Young Evangelicals Eager for Revival in Europe

“There is a fire among us.”

Stefano Guidi/Getty Images

Doing her best Billy Graham impersonation—hand raised, mouth open as if in mid-proclamation of the gospel—a 20-something woman posed at an Instagram-ready podium tucked away in a side vestibule at the European Congress on Evangelism. Her friend snapped photos that made it look as if she were addressing the massive crowd at one of Graham’s historic meetings.

But Ophélie Prisca-Diane, who is currently serving with Youth With A Mission in Paris, told Christianity Today she doesn’t think evangelism is just a thing of the past. In fact, she sees it as a thing of the future. She expects Christians her age to do big, big things.

“There is a fire among us,” Prisca-Diane said. “Our generation is very open to the gospel, more than generations before.”

She wasn’t the only one at the gathering of evangelical leaders with great expectations for Gen Z, the group of people currently between the ages of 13 and 28. Amid talk of secularization and potential persecution, Christian leaders repeatedly expressed confidence that young people would usher in the re-Christianization of the continent.

Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said equipping young people was one of the prime motivations for the congress. He said he and others have been encouraged to see people in their teens and 20s “taking hold of the gospel” and he hopes the congress will empower them to go further.

“There is a younger generation,” Graham said at the opening of the congress, “taking the challenge of preaching to the continent and the ends of the earth.”

Some data suggests a generational renewal of Christian faith has already begun. A recent report from the Bible Society shows that young people, particularly men, are attending church in increasing numbers in England and Wales. And a 2023 survey from Ipsos indicated growing interest in prayer and church attendance among Gen Z in Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Hungary.

But while there may be a relative uptick of religious interest, that doesn’t really change the overall picture of demographic decline. Roughly one in ten young people in Europe appear to attend church on a weekly basis—a stark contrast to older generations. There has been a steady, if not strictly linear, decline in religious practice for decades.

Today, significant numbers of Europeans between the ages of 16 and 29 are not affiliated with any religion: 90 percent in the Czech Republic, 75 percent in Sweden, 70 percent in the UK, and 64 percent in France.

In Estonia, so few people attend Sunday school that the number is less than the margin of error, according to Estonian theologian Gunnar Mägi, who now serves as president of Tyndale Theological Seminary in the Netherlands.

Nonetheless, Mägi, like other evangelicals in Europe, is hopeful.

“Europe is not post-Christian,” he told CT. “It is pre-revival.”

This isn’t just “evidence of things not seen” either (Heb. 11:1, KJV). The Tyndale president said he can’t help but be encouraged when he looks at young people across the continent and observes “worship and hunger like I’ve never seen before.”

Three of those young people were witnessing on the streets of Berlin during the evangelism congress. Inga Morozov, Stefan Carl Seppel, and Markus Martin, all from Estonia, say they have a heart for evangelism and an eagerness to tell people about Jesus. They took breaks from the congress to head out to Potsdamer Platz, stand in front of the famous Brandenburg Gate, and ask people if they have a personal relationship with Jesus or whether they know God’s love.

Martin, who hails from an island in the Baltic Sea, said he grew up in a Christian household but didn’t start evangelizing until a couple years ago. He attended a Christ for all Nations FireCamp in 2023 and learned how to share his faith. He came back inspired.

“I really felt, well, on fire afterward,” he said. “I sensed the potential for a revival in my generation, a movement of the Holy Spirit.”

He feels the Holy Spirit leading him personally, too, and he steps out in faith. He told CT he had a dream of a young boy and his family and it felt to him that the dream was from God. Then he saw the boy and family from his dream near the Brandenburg Gate.

“We shared the gospel with them,” he said. Though nothing came of the interaction, Martin was undeterred in his enthusiasm to share Jesus with as many people as possible in Berlin and back home.

In some ways, the Estonians looked like other young tourists in the cosmopolitan German capital. Seppel said the three of them enjoyed zooming around on rented scooters. But they also stopped the scooters to ask people if they wanted to be prayed for.

That enthusiasm for sharing their faith is exciting for older leaders at the congress. But as experienced evangelists they know that early eagerness can fade and missionary zeal can wane. Graham said channeling that fervor and fostering a long-term commitment to evangelism begins with training and teaching young people the Bible.

“There’s so much confusion,” Graham said. “Young people don’t know the Word of God. We need to take the headlines they’re reading on the iPhone and see what the Bible has to say about the issue and teach them the Word of God.”

Evangelical perspectives on sexuality may prove to be a stumbling block for many young people in Europe. Surveys show wide acceptance of homosexuality and support for same-sex marriage, as well as transgender rights. In Ireland, for example, three-quarters of adults express support for transgender sexual identities. In Norway, support increased 15 percentage points in 10 years. In Switzerland, a majority now favor allowing nonbinary gender identities on national identifications, and in Serbia, 64 percent want people to have access to medical procedures altering sexual characteristics.

Graham challenged the European evangelists gathered in Berlin to address sexual ethics and not to shy away from cultural conflicts. He believes young people in particular will respond. Youth rise to a provocation, Graham said. So provoke them.

Pastor and evangelist Greg Laurie echoed this argument. He said at the congress that he believes in confidently confronting young people with Christian beliefs and calling them to surrender their lives to Jesus.

Speaking at the European congress, Laurie recounted his own encounter with a challenging young evangelist named Lonnie Frisbee in 1970. The story was turned into the movie Jesus Revolution a few years ago, showing how Frisbee became a powerful witness for Christ and helped Laurie as a young man find his way to faith.

Frisbee’s sexual identity and ethics have been the subject of ongoing controversy since his death in 1993, and Laurie has been clear about his own position, saying he believes homosexuality “is outside of God’s order, and no amount of emotional arguments or political spin can change that precept of Scripture.”

Laurie didn’t get into the messy details of Frisbee’s life but referred to the “wayward youth” of the Jesus movement and spoke about how he was a passionate evangelist. He urged young people today to do the same and said he senses another Jesus movement coming in Europe.

“We’re going to evangelize, or we’re going to fossilize,” he said. “Preach more on the Cross and the blood of Christ, because that’s where the power is.”

Mägi told CT that events like the congress stir up waves of evangelism across the continent. Young people attend the gathering or camps put on by Christ for all Nations—or spend a year with Youth With A Mission—and then go back to places like Estonia, ready to stir up a revival in Europe.

It’s a biblical model, he said. Mägi points to the early church: “Who were the workers in Acts? They were new, fresh, young believers who were quickly trained.”

There are moments in history, the seminary president said, when God opens a door. Sometimes older Christians don’t recognize the opportunity in front of them, but young believers do.

“It’s possible to miss the moment,” he said. “These young people won’t let that happen.”

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Died: Jennifer Lyell, SBC Abuse Survivor and Former Lifeway Executive

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Once one of the highest-ranking women at a Southern Baptist entity, she fought public perception and legal fallout after reporting alleged abuse by a seminary professor.

Jennifer Lyell

B&H Publishing / Edits by Christianity Today

Jennifer Lyell, an editor and author whose promising career in Christian publishing was derailed when she accused a former Southern Baptist leader of abuse, died Saturday. She was 47.

“Jennifer passed gently into the arms of her Redeemer, surrounded by loved ones,” said her friend Rachael Denhollander, who said Lyell had suffered “a series of massive strokes, leading to her becoming unconscious sometime Monday afternoon. She was found Thursday evening after missing a medical appointment.”

For much of her adult life, Lyell had been a Southern Baptist success story. She came to faith at 20 at a Billy Graham crusade, went to seminary, dreamed of becoming a missionary, taught the Bible to young women and children and became a vice president at Lifeway, the Southern Baptist Convention’s publishing arm. There she worked on about a dozen New York Times bestsellers, according to a biography from her time at Lifeway.

By 2019, she was one of the highest-ranking women leaders in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Lyell had gone into publishing reluctantly, after her desire to be a missionary went unfulfilled.

“Eventually, I’m always convicted of the reality that my life is not my own. It was bought at an incomprehensible price,” she said in a 2009 profile published by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Lyell had earned a master of divinity degree.

While at seminary in 2004, the 26-year-old Lyell met David Sills, a professor in his late 40s who became her mentor and a surrogate father figure, welcoming her into his family. Sills was also president of Reaching & Teaching International Ministries, a missionary nonprofit.

In 2018, Lyell told her bosses that Sills had allegedly used force and his spiritual influence to coerce her into nonconsensual sexual acts over the course of 12 years. Sills admitted to misconduct and resigned from his seminary post and as president of the nonprofit, but no details were made public.

But when Sills found a new job with another Christian ministry the next year, Lyell went public with her allegations of abuse, telling her story to Baptist Press, an SBC news outlet. Rather than portraying her claims as abuse, the Baptist Press article said Lyell had had “a morally inappropriate relationship” with a seminary professor. That story was later retracted and Baptist Press apologized.

But the damage was done. Lyell was labeled a temptress and adulteress who led a Christian leader astray. She was showered with hate, with pastors and churches calling for her to be fired. A prominent activist journalist published an account alleging that Lyell had been less than truthful and arguing that Sills had been denied a chance to return to ministry. Lyell eventually left her job at Lifeway amid the turmoil.

“We are saddened to hear the news of the passing of Jennifer Lyell. Lifeway sends our prayers and deepest sympathies to Jennifer’s family and friends,” Lifeway spokesperson Carol Pipes said on Sunday in a statement.

“It takes years and years to recover from trauma, and no one should be in the position of having to explain it to the whole public while they’re still trying to do that,” she told Religion News Service in a 2021 interview, in which she said she regretted coming forward.

Controversy over the Baptist Press story, as well as other accusations that SBC leaders had mishandled abuse cases, led the denomination to order a major investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee’s handling of abuse. A 2022 report published by the investigative firm Guidepost Solutions found that SBC leaders had mistreated survivors and long sought to downplay the problem of abuse in the denomination, leading to a series of reforms.

The report, however, led to more trouble for Lyell. Sills sued the SBC and its leaders after the Guidepost report appeared, saying they had conspired to make him a scapegoat and that he was “repentant and obedient.” He also sued Lyell.

Lyell never backed down from her account. Earlier this year, in a deposition, she detailed the alleged abuse and how the Bible had been used to silence her for years.

“I do not need to be under oath to tell the truth—and there are no lies that will shake my certainty of what is true,” she said in a social media post when the suit was filed.

Lyell had rebuilt her life after leaving Christian publishing, attending law school and finding a new career. But like many adult women who accuse male spiritual leaders of abuse, she continued to be viewed with suspicion. Her death comes as reforms in the SBC protocols on abuse have slowed and one of the major planned reforms, a database to track abusive leaders, appears to be stalled permanently.

Still, Lyell never relented, said fellow survivor Tiffany Thigpen. “She inspired me. She encouraged me. She made me feel better about myself than I thought I deserved. And when I tried to deflect her words, she’d stop me and say, ‘No, stop. I need you to hear me,’” Thigpen said in an email.

Devastated & heartbroken as we grieve the loss of a faithful friend to so many, @Jenlyell. And yet grateful her faith is now sight and she is with the Father who never failed her. I wish all could know the hilarious, blunt, and loyal friend I did. She’s finally free and at peace. pic.twitter.com/j0e5vtdcij
— Megan Nichols Lively (@megannlively) June 8, 2025

Megan Lively, another abuse survivor, said her friend was “much more than the awful things that happened to her.” In a text to RNS, Lively noted that Lyell, who loved the music of Rich Mullins and the West Wing television show, was a Sunday school teacher and author of The Promises of God Storybook Bible for kids.

“She was one of the smartest and generous people I will know. She loved her Savior and is now at peace,” Lively said in a text.

Lyell is the second prominent SBC abuse survivor to die in recent months. In May, Gareld Duane Rollins, whose allegations of abuse against Texas judge and Southern Baptist leader Paul Pressler helped spark a major reckoning with abuse in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, died after years of illness.

Lyell remained a person of deep faith. A quote from the C. S. Lewis book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe adorns a pair of paving stones in her front lawn. The quote explains how Aslan the lion, a Jesus-like figure in the book, had come back to life—in a story that parallels Easter.

“When a willing victim, who has committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead … the Table would crack and death itself would start working backwards.”

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In Brazil, Evangelicals Rise to Record Levels, But Growth Is Slowing

Franco Iacomini

For the first time, 1 in 4 people in the country are Protestants, but the prediction of outnumbering Catholics by 2032 is unlikely to materialize.

A woman walks before Sunday services at an evangelical church located in a partially deforested section of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

Mario Tama / Getty

For the first time in Brazil’s history, evangelical Christians now account for more than a quarter of the population, according to new census figures released Friday.

In the 2022 data, published by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), evangelicals numbered 47.4 million people, or 26.9 percent of Brazilians aged 10 and over, up from 21.6 percent in 2010.

The evangelical figures include Pentecostals as well as all other Protestant groups; a denominational breakdown is expected in the coming months.

Meanwhile, the share of Brazil’s historically dominant Catholic population fell from 65.1 percent to 56.7 percent. Those who identified as having no religion increased from 7.9 percent to 9.3 percent. In two states, evangelicals outnumbered Catholics for the first time.

The momentum of evangelicals’ growth, however, is slowing. Between 2000 and 2010, the total number of evangelicals in Brazil rose from 26.2 million to 42.3 million, an increase of more than 16 million people. From 2010 to 2022, the increase was just over 5 million people.

Demographer José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a retired professor from the National School of Statistical Sciences, said the data doesn’t change trends but delays the moment when the number of evangelicals is expected to surpass the number of Catholics in the country.

In 2020, Alves published academic articles arguing that, based on trends shown in previous censuses, this overtaking could occur in 2032. “In that hypothesis, I was working with a trend of accelerated growth of evangelical churches and a sharp decline in the number of Catholics,” he said. Instead of accelerating, however, Protestantism grew at a slower pace.

As a result, the religious transition “will probably occur in the 2040s or even in the 2050s,” Alves said. In a revised version of his article, he puts 2049 as the possible date.

This deceleration was expected. Anthropologist Livan Chiroma, coordinator of Aliança LAB, the research and missional intelligence department of the Brazilian Evangelical Alliance, detected a cooling trend starting in 2018. By tracking data on evangelicals in public opinion polls, Aliança LAB found that polling institutes stopped betting on continuous growth during this period.

This timing coincides with the presidential election won by Jair Bolsonaro with heavy support from evangelical leaders. “Many believers seek a spiritual space in churches, not a political one,” Alves said. “When religious leaders adopt radical partisan positions, some members feel uncomfortable and even betrayed.”

As evangelical growth slowed, the proportion of people classified as religiously unaffiliated increased—up from 14.6 million in 2010 to 16.4 million in 2022. The nones—including atheists, agnostics, and those who declare no religious identity—account for 9.3 percent of Brazilians, the highest proportion in history.

The census also confirms the profile and the geography of Brazilian evangelicalism, which is predominantly female. Women make up 55.4 percent and men 44.6 percent—in the Brazilian population overall, 51.8 percent are women and 48.2 percent are men.

In general, evangelicals are less white than the national average—38 percent, compared to 44.3 percent—and more Black (12 percent, compared to 10.7 percent of Brazilians overall). Of the Indigenous population (only 1.4 million people), 32.2 percent identify as evangelical.

In another unprecedented shift, evangelicals outnumbered Catholics in two of Brazil’s 27 administrative regions: Acre and Rondônia, both located in the country’s northern Amazon region. In Acre, evangelicals made up 44.4 percent of the population, compared to 38.9 percent Catholics. In Rondônia, the numbers were closer—41.1 percent evangelical and 40.9 percent Catholic.

The growth of evangelical Christianity in the Amazon is a well-documented trend. As early as the 1991 census, when evangelicals made up just 9 percent of the national population, they already surpassed 20 percent in Rondônia. While missionary efforts in the region remain strong, scholars argue that demographic factors play a more decisive role in this expansion.

“We need to see the Amazon in less exotic terms,” said Chiroma. “Missiology tends to view the region through a lens of exoticism—river communities, Amerindians, the ‘noble savage,’ as sociologists put it. But while these groups are present, what’s often overlooked is the growing urbanization of the region, which is where much of this growth is happening.”

One example is Igreja Batista Bíblica Emanuel, a conservative Baptist congregation in the eastern outskirts of Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia. When the church was founded in 2000, the area was sparsely populated and mostly rural. Since then, Porto Velho’s population has grown by 38 percent, reaching 460,000. Rural plots have given way to makeshift housing and, later, to large-scale public housing developments, bringing with them the same urban challenges faced by other major cities.

Pastor Antônio de Souza, who leads the church, spoke to CT over the phone while police helicopters circled overhead, searching for suspects in the neighborhood’s dirt alleys. The previous Sunday, someone was shot on the empty lot next to the church. “There’s been an urban explosion in Porto Velho, with all the problems that brings,” he said.

In the midst of a population lacking security and care, churches fill a void. “We can evangelize in places where most people can’t even enter,” said Souza.

The country’s most populous region, the Southeast, is also the most religiously diverse. Catholics make up 52.2 percent, evangelicals 28 percent, the religiously unaffiliated 11 percent, and spiritists 2.7 percent.

In the South, 62.4 percent are Catholic, and 23.7 percent are evangelical. In 14 municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul state, though, the number of Catholics exceeds 95 percent. These are mostly small cities with a significant number of Italian and Polish immigrants who are Catholic.

In the Center-West—where the Brazilian capital, Brasília, is located—52.6 percent of residents are Catholic, and 31.4 percent are evangelical.

Brazil’s Northeast is the main stronghold of Catholicism and, consequently, the country’s least evangelical region. In the nine Northeastern states, 63.9 percent of the population identifies as Catholic and 22.5 percent as evangelical.

Piauí state has the lowest proportion of evangelicals at 15.6 percent. The percentage of Catholics is 77.4 percent, the highest in the country.

The lowest percentage of Catholics is in Roraima, in the country’s far north, at 37.9 percent. In that state, 34.3 percent are evangelical, and 16.9 percent are religiously unaffiliated—the highest number in the country.

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Evangelical Consultant Johnnie Moore Appointed to Lead Gaza Aid Effort

Yonat Shimron - Religion News Service

The former religious freedom commissioner and Trump faith adviser steps in after the first weeks of food distributions.

Johnnie Moore

Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post via Getty Images

American evangelicals, driven by a biblical vision to protect Israel, have long been integral to US. diplomacy in the Holy Land. And now they have another player on the team.

Johnnie Moore, the evangelical public relations executive with deep ties in the Middle East, was appointed chairman of the embattled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Tuesday.

The Trump administration appointed Mike Huckabee, another prominent evangelical, and a former Southern Baptist pastor who has described himself as a Christian Zionist, as the ambassador to Israel earlier this year.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, created within the past year, is a private group, formed with Israel’s blessing after it sought to circumvent the aid relief previously provided by the United Nations. Israel has long accused the UN of anti-Israeli bias and has alleged that aid from the UN ultimately falls into the hands of Hamas, the militant group.

From March to May, Israel had blocked all food and aid from entering Gaza, a move it said was aimed at pressuring Hamas. When Israel lifted the food blockade in mid-May, chaos ensued at the distribution points, with Israelis opening fire on dozens of Palestinians as they approached the GHF hubs.

Moore, like Huckabee, denied the shootings took place and blamed the media for false reporting.

In a Fox News op-ed published Tuesday, Moore wrote, “Over 7 million meals were delivered free to Gazans—no trucks seized, no aid diverted, no violence at distribution sites.”

The Red Cross and the UN human rights office said 27 people were killed on Tuesday. The Israeli army later acknowledged that it opened fire, though it has not said how many were killed.

Moore, 41, stepped into the role of chairman of the GHF after its previous head, Jake Wood, resigned hours before the initiative was set to begin late last month.

Wood cited concerns over the GHF’s ability to adhere to the “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.”

Moore was co-chairman of Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board during Trump’s first campaign for president in 2016. The following year, Moore and other evangelicals pressed Trump to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. Trump later appointed Moore to serve as a commissioner on the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom.

Moore is part of a much larger group of white evangelicals that forms the backbone of US support for Israel. These evangelicals believe there is an eternal bond between God and the Jewish people and that Christians should support the biblical covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants. Their vision for the state is rooted in the belief that God promised the land of Israel to the Jews in eternity.

Moore’s pro-Israel views have landed him roles on several boards or task forces of Jewish-led organizations. Those include the Anti-Defamation League and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, one of Israel’s largest philanthropic organizations. He is the 2017 recipient of the Medal of Valor from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Moore started out as a spokesman for Liberty University, the school where he also earned a PhD in public policy. He later founded a public relations group, Kairos, which was acquired in 2022 by JDA Worldwide.

During the National Religious Broadcasters convention two years ago, Moore talked on a podcast about his “zealous advocacy” for Israel, saying, “I started going to Israel and going to Israel again and again and again. I found so much of my faith come alive through that experience. … Israel has impacted me far, far more than almost anything else. I almost can’t think of my life as inseparable from Israel in some ways.”

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Died: Walter Brueggemann, Scholar of Prophetic Imagination

Yonat Shimron - Religion News Service

The Old Testament professor was widely taught in seminaries and influenced many mainline and evangelical ministers.

Westminster John Knox Press / edits by Christianity Today

Walter Brueggemann, one of the most widely respected Bible scholars of the past century, died on June 5 at his home in Michigan. He was 92.

The author of more than 100 books of theology and biblical criticism, Brueggemann was professor emeritus of Old Testament studies at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, until his retirement in 2003.

His specialty was the Hebrew Bible and especially the Hebrew prophets, and his books were aimed primarily at clergy and church leaders. But through sermons, Brueggemann’s concepts, have become familiar to many churchgoers.

Though ordained, Brueggemann never served as a pastor of his own church. He was, however, a much sought after and eloquent preacher and lecturer.

“He had incredible way to discern what was happening in the world and the church and to speak into that with a much needed word,” said Conrad L. Kanagy, professor emeritus at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, who wrote a biography of Brueggemann and edited some of his books.

Brueggemann’s books were broadly influential, especially in mainline Protestant circles, but his work impacted many evangelicals as well. His 1978 The Prophetic Imagination sold more than a million copies and remains a classic that is still frequently assigned in seminaries. In the book, he showed how the biblical prophets, called to imagine a different world, disrupted politics and the dominant culture and its assumptions.

“It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one,” he wrote.

Brueggemann himself was critical of American consumerism, militarism and nationalism.

“Walter Brueggemann is one of the world’s great teachers about the prophets,” said On Being podcast host Krista Tippett. “He translates their imagination from the chaos of ancient times to our own. He somehow also embodies this tradition’s fearless truth-telling together with fierce hope—and how it conveys ideas with disarming language.”

As news of his death spread online, several evangelical professors spoke of his influence on them.

“His Theology of the Old Testament reframed how I approached the Bible when I was a 23 year old seminary student. His other works continued to challenge me,” Steve Benzer, professor of pastoral ministry and theology at George W. Truett Seminary at Baylor University, said on social media.

Kaz Hayashi, professor of Old Testament at Bethel Seminary in Minnesota called Bruggemann “a great blessing for me and for the church.”

Breuggemann was text-focused but resisted the dominant modes of biblical interpretation because they put distance between the reader and the text. He sought to help pastors hear God’s voice within the biblical text.

Brueggemann was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1933. His father, a pastor in the German Evangelical Synod of North America, ordained him. He and his brother, Ed, grew up in Blackburn, Missouri.

As a teenager, Brueggemann and his brother visited a Black church on the edge of town. It later influenced his commitment to social justice.

His academic journey began at Elmhurst College (now university), in Elmhurst, Illinois. He went on to study at Eden Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary. He received a Ph.D. in education from St. Louis University, while teaching at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. He left Eden for Columbia Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school, in 1986.

Brueggemann, however, remained an active minister in the United Church of Christ. He was a frequent speaker at its conferences as well as a mentor to countless church leaders.

He is survived by his wife, Tia, and by his sons James and John and their families.

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Facing a Precarious Future in Hong Kong

Peter Maize

While Beijing has not yet clamped down on religion in the city, three churches are preparing.

Island Evangelical Community Church (IECC)

Courtesy of IECC

It’s 7:30 p.m. on a Saturday night, and Marian is waiting with her friends for the evening service to begin at Flow Church in Tsim Sha Tsui. She talks animatedly about how she felt after Beijing imposed a strict national security law in 2020 that silenced critics, decimated press freedom, and curtailed civic action in Hong Kong. At the time, Marian was filled with questions about how Christians should respond, “but my former church couldn’t answer my questions,” she said. CT agreed not to use her real name, as criticism of the government is sensitive in Hong Kong.

She started looking for a church that was discussing these issues. Later that year, she heard several sermons by John Chan, the founding pastor of Flow Church, on Romans 12, where Paul urges his readers not to “conform to the pattern of this world.” Chan didn’t shy away from discussing Hong Kong’s political situation but urged Hong Kongers to focus on integrating Christ into their lives without being overly concerned about worldly politics.

“People have questions about how to be a Christian in today’s situation,” Marian says. “Flow had practical answers.”

Marian joined a cell group of a dozen people who quickly became her friends. They meet twice a month and talk about their lives and challenges.

The Cantonese-speaking Flow Church began in 2018, the year before pro-democracy protests rocked Hong Kong, leading the government to clamp down on the former British colony. Chan’s original goal was to establish a church unburdened by traditions or denominational constraints, one that would attract the large contingent of young people, like Marian, who no longer felt a connection with the churches they grew up in.

“I felt God called me to establish a church for these people, one that was relevant to their lives,” Chan said. “They needed something new.” Flow Church has no office, no elders, no permanent home, an ethos summed up in its name. Their worship team sets up each week in a hall owned by another church and packs everything up after the service is over.

This type of flexibility explains how Chan and Flow Church plan to take on the religious persecution that Hong Kong may soon face. So far, the national security law has focused only on politics, not religion. Yet many are preparing for the day when restrictions may be placed on how and where they worship, much like in mainland China.

CT spoke with Flow Church and two international churches about how they are preparing for Hong Kong’s uncertain future and found three different strategies. While Flow Church is taking a malleable approach, the Vine plans to plant smaller churches, and Island Evangelical Community Church (IECC) plans to invest in an expensive new church building.

Many young Hong Kong people who were sympathetic to the goals of the 2019 protest movement joined Flow Church. Although the church did not overtly support the protests, its leaders provided counseling and mental health resources to young people who were impacted by the conflict.

“We’re not critiquing the government,” Chan said about the church’s stance. “We’re focused on the Bible.”

Chan believes that Hong Kong churches are within a 10-year grace period before the government imposes any significant changes. He says Flow is willing to cooperate to a certain degree. For example, he would put a Chinese flag on their stage if the government requires it. (In a June 12th call, Chan clarified that the church would try to seek alternatives or compromises rather than strictly following certain government directives, such as displaying a flag in the building.)

Yet for requirements that go against the Bible, “we will follow Jesus,” Chan said. “We will not compromise our faith. We’re mentally prepared for the future.”

That preparation includes a deliberate decision not to keep a database of members and an expectation that the Flow Church might disappear soon.

“We don’t expect Flow to have a long future,” Chan said. “The church is an event, a happening. We will focus on our lives.”

Flow Church has regular attendance of about 400 people each week, with up to 8,000 more online. Hong Kongers who have resettled overseas have started Flow Church branches. “We’re a megachurch,” he says with a laugh. “But not financially.” While offering collections cover the bills, only about 30 people give regularly, Chan said.

Chan noted that he doesn’t plan to plant more churches in Hong Kong because his focus is on “spiritual space, not physical space.” Instead, he sees his role as building relationships with people and facilitating small groups. That approach differs from how the Vine, an international church based in the busy urban area of Wan Chai, is planning for the future.

Unlike in China, where only foreign-passport holders can attend international churches, Hong Kongers make up a majority of the worshipers at the city’s international congregations. They are drawn not only by the English-language services but also by the more casual and relational style.

The Vine’s multistory building seats hundreds and has multiple meeting spaces. But the church’s senior pastor, Andrew Gardener, says the Vine is intent on planting smaller churches around Hong Kong with fewer than 200 people each.

The first church plant is located near Hong Kong’s border with Shenzhen, China, and has a nonprofit status separate from the main Vine Church. This allows the new church more autonomy and its own identity. Because it’s in an area where English is not widely spoken, the church has both English and Cantonese services.

“I would rather have a group of smaller churches tailor-made for the communities we are trying to reach than one large church in a static location that we expect everyone to come to,” Gardener said. “It’s a great way to serve Hong Kong.”

Gardener agrees with Chan that currently the Hong Kong government is refraining from intruding into religious affairs. Some international pastors believe that the government is systematically working its way through other sectors of society before turning its attention to churches. Gardener said opportunities to share the gospel are still open, and the Vine is able to hold Alpha courses in schools and corporate offices around the city.

“Day to day, nothing of substance has changed,” he noted.

Still, some Cantonese-language churches have come under the Hong Kong government’s scrutiny for being alleged incubators of “soft resistance”—the government’s vague term for actions that subtly oppose the new system imposed in 2020. Several Hong Kong clergy have been arrested in recent years on national security–related offenses, and others have chosen voluntary exile.

International churches face different challenges as the government suspects them of being tied to “foreign forces” and disapproves of their ministries to refugees, according to pastors CT spoke to.

Some of these churches have become the targets of anonymous attacks that use email and other means to accuse them of assisting anti-government forces in Hong Kong, according to international church pastors.

“The Vine is committed to justice work in our city, and at times this has put us on the government’s radar,” Gardener said. “But it’s community service—it’s not political.”

Meanwhile, another international church, IECC, is planning to plant its roots in one central location. While it currently rents several floors of a skyscraper for worship space, the congregation recently purchased a decrepit former theater and adjacent structure, which they plan to renovate into a new 100,000-square-foot church building.

The building costs nearly $100 million and will require an additional $30 million in renovation costs. Senior pastor Brett Hilliard said some church members and Christians outside the church have questioned why IECC would spend so much money on a massive new church building in Hong Kong when uncertainty looms.

“It’s a great investment, considering that we’re already spending a lot on rent,” Hilliard said. But beyond the financial considerations, “this makes a statement to the community that we choose faith over fear,” Hilliard said. “The church isn’t going away.”

Hilliard plans to use the ground floor of the building for “redemptive retail,” such as cafés and shops staffed by people with disabilities or ex-convicts.

Like many churches, IECC had difficult choices to make when protests engulfed Hong Kong in 2019 and the government cracked down.

“We didn’t participate or condemn,” Hilliard said. He acknowledged the challenge of maintaining a focus on the gospel message during that chaotic time when “our worship team included several police officers while some members of the congregation sat with placards that they intended to take to the protest after the service.”

That was six years ago. Today, Hilliard says he feels no overt pressure to avoid any topics. He stays away from predicting what the Hong Kong government will do but believes IECC will be able to gather as they serve the community and focus on the gospel message. He encourages the congregation to put aside political allegiances as they prepare for the future.

Meanwhile, during the Saturday night Flow Church service Marian attended, hundreds of young people sang worship songs like “Jesus Be the Center” and prayed for their city, one another, and their future.

Marian noted that she and her cell group are prepared for the day when the church is shut down. “It’s likely to happen,” she said. “If one day we can’t go to church, then the cell groups will be able to carry on.”

- More from Peter Maize

News

Kenya Keeps Losing Nurses It Can’t Afford to Keep

Pius Sawa

A Christian nurse looks to God and emigration for a way out of debt and overwork.

Nurses check a patient registry book at a hospital in Kenya.

Michel Lunanga / Stringer / Getty

Every time she opens her email, 35-year-old Caroline Mutama looks for a notification from US government officials to see if they have set the date for her visa interview at the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. She hopes to work as a nurse in Illinois. Mutama has already processed the travel documents for herself, her husband, and her two children.

Now all she can do is wait.

On weekdays, Mutama wakes up early, feeds her children, and prepares her oldest child for school. Then she walks five kilometers (about three miles) to her job as a registered nurse and midwife at Shiyunzu Health Center in Kakamega County. Like many nurses in Kenya, she works long hours for low pay.

Kenya’s frequent worker strikes—due to poor salaries and benefits—have undermined her efforts to make a living. She owes money to her bank, to her friends, and to her microloan savings group. Her husband has been unemployed since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down his company.

With her future in Kenya looking grim, Mutama has joined a rising number of Kenyan nurses hoping to immigrate to the United States or Europe in search of better pay and working conditions. In 2023, she began the application process for an EB-3 visa, which allows skilled workers and professionals to immigrate to the United States.

In February 2025, the Kenya National Union of Nurses raised alarm over the “acute shortage of nurses” in the country, a shortage that’s forcing some health facilities to close. In some cases, chronic understaffing has led to rationing care and to patients’ deaths in some emergency situations.

About 4,000 doctors and nurses leave Kenya every year, said Ouma Oluga, former secretary general of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union. TruMerit, an organization that processes nurses’ credentials to see if they are eligible to emigrate, reported that Kenya accounts for 6.5 percent of African nurses applying for VisaScreen certification—a key requirement for foreign-trained nurses in the US. This places Kenya first in Africa and third in the world after Philippines and Canada. In July 2021, Kenya signed a bilateral labor agreement with the UK to send 20,000 nurses to UK hospitals. By April 2024, 280 Kenyan nurses had immigrated to the UK via this program.

Kenya’s public hospitals can’t afford to lose these nurses, but they can’t afford to keep them either.

“While we are complaining we’re having a brain drain of doctors and nurses who are going to the Western world, we as a government are not able to afford to employ them because we do not have the resources,” Tharaka Nithi County governor Muthoni Njuki told a national news network.

Kenya president William Ruto admitted last year that the country only absorbs 200,000 of the 1 million qualified workers who enter the job market each year. This includes recent nursing school graduates. Nationwide economic struggles since Ruto’s government took power in September 2022 haven’t helped. Kenyan nurses continue to live and work in subpar conditions, despite frequent nurses’ union strikes.

Nurses have long struggled with high workloads and poor resources. For example, one study showed that a single neonatal nurse may be responsible for up to 40 sick babies at a time—all requiring a high degree of care.

In 2024, the council of governors in Kenya raised concern over the high rate of health workers leaving the country because the government couldn’t pay them well.

Some estimates place registered nurses’ salary range at 23,000 to 140,000 Kenyan shillings per month (about $178–$1,084 USD), including nursing directors. Kenya’s minimum wage is 15,200 shillings per month (about $118 USD). The median pay for a nurse in the US is $7,800 per month.

“We train our students for the international markets,” said Eunice Nyasiri Atsali, a nurse trainer at Kenyatta University. “The situation [in Kenya] is worse today because government has relocated the nurses to the counties and most of the counties have no capacity to pay the nurses. A degree-holder nurse is now earning 25,000 Kenya shillings [about $194 USD].”

Some nurses have fallen into debt. Traditional banks may deny loans to nurses if their account balances are too low, forcing them to look elsewhere for credit. Ruto’s government has also introduced new taxes—such as a those imposed on all public employees in Finance Bill 2024, sparking antitax demonstrations by Ruto’s critics last year.

Because of these challenges, many nurses do not want to remain in Kenya.

Mutama worries about family obligations in addition to her debts. Family funds helped her through school, but she hasn’t been able to repay them. Her three sisters and brother are now unemployed. Mutama said she feels guilty she can’t support everyone on her salary.

“[When I get to the US,] I will do my best to see that I support my siblings,” Mutama said. “I need their prayers so that I succeed. And when I move to the US, I will not forget them.”

Mutama’s application process hasn’t been easy. She’s had to prepare for nurses’ licensing exams and an English proficiency test, fill out visa applications, and wait endlessly for approval.

“Going to the US is not a joke. There are no shortcuts for nurses,” Mutama said. “The process is quite complicated, as you must be qualified to work as a nurse in the US.”

She has stayed up all night reading online materials on her laptop to prepare for licensing exams. Night shifts at her small health center receive fewer new patients than daytime shifts do. She said she took those shifts whenever possible so she could study while at work.

In early 2024, she raised money for an airline ticket so she could travel to South Africa to sit for her licensing exams. Three days prior to travel, she had only half the money she needed. A friend loaned her the remaining money at the last minute.

“This was the hand of God,” Mutama said.

She passed the exams for licensure—valid in the state of Illinois—but many of her friends did not. Eighteen months later, Mutama passed her English proficiency exam in Kenya.

But immigration policies have complicated the process. In 2020, the US slowed visa retrogression due to COVID-19. Processing backlogs at the US Embassy in Nairobi continue.

Mutama still waits for that all-important email, but she prays to God for the visa process to reopen soon and end her waiting.

“I hope that God will open the way for me,” she said.

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News

Evangelical Fault Lines Revealed in South Korean Election

Isabel Ong with Jennifer Park in South Korea

Some Christians are troubled by politicians’ anti-Communist rhetoric. Others are preoccupied with it.

A woman comes out of a booth to cast her early vote in a polling station for the presidential election in South Korea.

Chung Sung-Jun / Getty

Third time’s the charm for Democratic Party candidate Lee Jae-myung, now South Korea’s 14th president.

The 61-year-old former human rights lawyer ran for presidency twice unsuccessfully, first in 2017 and then in 2022, when he lost narrowly to impeached president Yoon Suk Yeol.

In the June 3 snap election—triggered by Parliament’s impeachment of Yoon on April 4 for breaching the constitution and other laws by declaring martial law—Lee beat five other presidential candidates and garnered close to 3 million votes more than Kim Moon-soo from the ruling conservative People Power Party.

When 36-year-old Yoon Go-eun (no relation to Yoon Suk Yeol) cast her ballot last Thursday during the early voting period at an elementary school in Gangnam, Seoul, she prayed God would raise up someone who could bring peace to the nation in a time of confusion.

Since Yoon’s martial law declaration last December, South Korea has experienced a season of political turmoil. Millions of people took to the streets for months, either protesting against Yoon or shoring up support for him.

Yoon Go-eun, a middle school teacher who attends a Presbyterian megachurch in Seoul, pinned her hopes on Lee. “In this moment of national instability, we need a leader who is capable, pragmatic, and able to restore order, especially in light of the recent crisis involving discussions of martial law,” she said.

When Yoon heard Lee had won, she felt a sense of release, “as if things were finally falling into place.” She thought of Proverbs 16:9 (“In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps”) and prayed that God would help Lee to carry out his responsibilities for the good of the people.

Although Kim, the conservative candidate who trailed behind Lee, is a churchgoer, Yoon did not vote for him. She’s troubled by Kim’s associations with pastor Jun Kwang-hoon and far-right ideologies, like the belief that there are Communist forces secretly colluding with China to aid North Korea within the country.

In South Korea, far-right politics are characterized by an anti-Communist and anti-China posture. These ideas have become entrenched within some Korean evangelical circles, leading them to label people who “criticise conservativism or conservative policies as pro-North Korean communists and antichrists,” Hawaii Pacific University professor Yong Jae Kim wrote in 2023.

Yoon felt disappointed by Kim Moon-soo’s lack of contrition for remarks he made last year that the Jeju islanders involved in an uprising between 1947 and 1954 were part of a “Communist riot.” In that incident, Korean military forces killed around 30,000 citizens on the island for protesting against the 1948 election in the belief that the results would divide the country permanently.

“To me, this is not the fruit of a healthy, biblically grounded faith,” Yoon said. “Such positions distort the gospel—and make me question whether [Kim] is truly a Christian.”

Yoon is not alone. The Korean evangelicals whom CT interviewed reflect a deepening political polarization in their voting decisions. Some favored Lee because they are against anti-Communist rhetoric, and others supported Kim because they believe he can protect South Korea from Communist influences.

Like Yoon, Kim Jiwon (no relation to Kim Moon-soo) voted for Lee. The 45-year-old manager at a logistics company, who worships at Jeju Youngnak Presbyterian Church, kept thinking of Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as he prayed over the election.

Although Kim does not think Lee’s policies are perfect, he felt they reflect “more consistent concern for issues of justice, equality, and the well-being of marginalized people.”

The new South Korean president grew up in poverty, working as a child laborer at factories, where he suffered a wrist injury that left him with a permanent disability. After securing a full scholarship to Seoul’s Chung-Ang University to study law, he became a human rights lawyer who defended industrial-accident victims and residents facing eviction amid urban redevelopment projects.

“We will not tolerate violations of rules that harm others—such as endangering lives, infringing workers’ rights, oppressing the weak or manipulating stock markets for unfair gain,” he said in his inaugural speech.

Lee begins his term immediately even as he faces five trials for various charges, including corruption, involvement in suspicious development projects, illegal money transfers to North Korea, misuse of official funds, and instigation of perjury.

Despite these scandals, Lee gained approval across the country as he led efforts to impeach Yoon. Ahead of the election, around half (50.2%) of Koreans polled in a nationwide survey were supportive of Lee.

Conservative candidate Kim Moon-soo, meanwhile, opposed Yoon’s impeachment, did not cut ties with Yoon, and refused to bow to the nation as an apology for declaring martial law.

Kim Moon-soo has also used divisive language, like referring to Koreans who fought for democracy during President Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship in the ’60s and ’70s as “commies,” Kim Jiwon said.

When Kim Moon-soo was a teenager, his high school suspended him for protesting against Park Chung-hee. Today, however, the presidential candidate “defends authoritarian measures and justifies state violence, including the possibility of martial law under the former president,” Kim Jiwon said. “To me, these are not the actions of someone who has faith.”

But some evangelicals think otherwise. They support Kim Moon-soo because of his hard-line stance against Communist infiltration in the country.

Kang Gwi-ran, a 60-year-old pro-Yoon supporter and Presbyterian pastor in Seoul, voted for Kim, as she believes South Korea is “politically, economically, and culturally infiltrated by the Chinese Communist regime.” She prayed fervently that Kim would be elected so he could carry out Yoon’s vision to eradicate pro-China influences in the country.

Kim and members of his party have accused Lee’s party of undermining the country’s ties to America by seeking stronger linkages with China. Right-wing YouTube channels also claimed that the impeached Yoon was a victim of China’s electoral influence.

“China was our enemy, whose Communist Party invaded our country during the Korean War,” Kim said in a televised presidential debate last month. “Then how can we treat China at the same level with the United States?”

“The church must awaken and help save the nation” from such “dangers,” Kang added.

Other evangelicals, like 70-year-old Gil Min-hwa, voted for Kim because she wants to see North and South Korea reunified. In her view, Kim values the alliance between South Korea and the US, which would help encourage a reunification that is “led by the South and grounded in democratic principles.”

“I believe God desires to use a unified Korea to play a key role in global evangelization,” said Gil, a retired pastor in the central city of Daejeon.

Two years ago, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un declared that unification between North and South was “impossible,” breaking from the country’s historical approach—articulated by Kim Il Sung in 1991—of seeking unification through establishing a confederacy with two systems.

Presidential candidates Kim and Lee have adopted starkly different approaches to reunification. Kim condemned North Korea’s human rights abuses and pushed to boost South Korean military prowess against North Korean nuclear threats.

Lee, meanwhile, pledged to rekindle dialogue and communication channels between North and South and make improvements to policies relating to North Korean defectors and humanitarian aid to the North.

Gil remains undeterred by Kim’s loss. “I will continue to trust God’s sovereign plan,” she said. “He can use both good and evil for his purposes.”

As anxiety over South Korea’s future and its newly minted leader continue to rock evangelical relationships in South Korea, Yoon finds that her church has been a refuge from the ongoing political storm.

At one small group meeting with fellow Christians who held dissimilar views, the group had honest conversations with one another and prayed for wisdom and for God’s justice to prevail, instead of praying only for their preferred election outcomes.

“Moments like these have shown me that our church values humility and love even amid political differences,” Yoon said. “We must stop using Scripture to justify our political opinions. The Bible is not a partisan weapon.”

- More from Isabel Ong

Culture

Review

What’s the Point of ‘The Life of Chuck’?

Hannah Long

A new movie based on a Stephen King novella aims at profundity—and comes up short.

Tom Hiddleston as Charles Krantz in The Life of Chuck.

Neon

There’s a scrap of homespun philosophy that resembles, at first glance, Christian anthropology. Life’s value doesn’t come from the big things but from the small. The most precious of things is the ordinary. Such are the implicit theses of a subgenre one might term “life-affirming cinema.” At one point in the new film The Life of Chuck, Nick Offerman’s faux-authoritative narrator, observing strangers caught up in an impromptu dance, says, “That is why God made the world. Just that.”

Although it’s not exclusive to the 1990s, I often associate the life-affirming subgenre with that era. Its mood is ubiquitous, from Dead Poets Society to The Shawshank Redemption to Forrest Gump. These films value simplicity, authenticity, and innocence over sophistication, structure, and society, a sort of transcendentalism for the modern age.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, it’s Shawshank and The Green Mile author Stephen King who wrote the short story upon which The Life of Chuck is based. It’s as pure a specimen of life-affirming cinema as is possible to find. Expanded here to full length by writer-director Mike Flanagan, the film’s premise is rich with opportunities for reflection on mortality, human value, and vocation.

But instead of turning to philosophers or theologians for answers, the film hangs itself on one line of Walt Whitman, his most famous: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” It’s too slender a strand upon which to suspend such heavy realities.

The story starts in a bourgeois apocalypse. A teacher, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), reasons with parents over their children’s infractions, though it all seems rather pointless. After all, the world is ending. Every disaster has hit simultaneously—internet outages, earthquakes, famines. Somehow, a grim but functioning suburban life remains in the ennui of a dying world, and Marty and his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) find each other before the stars blink out, one by one. We probably shouldn’t be surprised, Marty says, because, as Carl Sagan explained in the documentary Cosmos, we’re living in the last moments of the universe.

Contrasted against this dystopia is one bright spot: a chipper ad resembling a retirement card for a smiling man. “Thank you, Chuck! Thirty-nine great years,” the ad exults. It’s a sort of grim, ironic meme, the origin of which is lost. No one remembers who Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) is anymore.

Not even Chuck, because as it turns out, all of this is the “universe” in his head. He’s in a coma, dying in the arms of his wife, at the age of 39. The next two acts of the film follow one life-affirming day, not in the middle of his life but nine months from its end, when he impulsively dances to the beat of a drummer. Then the film finally jumps back to childhood (where he’s portrayed by a winsome Jacob Tremblay as an adolescent, and Benjamin Pajak as a child). At a young age, he’s orphaned; his early life is shaped by his grandparents’ tastes, his school career as a dancer, and his final confrontation with a premonition of what Sagan knew: The end is inevitable.

Over the course of Chuck’s childhood, we discern the origin of both his imagined apocalypse and his dance in the second act. He associates dancing primarily with his grandmother (Mia Sara), who would swing her hips to rock music while cooking. Arithmetic, meanwhile, Chuck connects with his grandfather, Albie (Mark Hamill), who once softened a stern speech about the poor job market for dancers by waxing poetic about numbers. (Chuck will eventually become an accountant.) Albie’s speech is one of the story’s more graceful moments, avoiding tired clichés that may have made the old man an easy villain—the grim authority figure on the side of math, certainty, and death.

But Albie is associated with death all the same. The only moment in the film shot like Stephen King’s normal horror milieu is when Chuck decides to look into the locked cupola, the one room in the house banned from his entry.

If we really are living in the last gasp of the universe, how can we fully live under this shadow? Knowing death will come, what is the use of dancing? The math never lies.

The film’s pretensions to profundity come up short here, partly due to failures of craft. You can hear the typewriter behind each character. Everyone loves to soliloquize, even a charming neighbor who drops his chipper small talk to meander about how the end is near. It may make sense when everyone is in one person’s head, as in the beginning act, but the tic continues through the other stories. This is all topped off by a cloying and unnecessary voice-over. One wishes the script had mined a richer vein of transcendentalist rhetoric than one line of Whitman or plumbed a deeper well of cultural knowledge than Cosmos.

But does the film at least ask the right questions? Why do we celebrate celebrities, sports stars, and astronauts instead of the ordinary man? Why do we look for fame and glory when we should rather rejoice in the perfection of a flower or savor a well-prepared meal?

Ultimately, what doesn’t land about The Life of Chuck is that the life it affirms is so curated that it doesn’t ring true. In such stories, the “ordinary” is never actually ordinary. The ordinary man, supposedly an Everyman pacing through a universal life, in fact often shows extraordinary virtues and talents and an exceptionally childlike innocence. He rarely breaks from his secular sainthood to descend to the level of foibles and flaws.

At first, he may seem like a Christ figure, but he’s not. He’s the natural man, untouched by society. Instead of having a heart tempted by sin, the life-affirming hero has an inner light which external forces—society, death—seek to snuff. His purity is achieved by living an authentic, mindful life. He doesn’t need to be saved. He has pulled himself up by his spiritual bootstraps.

Christians, rather than trusting in these self-oriented virtues, believe that purity leads to authenticity, not the other way around. And whence comes purity? From without and within at the same time, through the work of God. It may seem a fine distinction, but it explains why there’s always something a bit phony about the Everyman hero.

There’s a sentimentality in life-affirming stories that shortchanges the viewer. The problem with sentiment is not that it glamorizes bad things but that it makes good things into ultimate things (to paraphrase Tim Keller).

If life is really just a collection of experiences and memories, is the meaning of life then to be found in the multiplying of those things? A sort of tourism as telos? At a certain point, the “multitudes” in our heads, the other people remembered, are only valuable to the degree that we value them. If the self is all—Chuck’s “wonderful” self, living life fully—then when his world ends, the world ends. There’s a narcissism and a nihilism beneath this chipper exterior of a film mimicking transcendence without actually providing it.

Of course, that sounds more serious than it should—this is still a movie where a boy teaches his class to moon walk. And Chuck is indeed wonderful, but it would be nice for someone to remind him, as Gandalf does Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit, that he is “only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.” And as Bilbo responds, “Thank goodness!”

Hannah Long is an Appalachian writer living in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Angelus News, The Dispatch, and Plough Magazine.

- More from Hannah Long

Ideas

The Real Problem with AI Prayers

Alastair Roberts

A computer’s praise or petition sounds a lot like our human Christianese. That doesn’t make them equivalent.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels, Unsplash

At a recent Gospel Coalition conference, celebrity pastor John Piper told his audience about a task he had given ChatGPT: Write a prayer informed by the theology of Don Carson. He proceeded to read the resulting text. ChatGPT’s “prayer” seemed to tick all the theological boxes; the crowd murmured, seemingly impressed. But John Piper was not. He declared that such a “prayer” was not a prayer at all, being the product of a soulless machine rather than the expression of a worshipful human heart.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence have raised unsettling questions about our own humanity; indeed, each new advance in AI technology might seem to erode a once-secure realm of human uniqueness. Formerly situated in the vast expanse between beasts and the gods, our territory is now threatened by the rising capacities of our creations, raising the specter of our obsolescence. What remains to set human beings apart? As AI leaves a wave of redundancies in its wake, will it make humanity itself redundant?

These questions about human distinctiveness are important. People are made in the image of God; code is not. I imagine that’s much of what John Piper was getting at in his critique.

But his exercise also raised interesting questions about language itself. Machine-generated prayers really can sound just like human-generated ones, prone as we are to fall back on generic formulations and common clichés. If an AI prayer isn’t truly prayer, what implications might that have for our own praise and petition, which too often evince our programming in Christianese and other habitual forms?

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns his disciples not to “heap up empty phrases [“use vain repetitions,” in other translations] as the Gentiles do” (Matt. 6:7, ESV throughout). He then proceeds to teach the disciples the specific words of the Lord’s Prayer.

At first blush, it might seem that such a prescribed prayer is contrary to the warning of the preceding verses. Rather than “empty phrases,” staid and overly familiar, we should privilege spontaneity in our communication with God.

But in the AI era, the “spontaneity” of our prayers (indeed, of anything we say) might be less convincing. Large language models have shown us that speech initially presumed to manifest thoughtful, individual, creative expression may merely be routinized functions operating on generic data, no internal reflection required.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus addressed the problem of “vain repetitions” not by extolling the authenticity of spontaneous and personally composed—or generated?—prayers but by giving his hearers a specific prayer, with petitions whose depths his followers have meditated on for around 2,000 years.

Clearly, Jesus’ prior warnings must have some bearing on how we use the Lord’s Prayer. If we mindlessly and distractedly repeat its words with no regard for their import, we might as well be turning a Tibetan prayer wheel, automating the practice. Critics of liturgy have frequently complained of “reading set prayers” and often with genuine cause. Set prayers are there to be prayed. The words must become our words.

The words are ours neither by virtue of composition nor, in the context of a liturgy, by virtue of spontaneity or individuality. We did not come up with the words of the Lord’s Prayer, and we did not independently determine to pray them at a certain juncture in a service. While our mouths might be speaking the words, this does not seem to be sufficient to make them truly ours either. Scripture frequently calls for an integration of heart, word, and action, condemning these who honor God with their lips while their hearts are far from him (Matt. 15:8).

If we look for our human uniqueness in our capacity to produce textual artifacts, AI poses an existential threat. Not only does it show the difficulty of distinguishing the products of machines from those of human beings; it also reveals just how mindless and machine-like much human speech and writing can be, especially in a bureaucratic society.

Yet there is another way of regarding our relationship to language, a relationship more apparent in a society before the dominance of the written and printed word. In an oral culture, words are encountered not in autonomous texts but in speakers, ceremonies, and performances—in poets and singers, liturgies and plays, storytellers and orators, priests and public readers, politicians and philosophers. The primary vehicle of the word is the person.

While the apparent difference between human beings and AI as generators of words might be diminishing, the difference between human beings and AI as creatures of the word is vast and categorical.

Evangelicals have typically thought about Holy Scripture according to the mindset of literate moderns: Holy Scripture is equated with the physical object of our personal Bibles, which we study for knowledge of God. Yet Holy Scripture itself presents us with a more complicated picture. Yes, there are physical scriptural texts external to us—this is important. However, throughout the Scripture, God’s Word is progressively taking humanity itself as its proper vehicle. Also, for much of the history of the people of God, Holy Scripture was chiefly encountered not in the latent textual object of a privately owned Bible but in the living words of public reading and preaching, in liturgies, in the singing of psalms, and in texts treasured in personal memory.

The Lord is a speaking God. He delivers the Law to his people at Sinai, calling them to give their assent to it, to observe all its commandments, to take them to heart, and to serve him in love. The Law is an external word, standing over against resistant people and judging them for their rebellion.

The Book of Psalms opens with the figure of the blessed man who delights in and meditates on the Law day and night (1:1–2). It describes a righteous man who has the Law in his heart, speaking justice and having wisdom (37:30–31). In the Psalms, the second-person imperatives of the Law are encountered in the form of first-person expressions of delight and commitment—“Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (119:97).

The Book of Psalms depicts and encourages a relationship with the Law characterized by meditation, memorization, delight, elevation of words in song, and collective performance. Something similar can be seen in the Wisdom Literature, where external commands of the Law give way to the declarations of the wise man, who has internalized the wisdom and justice of the Law and can speak with insight and authority.

In the Prophets, human beings become bearers of God’s word in a new, more pronounced way. Ezekiel ate the scroll so that he could speak God’s word to the people with authority (Ezek. 3:1–9). Isaiah’s lips were touched with a coal from the divine altar so that he could speak with a burning holiness (Isa. 6:5–8). Jeremiah’s mouth was touched so that he might bear God’s words and thus be equipped with authority over nations “to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:9–10).

In Jesus Christ, the Word of God comes to humanity in person. In Jesus, the wisdom, authority, righteousness, justice, and life of God’s Word is fully realized in the medium of our flesh. Although the world would not contain the books that could be written about him, Jesus himself never wrote a book. He himself is the Word.

And he is forming people as living words. In 2 Corinthians 3:3, the apostle Paul described the Corinthian Christians as a “letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” Elsewhere, in Colossians 3:16, he spoke of “the word of Christ dwell[ing] in you richly” in the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. The church is a living message of Christ, a people who are formed as word bearers as Holy Scripture is metabolized into us through memorization, meditation, song, prayer, sermons, reading, and praise.

This, of course, is the purpose of something like the Lord’s Prayer: that in constantly returning to these words, we might be formed by them, becoming the sort of people who can pray them fully. Spontaneity and originality can be worthwhile in their place, but far more important than the words that we produce are the words that go down into our bones and are treasured in our hearts.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates observes how writing can substitute external reminder for internal memory and therefore risk encouraging forgetfulness in those who depend on it. Relying on writing, they no longer need to take words into themselves, forfeiting wisdom in the process.

In many respects, AI is a radical intensification of the externalization of the word first encouraged by writing. Perhaps its greatest danger is a deeper forgetfulness and forfeiture of wisdom. Within creation, it is only in human beings that the word enjoys its proper living character, being found with delight, wisdom, willing obedience, justice, and authority. Although AI can simulate the products of such creatures, it remains lifeless.

When we pray, presenting ourselves to God as creatures of his words is more important than presenting our own verbal creations. The words of our seemingly spontaneous prayers, seldom as original or expressive as they might appear, are of considerably less value than hearts and lives that treasure, internalize, and embody God’s own words. This is worship that no AI will ever be able to offer.

Alastair Roberts is an adjunct Senior Fellow for the Theopolis Institute and a professor at Davenant Hall. You can follow his work on The Anchored Argosy Substack.

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