Canadian Evangelicals Brace for Trade War

“We just want everyone to be friends.”

VCG/VCG via Getty Images

At Golden Harvest Baptist Church in Stevensville, Ontario, the Stars and Stripes still hangs alongside the Maple Leaf Flag in the auditorium.

The church is Canadian, but it has American members too. Golden Harvest Baptist is just 15 minutes east of a main border crossing, the Peace Bridge, and basically located in the suburbs of Buffalo. One couple drives from Buffalo to Canada for Sunday services. Several church members live on the Canada side but drive to the US, Monday to Friday, for work. Several families in the church include Canadians married to Americans.

That’s never really been a problem before.

“In a border community, it’s just part of your culture that you don’t see the US as adversarial,” pastor Ryan King told Christianity Today.

But now Canadians are booing the American national anthem at hockey games. People are talking about boycotting US products in the stores, and maple leaves mark everything made in Canada to encourage people to buy Canadian. There’s an undeniable surge of patriotism in the country, and people who don’t seem patriotic enough are being questioned—even Wayne Gretzky, one of Canada’s most esteemed athletes, was challenged for his seeming lack of loyalty. A lot of people in places like Stevensville are taking down their American flags.

But Golden Harvest Baptist hasn’t done that, so far. The church is trying to avoid reactionary responses to President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that Canada should become an American state. It hopes to stay calm in the face of Trump’s threats of a trade war.

“We just want everyone to be friends,” King said.

A lot of Canadians feel betrayed by their country’s closest ally, though. And Trump’s tariffs—which could go into effect on April 2, a day Trump has dubbed “liberation day”—will likely hurt people in the church, King said.

Stuff will probably cost more at stores in the US and Canada, and some goods may not be available anymore. Car manufacturers that employ church members on both sides could be impacted. The tariffs might even drive up the cost of the Sunday school material the church buys from the US.

“It’s something everyone is watching super carefully, but it hasn’t happened yet,” King said.

Similar scenes are playing out across the country as Canadian evangelicals who have had close relationships with Christians to the south try to figure out what the sharp change of international relationship between the two countries will mean for them.

“People are a little bit bewildered,” said Brian Dijkema, a public-policy analyst who serves as president of the Canadian side of Cardus, a nonpartisan Christian think tank.

Dijkema’s denomination, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), may face particular strain, as it is in the peculiar position of being binational. Many evangelical denominations have affiliations with denominations on the other side of the border. But the CRC is a single legal entity in the US and Canada. About 25 percent of its congregations are north of the border.

Reciprocal tariffs will probably not raise costs for churches, according to Al Postma, the CRC’s Canadian executive director. Most of the materials exchanged across the border between CRCs in the US are digital and shared freely, not sold.

The leadership is concerned about the long-term consequences of a trade war, regardless.

“There’s a lot of anger and frustration and concern,” Postma told CT. “That’s true broadly within the Canadian population, and it’s reflected as well in our Canadian CRCs.”

In February, the church put out a pastoral letter recognizing the pain many Canadians felt hearing Trump and some of his supporters downplay the significance of Canada’s national sovereignty. The church lamented “the brokenness we are experiencing in our cross-border relationship.”

Postma believes the churches can continue to work together, setting aside the international politics. But Christians will have to work not to confuse the current political leadership with the nations as a whole.

Brian Stiller, a global ambassador with World Evangelical Alliance and a former president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, said he thinks most Christians, north and south of the border, will connect on the individual level.

“I suspect that most of us [Canadians] who are offended by the American impulse will forgive our American friends—who generally will be more tolerant and accepting of us than their president seems to be,” he said.

But the relationship between US and Canadian evangelicals may still change. Stiller said he expects corporations, in particular, will be hesitant about depending too much on American partners or contributing to American-led projects.

“This will salt our relationship,” he told CT. “The brininess of this moment will stay in the water.”

In this tense climate, Stiller encourages Canadians to focus on words of Jesus found in Matthew 5:44: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

The gospel, after all, is counterintuitive, he argues.

“When your inclination is to boo their anthem, stand in respect,” he said. “When your inclination is to despise their bullying, love them instead. I see this moment not so much a test of Americanism; I see it as a test of true Canadian Christian attitudes.”

In Niagara Falls, Ontario, the pastor of Grace Gospel Church agrees. Martin Goode said people in his community and his congregation are feeling a lot of anxiety, but he’s encouraging them to see it as an opportunity to respond in Christlike ways.

“Trouble and change are normal,” Goode said. “The challenge is what kind of people we will be in the midst of it.”

- More from Adam MacInnis

Cafeteria Church

Amanda Held Opelt

Under the fluorescent lights, we come to commune, not to be entertained.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

For years, my church met in a theater—a newly constructed, state-of-the-art high school auditorium. Unburdened by the high cost of owning our own facility in Boone, North Carolina, the Heart was able to focus on other ministry goals. At the height of our growth, 800 people came over two services to experience our lead pastor’s dynamic preaching and music from our band, whose polished sound rivaled that of any professional production.

My church has always felt called to be a place where spiritual wanderers could come and experience hope and healing in Christ. Because we turned the house lights off during worship, many people slipped in late and sat quietly in the dark balcony, exiting before the benediction. While we were always seeking to integrate our visitors more fully, we accepted the idea that some of our Sunday morning attendees—seekers, perhaps, or those wounded by the church—simply wanted to experience the services anonymously.

And though we enjoyed the cheap rent, the theater did come with some hidden costs. Our leadership team spoke often about wanting our Sunday mornings to be authentic, not performative. Even so, our meeting space called for a certain kind of stagecraft.

This setup is typical for a church in the United States, where we owe the design of most modern church buildings in part to the fiery Presbyterian revivalist Charles Finney. In the 1830s, Finney rented one of the largest theaters in New York and outfitted it to house his growing congregation. So successful were his revivals in drawing emotional professions of faith that other churches began to follow suit, designing their sanctuaries with sloped auditorium-style seating and large stages.

The layout offered an advantage to church leaders who, like Finney, were increasingly structuring their services around two key elements: a lively sermon from a talented preacher and riveting worship from professional musicians. My church was, in many ways, the living legacy of that strategic architectural movement.

Because we rented our theater from the public school system, when the pandemic hit, we had little choice but to close our doors indefinitely as the high school implemented a strict lockdown policy. As the months dragged on and other churches reconfigured their gathering spaces so they could meet safely, we waited for the town to reopen.

While we worked hard to create online content and stay connected through video calls, it was clear that the coalescing feature of our church life had been our Sunday morning services in the theater. Families lost touch, and tithes stopped rolling in. When our church was finally able to meet at the high school again, “social distancing” was not hard to accomplish. Three out of every four seats were now empty.

We hobbled along for a while, generating as much enthusiasm from that stage as we could muster, hoping those seats would once again be filled. But the time in lockdown and the strenuous effort to rebuild had taken its toll. Staff members began to resign, including our teaching pastor. Most members of the worship team moved on.

Our church was no longer what it once was. The world was no longer what it once was. In light of that reality, we had two options: We could resign ourselves to our losses and close the doors of the church forever. Or we could try something new.

I’ve heard it said that the architecture of a church acts as a kind of spiritual formation. Though we had worked hard to avoid a showmanship mentality on Sunday mornings, something about meeting as a community of faith in that theater had encouraged spectatorship over participation, consumption over commitment. Our church body had spent an hour and a half every Sunday morning looking in one direction: at a stage. Despite our efforts, our physical space had cued all the people in that room to see themselves as the audience and those on stage as performers.

Now, that theater felt empty. We considered other spaces in the high school where our dwindling congregation could meet. The only other space large enough was the cafeteria.

Sticky-floored and smelling faintly of old pizza, the cafeteria was not exactly what most would call a winning strategy for growth. The room lacked a stage, a sound system, and any sense of formality. Rather than spotlights, we now basked in the glow of soda machines and buzzing fluorescent lights.

But that cafeteria had something unexpected to offer. If a theater is configured to facilitate spectatorship, a cafeteria is uniquely designed for communion. The Heart was now gathering in a room full of tables. Unlike when we were in the dimly lit, fixed rows, we were now face to face in a bright space where no one who showed up could hide.

The choice to move to the cafeteria coincided with another decision: We would not be hiring another teaching pastor. Instead, we would take a team approach to Sunday-morning sermons. The team—made up of our two remaining staff pastors and members of the congregation who had some Bible training—would collaborate throughout the week, working through the deeper theological questions presented by the text. Each of us would take our monthly turn filling the pulpit.

We simplified worship and set up a basic sound system. The minimalistic instrumentation meant that the voices of the congregation rose above the band, echoing off the walls of the cafeteria. Without the intimidation factor of the stage, more people began to sign up to play instruments or try their hand at harmonies.

We also incorporated a discussion time into every service. Members of the congregation could interact with the sermon right there on the spot, raising concerns or questions and sharing insights.

Our attendance stabilized. We balanced our budget. We welcomed some new families. But the success of our story can’t be measured in the number of attendees. Our growth has been in depth more than in breadth.

Our church, which we had always hoped felt like a family, began to actually operate as a family. Everyone in the community began to take responsibility for what happened on a Sunday morning—setting up tables and chairs, welcoming visitors, listening intently to the sermon so they could share their own thoughts during the discussion.

Without the stage, in the close quarters of the cafeteria, teaching now feels less like a presentation and more like a mutual conversation. With multiple voices amplified, we are safeguarded from the risk of personality-centrism. Relationships formed through these conversations spill over into the week, resulting in increased participation in small groups and community outreach.

Perhaps the most palpable difference is the freedom of Sunday mornings. The instrumentalists, though they are diligent to practice, can miss a note without the pressure of perfection that a stage tacitly demands. Whoever is teaching that week isn’t left alone to write the world’s most riveting sermon. No one wants our time together to be particularly sleek or polished.

We start late if the preservice conversation is especially lively. Babies wail and toddlers dance (badly) to the music, and no one minds. The pastors are seen as members of the community rather than masters of ceremonies. Because we are coming to commune rather than be entertained, grace for one another abounds.

Meeting at tables is no innovation; there’s history here, too. First-century believers were known, derided even, for love feasts that were open to all regardless of race, class, or religious background. The early church was prohibited by Rome from owning property; plagued by persecution, Christians often met in catacombs, hidden from the watchful eyes of their persecutors.

Beautiful, state-of-the-art spaces may feel necessary to draw a large crowd. They may be a way of providing the focus and formality that worship and study of the Word deserves. But I believe we are beginning to see that churches built, by intent or by default, around these theatrical elements too often lack the foundation needed to survive upheaval.

The cafeteria may not be forever. While our growth has not been astronomical, we’ve had enough increase in numbers that we’ve nearly reached seat limits. The acoustics are truly awful, making it hard for folks at the edges of the room to hear the sermon. The room has many distractions, and I, for one, am tired of shooing my six-year-old away from the lure of the vending machine during worship.

But if we do move back into the theater, we’ll bring our lessons learned with us. We’ll never turn the auditorium lights off, and we’ll brighten the room as much as possible. We’ll close the curtains to the stage and have the band and teacher all stand on the floor. We’ll bring in some moveable chairs so we can circle people up for the discussion time. We’ll maintain our team approach to teaching.

We’ve heard the old adage that the church is more than the building. But sometimes the church must transcend our buildings, must resist the cues and connotations imposed upon us by the spaces in which we meet. After all, in the new heaven and new earth, the community of saints does not appear to be gathered in a theater. Rather, the saints are feasting at a banqueting table (Isa. 25:6; Matt. 8:11; Rev. 19:9). And if that’s the case, then I say a cafeteria is as sacred a sanctuary as any.

Amanda Held Opelt is an author, speaker, and songwriter. She has published two books.

- More from Amanda Held Opelt

News

World Evangelical Alliance Seeks New Leader Who Can Bring Unity

Ken Chitwood

Can the next secretary general represent 600 million Christians and get them all to work together?

The WEA hopes to announce the next secretary general at the 2025 General Assembly in South Korea. Plans for the October meeting have been one recent point of contention.

Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

Peirong Lin, a deputy secretary at the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), likes to joke that evangelical is the most polarizing word in the world.

“Yet that is exactly what we are trying to unite around,” she told Christianity Today, “the euangelion, the Good News, the gospel, and what it looks like in different countries and contexts.”

Now the global organization of national and regional alliances representing 600 million evangelicals is looking for one person to help bring everybody together. The international council that oversees the WEA is stressing the need for unity as the search for a new secretary general gets underway.

“The Good News expresses itself in different ways around the world … and our responsibility as the WEA is to take a ‘world’ understanding to the gospel, not just a particular context,” Lin said. “The question for us going forward is how we can best represent everyone and work together.”

The search began 11 months after the resignation of secretary general Thomas Schirrmacher, who stepped down for health reasons amid ongoing controversies about the WEA’s participation in interfaith dialogue with Catholics. A plan for a quick search for a new replacement—one press release promised new leadership in six months—was scuttled. WEA leadership said it needed more time to review its organizational structure and consult more evangelical leaders about the strengths, weaknesses, and long-term direction of the alliance.

Goodwill Shana, the interim head of the WEA, said in an email that the appointment of a new leader will be a “very significant step for the WEA” and everyone wants to find “the person of God’s choice to lead us into the future.”

The WEA hopes to announce the name of the new secretary general at the upcoming General Assembly in October.

Plans for the October assembly have been one point of contention in recent days. One thousand evangelical leaders affiliated with Hapdong, Korea’s largest Presbyterian denomination, would not participate in the General Assembly. The letter challenged the WEA’s views of Scripture and the organization’s commitment to working on social issues, including Christian persecution, in collaboration with mainline Protestants and Catholics.

“The WEA’s theological stance is inconsistent with reformed and conservative evangelical doctrine, and our denomination should sever ties with the WEA due to its misalignment in faith and practice,” said the letter, which was published in a Korean church newspaper founded by Yoido Full Gospel Church, a 580,000-member megachurch led by Younghoon Lee, who is on the WEA’s official organizing committee.

The Christian Council of Korea (CCK), which was formerly affiliated with the WEA and represents 65 denominations, also voiced concerns about what it called the WEA’s “theological ambiguities.” The group’s former president, Seo-young Jeong, called for the General Assembly to be postponed until there was “verification” of the global organization’s orthodoxy.

CCK’s new president, Kyung-hwan Ko, has taken a harder line against the WEA, saying, “The gospel it preaches is not the gospel of the Bible.” In February, he announced plans to organize a forum of theologians to report on the WEA’s “apostate actions.”

The WEA declined to comment on specifics and reiterated its commitment to “unite the global church.”

The organization has also faced sharp criticism from the evangelical alliances in Italy and Spain, which said that the group crossed a line when the general secretary met with Pope Francis.

“We, evangelicals, do not bow our heads before the pope,” the Spanish group said. “We consider it necessary that we publicly express our resounding rejection of [Schirrmacher’s] participation in that event.”

Conflicts over the alliance’s association with Catholicism are not new, either. National evangelical associations in Italy, Spain, and Malta penned an open letter critiquing the WEA for not holding the line against Catholicism in 2018, and Italy, Spain, France, and Poland raised deep concerns about overlooked theological differences in 2013.

The next head of the WEA will be expected to navigate the disagreements and overcome the distrust.

According to Lin, the WEA is looking for “someone who can bring different people together to speak the Good News to all people in these troubled times.”

The next secretary general will also be expected to lead the alliance through substantial organizational updates, bringing the WEA into the 21st century. Making the organization more efficient and effective is a top priority.

“With Christians connected through the internet and global communications technologies, we don’t need alliances the way we did in 1846,” Lin said. “How can we [make changes] so it better serves our purposes in different countries and regions?”

Interviews of potential candidates are expected to start in June.

- More from Ken Chitwood

News

Wire Story

Judge Rules Against Johnny Hunt in Defamation Suit over SBC Abuse Report

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Court dismisses all but one claim in the former pastor’s case, which has cost Southern Baptists over $3 million.

Johnny Hunt

Screenshot from Youtube

A federal judge ruled against former Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt on Monday, rejecting his claims of defamation against Guidepost Solutions and rejecting nearly all the former megachurch pastor’s claims against the Southern Baptist Convention and its Executive Committee.

Judge William Campbell of the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee issued an order granting summary judgment in the case on Monday, with a memorandum detailing the judge’s decision forthcoming.

“We are grateful for this decision and the forward progress in our legal process,” Jeff Iorg, SBC Executive Committee president, told Religion News Service in a statement.

Hunt had sued Guidepost, an investigative firm, and SBC leaders for defamation and other damages after Guidepost published allegations of sexual assault against Hunt in a May 2022 report on an investigation into how SBC leaders had dealt with sexual abuse.

At issue was a 2010 incident in which Hunt allegedly kissed and fondled another pastor’s wife. Hunt, who had kept the incident secret for years, at first denied the incident occurred then claimed it was consensual.

In their court filings, Hunt’s lawyers claimed Guidepost had ruined his reputation and claimed the pastor’s sin were no one’s else’s business. Hunt, the former pastor of First Baptist Church in Woodstock and a former vice-president of the SBC’s North American Mission Board, claimed Guidepost and the SBC had cost him millions and sought more than $75 million in damages.

All counts of defamation, emotional distress, and the public disclosure of embarrassing private facts were dismissed against the SBC and the Executive Committee. However one claim alleging a tweet about Hunt from Texas Baptist pastor Bart Barber, who was SBC president from 2022 to 2024, was defamatory has not been dismissed.

Hunt served from 2008 to 2010 as SBC president and remained a popular speaker before the Guidepost report. Court-ordered mediation on the case failed last fall. A trial had been scheduled this summer.

The Executive Committee has spent more than $3.1 million in legal fees related to the Hunt lawsuit and a second lawsuit related to the Guidepost report.

Last month, the SBC’s Executive Committee decided to ask the denomination for an additional $3 million for the upcoming year to cover its legal bills, including those for the Hunt suit.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

News

Northern Israel Church Warily Gathers amid Renewed War

Jill Nelson

“Another round of war would be devastating.”

Israel Iluz, a Messianic Jewish pastor of Congregation Kiryat Shmona, in Northern Israel.

Photography by Jill Nelson

Israel Iluz, Messianic Jewish pastor of Congregation Kiryat Shmona, longs for quieter days.

For more than a year, he braved the Hezbollah rockets raining down in his northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona.

Sometimes, Iluz was too worn out to care about the missile threats. On several occasions, his wife interrupted his shower to alert him to the air-raid siren. Iluz told her to go on ahead to the bomb shelter. He just wanted to wash the shampoo out of his hair.

The past few months have been calmer, and Iluz hopes Hezbollah won’t start firing rockets again now that Israel is returning to Gaza and renewing its campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. On Friday, Israel bombed Beirut for the first time since the November cease-fire with the terrorist organization. A separate ceasefire with Hamas ended in mid-March when Israel resumed bombing Gaza after two months of quiet. The attacks killed 400 in the deadliest day of the war in more than a year, according to Gaza’s health authority.

The day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, Hezbollah began pounding northern Israel with rocket fire. In response, Israel conducted airstrikes and later ground operations against Hezbollah forces. The fighting drove tens of thousands of people to evacuate the border regions of both countries.

Unprepared for war on multiple fronts, Israel sent soldiers to makeshift camps in the north with limited supplies of canned food. So Iluz’s congregation began cooking hundreds of meals daily for troops protecting the northern border.

Close to 80 percent of Kiryat Shmona’s 23,000 residents evacuated, but a dozen members from Iluz’s church volunteered to serve the soldiers. Some drove in during the day from safer locations. When they heard air-raid sirens, they paused their cooking and hustled to the church’s bomb shelter.

The team learned to decipher the sounds and patterns of Hezbollah’s rocket fire. The attacks seemed to escalate after 5:00 p.m., so they timed their deliveries accordingly.

Some meal deliveries required a windy drive into the foothills where Hezbollah, a US-designated terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, was stationed. Iluz prayed for protection from rocket fire before departing in his van.

He understood the risks. Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 rockets into Israel since the war began, and some made it through the country’s Iron Dome defense system. One missile incinerated a car just around the corner from Iluz’s home during the first month of the war. Another missile damaged his church’s new facility only hours after his team left the building last May.

Now, the skies are quieter. Locals began moving back into their homes in early March, Iluz said. A November cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel gave the residents of Kiryat Shmona some hope for a safe return.

Iluz is grateful Kiryat Shmona no longer looks like a ghost town, yet that reprieve may be temporary with the end of the cease-fire. Iluz also continues to worry about the larger issues Israel faces as Iran-backed forces surround the country and are aligned under a common mission to destroy the Jewish nation. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to wield power in Gaza.

In March, as negotiations to extend the cease-fire repeatedly stalled, Israel blocked all humanitarian aid destined for Gaza. Then Israel launched a wave of attacks against Hamas operatives. At least five senior political figures died in the offensive.

The bombings killed nearly 600 Palestinians, bringing the death toll to more than 50,000, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. More than 130 children and entire families were killed, Gaza Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal told CNN.

Israel claims it is sending troops back to Gaza to roll back the gains Hamas made during the cease-fire and force the terrorist group to negotiate another hostage deal. During the cease-fire, Hamas released 33 hostages in exchange for nearly 1,800 Palestinian prisoners.

Polls show that both Palestinians and Israelis are ready for the war to end.

Protests in Israel swelled last week, with more than 100,000 gathering in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and other cities across the country. The protestors demanded an immediate deal between Israel and Hamas to release the remaining hostages and an end to government plans for a judicial overhaul, which protesters say would empower the ruling coalition.

Meanwhile, last Tuesday and Wednesday, thousands of Palestinians in northern Gaza gathered for what appeared to be the largest protest against Hamas since the war began. The crowds chanted, “Hamas out! Hamas is terrorism!” and “We want to live freely,” as they marched through streets lined with partially destroyed buildings.

Christians should mourn Palestinian loss of life, said David Pileggi, rector of Christ Church Jerusalem, a 175-year-old Anglican church in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Pileggi moved from the US to Israel in 1980 and has pastored his congregation for the past 17 years. His church has both Jewish and Arab staff members.

Last October, Christ Church organized an evening of Jewish-Arab unity that drew nearly 200 people, including many young adults. Attendees knelt together for Communion during the church service, then gathered in the adjacent courtyard for several hours of praise and worship.

Pileggi said sharing life together isn’t always straightforward. His church strives to model Paul’s call in Ephesians 2:15 to be “one new man” (KJV). That means the church emphasizes unity among believers even as they hold diverse views about Israel and the nature of the war.

“There are times where our Jewish Israeli staff are opposed to the policies of the government, especially as they relate to this war,” he said. “And at the same time, you have Arab Christians who want to see Israel smash Hamas and all other forms of Islamic extremism.”

Pileggi doesn’t believe all Israel’s wartime actions have been moral. However, he is concerned about the many threats Israel faces.

Twice last year, Iran attacked Israel. In April and again in October, Pileggi climbed the steps of his Jerusalem home to his rooftop as sirens alerted the ancient city. He watched hundreds of Iranian ballistic missiles streak across the sky and heard the distant booms of Israel’s Arrow, a long-range missile defense system, intercepting the weapons.

He said most residents of Jerusalem went to their bomb shelters, but he was confident Tehran wouldn’t target the Old City, a holy site for Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

He noted that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are all striving for Israel’s extermination and the establishment of an Islamic state in the region. “Just defeating Hamas on the battlefield will not discredit its ideology in Gaza or throughout the Arab world,” Pileggi said. “We need a spiritual, psychological, and political change that comes by fasting and prayer among Christians.”

In Kiryat Shmona, Iluz and his volunteers are winding down their meals for troops. This week, they hosted a barbecue offsite for close to 100 Israeli soldiers. They want their church to return to a sense of normalcy, so they spent the past few weeks organizing the remaining piles of plastic utensils, food containers, and cooking supplies while deep-cleaning the kitchen.

“You come to our church for the past year and a half, [and] you smell onions every time you go there,” Iluz said. “So now we [just] want the aroma of Christ.”

Iluz feels safer in Kiryat Shmona than he did last year. Israel has killed dozens of senior Hezbollah commanders and hundreds of fighters in targeted attacks across Lebanon and Syria. Israeli soldiers continued to dismantle miles of tunnels Hezbollah had been planning to use for an attack in northern Israel.

The repairs on Iluz’s church building are almost complete, and last Friday, Congregation Kiryat Shmona held its first church service since the war began. The next day, Israel’s Iron Dome intercepted three rockets over the small town of Metula, just five miles north of Kiryat Shmona. Hezbollah denied any involvement, but Israel retaliated with air strikes against Hezbollah bases across Lebanon.

Iluz said the people in his town and the members of his congregation are tired and want peace. “Another round of war would be devastating,” he said.

Despite the war’s continuation, both Iluz and Pileggi remain hopeful.

“We look forward to the promises in Isaiah 19 that the Middle East will one day be a blessing in all the earth,” Pileggi said. “I know it doesn’t look that way at the moment, but we believe that God has great promises for Arabs and Jews.”

- More from Jill Nelson

News

America Could Lose 10 Million Christians to Mass Deportation

Andy Olsen

A new study finds the Trump administration’s plans to expel undocumented immigrants would potentially impact more than 1 in 20 US evangelicals.

An Ecuadorian migrant family prays while waiting to be apprehended by US Border Patrol in June 2024.

Brandon Bell / Getty Images

During his final Bible study before the government forced him to leave the United States, pastor Eduardo Martorano asked his congregants to take care of his library.

The Venezuelan man had accumulated a formidable book collection during seminary in Michigan and his early days in ministry. He called it “a treasure.” He had moved all that paper and ink across the country when Iglesia La Vid, a small Spanish-language congregation in Laredo, Texas, invited him to serve as its pastor in 2021.

But on January 29, Martorano’s birthday, the pastor learned that the Trump administration had canceled Temporary Protected Status, or TPS—the immigration program that enabled him and his wife to live in the US and to lead a church—for nearly 350,000 Venezuelans. They had two months to self-remove, as immigration lawyers put it, or they could be deported.

The Martoranos and their four young children prepared a hasty move to Europe. They filled suitcases, spread out their possessions at a garage sale, and listed their car on Facebook. The pastor packed only ten books, many of them small volumes by 17th-century English theologians. The rest, including his beloved, 3,000-page copy of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics, he left behind.

The family’s flight portends what American churches stand to lose as the president’s efforts to execute “the largest deportation operation in American history” sweep up scores of Christians.

Roughly 1 in 12 Christians in the US are at risk of deportation or live with someone who is, according to a new study by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. More than 1 in 18 of the country’s evangelicals could be impacted by mass deportations.

Among the president’s many executive orders on the first day of his second term, he signed a border-security measure directing agencies to focus on “removing promptly all aliens who enter or remain in violation of Federal law.” The language echoed Trump’s earlier pledges to deport all undocumented immigrants.

Taken to its full extent, that would entail rounding up and shipping off an estimated 14 million people—a population the size of Pennsylvania. Experts say that’s unlikely without the billions of additional dollars congressional Republicans are trying to secure for further deportation efforts.

But if the administration succeeds, America will lose millions of Christians.

The Gordon-Conwell study, sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and World Relief, evaluated data from multiple sources including the American Community Survey and Pew Research Center. It found that, as of the end of 2024, more than 10 million US Christians were undocumented or otherwise had legal status the administration could revoke.

Indeed, the president has already ended special programs that allowed more than three-quarters of a million migrants to live and work legally in the US—including TPS for Venezuelans like Martorano and humanitarian parole for migrants from several other countries.

The world’s migrants are disproportionately Christian, and demographers say they are helping stanch secularization in countries like the US and Canada.

“What is in the report is common knowledge. Or at least should be,” Todd Johnson, codirector of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity and one of the report’s authors, told CT. But the “church and society need regular reminders of who immigrants really are.”

More than 75 percent of immigrants at risk of deportation in the US are Christians, according to the study. As authorities detain a growing number of immigrants who have no criminal records, immigrant church communities are feeling more of the pain.

Over the last two months, agents have arrested worship leaders and church planters. They have surprised undocumented immigrants leaving Sunday services.

Hispanic churches could be hit especially hard. Around 80 percent of unauthorized immigrants in the US are from Latin America. By some estimates, up to 1 in 4 Hispanic Protestant churches have pastors and members who could be deported.

“The administration’s mass deportation policies and congressional support of that would be in fact a church decline strategy,” said Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

But deportation isn’t the only way congregants disappear. The prospect of being detained is keeping worshipers at home and away from church. It is also pushing some immigrants to leave the country voluntarily.

The Trump administration has made a concerted effort to persuade millions of immigrants to self-remove. It has paid for TV and radio ads urging them to “leave now” or be captured. It has repurposed an app originally designed to facilitate legal entry into a tool for immigrants to notify the government that they are leaving.

In Martorano’s case, he didn’t want to remain in the country a day past April 2, the date his and his wife’s TPS expired. Even if they weren’t deported, overstaying would subject them to a ten-year bar from reentering the country.

But where to go?

Venezuela was “not an option,” Martorano said. Despite Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem’s assertion that “there are notable improvements” in Venezuela that allow nationals to go safely home, the administration’s own report describes the country as a crisis-stricken nation plagued by human rights abuses and “widespread poverty and food insecurity.”

Martorano’s mother, who still lives there, told him on the phone, “Son, please don’t return to Venezuela. Don’t come. Don’t.”

They considered living in Mexico near the border, where they could drive to their church in Laredo and keep close to the place where three of their four children were born. But the wait for a visa was too long.

They settled on Europe. Martorano, who is ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), said they’ll live in Italy for a year, then he hopes to apply for a religious-worker visa and return to pastor his church in person. (The pastorate, like many US industries, faces a labor shortage.)

But the government’s immigration policies have become unpredictable. Late Monday, days after Martorano and his family landed in Europe, a federal judge in San Francisco blocked the president from revoking deportation protections from Venezuelans. Meanwhile, Martorano is also applying for his US residency, but he’s heard that the administration is discreetly pausing some green card applications.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Martorano said in Spanish on a Zoom call from Madrid.

On paper, he is still the pastor of Iglesia La Vid—the church’s lone staff member. The 57-member congregation, almost entirely Mexican American, is financially supporting the Martoranos while they’re abroad. It helped pay for plane tickets and other moving expenses.

For now, La Vid plans to survive on a rotation of guest preachers until the family returns. The church has done it before: It lost its previous pastor to cancer, and members searched for two years before finally finding Martorano.

The Gordon-Conwell study warns that the administration’s immigration crackdown “may have devastating consequences for particular congregations. In some cases, if the pastor is deported, the congregation may be unable to find a new leader.”

The PCA has wrestled with how to support its churches that have undocumented members. In February, the denomination apologized after its refugee and immigrant ministry posted information advising migrants on their legal rights and how to protect themselves from immigration agents—a practice that has become common at immigrant congregations across the country.

On Martorano’s last Sunday at La Vid, he told attendees that God was the true pastor of this church. That he takes care of his sheep. That everything would be okay.

“They were very, very sad,” he said. “It’s a blow to the church.”

Martorano said he is not angry or bitter. He makes sense of their situation by leaning heavily into the Reformed church’s emphasis on God’s sovereignty. “It’s God who decides all things,” he said.

His perspective is born of his own story. Martorano came to faith in Venezuela at age 30, after seeing the movie Fireproof and succumbing to an inexplicable desire to read the Bible.

He was taken by surprise when Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids accepted him as a graduate student and offered him a full ride. And it was completely unexpected when Iglesia La Vid called him from Michigan to be its pastor three years ago.

Of course, it’s devastating to have to leave all your belongings and everything you’ve been building for nine years, Martorano said. But “when God sends afflictions, it’s so that we would desire the heavenly city, right?” he said. “So that we would not feel too comfortable in this world.”

The Christian life, Martorano said, is about redemption. He likes to tell people, “The gospel is good news that begins with bad news.”

Andy Olsen is senior features writer at Christianity Today.

- More from Andy Olsen

Ideas

Vandalism Is Not Righteous Resistance

Justin Giboney and Chris Butler

Contributor; Contributor

Christians should oppose evils and errors in our society, but we are called to more than mere resistance: vision, tenacity, grace, the proclamation of the gospel.

Koshu Kunii / Unsplash / Edits by CT

Teslas are burning in the streets.

For Americans, cars—and these cars in particular—were once symbols of innovation and modernity, but now they’ve become an outlet for frustration and disillusionment. The shift feels emblematic of a broader breakdown in our society, a loss of civility, trust, and commitment to the common good.

Christians should stand apart from that trend. Yet even many Christians seem to be cowed by this climate of public discord and political upheaval, not least from the Trump administration and its key adviser, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Christians may not be burning Teslas, but neither are we particularly known in this moment for credible action and a gospel-grounded hope.

On January 24, 1874, Richard H. Cain—a pastor, abolitionist, newspaper publisher, and congressman—stood ten toes down on the floor of the US Congress advocating for the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Cain represented a people who had technically been emancipated but were not fully free. More important, he spoke as an ambassador of a God who demands justice and order.

Opponents of the bill denied the humanity and equality of Cain’s people—a people these critics believed were unfit to uphold the American ideal and ineligible to pursue the American dream. And Cain had two obvious options for his response: He could run and hide, protecting himself and his career but abandoning the civil rights legislation he knew was needed. Or he could react with rage and hateful reciprocity, venting his animosity but losing the audience he needed to persuade.

Cain had every reason to succumb to fear or indulge his anger, but he knew neither would best advance his cause or faithfully serve his God. So instead, he discerned a less obvious but more excellent way. He responded with tenacity and grace, fiercely demanding justice while exuding moral imagination and maintaining his moral authority.

Rather than offering a broken word of retribution, Cain waxed redemptive on God’s purposes for this country. “I believe Almighty God has placed [the] races on this broad theater of activity, where thoughts and opinions are freely expressed … where we may take hold of every truth and develop every art and science that can advance the prosperity of the nation,” he said, and to “develop this great idea that all men are the children of one Father.”

Cain’s words cast a moral vision far beyond the conflict of the moment. Instead of offering bitter fruit born from justifiable anger, Cain offered a reconciled, purposeful path forward.

Christians today face a similar choice. As frustration mounts with political actors in high places, will we retreat into fear or lash out with unbridled anger? Or will we choose Cain’s path of tenacity and grace?

To “develop every art and science that can advance the prosperity of the nation”—Christians of the past took that task seriously. They did not merely debate education and health care policies; they founded school systems, both private and public, and built much of the health care infrastructure that still benefits us today. They matched words to deeds, faith to action (James 2:14–17).

When the US struggled to throw off the shameful legacy of Jim Crow, the church led the Civil Rights Movement on the same ground where we stand today, advancing a prosperity more significant than any material gain. And like Mahalia Jackson singing sweet spirituals in front of the 36 columns of the Lincoln Memorial, this work testified to the goodness of God and to the nature of his kingdom.

The gospel isn’t dead words or idle theory. It is not a spiritual philosophy with no effects on the world God made. For the heroes of our faith, spiritual conviction yielded righteous action (Heb. 11). It must yield the same in us.

We can’t hide or resort to public temper tantrums for the next four years—and we shouldn’t settle for such small, pedestrian responses anyway. The legacy of our faith calls us toward something greater.

Consider our country’s escalating crisis of literacy. The church must not ignore the problem or passively wait for some external savior or aimlessly lash out against perceived oppressors outside our communities. We can reclaim our long tradition of innovation and activism around literacy and work tirelessly for measurable change. Raising literacy rates by, say, 25 percent in underserved communities is a concrete, achievable, and worthy kingdom goal. Will we work toward that end? Or will we give in to social paralysis or fruitless cynicism, rage or hysteria?

Seriously: Are you upset about the dismantling of the Department of Education and unable to do anything to stop it? Don’t sulk. Go teach a child to read.

This is not a glib suggestion. The work the church would do and the relationships thousands or millions of Christians would build in pursuit of a literacy goal on that scale would change this country. Such work would itself be a source of resistance to trends of discord, chaos, and distrust. It would be a choice of vision over vandalism. (We are undertaking this very work through the And Campaign in the Atlanta metro area.)

And that choice is vital, because resistance to evils and errors in our society is necessary, but it’s not enough for disciples of Christ. When we lose in seminal elections (or in any other consequential matters in life), we can start to feel helpless and insecure, and we often want to put up a fight—any fight. But not all fights are prophetic or productive. Some are destructive and make things worse.

Beyond resisting, then, we must also seek to build and redeem, to imitate Jesus and the good work of the saints who have gone before us. This is not a time for timidity or retribution but tenacity and grace. The church’s voice cannot be silenced by fear and lost influence or screaming with rage. We must speak boldly, reclaiming our role as humble but determined innovators, powerfully serving our neighbors, and proclaiming Christ’s kingdom.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of And Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the author of the forthcoming book Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around: How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us out of the Culture War.

Chris Butler is the director of Christian civic formation at the Center for Christianity & Public Life.

Ideas

Friendship Doesn’t Just Happen to You

Justin Hampton

A “friendship recession” is no time to wait for friendships to develop from hobbies or happenstance. The Bible assumes more intentionality.

Traveler Stories Photos / Pexels / Edits by CT

What does it mean to be a friend? Any kid on the playground could give you some idea: A friend plays with you, shares Rice Krispies Treats when your mom keeps sending apples, keeps your secrets, and joins your projects. And, Rice Krispies Treats aside, that idea of friendship would be profoundly similar to the scriptural framing of this relationship as a source of good counsel, companionship, and unselfish aid.

I was eight years old when I first bestowed the honorable title of “best friend” on a new neighbor. My family had moved to his block from across town, and I’d started biking my new neighborhood daily, exploring and looking for other kids my age. I wanted a friend.

Finally, I met Earl. He lived a few doors down, and we had so much in common: Earl had an older sister who bossed him around. I had the same. He liked to go outside, ride his bike, and play two-hand touch football. So did I. And though he was slightly shorter than me, we were both in the third grade. Best friend boxes: officially checked.

In a matter of weeks, these superficial similarities coupled with a rapidly growing trust between us. We proved ourselves to each other, even when our interests diverged. Earl was happy for me if my team won its peewee football games, and I was equally excited for him when he got a new Nintendo cartridge. Maybe we couldn’t have articulated it, but we wanted the best for each other, and we understood that each friend’s victories were somehow shared. These days, three decades into friendship with Earl, I’d call it a desire for collective righteousness and well-being.

But these days, I don’t see that kind of friendship so often. As I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed a dearth of such relationships—and particularly newer friendships—in the lives of my peers, including fellow Christians. And I’m not the only one to notice; research shows our society is in a long-term “friendship recession.” We’re losing touch with old friends and failing to make new ones.

I don’t want to minimize the gravity of this shift. Yet thinking back to the start of my friendship with Earl, I’ve wondered: Are adult friendships really that much more difficult to establish? Or are we making it artificially difficult by having the wrong expectations of friendship itself? Perhaps our criteria have moved too far from what we would’ve said as kids and not close enough to what God tells us about friendship.

For a better and more biblical model of finding and becoming good friends, we could start with a story about King Solomon that offers a stark contrast to our supposedly sophisticated methods of forming friendships.

Just after an encounter in which the Lord endowed Solomon with unparalleled wisdom and discernment to rule (1 Kings 3:3–14), Solomon made several delegations of authority within his kingdom. He designated priests, secretaries, generals, governors of provinces, and household managers. He also appointed a man named Zabud, a priest, to an official governmental position that many translations simply title “friend” (1 Kings 4:1–5).

In this decision, Solomon gave the same weighty consideration to choosing a friend that he gave to selecting those to carry out important government business. He chose as his friend a man who could be expected to provide wise counsel and an understanding of righteousness, of what it means to live a godly life.

This is not the only biblical passage on friendship involving Solomon. In the Book of Proverbs, he speaks of friendship as a relationship of intentionality and even authority. Friendship in Proverbs doesn’t seem to happen by chance, like the organic childhood connection Earl and I had just from being the same age and in the same place.

Instead, Proverbs describes what a good friend does and advises deliberately choosing those with whom we keep company (12:26; 22:24). We are to make sure they are wise so as to eventually find ourselves wise (13:20). They are to offer earnest and pleasant counsel (27:9), as well as faithful wounds of correction (27:6). Good friends will stick with us even in hardship (18:24), and we must not forsake them in turn (27:10).

We no longer talk about choosing friends this way—but perhaps we should. Perhaps the days of relying on chance and surface-level commonalities to discover new friendships should be left to the playground. Perhaps we must be as diligent as Solomon in appointing friends and unselfishly becoming good friends ourselves. We can seek out friends rather than waiting for them to manifest through chance encounters.

That doesn’t mean we should reject the chance encounters or the way we built friendships as youth, founding them on some shared interest like Nintendo games or sports. But for Christians, our deepest adult friendships should have a stronger foundation than hobbies and happenstance. That foundation should be a shared commitment to Christ and the expanding influence of the kingdom of God and his righteousness in us.

God gives us grace to be sacrificially loving friends (John 15:12–13), to view others as beloved (1 John 4:7), to encourage others in love and good works (Heb. 10:24–25), to apply Jesus’s teaching that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

A friendship like this will need to be cultivated. We cannot rely on chance to produce needle-in-the-haystack encounters with people who share all our peripheral interests, then sulk because we don’t have enough deep friendships. Failing to deliberately seek out friendship with fellow Christians is an abdication of our responsibility to potential friends—and we simultaneously miss our own opportunities to be blessed by intentional friendship.

In my experience, the most transformative friendships are those in which my friends’ peripheral interests are dissimilar to mine yet we share committed faith in Jesus. Choosing friendship with people who are ethnically, economically, and/or culturally different from myself has been one of the greatest blessings in my Christian life. Forcing me into the discomfort of unfamiliarity, these friendships confront me with the handiwork of God in all his people. They remind me that biblical friendship is sometimes difficult, but that difficulty teaches me to love and be more like Christ.

Jesus sought us out and sacrificially befriended us (John 15:15). Undeterred by our differences, he chose us—and then he commanded us to “go and bear fruit” by “lov[ing] each other” (John 15:16–17). He compels us to imitate his choice to make friends and to make them on purpose, to ride around our neighborhoods looking for Earls with whom we have Christ in common.

Justin Hampton is the author of I’m Hungry and a graduate of Tuskegee University and Harvard Kennedy School. He has a background in real estate redevelopment, youth services, and education reform and currently operates as a business management consultant.

- More from Justin Hampton

News

The Yo-Yo Between Life and Death in Global Health

Emily Belz

Funding canceled. Funding renewed. New documents show the extent of the Trump administration’s historic aid cuts, and the few programs saved.

Rem Abduli holds the wrist of her one-year-old daughter suffering from severe malnutrition in a hospital in Sudan in 2024.

Guy Peterson / AFP

After years as a missionary and then a pastor, Mark Moore started a peanut butter factory in Fitzgerald, a small city in Georgia.

His nonprofit Mana Nutrition makes ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF), a peanut butter–based paste for severely malnourished children around the world. A formulation of peanuts, milk, vitamins, and powdered sugar, it is shelf-stable and comes in a hand-size packet that is easy to distribute.

Malnutrition causes almost half of preventable deaths for children under five. On RUTF, 90 percent of malnourished children recover within weeks.

USAID had contracts with Mana to produce thousands of metric tons of the paste for food crises in places like South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After President Donald Trump came into office, Mana’s contract halted under the 90-day review of all foreign aid, then restarted as exempted “lifesaving aid.”

Then it was fully terminated.

Then restored again.

The dramatic dismantling of US humanitarian aid over the past several weeks has sent organizations on a life-and-death roller coaster. Most did not have their funding restored.

For Christian nonprofits doing lifesaving work, the decisions around what aid programs remain and what programs were cut feel inexplicable.

Nonprofits have had to fire and rehire staff, plead for help from donors for emergency funding, and try to retain trust with local partners who feel betrayed.

“There was no need for the dynamite fishing that we’ve seen over the last six weeks,” said Randy Tift, a USAID veteran who led a series of internal reforms of the agency in the first Trump administration. “This was not well understood by the new team.”

At a recent prayer vigil on Capitol Hill about the aid cuts, Tift—now a senior adviser at the Accord Network, a coalition of Christian relief and development organizations—said bad actors in USAID could have “been easily spearfished” instead.

He lamented “the destruction of effective, irreplaceable American development collaboration, for example, infectious disease monitoring … famine early-warning systems … programs championed by faith leaders that we support to change practices like child forced labor and other kinds of everyday violence against the poor that we know by evidence can be solved.”

After the freeze and review of almost all USAID contracts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently announced the termination of about 80 percent of those contracts, including those for many faith-based groups providing lifesaving aid.

Late this week, faith-based organizations were still receiving notices of termination for their contracts.

“It’s hard to quantify the impact of lost trust with local partners,” said Michael Cerna, CEO of the Accord Network.

A handful of organizations have seen their contracts restored, but even in those cases, the sudden disruption has blown aid infrastructure apart.

Some data systems tracking health aren’t funded anymore, for example. HIV drugs might be funded, but the staff with specialized training to treat HIV complications may be gone. An untrained staff member could do a simple refill of an antiretroviral (ARV) medication but wouldn’t know what to do for an HIV patient coming in with a liver problem.

This week the Trump administration sent a 281-page spreadsheet to Congress detailing active and terminated USAID contracts, as first reported by The New York Times. Overall, 5,341 USAID contracts have been canceled and 898 retained, according to the agency’s memo to Congress, which CT reviewed.

In late February, Mana’s contracts were among the thousands at USAID that received termination notices. That meant Mana couldn’t even deliver the food it had already produced. (Mana is not officially faith based, but Moore describes it as “faith laced,” with ties to the Church of Christ.)

Media attention on Mana’s contract termination led to podcaster Jon Favreau posting on X that Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk was starving children. Musk responded by calling Favreau a name and then said he would look into it.

Shortly after, Mana learned its contracts had been restored, at least through the next few months.

“I felt a sense of survivor’s guilt for us,” Moore said. “The earthquake hit, and we are still standing.”

But even for an organization that got its contract back, turning everything off and on was not easy. Mana works at a large scale, signing contracts with peanut growers and milk suppliers months in advance for shipments to Congo this summer.

The nonprofit is trying to fulfill these renewed contracts while awaiting $20 million from the federal government for work already completed, going back to December.

Though its contract has been restored, payments remain frozen. The skeletal USAID staff that remains is overloaded managing projects, Moore said.

Mana spends $200,000 a day on ingredients for impending shipments, Moore said. He knows he has the less-than-ideal option of getting a line of credit from the bank against the federal contract. The nonprofit’s current contracts run through May.

If the malnutrition contracts go away again, Moore said, “we have a big, amazing facility to make peanut butter—we can pivot and make peanut butter for pets or something not as noble.”

Meanwhile, he’s not sure how all the RUTF (popularly known as plumpy’nut) it’s making will be shipped with supply chain holdups.

He’s had calls with World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse, trying to find ways to stabilize the supply chains in countries where Mana is working.

Other cuts will disrupt Mana’s work in the months ahead. Clinics where doctors would prescribe Mana-produced RUTF are shuttered. USAID funded a famine early-warning system around the world so groups would know where to direct the shipments; it’s unclear if that remains.

Talking about it, Moore couldn’t help but leave his peanut-butter-factory persona behind and resume his pastor’s role.

“The disciples said to Jesus, ‘Send these people away, Lord. They’re hungry—let them buy something in the marketplace,’” he said. “Jesus says, ‘We should feed them.’ … We believe in the marketplace more than our faith, I think.”

Based on CT’s review of the spreadsheet USAID sent to Congress, the many faith-based organizations that saw contracts terminated included groups providing HIV/AIDS treatment through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), tuberculosis treatment, malaria treatment, and other general health care.

All of USAID’s grants for American Schools and Hospitals Abroad were canceled, some of which went to Christian hospitals like Cure International.

Tuberculosis funding was cut by 56 percent, and malaria by 36 percent, according to analysis by the Center for Global Development (CGD). Sectors like family planning, higher education, infrastructure, water supply and sanitation, and maternal and child health were almost entirely zeroed out, according to CGD’s analysis.

Among the contracts terminated was a large tranche of funding for the Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau’s HIV care and treatment. One African source told CT some mission clinics in Uganda have closed as a result.

Ukraine, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo experienced the largest cuts in aid, according to CGD. Liberia had the largest cut as a percentage of its economy.

Experts CT interviewed could not discern a rationale for which programs the administration cut or preserved.

In Nigeria, a large tuberculosis treatment program was saved. In the Philippines, where tuberculosis is a serious problem, its treatment program was zeroed out.

The administration sent a memo in late February asking for explanation from grant recipients about how their US-funded programs meet three criteria: making America “safer, stronger, and more prosperous.” The memo says the goal is to enhance “sovereignty over globalism” and prevent “a global welfare mentality.”

Grant recipients have to affirm certain protocols, like that they are following the Mexico City Policy, that they have anti-trafficking policies, and that there are no “DEI elements” or “environmental justice” elements in a project. They also must state whether their projects include plans to transition away from foreign assistance in the next five years.

Organizations didn’t know if their answers to those questions played any role in grants being renewed.

It remains an open legal question whether the executive branch can unilaterally terminate funds, but a Republican-controlled Congress has so far not challenged Trump’s decisions to stop funds. The issue of the Trump administration’s shuttering of USAID is still working its way through the courts.

A smaller group of faith-based organizations had USAID funding restored. The roller coaster has been exhausting even for them.

Partners in Hope, a vital Christian medical center that reports it oversees HIV treatment for 207,000 patients in Malawi, lost its PEPFAR funding in the administration’s across-the-board pause in USAID funding when Trump took office.

A month ago, Partners in Hope received notice that after the review, its contracts had been terminated. The hospital had to lay off 1,100 members of its staff, a devastating blow.

African Mission Healthcare, a foundation with deep ties to the hospital, stepped in with cash support to keep the main hospital’s HIV clinic for 5,700 patients open.

Then, this week, Partners in Hope’s contracts for care and treatment of HIV patients were restored. The medical center will try to start the complicated process of rehiring staff when the funding starts again.

“We’re gratified by the fact that the US government sees the value of Partners in Hope and this type of care. It has been a roller coaster up and down, and now we hope the funds flow quickly,” said Jon Fielder, a longtime HIV doctor who leads African Mission Healthcare (AMH). “We hope all these care and treatment grants get activated. AMH had to step in to keep the clinic open, but other clinics did not have partners.”

Other organization staff noted to CT that firing and rehiring staff is complicated country to country—navigating taxes, severance, and local laws. In some countries the laws require a full year of severance, meaning the nonprofit might have to pay one salary and hire another worker to do the same job if its contract is restored.

PIM, a Christian maternity clinic in Côte d’Ivoire treating thousands of mothers and children with HIV, is another organization that received a full termination notice in late February.

Kip Lines, head of Christian Ministry Fellowship (CMF) International, the US missions organization that supports PIM, said his heart sank when he saw the termination. The contract was supposed to go through September 2028.

Like many other groups, after the pause and then termination, the Ivoirian organization was scrambling to find ARVs to continue HIV treatment. CMF International started fundraising from US donors for ARVs but didn’t know how long emergency donations would last.

Then this week, PIM’s PEPFAR funding was restored through September of this year. Lines thanked individuals and churches in a Facebook post for helping them continue care for the two months when funding was cut off.

“Please continue to pray for those in our government who are evaluating and making decisions about which programs are being funded,” Lines wrote on Facebook. “I know that many programs will not receive this good news that we have received.”

Two months into the aid freeze, with ongoing uncertainty, clinicians told CT they see this month as critical for global health nonprofits whose funding has been cut. Staffs are gone, supplies are dwindling, and money from emergency fundraising appeals might be fading.

Mana, meanwhile, isn’t sure when it will be paid and whether its RUTF will reach the intended mouths. But it now has peanut butter paste for malnourished children heading to South Sudan.

“We’re determined to weather the storm,” said Moore. “But it is a big storm.”

Additional reporting from Harvest Prude.

- More from Emily Belz

News

US Refugee Ban Halts a Pakistani Christian Family’s Resettlement

Angela Lu Fulton

A Texas church has funds and furniture ready for the family members, who had been stuck in Thailand for more than a decade.

A Pakistani Christian asylum seeker and her family staying at an apartment in Thailand.

Romeo Gacad / Getty

Omar, a Pakistani asylum seeker in Bangkok, remembers the moment he fully understood the precarious nature of his situation. He was 16 and riding his bike home from church when Thai police officers picked him up, stuffed him in a taxi, and brought him to a detention center. For seven hours, Thai officers interrogated, slapped, and humiliated him.

Omar had escaped Pakistan, where his family was persecuted for associating with Christians, at the age of nine. His family went to Thailand, the closest country where they could easily get visas, but overstayed their visas as they sought refugee status at Bangkok’s office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). They hoped for a chance to one day resettle in a different country. As they received help from Christians, the family converted from Islam to Christianity.

Pakistan is the eighth most dangerous country for Christians, according to the 2025 World Watch List. Violating the blasphemy law could lead to a death sentence. In 2023, thousands of Muslims set fire to four churches and vandalized the homes of Christians over claims that two Christians had desecrated the Quran.

For the next 13 years, Omar’s family shared a 15-by-17-foot room, navigating the challenge of being unwanted guests in the Southeast Asian country. Thailand is not a signatory of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, meaning refugees and asylum seekers are treated as illegal immigrants until their resettlement. As a result, Omar’s father spent years in the city’s notorious Immigration Detention Center for holding an expired visa. Christianity Today agreed not to use Omar’s real name or details about his family due to fears of detainment and questioning by police.

Police eventually let Omar go, yet the subsequent COVID-19 lockdowns and the terror of being caught by police kept him from stepping out of his home for the next three years. “I got PTSD. … I was so afraid,” Omar said. “What if they come? What if they see me? What if they’re downstairs?”

He contemplated ways to end his life and prayed that he wouldn’t wake up the next morning. As he had stopped going to school, he idled away his time playing video games and contemplating his life. He had nearly lost all hope when an American woman from his church came to his family’s home to pick up some sewing from his mother. With her help, he began to step back outside—working out at the gym, finishing his GED, and returning to church.

Across the world in a small town near Amarillo, Texas, Mike and Kathie Jackson had spent the past 11 years financially and emotionally supporting Omar’s family and seeking ways to help them get to a safe country. Since befriending Omar’s father while visiting their daughter’s family in Bangkok, they have partnered with Freedom Seekers International (FSI), an organization that seeks to rescue persecuted Christians. They’ve written to senators and the US State Department, contacted agencies, and even helped Omar’s family apply to resettle in Canada.

Yet none of these avenues have worked. Omar’s family faces an additional challenge: While they initially received UNHCR refugee status, several years later the organization revoked it after disputing the details of the family’s claim.

Last year, when the State Department began allowing US citizens to form local sponsorship groups to help specific immigrants resettle in the US through the Welcome Corp, the Jacksons immediately applied. With the help of their church, First Baptist Church Canyon, they raised $2,500 per member of Omar’s family, filled a garage with donated furniture, and talked to community members about hiring Omar’s father and sending Omar and his siblings to West Texas A&M University. FSI would help fund an additional three months of the family’s resettlement after they arrived. In June, their application was approved, and all that was left was for the family to wait for an interview in Bangkok before they could arrange a flight to the US.

But in January, the Trump administration suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program and, a month later, terminated the Welcome Corp program.

“Our hopes got shattered again,” Omar said.

For other persecuted Christians FSI is trying to help, Trump’s pause on refugee resettlement has had even more dire consequences, including for 50 Afghan Christians whom the group is moving from safehouse to safehouse in Pakistan to elude authorities who would deport them back to Afghanistan.

At the same time, FSI has also been working to help 100 Christians from Central Vietnam who have escaped to Bangkok get resettled in the US. Five of these families from the Montagnard ethnic minority had sponsors and, like Omar’s family, were going through the Welcome Corp process to be resettled in East Texas.

“We’ve already submitted [applications],” said Deana Brown, founder and CEO of FSI. “We have funding. We have places for them to live. We have vehicles. … Everything’s ready. We’re just waiting for the program to run.”

But then on February 23, Thai officials arrested a group of Montagnard Christian refugees in Bangkok as they attended a memorial service organized by the wife of Y Quynh Bdap, Montagnard activist and founder of Montagnards Stand for Justice (MSJ). His extradition case is going through the Thai court system. The Vietnamese government labels MSJ a terrorist group.

In the group of arrested Christians, three families—a total of 16 people—were part of FSI’s cases.

Currently, the Thai government is holding 48 Vietnamese Christians in Bangkok’s Immigration Detention Center, according to Tim Conkling, an American missionary who partners with FSI.

The center suffers from “severe overcrowding,” a 2024 report found, while former detainees report abuse, lack of hygiene, and limited health care. Among the Vietnamese detainees are four children, an elderly couple, and three pregnant women—including one who gave birth in the detention center on March 22.

Since these Christians’ detention, a local church agreed to raise bail money, which costs about $1,500 per adult, for 23 of them. FSI worked to raise bail for the rest of the group, and the Center for Asylum Protection, which provides legal support for UNHCR refugees, is facilitating the applications of the guarantors for the refugees and the payment of the bail money.

Beyond bail money, the groups also need to provide money to support the refugees since they won’t be able to work—if they are caught working illegally, they will be thrown back into the detention center, and the bail money won’t be returned.

This week, FSI and the other groups were able to raise the bail money for all 48 individuals. Now the groups are waiting for their guarantors’ paperwork to be accepted and the refugees to be released.

Brown, who voted for Trump, said she believes the administration is making these changes to the government “to get a better hold of what [the US is] doing as to be the most productive and the best for all around.” But at the same time, she’s disappointed in the ending of the refugee program and believes the government is “doing stupid.”

Some believe the Trump administration’s apparent lack of concern for international human rights and refugees has led Thailand to give in to the demands of neighboring countries like China. In late February, Thailand deported 40 Uyghurs back to China, where the ethnic minority is severely persecuted, despite protests from the US, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Conkling believes the Vietnamese Christians’ arrests may be the result of current geopolitical conditions and the potential for a windfall for local authorities from the bail money.

“It looks to me like a financially motivated raid …[that] was furthered by the fact that the Thai government knows now that the US ain’t going to be there to help refugees,” he said.

Since Welcome Corp ended, the Jacksons and members of their church have sent letters and petitions to their senators, their congressmen, and Rubio to get Welcome Corp started again so they can bring Omar’s family to the US..

“We have seen the harm and what’s happened with all the illegal immigration,” Kathie Jackson said. “But the more you disapprove of illegal immigration, the more you should push and approve legal immigration.”

The Jacksons believe Welcome Corp was the best program available to refugees and asylum seekers. It’s cheaper than Canada’s resettlement program, the refugees go through vetting, US citizens sponsor the refugees and raise their own funds—at no cost to the government—and communities come alongside the newcomers. “People [have] invested and have raised funds, and they’ve prayed over it [and] provided furnishing,” Mike Jackson said. “There’s a lot going on in the community to try to make this happen.”

Recently, Omar said his friend’s dad, another Pakistani asylum seeker, died from a heart attack on the way to the market. It made Omar realize the futility of his life in Bangkok. “There’s just no life for us here,” he said.

Omar said he is hanging on to Isaiah 60:22, which says, “At the right time, I, the Lord, will make it happen” (NLT). He adds, “I hope it happens fast.”

“I can’t give up,” Omar said. “I’ve come a long way. I’ve been through a lot of suffering [and] hardship in my family. But I’ll try my best to do the best with my life.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article had the wrong last name for the Jacksons.

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

related

related

related

Share

Related

Share

related

related

related

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related