Southern Baptists Abandon Abuse Database

The Executive Committee’s major focus is now recouping $3 million in legal fees related to the crisis.

Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee president Jeff Iorg

Bob Smietana / Religion News Service

A proposed online database that would list the names of abusive Southern Baptist pastors is now on hold, with no names likely to be added to the website by the denomination’s annual meeting this summer.

Instead, Southern Baptist leaders working to address abuse in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination say they will focus on helping churches access other databases of abusers and training churches to do better background checks. However, the so-called Ministry Check database, which was a centerpiece of reforms approved by Southern Baptist messengers—or local church representatives—is now on the back burner.

“At this point, it’s not a focus for us,” Jeff Iorg, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, told reporters at a news conference Tuesday during the committee’s annual meeting in Nashville.

The proposed database has been derailed by denominational apathy, legal worries and a desire to protect donations to the Southern Baptist Convention’s mission programs, RNS previously reported.

Sexual abuse survivors have been advocating for a database of abusers since at least 2007, when ABC News’ 20/20 published a report on abuse among Southern Baptist pastors. The Executive Committee rejected the idea in 2008, but it resurfaced in 2021 after a Guidepost Solutions investigation found Southern Baptists had long downplayed the issue of abuse in the denomination and mistreated abuse survivors who tried to raise the alarm about the issue.

That led to initiating reforms, which were to include building education for churches and creating the Ministry Check database. For years, an SBC task force charged with implementing reforms said the database would soon go live, once concerns about finances and legal issues were overcome.

A website for SBC abuse reform, which SBC leaders called “historic” when it was launched in 2023, included a link to the Ministry Check website. However, no names appear on that site.

“Coming soon, Ministry Check will provide leaders with the ability to search for information about individuals who have been convicted, found liable or confessed to abuse,” the website reads.

The delay in adding names to the database, among other delays, led some advocates to wash their hands of the SBC’s abuse reform efforts.

“Accountability is illusion and institutional reform is a hall of mirrors,” wrote Christa Brown, a longtime advocate of SBC reforms, and other abuse survivors in a recent editorial.

Iorg did not rule out future work on the database but said it would not happen soon. Jeff Dalrymple, who was recently named to head up the SBC’s response to sexual abuse, also said he would not rule out future work on a database.

A now-disbanded task force charged with implementing the SBC reforms, including the database, started a nonprofit last year called the Abuse Reform Commission. However, its proposal for funding was rejected by the heads of the mission boards.

Earlier in the meeting, Iorg outlined a set of priorities for responding to and preventing abuse, including providing more training for churches and working more closely with the denomination’s state conventions of churches. He also gave thanks for Dalrymple’s new role, which he said would help move the reforms and response to abuse forward.

Iorg said more data was needed about the scope of abuse in the denomination and steps churches are taking to prevent it and respond when it happens.

A 2024 report from Lifeway Research, which is owned by the SBC’s publishing house, found that only 58 percent of churches did background checks on those who work with children; those checks are considered one of the essential steps in abuse prevention.

Dalrymple, who was previously executive director of the Evangelical Council for Abuse Prevention, a nonprofit that addresses abuse, said helping churches deal with abuse was part of his calling in life.

The news the database has stalled was both disappointing and expected for abuse survivors Jules Woodson and Tiffany Thigpen, who have long advocated for reforms. Both said that because the SBC does not oversee its pastors and because abusers only make it onto criminal databases after convicted, a list of abusive pastors is necessary.

After years of delay, Thigpen said at least survivors have an answer about the future of the database.

“I’m just glad it was said out loud,” she said. “So now we are off the hook for hope.”

Thigpen said Tuesday’s meeting felt like the end of an era for survivors who have pushed for reform and that SBC leaders have moved on. But she said that even though the database seemed doomed, Southern Baptists can no longer say abuse is not a problem.

Woodson said the move away from a database showed the will of church messengers doesn’t matter in the end. Southern Baptist leaders, she said, will do what they think is best, no matter what anyone else says. She compared the SBC abuse issues to a house on fire—and instead of calling the fire department, Southern Baptists asked a board of directors to put the fire out. That left them standing around with buckets while things burn.

“They should have called the fire department,” she said.

The cost of dealing with abuse was also on the minds of Iorg and other Baptist leaders meeting in Nashville. Legal costs from the Guidepost investigation and the abuse crisis generally have totaled $13 million and drained the Executive Committee’s reserves. On Tuesday, Executive Committee members recommended a 2025 budget for the denomination’s Cooperative Program that includes a $3 million “priority allocation” for legal costs.

That allocation will have to be approved by SBC messengers this summer at the denomination’s meetings in Dallas and will likely be controversial. Cooperative Program funds from churches are used to pay for missionaries, seminary education, church planting and other national ministries—and previous attempts to tap SBC’s Cooperative Program funds to address the issue of abuse stalled.

So far, SBC abuse reforms have been funded by an initial $4 million from Send Relief, a joint venture of the SBC’s International Mission Board and North American Mission Board. No permanent funding plan is in place.

Iorg said the “priority allocation” has been the subject of vigorous debate and called it “the most palatable of a lot of bad options.”

He also said the messengers to past SBC meetings authorized the investigation into abuse, and the legal cost is part of the consequences of that decision. He noted the Executive Committee is actively trying to sell its building, which could help with legal costs.

When asked if he regretted past decisions that led to the costs, Iorg said addressing abuse was the right thing to do, though he wished Southern Baptists had found a way to do it that was not as costly or disruptive.

During the meeting, Southern Baptist leaders also removed two churches from the denomination—one in California over the issue of abuse, and a second in Alaska due to having “egalitarian” views about the roles of men and women in leadership. The SBC’s statement of faith has restricted the role of pastor to men, and in recent years the denomination has become more aggressive in removing churches with women pastors.

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Theology

Be Careful Who You Pretend to Be

Russell Moore

Columnist

You can fake your way to vice but never to virtue.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

American Christian social media lit up last week with the story of another fraudulent influencer. An account claiming to be run by a patriarchy-supporting “trad wife” with 14 children turned out to be that of a single, childless woman with a fake identity and a falsely narrated life.

This case was an especially literal example of a broader truth that ought to serve as a warning in an age of ideological extremism: You become who you pretend to be—but in one direction only. You can fake your way to vice but never to virtue.

The evolutionary biologist Hanno Sauer has written a book, The Invention of Good and Evil, that seems designed to elicit eyerolls from me from the title on. Sauer’s argument is common enough from the reductionist materialist perspective: that morality and immorality, good and evil, don’t reflect anything transcendent about reality but instead show how humans have evolved to cooperate for the flourishing of the gene pool.

Sauer’s analysis is more interesting when he gets to a sociological examination of the last 50 years or so, however. He wonders how, in this cultural moment, people navigate what’s right and wrong. Among other things, he points to the role of pretense.

After a long discussion of broadening views of human rights, including what some refer to as the “wokeness” wars of the past several years, Sauer looks at the global right-wing backlash, especially as mediated through social media. There, he describes a pattern of irony-leading-to-reality that I’ve seen play itself out in a thousand tragic stories.

He asks, first of all, why so many have embraced what would be seen in almost any other age as cruelty of a cartoonish sort. Some of this, he argues, is the desperate search for something against which to rebel.

“In the case of many adolescents, what’s left to rebel against when your former hippie parents don’t have a problem with drugs and premarital sex?” he writes. “Not infrequently, this next step has consisted of swastikas, crude misogyny and confessions of murder fantasies.”

At first, much of this rebellion is played for laughs. “Which aspects of the right-wing backlash were really meant seriously, and which were simply provocation, whether the ends eventually justified almost every means?” Sauer asks. In the beginning, much of it is the latter, “only ever meant ironically, or more precisely meta-ironically: the irony being to leave it unclear what was really meant ironically and what was not,” he writes.

Human psychology, however, does not allow the heart to keep this kind of “vice-signaling” at the level of trolling. “Unfortunately, some people who had been in on the joke forgot that you have to be careful who you pretend to be, because at some point you become who you pretend to be,” Sauer notes. “Many, once they’d shed their ironic pose, became real Nazis or real misogynists (and often both).”

This is especially true, he argues, in a time of “extremism inflation” driven by an attention economy. If you’ve wondered why much of what you see in online Christianity seems to be a direct inversion of the Christian elder—as “temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1 Tim. 3:2–3)—you are not the crazy one.

“Almost every social grouping, both right- and left-wing, has to struggle with the problem of extremism inflation, particularly as those few extremists end up dominating discourse,” Sauer writes. “A group’s ideology inevitably ends up being dominated by the people who represent the most extreme version of that ideology, and beyond a certain point, this extreme version eventually becomes the new normal.” He continues,

Anyone who wants to join the group or move up within it must be able to demonstrate a particular loyalty to the cause, and that usually means escalating this radicalization loop even more. From there, it is only a small step to proclaiming that Kim Jong Un can teleport or that the “Führer” is infallible. Vanishingly few actually believe this nonsense, or indeed that anyone else believes it. But ideological extremism becomes a costly signal, as it is designed to build trust within groups by burning bridges with common sense—and with others—and further consolidating the group’s bonds.

In this way, the vapid advice for people to “fake it until you make it” is actually true. Pretending to be extreme will eventually make the typical person into an extremist. Pretending to see compassion as toxic or fidelity as weakness will eventually lead to an inner life of cruelty and coarseness that matches the outer show.

That’s because the hunger for the pretense is itself already a loss of integrity. Those who mimic the ways of an idol, the Bible says, do, in fact, become like that idol over time (Ps. 115:8).

For this reason, the apostle Paul warns about unconfronted immorality under the cover of church membership: “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1 Cor. 5:6, ESV throughout). What’s normalized is imitated, and immorality that is imitated ultimately becomes real.

It doesn’t work the other way around, though. You can pretend your way to vice but not to virtue. You can wink with irony on your way to hell, but there’s no return ticket.

That’s because integrity and morality and godliness do not come about by outward demonstration. Whitewashing the tomb does nothing to enliven the decomposing corpses underneath (Matt. 23:27–29). Having “the appearance of godliness but denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5) is not the first step to real godliness but the contradiction and desecration of it.

The way to immorality starts with building one’s way up, and you can fake your way to a foothold on that climb. But the way of Christ starts with a recognition of lack—of the kind of empty-handedness that puts away falsehood (Eph. 4:25).

Pretend to be a Nazi long enough, and you will soon find yourself goose-stepping along with the best of them. Laugh at sexual abuse and human trafficking long enough, and you will become a predator.

Those who wink and nod with “Aren’t we naughty?” trolls, thinking they can do so without ever becoming what they pretend to be, enact a sad irony. They seem to think they can create a Christian nation only if the state is coercive enough to make people pretend to be Christians until they are. But the exact opposite is true.

You cannot pretend your way to a changed heart or a renewed mind, much less to Christian maturity. The Spirit doesn’t work that way.

Jesus will ask you what he asks of everyone: “What are you seeking?” (John 1:38). But you will not enter the kingdom of God without a congruence between the heart and the mouth. Admittance to the kingdom is through mercy and grace alone, which come only to those who have given up on earning and achieving (Rom. 10:9–11).

Millennia ago, the Bible warned us of all this. “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith,” Paul wrote to Timothy. “Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions” (1 Tim. 1:5–7).

Be careful what you pretend to be. Pretending your way to hell will take you there—and pretending your way to heaven will take you to hell too.

A sincere faith, a good conscience: These things are not good for clout in a time of extremism inflation. But ask yourself: Is that what you really want?

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Culture

When a Church Breaks

Yi Ning Chiu

My congregation fought and disbanded. Was it all a waste?

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

Jesus Christ lived 33 years on earth and spent most of them in obscurity. It is hard to absorb this fact. The Son of God, entering a broken world, did not use his power to immediately reconfigure it, but chose instead to submerge himself in his circumstances and live as one of us.

He did this so well that many observers failed to grasp the truth of his nature. Most of his life elapsed in ways that must have seemed nondescript; only a few years are recorded. Christ’s biography can read as a few carefully detailed episodes—the birth in a manger, the dazzling public ministry, the Crucifixion and epochal Resurrection—situated at the opposite ends of three sparsely observed decades.

What did Jesus do with all that time? We can only hypothesize. What we do know is that Christ emerged from his undocumented years as a man fully acculturated to his environment. He quoted the literature of his people and observed their traditions. He understood their laws and their contested interpretations.

Whatever else he accomplished, it appears that Jesus diligently attended to the world he was born into, allowing himself to be shaped by a set of religious institutions and governing structures that he understood to be fatally flawed. The Word became flesh, says the apostle John, and dwelt among us (1:14).

If you believe that Jesus is God incarnate, that he entered our reality with both knowledge of its grimness and knowledge of his power to redeem it, his use of time may strike you as odd. His willingness to live alongside others remains one of his most provocative qualities.

I am trying to understand Jesus’ orientation toward his surroundings because I am reevaluating my relationship with his church. My congregation of 13 years recently dissolved in one of those commonplace tragedies that regularly dissolve congregations of every description but are nonetheless singular and life-altering when you are the one involved.

Among the casualties of this dissolution was the racial-justice ministry I led. The process of establishing this ministry had been as contentious and protracted for our congregation as similar situations are for most of our evangelical peers. When acrimonious electoral politics and the slog of pandemic life exposed fissures that had long existed, I began hearing murmurs that this ministry was accelerating the church’s destruction.

People wanted to know if I understood the strain I was causing by asking our community to think about race. Although I had been recruited by church leaders, they also wanted to know if launching this ministry was my act of personal ambition, aimed at seizing control of the pulpit. Was I truly a Christian—or was I a pretender who was working to inject the congregation with my politics? These questions came from people I considered my friends. Some of them became so hostile toward my family and me that I wondered if I was hallucinating our interactions.

Our church leadership, exhausted by the situation, made an executive decision to terminate the racial-justice ministry. I found out about this decision, and about the end of my role, in a public announcement delivered at a Sunday gathering, effective immediately. In the aftermath I texted everyone who had criticized my work to ask if we could talk about what had happened. When a few of my friends responded and asked to meet, I drove over that afternoon. From outside their home, I watched them open their door. After a brief exchange, the door closed again.

The church had also been struggling with other problems. Within a few weeks, its difficulties compounded, and the congregation scattered. My family and I began visiting neighboring churches, trying to decide where to go next. It is hard to return to the church once you’ve seen what it is capable of doing to its members. It is also hard, once you’ve experienced the tenderness and affection that can accrue, to stop trying. In every new place, I am flooded with desire to belong—and with dread of what could happen when I finally do.

I was not planning to look for a new church. When I joined my old congregation as a college freshman, I assumed I would stay for the rest of my life. I had walked in on a Sunday service held in a campus recreation center. The pastor’s message was about shared life as a radical expression of faith and about Christ as one who bridges our differences.

I was moved; I joined the church that semester. I was compelled by its members and by the portrait they painted of Jesus—a Savior who had already transcended all forms of earthly acrimony and was inviting his followers to do the same.

Jesus was the kind of man who could discuss theology with a Samaritan woman in public, demolishing hierarchies of race and gender in an act of civility that rendered a glimpse of the kingdom he was here to announce. He could walk into a temple courtyard and overturn the moneychangers’ tables without apology, then use the newly vacated space to administer healing to the blind and the lame. There was no historically entrenched division he couldn’t overcome, no form of brokenness beyond his ability to repair.

Jesus mesmerized me with his brilliant, difficult goodness. He indicated that a world of conciliation and justice was within reach and that he was preparing his followers to obtain it. He blessed the poor in spirit, the peacemaker, the meek. He said that in his kingdom, the first would be last.

Jesus made the present age tolerable by declaring that another was at hand. To me, this meant I had no obligation to accept the world in its existing state. For the rest of my time in college, I threw myself into campus protests and prayer rallies with equal vigor. After graduation I took a series of nonprofit jobs, working in roles that addressed racial and economic inequities, and volunteered with my church on nights and weekends. Jesus, I presumed, called me to live as a refutation to my surroundings.

I spent five years praying for opportunities to pursue justice and equity work through ministry. When my pastor invited me to consider the racial-justice role, I took it as a divinely appointed gift. When my role ended and my church collapsed, I took it as a blow to my certainty that I had understood Jesus correctly, or at all.

In the Gospels, Jesus heals the sick and turns water into wine. He compels a mob to set down its stones. He is undaunted by the most immutable realities; they become malleable under his hand. These episodes from Christ’s biography are the ones I know best, and they have formed me for most of my adulthood.

In the aftermath of my church’s dissolution, I’ve revisited the Gospels and felt rebuked by how incompletely I’ve studied Christ’s life. These moments of tangible victory do not represent the whole of his story.

Jesus is rejected as vehemently as he is received, feared and resented as much as he is admired. Some rejoice in his ascendance; others plan for his demise. Crowds praise him; later they bay for his blood. He permits this, knowing where it will all lead.

Jesus is arrested and refuses to defend himself at his hearing. He is unjustly sentenced, then crucified. He forgives his accusers. He yields to his executioners. He dies. His authoritative power, so expertly wielded elsewhere, is completely restrained. When faced with a visceral manifestation of human depravity, Jesus allows it to annihilate him.

Evidently, he does not choose to transform every unfavorable circumstance.

As we visit new churches, I think constantly about Christ’s insistence on living among the people who will betray him and about his refusal to escape his captors. I find this newly irritating for reasons I can’t explain.

It is possible I am bothered by evidence of Christ’s willful, deliberate vulnerability. It is possible I liked him best when I believed he would always lead his people to bypass the depredations of ordinary life.

I want to claim that my allegiance to Christ stems from pure high-mindedness, that my passion for justice is an expression of my piety, that everything that happened with my church pained me simply because I cared for it so much. These claims are partially true.

My discomfort with Christ’s self-restraint suggests that I am also drawn to him for other reasons. I’ve taken his goodness and power as evidence that he will always generate the version of reality I long for. Christ healing the sick, Christ cleansing the temple, Christ teaching a Samaritan woman: I understand these stories as signs that he can overpower the effects of physical decay, institutional failure, and racial hatred and that when his followers encounter all these things, they can expect to prevail.

Since my church’s implosion, I’ve soothed myself by arguing that Christ will quickly reverse what happened. Soon, I’ve thought, he will repair us, and we will finish what we started. But in the intervening time, I’ve only seen more churches splinter over justice issues, ranging from their struggles to nurture diverse congregations to their inability to address problems of endemic sexual abuse. I’ve also seen these churches presented with opportunities for conciliation, which few of them have shown interest in pursuing. Now years have passed without these churches, or my own, displaying much evidence of repair.

I suspect that these opportunities for conciliation were Christ’s moments of intervention. Why didn’t he force us to respond? The answer is obvious when I revisit the list of miracles that I’ve admired and considered as revelations of Christ’s coming kingdom: There is no miracle in which Christ wields his power to manipulate human choice.

Jesus gives himself to a world that promises to brutalize him, and all available evidence indicates that he never once retracts himself.

He gestates in the body of a Jewish woman oppressed under Roman rule, and he’s born into an empire that targets infants of his description with state-sanctioned violence. His earliest moments on earth are fraught with hostility; even so, he remains.

He is raised by parents whom he loves, whom he understands will soon be unable to protect him. He absorbs the instruction of his religious teachers, aware that they represent a corroded institution that he will grow up to challenge. He must know that this is a world he will overturn and divide. Somehow, this does not deter him from immersing himself within it, from loving it as it is.

How often is he tempted to despise what he sees? How many times is he halted by occupying soldiers and given a burden to hoist onto his back? How many acts of cruelty are regularly performed in front of him, committed by the people he knows best?

How is it possible for him to know our world without wishing to escape it? What is he trying to tell us with his decision to stay?

Christ delivers an answer to these questions with his last 40 days on earth. Once he is resurrected, he returns to the world that killed him. In the weeks approaching his ascension, he chooses to conclude his time on earth as he began it: anonymously embedded in the rhythms of common life.

The final chapter of John’s gospel opens with Jesus standing alone by the Sea of Galilee, unrecognized by his disciples, waiting for them as they fish. These men, who have not yet apologized for abandoning Jesus to his death, arrive on shore to find that he has already stoked a fire and prepared a meal. Jesus applies himself to the work of serving breakfast and allots himself a few lines of dialogue in which he tells the men to eat.

In the ending of Luke’s gospel, Jesus falls into step alongside two men journeying from Jerusalem to Emmaus, then joins their discussion about everything they hoped for—and were disappointed in—concerning a crucified prophet from Nazareth. He articulates his own interpretation of the Scriptures, explaining why they needed a Savior who would suffer at the hands of a world he had known from its inception. The men listen and invite him to dine with them at their destination. Once they arrive, Jesus seats himself, blesses the meal, and administers the food with his own hands.

The tasks Christ completes before his ascension clarify the nature of his power: The world may kill him, but it cannot deter him. It may alienate him, but it cannot extinguish his essential goodness. The apostle John, who called Christ the Word made flesh, also called him a light shining in the darkness, which the darkness has not overcome (1:14, 5). If Christ’s early days raise the question of what he intended to accomplish with his time, his final days give an answer. He has formed his life into a sign and a wonder. He has lived as a miracle of sustained nearness.

When Christ appeared as only an invitation to transcendence, it was hard for me to envision a path forward within the church. My own church, so devout, so beloved, the recipient of so many hours of labor and care, had still been corroded by the uglier tendencies of the surrounding culture. If Christ’s trajectory led away from the common dysfunctions that no church and no group of people has fully overcome, then following him meant letting the possibility of communal life recede into the distance.

This can sound like a reasonable conclusion. Responding to Christ’s example of radical goodness may consist of shearing off our morally ambiguous entanglements. Yet this choice is not radical enough. Its logic is indistinguishable from the thinking that already pervades our culture.

Most of our contemporary idioms prescribe divestment as a cure for the problems endemic to life with others. Without needing the example of Christ, we can protest or defund the institutions we dislike. We can cut off toxic relationships. We can pull our children out of school. The idea that we should create distance between ourselves and the rest of the world in order to pursue ideals is not revelatory. If the conclusions drawn from a study of Christ’s life are indistinguishable from the conclusions that can be drawn without him, they are not sufficiently considered.

Christ’s life is too singular. It cannot be understood, nor can its effects be approximated, by any logic apart from his own. By most measures, it is a cipher: 30 years squandered, a premature death, a resurrection followed by gestures that seem frustratingly unsuited to God in human form. It is an illegible biography unless you suppose that Christ may have been doing what he promised to do from the beginning—to inaugurate a new reality.

Perhaps that way of being is crystallized in how Christ ultimately identifies himself to his friends. During the early days of his ministry, he frequently declared that the kingdom of heaven was at hand; after his resurrection, he seems to enact this statement by asking the apostle Thomas to place his fingers in his side. The summation of Christ’s message is found in a scarred, pitted body that allows itself to be pierced and returns to offer itself once again.

There is no way of interpreting Christ that justifies walking away from the world. To imitate him is to live with one another in a posture of steadfast, interminable approach.

Ironically enough, my resolve to emulate Christ weakens whenever I come back into contact with his people. My family and I are now attending a new church and taking steps toward conciliation with members of our old one. These interactions are cordial but uneven, making it hard for me to draw a connection between Christ’s acts of loving proximity and whatever it is we are doing when we are together.

The assumption of goodwill that existed between members of our old church is mostly gone. Some of the friendships within that circle have resumed; others have not. I feel a fresh wave of sadness every time I think about what our relationships used to be and what they are now. It is amazing to me that trust between people can be so painstakingly built, then so cleanly demolished. At our new church, lovely and welcoming as it is, I cannot imagine making the same investment and seeing it lost again without concluding that time spent with the people of God is anything but a waste.

Engaging with the church can be so painful that I want to argue I don’t need the church in order to consummate my beliefs. Any group of people will do. This idea falls apart as quickly as it comes together: I know, as much as I want to think otherwise, that I need to go back to the church because it is the ultimate proving ground for all that is conveyed through Christ’s story. If his proximity has a transformative effect, I expect to see it first among those of us who claim to follow him.

Returning to the church is nonnegotiable. Christ’s story is compelling enough to bring me to my knees, but without a through line connecting his biography to ours, it will always seem like an abstraction of goodness, existing in another dimension, incapable of making landfall in our own.

In the mystery of Christ in the Gospels and the mystery of Christ in his church today, I think the apostle Thomas and I occupy similar positions. I look at the church and wonder what, exactly, I am seeing. It is possible that Thomas asks a version of this question when he is confronted with Christ’s resurrected form.

Christ appears before Thomas with a gash in his side and punctures through his hands and feet. How can Thomas discern whether he is seeing a body in collapse or a body that has overcome decay and is passing into glory? Is this body to be mourned or celebrated, buried or embraced?

If the present-day church is the extension of Christ’s body, I can sense the degree to which it has been ravaged. Every church has been pierced, not only by our contemporary disagreements but also by the generational animosities we have inherited. Just so, when Christ presents his body to Thomas, it is mangled with the evidence of all he has suffered.

Yet it is possible for his body to mean more than one thing. I think about this as I remember the friends whose phone call I picked up and whose house I drove to after the racial-justice ministry dissolved. Before they closed the door, I had gotten out of my car and stood at the entrance to their home. I consider this my last interaction with my old church, and it plays in my mind like the ending to a tragedy.

My friends closed their door, and I drove away, but we also briefly faced one another. I had brought them a parting gift, and they thanked me before accepting it. Whatever grievances we could have revisited, whatever disagreements we could have chosen to litigate, we contained them long enough to conduct this exchange.

I could assign multiple narratives to the years spent with my old church, and the harshest ones would all hold a degree of truth. The most obvious would center on our moral frailty and on our community as a locus of mutually inflicted disappointments. The most thorough, however, accounting not only for our own story but for Christ’s, frames our time together not as a failure but as an unfinished gesture.

At the end of his 33 years, Christ’s body tells the full story of his life, of how he is both indelibly marked by our world and resurrected by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps his church is both these things: a reminder of our earthly inadequacy and a definitive sign that a new way of being has arrived. The people of God look like a broken body shuddering toward resurrection.

Our nation’s protracted racial reckoning has not come to a close, and no church anywhere has prevailed over the history we were born into. My friends and I have not resolved any of these problems, which preexisted us and will likely outlast us all.

Against this backdrop, however, even the quiet exchange on my friends’ driveway appears as a weak but unmistakable approximation of Christ’s signature miracle: In spite of everything, we had drawn each other close. The church, profoundly wounded though it may be, was not a waste of our time.If Christ’s nature is a revelation of nearness, for a moment together, we apprehended him.

Yi Ning Chiu writes the newsletter Please Don’t Go. Previously, she was the columnist for Ekstasis, Christianity Today’s creative NextGen project.

- More from Yi Ning Chiu

Ideas

The Risk in Immigration Reporting

Marvin Olasky

On high-stakes, high-interest issues like border policy, journalists of all views may be tempted to distort the facts or even biblical truth. Christians should hold to a higher standard.

Warning signs displayed at the Paso del Norte international bridge linking Mexico with Texas.

Herika Martinez / Getty

The United States is home to about 48 million immigrants today, but media outlets favoring a more restrictive immigration policy report on only a small fraction of them.

Fox News is a good case in point: Night after night, the cable channel headlines a very particular kind of newcomer. “ICE removes ‘foreign fugitive’ wanted in Mexico on rape charge.” “Man allegedly in country illegally accused of murdering elderly partner.” “Jamaican man illegally in US arrested in Florida for sex crimes involving teenager.” “ICE nabs another suspected Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang member.” “Migrant TDA gang member breaks officer’s arm.”

Are all those Fox headlines factual? Probably. In a country of 340 million, it’s easy to bite into a rotten apple. But “just the facts” does not mean “all the facts.” And while it’s hard to know for sure the national immigrant crime rate due to incomplete reporting by 49 states, Texas records for homicide convictions from 2013 to 2022 indicate that “illegal immigrants were 26.2 percent less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide.”

A federal Department of Justice study during the first Trump term similarly found undocumented immigrants in Texas “had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses.” US-born citizens were more than twice as likely as undocumented immigrants to be arrested for violent or drug crimes and more than four times as likely to be arrested for property crimes.

My interest here is not just about those facts. It is also about the responsibilities of the journalist and the Christian.

Journalism is not a neutral art. Reporters learn to feature stories with human interest, and much of what they communicate to their audiences depends on which humans they find most interesting and which stories they find most gripping. A crime tale gets more clicks than a story about immigrants going to church, but those quiet stories are much more frequent. Stories about criminals get more attention than those focused on the overwhelming majority of immigrants who work hard and provide for their families.

This is not only a risk for journalists who want restrictive immigration policies. For those of us who want to welcome immigrants to the United States, the mirror temptation is to write only about exemplary immigrants put in difficult spots by corrupt or heartless officials while ignoring more mundane and diffuse negative effects of large-scale immigration: crowded schools and hospitals, perhaps, or rising rents due to increased local demand, or cultural conflict within local churches. These quiet stories, too, deserve to be told.

In some cases, more troubling than anti-immigrant journalism is the theology and anthropology that underlie it. Hebrews 13:2 is clear: ^“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” The verse refers to Genesis 18, where Abraham greeted and fed three strangers, then realized they were angels. The verse parallels many other biblical injunctions to be hospitable.

Some people dislike that word strangers and suggest we should love only our close-in neighbors as ourselves. But Jesus notes in Matthew 5, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?” (vv. 46–47). We don’t have specific instructions about how to apply this on a national scale in a secular country, but the thrust is clear: Work on it!

However we work that out, Christians especially should rise above the strident and misleading anti-immigrant messages we see in some media, even some Christian publications. Flip Hebrews backward, and you get Fox’s implication: Do not show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to devils without knowing it. Those Fox headlines distort both current facts and biblical truth.

Left unchecked, this backward testament can lead even Christians to dehumanize immigrants in rhetoric—wrongful no matter how right the cause of policy reform. In the December issue of American Reformer, for example, Hillsdale College PhD candidate Ben Crenshaw criticizes Christians who “claim that the image of God in man and human dignity requires a compassionate and welcoming policy toward immigrants” and others in need. He says, “American evangelicals and conservative Christians who have been taught that Christian love and Christlikeness require welcoming all immigrants, no matter their legal or illegal status,” are a “major obstacle to effective immigration policy.”

To disabuse us of that notion, Crenshaw writes in his penultimate paragraph that the imago Dei does not mean humans “possess a raw and innate dignity that confers worth upon all they do or become, and that subsequently demands that individuals and governments treat them with respect.” On the contrary, he says, “more often than not, men degrade themselves and choose to become bestial or vegetative. In these cases, they should be treated as such.”

Those statements open the door wide to seeing ourselves as righteous and others as subhuman—and treating them that way “more often than not.” Crenshaw hastens to add in his last paragraph, “This does not mean that all illegal immigrants are beasts or plants that can be discarded without a second thought.” Not all? 75 percent? 50 percent? 25 percent? 10 percent?

We all sin and deserve to be on the discard pile, but Christ died for us. At first thought, we tend to discard people not in our tribes, but Christ instructs us to think again, then show hospitality and love.

Marvin Olasky is executive editor of news and global at Christianity Today.

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Culture

Captain America’s Human-Sized Heroism

Paul Marchbanks

In the franchise’s latest installment, our hero doubts himself—and marches on.

Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson in Captain America: Brave New World.

All images ©Disney. Editorial use only.

In a recurring dream that dogged my childhood, I took a flying leap into the air and glided a few feet above the ground. As I recall, excitement never quite rose to exhilaration. My floating body moved at a steady height and pace. I didn’t soar into the clouds or careen wildly around rooftops at high speed. I just coasted along until sleep pulled me into the next bizarre scenario.

Why couldn’t my elementary-aged imagination escape the troposphere or break the sound barrier like the tricolored champions then flying out of comic books and onto the silver screen? Were my escapades’ limits the product of inadequate creativity, or was my subconscious—or perhaps my Creator—trying to tell me something?

Whatever your response, conscious or unconscious, to the abundance of superheroes at today’s multiplex, this class of story continues to offer something relatively unique. When we choose to confront the “arresting strangeness” that J. R. R. Tolkien locates in the Secondary Worlds of fantasy, we sometimes glimpse that Evangelium which he finds in exemplars of the genre—a transcendent joy that denies “universal final defeat.”

Today’s creative revisioning of those epic warriors of ancient myth presents modern viewers with at least two options. In the first, the extraordinary actions of characters who suspend nature’s laws offer an occasion to revel in both power and its willing surrender. The heroes put their lives on the line to deliver the endangered, swooping in to rescue victims of malevolence and restoring equilibrium by dint of expert timing and judicious force. We might join them in our imaginations, jeopardizing our safety to save commuters barreling toward a fiery death, preventing tragedy by flying round the world so fast we reverse time, or giving our lives to resurrect the dead.

Spy flicks and war films offer other opportunities to identify with selfless heroism. The superpowered hero, however, adds something more to the equation. Incredible abilities recall biblical incidents, miracles both local and large-scale. Shaping weather like Thor and Storm recalls the parting of the Red Sea (Ex. 14:19–31) and Jesus’ calming of a tempest (Mark 4:35–41), while the healing powers of Arion and Halo echo the Messiah’s erasures of disability and revivification of the dead. When a particularly dramatic rescue manages to illustrate that ultimate fusion of love and surrender (John 15:13), the parallel grows still stronger.

Alternatively, marvelous recovery invites us to associate with the rescued, with the hapless pedestrian saved from a falling building or the oblivious child protected from a speeding bullet. As the most rigorous workouts, healthy diets, and curated personal calendars cannot forestall mortality indefinitely, stories putting human finitude in grand terms provide useful reminders. Physical peril mirrors spiritual vulnerability.

There’s at least one other path through certain superhero movies, one easier to walk when the tales’ exceptional heroes are not superpowered. Without impervious skin, laser-shooting eyes, or the ability to walk through walls, superheroes grow much more relatable, representing something more than themselves. The superpowered Wonder Woman is less an Amazon than she is herself, a swift and strong warrior whose might is matched only by compassion. Batman, on the other hand, relies as much on an underworld reputation as an inhuman monster as he does technology and fighting skill, and Iron Man’s connection to the military-industrial complex he helped revolutionize magnifies the threat he poses to miscreants.

Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World concerns itself with the passing of the baton from the former sort of hero to the latter. It’s a transition from demigod to mortal man, seven films and one TV show in the making.

From the moment Steve Rogers appears beside his future replacement, their differences could not be more obvious. Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014) opens with Sam Wilson in a morning run around DC’s National Mall, his pace obliterated by the current Captain America’s dizzying velocity as he laps Sam repeatedly. As Sam later explains, now outfitted in superhero garb as the Falcon, “Don’t look at me. I do what he does, just slower.” The heroes’ fast friendship and mutual courage do help them take down the bad guys, but the Falcon’s mechanical pinions can be pulled, eliminating his advantage over a normal adversary.

Sam loses his wings again in the series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), a few episodes after he’s relinquished the shield bequeathed him by Steve. Unable to shake the feeling “that it’s someone else’s,” Sam gives up the symbol publicly. Admitting its power, he refuses to believe anyone except Steve deserves to use it. The first supersoldier’s relentless grit while still a scrawny recruit, later magnified by “super serum” and coupled with an unwavering commitment to freedom, has made Steve an icon to many—a godlike figure incapable of wrong.

Sam maintains for far too long that since he cannot be the Steve Rogers, he has no right to wear his sigil or bear his shield. What others see as an honor, Sam considers an impossible standard, a burden he lacks the strength to carry.

It takes someone else stepping into Steve’s buccaneer-boots role for Sam to reevaluate his decision. Like the Galatians Paul berates for distorting the gospel (Gal 1:6–9), the decorated soldier crowned as the next Captain America betrays the principles he’s intended to personify. He sullies the well-known symbol of freedom quite literally, staining it with the blood of a man he kills in an act of rage. Confronted with atrocity, things finally click for Sam. He picks up the shield, slips on a mended pair of wings, and dives into a new film.

Captain America: Brave New World has little to do with the Aldous Huxley novel that gave it its name (besides briefly exploring the allure of medicating emotion), nor does it deliver as incisive a social critique as the three Captain America films that preceded it. It does, however, offer observations surprisingly congruent with a Christian ethic.

Sam uses the shield as effectively as Steve ever did, a mélange of balletic moves and kickboxing techniques helping him propel the disk to devastating effect. It is not, however, the application of force which ultimately wins the day. Sam’s first appearance 11 years earlier introduced him as a grief counselor for military veterans, a former Air Force pilot whose experience with loss granted him insight into others’ trauma. He demonstrated that same understanding at the end of his TV series when he encouraged a friend to actively serve the needy instead of merely pummeling villains and chided a senator for deploying easy labels like terrorist and thug that justify violence in the face of great need.

In his latest cinematic outing, the true climax occurs when the fighting ceases, Sam’s wings broken (again) and his body battered in a way Steve’s never was. In this moment of weakness, he talks down his adversary by lifting him up—reminding him that he can become the better man he seeks to be by stepping back from violence instead of pressing the attack. Sam models a love for his enemy that successfully (and quite literally) transforms the opposition, solidifying his new status as a symbol whose power rests not in any supernatural talents of his own but in the values for which he stands. As his friend Bucky observes, where Steve’s larger-than-life stature “gave people something to believe in,” Sam, a Black, working-class man who carries the hopes of the marginalized, “gives them something to aspire to.”

He doesn’t need superpowers to impact the world. He doesn’t even need to fly. Perhaps God was teaching me in my childhood dream that I don’t need to either. Living in this life as I’m being pulled toward the next, my current role—suspended between two worlds—is to soldier onward at a steady pace (2 Tim. 2:3–4), to never stop moving (Heb. 12:1). Equipped with my own symbol of freedom (Matt. 16:24) and carrying a shield of faith in someone far greater than myself (Eph. 6:16), I seek to remain what Christ named me: an image bearer (2 Cor. 3:18).

Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”

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News

Germans Head to the Polls as Evangelicals Pray for Stability

Ken Chitwood in Germany

Heated rhetoric and divisive questions raise concerns about the fragility of democracy amid US-style politics.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Green Party candidate Robert Habeck, Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, and Alternative for Germany candidate Alice Weidel debate the future of the country.

Michael Kappeler/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Elections in Germany are typically pretty quiet, according to Assemblies of God pastor Timothy Carentz.

Germans are wary of extremism, concerned about propriety, and committed to a principle of political privacy or “electoral secrecy,” which is enshrined in the German constitution. They often don’t put signs up in their yards or get into heated arguments about candidates at the pub.

But this year, following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition in November, things have been more heated.

“We’ve noticed people getting more and more vocal,” said Carentz, an American who runs Rhema Café, a coffee shop and ministry center in Kaiserslautern, in southwestern Germany.

He’s heard debates about the economy, which is floundering, and rise of right-wing nationalists. People are arguing about immigration and asylum policies, the war in Ukraine, high energy prices, and which politicians (if any) can be trusted to help.

The conversations seem more divisive than usual.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen Germans so active, engaged, and opinionated about it all,” Carentz said. “This year, people are putting up banners outside their apartment windows, leaving stickers around town, wanting to hand out brochures and pamphlets.”

Amid it all, evangelical leaders told Christianity Today, they are focusing on God’s love for all people and the value of every human life—unborn and migrant, in Ukraine and the Middle East, and at home in Germany. And they are praying for Germany’s democracy.

The country has been in a lot of turmoil since the three-year-old coalition—made up of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens and the probusiness Free Democratic Party (FDP)—fell apart in an argument over a proposed budget. Under the stress of the recent reelection of Donald Trump in the US, differences over economic policy could no longer be reconciled, and the three parties stopped working together.

Germans will vote in a snap election on February 23. Currently, the SPD is polling at about 16 percent, down about 10 points from its 2021 victory. The Greens have 13 percent support. The FDP is polling so poorly that it may not clear the minimum threshold to get any seats in parliament.

The center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), are on track to win the largest share of the vote. Current polls show that the party that was in power for 16 years under the leadership of Angela Merkel has around 30 percent support.

The CDU/CSU candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has emphasized the need to restrict immigration, rev up the economy, embrace nuclear power, strengthen Germany’s military, and rely less on America. The party’s platform also promises tax cuts, lower electricity costs, and investment in the tech sector.

“You deserve a government that governs our country better,” the platform says. “We know how to do it.”

The CDU/CSU does not seem to know who to do it with, however.

To govern, a party needs the support of at least half the representatives in parliament. The CDU/CSU might be able to form a coalition with the SPD. The center-right and center-left parties have partnered before, governing as a “grand coalition” from 2005 to 2009 and 2013 to 2021.

But both have lost support since then. Back in 2013, the two parties commanded a combined 68 percent of the popular vote. Today they’re hovering around 45 percent in polls.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has seen a surge of support, on the other hand, harnessing anger and anxiety over immigration, climate-change policies, COVID-19 restrictions, and the war in Ukraine, as well as ongoing dissatisfaction with the European Union. The AfD is currently polling second, even after a series of controversies over meetings to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship, and the use of banned Nazi phrases.

The CDU/CSU has been sharply criticized after working with the AfD to pass a nonbinding immigration motion—including criticism in a joint letter from the Protestant Church in Germany and the Catholic German Bishops’ Conference warning against the collaboration. Merz has recommitted to not forming a coalition with the right-wing party.

Several other smaller parties are running as well, including the Left Party, which is polling at about 6 percent, and a new left-wing party named for politician Sahra Wagenknecht, which is polling at 5 percent.

Members of Germany’s independent Protestant churches, called free churches, are not a significant bloc of voters. They’re unlikely to sway the election one way or another. But they have not been left untouched by the political debates roiling the country ahead of the February 23 election.

Konstantin von Abendroth, who represents the Association of Protestant Free Churches at the federal level, told CT that evangelicals are mostly concerned with the same issues that concern other voters.

“I know devout Christians in all parties,” he said. “Pacifists who vote for the Left. Christians who emphasize freedom of lifestyle and therefore vote for the Greens. Christians who emphasize social justice and therefore vote for the SPD. Christians who want to achieve peace through rearmament and therefore vote for the CDU. Christians who are afraid of Muslims and therefore vote for the AfD.”

Some free-church Christians have been drawn to the social conservatism of the AfD—and the kind of social change promised by someone like Trump in America.

“During the election campaign, Donald Trump interested evangelical Christians with some conservative family ethics but, above all, with the economic upturn he promised,” von Abendroth said.

Trump’s seeming delight in chaos and disruption, though, along with his aggressive rhetoric and the demeaning way he speaks about people, makes even the most sympathetic evangelicals a bit leery. Seeing people around Trump, notably billionaire Elon Musk, come out in support of the AfD seems to have prompted a bit of a backlash too.

“I expect that the actions of the current American government will lead to fewer evangelical Christians voting for the AfD,” von Abendroth said.

Frank Heinrich, one of the leaders of the Evangelical Alliance in Germany, said if evangelicals stand out on any issue, it is their emphasis on the dignity of every human as a creature of God.

“In our view,” Heinrich said, “this is the decisive prerequisite for any democratic society.”

Many evangelicals are more concerned than their neighbors about abortion. Terminating a pregnancy is illegal in Germany except to save the life of the mother, but it is currently nonpunishable in the first 12 weeks. The SPD and the Greens, with support from the Left Party, recently proposed decriminalizing abortion in the first trimester.

That may push some Christians to support Merz and the CDU/CSU. The center-right party’s candidate is Catholic and called abortion “an affront to the people” on the campaign. The AfD also opposes state support for abortion.

The proposed decriminalization didn’t advance in parliament, though, despite popular support nationally, including 62 percent of Catholics and 75 percent of Protestants, so it is unclear how pressing the issue will be when voters cast their ballots.

According to Heinrich, German evangelicals’ pro-life commitments also lead them to prioritize certain foreign policy concerns including peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. And they care a lot about sustainability issues. The Evangelical Alliance recently set up a new working group on climate change.

Perhaps the biggest political concern right now, though, is the state of politics itself. Many members of free churches are worried about how heated everything has gotten this election.

“Looking at the United States, there is a lot of skepticism among evangelicals about this style of politics,” Heinrich said.

When the Evangelical Alliance leader attended the National Prayer Breakfast in the US last week, Trump’s speech made him want to hide under the table. The way Trump talks about his political opponents—fellow citizens who disagree with him—was especially concerning, Heinrich said.

And stability feels really important to a lot of evangelicals in Germany right now.

The western part of Germany has only been a democracy for 75 years. And the eastern part of the country only freed itself from authoritarian rule 35 years ago. A thriving, healthy, and free society, where transfers of power are peaceful and people can disagree about the future of the country, is not something they want to take for granted.

“When the chancellor called for new elections, it showed how stable the system is,” Heinrich said. “That’s not guaranteed or always the case. … That’s what we are praying for here—that the stability would not go away.”

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News

Christians Double Down on Evangelism as Thailand Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

James Thompson

Pastors prioritize personal relationships and talking directly with LGBTQ people who show up at their churches.

Couples attend their wedding at a marriage registration event at a shopping mall in Thailand.

Lillian Suwanrumpha / Getty

Choenjuti Buangern’s journey to Jesus started in an unlikely place: an elementary school classroom in Hat Yai, Thailand.

Educational curriculums in the majority-Buddhist country include religious instruction that is often heavily focused on the nation’s dominant faith. However, schools usually devote a few lessons to the world’s other major religions.

One day, Choenjuti’s teacher quoted Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount: “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” (Matt. 5:39).

“Wow, why does he talk like that?” Choenjuti remembered thinking. “I felt interested to learn more about Jesus and Christianity.”

Choenjuti’s interest in Christianity lay dormant for many years. Her family and culture were Buddhist, which heavily influenced her spiritual development.

“Before I was a Christian … I felt that karma would catch up with me,” she said. “I thought, How can I escape this fate?”

One day, an answer came, which Choenjuti experienced as “like an echo in my body” telling her to “come to Christ.”

She called a Christian friend who had previously given her a Bible and asked what she needed to do. The friend directed her to a version of the sinner’s prayer printed in the back of the Bible. Choenjuti didn’t wait: She read the words aloud and directed them to God.

Soon after her conversion, she began looking for a church. At the first congregation she visited, the pastor prayed that the “LGBT people in this world will disappear.” The words shocked her and made her think of the scene from Avengers: Infinity War when the supervillain Thanos causes millions of people to vanish.

Choenjuti was dating another woman at the time. She also had short hair and didn’t wear girly clothes. She wondered if the prayer had been directed toward her and decided to try a different church.

She eventually found her way to Muang Thai Church and came out to its pastor, Vara Mejudhon, the first time she met him. Vara and his church hold a traditional understanding of Christian sexual ethics, but Choenjuti wasn’t that concerned with the congregation’s theological positions. She just wanted to see Vara’s reaction.

“He looked surprised, but he welcomed me to join the church and worship God together,” Choenjuti said.

Over the next two years, Choenjuti developed strong relationships with people at the church and grew in her new faith. As she learned more about Christian beliefs, she wrestled with her sexuality. Why did she feel this way if it wasn’t God’s will?

Finally, she concluded that the deeper relationship with God she desired would require obedience in this area of her life, and she broke up with her partner.

“I felt like God wants me to be pure,” Choenjuti said.

Witnessing Choenjuti’s commitment to Christ encouraged Vara.

“She stood firm in her belief,” he said. “And she prioritized her relationship with God more than her partner’s relationship and her own desire.”

Vara knows how difficult it can be to reach members of Thailand’s relatively large LGBTQ population, especially in a society that has largely accepted same-sex relationships.

As a member of Thai Christian Thinkers, a club which brings together pastors and theologians to create educational resources for the broader Thai church, Vara has helped write a book explaining Christian beliefs on sexuality and advising the church on how to engage LGBTQ people. The group is working on a sequel.

Recent events may increase demand for these materials. Last month, a law legalizing same-sex marriage went into effect. Over 1,800 same-sex couples were legally married on the first day of its implementation.

Thai LGBTQ activists said that their victory was not a foregone conclusion. In 2012, 60 percent of Thais opposed same-sex marriage according to a nationwide survey conducted by the government.

Over the following years, advocates lobbied lawmakers and launched public demonstrations. Thai movies and television shows increasingly depicted LGBTQ relationships. In 2023, another Thai government survey found that 96.6 percent of the population now favored legalization of same-sex marriage.

Varying opinions about same-sex relationships exist within Theravada Buddhism, the religion of the vast majority of Thais. Generally, however, Buddhist leaders have not taken strong stances against the new law.

Instead, “opposition to same-sex marriage was mainly concentrated among Thailand’s small Muslim minority,” noted The Nation, a Thai English-language news publication.

Not mentioned was Thailand’s even smaller Christian minority, which is estimated to make up about 1 percent of the population.

Chatchai Charuwatee, who pastors First Presbyterian Church (Samray) in Bangkok, said that most Thai churches hold a conservative stance on LGBTQ issues, noting that churches submitted a letter of concern to the National Assembly expressing opposition to legalizing same-sex marriage.

However, he said this shift in the law “hasn’t affected any part of the local church that much,” as it is not specifically directed at “religious entities or religious ministry.” He believes the Thai government is generally protective of religious communities and their right to practice their faiths, meaning that the new law will likely not cause legal problems for churches. For example, he doesn’t think a church would face repercussions for refusing to host a same-sex marriage ceremony.

But though he is willing to openly share his convictions on controversial topics when necessary (even appearing on a Thai television show to discuss Christians’ views on LGBTQ issues), Chatchai does not want Christians to become known for debating issues of sexuality in the public square. Like Vara, he prefers to establish personal relationships and talk directly with individuals who are struggling or have questions. This mitigates the risk of misunderstanding and offense.

“I believe that the message of the gospel itself will convict the souls of its hearers and will naturally lead them to want to change their lifestyle if they are LGBTQ individuals,” Chatchai said.

Chatchai recalled getting to know a same-sex couple that was attending another church he had pastored earlier in his career. He thought about addressing their relationship directly but decided against it.

“I don’t think they [would have] listened to me because they would feel like I [was being] a judge to them instead of a friend,” Chatchai reflected. “So I started becoming a friend.”

The couple attended a Bible study with Chatchai for several months. He also began visiting them in their home and learned more about their lives and relationship. Eventually, the two women shared with Chatchai that they had decided to no longer be romantic partners.

“They wanted to end that kind of relationship,” he said. “That was the work of the Holy Spirit himself.”

Preferring personal conversations over public declarations seems to be the norm for many Thai Christian leaders. In addition to his church ministry, Chatchai serves on the board of CGN Thai, a media outlet that produces Thai-language Christian content. It has addressed LGBTQ issues before. But a couple of years ago when CGN staff suggested producing a ten-minute video explaining Christian beliefs on the issue, the board balked.

“We don’t think ten minutes will be enough to explain how we love the LGBT people and how we respond to them,” Chatchai said about the decision.

Chatchai also wants the leadership of Thailand’s three main Protestant groups—the Church of Christ in Thailand, the Evangelical Fellowship of Thailand, and the Thailand Baptist Convention—to steer the conversation on this issue, especially in the wake of the new law. He said it wouldn’t be appropriate for parachurch organizations like CGN to take the lead.

Chris Flanders, a former American missionary in Thailand and now professor of missions and intercultural service at Abilene Christian University, said that there is precedent in the New Testament for the gentle approach to discipleship favored by many Thai pastors.

Of course, Jesus was at times very direct, even harsh, during his ministry. But Flanders said that in some cases, Jesus chose to interact with people in an indirect manner that Thais can more easily relate to, pointing to Jesus’ response to James and John in Mark 10, as well as the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8.

When discussing these different philosophies of engagement, Thai Christians have to remember that their community makes up less than a million out of 77 million of the country’s population, said Chatchai.

“So our focus, our priority,” he said, “should be going toward evangelism rather than trying to debate.”

- More from James Thompson

Culture

Nashville Songwriter Dwan Hill Wants You to Join Choir

Interview by Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

“When you sing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ or ‘Amazing Grace,’ for that three minutes, you are united in heart,” he told CT.

Photo by Tres Cox

On a May evening in 2022, Dwan Hill and a small team of musicians set up music stands, chairs, a piano, and an organ in Columbia A, a studio on Nashville’s Music Row owned by Belmont University. Hill had brought a stack of black folders containing sheets of printed lyrics. Throughout the previous week, he’d watched as the Google form he’d created for this event filled up: 50, 75, 100 people.

They had snacks. They had charcuterie, even. But as the room filled, it was clear that people weren’t showing up for the food; they were coming to sing.

This was the first gathering of The Choir Room, and Hill assumed it would be a one-time thing. But as the night went on, he saw that something about this laid-back model of collective music making was meeting a need.

When The Choir Room convenes, singers gather in the round, with Hill and a small group of instrumentalists in the middle. They learn new songs, working out parts as they go. They clap and sway. Hill conducts the ensemble, calling out lyrics and signaling entrances. There are no auditions, and music-reading ability is optional.

Hill, a Grammy- and Dove-award-winning producer, songwriter, and recording artist based in Nashville, had been missing the community that choir creates. His roots in the Black church and gospel music gave him a passion for singing as both vertical and horizontal, worshipful and communal. He started The Choir Room with a low-key invitation posted on Instagram, curious to see who else might want to get together to sing.

The Choir Room is, first and foremost, a gathering; the monthly meetups aren’t rehearsals or performances. That first session in Columbia A attracted around 100 people. Now, events draw 700 to 1,000 and have featured artists like We The Kingdom, Ben Rector, and Matt Maher. In October 2024, Hill released The Choir Room’s first album, Let’s Have Church (Live). Even so, he says, the product was never the point.

Hill spoke with CT about the origins of The Choir Room and why he thinks choir might be exactly what the church needs today.

You’ve done just about everything in the Nashville music industry: You’re a writer, producer, recording artist, and worship leader. When did you know music was going to be the path for you?

Music is our family trade. Some people grow up playing basketball or watching their family work as engineers or join the military. For my family, it was music ministry. Three generations up are ministers and musicians. My mom is a choir director. My dad played piano and saxophone. My dad had a Hammond organ in the dining room of our house. Who does that?

I fell in love with music at an early age; I remember spending hours playing piano after school. I got into gospel music because of my mom. I had all this early exposure and education. By middle school or early high school, I made a very clear decision that I wanted to do music for the rest of my life. I just didn’t see any other option.

What you do with The Choir Room is a combination of performing, teaching, conducting, and writing. When you imagined yourself working as a professional musician when you were younger, what did you have in mind?

I moved to Nashville to go to Belmont University and major in music education; I thought I would be a high school choir director. I was told that you can have more steady work if you’re a teacher rather than a touring musician. And I’ve always really enjoyed seeing the light bulbs go off for people the first time they understand a musical concept.

But then I student taught and realized that though I love music, I do not love the in-school teaching model. I planned to move to California to get a degree in jazz piano at USC. But I didn’t get in. It was a heartbreaking season for me. I thought, Maybe if I don’t want to teach, music isn’t even my thing. Maybe I’m not as talented as I need to be.

A couple weeks after the rejection, I got called to go on the road with the blues artist Jonny Lang. That completely changed my life. I was on the road with him as his pianist for ten years. Then I met CeCe Winans and traveled with her for a while, and we eventually started a church together. And that’s when I found a new love for songwriting.

Your touring career eventually took a back seat to music ministry, and now you’re doing a little bit of both with The Choir Room. What was the catalyst for this project?

My whole life has been mostly spent in white schools and the Black church. The school I went to outside of Memphis was mostly white, Belmont was mostly white, but my family went to a Black church. Choir, in my childhood, was basically my small group. As an adult, I was missing singing with my friends in a casual, nonperformative setting, just for fun. Choir was where we ate good food and sang together. It’s where we saw God work miracles. We learned the Word of God. We found mentorship. It was basically my little church.

One day I was driving up the interstate in Nashville, and I lobbed up a prayer: “Lord, if you provide an organ and a piano in a nice room, I’ll see what I can do.”

Not too long after, a friend at Belmont offered me a space on Music Row. Suddenly we had a place to do choir.

When did you realize that The Choir Room was going to be more than a one-time thing?

When we got in the room that first time, I could tell that people were hungry for what we were offering. I was also pleasantly surprised by the diversity. Most of those people go to a church that doesn’t look like that room.

Because we sing in the round, you can look across the way and see someone who doesn’t look like you singing the same song—maybe a song that you grew up with or a song that you love.

I started to realize this was bigger than me and the team. This is actually doing something spiritual for the people in the room. They’re finding spiritual fulfillment and community in this space.

What do you think makes this kind of social, choral singing so spiritually powerful?

My favorite verse in Scripture is Colossians 3:16: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”

Of all the things Paul could have encouraged people to do, he chose singing. The truth of God gets into the heart through singing. People aren’t showing up thinking, I’m going to receive the gospel today. But when you experience it, I think you tap into something eternal.

There’s also a communal dimension. Practically speaking, what other time in your day are you speaking or singing the same truth with people with whom you may disagree on a lot of other things?

There’s unity. There’s a coming together and even a reconciliation across cultures and ages and denominations. When you sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” or “Amazing Grace,” for that three minutes, you are united in heart. And, man, if there’s something our world needs, it’s setting aside the things that divide and picking up the things that unite.

As someone with experience in both the Black church and white evangelical churches with music practices that tend to be less choral and more focused on bands and individuals, what do you think the communal singing you model with The Choir Room can offer to churches that some other contemporary forms of musical worship can’t?

I lead worship at Cross Point Church, which is a multisite, majority white church in Nashville. They brought me in explicitly to help lead the spiritual development of the music team but also to help diversify the musical expression of the church. So, I’m in this conversation every week.

When I walk into a church service as a worship leader, I have to constantly remind people, “Don’t close your eyes. You’re not in your private prayer closet. Look at the people around you.”

We know we worship the Lord, but it’s the “together” part that I want to highlight because the setup in our modern buildings doesn’t support togetherness. There’s a stage and audience. There’s a microphone and amplification of one voice. All of that can, in many cases, discourage people from singing.

Have we actually set up our buildings to match our theology, and do we even know what our theology of worship is? Let’s back all the way up. Do we believe that the Word of God should be in the mouths of God’s people? And if so, how do we structure our services? How do we write our songs?

Culture change is difficult and slow. What does it look like to disciple a church into a healthier singing culture, in your view?

At our campuses we have people coming in with coffee cups like they’re spectating the service. I used to look at that and feel like flipping tables. Don’t you know who you’re singing about? But now I see it as a discipleship opportunity. People don’t know what they don’t know.

I try to be practical. I try to pick songs that the congregation knows or can learn very quickly. And I try to give context to songs. So, instead of just saying “Sing along with me” when we did “Way Maker” last week, I said, “Hey, I bet there are people here who are in the gap between your prayer and God answering your prayer. And whether you’re young or old, Black or white, we all know what disappointment feels like. We pray a prayer, and we don’t see God move the way we want him to. But hey, can we all just agree that God will make a way?”

I think even reluctant singers are inspired to sing by the truth of the gospel hitting their broken situation.

Then of course there are the musical things that worship leaders and musicians worry about, like keying songs in the right place so we’re not trying to sing in the stratosphere. Or giving congregations vocal cues like “Okay, let’s sing that chorus one more time.”

I think so many church musicians are inspired by The Choir Room and get excited about the prospect of cultivating a more participatory musical subculture in their communities, but most of them don’t live in Nashville. The singers at Choir Room gatherings are amateurs, but you and many of the instrumentalists who help lead it are professionals. What advice do you have for people who don’t have access to the same resources but want to start moving in this direction?

The beautiful and powerful thing about choir music is that the people who are there, are there. Jesus gave a really great metric; he said “where two or three are gathered.” So that’s enough. You don’t have to sing three-part harmony. You can sing “Amazing Grace” in unison. And that’s as beautiful as a cantata with an orchestra.

I think leaders can disciple their churches into singing where they are. You could do choir with three people in your house. It’s the genius of what God gave us. If you have breath in your lungs, sing.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

How Baylor Is Facing Its Slavery History

Emily Belz in Waco, Texas

The Christian college is building a memorial to enslaved people, despite a national backlash against diversity initiatives.

A rendering of Baylor University's Memorial to Enslaved Persons, which is currently under construction on the school's campus.

Courtesy of Baylor University

Amid the oak trees of Baylor University’s Founders Mall, a beautiful green corridor that stretches down the center of campus, a memorial is under construction. The oaks have their own history as part of a tradition of students planting trees on campus, and now Baylor is adding to the landscape a reminder of some of its darker history.

Going up is a memorial to the enslaved people who helped build the school’s original campus in Independence, Texas. It is slated for completion this year.

Amid national backlash to diversity initiatives and Black history celebrations, Baylor has undertaken new research into its institutional history with slavery and is making changes to its campus.

“Christian institutions have an opportunity because our commitment to justice extends beyond government compliance,” said Malcolm Foley, a Black pastor and historian of lynching who has served on the school’s commission about the memorials and helped lead the design efforts on the memorial to enslaved people. “This is something that we cannot water down.”

The commission’s report narrates Baylor’s history, saying the school came to be when Baptist missionaries from the South began moving to Texas in the 1830s. Texas was still a Mexican state that outlawed slavery, but the Baptists brought slaves and the institution of slavery with them, and Texas became an independent republic in 1836.

Baylor’s first four presidents, as well as 11 of the 15 first board trustees, were slave owners. Wealth generated from enslaved men, women, and children “directly benefited the University,” a history page on the school’s website now states. By 1850, half the population in the county surrounding Baylor were enslaved, according to the commission’s historical research.

Early leaders of the school supported the Confederacy. Rufus Burleson, the school’s second president, was a Confederate chaplain and urged students to join the Confederate army. The school recently moved a statue of him to a less prominent location on campus.

Last fall, the Christian university unveiled limestone blocks with additional historical information placed around a statue of Judge R. E. B. Baylor, a slave owner who founded the school with other Baptists in 1845.

“The Bible explains in both Exodus and John that freedom is central to the Christian life, and we should be transparent about the times in our history when Baylor was an obstacle to freedom,” the school website states.

The memorial to enslaved people will feature words from Exodus 20:2 (“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery”) and John 8:36 (“So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed”).

Baylor leadership and students pushed to address campus monuments to slave owners after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the school leadership formed a commission of students, faculty, staff, board members, and alumni to research the dark parts of its history and consider how it presented that on campus.

In a 90-page report in December 2020, the commission issued recommendations on changing certain campus statues and building a memorial to enslaved people connected to the school. Some commission members are still working on research projects about individual slaves who were part of Baylor’s history.

“Our goal at the outset of this process was not to erase Baylor’s history, but rather to tell the university’s complete story by taking an additive approach as we shine light on the past,” said Baylor board chair Mark Rountree in a statement in 2022 at the start of the reconfiguring of campus monuments.

The scope of the commission’s work—considering campus monuments— was “intentionally narrow,” wrote Rountree in a 2021 note to the Baylor community.

The work on campus memorials has ongoing backing from Baylor president Linda Livingstone and Foley, who is her equity adviser. With his four years on the job, Foley has lasted longer in this role than the average diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officer because of Livingstone’s support, he said. People in DEI positions average three years in higher education, according to a 2016 study.

“Christians had such a significant role in not only justifying racialized chattel slavery but actively pushing it forward,” said Foley. “We have a unique responsibility to not only repent of it but repair the harm actually caused by it.”

This month, Foley has been preaching through Revelation at his nondenominational church, Mosaic Waco, where some Baylor professors and students attend. Mosaic emphasizes being multicultural as part of its mission.

And Foley is watching the growing national backlash to DEI work with dismay.

DEI can have many meanings, but for staff at Christian colleges, it has meant organizing talks about racism, addressing the diversity of staff, or looking at how schools portray racial minorities in promotional materials.

Some DEI objectors worry such initiatives impose a uniform ideology, like removing curriculum that might not conform to certain progressive ideals. Foley is sympathetic to that argument.

“If the stated issue folks have with it is it becomes an office of ideological policing—if that’s going on, that shouldn’t go on,” he said. But he added, “I know folks who have had divisions dismantled who weren’t doing ideological policing.”

As with any efforts designed to change an organization, DEI work can be isolating and unpopular. Foley says his work requires “everyone for it to actually go forward, because it’s culture shaping.”

Baylor’s student population is mostly white, but last year’s freshman class at Baylor had the highest percentage of racial minorities in the school’s history, at 38 percent of the class. Overall minority enrollment stands at 35.3 percent.

In 2021, 50 percent of Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) institutions reported having staff in diversity advocate roles.

Whether that number has changed is unclear. Updated CCCU data is still being collected, according to spokesperson Amanda Staggenborg, “due to changes in positions and titles related to diversity advocates on campuses,” but she added that “we remain committed to promoting biblical unity and fostering a sense of belonging for everyone at CCCU institutions.”

Baylor didn’t hire Foley because of “donor pressure,” he said, but a genuine commitment to try to understand how the culture of the school might retain some of its racial past.

The idea of abolishing DEI, he said, suggests that institutions operated in a colorblind way prior to DEI. Historically, he said, that is not true.

“I fundamentally don’t want us to lie to ourselves and one another,” he said. “People think this work is just about white people feeling guilty. My goal is not to make people to feel guilty for things they haven’t done. My goal is for people to be committed to treating everyone they come in contact with justly. It requires an understanding of history … and how far we have to go.”

Baylor’s process of racial integration in the 1960s, for example, didn’t happen naturally but came about “under pressure,” according to Foley. Segregation built a particular institutional culture, he said, that is not easily undone. Statues are just symbols, but he found that the process of addressing the statues made Baylor confront its history.

He believes Christian institutions should be committed to looking at history and understanding how it still affects their communities’ obligation to love and justice today.

“We need administrations of institutions that are deeply committed to doing the right thing,” Foley said. “For Christian institutions and people, we live our lives under the shadow of the throne of God and the Lamb. … That gives us the confidence to do what we have to do and then face the consequences that fall from it.”

- More from Emily Belz

Church Life

The Young Lawyer Who United Lebanon’s Christians in Worship

Jayson Casper

He created a 300-person Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant choir and orchestra. Then he took a break.

Maronite Catholic archdiocese of Antelias

Lebanon has 12 officially registered Christian sects. Jesus prayed the church would be one. Once Mark Merhej did the math, the solution was worship. And in January 2024, the 29-year-old Maronite Catholic layman brought together representative patriarchs, bishops, and pastors from nearly every ecclesial family to pray collectively for the peace of Beirut.

Merhej began planning the event three years before the Israel-Hezbollah war, contemplating how to bring unity to the fractured Lebanese body of Christ. As the two belligerents exchanged missiles over the nation’s southern border, over 10,000 Lebanese Christians joined in worship with Merhej’s 300-person ecumenical choir and orchestra to pour out their hearts in pursuit of God’s presence.

“Worship is the communal experience of God’s lordship and grace,” Merhej said. “The world outside—the war—is irrelevant.”

Merhej aimed to bring a higher vision to the troubled Christian community. That January, during the official week of prayer for Christian unity—usually a perfunctory affair—he filled the Beirut Forum with soaring hymnodies of Byzantine chants and intoned hallelujahs. Members of the choir, inspired by their interdenominational harmony, wanted to keep performing. And the bishops, he sensed, resonated with his ecclesial vision.

But after the event, Merhej stepped back.

As Beirut wrestled with the war, Merhej wrestled with God. He came to believe God wanted him to withdraw not only from a vibrant music ministry but also from his budding relationships with senior clergy members. At first, he didn’t understand this directive, and for months he let others take the initiative. But as he grew in his personal faith, planning a scaled-back but similar event one year later helped him discern God’s purpose for his rest.

Maronite Catholic archdiocese of Antelias

Mark Merhej conducting a choir to promote church unity in Lebanon.

The heavenly realms

Growing up, Merhej was mostly unaware that local Christians divided themselves between six Catholic, five Orthodox, and one Protestant council that includes several denominations. Theological schisms had split the Levant church over the centuries, which further splintered as Vatican, British, and American missionaries competed for new church members from historic Christian traditions.

In 1974, the newly formed Middle East Council of Churches (MECC) brought together Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Protestant clergy to strengthen relations among minority Christians. (Catholics joined in 1990.) Today, though the MECC community has organized numerous service projects and theological dialogues, spiritual unity has not extended to religious practice. Some churches will not take Communion together, nor participate in joint liturgical services.

Merhej grew up in the mountains of Lebanon in a Maronite Catholic community. Surrounded by Muslim powers since the seventh century, Lebanon’s largest Christian sect developed a strong but insular faith.

His family also belonged to the Sword of the Spirit charismatic community, a worldwide Catholic renewal movement open to other Christian traditions and vibrant in worship that goes beyond liturgy. Merhej learned guitar at age 5, and by age 12 he had played in church. When he was 17, his bishop, Antoine Bou Najem, asked him to lead evening Mass for the youth in his parish. Two years later, he gained his first experience conducting a choir at a worship event for the local faithful.

Merhej came to love helping others connect with God. Three years later, he organized another even larger worship night, and then another, and another, even as he progressed in his studies and career, including opening an international-business law firm in 2020.

Merhej’s devotion had always been to the Father, through Jesus, and in the Holy Spirit, acknowledging that some Catholics elevated Mary too far in their intercession. But as he studied the Scriptures, he came to believe that in worshiping the Trinity, believers can join the saints in communion with God.

At the same time, Merhej was watching Beirut decay—physically and spiritually. The port explosion in 2020 coincided with an economic crisis that emptied the capital of people and business. COVID-19 curtailed movement in the city, but when society reopened, downtown churches of all denominations remained largely empty.

The following year, 2021, he approached his bishop with an idea: an ecumenical event to worship with all Christians in their flailing nation. A choir would rejuvenate Beirut, bringing prayer and vitality through rehearsals in the now-quiet cathedrals.

Bou Najem blessed the initiative and connected him with Catholic and Orthodox leaders. Merhej began going church-to-church to invite lay participation and navigated the struggles between denominations. Protestants offered a different challenge.

Let controversy cease

Lebanon’s Protestants have largely cooperated with each other, even when they have disagreed about collaborating with other Christians. Some, like Presbyterians and Armenian Evangelicals, have joined the MECC. Others, like many Baptists and Pentecostals, view participation in the MECC as forsaking evangelism in exchange for wider Christian fellowship. Most evangelicals converted from Orthodox or Catholic backgrounds, and many Maronites strive to keep Protestant church plants out of their communities. The historic churches accuse evangelicals of sheep stealing, and evangelicals in turn express their concern over nominal faith.

Eager for evangelical participation in the choir, Merhej sought out Paul Haidostian, who represents evangelicals as one of MECC’s four presidents. The Armenian Evangelical enthusiastically introduced Merhej to other pastors in his theological family.

Maronite Catholic archdiocese of Antelias

Paul Haidostian, who Merhej contacted to get Evangelical representation in the choir.

“His focus on the Holy Spirit impressed me, and his style is close to the evangelical heart,” said Haidostian. “I want that spirit in our churches.”

Merhej won trust with clergy by emphasizing that they were all “shepherds,” appealing to a low-church ecclesiology that did not distinguish between pastor and patriarch. Worshiping together, he explained, would help all church leaders revive their spiritual flocks. His charismatic background opened doors, and by the time bimonthly rehearsals began in April 2023, Merhej had secured participation from two churches on each side of the evangelical ecumenical divide.

Ephesians 1 inspired Merhej’s vision for the event. He wanted participants to grasp Paul’s affirmation that the Christian is “blessed … in the heavenly realms” (v. 3) and experience a glimpse of the unity between “all things in heaven and on earth” (v. 10). The Holy Spirit guarantees this inheritance “to the praise of his glory” (v. 14), which all God’s redeemed—living and dead—can offer together.

Interdenominational engagements in Lebanon usually have each church present its own choir. Merhej’s vision went beyond mutual appreciation. Instead, his ecumenical choir facilitated joint worship through the traditions of all. Evangelicals offered “How Great Thou Art.” Latin Catholics put forward the angelic Gregorian chant “Veni Creator Spiritus.” “Qom Fawlos” drew from ancient Syriac liturgy. Together with “Prokimenon,” familiar to Greek Orthodox, Merhej selected hymns from all four theological families to bid reverent welcome to the Holy Spirit, whom he sought to center at the event.

But Merhej was not content to sing a set list representing the 12 Lebanese sects. He included Rachmaninoff’s Russian Orthodox “Bogoroditse Devo.” The Swahili “Baba Yetu”first confused and then delighted the audience. A Spanish Taizé tune quieted the crowd, while the contemporary French-Arabic “Psaume de la Creation” led the audience to wave their cell phone flashlights in adoration. As conductor, Merhej told CT he aimed to progressively bring the entirety of God’s church into the heavenly realms. Some in the choir, he said, spoke in tongues during the crescendo.

Other messages he more subtly embedded. Two massive church bells rang out mid-service to symbolize Christian presence in the Middle East. A sign language performance highlighted the special needs community. And the eighth-century “Ubi Caritas et Amor Deus Ibi Est,” chanted during Maundy Thursday foot-washing ceremonies, contained the line “let controversies cease.”

“We are fighting a spiritual war for our unity,” Merhej said. “Let each church bring its weapons and fight together.”

Maronite Catholic archdiocese of Antelias

Two massive church bells that rang during the choir service to symbolize Christian presence in the Middle East.

Pruning the fruit

Throughout the evening, church leaders read different passages of Scripture, and the screen displayed various Bible verses, concluding with Jesus’ John 17 prayer “that they may be one as we are one” (v. 22). But not long after the event, Merhej’s spiritual mentors told him to withdraw from his choir, to stand alone before his Creator. They emphasized Jesus’ words two chapters earlier: “Every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes” (15:2).

The wisdom of his mentors had proved true repeatedly over the course of his life, he said. Scripture is clear: God prunes us to prepare us to “be even more fruitful”(v. 2). And Jesus set the example; after great miracles, he withdrew to quiet places. He is the vine, and we—with arms raised in bent imitation, per the classic children’s song—are the branches.

Merhej complied, but he did not fully understand. Why would God give him such close relations with senior church leaders if not to remain connected and reemphasize their unity? Choir members were eager to keep singing with their new friends. Merhej had envisioned becoming their spiritual mentor and performing in churches across the country, hoping this might spark an ecumenical worship revival.

Instead, in his absence, though some choir members drifted away, others joined ensembles with one another or continued to meet to pray together. Merhej encouraged a few members to organize events of their own and helped coach them. He saw these gatherings as good fruit of a different sort.

Yet it was not the same. And as he waited on God, Israel began a ground operation against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Though the mid-September escalation hit mostly Hezbollah targets, Christians were afraid too—not least of sectarian implosion. Some closed their doors on displaced Shiites seeking shelter, fearing Israeli missiles might follow.

From Merhej’s vantage point, many Christians were angry. Hezbollah had brought this war to Lebanon, they said, defending Palestinians who—however just their historic cause—brought destruction to Beirut a half century earlier as they warred with Israel from Lebanese territory. And while Israel was an enemy state, at least the two would be fighting each other. The sentiment was understandable, Merhej thought. But it was not Christian.

Two weeks after the Israeli escalation, Bou Najem summoned the Maronite faithful to prayer and asked Merhej to lead worship. His church community, four miles northeast of the Beirut port, was in a safe area far from Hezbollah leadership or concealed weapon depots. But the bishop’s people needed peace, and he preached on John 14: “Do not let your hearts be troubled” (v. 27). “Some trust in chariots,” he continued from Psalm 20, “but we trust in the name of the Lord” (v. 7). The 1,000 people attending responded in praise to God. Some, including Merhej’s parents, began to serve the Shiites seeking local shelter.

“Our worship is not related to politics,” Merhej said of Lebanese Christian attitudes. “But the hearts of too many have not yet changed.”

Addressing deep wounds

The late November cease-fire brought a semblance of stability to Beirut. Around that same time, Haidostian reached out on behalf of the MECC to see if Merhej would convene an ecumenical choir for the January 2025 week-of-prayer service hosted by First Armenian Evangelical Church.

The event would be smaller than the previous year but the symbolism greater. This year’s celebration ended the 50th anniversary year of MECC’s founding and began the 1700th anniversary of the Nicaean Council. Many senior clergy would be there to represent their denomination in a structured program.

As Merhej prepared, he reviewed the liturgy and locked in on the psalm selected by an ecumenical monastic community in Italy. “My heart is not proud,” he read from Psalm 131:1, and it resonated. The sight of thousands gathered at the Beirut Forum had filled him with praise for God, not for himself. “I do not concern myself with great matters,” the verse continued, and the purpose of his pruning began to take shape. God had given him access to patriarchs, bishops, and pastors—all shepherds alike—but his heart had rushed too quickly toward the hope of stimulating their unity.

The next verse in the short psalm arrested him: “But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content” (v. 2). After last year’s event, Merhej thought he knew what he was doing. Yet God wanted him to return not just to childlike faith but to the experience of a toddler, completely dependent. The psalm ended with “now and forevermore” (v. 3). Linking the passage with the vine of John 15, he understood even more deeply that greater fruit required remaining connected to God—and waiting for God’s leading.

With this opportunity, Merhej felt God’s affirmation. He accepted Haidostian’s offer and assembled a 20-member choir with singers drawn primarily from Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Armenian communities. Among other musical offerings, he chose the David Willcocks arrangement of Psalm 131 from the Anglican tradition. The voices resounded through the Gothic sanctuary and closed with the traditional “world without end. Amen.”

But another mark of church unity was yet to come. One choir member said that as an evangelical, she often felt looked down on by Maronites. After years of singing only in her own community, months of rehearsals with Merhej leading up to the 2024 event helped her experience that all Christians are one. But outside that space, she felt disillusioned about the divided state of the church.

What happened next at the 2025 week-of-prayer event surprised her. Most denominations sent lower-ranking clerics to the gathering, and their black robes with red or purple trim filled the seats of the chancel. But one figure stood out in prominence. Haidostian had personally reached out to Maronite patriarch Bechara al-Rai, offering him the opportunity to preach. Al-Rai accepted, calling disunity “a deep wound in the mystical body of Christ.” It was probably the first time in history, Haidostian said, that the head of his denomination had ever preached in an Armenian Evangelical church.

“We have to see what the churches will do next,” said Merhej. “Maybe God is doing a new thing.”