We’re tired or wanting a minute to ourselves. Zahl argues that the only way out of our personal and collective captivity, whatever its flavor, is grace. Like we crave food, Zahl says, “we crave grace because it answers our real, objective spiritual predicaments: guilt, lack of love, death, separation from God.”

Grace—the unconditional love God showers upon undeserving sinners—is a core biblical tenet that every Christian knows and that few take time to carefully consider. And I may be projecting here, but even if some of us understand grace theologically, few consider its power to help untie the knots that bind us to our disordered desire and captivity.

“Grace,” writes Zahl, “is the most evergreen reason that people become Christians, and it is the most compelling reason for remaining one.”

What you find in the Christian faith that you cannot find elsewhere is what my neighbor and plenty of other modern people besides have found: the Big Relief of God’s saving grace, which is to say, the gospel of Jesus Christ. Grace is the most important, most urgent, and most radical contribution Christianity has to make to the life of the world—to your life and mine!

Zahl, an author and director of Mockingbird Ministries, describes himself in the book as a “fairly comfortable middle-aged husband and father of three.” Despite a high degree of cultural literacy, he comes across as a “normie” dad who takes his kids to sports practice and loads the dishwasher after a long day at the office.

Zahl is not trying to put on an air of over-intellectualism in these pages—the writing style in The Big Relief is as approachable and practical as its ideas. Zahl is also pastoral. I wrote in the margins of my copy, complete with all-caps emphasis, “I feel MINISTERED to as I read.”

“We are all chasing relief,” Zahl argues. “The experience of being a person is, in many ways, the experience of craving and seeking relief. We want out from under, room to breathe, if just for a little while.” In each chapter, Zahl breaks down the theology of grace, illustrating the particular forms of relief it brings. (Chapter titles include “Favor: The Release from Rejection” and “Rest: The Relief from Keeping Up.”)

Zahl notes that “relief is not a word often associated with God today, at least not with the God of Christianity.” For many people, he says, religion “feels less like a place to seek refuge than a system to seek refuge from.” That hasn’t been Zahl’s experience of church, which he describes as “the place I go when there is no place left to go.” But instead of analyzing reasons the church is failing, Zahl finds hope for its future through the lens of grace, calling it “the Big Relief at the heart of Christianity.”

The book should appeal to a wide range of readers, whether they experience the church as a place of refuge or long to break free of its grip. Zahl covers themes so broadly relatable—like rejection, regret, guilt, status anxiety, and “keeping up” with neighbors and peers—that nearly everyone should find at least some welcome insight or encouragement. (For most readers, of course, certain topics will resonate more than others. In my case, having long ago thrown in the towel on meeting the world’s standards of productivity, I found myself less interested in Zahl’s chapter on play as a release valve.)

In some of Zahl’s most incisive sections, he looks at matters of favor and guilt through the lens of contemporary politics. “The pressure to belong—to be both loved and liked by others—is less of a pressure and more of a longing,” he writes. “The most popular road to belonging today is probably politics. … When political arguments get overheated, it behooves those of us on the sidelines to remember that, for some people, it’s not just policies at stake but personal acceptance.”

Here, Zahl drills down to our emotional motivations for taking sides, the dynamics of which look a lot like the playground and the high school lunchroom. We long to be liked, and advertising our political opinions and affiliations can seem like the surest path to belonging.

Yet taking this path also courts the risk of alienation from friends or family members on the other side of the political aisle. As Zahl explains, we find relief from these tensions by resting in the grace of belonging first to Christ. “The Big Relief reverses the order of belonging,” he writes. “In a setting of grace, belonging precedes behavior. … Grace makes the first move.”

Zahl, in his chapter on the grace of Christ’s atonement, is also insightful in connecting our political passions and divisions to the weight of guilt we carry. Here, Zahl holds both progressive and conservative readers to account with a refreshing reminder that, whatever our politics, guilt is a driving force in how we identify politically and who we identify with.

“Guilt,” he writes, “is more a default state of being, exerting constant pressure and wreaking havoc on mental health. In left-of-center circles, many people feel pressure to demonstrate contrition and regret over cycles of injustice. In right-of-center circles, many people feel pressure to assert their innocence and reject any framework that might imply otherwise.” For members of either circle, Zahl argues, relief comes from the “once and for all atonement of Calvary,” which takes our guilt off our shoulders.

Despite its focus on contemporary sources of anxiety and captivity, The Big Relief is generationally ecumenical. Gen Xers in particular (Zahl’s own cohort) will find plenty of Easter eggs, including subheads riffing on records from alternative rock bands like The Replacements and Pavement. One especially resonant section recalls classic ’90s-era college campus debates on postmodernism and moral relativism.

Zahl leaves us with a warning to be careful, cautioning that “grace can become a new test of purity.” We can waste time running after a specific act of God’s grace instead of discovering it in life’s more mundane expressions.

I’ve seen people I love chase a dramatic form of grace—something miraculous, maybe, like a radical healing or revival—for extended periods. This can leave them insular and disconnected from family. Even worse, it can tempt them to look for tangible gifts of grace more than they look to the God who grants them.

Zahl reminds us that grace, like so many good gifts, is usually delivered in boring circumstances—in other words, in real life. Remember Zahl’s central question here: not “if we are captives, but how we approach our captivity.” As a captive to my own internal and external desires, I appreciate Zahl’s timely reminder that I, and others burdened like me, have never been freer.

Sara Billups is the Seattle-based author of Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home and the forthcoming Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics. She writes at Bitter Scroll on Substack.

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News

The Anglican Communion Is Coming Apart

Tim Wyatt

Conservative Gafcon leaders break from Canterbury and claim the future of global Anglicanism.

Canterbury Cathedral

Max Barrett / Getty Images Plus

Not even two weeks after the Church of England unveiled Sarah Mullally as the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, a network of conservative Anglicans has exploded what fragile harmony or consensus existed.

A statement released last week from Archbishop of Rwanda Laurent Mbanda, chair of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (Gafcon), announced his group plans to take control of global Anglicanism and refound it on scriptural orthodoxy.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has for centuries served as the “first among equals” spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, a family of 42 churches worldwide that derive from the Church of England. But years of strife over same-sex relationships have culminated in last week’s statement, raising the possibility that the fraying communion may be disintegrating for good.

In the statement, Mbanda declared that “the future has arrived” and that Gafcon was making good on its promise from almost 20 years ago to save Anglicanism from theological liberalism.

The movement began in 2008 when scores of conservative churches, mostly from Africa and Asia, boycotted the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops called by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Instead, they held their own gathering in Jerusalem, which evolved into the Gafcon network.

At the time, the dispute focused on moves by liberal Anglican churches in the United States and Canada to consecrate gay men and women as bishops and to create liturgies to bless same-sex couples. Then, in 2023, the mother church for the whole communion agreed to bless gay relationships. This prompted Gafcon to publicly reject the then–Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby’s traditional authority as head of the communion.

The latest statement appears to go further. Mbanda wrote that Gafcon would “reorder” the communion so its sole source of unity was the Bible. The traditional institutions that bind the autonomous Anglican provinces together—including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference of bishops—had failed to uphold traditional teaching and are rejected, the statement added.

“We cannot continue to have communion with those who advocate the revisionist agenda, which has abandoned the inerrant word of God as the final authority,” Mbanda wrote.

Gafcon statements expressed similar sentiments before, but now leaders are asking member churches to pick a side. While some Gafcon churches have for years cut all ties with the communion and even rewritten their constitutions to strip out mention of the Church of England or the Archbishop of Canterbury, others have continued in both camps: going to Gafcon events and taking part in the traditional institutions of the Anglican Communion.

This has to end, Mbanda’s statement said, and churches that belong to what Gafcon now calls the Global Anglican Communion cannot go to meetings called by the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor give or receive money from the official Anglican Communion. And for the first time, the Gafcon archbishops will elect one of their own to act as “first among equals,” a direct rival to the authority of Canterbury.

Nobody expected Gafcon to approve of the choice of Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury. The former senior nurse turned bishop previously led the project to introduce gay blessings and also represents the first woman to ascend to the throne of Saint Augustine in Canterbury Cathedral, an issue for certain Gafcon provinces that do not ordain women as priests or bishops.

But few predicted such a bold move and so soon. Some have interpreted the statement as a schism, with Gafcon establishing a rival Global Anglican Communion set against the official Anglican Communion.

The Church of Ireland, Anglican Church of Canada, and Episcopal Church reaffirmed their loyalty to the Canterbury-aligned communion.

“We grieve that some GAFCON primates have chosen to remove themselves from the Anglican Communion,” said Sean Rowe, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. “We pray for their participation in God’s mission in their contexts.”

But Mbanda and other Gafcon figures insist they are not leaving but instead wresting back control of the communion from its traditional sources of authority, what they see as liberal and discredited.

In a podcast interview after the statement, Mbanda said the Global Anglican Communion was closer to a rebrand than a new organization and that it was the revisionist Anglicans in the UK and North America who were the true schismatics.

“Why would they accuse me of being schismatic when they are the ones who departed?” he said. “We have always been there. We stay there. We continue there.”

The announcement changes little for churches such as his in Rwanda, let alone breakaway Anglican movements such as the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), which are sponsored by Gafcon and have never been in communion with Canterbury.

These conservative churches do not take part in communion affairs or institutions and have already jettisoned their links with the church in England. The statement will pose greater challenges for more moderate Gafcon members, such as Anglican churches in Kenya, Uganda, or Chile. Felix Orji, a Nigerian bishop who leads an ACNA diocese in Texas, said some provinces which have had a foot in both camps will have “an intense battle over this issue.”

“There’s going to be some conflict in the internal running of certain Gafcon provinces, and this may push some of them to decide, ‘You know what? We’re going to stay with [the] mother church. We’re not going to go with Gafcon,’” he said. “So it’s a risky venture, but it was necessary.”

But do not expect the entire Anglican project worldwide to divide into two camps just yet. Susie Leafe, the director of the British pro-Gafcon group Anglican Futures, said nobody expected the conservative minorities languishing within liberal provinces to abandon their buildings and salaries to start afresh as breakaway churches.

“I don’t think they’re going to suddenly say that everybody in the Church of England or the Anglican Church of Australia—that’s very mixed—they’ve all got to leave for new church plants.” The messy reality of Anglicanism, with liberals and conservatives and everything in between bound up in loose affiliation, will continue for now.

Indeed, the official response from the communion’s secretary general, Anthony Poggo, has been a plea for provinces not to abandon an official, if plodding, process currently consulting on more tepid reforms to how Anglican churches with different beliefs can relate to each other.

“I share the hope of the commission that all Anglicans, and the whole Church of God, may still seek and find agreement in the Faith,” Poggo wrote. Theological uniformity cannot be demanded—it requires “patience and love” and the “hard work of discernment.”

Gafcon leaders have denied their move was solely prompted by Mullally’s accession, but Orji doubted the statement would have arrived if, by some miracle, a more conservative figure had emerged as the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

“We’ve been pleading for repentance, for rapprochement, and now you have a woman, and this woman is in favor of everything we’re against,” the ACNA bishop said. “And so there is no hope. If the Church of England had chosen a male who is evangelical, I don’t think that this decision would have been made.”

Lee McMunn, a former Church of England vicar now a bishop in the Gafcon-aligned Anglican Mission in England, said Mbanda’s surprise statement prompted both joy and encouragement for small breakaway movements like his own.

“So much of Anglicanism is often characterised by nuanced statements to prevent anybody from feeling they’re left out,” he said. “So to have a really bold declaration centred on God’s Word, that’s the key for me.”

Refusing communion funds would be costly but worth it for other provinces previously still linked to Canterbury, McMunn said. “If we’re going to stand together on the Word of God, there will be sacrifices to be made. But it is worth it because there is now a clarity in terms of our communion.”

Beneath the disagreement over Mullally’s gender and her LGBTQ-affirming theology is a deeper argument over the definition of Anglicanism. Is it a relational movement, united around historic colonial ties to England and sustained by friendship and shared liturgies? Or is Anglicanism, going all the way back to the first break with Rome led by Henry VIII in 16th-century England, about fidelity to the Bible over transnational institutions and relationships?

Orji said he retained a lot of fondness for England, dating back to the British schoolteachers who led him to Christ when Orji was a teenager in Nigeria. But he welcomed Gafcon’s apparent decision to abandon these ties.

“It is important that the primacy of England should not take precedence over the primacy of Scripture,” he said. “We cannot allow our affection for England to trump affection for Christ and his Word.”

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News

Excerpt

Shutdown Highlights Challenges in Rural Health Care

The Bulletin with Kevin Stansbury

Small-town doctors grapple with looming budget cuts and lack of support.

As the government shutdown stretches into its third week, everyday citizens are beginning to feel its effects. For physicians working in rural areas, the shutdown has further exposed health care challenges that depend on a working Congress for solutions.

To learn more, Russell Moore and Mike Cosper of The Bulletin sat down with Kevin Stansbury, chief executive officer of Lincoln Community Hospital and Care Center in Hugo, Colorado, a small town with a population of just under 800 people.

This conversation is edited and condensed from a discussion that appeared in episode 217 of The Bulletin. Listen to the whole conversation here.

This past spring, you wrote an op-ed for The New York Times voicing concerns about how potential congressional health-care cuts could affect rural communities. What were your worries then, and have they been realized in this shutdown?

Kevin Stansbury: Right now, it’s anticipatory fear. Most of the cuts within the One Big Beautiful Bill are delayed for a couple of years, some as many as three years. But we’re getting ready for them. Unfortunately, the act failed to highlight that what rural health care actually needs is more help with our reimbursement.

At my little hospital, 75 percent of my patients use Medicare or Medicaid or simply don’t have access to insurance at all. A change in the premium tax credit, potential cuts in Medicaid, and a looming Medicare cut—that perfect storm is going to be problematic for my patients. Close to 50 percent of the rural hospitals across the country operate at a loss right now. The last thing we needed was more cuts to reimbursement.

In the shutdown, patients generally are still going to get care. Medicare and Medicaid are both essential programs, so payments continue. Access to health care is still there, as it was before the shutdown. I’m just not going to get paid for it. Some have had concerns about folks accessing the emergency department. If nobody pays for that, how do I keep in business? How do I make sure that patients that do have insurance still have access to health care?

The problem with the shutdown is that we don’t have good access to policymakers. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services are down to essential employees; so there’s nobody there to answer questions on accreditation, rule-making, and benefits. It’s a very complex problem, and it’s frustrating that we can’t seem to get the ear of policymakers that this needs dramatic change.

Do you have concerns for the elderly during this pause of programs that assisted them before?

Stansbury: Access to long-term care for our elderly patients is a huge, neglected problem in rural areas. Our patients tend to be older, sick, or poor. The need for nursing home services is critical. Yet 98 percent of my long-term care patients are Medicaid patients.

If material cuts come to Medicaid, how do I tell a resident who’s lived in this community their entire life—they’re maybe in their 90s—how do I tell them I can no longer care for them? Where do they go? The next closest nursing home to me is about 90 miles away. If you’re 90, your kids are maybe in their 70s. They don’t have the ability to travel to visit you. Twenty percent of rural counties right now no longer have a nursing home. They’re just gone because the reimbursement is inadequate and it’s tough to maintain that service.

Russell Moore: Many churches don’t know how to deal with this because it is a cascading problem. The church has to address many different needs for somebody who can’t get nursing care. How do we minister to that person? How do we minister to the adult children who are trying to grapple with what to do about their parent? How do we support them as they juggle the other responsibilities of their lives? How do we minister to those in the health care professions who are, in some cases, burned out by the level of care they must give without any long-term solutions for the stressors? I think a lot of churches don’t know what to do.

It’s not as easy as saying, “Okay, we’ve got somebody with a health issue. Let’s all take up an offering and help that person.” There are times when that’s the case. However, when it’s an entire community, and churches themselves are facing the same factors, they’re not able to respond adequately even if they know what to do. That’s not just about health care. It has to do with people’s spiritual lives, their cultural lives, their family lives.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen increased curiosity about and, in some cases, a caricaturing of rural America. How do both of these show up in discussions of health care needs?

Mike Cosper: There are two sides of the problem. Bureaucracy is the rule of nobody. When we deal with funding cuts or processing problems with bureaucracies, whether it’s the IRS or Medicare or Medicaid, it can seem like nobody’s responsible.

At the same time, this story shows us that there are some problems that the federal government is best suited to address. Who else is going to solve the problem of health care in rural America if the federal government doesn’t?

There’s often an idealism among evangelical conservatives that says government should be as small as humanly possible and that generous Christians need to step up and take care of the poor in their communities. The problem is just too big here for that. The church can’t do this adequately. We don’t have the resources for it. That’s a problem that evangelical conservatives have not adequately wrestled with.

Stansbury: Many rural communities have been devastated by the opioid epidemic. We are blessed that our area doesn’t have a heavy opioid problem. Our problem is alcohol abuse, THC and marijuana, and people who fall into depression or anxiety and then try to self-medicate. Rural hospitals are very good at providing care for issues like these. We integrate our behavioral health services within our primary care services so that, if you come to the doctor’s office for your annual exam or chronic disease management, we’re always doing an assessment of your anxiety and depression. If you need help, it’s easy for us to get a provider in to see you at the same time.

Often, policymakers try to take systems that they’ve developed in urban areas and squeeze them into rural areas. We want them to see that we are different. Rural areas sometimes deliver care that is superior to what’s available in urban areas because we really know our patients. I’d love to see systems that work here scaled up for the urban areas.

In your op-ed in The New York Times, you write: “Before we opened an X-ray clinic in a remote area, residents would make deals with the local veterinarian for imaging.” I can’t imagine having to bring my child with a broken leg down to the vet where I take my dogs for services. All of these special services must be very costly for a small hospital.

Stansbury: I’m an independent, rural hospital. It’s me. I don’t call Dallas or Nashville for permission. I have a locally appointed board, and we make our decisions in the best interest of the community. There are a lot of advantages to that, but one of the disadvantages—in addition to wrestling with the federal government—is wrestling with insurance companies. I’ve been talking to one for over 18 months trying to get paid what it costs me to deliver the care.

If you look at the analysis across the country, independent rural hospitals are paid the least. I think there’s a very good argument that we should be paid the most because I have to maintain an emergency department 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

I tell policymakers in Denver all the time: If you drive east on I-70, you care about my hospital, because I’m the only hospital between Denver and the Kansas line. That’s 180 miles. We pick up a lot of patients off of the interstate who have had an incident while traveling. If I’m not out here, there’s nobody to do that. You have to drive 140 miles to Colby, Kansas, for the next closest obstetrics program on the eastern plains of Colorado. Right now, there are only four hospitals in that large area that continue to deliver babies.

Those are the kinds of things we should look at and say, Would we tolerate that in urban areas? Why then do we tolerate it in rural areas and without a serious conversation about how we address those things? I think that’s a very compelling conservative case. The government needs to step in and make sure we’re paid adequately and supporting our patients with the care they need.

Moore: Regardless of where you live, this is a problem for all of us. There’s this assumption sometimes that if we don’t expend the money, then we’re saving the money. But these serious costs that are locally borne are going to end up costing all of us money—as a country, as a community.

When it comes to health care, often we don’t think about it until we are right at the moment where it’s directly affecting us. A Christian recently admitted to me, “I never even really thought about Medicaid at all. But now I’m in a situation where suddenly I’m dealing with an elderly mother with dementia. We’re trying to figure out Medicaid. I don’t know how people navigate this entire system.” Unfortunately, it’s something we haven’t been taught to think or even care about until we need it.

Here, the church can be instrumental. Churches can support people so they don’t slip away in this time of great stress. Find out what’s happening and talk to the people, like policymakers, who can make these decisions to let them know one person’s health care in a community eventually affects all of us.

Stansbury: We forget that rural areas are where our food and fiber, our fuel, our clean water generally come from. Rural hospitals are often the economic engine that maintains the viability of rural communities.

A 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City looked at what happens to communities when a hospital’s closed. Over a 10-year period, job losses continue and the communities are absolutely devastated. Who’s left behind to grow the food, to produce the fiber, to produce the fuel, to maintain the clear water? Regardless of where you live, it’s really in our national interest to maintain the viability of rural communities and maintain access to basic, essential services.

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Church Life

Time Is Scarce. It Should Be Sacred.

Claude Atcho

The church calendar can help us address our frenzied pace of life.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

I never set out to be a church calendar apologist. As a child growing up in diverse denominational settings—old-school Baptist services, Roman Catholic Mass, and storefront African gatherings—I witnessed beauty and vibrancy in each. Still, aside from the high points of Good Friday and Easter, the church year never caught my eye.

In my first decade of pastoral ministry, I mostly observed the church year and its adherents from afar, and I didn’t care much for what I observed—it seemed like an impenetrable language spoken only by the sophisticated. I was disinterested. Only upon a continual confrontation with my devotional weakness did I grasp the church year for the gift it is to all God’s people: a formative, communal immersion in the life of Jesus.

Much like liturgy, the church year is trending among low-church evangelicals. Both liturgy and the calendar are cut from a similar cloth. Broadly speaking, they offer a historically rooted, highly experiential, and robustly biblical way to experience Christ with his people. While all worship is liturgical, in the sense that all worship possesses an order and follows a form, what we usually mean by liturgy is worship that is intentionally participatory and responsive. It is not a spectator sport but the Spirit-enabled work of all those gathered—responding, kneeling, praying.

For centuries, Christians have experienced time as spiritually formative, drawing on the Jewish practices of feasts, seasons, and remembrance (Lev. 23:4–8) that are now centered on God’s revelation in Jesus. The church year gifts us a framework for communal formation by marking our days through the movements of Jesus’ life.

Just as liturgy challenges the notion of worship as a performance in which we gaze at the stage, the church year challenges the notion of time as a servant of productivity. On Sundays, liturgy calls us toward participation, away from our temptation to spectate. The church calendar beckons us into formation over frenzy the rest of the year.

Time is the context in which formation occurs because it is the arena in which our existence unfolds. Writer Annie Dillard puts it well: “How we spend our days … is how we spend our lives.” This essential truth often sends us toward one of two extremes: frantic activity or quiet panic.

Because time is short, one default response is to live like a Ferrari, at full tilt. This pressure is persistent, even if unspoken and self-generated. The scarcity of time tempts us to seize every good opportunity, reach every goal, and ascend to new levels of success in each passing year. The result is usually an overstuffed calendar, a prolonged dalliance with burnout, and an exhausted, resigned pledge to change our ways once the calendar hits January 1.

Against such pressures, does the church year really help? There are legitimate objections: Isn’t the church year—with its many feast and fast days—simply an invitation into more activities? Certainly, there’s a way to follow the church year that results in burnout, and worse still, spiritual pride. But rightly embraced and humbly inhabited, the church year offers us an entirely different posture to time itself.

The church year is not a miracle worker; it is incapable of increasing time, but it is fully capable of changing our orientation to it, offering us a sanctified shift in our temporal operating system. Within this system, time is a gift from our triune God, a gift that, with each change of the season, places us into the story of Jesus together by calling us to define our days by the movements of his story.

The Christ-centeredness of the church year is its greatest benefit. I’m a church year apologist only in the sense that I desire people to experience Jesus in every way possible. What disciple doesn’t want the life of Jesus shaping and saturating their lives—even their calendar? In the church year, God enlists both time and calendar as our tutors, shaping us in the curriculum of Christ’s life.

The various shapes of the church year, even when nuanced and diverse, are unified in their Christocentrism. Many define the movement of the church year in two parts: the story of Jesus and the story of Jesus’ people.

Drawing upon the work of Robert Webber, I prefer a tripartite approach: the cycle of light (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany), the cycle of life (Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, Pentecost), and the cycle of love (Ordinary Time).

The cycle of light is God with us in the Incarnation and Second Coming, the cycle of life demonstrates God for us in the gift of salvation through the cross, Resurrection, and sending of the Spirit; and the cycle of love is God working through us in service, mercy, and mission, as it is “no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). In these movements of the gospel story, the church year invites us to measure and spend our days and months not by frenzy or productivity but in the rehearsal and enjoyment of Jesus’ saving life.

Again, the church year is not a miraculous medicine for all spiritual ailments. There are many churches devoted to liturgical precision—gestures, seasons, and music—while neglecting their first love (Rev. 2:4). Apart from the Spirit’s animating breath, a liturgical church is nothing but a valley of dry bones. In fact, when placed in hands that are not continually governed by a heart growing in Spirit-filled virtue, the church year can become a weapon of spiritual pride. If the way of Jesus is humility (Phil. 2:5–11), then Lord have mercy on us when the framework given to immerse us in his life leads us to self-righteousness. The fleshly zeal of a new church calendar adherent can turn a gift of grace into a well of arrogance.

The church year is not a tool reserved for the sophisticated or elite. It’s a family heirloom available to all believers and churches—Baptist, nondenominational, Pentecostal, Anglican, or otherwise. Imagine a parent who leaves a family heirloom for all their children, only to discover the kids are shouting and fighting over who gets to use the gift that was meant for all. Whether a church or a family embraces it all or only some, the church year is the church’s ancestral gift to be received with thanks, never superiority.

The gift of keeping time with Christ is ours to receive. We can start by reframing our notion of time. It is not simply fleeting. It is a gift in the hands of the God who seeks and loves us and this world, the God revealed first in the resurrection of Israel through the Exodus, the same God revealed in Jesus Christ. Each season of our year is to be measured by his life, and we can let that shape our prayers and devotions.

As we approach Advent, the season that leads us to reflect on Christ’s first and second coming, we can reflect with others on the gracious eruption of Jesus into this world and into the very particulars of real life, here and now. This framework will support us in walking by faith rather than only being swayed by the ebbs and flows of end-of-quarter deadlines, tax season, and Black Friday.

Through the Spirit, a holy life can be lived in a variety of orientations to time, but if we’re honest, most of us must confess the effort required is close to Herculean. Perhaps, like me, you long to walk more closely with Jesus but stumble in discipline. By the power of the Spirit, the church year can be a steady, gracious guide into a rich spirituality that is centered less on your resolve and more on your attention, looking to the movements of Jesus’ life lived for us.

Claude Atcho is pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of Rhythms of Faith: A Devotional Pilgrimage Through the Church Year and Reading Black Books.

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News

Even After Escaping Boko Haram, Women Wrestle with Trauma

Emmanuel Nwachukwu

“It’s not just the memories. It’s also how people treat you.”

A 12 year old Nigerian girl who escaped the Boko Haram insurgency in 2019.

Fati Abubakar / Contributor / Getty

Armed Boko Haram militants kidnapped Murna Yusuf, then in her early 30s, in July 2021 as she rode on a bus from Kukar-Gadu, Yobe State, to Maiduguri, Borno State, in northeastern Nigeria. The terrorists found Yusuf’s worn Bible as they rifled through the passengers’ belongings.

“They asked if I was a Christian,” she said. “I was not going to deny Jesus for anything—not even for Boko Haram.”

The militants threw her Bible back to her, ordering her to pick it up. Then they separated her from the other passengers, most of whom were Muslims.

“I begged them to let me go, but they said only if I change my faith,” she said. “I thought that was the end of me. All I could pray for was God’s mercy.”

The militants drove her more than six hours into the deepest part of the forest, then put her in a house with two other captives—Agnes and Christy—who soon became her friends. They ate sparse meals of ground guinea corn mixed with wild leaves gathered from the bush. Yusuf and her two companions fetched water from streams, gathered firewood under watchful eyes, and clung to their faith in secret. “We read from my Bible, fasted, and prayed for several days,” she said. “On Sundays, we held quiet services, singing praises in our hearts so they wouldn’t hear.”

For five weeks, Yusuf endured her captors’ attempts to coerce her into converting to Islam. Then Yusuf and her friends sneaked out of the camp. They set a pot on fire as a distraction and pretended to run for water from a nearby stream. They didn’t come back, instead trekking through the night. During the day, they evaded Boko Haram patrols by hiding in the tall grass. A suspicious boy nearly alerted the insurgents, but the women were able to get away.

For six days, they walked without food until they arrived at a road between Sabon Gari and Damboa in Borno State. They flagged down a car, hid in the trunk, and eventually reached Agnes’s uncle’s house in Biu.

“We lay on the floor, too weak to move,” she said. “But we knew that God had delivered us.”

Her suffering didn’t end with safety. More than four years later, Yusuf still struggles with panic attacks, insomnia, and flashbacks.

In Nigeria’s northeast, hundreds of women and girls like Yusuf have escaped Boko Haram’s brutal captivity only to face ongoing trauma as they struggle to reintegrate into their families and communities. They face mistreatment and stigma, in a region that lacks resources to treat trauma. Since 2014, the Islamic militant group has abducted at least 1,500 children, as well as women.

Boko Haram opposes education for women and often targets young women and girls in schools. In 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok in Borno State. Four years later, they abducted another 110 preteen and teenaged girls from a school in neighboring Yobe State. Some remain captive, including 82 Chibok girls. Militants have held Leah Sharibu, a Christian who refused to convert to Islam, for more than seven years.

Survivors recount beatings, sexual violence, and assault. Militants indoctrinate their victims and force them into marriages and domestic servitude using torture, psychological abuse, and coerced religious conversion. The terrorist group sells some victims into sex slavery or uses them in suicide bombings.

Nigerian military efforts and negotiations have led to the release of some kidnapped girls. Others have escaped—jumping from moving vehicles, fleeing during chaos, or sneaking away after weeks or months in the camps. Thousands of survivors have said their escapes were followed by further violations by Nigerian military, including starvation, rape, and forced abortions.

“Instead of receiving protection from the authorities, women and girls have been forced to succumb to rape in order to avoid starvation or hunger,” Amnesty International said. The Nigerian military denied the allegation.

Even after escaping, the threat of retaliation from Boko Haram members lingers. Fear dominates survivors’ daily existence. Continued attacks make some villages dangerous for aid workers to reach as they try to help escaped victims.

Yusuf said stigma also discourages survivors from seeking help. Communities shun survivors as tainted, believing they are radicalized or in collaboration with their captors.

“It’s not just the memories,” Yusuf said. “It’s also how people treat you.”

For her, rejection came from fellow Christians. Yusuf said some church members mocked her: “I felt like it was my own people hurting me.”

Stigma also makes finding a spouse difficult. Some have returned from captivity with children born of rape. Communities often reject them and their children. One survivor told the BBC she sometimes wished she was back in the forest instead of suffering under the stigma of having been a Boko Haram bride.

Veronica Kaduwa, who spent more than three years in Boko Haram captivity before escaping, told CT, “The mockery and assault isn’t worth it. Sometimes it feels worse than when you were in captivity. I wish churches were doing more to help us.”

While some churches are stepping up assistance for survivors, access to counseling and to humanitarian aid workers providing drugs, food, and shelter remain limited.

“Several girls showed signs of stress when talking about their experiences,” Mausi Segun, a Nigerian human rights researcher, told Human Rights Watch. “The girls said that their fathers tried to counsel them, or that their pastors told them to pray. But they needed more.”

Local and international Christian organizations try to fill in the missing pieces. Open Doors International’s trauma program holds weeklong seminars with teaching and counseling for survivors and offers ongoing trauma care through local coordinators. In September, the Gideon and Funmi Para-Mallam Peace Foundation hosted a trauma-care event, with mentoring by women from four local churches. Eleven survivors participated.

Founder Gideon Para-Mallam said the foundation launched the program and introduced longer-term counseling services after recognizing the psychological toll—panic attacks, chronic insomnia, high blood pressure, and flashbacks—that survivors continue to experience: “Many of them have struggled to get on with life.”

“Churches must go beyond thanksgiving services [when the girls are out of captivity],” Para-Mallam said. “Society has moved on, but God calls some of us to keep their plight in public view.”

Yusuf currently attends Christian support groups to help cope with her trauma and hopes to channel her pain for a bigger purpose.

She enrolled in a master’s degree program in counseling at the University of Abuja in Nigeria’s capital and provides guidance to other survivors.

“God has sent two girls my way,” Yusuf said. “They went through hell. So I use what God has deposited in me to encourage them.”

- More from Emmanuel Nwachukwu

Ideas

AI Won’t Get Us to Heaven. But It Might Be There When We Arrive.

Derek C. Schuurman

If eternity includes harps and the ships of Tarshish, why not computers too?

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

“Will there be harps in heaven?” Each year in my capstone course for senior computer science students, I ask them this question. Yes, many reply.

But when I ask, “Will there be computers in heaven?” or “How about AI?” students are not so sure. Many, in fact, are convinced that computers will not be present in eternity. Why would we need them? The usefulness of their degrees seems limited to this life only; a music major is apparently more durable for the next.

Yet harps and computers are both cultural artifacts. So how do we discern what will persist?

I pose this question not only to generate lively debate but also to unlock key biblical assumptions about culture and technology within the arc of the biblical story—a story that begins with creation and ends with a new creation.

To determine whether there may be AI in heaven, we need to go back to the beginning. Creation is much more comprehensive than what we might call “natural things”; it also includes those things’ latent potential.

Already in Genesis 4, we see people uncovering some of the possibilities in creation: people like Jubal, the father of those who play harp and flute, and Tubal-Cain, who forges tools out of bronze and iron (perhaps one of the first engineers in the Bible). Over time, creational possibility has expanded to include poems and pancakes, beer and banjos, airplanes and art—and artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence arises directly from the marvelous structure of reality. The positioning of petals on a flower, the movement of traffic, the rhythm in music, the arrangement of DNA, and changes in weather all follow mathematical and statistical patterns. The advent of the computer (another creational possibility) provides a tool capable of processing large amounts of data and detecting these patterns. ChatGPT, which trains on text in order to output a statistically plausible sequence of words, is only possible due to the patterns in God’s good creation.

But since the Fall, “the whole creation has been groaning” (Rom. 8:22). The effects of sin are intertwined with all of our cultural and technical activities—including AI. Bias creeps into systems. Chatbots can be deployed to promote propaganda and disinformation. Problems with AI do not arise from defects in creational possibilities but rather from a misdirection of these possibilities.

Sin also impacts the human heart, and we are continually tempted to place our trust in what’s created rather than in the Creator. Take the 2023 manifesto by Marc Andreessen—early web pioneer and Silicon Valley venture capitalist—titled “Why AI Will Save the World.”

This kind of thinking is sometimes referred to as “technicism,” the belief that technological progress will solve all our problems. Andreessen suggests that in the new AI era, every child will have “an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful,” just as “the creative arts will enter a golden age.” AI will help us tackle challenges from “curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel.”

Some take this view further by promoting effective accelerationism, advocating unrestricted technological progress so AI can more rapidly solve humanity’s problems. The question is not whether AI will be in heaven. Rather, AI is the path to heaven or to some other utopia.

Dataism is another computer-scientist pitfall—the reductionist notion that all created reality is nothing but information. Yuval Noah Harari describes dataism as the view that “organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data.” Rather than seeing data as simply one aspect of creation, it’s elevated to an independent entity upon which everything else depends, assigned a sort of divine status.

Some thinkers argue that by preserving data, we can overcome the problem of death; someday we’ll download our “mindfile” into a computer and live indefinitely in a virtual paradise.

In his latest book The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, well-known computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests we are entering the last phase of human transformation, “reinventing the intelligence that nature gave us on a more powerful digital substrate, and then merging with it.” In his seminal earlier book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicted that “there won’t be mortality by the end of the twenty‐first century.” AI is not something in heaven. Merging with AI is heaven itself.

Trust in the power of data is also behind the emerging “digital afterlife” industry. “Griefbots” use left-behind emails, messages, and voice recordings to simulate the patterns and personality of dead loved ones, allowing the bereaved to continue conversing with a simulation. Others are developing AI companions, pastors, and therapy bots.

But data is only an echo of one aspect of a person’s life. It is decidedly not the entire person. Writer Andy Crouch describes fully flourishing humans as “heart-soul-mind-strength complexes designed for love.” Our being “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14) in the image of God cannot be reduced to a machine that mimics minds.

The biblical story does not end with the Fall. In the fullness of time, Christ came to bring redemption, which is not only personal but involves God’s plan to “reconcile to himself all things” (Col. 1:20) on a universal scope. In the words of theologian N. T. Wright, “creation is to be redeemed; that is, space is to be redeemed, time is to be redeemed, and matter is to be redeemed.” God calls us to participate in this work as agents of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18–19) promoting renewal in all things—including AI.

In practice, this entails shaping responsible AI guided by wisdom, justice, and stewardship—perhaps directing the technology to increase crop yields, reduce traffic crashes, analyze medical images, enable new drug discoveries, solve protein-folding puzzles, and accelerate Bible translation. Having played with the mathematics of machine learning, I can attest to the delight of uncovering creational patterns, much as an astronomer finds joy in identifying new comets in the cosmos.

The biblical story ends with that wonderful vision in which Christ comes again to make all things new. However, engineers and computer scientists must keep in mind that the builder and architect of the new heavens and earth is God, not themselves (Heb. 11:10). The New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven (Rev. 21:2)—it is not subcontracted to us. God’s plans do not depend on our clever AI, nor can a powerful rogue machine derail his plans.

In the good world to come, we will not be disembodied souls or reduced to celestial data but rather given new bodies on a new earth. In 1 Corinthians 15 we read that “in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” we will be “raised imperishable” (v. 52). We will live with Christ in his new creation, not flattened to the realm of data but physically resurrected into a many-splendored world free of sin.

The biblical story begins in a garden and ends in a city, which theologian Richard Mouw suggests indicates a “continuity between our present lives as people immersed in cultural contexts and the life to come.” Mouw points to Isaiah 60, which describes animals, precious metals, and lumber being brought into Zion. There is even mention of the “ships of Tarshish” employed for the “honor of the Lord your God” (v. 9). These “instruments of pagan commercial power,” Mouw writes, were “made into fitting vessels of service for the Lord and his people.”

Likewise, in Revelation 21, we read of the new heavens and earth and how the kings of the earth “will bring their splendor” along with the “glory and honor of the nations” (vv. 24–26). Is it possible that modern artifacts of pagan commercial power might find their way there too? Floating alongside the ships of Tarshish, might we see aircraft carriers? Maybe drones flying overhead, all directed to the honor of God?

Merging with AI is not heaven, nor is AI the path to heaven. But will there be AI in the new heavens and earth? If the “all things” being reconciled is indeed comprehensive, it follows that it will include all creational possibilities.

We don’t know what that will entail. In my imagination, I picture sin-free computers assisting us to delight in the beauty and complexities of the patterns in the new creation, or perhaps put to more practical uses in the running of the new city.

Theologian Albert Wolters wrote that “there is no reason to doubt that computer technology and jazz music will survive, largely intact, in the future restored earth.” Admittedly, this is a matter of speculation. But I like to think that, yes, both computers and AI will be there, somehow put in loving service to God. I suspect that, along with jazz music, harps will be there too.

Derek C. Schuurman is professor and department chair of computer science at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of Shaping a Digital World and co-author of A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers.

- More from Derek C. Schuurman

News

Where Millions of Christians Don’t Get to Read the Bible

Megan Fowler

A new report identifies countries facing poverty, persecution, and printing shortages that limit access to Scripture.

Philippe Lissac / Godong via Getty Images

Earlier this year, Wybo Nicolai joined hundreds of Ethiopians at a church more than an hour outside the capital, Addis Ababa. As they sang and heard from Scripture together, only about 25 of the worshipers had their own Bibles.

The situation reflects a crisis in Bible access across Africa, as well as in the Middle East and parts of Asia. Though more Christians live in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world, Bible production has not kept up with church growth, and more than 10 million Christians in Ethiopia do not have access to the Bible, according to new estimates from the Bible Access Initiative.

Nicolai, who helped develop Open Doors’ World Watch List ranking Christian persecution, belongs to a new collaborative of ministries working to highlight the challenges many Christians face in accessing Scripture.

In Ethiopia, he handed out copies of the Bible to churchgoers, some who had waited years to own one. Even “being able to help one person is a blessing,” he said.

About 100 million Christians in 88 countries—around a fifth of the global church—can’t freely read their own copy of the Bible in their own language without challenges, according to the Bible Access Initiative’s first report. The report ranks the countries that face the most restrictions on owning a Bible on one list and the countries with the greatest Bible shortages on another.

Ethiopia ranks third for the world’s most severe Bible shortage, behind the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria. Researchers factor in Bible ownership, available translations, distribution, and economics. Of the top 20 countries ranked by Bible shortage, 14 are in Africa.

A separate ranking designates countries that restrict Bible ownership and distribution. In at least 15 countries, importing, printing, and distributing the Bible is illegal, and Bible ownership comes with restrictions. The five countries with the most Bible restrictions are Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, North Korea, and Mauritania.

An additional 18 countries place “severe” restrictions on Bible access. In Pakistan, for example, printing the Bible is technically legal, but only from approved Christian publishers who must navigate complex bureaucratic requirements. Though Pakistani churches are permitted to store Bibles, it is risky to do so because churches are sometimes the target of violent attacks.

In Somalia, only 5,000 of the country’s 18 million people are Christians, and a strict interpretation of sharia law makes it illegal to print, import, store, or distribute Bibles. Beyond legal restrictions, few Somalians, who face extreme poverty and food insecurity, can afford a copy. And because of poor infrastructure—less than half the country has electricity and even fewer have internet access—even digital Bibles are out of reach.

CT previously reported on how, in Africa, import costs from overseas or even from neighboring countries can drive Bible prices up two to three times the price in the US, putting Bibles further out of reach for poor Christians. A study Bible sold in Uganda—which ranks 7th for Bible shortages—could cost “the equivalent of at least $100 USD … a whole month’s rent,” one leader said.

In each of the four countries facing the most Bible shortages—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and India—more than 10 million believers lack access to the Bible.

India ranks near the top for Bible scarcity, which leaders say is closely related to the restrictions and social hostility around Scripture. In some regions believers can read freely, while in others—particularly parts of Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Manipur—Christians hide their Bibles or keep them wrapped in cloth to avoid attention.

“In many parts of India, especially where anti-conversion laws are enforced or communal hostility is high, owning a Bible can draw suspicion or even accusation. What should be a private act of devotion can quickly become a public issue,” said Vijayesh Lal, general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India.

Lal notes that 11 Indian states have anti-conversion laws that make sharing or publicly reading the Bible “a risky act.” He said pastors and ministry leaders have been detained, churches have been raided, and believers have been attacked for possessing or distributing Bibles. Even home Bible studies are sometimes accused of illegal proselytizing, he said.

Though owning a Bible is technically legal, Lal said there is a climate of deep suspicion, and in some regions, extremist groups are hostile to Christians. Bible shipments are sometimes stopped, and Lal said that in several states, mobs and authorities have confiscated Bibles.

“We have also seen mobs burn Scriptures with impunity. Under current regulations, the import or large-scale printing of Bibles is closely monitored, and restrictions on foreign funding have crippled several long-standing Christian organizations that once supplied Bibles to poorer communities,” he said.

The Bible Access List was developed by the Bible Access Initiative, a collaborative of Bible agencies, to identify where access to the Bible is most difficult and where shortages among Christians are greatest.

The initiative was founded by Open Doors International and the Digital Bible Society, and other agencies—including Frontlines International, Bible League International, Biblica, Bible League Canada, and OneHope—supported the work.

The Bible Access List highlights how complex the issue of Bible access can be. Legal restrictions, persecution, infrastructure challenges, economic barriers, and language gaps are the five primary reasons millions of Christians have difficulty accessing the Bible.

For the millions of believers who are illiterate, a physical Bible would be of little use. Across the globe, UNESCO estimates that 739 million adults over age 15 lack basic literacy skills.

For others, a Bible translation does not exist in their heart language.

“One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to solving the issues of Bible access globally,” said Jaap van Bezooijen, who oversaw the research and systems development for the Bible Access List. “Real Bible access means reaching people where they are, with the format they can use, at a time they can receive it safely.”

Many of the countries on the Bible Access List also appear on Open Doors’ World Watch List; Somalia is No. 2 on the World Watch List and the top country for Bible restrictions. But Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo appear much lower on the World Watch List while topping the Bible Access List for Bible shortages.

Nicolai said the number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa appearing on the Bible Access’ shortage list was one of the most surprising findings from the research.

“We hope to also become a guidepost for missions agencies as we understand what is happening around the world,” said Ken Bitgood, CEO of the Digital Bible Society.

As he spoke with CT, his organization was shipping microSD cards to northern India. He said the cards were loaded with thousands of resources, including audio Bibles, videos, and children’s programming. The cards slip into the back of most Android devices.

In other regions, an audio Bible on a solar-powered device makes the most sense.

Lal hopes the Western church will realize the Bible’s value to persecuted Christians. Throughout history, governments have sought to suppress Scripture, but they can never extinguish its message.

“But every time, it has emerged stronger,” Lal said.

- More from Megan Fowler

Church Life

What Porn Does to Us

Interview by Russell Moore

Christine Emba talks with Russell Moore about how psychological research supports biblical injunctions.

Harry Prabowo / Unsplash

The Christian sex ethic says sexual relations should occur only in marriage, but that’s not the way most Americans and many Christians act. Pornography is almost rampant, and not just outside the church.

Christine Emba, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Rethinking Sex, told Russell Moore on his podcast last month that pornography now shapes what people want. If you’re a listener, go here for the 7,800 spoken words. If you’re a reader, here are 1,500 words, excerpted and tightened by human hands, not artificial intelligence, starting with Emba’s description of how pornography works:

There’s normal watching. Something appeals to you, like a jingle that sticks in your brain. Then there’s pornography, which engages our sexual instinct, one of our deepest desires and one of our most intense pleasure centers. And yet pornography is not about real relationships. It does not even attempt to show real love and real respect for the other person. We’re consuming other people’s bodies.

The average age of first exposure to pornography is between 13 and 15. The relationship between men and women they’re seeing is often violent and ugly: choking, slapping, hitting, vile language, women treated as objects to be abused. That shapes their image of what women and men do.

You’re fed categories you like or are supposed to like, and that further channels your imagination in certain directions. “Click here for blond people. Click here for younger women. Click here for something else.” Real women and men make these productions: “They are objects for my consumption, and whatever happens to them is worth it because I get to have what I want.” It’s teaching men to see women as made for my pleasure, my consumption.

That understanding of what women are for can spill out into real life and into real interactions with other people. People say, “It’s just pornography. It’s just something I’m watching. It doesn’t have anything to do with my real life.” That’s not how people work. Our brains aren’t wired like that. And our souls are not wired like that.

We have lots of debate about the language of addiction as it applies to pornography.

The scientific understanding of addiction is something you can’t control, a disease that’s affecting your life in a negative way. Some people feel withdrawal when they stop using it. But porn changes users in other ways as well.

I interviewed a young guy [who was] in a self-directed study program on a campus and didn’t know anybody. He was bored and lonely and started watching a lot of porn. He also wanted to be in a relationship and eventually get married. He found he couldn’t be physically attracted to a woman he liked because she didn’t resemble what he saw in porn. She was a live woman with flaws, and he had trained himself not to like a real woman. The solution for him was cutting out porn entirely and trying to reframe his understanding of attraction.

It worked out for him. He is now married and has a baby on the way. The first step was recognizing what porn might be. It is easy to access. It doesn’t ask anything of you. It’s always there. To go on a date you have to take a shower, get dressed, go outside, talk to someone who might turn you down, find someone else who might also turn you down. That is a lot of work. I worry about young men trapped in the “it’s not great but it’s sufficient” position—and that keeping them from going further.

Do academic studies show the danger?

Research shows that young men who watch violent pornography are less likely to intervene in situations where women call for help and more likely to blame the victim in a rape case. But it’s hard to find clear studies on pornography, because so many of them are [ideologically] motivated. Porn companies want to prove it’s fine. Religious organizations want to prove it’s bad. The research is seen as skewed by many readers, but research can show we become habituated to things. Do something enough times, and it becomes normal, inoffensive, or perhaps part of your own practice.

I’ve seen a big shift to sexless marriages—not the typical pattern of older people hormonally slowing down, but young married couples. In almost every case the reason was the man. They’d explain that sex with their wives felt awkward, too intense emotionally after porn, which is just consumption.

The pandemic made it harder for young people to go out on dates to connect one-on-one, and especially for this swath of people of the age in which they learn to do that. It made some men a lot more nervous and cautious about interacting with women. You couldn’t necessarily go out and see someone, but porn was there with smartphone access.

I hear a lot from young women who say men they run into are porn led. They’ll say, “I was texting with this guy, and he started saying wild and gross things to me over text. I don’t want to be with a person like that.”

Or they’ll say, “I slept with this person, and he immediately tried some sort of crazy, rough action on me,” such as surprise choking, which has become shockingly common over the past couple of years and is definitely coming from pornography. A landscape in which men behave toward me in the way that men behave in pornography is terrifying—so I’d rather just not engage. I’m not gonna be in a relationship. I’m not gonna date if that’s what’s out there. It pushes people away on both ends.

What should a person look for to see if it’s a healthy potential dating relationship?

This sounds simplistic, but it’s not. Does the person you’re with treat you like a person—not like an object, someone who’s there to cater to desires, but interested in you as a person, in your thoughts, your sensitivities?

I wonder if we could bring in mentorship from older people who understand what the norms were. People do not want to talk to their parents about their dating life, but an older person in their community or in their church or aunts or uncles who make themselves available could be helpful in giving feedback: “That doesn’t seem normal.” “Are you sure about this?”

In America we’re all about individualism and allowing people the freedom to make their own choices and not interfering, but guidance is really important. I don’t just walk up to somebody and say, “Do you want some guidance in terms of love and intimacy?” We have a generational divide. People hang out with their age slice in some way. It would be valuable for churches or individuals to find ways to cross barriers.

Is the discussion of porn and smartphones parallel in some way, in that people assume this is just what the world is like now and there’s nothing you can do about it?

But we can. Gen Z is actually more in favor of regulations on porn and porn access than older people—[like] age bans, as they’ve adopted in various places. There is support for pushback against the way that kind of porn has taken over the internet. That’s probably because younger people in particular have had this all their lives and they see how it has harmed them.

Do age verification and these kinds of measures actually work?

It’s too early to say, but in some states where these age-verification laws have been put in place, Pornhub, one of the largest streaming sites for porn, has just decided to not provide porn in that state. That’s a win. It’s true that people can use VPNs or other ways to get around these age-verification tools, but they are a speed bump. They put some friction in between a young person [accessing] a porn site.

Friction does something. Even if some people sneak around it, some people won’t. The law is a teacher. An age limitation and labeling make it clear that this isn’t just an innocuous thing but something you should think twice about, something you have to be old enough to watch—or maybe you shouldn’t be watching it at all.

It’s seeding the idea that this is a bit dangerous. That’s important because right now we have a discourse that says, “No, it’s fine. Go ahead. Do what you feel.” And that has not helped anyone at all.

We almost have a consensus, at least in mainstream American life, that child porn is wrong. Is that right?

But often the argument seems to be simply the abuse of the children involved, which is a major reason why it’s wrong. With AI allowing for image construction without abusing a real person, will it be more difficult for people to argue for the wrongness of child porn? They’ll say it’s a victimless crime.

I hope that is a step beyond what people are willing to take, but that argument is made. That’s horrifying and scary. You can train your attraction. I am very uncomfortable with saying, in essence, “It’s okay to train yourself to be into child-sexual-assault material as long as you don’t take it any further than that.”

News

Amid ICE Raids, Korean American Churches Stay Quiet

Aimee Moon

Christians in the community are divided on how to respond, yet more churches want to prepare their congregants.

Parishioners attend Sunday service at New Life Baptist Church of Atlanta.

Yasuyoshi Chiba / Contributor / Getty

When news broke last month that ICE had detained more than 300 Korean nationals at a Hyundai plant near Savannah, Georgia, Christina Shin took a break from posting reviews of beauty products and irreverent slice-of-life videos on TikTok to address the issue of immigration.

Shin criticized the raid and the Korean American Christians who used the catchline, “Illegal is illegal” to defend ICE’s right to enforce the law.

“We are privileged that our parents got here legally, got the paperwork, made us [to] be born in the States,” Shin says into the camera, speaking to second-generation Korean Americans who take a hard line on immigration. Shin, a 35-year-old office manager in Atlanta, said she is not affiliated with any political party, but seeing the callous responses from some of her fellow Korean American Christians made her “blood boil.”

“It doesn’t seem like they have any empathy for their community members,” she told CT.

Still, when she went to her church on Sunday, she chose not to talk about the raid with her friends and fellow parishioners. She attends a 200-person Korean-speaking ministry for young adults that is part of a larger Korean church outside of Atlanta.

“I don’t want to be the one causing drama and stuff, especially at a church discussion where we’re trying to love each other,” she said.

Highlighting the sensitivity of these topics in immigrant churches, Shin asked that her church not be named.

The September 4 raid at an electric vehicle battery plant co-owned by South Korean companies Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution was the largest single-site operation by US immigration authorities.

Images of workers handcuffed at the Savannah plant and reports that they faced poor conditions in the detention center spread across social media, causing panic and confusion among Koreans both at home and abroad. US Homeland Security stated that those arrested had overstayed their visas or had entered the country illegally, although some workers disputed the claim.

The operation came on the heels of several other cases of ICE apprehending Koreans in the US. In June, ICE arrested Justin Chung, who had served a commuted sentence for murder in 2007, while he was in the process of complying with deportation orders, according to a Korean American advocacy group.

Then in July, ICE took Tae Heung “Will” Kim, a 40-year-old PhD student and green-card holder, without explanation or access to a lawyer. Authorities later pointed to a 2011 drug charge. In August, faith leaders successfully rallied for the release of Yeonsoo Go, a 20-year-old undergrad at Purdue University and daughter of an Episcopal priest, who was arrested after a visa hearing and held at a Louisiana facility.

In South Korea, anger toward the Hyundai-LG raid united conservative and liberal lawmakers, even as right-wing supporters of the impeached president Yoon Suk Yeol borrowed language from the MAGA movement. Within a month, the US eased restrictions on South Koreans working in factories like the one in Georgia.

In the US, Korean American Christians have had mixed reactions to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics. While some emphasize the importance of upholding law and order, others, like Shin, argue that such views overlook the hardships that immigrants face.

Many churches have stayed silent on the issue, seeking to protect undocumented members and to preserve unity among congregants who hold differing political views. At the same time, organizations like the Korean American Sanctuary Church Network continue to offer legal services, financial assistance, and shelter to immigrants in need.

“We should take care of the weak and the people who are not privileged enough to go through the right process,” Shin said.

About 110,000 unauthorized immigrants from South Korea live in the US, according to a 2022 report from Pew Research Center. While the earliest waves of Korean immigrants were primarily laborers, victims of war, and political refugees, the US saw a surge of white-collar workers from the 1960s through the 1980s driven by high unemployment and political instability in South Korea. Today, the Korean American population numbers 1.8 million, with more than one-third identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants.

For many Korean Christians on the right, sympathy for immigrants is separate from the principle of fairness in the justice system.

“A crime is a crime, but that does not mean that I’m less compassionate on the person,” said Samuel Shon, 34, a small business owner and deacon in Fairfax, Virginia. For Shon, abiding by the law is a way to honor God. However, he said his faith calls for empathy toward those who were not born with citizenship.

“I feel for them, because they’re just trying to do what’s best for their family, for their individual selves,” said Shon.

Shon’s parents immigrated from Korea to the US in the 1980s and started out as street vendors before working their way up to own several businesses. At the time, US immigration policy favored family reunification and skilled laborers, causing Korean-born immigrants to become the 10th-largest immigrant group in the country.

For Shon, following legal pathways to US citizenship, however challenging, is a prime example of biblical submission to authority. “I don’t think it ought to be an easy process. It should be difficult, much like citizenship in heaven … that was bought with a price,” he said.

In Los Angeles, James Chae, 42, knows just how difficult the immigration system can be. His wife, a Korean national, waited seven years for US citizenship. Though Chae, who identifies as center-right, supports reforms to make the system more efficient, he said existing immigration laws should be enforced in the meantime, pointing to concerns over crime and national security.

“My heart goes out to them,” Chae said of the undocumented people in his city. “What would Jesus do? I’m sure he would have open arms … [But] in the world we live in today, it’s really hard to do what we think Jesus would have done.”

Even though Trump’s immigration policies affect many Korean Americans, pastors and congregations often stay apolitical and dispassionate at church.

Raymond Chang, a pastor and the president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative, noted that one reason is because some pastors don’t want to draw attention to vulnerable undocumented congregants. This is especially relevant as, in January, the Trump administration rolled back protections that prevented federal agencies from making arrests at churches and schools.

Pastors also face internal division. Like many religious leaders across the country, some Korean American pastors said they’ve faced criticism from parishioners for speaking too much about current events. Some said long-time members of the church have left over political disagreements.

“There’s a lot of … churches that are trying to figure out [how to] disciple people in the midst of all the political division that we’re seeing?” Chang said. “The conversation is so polarizing and toxic and loud.”

Justin Oh, 26, of Long Island, once believed pastors should avoid politics entirely. “Those are secondary things, and obviously the most important thing is preaching Christ,” he said.

But after seeing an increase in divisive political content on social media, especially rhetoric demeaning certain groups of people, Oh’s view of the church’s role has evolved. “For us to just stay silent, I don’t think that’s right,” he said.

Oh noted that the Korean Christian community tends to not engage on immigration issues publicly. “We live in a bubble. We just stick with each other and pretend as if nothing else happens,” he said.

For Mina Song Lee, 25, a theology student in Atlanta, this passivity highlights a dissonance within the Korean American church. Historically, the church has been the central institution for immigrants to the US, offering practical aid and standing against racial discrimination. Many pastors started Korean American churches with ministries for new arrivals in mind.

“There are resources within the Christian tradition that are incredibly liberating, incredibly healing,” Lee said. Yet growing up in a Korean Pentecostal megachurch in New York City, Lee, a registered Democrat, saw little focus on social organizing. She described a culture where faith was personal, not political. “Our theology doesn’t compel us to be political actors,” said Lee.

She enrolled at Emory University in hopes of understanding how that apolitical posture developed. In Atlanta, Lee volunteers with church-run fundraisers and food drives to support the local migrant population—and hopes for more dialogue and action from the Korean community in the future.

Some advocates say they are beginning to see a shift in how Korean American churches are responding to immigration issues. After the Hyundai-LG raid, more first-generation Korean American churches in Georgia opened their doors to host Know Your Rights trainings, sessions designed to prepare people for encounters with immigration authorities.

Grace Choi, head of the New York chapter of the Coalition of AAPI Churches, said the move was unusual among Korean faith leaders who have long resisted anything in the public sphere, including nonpartisan voter registration drives.

“[The raid] is sparking another level of engagement with churches,” Choi said.

More churches are also interested in working with the Korean American Sanctuary Church Network, which was formed in 2017 in response to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump’s first campaign. Today it includes 150 churches across the New York metropolitan area and Chicago.

Initially, some congregations were opposed to working with the network, but that’s changing, said Youngsoo Choi (no relation to Grace), head of the organization’s legal task force: “They understand how important it is to have such organizations [on] their side in this challenging time.”

The network partners with immigration attorneys, community advocates, and faith leaders to offer legal support and spiritual care to the Korean immigrant community. Earlier this year, it held legal seminars at nine local churches over a two-month period.

Even as some churches are more willing to engage on immigration issues, for Korean American congregants like Shin, the decision to publicly voice their opinions is a fraught one.

Shin’s TikTok has returned to its lighter fare, and she remains cautious about sharing her views on immigration at church. Still, she recently brought up the issue during a dinner with her small group, warning that “if ICE really wanted to, then they could hit up all the churches.”

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Amid ICE Raids, Korean American Churches Stay Quiet

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