Religion on Egyptian Citizens’ ID Cards Enables Christian Persecution

Jill Nelson in Egypt

The requirement makes it difficult for religious minorities to get jobs, justice, and opportunities. Advocates are pushing for change.

Coptic Christians in Egypt tattoo crosses on their right wrists as a symbol of their faith.

Roger Anis / Stringer / Getty

On a September afternoon in an Egyptian city, cars and donkey carts navigate around pedestrians crossing the streets. Locals purchase cuts of meat from a carcass hanging by the road as a dog jumps on top of a parked car for a better view.

A quiet apartment on an adjacent side street provides a reprieve from the daily commotion. It also offers sanctuary for local Christians facing religious-based threats and violence. The apartment is among 20 safe houses Help for the Persecuted operates across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Inside, Amira Butros shares over a glass of soda why she fled her home. Christianity Today agreed not to use the real names or locations of Butros and three other Egyptian Christians due to ongoing safety concerns.

Butros previously lived in a spacious two-floor apartment where members of the growing Sudanese refugee community gathered. She hosted a house church, provided English classes, and distributed blankets and other supplies. In early September, her Muslim neighbor broke into her home and physically assaulted her, her mother, and several of the visiting Sudanese, Butros said. Then the man alerted other neighbors and accused Butros of converting Muslims to Christianity.

Local authorities refused to file her complaint because she was a Christian, Butros said. She no longer felt safe in her apartment and contacted Help for the Persecuted to secure temporary lodging. She put her ministry work on hold.

Although Egypt’s Constitution protects religious freedom and criminalizes discrimination, the government seldom investigates acts of violence against Christians. Additional laws strictly limit freedom for religious minorities, creating a system of contradictions.

Religious freedom advocates around the world are urging Cairo to do better. Groups want the Egyptian government to remove individuals’ religions from their ID cards to prevent discrimination.

“We need to create a social movement that will bring greater freedom and religious liberty to the region,” said Shirin Taber, executive director of the US-based Empower Women Media (EWM), which mobilizes religious freedom advocates in the Middle East and Pakistan. “We feel that addressing things like the identity card—but also supporting businesses, artists, athletes, creatives, and content creators—will help advance the movement in the region.”

Egypt’s Christians number more than 10 million—at least 10 percent of the country’s 111 million people—making it the largest Christian community in the Middle East and North Africa. Over 90 percent of the Christian population is Coptic Orthodox, but the government also targets Protestants.

In October, a large Muslim mob attacked a Coptic Christian community in the Upper Egyptian town of Minya. Rumors of an 18-year-old Christian man dating a Muslim woman sparked the violence and led to the expulsion of the Christian family from the village.

Only weeks earlier, US representatives French Hill and Thomas Suozzi introduced a resolution asking the Egyptian government to grant Coptic Christians equal rights and prosecute those who commit crimes against Christians. “As the largest Christian community in the Middle East, the Copts have long endured systemic injustice,” Suozzi noted in a press release.

An Egyptian Christian ministry leader said converts to Christianity face some of the most significant challenges, and local authorities at times enable or encourage the persecution.

For instance, in 2021, Egyptian authorities jailed Abdulbaqi Saeed Abdo, originally from Yemen, for sharing his testimony on a Christian TV channel and participating in a social media group for Muslim-background believers. Authorities released him earlier this year after an international campaign. Now he and his family live in Canada.

When police discover that a member of a Muslim family is attending church, they ask the family and neighbors to pressure the new convert, the ministry leader said. The convert is often forced into hiding.

He added that church leaders can openly preach the gospel inside the church, but it’s illegal to proselytize or hold Christian events outside church grounds. It’s also illegal to change someone’s designated religion on a national ID card from Muslim to any other faith. Converts to Islam face no challenges making a change.

An Egyptian Christian businessman said authorities sometimes check ID cards at Christian conferences and prevent Muslim-background believers from entering due to their stated religion. “If we remove this from ID cards, it will give better opportunities for businesspeople, better opportunities for people to choose their faith, better opportunities for people to live their lives,” he said.

EWM recently launched a campaign to equip Egyptian leaders to advocate for changes to the country’s ID-card legislation. The organization released a report and video explaining the need for the initiative.

Every Egyptian over the age of 16 is required to have a national ID with one of the three recognized religions on it: Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. The card is necessary for many aspects of life, including enrolling in university, getting a job, traveling, and opening a bank account. In 2008, the government granted members of the Baha’i faith permission to leave the religion field empty on their ID cards.

Taber believes Christians and other religious minorities would experience greater freedom if the government lifted the ID-card requirement. “You’ll have a better chance of getting that job, getting enrolled in university, and your child being able to play on the soccer team,” she noted. “Women, youth, and minorities are discriminated against the most.”

Another Egyptian Christian expressed skepticism about the initiative. He doesn’t believe it will bring much benefit because “Egyptian society is highly interconnected” and names often reveal religious affiliation. Christians typically choose biblical names while Muslims draw names from Islamic tradition. Some names overlap.

Other Egyptians, including Sherif Azer, the director of programs at the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, are more optimistic about the initiative’s potential impact. In a September policy brief addressing religious persecution, the Egyptian human rights activist listed ID-card reform among five recommendations for improving religious freedom.

In 2018, Azer criticized Cairo’s failure to pass a parliamentary bill that sought to remove the religion field from identification cards. “Whenever there’s a situation that requires showing your ID … you would be categorized right away,” Azer told Morning Star News.

Yet Taber said she sees “the winds of change blowing” across the region, especially among the business community and educated women. She cited Arab countries normalizing relations with Israel as an example of change “we only dreamed about in the past.” In May, EWM hosted a training in Cairo that educated 90 women about their religious liberties.

Taber’s Egyptian contacts tell her that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who led the 2013 military coup against Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, is open to reform and has opened new churches and attended Christian services.

Yet Islamists and clerics at Al-Azhar, one of the world’s most influential Islamic institutions, frequently block attempts to change the legislation, Taber added.

Taber, an Iranian American Christian and author of Muslims Next Door, will explore these challenges at an EWM-sponsored summit in Malta in March with several senior-level Egyptians officials in attendance. She also plans to bring in members of the Coptic community to foster greater collaboration with Protestants and a more unified response to religious persecution.

Back at the Cairo safe house, Butros looks for a new place to resume her ministry work with Sudanese refugees, many of whom faced worse persecution in Sudan than in Egypt. “We create support for those who have experienced persecution,” Butros said through a translator. “It’s very important I continue my service with these people.”

Taber underscored the importance of addressing persecution while simultaneously doing evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. “If not, you’re just doing it all backwards,” Taber said. “Christ compels us, and he is the Prince of Peace and has given us everything we need to do the work.”

- More from Jill Nelson

Books

Review

Personal Preference Is No Way to Judge Faithful Worship

Kevin Antlitz

Steven Félix-Jäger’s new volume on biblical, aesthetic, theological, and pastoral considerations in worship will serve many churches.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Zondervan Academic

“Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it.” This famous line from Chaim Potok’s novel My Name Is Asher Lev captures the fluency required to speak meaningfully into or against a tradition. A tradition must be known, experienced, and even loved before it can be properly judged. Without that depth of understanding, critiques and contributions tend to ring hollow or even false.

While few of us can hope to truly master even one Christian tradition, Steven Félix-Jäger’s How to Worship for All Its Worth helps readers grow in both understanding and appreciation for the ways different traditions worship God.

Worship is a vast and sprawling subject, and Félix-Jäger wisely narrows his focus to congregational worship and music. Yet within that frame, he offers a rich, accessible guide for encountering the breadth of worship practices across the church.

As an artist, scholar, minister, and educator, Félix-Jäger is fluent in the fields (biblical studies, philosophy, practical theology, music theory, and more) required to seriously and generously engage with the wide range of authentic Christian worship that exists today. Whether assessing the theological merits of the chorus of a contemporary song or explaining Immanuel Kant’s perspective on aesthetics, Félix-Jäger proves himself a faithful guide. He’s the kind of scholar-practitioner who is uniquely qualified to train the reader in how to make good judgments about congregational worship.

This kind of judgment, he makes abundantly clear, is not a bad thing. To judge in this sense is to critically assess something to determine its value or significance.

Learning how to make good judgments about worship is ultimately what this book is for. It’s a kind of training manual to help Christians, worship leaders, and pastors critically assess different aspects of worship for different worshiping communities so they can help God’s people worship.

The book is divided into two parts. The first outlines four principles for how to faithfully design and evaluate worship. The second applies these principles in five case studies, each focusing on a representative church from the Reformed, Pentecostal, Black gospel, evangelical, and charismatic Catholic traditions, respectively.

The first principle is about how to use biblical judgment to assess fidelity to the Scriptures in worship. Here, Félix-Jäger highlights the communal dimension of biblical interpretation. “While every [church] tradition reads the whole Bible, each tradition comes at the text from a different vantage point,” he notes. “Traditions implicitly apply the insights of certain texts over others and receive biblical texts differently depending on their context.”

These differing approaches to the Scripture make for differing worship practices too. For instance, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America relies on the “regulative principle,” which holds that worship must be based on explicit commands or examples in Scripture. That’s why these churches they only sing psalms without musical accompaniment. This principle also explains the prominence of the biblical theme of liberation in the Black gospel tradition.

The worship in these traditions may not be your cup of tea—and fair enough. But not preferring or perhaps even feeling out of place with the style and substance of a worship service isn’t enough to call it unbiblical.

To fairly judge a congregation’s worship in terms of scriptural faithfulness, then, we can’t use our own church as the standard. Some differences in worship are wrong, bad, or heretical—but many are not. If we can understand each tradition’s worship habits in light of its relationship to Scripture, we’ll often be able to honor and appreciate styles of worship we do not prefer. This is a key insight Félix-Jäger develops in all four principles.

The second principle is about using aesthetic judgment to assess the form and fit of worship. Here Félix-Jäger surveys some of the philosophical foundations of art and touches on the formal elements of music, including rhythm, pitch, and timbre. With this, he gives the reader language to talk about the style and substance of worship practices and whether they fit a particular context.

Just as it doesn’t make sense to critique punk because it’s not jazz, it doesn’t make sense to critique a Hillsong anthem because it’s not a traditional hymn. Aesthetic judgment is about assessing forms of worship on their own terms and in the contexts where they’re used.

Next is theological judgment. Here, Félix-Jäger develops Gavin Ortlund’s idea of “theological triage,” which orders theological beliefs according to their significance for the Christian faith. Pinning down what is primary, secondary, and tertiary is often messy in practice, but these are helpful categories for determining which truths should be centered in worship (such as God’s Trinitarian nature) and which are tertiary and should be avoided (like particular views on eschatology).

The last principle is about pastoral judgment for congregational worship. Félix-Jäger discusses the pastoral work of the worship leader and the formative power of worship music to shape individuals and communities—and it’s here that he gets to the heart of this project.

Why does biblical fidelity matter? Why is aesthetic fit important? Why does theological emphasis deserve careful planning? Because worship plays a profoundly pastoral function in shaping a congregation’s understanding of and relationship with God.

In the latter half of How to Worship, Félix-Jäger puts his theory to work, offering ethnographical studies of representative churches from a range of traditions.

Each evaluation follows the same pattern. Drawing on historical research, interviews with church leaders and members, and participation in the worship services, Félix-Jäger describes the history and distinctives of the congregation in question as well as its denomination or tradition. He also outlines the church’s geographic and cultural context along with its architecture, then evaluates all its elements of worship, from the type of instruments played and song selection to the style of the sermon and the overall vibe of the service.

As he does this, he renders biblical, theological, aesthetic, and pastoral judgments about each congregation’s worship, ending with commendations and recommendations. Together, the five case studies give a sense of how to judge worship in a structured and charitable way. Combined with a careful and thoughtful writing style, this practical demonstration helps make the book successful in its aims.

Still, let me close with three judgments of my own. The first is a small and mostly stylistic quibble. Throughout the book, certain words and phrases are bolded and defined. Definitions are helpful for a book like this, but I found myself distracted by the editorial decision to define certain terms and not others. Why “Southern Baptist Convention” but not “Roman Catholic Church”? Why “TULIP” but not “Charismatic Renewal Movement”? Why “Bapticostal” but not “born again”? The execution of this feature didn’t quite make sense in a book so defined by its engagement with a wide range of Christian traditions.

Second, Félix-Jäger has little attention for congregations with a more high-church mode of worshiping—all the smells and bells, so to speak. He does go beyond the Protestant world but chooses to focus on a narrow stream of charismatic Roman Catholicism, which has a good deal of overlap with Pentecostals and Evangelicals. Why not go all-in and evaluate a traditional Catholic parish?

I understand that Félix-Jäger couldn’t be comprehensive in his scope, and I’m biased as a priest at an Anglican church. But many Christians—including many Protestants and even many evangelicals—worship in more liturgical and sacramental churches. More attention to this type of worship would’ve presented a clearer picture of the global church and a more challenging text case for many readers seeking to evaluate worship according to Scripture, aesthetics, theology, and pastoral concerns rather than mere preference.

Finally, though he acknowledges that his descriptions are not comprehensive and are shaped by “cultural insiders,” I was often puzzled by the distinctions Félix-Jäger drew. More than once when he identified a supposed difference, I found myself wondering what tradition would not consider it important.

For instance, he writes that an emphasis on the “now and not yet” reality of the kingdom is a distinguishing feature of Pentecostals. While that theme is certainly central in Pentecostal worship, this kind of inaugurated eschatology is also a major emphasis in many other traditions. In fact, the modern articulation of the “already/not yet” framework is rooted in the work of Reformed and evangelical theologians such as Geerhardus Vos and George E. Ladd. Pentecostals may express this theme in characteristic ways, but it hardly makes them distinct.

Despite these weaknesses, How to Worship for All Its Worth has much to offer as a toolbox for worship practitioners. Its most important tool is a shared vocabulary for talking about worship in ways that rise above personal preference or inherited prejudice. This common language can foster unity and mutual appreciation within the body of Christ.

I found especially helpful Félix-Jäger’s treatment of flow, defined as “the progression of a worship service, where each element of worship naturally leads to the next.” This is a simple but useful idea that draws attention to how the elements of worship join a narrative and emotional arc that facilitates engagement, encounter, and ultimately transformation—or fails to do so. Churches rooted in more liturgical or sacramental traditions, like mine, may need to supplement this approach to service design with resources tailored to their own dynamics, but the core framework is widely applicable and quite helpful.

The book also equips us pastors and worship leaders who plan or lead services to bolster our own traditions and build up our local churches. It would be especially valuable at the beginning of a new pastor’s tenure or during a season when a church is seeking to become more hospitable to newcomers. But in any season, this is a worthwhile guide to shepherding God’s people into his presence more faithfully. Is there any task more central to the church’s life than this?

Kevin Antlitz is a writer and an Anglican priest in Pittsburgh. He previously pastored in Washington, DC, and did campus ministry at Princeton University.

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News

Killed: Acclaimed Gospel Vocalist Jubilant Sykes

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

The Grammy-nominated singer jumped from gospel to opera to spirituals to jazz; he considered it all sacred.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In 1981, an industry newcomer named Jubilant Sykes released his debut album, Number of the Lord, with Light Records, the same label as gospel legend Andraé Crouch. At the time, gospel music scholar Robert Darden was working as a music journalist in New York, and he remembers the day he listened to that album.

“This album was different. It was gospel, it was funk,” Darden said. But it wasn’t the style or instrumentation that stood out to him most—it was Sykes’ voice.

“At that moment, Sykes had the best voice in gospel.”

Sykes drew acclaim as a rising gospel star—praised for his rich baritone sound, virtuosity, and control—but he didn’t remain in the niche for long. His trajectory from gospel to opera to popular sacred music was a path through the music industry as singular as his voice.

“I’ve been singing since I was a kid. I wanted to be like Michael Jackson of the Jackson 5,” Sykes said in an interview in 2004. “But these doors are the doors that just happened to open. It’s nothing that I really planned.”

Over the course of his five-decade career, Sykes lent his versatile baritone voice to contemporary sacred music, gospel, funk, African American spirituals, and contemporary gospel. He received a Grammy nomination in 2009 for his performance as Celebrant in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass and collaborated with a roster of high-profile artists including Julie Andrews, John Williams, Carlos Santana, Josh Groban, and Brian Wilson. He also worked with the music ministry at John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church in southern California and performed on several occasions with contemporary worship artists Keith and Kristyn Getty.

Jubilant Sykes died on December 8, 2025, in Santa Monica at the age of 71. Sykes died after being fatally stabbed in his Santa Monica home. His 31-year-old son, Micah, has been arrested and investigating authorities say he will be charged with homicide.

When Sykes’ soprano voice dropped at the beginning of puberty, he started to lose interest in singing. He credits his voice teacher with preserving his love for making music and helping him see the beauty in his deepening voice. In 2002, Sykes told NPR that his teacher, Linda Anderson, “turned him on to classical music” and instilled in him a love for Bach and confidence in his changing vocal chords.

As a college student at Cal State Fullerton, Sykes continued singing but didn’t seriously consider a career as a professional singer. Even so, he decided to continue his studies as a graduate student at the University of Southern California, which cast him in a production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess that ended up touring Europe.

At every turn, Sykes’ stunning baritone voice attracted the attention of teachers and directors, earning him opportunities to collaborate and audition to appear on the biggest stages in the classical music world. In 1990, he performed with the New York Metropolitan Opera as the character of James in Porgy and Bess and went on to appear in venues like the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall.

What made Sykes unusual in the classical music world was his openness to stepping outside the confines of the highbrow. For a period in the late 1990s, he was performing in jazz clubs one night and turning around to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony the following day. His 1981 album blended funk and traditional gospel elements, and he recorded and performed jazz and gospel music even after achieving success in opera.

Following his time with the Met, Sykes toiled away as a working singer, often holding multiple jobs or working on two or three projects at a time. That versatility made it possible to have a sustainable but demanding full-time singing career. He told interviewers that it wasn’t ideal, but “it’s just the way the chips fell.”

Robert Darden, now a professor emeritus of journalism and founder of Baylor University’s Black Gospel Restoration Project said that, outside his impact in the opera world, Sykes carried on the tradition of black vocalists like Paul Robeson, who helped preserve and elevate African American spirituals.

After the Civil War, African American spirituals were at risk of being lost. A vernacular musical tradition, spirituals evolved in slave communities and migrated between them, evolving as they moved.

“Spirituals were never sung the same way twice, from church to church and plantation to plantation,” Darden said. “After the war, there was a real fear that these traditional spirituals would disappear.”

To preserve the songs while simultaneously elevating the form, composer Harry T. Burleigh (1866–1949) arranged spirituals as art songs, drawing on European conventions. While these arrangements and subsequent recordings of them by figures like Robeson (1898–1976) made significant changes and additions to traditional spirituals, they preserved lyrics and melodies and helped ensure that the genre would be documented and appreciated as a legitimate form of American art music.

“Sykes is one of the most recent figures of this tradition,” Darden said. “He, like many African American opera stars, came from the church and heard these spirituals, then recorded them with incredible sensitivity. These versions will move you to tears. They resonate.”

Sykes’ 1994 album Jubilant Sykes Sings Copland and Spirituals features stirring renditions of music by influential American composer Aaron Copland alongside arrangements of spirituals like “Go Down, Moses” and “City Called Heaven.” With cinematic accompaniment by the London Symphony Orchestra, Sykes’ solo voice carries the words of each spiritual with sensitivity and pathos.

Sykes said that singing spirituals like “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” gives voice both to the horror of the slave experience in America, “the loneliness, the madness and the darkness of it all”—and to enduring hope “that I am never really alone.”

In 2009, Sykes’ performance as Celebrant in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, a demanding musical theater work based on the Tridentine Mass, received a Grammy nomination. Throughout his career, Sykes was open about his Christian faith and about his belief that his performances—whether explicitly sacred or not—were all a form of worship.

“It’s not that one is secular and one is sacred. It all is to the glory of God. Bach said that all music should be in the honor and glory of God,” Sykes said in a 1998 interview. “And I think that’s true.”

Sykes was involved in the music ministry at Grace Community Church since 1978, according to a statement from the church. At Grace, he met his longtime collaborator, classical guitarist Christopher Parkening. The two toured together on and off for over a decade and recorded an album, Jubilation, together in 2007.

Sykes also collaborated with modern hymn writers and worship leaders Keith and Kristyn Getty—most recently at a concert at the Grand Ole Opry in celebration of the publication of the Gettys’ Sing! Hymnal.

In a post on Facebook, the Gettys wrote about Sykes’ “ability to find the wonder and extraordinary in the ordinary” and his “unique Christian voice.”

Sykes carried a deep appreciation for classical music, but he rejected the tendency of the music industry to silo performers. At times, he seemed to suggest that his career might have been easier if he’d picked a lane and stayed there. His eclectic discography and performance career reflect an artist who loved music too much to pick a niche.

“I have a passion for music, and I probably want to do too many things at one time,” Sykes said. “I’ve got to take myself seriously enough to work, but not so seriously that I become more neurotic. At this stage of the game, you take [engagements] as they come … and they come by God’s grace.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Books

My Top 5 Books on Christianity in South Asia

Compiled by Nathanael Somanathan

Wisdom on staying faithful in ministry and navigating multireligious realities in India, Sri Lanka, and beyond.

Illustration by Christianity Today

The following books were selected by Nathanael Somanathan, deputy principal at Colombo Theological Seminary in Sri Lanka.

South Asia’s missional memory reaches as far back as the first century, when the apostle Thomas is believed to have traveled to India and possibly even farther, establishing a church in the northern part of Sri Lanka. However, the verifiable history of missions in South Asia began in the 16th century alongside colonization, when Franciscan and Dominican missionaries first arrived in India, followed by the Jesuits. It was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that the Protestant missions movement emerged, particularly with Dutch colonization in places like Sri Lanka.

Today, the subcontinent is home to paradoxes, syncretisms, and layers of diversity. Religion and culture within countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka are so deeply intertwined that Christian mission in the region has been both challenging and creative.

Yet Christianity has managed to thrive in its own ways, producing a church that has persevered through persecution and enriched itself through the theological and philosophical wealth of its own resources. Here are some books that showcase this.

South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim by Chandra Mallampalli

A ubiquitous narrative in world Christianity studies today is that the faith is rapidly expanding in the Global South and that the center of gravity in the Christian faith has consequently shifted from North America and Europe to regions such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, studies often overlook a large sector of this new demographic: South Asia.

In this recent monograph, historian Chandra Mallampalli, a second-generation American born to immigrant Indian parents, sheds light on why this is the case. The preoccupation with numerical growth within world Christianity studies has obscured “vital lessons about interreligious encounters and the experiences of marginal people” within South Asia, he argues.

Mallampalli’s historiography focuses particularly on Indian believers whose stories are profoundly shaped by the Hindu and Muslim environments they live in. He weaves a compelling narrative of Indian Christian identities that often exist as religious minorities on the fringes of society. The book covers an impressive range of Christian groups across nearly two millennia, leaving the reader inspired by a Christianity that may not have triumphed in numbers but certainly has in spirit and witness.

The Call to Joy and Pain: Embracing Suffering in Your Ministry by Ajith Fernando

Prominent Sri Lankan theologian Ajith Fernando responds to a common misconception that Christians must not suffer, especially in ministry. Drawing from his experiences as Youth for Christ’s former national director for more than three decades and how he navigated several ministry crises, Fernando relates the themes of suffering and pain to lament, gospel witness, and discipleship. He encourages readers to embrace hardship without losing the joy of serving God.

This book is an encouragement for people on the verge of burnout as they struggle with ministry life, marked by euphoric mountaintop experiences and dark, difficult valleys. Fernando’s thesis can be summarized in this quote: “Something is seriously wrong not when Christians suffer but when they do not have the joy of the Lord.”

The Recovery of Mission: Beyond the Pluralist Paradigm by Vinoth Ramachandra

This 1996 book remains a seminal contribution to mission studies. Ramachandra wrote it as a response to a widespread debate in the field at the time on whether all religious traditions offer a path to salvation and whether interfaith dialogue and cooperation in social work could replace a traditional understanding of mission as evangelization.

The effectiveness of Ramachandra’s critique of pluralism, represented by three of its most influential proponents—Stanley Samartha, Raimundo Panikkar, and Aloysius Pieris—lies in the fact that Ramachandra is an Asian theologian who lives in Sri Lanka and offers insights shaped by this local missional context.

Ramachandra draws on Lesslie Newbigin’s paradigm of mission—namely, the gospel as public truth in a pluralist society—and focuses on the “scandal” of the person and work of Jesus. Throughout, he emphasizes the incarnational implications for mission as an alternative to the pluralist paradigm. The book ultimately points to his conviction that the Good News produces a new humanity—the church—which is integral to gospel proclamation.

The Problem of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity by Lynn A. de Silva

Second only to Hinduism, Buddhism dominates the religious landscape of South Asia, particularly in countries such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan. In this context, Buddhist-Christian dialogue is paramount for fostering mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence. A notable example in this regard is the Sri Lankan Methodist minister Lynn de Silva, who pioneered many conversations between adherents of the faiths.

In this book, De Silva addresses the challenging question of what the “self” is. He identifies how Christianity tends toward eternalism and Buddhism toward nihilism and coins the concept of anattā–pneuma (non-egocentric mutuality) as a meeting place between the two faith traditions. This concept enriches the Buddhist-Christian understanding of personhood and helps to facilitate a “communal selflessness” in his view. I recommend this book to those interested in the academic study of cross-cultural missions and interreligious dialogue with Buddhism.

An Honorable Heritage: The Pandita Ramabai Story in Her Own Words by Pandita Ramabai

Pandita Ramabai is frequently overlooked for the pioneering role she played in Indian Christianity. She led the 1905 Mukti revivals, where thousands of young girls experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and inspired the subsequent Pentecostal movement that emerged in South Asia.

Here, Ramabai recounts her Brahmin upbringing, her training as a Sanskrit scholar, and how she ended up as a Christian evangelist and social reformer dedicated to women’s emancipation in India. After her parents and sister died of starvation during a famine, young Ramabai was thrown into despair. Later, she encountered several Christians and was baptized, but she only fully encountered Christ when she stumbled upon the book From Death Into Life by 19th-century Anglican revivalist William Haslam while in England. She came to realize that she needed Jesus Christ the person, not just Christianity the religion.

Ramabai’s autobiography is a must-read for believers of all ages. Her life exemplifies revival, transformation, and hope—dimensions that are inseparable from the Christian gospel and the work of the Spirit.

Check out other top 5 books on Christianity in East Asia and Southeast Asia.

- More from Compiled by Nathanael Somanathan

News

Top Women’s Cricket Player Trolled for Her Christian Faith

Vikram Mukka

Christian public figures in India face online attacks and offline consequences for speaking about Jesus.

Jemimah Rodrigues celebrating victory in the ICC Women's Cricket World Cup 2025 Semi-Final match.

Alex Davidson / ICC / Contributor / Getty

Emotions ran high at the DY Patil Sports Academy in Navi Mumbai, India, on October 30, when the India women’s cricket team faced Australia in a nerve-racking World Cup semifinal.

As the crowd roared, cameras zoomed in on Jemimah Rodrigues as she delivered a match-winning knock, leading her team into the finals for the first time since 2017. Tears streamed down Rodrigues’s face as she dropped to her knees in relief.

“Towards the end, I was just quoting a Scripture from the Bible—to just stand still and that God will fight for me,” she said in a postmatch interview, referring to Exodus 14:14. “I have almost cried every day through this tour. Not doing well mentally, going through anxiety. I knew I had to show up, and God took care of everything.”

Despite Rodrigues’s match-winning hit—and India winning the Women’s Cricket World Cup three days later—online commenters hounded her for speaking publicly about Christianity. “Once a rice bag always a rice bag,” wrote one person on X in response to a cricket post. (Rice bag is a derogatory term in India used to describe someone who converted to Christianity for material benefits.) Others used slurs such as “missionary dog.”

Many dragged her family, accusing them of participating in forced conversions. “She continued her conversion racket even in post-match,” posted another X account. “If her father and she continue to do that, Hate is only what you expect.”

The harshest comments targeted her father, Ivan Rodrigues, a junior cricket coach and PE teacher. “Her father was a soul ripper so deserved flak,” a commenter wrote. “Every converter is a soul terrorist. Their kids’ good deeds don’t cancel it.”

This wasn’t the first time the Rodrigueses came under attack for being Christians. In October 2024, Khar Gymkhana—one of Mumbai’s oldest clubs—revoked Jemimah Rodrigues’s honorary membership, following allegations that her father used the club premises for conversion activities.

Dismissing the accusations, he said prayer meetings there were conducted in accordance with club rules and with the club’s full knowledge. Khar Gymkhana’s president called the allegations “politically motivated,” noting that the club committee members’ comments came before elections and they lacked evidence.

Since then, videos of Jemimah Rodrigues leading worship or participating in healing services have circulated online, with netizens mocking her faith and shaming her family.

Although reports about persecution against Indian Christians focus on churches vandalized, pastors beaten, or prayer meetings disrupted, Christian public figures and content creators often face vicious online attacks when they speak out about their faith. That spills into their offline lives when they lose jobs and struggle with depression over the constant barrage of hate.

Beyond terms like rice bag, trolls also call Indian Christians “foreign agents,” claiming their loyalties lie with the West, where Christianity is the predominant religion. Lately, terms such as gorre (“lamb”) and gorre biddalu (“children of the lamb”) in the Telugu language have been used as dog whistles, recasting the Christian imagery of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb into ridicule.

To many Indians, the word converted carries a presumption of force and fraud. Christians are seen as converted, never as believers who chose freely.

In the Hindu nationalist worldview, this is particularly true in the case of Dalits and Adivasis (Indigenous groups), whom they believe are especially vulnerable to Christianity because of their socioeconomic status. Hindu nationalists believe they must protect those groups from Christianity to maintain a Hindu demographic majority.

Those who wear their Christian faith on their sleeve often bear the brunt of this language. Content creator Angelcy Benjamin, who posts humorous reels about her faith journey on Instagram, says slurs are all too common.

“People ask how many bags of rice my family received to convert,” she said. “I no longer get offended. I am a proud rice bag. My faith only deepens in the face of hate, and my resolve to share the gospel only rises.”

Others’ experience online is not so easy. When content creator Joy Mattu posted a call for prayer and peace after India and Pakistan exchanged missile fire last May, the comments turned vicious.

“I was called Pakistani, foreigner, British agent,” he recalled. Anonymous accounts sent him threats: “Tell me where you live. Even if you don’t, we will track you.”

He stopped posting on Instagram for a month. “My mother and sister were abused in comments,” he recounted. “It was psychologically draining,”

Some face consequences in their workplace. Smriti—a Christian influencer who speaks about her conversion from a devout Hindu background—lost two jobs within three months. One employer pressured her to resign, while another terminated her.

Meanwhile, podcaster and author John Giftah said he lost two jobs because of his online content. His podcast, Fuel for the Soul with John Giftah, is India’s No. 1 Christian podcast.

“My boss openly said, ‘Give him more work so he cannot make his YouTube videos to brainwash and convert people,’” he said. “In meetings, they mocked my faith.”

The job losses and constant humiliation depressed him to the point of feeling suicidal. He started going to therapy while also finding solace in the Scriptures, especially 1 Corinthians 7:17—“Nevertheless, each person should live as a believer in whatever situation the Lord has assigned to them, just as God has called them.”

Human rights activist and author John Dayal stresses that the language of contempt and digital hate connects to the physical persecution inflicted on Christians.

“It is part of the same continuum,” Dayal said. “Social media is a force multiplier for hate-mongers. They borrow the same vocabulary that has targeted Christians for decades. It is time Christians stand up to the weaponization of hate.”

He believes believers can fight the online narrative by sharing their own narratives.

Research attests to Dayal’s view. As part of a larger Hindu nationalist strategy, the constant anti-Christian rhetoric produces a “wider cultural common sense” and language, rendering violence against Christians a “moral obligation” to save Hindu India. Once it becomes part of everyday digital spaces, it is constantly circulated and recirculated until the stigmatization of Christians is normalized.

Out of the 1,165 instances of hate speech documented by the India Hate Lab 2024 report, 115 of them targeted Christians directly or alongside Muslims. The peaks came during Christian seasons such as Advent and Christmas.

Every time Jemimah Rodrigues and her family became the target of online abuse, she said that they chose to forgive.

“God is our witness,” she told the Hindustan Times. “So, we decided to stay silent, not to prove anything or fight back. We chose to forgive those who hurt us, because that’s what Jesus taught us: to forgive even those who wrong us.”

- More from Vikram Mukka

Ideas

The Case Against VIP Tickets at Christian Conferences

Jazer Willis

Exclusive perks may be well-intended business decisions, but Christian gatherings shouldn’t reinforce economic hierarchy.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

When I was younger, my family would take trips to Jacksonville to visit my great-grandma Alice, or Mama. I remember the small profile of Mama’s swollen ankles against the lilac hem of her duster. She was happy to see us. Her sweet, senescent cheekbone touched against the chubbiness of mine as we hugged. The house smelled like my mother’s cooking but somehow better. Mama was always cooking before anyone called, cutting her sweet potatoes as if the stillness of day meant that somebody, somewhere, might be hungry.

The reason Mama knew how to love this way so well was the same reason she prepared a table in an empty house. Mama fed people before she knew who was coming. I didn’t know then that what she was doing was discipleship: she was showing me hospitality without hierarchy.

Mama went on to be with Jesus some time ago, but what she embodied never departed from me. As I grew older, this picture of access made me wrestle with parts of my life where my faith intersected with market realities. As an adult, I have spent a massive amount of my time writing, performing, and traveling as a spoken-word artist. I’ve been in different spaces that magnify God’s presence: youth conferences, Christian poetry events, workshops, and festivals. I’ve also earned my income there.

To gather Christians in large numbers for art, inspiration, and spiritual enrichment, we create events that require a financial structure (i.e., tickets, tiers, passes, and exclusive access) and make the gathering viable. It’s a system shaped partly by calling, partly by creativity, and partly by raw economics. We consider ticket sales, budgeting, travel costs, artist and speaker fees, and overall production value. The gatherings are indeed ministries, but financial imperatives remain at play. How else, after all, would I be able to cover my school’s tuition, groceries, and gas?

At the same time, I have grown to feel uneasy about some things, namely VIP passes and more expensive tickets offering a small number of attendees backstage access, meet and greets, and a host of benefits other attendees don’t get to experience. Christian musicians have received some criticisms for offering a VIP experience. But these tickets are also sold at conferences and other non-musical events, which are my wheelhouse and primary concern here.

While it’s true high-access experiences can subsidize costs for attendees across the board, our quest to generate revenue through these measures is reinforcing existing economic hierarchies and deserves critical thought.

Conferences and sporadic Christian events are not the local church, and I’m not suggesting they should be treated as so. They don’t carry the same covenantal weight, elders, pastoral responsibility, or scriptural mandate of a gathered body. They are not mandatory for Chrisitan formation, nor are they meant to replace the means of grace that shape the everyday lives of believers.

But even while conferences are not church, they are important. Gatherings shape the Christian imagination and our discipleship. And when the spaces that shape us become financially stratified, they risk discipling us into a hierarchy Jesus never modeled (James 2:1-9). My concern is not that conferences cost money; it’s what happens when the cost subtly separates us from each other and determines who can afford to be in some rooms and who can’t (and I know some can’t because they have told me so).

For a couple of years in my life, I traveled with the Poets in Autumn (PIA), a group of Christian poets who toured city to city for more than two months.

People came to see us do something creative and faithful. We performed poetry mostly in churches, where people gathered not just to hear poetry but to be inspired, challenged, entertained, and in some ways discipled—even if they weren’t aware of it yet. I saw firsthand the beauty of those spaces. Attendees who wouldn’t normally be among one another were worshiping together while communities formed in church foyers.

Our tour schedule included a long list of cities where we sold tickets for regular admissions as well as VIP passes. But when the tour reached my hometown of Philadelphia, my senior pastor at the time did something special – he volunteered to cover the entire show. Every seat we had to offer that day would be free. He only had one caveat: Let everybody come in and experience the same thing.

People came out in droves, not just from Philly but from New York City, Delaware, Virginia, even Florida. That night, the building was full. Many were added to the church and found community and a language for what they had been carrying up until this point. It wasn’t perfect, nor was it meant to be a permanent model. But it’s a wonderful glimpse of what took place in Philly for one night, all a result of one person’s generosity.

Some churches might be able to partner with conferences and replicate these types of experiences. However, I’m aware that will be a rare occurrence, so here’s a more sustainable option: “VIP” access doesn’t need to disappear; it just needs to be reframed.

Instead of offering proximity to speakers, teachers, poets and the like, these higher-priced tickets can provide a service. One idea is to honor patrons who chose to spend more, instead of simply rewarding wealth. When Christian gatherings advertise higher-priced VIP tickets, they can tell people those tickets will subsidize costs for other attendees or simply help sustain the ministry. People who purchase VIP tickets wouldn’t get any exclusive access or benefits, but as with charity donations, they can receive thank-you cards expressing gratitude.

There are tradeoffs, of course. Some people pay more only if they know they will get something extra in return. But on the other hand, if attendees who pay a (subsidized) ticket are informed that VIP ticket holders are lowering the cost of admission or sustaining the ministry out of pure liberality, it would spur more appreciation and perhaps a sense of community in the overall attendance.

If tiered tickets remain, let them serve as Mama would, with those who buy them knowing the fullest plate feeds others well. The highest tier will invest the most financially in the body. This type of new model would expand the work of the conferences and ministries instead of the distance between attendees. In other words, the VIP label exists for a good reason—it’s more generous.

Jazer Willis is a poet, writer, and creative theologian studying at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. His work explores spirituality, memory, and culture.

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Ideas

Turn Toward Each Other and Away from the Screen

Carrie McKean

Contributor

Perhaps technology has changed everything. But God is still here, still wiring humans for connection and presence.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Over the past few Sunday mornings, I was part of a soul-care cohort at our church. Repeatedly, the pastor leading the class would ask, “How is your soul?”

At the start, he gave us a self-assessment to take that left many of us feeling frantic, frazzled by our own answers and our sense of urgency around improvement. Pastor Steve, sensing the frenetic energy in the room, gently called us back to the present, reminding us to slow down, pay attention, and ask God what he wants us to see and how we can invite him here.

Don’t jump too quickly to trying to solve everything at once, he’d say.

When I write about technology in schools, I often need to give myself the same reminder. This is a conversation that can’t be simplified. We can’t go back to the edtech of the 1990s, to Oregon Trail and typing class (which, ironically, seems to be missing in much of education today) and computers limited as a tool to use then set aside to go play outside.

As one secondary teacher told me, it’s important that we teach students how to use technological tools—managing projects, checking due dates, and professionally communicating via email—to ensure they are prepared for college and career. Indeed, we all need to learn how to use digital technology responsibly. But it’s become so ubiquitous in primary education that responsibility feels out of reach.

It’s tempting to either give up and stop resisting or veer into full-blown panic about the academic outcomes we’re seeing in many American schools. How are we supposed to prepare our children for a tech-infused future we can’t comprehend? Do we resign ourselves to a post-literate, post-numerate future where machines do all our thinking?

I’ve spent nearly a decade dealing with school tech as a mother and half a decade considering it on the national scale as a journalist. If those years have taught me anything, it’s that we need to slow down.

We implemented tech-forward education with little thought for the consequences, dreaming about what could be possible instead of carefully discerning what would be wise. Now we solve each tech problem with a new tech solution, layering program on program and screen on screen and disregarding how poorly many of these solutions play out in real life, at real schools, for real children.

It’s also tempting to point fingers. Responsibility for our school tech woes isn’t evenly distributed, but it’s not the bad behavior of just one group that got us here. Educational technology, or edtech, companies use lobbyists to sell their products to states and schools. Districts buy iPads for kindergartners because, well, everyone else is doing it and it’s one way to manage a too-large class of 26 kids. Teachers use virtual quizzes to save time and assign virtual textbooks because that’s what the school district purchased for them. Students cheat and take shortcuts to get through rote work in glitchy programs on their school-issued devices. And parents are often left in the dark, unaware of or ambivalent about how much time at school is spent on screens—perhaps because we have similar habits ourselves.

Slow down, pay attention, and ask God what he wants us to see and how we can invite him here.

I’m writing this article in an old church turned coffee shop in Battle Ground, Washington. I’m spending a few days out here with my elderly grandfather, caring for him after he took a fall. He is 96 and doesn’t have internet or good cell service at the house, so I used Google to find the closest coffee shop with Wi-Fi. (The glories of technology!)

I didn’t expect to walk into an old church. But here I am, and on the first Sunday of Advent. Christmas carols are playing from the speaker mounted in the loft where the choir used to sing. It’s a little sad, but as I listen to the girls behind me discuss what passage from 1 John they want to study in their Bible class, I think, God is still here, even if this place looks nothing like what its old parishioners knew.

Tech has transformed—and in some ways, ruined—my children’s education. Similar to the old church, their schooling looks nothing like what I expected. Sometimes, when I think about it too long, I spin myself into a tizzy, worried and anxious about many things (Luke 10:41). But God is still here too.

The girls behind me settle on 1 John 4: “The one who is in you is greater than the one who is the world,” one reads, sitting on a couch where the pulpit used to be (v. 4). She goes over the whole chapter aloud.

In sending his only Son Jesus, God “showed his love among us,” it says in verse 9. In Advent, we anticipate that coming: the Word made flesh. Embodied. Incarnational. Not God in a spiritual or digital form, but God who sits at the table and laughs with you. God at a coffee shop, if you will.

And maybe that is the invitation, the answer to all our worries about tech. People are still hungry for real, human connection. I see that need all around me, and even many who work with technology and love it more than I do see the need too.

Recently I spoke to Ginger Schantz, who operates a tech education center, Venture Robotics, in Midland, Texas, with her husband, Dann. “The students we have worked with value the relationship more than the technology lessons,” she told me. “The students always want to be around Dann. Yes, they like our gadgets, but the shine wears off after a while and they just like talking to him and the other kids that are there.”

This is what 1 John 4:7 requires of us: to love one another. In our time, that must include—as often as possible—turning away from the machines and back to the moment. Back to the living and breathing, complicated and curious person sitting across the table from us—or across the classroom.

Last week, I stopped by my daughter’s high school and noticed a series of colorful, student-made research posters hanging in a hallway, a scene more common on an elementary campus than a campus like this. Each delved into the history, geography, and culture of a different country.

I spent a few minutes chatting with the principal, and when I remarked on how good it was to see that work, the principal told me it was there by popular demand: Last year’s student surveys revealed a weariness with online work, so with her encouragement, teachers were doing more offline again. I imagined the scene in the classroom where those posters were made: students talking as they worked, sharing markers and ideas and jokes.

Just down the hall was an English room, where my daughter’s class was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud. A few doors past that, in the intro to engineering class, the students were building bridges and testing them for strength, competing among themselves with the good-natured intensity only 15-year-old boys can muster.

Perhaps technology has changed everything. But walking through the halls that afternoon reminded me that it hasn’t changed what it means to be human. God is still here, still wiring humans for connection and presence. Maybe we’ve gone too fast and too far in the wrong direction, but it isn’t too late to slow down and pay attention, turning toward one another instead of toward machines.

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

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History

The Call to Art, Africa, and Politics

Daniel Silliman

In 1964, CT urged Christians to “be what they really are—new men and women in Christ.”

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

The same day in 1963 that John F. Kennedy died violently in Dallas, the Christian writer C. S. Lewis died quietly at his home in Oxford. The following year, CT published an appreciation of Lewis’s life and work.

The death of Clive Staples Lewis on November 22 removed from the world one of its most lucid, winsome, and powerful writers on Christianity. We have reason to thank God that such a man was raised up in our time. …

Certain themes run all through Lewis’s books, whether expository or fictional. One is that every living being is destined for everlasting life and that every moment of life is a preparation for that condition. … But perhaps the most persistent theme in Lewis is that of man’s longing for Joy. He calls this longing “the inconsolable secret” that inhabits the soul of every man, a desire that no natural happiness can ever satisfy. It is lifelong pointer toward heaven, a nostalgia to cross empty spaces and be joined to the true reality from which we now feel cut off. …

He was a Christian of no uncertain stamp. He managed the difficult feat of successfully integrating his scholarship and his religion. If we add to these things the gifts of a lively imagination, a vigorous and witty mind, and a brilliance of language, we can discover why his books have sold widely and why his readers are steadily on the increase.

Perhaps inspired by Lewis, CT published a slate of articles on Christians and art in 1964, encouraging readers to pick up Shakespeare and the poet Heinrich Heine and to wrestle with the work of Vladimir Nabokov and Tennessee Williams. A reporter noted that Billy Graham “laced his messages with heavy doses” of writers Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Eugene O’Neill. And CT asked evangelical painter Grant Reynard to write “Christians and Art: A Painter’s View.”

Christians should be encouraged to go to art museums to study great pictures on biblical themes. … This process of attaining a measure of good taste in the Christian use of art will take time, but God will assuredly be pleased at any use of our leisure devoted to bringing inspiration, dignity, and reverence to the worship of our Saviour Jesus Christ through a better quality of art. …

Christians will do well to spend more time in raising their level of art appreciation. Art, whether that of the great masters or the humbler efforts of lesser talents, belongs to those things God has given us to enjoy. And in its truest integrity it exists for the glory of God. We need architecture that fittingly houses places of worship, music that worthily praises God the Father and brings men closer to God the Son, pictures on the walls of our homes that, while not necessarily religious, are examples of good art. We need Christian artists of dedicated talent who will extend their horizons in humility and devotion to the true praise of the Giver of talent, who is best honored by the faithful use of his good gifts.

Evangelicals looked for other ways to engage culture as well. CT reported that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Campus Crusade for Christ, and other evangelical campus ministers were sending young believers to spring break hot spots.

These groups are using what might be called guerrilla tactics to penetrate alien, and often hostile, territory. This year at Fort Lauderdale, radio antennas on cars were stacked high with beer cans; at Daytona Beach, sweatshirts bore such slogans as “Help Stamp Out Virginity.” On Balboa Island, on the West Coast, Campus Crusade hung out its sign at headquarters, while across the street someone hung out another sign bearing the legend, “Booze is the Answer.”

But the unorthodox methods have proved themselves, according to their proponents. …

At Newport Beach–Balboa Island, Campus Crusade teams of two strolled up and down the beaches with their questionnaires for a “religious opinion survey.” More than 1,000 forms were completed, and more than 400 young people accepted Christ as Saviour, according to Josh McDowell, a crusade director.

“No, we don’t convince everyone we talk to,” said McDowell, “but we give everyone a chance to hear the message.” Members talked to some 1,300 vacationers on the beaches, on the streets, and at twist parties.

CT published a special issue on Christianity in post-colonial Africa, looking at local churches and missions in the northern, western, central, eastern, and southern regions. A Canadian missionary to Canada explained the need for a “Reassessment in Africa.”

Before 1950 there were only four independent states in Africa: Ethiopia, Egypt, Liberia, and South Africa. By the end of 1964 there will be thirty-five. One-third of the U. N. General Assembly’s seats are filled today with Africans once represented by half a dozen European powers. … Africa is so vast (the United States, Europe, and India could be tucked into it with much room to spare) that inland villages continue traditional patterns of living while coastal areas are rocked by the impact of rapid change. The evolution of civilization in Europe, molded by trial and error over half a millennium, has been telescoped into a few decades in Africa. …

Some seed planted by the gospel husbandmen withered, some was bad, some took root and flourished. The depth of the roots is being tested in 1964 by the scorching heat of persecution and the violent winds of change. The majority of people remain outside the Church. … On the other hand, every leader in Africa has at some time had contact with a mission school. Dispensaries and hospitals carry on a Christian witness across the continent. Churches are well filled.

Before the year was over, violence broke out in what was then called the Republic of the Congo. CT reported that the Communist-backed rebels targeted Christians, killing Protestant and Catholic ministers.

In a show of savagery that shocked the intelligent world, bearded Congolese rebels last month turned back the clock and reverted to a barbarian age. …

The youngest American victim was Miss Phyllis Rine, 25, a teacher from Cincinnati who signed up for service in Congo in 1960, the year the country assumed independence amidst considerable turmoil. Miss Rine was then a student at Cincinnati Bible Seminary. After graduation she taught at church and public schools in the Cincinnati area. She told the mission board that “during this time I came to know and love the Negro people. I’ve been challenged by the great need for workers in the Congo.”

She went to Congo in 1962 under the African Christian Mission, a small independent board of autonomous Churches of Christ. An associate recalls that a few days before the rebels arrived Miss Rine “was all enthused about her plan to ride her bicycle into the Stanleyville suburbs and teach and preach on the street corners.”

Miss Rine was killed by machine-gun fire in a square in Stanleyville, near the monument that stands in memory of the late Patrice Lumumba, the leftist who was Congo’s first premier.

Back in the United States, President Lyndon Johnson, sworn in after Kennedy’s assassination, passed a landmark civil rights bill. CT published a roundup of commentary for and against the legislation and an editorial reflecting on Christians’ moral responsibility at this pivotal moment.

The period ahead may well be domestically the most crucial in our history since the Civil War. Complex problems of compliance and enforcement will not quickly be solved. Long-established traditions will not easily be changed. In their response to the new law, our people face a searching test of civic maturity and responsibility. If some of the provisions of the civil rights act prove incapable of enforcement, superfluous, or unconstitutional, these flaws are bound to be revealed and, it is to be hoped, corrected by democratic processes. In the meantime great restraint in demonstrations and avoidance of inflammatory actions are essential.

But what, it may be asked, can Christians do in the present situation? The answer to that question must be given with humility. Surely now is the time to speak words of healing, repentance, love, and forgiveness according to the Word of God. …

In a new and critical situation when the stability of our democracy is being tested, let Christians be what they really are—new men and women in Christ. Let them obey the God-ordained authority of their government, while manifesting love for their neighbors. And let them also proclaim the Gospel. Short of this there can be no real fulfillment of Christian responsibility.

Republicans nominated conservative Barry Goldwater to run against Johnson in the November election.

The 55-year-old Goldwater, despite a decisive first-ballot victory at the party convention in San Francisco, is one of the most controversial presidential nominees in American history.

The conservative political views of the one-time Episcopal altar boy set him at odds with many American religious leaders whose social philosophy promotes a centralization of government, which Goldwater opposes.

On the other hand, rank-and-file fundamentalists might line up behind Goldwater in appreciable numbers. … Although not a particularly regular church-goer, Senator Goldwater still is an Episcopal communicant in good standing. He has said that next to his mother the two people to whom he owed the most were [Episcopal priest William] Scarlett and Bishop Walter Mitchell. Ironically, both Scarlett and Mitchell, now retired, take sharp issue with Goldwater’s political views.

CT noted that no Protestant newspaper or magazine endorsed Goldwater and that most editors preferred Johnson—although they couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the choice.

[A] Christianity Today poll embraced the entire memberships of the Associated Church Press (173 publications) and the Evangelical Press Association (161 publications). Nearly all Protestant periodicals in the United States belong to one or the other of these organizations. …

Of those who responded (180 U. S. editors), 98 indicated a personal preference for Johnson and 60 for Goldwater, while 22 expressed no preference. … The questionnaire did not ask responders to identify themselves and asked for no comments. A number of editors, however, replied in terms of a “sterile choice,” “the lesser of two evils,” and so forth.

That the decision was difficult for some editors was reflected in such ambivalent statements as … “I personally do not favor Goldwater but plan to vote for him.”

“When it comes to the Democrats, I’m not happy about the party, and when it comes to the Republicans I’m not happy about the man,” wrote another editor. He had circled President Johnson’s name.

Goldwater won majorities in his home state of Arizona and five Southern states where Johnson’s support for civil rights was wildly unpopular. The Democratic candidate won everywhere else, taking 486 of the 538 electoral college votes. CT called it a “thumping victory.” The magazine also reported that evangelicals hoping to influence Johnson’s administration should look to “59-year-old Dr. Clyde W. Taylor,” who was “the closest thing to an evangelical lobby in Washington.”

Taylor’s dedication and multi-faceted Christian service have earned him the respect of many as God’s handyman in Washington. His coming in 1944 gave [the National Association of Evangelicals] the distinction of being the first Protestant interdenominational organization to open an office in the capital city. Since then the operation has performed a myriad of services for U. S. evangelicals ranging from visa aid to tax counsel and chaplain placement.

Taylor seldom fraternizes with Washington’s elite, but he holds the confidence of a host of knowledgeable contacts in echelons where most decisions are made. … He seizes every opportunity to brief the rank and file on the status of evangelical advance. In the heat of delivery he is sometimes given to overstatement, but those who know him best say it is almost inevitable in one who is such a vivid thinker. His latest thoughts are on NAE’s future: “We plan to re-examine our whole purpose and policy to see how we can have a more dynamic testimony in society.”

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

The Debate over Government Overreach Started in 1776

Harvest Prude

Three books to read this month on politics and public life.

Illustration by Christianity Today

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

The Pursuit of Liberty, How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America, Jeffrey Rosen (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

In his latest book, Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center, wastes no time plunging readers into an American history primer. From page 1, he zeroes in on the central disagreement of two Founding Fathers which, he holds, still animates our current national debate about liberty and governmental power.

Always fearful of tyrants and demagogues, Thomas Jefferson supported crafting a small and weak federal government to keep states’ rights and individual liberties robust. Fearful of mob rule, Alexander Hamilton saw the advantages of a strong central government helmed by a powerful executive.

The tension between the two views has often, though not always, “kept American politics from descending into violence,” Rosen writes.

The debate between the two is a familiar one all the way back to classrooms, but Rosen’s offering focuses on tracing the “competing threads” of Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s ideas from the nucleus of America to present-day politics. He notes how both views have found champions throughout the “tapestry” of American history, from the Civil War to the New Deal, and continue to find expression in modern debates around the administrative state and the size of government.

His thesis—that the founders’ debate explains “nearly everything” about American political history—runs the risk of oversimplification, but history nerds and political junkies alike will find much to enjoy in Rosen’s history tour.

Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution, Amy Coney Barrett (Penguin Random House, 2025)

Even for folks who are not constitutional law nerds, Listening to the Law provides a fascinating glimpse into the life of one of the most powerful women in America. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book is part autobiography, part civics primer on the inner workings of the high court, and part constitutional treatise.

The personal details she includes about her family, school-age children, and life before her appointment are sparse yet humanizing. Occasionally, her anecdotes are humorous, such as the time she snuck out of Mass through a side door and scaled a fence in high heels to avoid camera crews.

Coney Barrett also explains how the Supreme Court works—why and how the justices accept or reject certain cases, how she personally prepares for oral arguments, and how she and her colleagues jockey each other into siding with their interpretation of the right ruling.

A devout Catholic, she defends the ability of people of faith to faithfully follow the law rather than their own moral views.

“Whatever the source of the conviction, it cannot affect the outcome of the case,” she argues, after discussing a case where she voted in favor of upholding the death penalty despite her own moral repugnance to capital punishment.

While there are plenty of high-profile cases relating to the current administration that she doesn’t address, she does discuss the most controversial ruling the Supreme Court has made in recent years, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. As she had not written a separate concurrence with the decision overturning the national right to abortion, her argument (no spoilers!) is worth perusing.

Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, Patrick Ruffini (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

In the wake of the last presidential election, Patrick Ruffini received renewed attention for writing the book that “predicted the 2024 election.” It was well-deserved. Many of Ruffini’s insights in his 2023 book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, hold up, even on a revisit two years later.

Ruffini, a Republican pollster and cofounder of the polling firm Echelon Insights, draws from a deep well of experience in mapping the sentiments of American voters to explain the gains Republicans made among racial and ethnic minorities.

Partisan affinity is increasingly determined by whether a voter has a college diploma, he argues, rather than race, ethnicity, or income. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris dominated among voters with a college degree in the last election, winning them by 16 percentage points. But only 40 percent of all voters have a college degree, and Donald Trump captured voters without one by a double-digit margin at 14 percentage points.

This multiracial working-class coalition is particularly sympathetic, Ruffini holds, to a party focused on kitchen table issues over cultural issues vis-a-vis race and gender. Ruffini notes historic GOP gains among Hispanic voters and other immigrant communities. The 2024 election continued that trend, as Trump captured nearly half of Hispanic voters and made gains among immigrants, Asian voters and Black men.

It’s still an open question, especially in the wake of the recent midterm election, whether the right will be able to make convincing economic arguments, steer clear of culture war dumpster fires, and hold onto those gains. But Ruffini’s core argument—that demography is decidedly not destiny—should keep both parties vigilant.

Harvest Prude is national political correspondent for Christianity Today.

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Church Life

The Chinese Christian Behind 2,000 Hymns

X. Yang

Lü Xiaomin never received formal music training. But her worship songs have made her a household name in China’s churches.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Lu Xiaomin‌, WikiMedia Commons

At 5 a.m. every day, Lü Xiaomin kneels on the floor in a dimly lit room of an apartment in northern China. She sings a hymn aloud, reads a passage of Scripture, and prays to God. Sometimes, she meets other believers online or in person to read God’s Word together. After breakfast and a short walk, her schedule fills with ministry work, like sharing her life testimony with people or preparing Bible studies.

Lü’s lifestyle embodies the signature worship song she composed in the early 1990s, “Five O’clock in the Morning in China.” In a lilting melody, the song declares,

At five o’clock in the morning in China,
You hear the sound of people praying.
Prayers bring revival and peace.
It brings unity and victory …
Soaring over lakes and mountains,
Melting the coldest of hearts.

Lü’s vocation as a hymn writer might seem surprising, as she never received any formal music training and learned how to write Chinese characters from a dictionary while shepherding sheep in a field. But her songs have made her a household name—“Sister Xiaomin”—among Chinese Christians worldwide.

“I don’t really understand music theory, but I know the Spirit gives the song, and I just write it down when I receive it,” Lü said. “I am a grassroot, a grassroot filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Lü was born in 1970 to a non-Christian Hui-minority family in Fangcheng, a county in northern China. Her parents planned to give her away to another family when she was 10 days old, but a big flood occurred on the day this was going to happen. “It was God’s blessing to our family,” her mother said in the 2000 documentary The Cross: Jesus in China.

In junior high, Lü had a chronic sinus infection and constantly felt dizzy and nauseous. She decided to drop out of school and began working as a farmer. As she grappled with her poor health, her aunt encouraged her to come to church and told her that God would heal her.

“Often, I sat down and looked at the sky, the birds, the flowers, the trees, the grass, and the fields,” Lü said in the documentary. “In my heart, I knew all these were the works of a creator, but I didn’t know who he was and what his name was.”

After the conversation with her aunt, Lü realized that God was the creator she had been searching for. She rushed to her aunt’s home, interrupted her dinner, and asked her to bring her to church immediately. The 19-year-old accepted Christ that very night.

The following year, Lü joined the Fangcheng Fellowship—one of the largest house church networks in China—and became a lay evangelist. One night, after encountering the Holy Spirit during a rural house church revival meeting, she felt restless and could not sleep. Suddenly, the melody and lyrics of a song came to her in the middle of the night, and she burst into spontaneous worship.

This tune became the first hymn she wrote: “Bring Your Joy,” which exhorts believers to lay down their burdens and live out the gospel together. This song also sparked the stirrings of a movement known as Canaan Hymns: a collection of more than 2,200 songs with catchy, colloquial lyrics set to emotionally stirring melodies in the style of a Chinese folk song.

Lü’s initial hymn-writing endeavors were born out of the revival of Christianity in China between 1989 and 1998. This was a golden period where the faith spread outward from rural areas as believers shared a fervent commitment to telling people about the gospel, even amid suffering.

Hundreds of believers from around the country would travel to Lü’s town to worship together in the small house and courtyard of a host family. These meetings were often vibrant, overflowing with the power of the Holy Spirit, Lü recalled.

When the meetings ended, believers would take home recordings of Lü’s hymns on cassette tapes to share them with their communities. Itinerant preachers also brought her songs to other parts of China, like Yunnan and Xinjiang. Many of these preachers had little or no financial support. Whenever they met each other, they would often sing the hymn “Lord, May You Hold Our Hands” with tears streaming down their faces as they petitioned God loudly for strength and tenacity.

In the early aughts, Lü’s hymns moved from lyrics that pleaded for divine intervention and mercy to ones that professed God’s unconditional love as the church grew into maturity. For instance, the song “There Really Is a God Who Loves You” affirms that God bestows breath on us and forgives us each day. In 2002, Chinese Canadian composer An-lun Huang created formal musical scores for these hymns, helping them to gain wider recognition in churches across China and the Chinese diaspora.

From 2009, Chinese churches gradually shifted from rural house churches to more urban dwellings. Lü recognized widening divisions in believers’ demographic profiles and denominations. Her conviction to compose hymns to unite people with a common vision of their mission grew.

During this time, the Chinese church rekindled the Back to Jerusalem movement, encouraging believers to share the Good News from the east to the west as a means of fulfilling the Great Commission. Lü’s hymn “Mission of China: Preach the Gospel” captured this sentiment well: “The wheels roll, the road is long, and the Chinese church must preach the gospel. … The Holy [Spirit’s] flame has been passed down to this day, miraculously guided by the Lord.”

As Lü’s fame spread, she experienced many trials and was often the subject of nasty rumors. Once, she heard gossip that her son had a foreign father because of her trips for overseas ministry. Other times, she faced pressure to curb her efforts to share the Christian faith. Some people she shared her faith with, however, ended up watching The Cross documentary about her life and unexpectedly decided to pray to God.

Lü also came to realize she had often overwhelmed her husband with her expectations of ministry life by pressuring him to read Scripture, pray, and attend gatherings. Yet he faithfully supported her ministry and did everything with patience and dedication. She resolved to embrace gratitude and humility and view life and service from the Lord’s perspective.

Some believers find Lü’s hymns too China-centric. The lyrics of one hymn say, “China, facing the baptism of life and death / You must be in awe. Only then will China be most beautiful.” Another hymn declares God’s power and sovereignty over the entire country.

Lü is dismissive of this criticism. “China carries a double debt—not only to Jesus but also to the missionaries who once shed their blood on Chinese soil,” she said. “Why did God love China so much as to send so many missionaries here?”

Other believers feel that Lü’s hymns sound too old-fashioned. But Lü reckons that hymn writing is not about honing an artistic product to perfection in a bid to please listeners. Instead, the hymns she writes should be a channel of confession, intercession, evangelism, and mission in and through the church.

“When songs become too polished, they lose their earthiness and originality, and brothers and sisters struggle to follow [the lyrics],” she said.

Wu, a pastor in his 40s from the eastern part of China, grew up listening to Canaan Hymns. He continues to cling to these songs, as they remind him to have steadfast faith in God. The first 200 hymns Lü composed are especially moving to him, and the congregations he planted regularly sing these songs in their gatherings.

Some younger Chinese believers are committed to making Lü’s hymns sound more contemporary. In July, Christian worship group Deep Spring Band released a music video featuring Lü’s hymn “We Are Dear Brothers.” The group performed the song while beating large drums on the banks of the Yellow River, singing, “We are brothers, forever inseparable, / One Lord, one faith, one baptism, sealed with the Holy Spirit.”

Two years ago, the band recorded a music video for another of Lü’s songs, “Blessings to You, the Campus in my Heart,” which described God pouring out his love over schools in the country.

“We love Canaan Hymns because they touch our souls deeply, regardless of age,” said Yao, one of the band members. “We want [her songs] to reach out to the young generation of the digital age with this music video, as many are lost in isolation and depression.”

Lü’s hymns continue to be popular in Chinese diasporic churches in the US and elsewhere. Congregants at a Chinese church in Australia frequently sing these songs as they resonate with the lived experiences of their brothers and sisters in Christ from Mainland China, said Tin, their 60-year-old lead pastor.

In the last five years, Lü’s hymns have adopted a more prophetic tone, often urging believers to live with a sense of eschatological urgency amid worldwide crises. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across China, she wrote “Wuhan, Wuhan, You Are Not Alone” to encourage people in the city to persevere. Another song, “You Are the Ark in the Great Flood,” proclaims God as a refuge in disaster, a beacon of light, and a home for prodigals.

More than three decades after she penned her first song, Lü continues to get up at 5 a.m. daily to pray, read the Bible, and write hymns for the Chinese church. Her greatest longing is to lead people to know Jesus more intimately.

“I must keep learning—Scripture, worship, service—not to please anyone but to obey the Spirit’s prompting,” she said.

- More from X. Yang

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