Anchor Hymns Makes Old Things New

Drawing on centuries of hymnody, the songwriting collective asks the question “What else could we be singing about?”

Photography by Olivia Buchanan

On a January morning in 2022, the basement of Church of the Redeemer, an Anglican church in a quiet Nashville neighborhood, smelled like food for the first time in months. Someone was preparing a meal in the kitchen. The church had been virtually empty since a funeral for the church’s pastor, who passed away in a car accident in August 2021. In-person services hadn’t resumed yet; everyone was tiring of virtual gatherings.

But now, songwriters were assembling in the basement, greeting friends they hadn’t seen much since before the 2020 pandemic. This intimate gathering was the first writing meetup of Anchor Hymns, a collective formed by singer-songwriter and producer Andrew Osenga, formerly of the Christian band Caedmon’s Call.

Anchor Hymns brought together a community of musicians that was still reeling from the isolation and uncertainty of the pandemic. Some were mourning the deaths of friends and loved ones. Others were coming to terms with lost friendships.

“We started talking about how a lot of our contemporary worship songs feel like pop songs, and you don’t sing pop songs at a funeral,” Osenga said. “So our prompt that afternoon was to write songs that could be sung at funerals.”

It sounds like a bleak beginning for a creative endeavor. But the tension of hope in the midst of pain has been a source of inspiration for Anchor Hymns. The group’s newest album, The Garden (Live) (releasing March 28), was recorded live at the Covenant School in Nashville at one of the first events at the school since the mass shooting that took place there in March 2023.

The group’s tagline, “songs that will outlast us,” nods to its mission to offer the church newly composed songs and newly arranged hymns that feel both historically rooted and forward-looking. Over the past three years, Anchor Hymns has released music featuring artists such as Sandra McCracken, Sarah Kroger, Paul Baloche, Melanie Penn, Mitch Wong, Citizens, Dee Wilson, Matt Maher, and Leslie Jordan.

CT spoke with Andrew Osenga, Sandra McCracken, and Sarah Kroger about what it looks like to write music for disorienting times and how hymns can help the family of God bear one another’s burdens. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Andrew, you led the formation of Anchor Hymns in 2022. What was the animating idea behind the project?

Osenga: When I look at older hymns, I see a wide variety of songs on different subjects and in a lot of different musical styles. When I think about a lot of the songs that we sing today, I think we tend to sing about three or four subjects. We have a very narrow vocabulary in the church.

We’ve been able to look at what churches have been singing for centuries and ask, “What else could we be singing about?” What about songs about grief or different kinds of joy? Songs about sacrificial love, loving your enemy, death, giving, or missions?

McCracken: Early on, in a meeting before we even had a name for the project, we talked about how a lot of people we knew were leaving the church. We were drawn to the idea of having songs that would not just outlast us but that would reach out and welcome people who may not want to be there now but might find themselves wanting to be there again. That was the hope.

This group of musicians is pretty ecumenical. We come from different backgrounds, and we’re not all going to vote the same way or agree on one set of theological statements, but there are things we can sing together, and we’re trying to find those.

Kroger: As one of the few Catholics in the group, I felt connected to this idea of new hymns because Catholics have a rich history of hymns in our own church. There are a lot of hymns that are specifically Catholic and others that fall into the Protestant category, and there’s not a lot of cross-pollinating. There are a few hymns that have crossed the barrier— “Be Thou My Vision,” “Come Thou Fount”—but I didn’t know “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” until I was an adult. And that is sad to me because it’s such a stunning song.

So for me, this project was an opportunity to cross-pollinate a little bit, to use these beautiful texts as inspiration and make something new that includes all of our voices and perspectives.

Sarah, what do you think the Catholic tradition of hymnody and liturgy offers that could enrich some of the worship practices of American evangelical or nondenominational churches?

Kroger: As I’ve become friends and collaborators with people in Protestant spaces, it’s been awesome to have conversations about what unites us. I also recognize that Catholics have valuable traditions. For example, every Catholic church has a crucifix. Christ’s death is right in front of you. We have whole seasons centered on death. Right now, we’re in Lent, where we’re reminded that “you are ashes and to ashes you shall return.” We’re not afraid of thinking about suffering.

There’s also a rich history and tradition of silence in Catholicism. We’re not afraid of silence in our liturgies either. Which is not to say that all Protestants are—but I do think in the American church there’s a lot of filling every moment with something.

The past few years have brought what appears to be a surge in interest in hymns and hymnals. It seems there is a cycle in American evangelical culture of periodic returns to hymnody or more historically rooted worship practices. Why do you think hymnody—new or old—might be capturing the interest of some American Christians right now?

Kroger: I think the reason why I have been drawn to hymns more recently is because they connect me to this rich history of believers. I think about all the people who have sung these songs for centuries, some melodies literally since the beginning of the church.

To think about all of the people who have had joyful moments with these songs, wrestled with faith through these songs, and lifted these songs up in their own journeys—it is grounding and edifying for me to recognize that I’m a part of something bigger. And to add my voice to that history is really special.

McCracken: I think the disorientation of our time causes us to reach for things that are either nostalgic or connected to the past. And I think people want the sung theology of hymns; they are like sung gospel.

Hymns have a way of bringing us back to truth beyond just our own emotions. I think hymns do that more than some of the contemporary worship music that is more singularly emotive. Hymns tend to tell a wider story as you move through different verses that each have their own inflection.

Osenga: I don’t mean this in a cynical way, but I think that in a world where so many things feel like products, where we get our new songs from the radio or from a marketing email, there’s something about a song that we know existed before a marketing machine or a record company. There’s an inherent trust. We trust its motive in a different way.

I also think there’s a way that God speaks through melody and memory together, even beyond a lyric. These melodies have been passed down through generations. My grandfather had a very different theology than I do, but we believed in the same Jesus and are loved by the same Jesus. And I have these memories of him singing. There’s power in that.

The new Anchor Hymns album, The Garden (Live), was recorded at the Covenant School, where a shooting took place the year before. How did that impact the recording and the content of the album?

Osenga: Sandra’s husband was working at the school at the time and was hosting a conference for worship leaders, pastors, and theologians. We were invited to participate and [we] asked if we could record. The conference wasn’t a Covenant event, but we were trying to be really conscientious and bring songs about God’s hope and faithfulness. You couldn’t shake the fact that we were in the space where it happened.

McCracken: Everyone was certainly still reeling from the event. On the recording, you’ll hear “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and we had planned to sing it but didn’t have time to rehearse. Now when I hear that recording, I can hear strength, and I can hear God’s faithfulness in a moment in a room with bullet holes in the glass that a lot of people didn’t want to talk about and maybe still don’t want to talk about. And that’s okay.

What does it mean to sing in these holy, sacred moments when there is disorientation? When I hear that recording, I can hear all these layers, the way the voices are reverberating in that room with that community. It’s a confession, and a communal one. I’m so grateful for it.

Kroger: Thinking about that moment, singing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” in that beautiful church, and about what everyone was carrying, I remember that there are times when I’m participating in the hymn, physically singing it. And then there are times when the weight of what I’m carrying is just too much and I need other people to sing it for me. That’s what hymns offer us: this experience of community. Sometimes you’re participating, and sometimes you’re being carried. That’s the beauty of hymns.

Osenga: I think everyone has their own idea of what a hymn is. For most laypeople, a hymn is an old-fashioned church song, and their idea of a hymn is different from the next person’s idea of a hymn because their “old-fashioned church” is different from the next person’s.

So I think some of what we really mean when we talk about singing hymns is standing together and hearing each other sing about God. It’s not like being at a concert; it’s hearing from our neighbors. It’s hearing from my dad, and my kid, and my third-grade teacher over there, and my neighbor, and the guy I don’t like, and the person I don’t know.

Sometimes they need to hear me, and sometimes I need to hear them. Sometimes I’m fully believing it, and sometimes I’m coming in asking them, “Please help me believe it.” Sometimes as I hear my friends sing it, I realize I needed to know that they believe it, because that helps me know that I believe it.

That’s what we’re talking about: carrying each other. It’s not necessarily even that we’re wanting an old-fashioned song. I think it’s that we’re wanting the experience of just being together and hearing one another, walking side by side. In our culture, there’s so much noise. We don’t hear each other anymore.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Church Life

Can an E-Book App Address a Theological Resources Gap?

Christina Stanton

Churches, ministries, seminaries, and universities around the world struggle to access Christian material. BiblioTech wants to help.

Since Amazon released the Kindle e-reader in 2007, e-books have surged in popularity. But the features that make the technology convenient also hinder its appeal.

Much of the world still has slow or spotty internet service, like the rural Philippines, where American missionary and avid reader Nikki DeMarco Esquivel lives and runs her nonprofit, Mercy House. There, an e-book typically takes more than five hours to download, if it doesn’t fail altogether.

Logistical challenges are also common in Africa, said Philip Hunt, president of Central Africa Baptist University in Zambia. While urban areas may have internet access, many people lack smartphones to connect to it. With more than 60 percent of Zambians making less than $2.15 a day, buying iPads or dedicated e-readers is both difficult and costly. Additionally, many Zambians don’t have bank accounts, making e-payments impossible.

South African pastor Samuel Ndima recalled his seminary days when popular library books were often unavailable, forcing up to six students to share a single book for assignments. He noted that a new, high-quality laptop from brands like Dell or HP can cost around 8,000 rand (roughly $440 USD)—nearly twice the average monthly income in his community, where few can afford broadband internet.

E-books could alleviate these situations, including Ndima’s current need for Bible study material for small groups at his Baptist church in the Western Cape.

Scholar Leaders, an organization that invests in theological leaders across the globe, works to overcome the obstacles that hinder widespread e-book access, especially to Christian publications.

Last year, the ministry launched BiblioTech, an initiative it hopes will allow more Majority World Christians to access publications and journals that would otherwise be too costly or hard to access. The partnership with US Christian publishers such as Baker, Eerdmans, Langham, Fortress, Crossway, WJK, Regnum, and InterVarsity gives seminaries in poorer countries access to commentaries and pastoral training resources via a mobile app.

As it embarked on the project, Scholar Leaders first had to address publishers’ concerns over digital piracy. This often occurs when readers legally buy e-books but then pass them along to others for free. Many of the protections that publishers try to install, such as digital rights management (DRM) software, can be overridden or removed within minutes with instructions that can easily be found online.

“The ease of digital file sharing in Eastern Europe, combined with less established intellectual property norms, leads to widespread unauthorized distribution,” said Polish publisher Aleksander Saško Nezamutdinov. “When one customer shares an e-book, we permanently lose multiple potential sales.”

Alfonso Triviño, CEO of Spain’s largest Protestant publishing house, said he has been dismayed to find full PDF versions of books from Christian publishers circulated widely on digital apps and even loaded into the portals of some churches.

BiblioTech uses advanced encryption technology in its DRM software to curb piracy. That level of protection has increased publishers’ confidence in BiblioTech, said Scott Watson, director of acquisitions at Scholar Leaders’ Theological Book Network.

Programmers also had to create a “lite” tool that would work on lower-end devices in places without reliable internet connections. BiblioTech has an app for Android phones and tablets and Windows and Mac computers. Its iPhone app is still in development.

“If it were easy, someone would have done it already,” said Watson.

BiblioTech incorporates machine translation on the platform for Spanish and Portuguese readers and is working on integrating French. Other languages, including Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Russian, German, and Korean, may be added in the future. To build out these language features, Watson said, designers had to incorporate “user-friendly machine translation into the app” while protecting the translated literature from becoming fodder for large language models, a type of artificial intelligence, which would violate the authors’ intellectual property rights.

Using machine translation—rather than professional human translation—required the BiblioTech team to weigh its commitment to literary excellence in relation to the needs of the Majority World church. Professional human translation provides advantages, especially in the nuanced and specialized contexts of theological literature. But because of the high cost of professional human translation and the need to apply those high costs across each work that is being translated, machine translation will still have a tremendous impact with regard to accessibility for BiblioTech’s partners.

Despite the hurdles, Watson has been encouraged by the positive reactions from publishers and partners in software development.

“It’s obvious that all these friends really do share a fundamental missional commitment: They want to get good Christian literature into the hands of under-resourced pastors worldwide,” he said. “I feel like we’re all in this together … which is how kingdom work should be.”

BiblioTech is being tested with Scholar Leaders’ partner schools in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Philippines, Lebanon, Nigeria, Palestine, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Ukraine, India, Egypt, and Brazil and will be available to additional schools later this year.

The program’s success with supplying e-books to theological education centers gives Esquivel much hope. A large part of her nonprofit focuses on education and illiteracy. She believes that accessing these materials would help students break out of generational poverty—and also encourage her team.

“[My] staff would learn to better understand God’s Word,” she said, “and live it out more effectively in our roles as ministry leaders.”

- More from Christina Stanton

Inkwell

How Friendship Is the Lifeblood of Art

Samuel Christian

Culture as the byproduct of communion

Still Life With A Guitar by Tomás Hiepes

OUR HISTORIES of cultural development are often presented as a series of ideas flowering into great movements: Antiquity, Renaissance, Romanticism. Other times, they are depicted as the appearance of great works of art that represent a generation: The Sistine Chapel, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, The Wasteland. Sometimes, we look at the past through figures who have done something we deem worthy to remember and make note of: Byron, Van Gogh, Steven Spielberg, Taylor Swift.

Perhaps, we can go even further and trace the massive shifts in culture to the creative collisions of personal relationships, too. John Keats meeting Fanny Brawne; Wordsworth, wandering not as a lonely cloud, but with his sister Dorothy and friend Coleridge; of gatherings around a fire to hear some tale of old—for the story, yes, but just as much for the one whose hand is squeezed as Beowulf approaches the dragon.

I GREW UP as one of six siblings in the suburbia of south-east Essex in England, and we had a whole lot of fun. My elder sister and I were very much the ringleaders, quickly roping our younger siblings into our exciting new adventures. We were quite ambitious when it came to our weekends: for a number of summers, this meant making our own films. Sometimes it was an original screenplay, but most of the time, it was adaptations of our favorite stories: Little House on the Prairie, Swallows and Amazons, and even an episode of the Canadian drama Heartland animated with Playmobil.

Together with our family friends, we would turn the garden into a film studio, creating full costumes and sets. After the whole process, though, the thing we were most excited for was not the premiere of the film itself, but instead watching back our even longer “behind the scenes” documentary. Over the years, these have been what we go back to watch: a window into our process filled with laughter, larking about, and little eccentricities while exploring the stories fundamental to our growing lives.

It wasn’t the films we made that mattered so much—we were proud of them then, more embarrassed now—these bouts of creativity and storytelling were all about the time spent with each other. Those behind-the-scenes videos remind me that our art is, and has always been, a practice of relationship, a shared currency of love. Creativity is often the loom that weaves the threads of our lives into a beautiful tapestry. Shared ideas. Shared experiences. Shared feelings. A shared culture.

IN A CHARITY SHOP a few years ago, wandering the Isle of Mull, I found a book, Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Williams was one of the core members of the literary group known as the Inklings, which famously included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and a shifting cast of creators and characters. When Williams moved from Oxford to London, this collection of essays was originally collated by the other Inklings as a “greeting” to give Williams when he next visited. Tragically, Williams passed away before they had the chance, and so the essays were published instead as a “memorial”.

The cover reads, “Charles Williams, poet, novelist, critic, and incomparable talker, died in 1945. During the years of his intellectual maturity, there gathered ‘round him a group of admirers who found in contact with his darting, fantastic and challenging intellect a rare source of stimulus. Some of these have thought that the best memorial of friendship would be a collection of essays on subjects he most liked to discuss.”

Whenever I hold this book and flick through its pages, I’m immediately struck not by the groundbreaking ideas—some still read in universities today—but by the pure expression and seriousness of friendship. These essays were written, edited and published out of respect, love, and mourning for a friend. For here was a group of people where art was simply a product of creativity forged for and through the deepening of relationship.

OVER IN FRANCE, there’s the Academie Suisse, the informal art school where Claude Monet studied upon arriving in Paris. A city that was a borderland, a grey zone at the time. “The great tradition has been lost…” wrote Baudelaire, “the new one is not yet established.” That “new one” would become Impressionism, a movement that we still feel the effects of today. A movement born out of the relationships that began at that informal art school. Here, Monet met Renoir and Sisley, and most importantly, Bazille—who would be a lifelong friend. They painted together and shared a studio. It was Bazille who took Monet to parties and introduced him to his first Paris buyer. Art historian Jackie Wulleschläger writes that “Monet woke Bazille up every morning, got him to an easel and advised on his compositions, while Bazille served as an echo chamber for Monet’s developing sense of himself and his painting.”

The interweaving of lives in Monet’s story tends to be analyzed by their influence on his artistic practice. These names have indeed greatly impacted his work and vice versa. However, we can also see this as flowing the other way. The lifelong friendship with Bazille, the connections forged with Renoir, the competitive mentorship of Manet are relationships actually born out of Monet’s practicing of creativity, just as much as his art grew from them.

I’VE EXPERIENCED the profundity of a friendship formed through the arts myself as well. I first came into contact with Jacob years ago through his poetry that he shared online. He was in the US then, and I in Cumbria, UK. We only spoke a couple of years after this, again through poetry and publishing it in our community magazine. When both of us finally ended up in London, we met in person and became immediate friends. Our friendship has continued to thrive and deepen through poems and words shared, hours writing together, and reading each other’s work in raw form. This has led to a sense of security that allows us to remain honest, open, and vulnerable with each other.

When we create, we are always opening up a part of ourselves. To create with words or images or music, or in any other form, is to translate part of the inner life into the communal. This is why creativity takes such courage. And to share what we create, even more. It is to be vulnerable that, at its best, leads to the formation of friendship. Sometimes, through one of those “What, you too?” moments that C.S. Lewis talks about. Other times, understanding and empathy. Our creativity is the fertile ground for deep and lifelong relationships.

Art helps us reach out to another because, in the words of Christian Wiman, when we create, “we cease to be ourselves and become, paradoxically, more ourselves. Our souls.” To create is a spiritual act—one where we tap into something of the essence of what it means to be human. And where we reveal something of who we are. This is less of an exploration of our interiority, but a tearing of the curtain that hid us from joining the dance.

THE ULTIMATE CREATIVE ACT was only possible through relationship. In the beginning, God created out of a place of trinitarian relationship. Father, Son and Spirit crafting as one a masterful work; life itself. My aunt says that it is a bit like a film. A director, actor, and writer, all simultaneously present in a scene. And God created people in his image, that he might have a relationship with them.

To live out of this identity, the imago dei, this essence of who we are, is to represent the attributes of God, no matter how pale the imitation, within this world. Creativity is something we can practice because of this. And to create as God did, is to create out of relationship, for relationship.

Throughout the Bible, this is how creativity manifests. From the Tabernacle bringing people together into God’s presence, to the rawness of the Psalms, honest poems shared in community and offered to God. As we read in John’s Gospel: “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Christ is present in all that we make. He is present in the process if we might but look closely to see.

“TRUE CREATIVITY,” writes Trevor Hart, “is always a pursuit of the good which renders the self adjacent; it is an act of love.” To be caught by beauty or tragedy, truth or goodness, is to be brought closer to someone. A feeling—bitter or ecstatic—that I am not just myself. Creation is more a poetic utterance of love than an industrial efficiency, to paraphrase Makoto Fujimura. Something made faithfully speaks of love and opens us up to be loved. It is an opportunity to be like Christ, to see a soul, know one and love one.

In the transitory and lonely city of London, it is as true as ever that to shape culture is to commit to relationship. A courageous act of love, a radical step. As I look back at my creative journey to date, I can see the paintings and unfinished drafts; the milestones of awards won and words published. All good things. All important. But there, between each of these, I look back and see the friendships found along the way. The loves blossoming and loves lost. A life held together by others in the sharing of poems and hand-painted cards, the mutual tears in front of cinema screens, and shared silences before paintings. The conversations about daily struggles; the grappling of ideas; the light bulbs of collaboration, and the overflow into words on the page, paint on the canvas, potted seeds on a window sill.

AS A TEENAGER, on a cold winter’s night when the sun had already set, I walked up the long road as I did every Thursday. I would normally have a bag of books with me. Often a notepad of scribblings. My head whirling with ideas and topics to discuss. I would turn into the driveway and ring the bell of the bungalow with the fairy castle turret. My Grandpa would open the door and invite me in. With tea and a cherry bakewell, we would sit by the open fire. We would almost always start with some lines by William Cowper, Grandpa’s favourite poet. The rest of the evening would be filled with other writings, newspaper cuttings, ideas and editing the drafts of my poems.

“Inklings” we called these evenings, and I never wanted them to end. In those often lonely school years, struggling to fit in and praying for close friendship, these nights were the highlight of my week and a balm to my soul. It was where I wrestled with words and seriously thought about the stories I wanted to tell for the first time. Now though, I can say that the greatest thing to be created in this reading, writing and editing of poems has been an enduring relationship over many years between a grandfather and his grandson.

Samuel Christian is a writer and the founder of The Pursuit of Good Stuff, a spiritual habitat for creators that features collectives, exhibitions and resources.

- More from Samuel Christian

Theology

C.S. Lewis on the Psalms’ ‘Ferocious Parts’

Brett Vanderzee

Our beloved apologist wrestled with the Psalms’ hardest words in his season of suffering.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, WikiMedia Commons

In trying times, we often turn to the familiar: a lifelong friend, a staple recipe, an album that has worn deep grooves in our mind. When the world outside is worrisome and strange, we seek the proven solace of the known.

Perhaps that’s why more Christians are turning to the Psalms these days. The lived-in nature of this ancient text makes it suitable for the extremities of our lives. Picture Augustine of Hippo meditating on four Psalms in the waning days of his life or Christ himself quoting the Psalter as he hung from a Roman cross.

Yet the comfort of the Psalms is not always apparent. What are we to make of, for instance, Psalm 69’s vengeance, the violence in Psalm 137, or the tone of hatred at the end of Psalm 139? How can we see through the shadowy valleys—in this sacred book and in our lives—to arrive at God’s goodness and rest?

It was this kind of questioning of the Psalter, amid the present sorrows of his life, that drew the famous and beloved C. S. Lewis deeper into its pages.

In 1950, Lewis got a fan letter from an American woman named Joy Gresham. Having been a bachelor for more than half a century, he eventually fell for Joy, and the two were married in April 1956. Just six months later, Joy took a nasty spill and broke her left femur. After she received X-rays in Oxfordshire, they found out she had bone cancer.

In this season—living in the high of newfound love and the hardship of disease—Lewis had an idea for a book. He began writing it in June 1957 and finished it that October, and it was published the following September. The book was Reflections on the Psalms.

Though Lewis called it “a very unambitious little work,” it was his only monograph focused entirely on a single book of the Bible. In that regard, it paints a vivid and vital picture of how Lewis approached the Scriptures—even the more stomach-turning texts.

This is precisely where Lewis begins the book: the unsavory elements of the Psalter. Following what he calls “nursery gastronomy”—eating the least appetizing items on the plate first—Lewis frontloads Reflections with the most unpalatable passages.

He tackles three topics right out of the gate: judgment, cursings, and death. It is in the chapter on cursings that he states plainly what many Christians may be embarrassed to admit: “In some of the Psalms the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth.” These are not words written by a man with contempt for God’s Word. Rather, Lewis’s deep reverence for the Bible compels him to face it with honesty and charity—even when he feels the fire of its offense.

I was a wide-eyed pastor laboring to preach the Psalms when I learned of Lewis’s Reflections. The more insightful I found it, the more confounded I was that no one had mentioned it to me before. In retrospect, this should have been unsurprising, since it is a humble book—both in reception and in design.

It was humbly received in that it remains something of a deep cut in the C. S. Lewis canon. (If Goodreads stats are any indication, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has just shy of 3 million ratings, while as of writing this, Reflections has garnered only a little more than 8,700—quite modest for a work by Lewis.)

The book was humbly designed in that Lewis did not intend it as a full-fledged biblical commentary—to its credit. He doesn’t plod through chapter by chapter; he skates deftly over the Psalter as a whole, hitting some of the thorniest questions facing faithful readers of Scripture. It is, above all, an approach to Psalms gestated in worship, born through years of praying these passages over and over—“sometimes by my enjoyment of them,” Lewis writes, “sometimes by meeting with what at first I could not enjoy.”

One of the most potent texts he tackles in the cursings chapter is Psalm 137. This nine-verse lament over the destruction of Jerusalem composes some of the loveliest poetry in the Bible. “By the rivers of Babylon,” it begins, “there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion” (v. 1, NRSVue).

The horror and heartbreak of Israel’s exile form the backdrop as agony, longing, and defiance seem to spill from every line. “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” the poet asks, until finally his anger crescendos to a repulsive finish: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (Or in Eugene Peterson’s stark paraphrase: “Yes, a reward to the one who grabs your babies and smashes their heads on the rocks!”)

How is one to read such blood-soaked poetry? How is one to read it as God’s Word? In many ways, C. S. Lewis is precisely the man to teach us.

Not only did Lewis live through World War II in England, but also he was a veteran of World War I. His first published work (under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton) was a cycle of poems called Spirits in Bondage—most of which he wrote as a young atheist in the trenches of the Great War.

The second poem in the cycle, “French Nocturne,” ends in grim misanthropy: “I am a wolf. Back to the world again, / And speech of fellow-brutes that once were men / Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot sing.” (We can even hear echoes of the psalmist’s lack of singing in Babylon.) Spirits in Bondage is not a great work of art, but its lyrics gurgle up from the same miry pit that fed the darkest parts of the Psalter.

When Lewis comes to Psalm 137 as a mature Christian writing Reflections, he comes with an entire life’s worth of suffering, poetry, violence, and death. He comes as a man who knows the fittingness of anger in the face of colossal atrocities—yet one who recognizes the need to filter such anger through the prism of Christ’s teachings.

“The ferocious parts of the Psalms,” Lewis writes, “serve as a reminder that there is in the world such a thing as wickedness and that it (if not its perpetrators) is hateful to God. In that way, however dangerous the human distortion may be, His word sounds through these passages too.”

For Lewis, the purpose of a verse like Psalm 137:9 is revelation: It raises the curtain on unvarnished human emotion. It unveils the natural outgrowth of oppression and amplifies our longing for justice to the highest amperage. It holds a shattered mirror to the ugliness of our own hatreds.

In his own way and time, Lewis anticipates another perspective from our era. In his book Reading While Black, Esau McCaulley also addresses Psalm 137 in a chapter on “The Bible and Black Anger.” In it, he finds a kinship between Israel’s exilic tragedies and the brutalization of Black people in the antebellum South:

What kind of prayer would you expect Israel to pray after watching the murder of their children and the destruction of their families? What kinds of words of vengeance lingered in the hearts of the Black slave women and men when they found themselves at the mercy of their enslavers’ passions?

The apostle Paul writes that all Scripture is inspired by God (2 Tim. 3:16). Perhaps the primary purpose of a text like Psalm 137 is “rebuking” and “correcting.”

“God wanted Israel and us to know what human sin had done to the powerless,” McCaulley continues. “By recording this in Israel’s sacred texts, God made their problems our problems. Psalm 137 calls on the gathered community to make sure that this type of trauma is never repeated.”

Less than two years after Reflections was published, Lewis’s wife, Joy, succumbed to cancer. After a season of improvement, a flickering of life and hope, the disease came sweeping back. During the aftermath of losing his wife, Lewis kept a journal that would eventually become A Grief Observed (originally published under a pseudonym).

In raw, even chilling candor, Lewis documents his experience of mourning the woman who had become his world. To read C. S. Lewis—famed defender of the Christian faith—questioning the goodness of God is akin to finding fury in the Psalms. More than once, Lewis references Christ’s dying quotation of Psalm 22, and then he shouts out of his own godforsakenness: “Time after time, when [God] seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.”

Later in the book, Lewis reflects on his outbursts with the same wisdom he applied in his book on the Psalms. Just as he once wrestled with the “cursings” in the psalms of lament, he now reexamines the raw anger he unleashed in his own grief journal.

Looking back, he acknowledges the deeper impulse behind his words: “All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred,” he writes later on in A Grief Observed. “I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back.”

In other words, Lewis recognizes a kind of Psalm 137 pattern playing out in his own suffering psyche; his former ranting said less about God and more about the universal human experience of grief in the presence of God.

Just as he brought his life’s tragedies to bear in reading the Psalms, Lewis brought the Psalms to bear in his reading of life’s tragedies. In a kind of cross-shaped irony, the most barbaric parts of the Psalter can be used by God to free us, to lift us up from the abyss, “out of the mud and mire” (Ps. 40:2).

In Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis gives us a wise and humane framework for understanding Scripture’s more scandalous parts. But that is just the beginning of what he offers in this humble work. Ranging over a wide array of topics, Lewis not only stokes our desire to pray the Psalms; he also helps us to see Christ in them.

He celebrates that the God who became flesh in Jesus also humbled himself to the lines of the Psalter. As Lewis writes in the book’s opening pages: “Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.”

My wife is a photographer, and I have been awed by the images she captured in places like Yosemite and the Rockies. In these settings, wide-angle lenses allow her to be close to the subjects while including a vast expanse of background material. This is the kind of work C. S. Lewis does in Reflections on the Psalms.

Though starting with little light on the dark side of the Psalms, Lewis includes an astoundingly diverse array of insights and metaphors from otherwise distant regions. He guides the reader’s eye by drawing near to the Psalter while situating it in the broad sweep of human culture, nature, and history.

Most of all, he does this in a way that helps Christians see the enduring beauty of the Psalms—even and especially the gruesome ones. He helps us to sing, to read, and to pray them.

Lewis proves himself to be, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas, “a trusted friend in Christ”; a man who has seen wars, joys, and sorrows up close; a man of deep learning, who wears that learning lightly enough to walk us through the valley to new vistas of faith.

Brett Vanderzee is music and preaching minister at The Springs Church of Christ in Edmond, Oklahoma.

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Church Life

The Dean of American Church Historians

Grant Wacker

Memories and reflections on Martin E. Marty, a scholar of remarkable influence, kindness, and wit, from a friend and colleague of 50 years.

Wikimedia Commons / Edits by CT

Martin E. Marty, the “dean of American church historians,” died on February 25 at age 97. Born and reared in the village of West Point, Nebraska—Willa Cather country, he said—he would go on to serve Lutheran churches in the Chicago area for ten years before studying and then teaching at the University of Chicago from 1963 until he retired in 1998.

In 1986, an essay in Time magazine called Marty—who like Elvis typically went by a single name—“the most influential living interpreter of American religion.” And with good reason. I was honored to meet him at a gathering of the American Society of Church History in 1975.

Marty’s impact fell into four related spheres. The first was the sheer magnitude of his presence. The numbers piled up like snow drifts: in my estimation, 60-plus authored or edited books; more than 6,500 published articles, reviews, columns, essays, and sermons; oversight of 115 doctoral dissertations; 50 years as an editor of The Christian Century; more than 3,500 lectures around the world; speaking engagements at nearly 700 colleges, universities, seminaries, and church groups; 80 honorary degrees; recognition as the winner of the National Book Award (1972), the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995), and the National Medal for the Humanities (1997).

The second sphere was Marty’s scholarship. Though he paid his dues in the bowels of archives, primary excavations of that sort were not his gift. Rather, he flexed his intellectual muscles by ranging over the whole of Christian history, writing with particular depth and precision about modern Catholic history, Reformation history, biography, 19th- and 20th-century American religious history, and grief.

Within that framework, Marty focused on how Protestant dominance yielded to religious pluralism, how pluralism enriched the nation’s common life, and how to preserve it. These concerns emerged most clearly in his signature volume, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America. His message was perennial and clear: All were welcome at the table as long as they played by the rules, let others talk, and promised to listen.

For Marty, pluralism was not just an academic subject but a principle by which he lived. He answered his phone, returned unsolicited emails, and freely talked to reporters with no evident qualms about the risk of being misquoted. Journalists sought Marty’s wisdom not only because of his staggering erudition but also because he knew how to put them at ease, how to speak concisely, and how to put current events in in-depth historical perspective.

Respect for Marty came from all quarters. “He was always wonderfully encouraging to me,” David Hollinger, a distinguished secular historian at the University of California, Berkeley, told me by email. “The numbers … do not convey the man I knew and loved for nearly six decades,” remembered Kenneth Woodward, for decades religion editor at Newsweek.

Once, a naive assistant professor in North Carolina even asked Marty if he would read his dissertation. Of course, Marty agreed. (I was elated.)

Marty was a convinced churchman, too, and that was a third sphere of influence. He told the truth with his life. In many ways he seemed to be a clergyman first and an academic second. Sometimes, he affirmed, “it’s great to be in a situation where being in the presence of God stuns you a little bit.”

Marty was theologically educated in Lutheran schools—preparatory school, college, and seminary. An ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, his mainline sympathies showed up clearly outside the pulpit. In 1964, he spent six weeks as an invited Protestant observer at Vatican II in Rome. The following year, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama. He forthrightly cast his lot with the mainline’s concern for civil rights, internationalism, ecumenism, gender equality, and openness to science.

Even so, Marty’s theological views did not easily fit onto a conventional conservative/liberal spectrum. Creeds counted, and so did sacraments, liturgy, sacred music, and the church as the visible body of Christ. “His anticipated appointment with the Lord of eternity was something he embraced all his life,” wrote Peter Marty, his son and the current editor of The Christian Century, just after his father’s death. “He approached every morning as if it were a fresh splash of grace, a clean slate.”

The fourth sphere of Marty’s influence was the personal. The incandescent power of his personality cast a glow around his publications. They stood on their own, of course, but for folks who knew him personally, the books came with a special luster.

Daily habits spelled a distinctive character: up at 4:44 each morning, busy writing before breakfast, taking a 10-minute power nap each afternoon. Then, too, Marty was invariably the most dapper man in the room, outfitted in an uptown suit, vest, and colorful bow tie. Somehow it all worked.

His wit was legendary. Once, he asked a graduate student to name three good things the Lord had done for him that day. The student responded, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Marty shot back, “That’s one.” It was the kind of wit that revealed, as historian Mark Noll put it in another context, a “really big motor up there.”

Marty never forgot a name—including the names of friends’ and acquaintances’ spouses, children, grandchildren, even pets. If you lost a parent, you received a handwritten sympathy note. His humanity was the real deal.

An ivory-tower intellectual Marty was not. He was the father of four sons and two permanent foster children. After his first wife, Elsa, died of cancer, he married Harriet Meyer, a musician, who survives him. A plaque at the door of Marty and Harriet’s retirement condo high up the Hancock tower in Chicago bore these words from the Puritan leader John Winthrop from about 1630:

When God intends a man to a work he sets a Bias on his heart so as tho’ he be tumbled this way and that yet his Bias still draws him to that side, and there he rests at last.

Winthrop’s vision seemed to anticipate Marty’s.

Marty’s relationship with evangelicals followed a definable trajectory. Many mainliners, including other authors at the Century, viewed the early- and mid-career Billy Graham with disdain. Marty rarely, if ever, explicitly criticized anyone, including Graham. But in those days, he did view Graham warily—as well he might, for Graham often seemed to love America a bit too much.

But Graham changed, and so did Marty. On the occasion of Graham’s 70th birthday, Marty joined Christianity Today in a celebratory issue. In an article titled, “Reflections on Graham by a Former Grump,” Marty explained that the true divide in American religion was not liberal/conservative but “mean and nonmean.” Graham fell into the latter camp for many reasons, including his willingness to work with anyone who would work with him.

Some years ago, I embarked on a biography of Graham, whom I visited several times in his 90s in his remote mountaintop home in Montreat, North Carolina. Marty asked if he could join me, for they had never met, but Graham’s family declined the offer because of the evangelist’s failing health. When I conveyed that news to Marty, his response was as simple and sweet and honest as his life had been: “Then Billy and I will just have to have that conversation together when we get to heaven.”

Grant Wacker is the Gilbert T. Rowe distinguished professor of Christian history, emeritus, at Duke Divinity School. He is the author of One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham.

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Church Life

Building the Habit of Family Worship

Esther Shin Chuang

Growing up in the Asian church, I thought worship belonged in the church. Now I’m bringing it into our home.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Growing up as a pastor’s kid in Chuncheon, South Korea, I rarely prayed with my family at home outside of mealtimes. It became even more difficult to pray together when my family lived separately from one another. I was 12 years old when my whole family moved to the US for my music education, but a year later, my dad returned to Korea to continue his work in ministry.

When my mom, my brother, and I visited my dad during our long summer breaks, we would occasionally join him for daily 5 a.m. prayer services at church. Even as I rubbed sleep from my eyes and stifled yawns, seeing my parents earnestly praying and worshiping God before the sun rose left a strong impression on me.

I learned to pray at church, and I learned to worship God at church. At home, my dad would lay his hands on me and pray if I had a fever or pray for me over the phone when I faced conflicts with my friends. We did devotions individually, but my family rarely gathered together to worship God outside of church.

I didn’t learn about family worship until I was pursuing a doctorate of worship studies in my late 20s. By then, I was married and planning to start a family, so the topic caught my eye. Donald S. Whitney’s book Family Worship listed Scripture passages such as Deuteronomy 6:7, which called on God’s people to impress his commandments on their children: “Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” Whitney made it clear that God’s intention was for families to worship together in the home.

“It is unlikely that exposure to the church once or twice a week will impress your children enough with the greatness and glory of God that they will want to pursue him once they leave your home,” he wrote. “That is why family worship is so important.”

Family worship hadn’t been prioritized in the Asian churches I’d attended or visited, as ministry often takes precedence over the family. Churches are busy with activities and services that pull parents away from their families rather than bringing them together. Parents also often work long hours in Asia, leaving them with little time to spend with their kids.

Yet some Asian church leaders are awakening to the importance of families taking the proactive step of discipling their kids. The Asia Evangelical Alliance (AEA) named its 2024 General Assembly “Disciple or Die,” sending the message that if believers don’t concentrate on discipling their children, their churches will disappear.

In the Philippines, pastors are often seen as the sole spiritual leaders of the flocks, so Christians often don’t see the need for further discipleship in the home, Peter Tan-Chi, pastor of the megachurch Christ’s Commission Fellowship, told CT in an email.

“Many parents rely on church programs or Sunday school for their children’s spiritual growth, but this overlooks the importance of family-led discipleship as described in the Old Testament,” Tan-Chi said.

He tells his parishioners that “every family is a discipleship group” where parents can model their faith through praying, having honest discussions, and serving together.

Other churches in the region have also started to step up, said Gwen de Rozario, director of AEA’s Children Commission. At Pungsunghan Church in Suwon, a city south of Seoul, families discuss the coming Sunday’s Bible passage before hearing it preached from the pulpit. Then the church meets in age-specific groups to study the passage, and families gather throughout the week for devotions. “Parents who were authoritative have begun to talk with their children and understand them better,” de Rozario said.

My husband and I created our own traditions when our first child was born. While rocking our newborn baby, we would sing “Jesus Loves Me,” read a short passage in the Bible, and pray together. Sometimes our family worship was interspersed with my daughter’s piercing cries, yet it became her sweet bedtime routine. When our daughter became a toddler, we started reading a children’s Bible to her and singing worship songs with body motions. She would giggle and laugh with joy during our family worship.

But when our family of three became four, making time for this spiritual discipline became a struggle as we juggled the needs of a toddler and a newborn. Some days, we would run out of time trying to get the kids to bed. When guests came over, we would forget to do our worship time. When we moved to Malaysia, where my husband’s demanding job would keep him as late as 9 p.m., the regular routine of daily family worship seemed impossible. Before I realized it, we had stopped doing family worship for three years.

In 2024, I attended a bimonthly prayer meeting for moms at my children’s school in Penang, Malaysia. That day, fellow mom Margaret Emis brought laminated Scripture cards praising God for the work he had done. She said that these cards, which helped her kids memorize Bible verses and guided their prayer time, had been part of her family’s worship sessions for 15 years.

Fifteen years? I was amazed. I sat down with Margaret later to learn more about how she managed to keep up the practice amid the busyness of life. She said it started when she read John MacArthur’s What the Bible Says about Parenting. One quote stood out to her.

“Whenever outside influences shape a child’s character more than the parents, the parents have failed in their duties,” he wrote. “God has placed in our hands the responsibility of bringing our children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and we will give account to God for our stewardship of this great gift.”

The words pierced Margaret’s heart. Her kids were still young, but she wanted to pass down her Christian faith to them. Realizing that she needed to actively disciple her kids, Margaret decided that she would do family worship every day.

Margaret prepares breakfast by 6 a.m. so that her husband and her three daughters can do family worship at the table. She chose breakfast time because it was the only meal that the whole family ate together every day. For an hour, the whole family reads the Bible, learns about God, sings worship songs, and prays.

Over the years, Margaret and her husband taught their children the attributes of God, read through the Puritan prayers in The Valley of Vision, prayed for unreached people groups, and recited the questions and answers of the Westminster catechism. Margaret creates the Bible reading plans and finds material as her husband leads the worship time.

Still, some challenges remain: It’s difficult to have the discipline to do it daily. She must make sure her children, who are now in high school, go to bed early. She wakes up around 5 a.m. not only to have breakfast ready but also to spend alone time with God to set the right attitude going into the day. “Am I going to be grumpy?” she mused. “Or am I going to be thankful that God saved me and let the joy of the Lord be my strength and serve my family?”

Another friend, Leon Lim, a pastor in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, leads his own version of family worship in his home. Whenever we stayed at his house or his family visited us, they invited us to join in their family worship.

At Leon’s home, his whole family, including his elderly mother, brother, wife, and two kids—ages 4 and 8—gather every night at 9 p.m. For 15 minutes or so, they sing a worship song, read Scripture, pray, sing “Kyrie Eleison” (a liturgy asking God for mercy), pray the Lord’s Prayer, and end with a blessing: “Almighty God, Creator Christ, and Holy Spirit bless and preserve you. Amen.”

“We go book by book in the Bible, and the kids really want to read the Bible,” Leon said. “It was exciting to see their love of reading Scripture.” They have not missed a single day of doing family worship since starting in 2019. Sometimes they would do it in the car, sometimes through Zoom if one family member was away.

Although Leon’s parents are both pastors, he had never seen family worship modeled in the home. He noted that “the call towards the father being the spiritual leader of the home and to lead the spiritual lives of their families [in Malaysia] is still rather weak,” with believers instead relying on the church to spiritually form their children.

Initially, he struggled to know how to do family worship. But now it’s a time his family looks forward to “as we always find refuge in God no matter what the circumstances of our day or season may be.”

These two families motivated me to ask once again how my own family could worship God at home.

Whitney, the author of Family Worship, suggests having a regular time each day for the practice and choosing a time when the family is already accustomed to gathering. For us, that meant around the kids’ bedtimes. We sit on our bed and take turns reflecting on the day and how we have seen God at work.

Recently, my seven-year-old daughter said she saw God at work when my husband prayed for a family member’s salvation. My four-year-old chimed in: “God is my healer. His name is Rapha!” Their answers surprised us and made us smile. We would then read the children’s Bible, thank God for how he has worked in the day, and sing a song of blessing.

Family worship can still be a challenge for my family. Our four-year-old son will often run away in the middle of the worship time. When we come home late and are rushed for bedtime, we skip the song and just pray. But my husband and I are striving to regularly worship God with our children because, as Whitney wrote, “God deserves to be worshiped daily in our homes by our families.”

Additional reporting by Bruce Barron

Esther Shin Chuang, who holds a doctorate in worship studies, is an award-winning concert pianist, worship leader, and faculty at six seminaries throughout Southeast Asia. She and her husband are pastors at Georgetown Baptist Church in Penang, Malaysia.

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News

Syria Massacre Leaves Christians Asking If They’re Next

Jill Nelson

Islamists didn’t target the church in the violence that killed more than 1,000, but the community is on edge.

A woman grieving for a victim of the a recent wave of sectarian violence targeting Syria's Alawite minority.

Delil Souleiman / Getty

Adi Oweis was lounging with his kids in his Maryland home last week when his phone lit up with alerts from friends in Syria. Islamists connected to the new government were on their way to the country’s coastal Alawite region.

Graphic videos soon arrived in his group chats: entire families slaughtered and row after row of dead Syrians lining the streets. Some of the victims were his Alawite friends.

Now he fears for the future of the Syrian church.

Oweis, who works for an international nonprofit focused on interfaith dialogue, is a member of the Syrian Greek Orthodox community and lived in Damascus, Syria’s capital, until 2009. He was shocked by the violent campaign against people he once lived among. Christianity Today agreed not to use his real name to protect his Syrian family members.

Islamists killed more than 1,300 people, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Most of the victims were civilians from the Alawite community, the minority Shia sect to which former president Bashar al-Assad belongs. Clashes between government forces and an armed remnant of Assad’s regime in the provinces of Latakia and Tartus last week led to sectarian violence as Sunni militia descended on the region. Alawites, who held prominent positions under Assad’s rule, have a history of living side by side with Christians.

“It freaked us out,” Oweis said. “We couldn’t sleep. It was a very painful few days.” Oweis confirmed the deaths of ten Christians through his channels in Syria, but he doesn’t believe the government forces and rogue militia are intentionally targeting the Christian community.

“They see us as infidels, as people who don’t believe in what they believe in,” Oweis said. “At the same time, they don’t see us as people who persecuted them in the past.”

Still, Syrian Christians are worried, wondering if the new government will target them next.

The revenge killings mark the worst violence since the December ouster of Assad. Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as al-Golani, led the Sunni movement to overthrow Assad and now serves as Syria’s interim president.

Many Syrians welcomed the end of Assad’s 24-year grip on power. His Ba’ath party ruled for more than five decades and was guilty of numerous atrocities against Syrians. Yet Sharaa’s former ties to al-Qaeda have raised concerns that Syrians may have exchanged one violent regime for another. Christians and other minorities, including Alawites, Kurds, and Druze, could face increasing threats, said Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute.

“There are no restraints for the protection of religious minorities,” said Shea, who served on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom seven times. “It’s open season on them.”

Some reports characterized Syria’s conflict as ethnic in nature, but Shea believes religion is a primary driver. She tracks Islamist regimes and has observed patterns of religious oppression in Iraq, Nigeria, and Syria.

“[The killings] may not be done on orders, but I’d be surprised if the government protects Christians or anyone else,” she said. According to Shea, Sharaa has a tenuous hold on power and directs a coalition of radicals that includes “hardened jihadist fighters” from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, and other countries.

She believes Syria’s interim president is a radical Islamist who projects a moderate image to the West to secure sanctions relief and aid.

“The United States condemns the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria in recent days,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement Sunday. He called on the Syrian government to pursue justice.

Sharaa’s office has said it would create an independent committee to investigate the killings by both sides. “No one will be above the law, and all those whose hands are stained with Syrian blood will face justice—fairly and without delay,” Sharaa said in a speech Sunday.

Oweis questions widely circulated social media posts describing a Christian slaughter, and he said reports claiming a priest died during the attacks are false. But he is still concerned about the future of Syria’s Christian community since Islamists view Christians as “low-hanging fruit.”

“It’s a house you can go to without any resistance because they know that Christians don’t have arms,” Oweis said. “And they are not clustered in one place like the Alawites where they can … resist for a long time.”

Oweis said Syrian forces looted hundreds of Christian homes during the assault on Alawite communities between the coastal towns of Tartus and Latakia. Jihadis stormed the home of Oweis’s friend and spared his life after discovering his Christian identity. But they stole his car.

Theft is so prevalent in Christian communities that churches typically hide their icons during the week and display them on Sundays only, Oweis said. Some icons are more than 400 years old and very valuable.

Shea said the Syrian Christian population has dwindled significantly in the past few decades and now numbers around 300,000. While no surveys have been conducted, Oweis said Catholic and Greek Orthodox estimates are more optimistic and range from 600,000 to 1 million.

Despite the indiscriminate killings and targeted theft, many Christians are choosing to stay in Syria and maintain a low profile, according to Christians with connections in the country. At the same time, some reports suggest that thousands of Syrians are crossing the border into Lebanon.

Those who stay face threats on multiple fronts.

A group of around 500 Kurdish Christians from the northern town of Afrin has been displaced multiple times due to fighting between Turkish militias and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), said Majeed Kurdi, a US-based Iraqi Kurdish pastor working with Freedom Seekers International to provide aid to that group. Tensions increased when the new government pressured armed groups to merge with the national military.

The Kurdish Christians, who are currently living in Aleppo, Syria, are part of the nondenominational Good Shepherd Church but currently have no place to safely meet. The church has added more Kurds to its group each time it has evacuated a town or refugee camp, and the group has now swelled to around 1,200, including many nonbelievers who are interested in Christianity, according to Kurdi.

But their situation is precarious.

“[The militias] are, from time to time, trying to attack the Christians,” Kurdi said. “And especially they are looking for the converted Muslims to Christianity.”

Kurdi said Turkish-backed mercenaries who oppose the Kurdish presence in the border region have kidnapped Kurds, including women on their way to the market, as far south as Aleppo.

“All these powers are clashing in the area,” said Kurdi. “That’s why it’s impossible to have unity. Nobody listens to the others.”

On Monday, the SDF agreed to merge with the new Syrian government. Kurdi called the arrangement a “good beginning between both sides,” but he doesn’t think it will curtail Turkish assaults on Kurds. Another looming question is whether the 9,000 ISIS prisoners the SDF currently guards will be transferred to the new Syrian government.

Oweis said the broader Christian community is the least-armed group in Syria. Now Christians fear mobs connected to Sharaa’s ruling Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, could turn against them in an instant.

Yet Christians maintain a measure of hope. “We are not good in the art of war at all, but we are good in the art of peace,” Oweis said.

Throughout Syria’s decades of turmoil, Christians have developed relationships with Alawites, Druze, and Sunni Muslims, Oweis said. Some Christian communities have sponsored dinners that bring various factions together.

On Monday, Sharaa claimed the revenge killings were contained and vowed to bring those responsible to justice, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed the targeted killings have since continued. Some Syrians question Sharaa’s intentions, and Oweis knows the road ahead will be difficult and complex.

But any pause could be an opportunity for progress.

“The militias left the Alawite region, so we hope for reconciliation,” Oweis said. “For Christians, fighting in an armed manner or resisting them is almost impossible, and it could result in a genocide for the Christian population.”

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News

Wire Story

Southern Baptists Say DOJ Investigation Concludes Without Further Charges

Bob Smietana - Religion News Association

After the federal inquiry didn’t turn up findings around abuse, advocates fear critics will continue to push back against reform.

Jae C. Hong / AP

Lawyers for the Southern Baptist Convention said Wednesday that the US Department of Justice has ended an investigation into the denomination’s response to allegations of sexual abuse committed by Southern Baptist pastors and institutional leaders.

That investigation was launched in 2022 after the release of the Guidepost report that demonstrated that SBC executives had mistreated abuse survivors and sought to downplay the effects of abuse in the convention.

“Earlier today, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York informed us that the investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention and Executive Committee has officially concluded,” SBC attorneys Gene Besen and Scarlett Nokes told Baptist Press, an official SBC outlet.

Megan Lively, an abuse survivor and activist, said she was disappointed to hear from an FBI agent that the investigation was over. She had hoped, she said, that the investigation would move the SBC to take abuse reforms seriously. “It’s just a mess,” she added.

A spokesman for the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.

No abuse charges have been filed as a result of the Guidepost report, though Matt Queen, a former Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor and provost, pleaded guilty last fall to lying to the FBI, and last week was sentenced to six months of house arrest, a year of supervised release and a $2,000 fine.

But aside from Queen’s case, few details of the investigation have been made public. Given that national SBC leaders have no direct control over pastors or churches, it was always unclear what crimes SBC leaders might be charged with.

Leaders from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Queen was once a professor as well as provost, said in a statement: “For more than two years, Southwestern fully cooperated with the DOJ throughout the investigation and is pleased that there were no findings of wrongdoing against the institution or current employees. We remain committed to ensuring the safety of all members of the seminary community.”

This is the second time the SBC’s attorneys have announced an end to the DOJ investigation. Last March, those attorneys said that the investigation into the Executive Committee, which oversees the denomination’s day-to-day operations, was over, but later clarified that the investigation into the denomination as a whole continued.

Southern Baptist leaders have spent more than $2 million on legal fees related to the investigation. Those fees, along with more than $3 million spent defending lawsuits filed by a pair of former SBC leaders named in the Guidepost report, and the cost of the Guidepost investigation itself, have drained the Executive Committee’s reserves and left it unable to pay its legal bills.

On Wednesday, Jeff Iorg, president and CEO of the Executive Committee, gave thanks for the investigation’s end. “We’re grateful that we can close this chapter in our legal proceedings and move forward,” he said.

The SBC’s attempts to manage accusations of sexual abuse have occupied the leadership for more than a decade, and the convention’s governing body, the annual meeting of “messengers” from local churches, has demanded reform, forcing the Executive Committee to commission the Guidepost investigation in a floor vote in 2021.

But critics of the reform efforts point to the cost of the Guidepost investigation to claim that it was a mistake. Abuse advocates worry that those critics will now use the end of the DOJ investigation to derail reforms.

The Guidepost report led Southern Baptists to pass a series of reforms intended to address abuse in churches, including more training and publishing a database of abusive pastors. Those reforms have largely stalled.

While the SBC has distributed training materials and hired a national staffer to help oversee reforms, the database has been tabled for now, with SBC leaders saying last month it is no longer a priority.

Abuse survivors now worry that the end of the investigation and the tabling of the database signal that abuse reforms have run out of steam.

“Everything seems to be falling apart,” said Lively.

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Culture

My Walmart Evangelism Wasn’t Working

Heidie Senseman

The Good News didn’t sound so good when I ambushed people in the chip aisle.

As college freshmen, my friends and I spent many Friday evenings wandering around Walmarts in southwest Ohio. We paced the tile floors, squinted under fluorescent lights, smelled the bread wafting in from the Subway in the foyer. We strolled up and down the aisles, passing unloaded palettes and abandoned carts. But we weren’t there for groceries. We were there to ask shoppers how we could pray for them.

Our method was simple: Identify a shopper, approach that person slowly, and introduce yourself. Be warm, concise. State your purpose. Hi! My name is Heidie, and this is my friend Leah. We’re Christians, and we were wondering if there was any way we could pray for you today. Then we would smile and wait until the person we were speaking to no longer looked startled.

Many people said no thank you and hurried away, the way one does when cornered by a Girl Scout during cookie season. Some ignored us, continuing to reach for canned goods and check items off their lists. Some responded with open derision, emitting unfriendly grunts or mumbling things like you fundamentalists. But occasionally, a person would say sure, we’d inquire what about, and then we’d start to pray.

Our prayer offer was genuine, though perhaps a sort of front. What we really wanted was to evangelize. We wanted to present the gospel message beginning to end, creation to consummation, and invite people to respond. So we prayed informative prayers. We situated requests inside the story of biblical history, defining terms and quoting Scripture along the way. The social conventions surrounding prayer—namely, that you remain buckled in until someone says amen—made our presentations possible.

This was the evangelistic strategy we’d learned from students earning their master of divinity at our devout Baptist college. The MDiv students took a course titled Introduction to Evangelism, so our campus had a constant supply of pastors-in-training looking to lead outings and confer tips. If all you can do is pray for someone, I heard many MDiv students explain, then pray the gospel. So we did. I prayed the gospel in the produce aisle of a superstore. My friend Zoe opted for the coffee shops in “Hippie Village.” My friend Andrew preferred a nearby mall. My roommate, Alina, visited public universities.

The MDiv students weren’t driving our school’s emphasis on evangelism—more so responding to it. In our daily campus-wide chapel services, speakers regularly preached that all Christians are called to live on mission and that we are in a cosmic battle for souls. My group’s Walmart outreach may have been a caricature of these principles—something I credit to the clumsiness of freshman fervor—but we were working from our chaplains’ exhortations. Tell the story. Name the stakes. Make clear the route to salvation.

Sure, we’d get backlash. But the gospel was offensive to nonbelievers. A “stumbling block,” in Paul’s words (1 Cor. 1:23). Backlash was to be expected. Our job was to “shake the dust off [our] feet” and carry on (Matt. 10:14). One chapel speaker quoted Charles Spurgeon on the subject. “If sinners be damned,” Spurgeon had written, “at least let them leap to hell over our dead bodies.” The speaker enunciated hard on dead bodies. Harrowed amens echoed from our chapel audience.

My Walmart evangelism faded midway through my sophomore year, when most of the MDiv students I knew had finished Introduction to Evangelism and moved on to Biblical Greek. Quiet Friday evenings gave me an opportunity to take stock. I was glad to have an answer when chapel speakers asked the room, How are you responding to the Great Commission? I was grateful, also, for my hardened spiritual calluses, for the dying to self I’d experienced in the face of derision and side-eyes.

My efforts had come from an earnest place. One of the most common encouragements my friends and I would offer each other after a difficult exchange with a shopper was, strangely, a reminder of hell’s reality. Real people were actually facing eternal condemnation. Constantly. A shot at saving someone from that fate was worth rejection.

And yet I still wasn’t satisfied with our approach. People rarely agreed to pray with us, and even those who did hurried away after “amen.” No questions, no conversations. I knew the typical consolation of We just plant the seed, and God will give growth if he wills (1 Cor. 3:6), but I’d started to lose confidence that we were really “planting seeds.” The difficulties we faced seemed prior to “planting,” and prior, even to the “rock of offense” (1 Pet. 2:8, ESV). As I replayed memories of botched approaches in my head, it occurred to me that maybe the gospel hadn’t been what offended our Walmart shoppers; maybe the gall of two strange, Pollyanna-ish teenagers demanding their attention in the chip aisle had.

My reflections were helped along by my upper-level writing courses. Our classes featured loads of discussions about literature’s devotional potential and the duty of the Christian writer, but there wasn’t pressure to sneak sermons into our stories, nor was there any subtext that our writing would be better if we did. Instead, my professors wanted us to approach storytelling with nuance. We discussed books that overtly proclaimed the gospel, like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, but we also discussed works that were more subtly—if even detectably—Christian, like Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and T. S. Eliot’s poetry.

Whatever we read, we focused on craft. We were just as concerned with what an author was saying as we were with how the author was saying it. Good writers, my professors emphasized, care about presentation. They connect with their readers. They build rapport. They use humor, tone, narrative, tact, which is why people feel so affected by their words. These were important breakthroughs for me. They taught me a lesson I desperately needed to learn, with applications far beyond the classroom: One could have a great message but deliver it terribly.

I spent the first half of my senior year applying to MFA programs in creative writing, and by the spring, I had been accepted to one at the University of Iowa. UIowa was the kind of place that chapel speakers referred to as “the world.” My university president had recently written an article in which he criticized educational systems teaching “secular humanism, evolutionary theory, and a Godless atheism.” I was headed for one of those.

And with no semblance of an evangelistic strategy, might I add. My Walmart reflections had persuaded me away from the cold-call approach, but they hadn’t squelched my obligation to the Great Commission. I wanted to lead people to the light, to snatch souls out of the fire (Jude v. 23). But it felt upside-down to show up at a university declaring that I had something to teach everyone else. And I didn’t want to reduce my soon-to-be classmates to a sort of faceless evangelistic cause before even meeting them.

Get-to-know-you questions filled my first weeks at Iowa. Classmates asked me, What was your college like? What do you write about? On repeat, I answered: small Baptist college, very devout, Christian art, conversion. I expected my peers to produce the same look of stunned discomfort that my Walmart targets typically had. Instead, they asked more questions.

My answers opened new conversations: about my high-school conversion to Christianity, and my junior year discipleship group, and a 62-foot-tall Jesus statue in Ohio. I wondered if all this talk might count as a kind of evangelism. The rubric in my head told me no. I wasn’t “naming the stakes” or inviting them to bow their heads in informative prayer. But I was providing an account of the Christian life. Of my Christian life. And it was the details they seemed most interested in. The earthiness and humor, for example, of my 14-year-old self googling “serious Jesus colleges Midwest” seemed to give my peers something they could latch onto, some sort of example in which they could locate or revise the things they’d heard about religion.

A bit further into the semester, a classmate asked me why I’d chosen the MFA at Iowa. I explained: As newlyweds, my husband and I decided we both wanted to attend graduate programs. We sat down and made a list of every university in the US that offered both a funded MFA in creative nonfiction and a funded PhD in theoretical physics. We applied until we had no more money to cover application fees. Then we prayed for months. He got accepted into Iowa. I got waitlisted. So we continued to pray and asked everyone we knew to pray, and then a few weeks later, on the national graduate-school deadline, four hours before the midnight cutoff, I got an email letting me know that a spot had opened up for me.

“I’ll give it to you,” my classmate said, half smiling. “That sounds … divine.”

The moment felt significant: an agnostic glimpsing God. But I didn’t want to push the conversation toward some cosmic ultimatum. Maybe that was my cowardice. Maybe it was something like tact.

I’ve heard all kinds of objections to evangelistic finesse: that God works through broken vessels, that we aren’t to conform to the patterns of the world, that the beauty of the gospel is shared through stumbling lips. I understand the sentiments, and I’m grateful for the ways they encourage Christians who, with Moses, say, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent” (Ex. 4:10). It’s a prayer we all pray at times.

But I wonder if our familiarity with that prayer has led us to expect bumpy deliveries—or to prefer them, even, misinterpreting a lack of discretion as evangelistic seriousness. It’s easy to cast the plight of a Walmart evangelist in the same light as the apostles’ persecution. It’s harder to admit that confronting strangers with the gospel in the street, a park, or a store might produce an affront that’s more social than theological. Harder to accept that people don’t like being dragged into intimate conversations with strangers. We find ideas more compelling when they’re delivered through the lips of those we know—that is, when there’s a connection, or a relationship, or context.

To be fair, some are hostile toward evangelism regardless of its delivery, even among friends. In one of my first-semester seminars at Iowa, I listened in on a conversation about proselytizing. I didn’t know the word, but I could identify the sour tone in which it was spoken. One classmate called it condescending. Another used the word fanatical. My professor said it was an act of colonialism. People nodded. It wasn’t until someone explicitly said religion that I understood what we were talking about. They weren’t decrying the “stumbling block” (1 Cor. 1:23) of the gospel; they were wholesale decrying the evangelistic act. They were angered by the overt persuasion of it, by the thought that someone might try to convert them.

Two weeks later, the Gideons came to Iowa City. They stood on high-traffic sidewalks and passed out pocket-sized New Testaments. I accepted one as a small act of solidarity, despite having six Bibles at home, and then retreated to a nearby academic building to watch from a window. I winced when students waved the Gideons off, glared, or accepted a pocket New Testament only to throw it in the trashcan at the corner. I watched many New Testaments topple into the trash. I saw the Gideons see it, too.

These were the scenes I held in my head as I worked on my first workshop essay—a personal piece of writing I’d submit to my classmates for feedback. I feared being accused of proselytizing, and I hated that fear, so I mustered the courage I could and wrote about it indirectly. I wrote about the Bible lessons I’d delivered to third graders during my summers working at a Christian camp, and about my time as a public relations writer for my Baptist college’s marketing division, and about my run-in with the Gideons, all situated between my abstract ponderings about religious outreach—about “proselytizing.” It was an unwieldy collage of an essay that I submitted in a panic.

On the day of my workshop, I heard two clear notes from the room. One, the abstract sections were muddled and unnecessary. Two, they loved the moments when I presented religion through personal stories.

One classmate told me the essay “came alive” in the summer-camp scenes. Another said the narrative details made her feel that she was seeing inside Christianity. A third said the personal anecdotes helped her access the essay’s ideas. It wasn’t the reaction I expected, especially with an essay so clearly about religious people sharing their religion. But somehow the narratives created more engagement. A different professor of mine would state it succinctly in a conference with me a couple semesters later: “I’m not interested in talking about Christianity. But I do like your stories.”

Her words called to mind something Paul wrote of his own evangelistic appeal: “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law. … To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some” (1 Cor. 9:20–22). And perhaps we could add: To the writers I became a writer.

The storyteller and the evangelist alike bring listeners to the brink of a new world. They invite them in, the refrain Come and see on their lips. C. S. Lewis, the gospel allegorist I read in my undergrad literature courses—the writer also responsible for some of the 20th century’s most winsome spiritual essays—described stories, sermonic or not, as windows and doors. That is, access points. Portals. Things people can peer into and step through to “see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts.” I can’t think of a better description of what evangelism hopes to accomplish in its hearers.

Of course, this is not a foolproof method; there isn’t one. But I’m convinced evangelists would do well to stash some stories in their pockets, especially for an audience whose greatest need is not airtight doctrinal presentation but a better narrative and a new set of eyes to see it. Again, in Lewis’s words: “One of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out.’ Or from another point of view, ‘I have got in.’”

After the workshop, one of my classmates texted me that she was appointing me her “spiritual consultant.” Her words contained some hyperbole, but she wasn’t lying. She began sending her questions my way. How were saints canonized in the Catholic church? How many Marys were in Jesus’ friend group? What did liturgy mean?

Other classmates have joined in, too. Since my first workshop, I’ve been asked, “What are the classes of relics? Why did Saint Nicholas and Arius fight? Why do Christians rub ashes on their foreheads in February? Are songbooks the same as hymnals? Is hell a metaphor? Why do Christians get married so young?” And, ever so nonchalantly—“How does the Incarnation work?”

I love these questions. I love them because they’re meaty, and because they expect answers, and because they bid me to discuss the things of God with seekers and skeptics and friends, which is what I craved and never found in a year’s worth of Walmart aisles.

Heidie Senseman is an MFA candidate in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her essays have previously appeared in Vita Poetica, Dappled Things, Plough, Ekstasis, and other publications.

- More from Heidie Senseman

Ideas

A Closing Door to Persecuted Christians

Ryan Brown

Trump’s new immigration policies will hurt believers at risk for their faith.

It took 18 hours for one Iranian Christian convert to cross the Iranian-Turkish border when she fled her country. “We were in a cold, dark truck with other people,” she later remembered.

Another Iranian convert still can’t talk about the moment she and her family made the border crossing without crying. “I looked at the flag and said, ‘It’s [my] last look at [the Iranian] flag,’” she said, weeping. “It is really difficult.”

And for another, leaving her home in Iran for Türkiye meant entering a country where “we barely receive our basic human rights” as refugees.

Each of these women is an Iranian Christian whom the regime imprisoned because she left Islam, put her faith in Christ, and belonged to an underground house church. After interrogation, each was released with a stern warning to avoid continuing to meet with other Christians. Each woman knew that if she stayed and continued to practice her faith, she could be arrested again, and this time she wouldn’t see the outside of a prison for years.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, thousands of Christians fled the country after the Taliban militant government took over in 2021. Many of these believers are converts from Islam and knew that if the new regime discovered their faith, they risked execution.

In North Korea, Christians sometimes make the difficult and dangerous journey to China. Even if they make it across the border, they know that if the Chinese government catches them, they can be repatriated back to North Korea and sentenced to a lifetime in labor camps. Meanwhile, the number of North Koreans the Chinese government has deported has only increased since the COVID-19 pandemic.

These are but a handful of the desperate situations faced by followers of Jesus. For decades, persecuted Christians have left their homes and entered a sort of migration limbo, all the while hoping they could one day end up in a country that would protect their religious convictions. For decades, this country was the United States. But the trajectory of current policies from President Donald Trump’s administration are making it quite likely the US government will send followers of Jesus back to environments where they will be arrested, imprisoned, or even killed.

As American Christians, how might we respond?

The reality ‘back home’

Christians of sincere conviction have varying opinions on how to address immigration. In recent years, numerous parts of the country have struggled to provide housing and services to the thousands of arriving migrants. In fact, in a recent report released by World Relief and Open Doors US (the organization where I’m honored to serve), we “affirmed the need for reforms to improve border security and the asylum process.”

However, since January, Trump’s executive orders have resulted in merely shutting programs down rather than offering any type of meaningful reform. Suspending the refugee resettlement program, ending the asylum process at the southern border, as dysfunctional as it is, and transferring migrants to other countries where they face forced deportation puts thousands of people in dangerous situations. Without initiatives like these, America will be endangering Christian converts from Iran and around the world who fear for their lives and their families’ lives if the US forces them to return.

For instance, last year, Laleh Saati returned to Iran after spending several frustrating years seeking asylum in Malaysia. Authorities arrested her at her father’s home in a suburb of Tehran and imprisoned her in a ward which sits under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Intelligence, the secretive branch of the Iranian government that has been accused of carrying out assassinations at home and abroad.

Once Saati was in prison, officials interrogated her for roughly three weeks, displaying photographs and videos of her Christian activities and baptism in Malaysia as evidence of her supposed crime. On March 16, 2024, Saati was sentenced to two years in prison for “acting against national security by connecting with Zionist Christian organisations,” a common charge against Christian converts in Iran. She was just one of the 139 Christians arrested for their faith in 2024 in Iran.

Even after Iranians are released from detention or prison, their situation remains extremely difficult. Many report that the secret police continue to follow them and that their faith poses a challenge to their livelihoods. The Christian who eventually fled Iran in the back of a crowded truck, told Open Doors that after her arrest, the hospital where she worked fired her once after discovering her faith. Other Christians report that schools have expelled their children. Faced with harassment and discrimination, many Christians make the painful decision to leave.

Though most Iranian Christians head first to Türkiye, where they don’t face immediate danger of arrest, they aren’t legally allowed to work or, in some cases, attend school. Türkiye offers no legal pathway for them to make the country their final home. Further, the government can deport them at any point and restricts their movement, meaning they can’t venture beyond a 20- to 30-mile radius of the place where they settle.

No longer a place of refuge?

This pattern happens around the world: Christians flee their homes when it feels as if their only options are apostasy, prison, or relocation. They make the choice to leave their homes and go to other countries, often bordering nations where they hope they can escape the authorities’ notice. These believers live in a sort of legal gray area where they hope they can find permanent homes even as they live at the mercy of the countries where they’ve fled.

From there, they may file for refugee status with the United Nations, waiting (often for years) before they’re told they can resettle. Even then, only 1 percent of those seeking a permanent place to settle ultimately end up in the United States or another nation.

For decades, the United States has been a place where Christians could safely claim asylum or be resettled as refugees. The legal path to finding safe haven is not an easy one—refugees and people claiming asylum must demonstrate they have a “well-founded fear of persecution,” in the words of the US Refugee Act of 1980. Additionally, people who claim asylum can have difficulty finding jobs while they wait for their claims to be approved or denied. Of course, the system isn’t foolproof—some have expressed concern over fake conversions, for instance, though asylum fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States. And that immigration asylum claims that overwhelmed the US system during the Biden administration reveal a status quo that needs reform.

However, American Christians can’t lose sight that real people will be profoundly impacted if the US chooses to forgo careful reform and instead accept the complete suspension of these programs designed to help those in real danger. Currently, with the stoppage of both the asylum process and the refugee resettlement program, Christians no longer have the option of a safe place in the United States.

Are we suffering with them?

As Christians, we can’t let our advocacy for our brothers and sisters in Christ descend to the toxic, polarized dialogue that often characterizes these conversations. Scripture teaches us that when one part of the body suffers, we all suffer with it (1 Cor. 12:26). Instead, our response should recognize that their persecution comes because of their love for and obedience to Jesus—and that our country has the capacity to offer sanctuary and support.

Those of us in the US must advocate for policies that protect people genuinely facing religious persecution. Again, Christians can disagree on the particulars in good conscience. But our nation was founded in part because of people fleeing religious persecution, and today, over 380 million Christians worldwide face high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith. While most persecuted believers feel called to remain in their countries (and Open Doors’ primary purpose is to strengthen those who stay), the few who must flee deserve the freedom to follow Jesus safely. We must challenge our elected officials to remember these vulnerable Christians when reforming immigration policies.

I also encourage Christians to get involved with organizations—at local, national and international levels—that help people fleeing religious persecution and help those in the United States who have lost expected help from the government. That may include financial support, but it also includes things like volunteering, local advocacy to shape state and city policies around refugee aid, or work with churches to help asylum seekers and persecuted Christians find hope and purpose in the United States.

Finally, let’s keep praying. In my role at Open Doors US, I always hear a common refrain from our persecuted brothers and sisters: “Pray with us.” Prayer can bring us into solidarity with persecuted Christians, can provide comfort and hope, and, as Scripture shows us, can even change the hearts of those who lead governments like Iran’s that threaten the well-being of God’s followers.

Our responsibilities as followers of Jesus must drive our actions in each of these areas. As American Christians, we must not forget our sisters and brothers who have fled Iran or any other countries because of their faith—and then we need to work to make sure they can have a safer place to go.

Ryan Brown is CEO of Open Doors US, part of the international ministry of Open Doors.

- More from Ryan Brown

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The reality ‘back home’

No longer a place of refuge?

Are we suffering with them?

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The reality ‘back home’

No longer a place of refuge?

Are we suffering with them?

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