What Do Christians Owe Their Ex-Boyfriends?

Sometimes loving your neighbor means telling him you’re not in love anymore.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels, Wikimedia Commons

During a recent breakup, in an attempt to regain control over my life, I went back and forth about what would help. A new piercing? A tattoo? Dying my hair? But I hate needles, and I like my natural color. Many Olivia Rodrigo belt sessions in the car, pints of dairy-free ice cream, cuddles with my breakup bear (Build-A-Bear, have I got a marketing campaign for you!), and tears later, I started feeling a little more like myself again.

But I hadn’t resolved the tension I feel whenever one of my dating relationships ends. How do I love my neighbor when I’m telling him I don’t love him anymore? Or when he is telling me? What do we, as Christians, owe each other in breakups?

On one level, these are practical questions. Regardless of whether it was your decision, someone else’s decision, or a mutual choice, even amicable breakups often bring out the worst in us. Christians can aspire to better in those painful final conversations, informed by the instructions to early church communities that were navigating disagreements (Eph. 4:15, 29; Col. 4:6). Even in our anger, sadness, and grief, we can choose words that will inflict the least amount of damage, opting for clarity and concision rather than Shakespearean soliloquies or letters claiming to seek “closure” that are really designed to get the last word. We can be quick to listen to our exes’ perspectives, slow to speak, and even slower to anger (James 1:19).

Breaking up as a Christian also means avoiding some contemporary norms around the ends of relationships. Ranting, gossiping, or putting up a “thrive post” only leads to bitterness. (In the aftermath of my breakups, I’ve tried to avoid social media altogether.) Confiding in trustworthy friends and voicing frustrations to God in prayer allows for healthy processing without spreading rumors.

But loving your neighbor during a breakup requires a change not only in behavior but also in philosophy—of wanting the best for your ex in the fullest sense of that expression. “Our love for others, for who they are, moves us to seek the best for their lives,” wrote Pope Francis in a recent encyclical. That love might be no longer romantic but brotherly and sisterly. Love that seeks the best for the other might involve making the decision not to be together—or accepting that decision once it’s been made.

Let me be clear: I’m not endorsing that devastating one-liner God told me to break up with you. As someone who’s been on both ends of that excuse, I can attest that it’s usually not helpful. As a recipient, there’s no room to question such a declaration. If God told you, why wouldn’t he tell me? Even if a person has felt the Spirit’s prompting to end a relationship, “God told me” often comes off as the easy way out.

Better to be brave and honest about the reasons you need to part ways. It is possible to acknowledge pitfalls in a relationship without turning that acknowledgment into a diss track. For example: “We spend a lot of time arguing,” “We are not great at listening to one another,” and “I don’t feel that you respect my time with my family.”

Breaking up as a Christian often means considering what’s best for your ex even as you also respect what’s best for yourself. (I’m talking here about relationships ending over incompatibility or changed feelings, not over abuse.) You are not responsible for how another person reacts to a breakup. But you do have responsibility for your own actions.

If you’re the one receiving the bad news, it’s even harder to keep the other person’s needs in focus: That person is awful and selfish and wrong! It takes radical empathy (and humility) to listen to explanations for the decision and to respect the other person’s boundaries.

Though they were partners in ministry rather than romance, Paul and Barnabas’s parting ways is a helpful model for a relationship’s end. Their difference of opinion about whether John Mark should join them caused “such a sharp disagreement that they parted company” (Acts 15:39).

But both parties were ultimately instrumental in spreading the gospel. And neither is recorded as speaking poorly of the other. Barnabas never posted about Paul’s shortcomings on Facebook, and Paul never spread rumors about Barnabas as he wrote his epistles. Sometimes, relationships just need to end, for reasons that we might not be able to understand at the time but that might result in flourishing for both parties.

Seeing breakups as acts of love doesn’t mean we have to be happy about them. A therapist once told me that ending a relationship often requires moving through the five stages of grief. The Lord meets us in our sorrow; Psalm 56:8 says that God keeps track of all our tears. In my weakest moments at the end of a relationship, I’ve looked to Christ crying out on the cross, knowing he too felt forsaken.

For me, the hardest part of any breakup is always the aftermath, once we’ve returned sweatshirts, hair ties, and borrowed books and have sent our final texts. I’m embarrassed and want to move on as quickly as possible. But terrible advice from family and friends shows how futile that is. “There are more fish in the sea.” Well, what if I wanted that fish? “Your perfect match is out there right now.” But God doesn’t promise marriage. What if that was my only shot? “He wasn’t even that cute.” So you think I have bad taste?

As Jesus reminds us to love our neighbor as ourselves, he insists we must love God first and foremost: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’” (Mark 12:30–31). Perhaps a breakup is an opportunity, however unwanted or misunderstood, to love God better. Maybe the other person had become a stumbling block for you; maybe you’d become an idol. Regardless, love of God always undergirds love of others.

You might want to avoid the tattoo, the spontaneous haircut, and the lengthy letters trying to win someone back. But let yourself get ice cream, cry to friends, go to Build-A-Bear. And know that the love of God extends graciously, both to you and your ex.

Mia Staub is editorial project manager at Christianity Today.

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News

Founding Congregation to Exit Christian Reformed Church

Megan Fowler

Few legal entanglements complicate the departure, but brings a lot of grief over denominational division.

First Christian Reformed Church Youtube screengrab.

First Christian Reformed Church chose its name for a reason. It’s the oldest Christian Reformed Church (CRC) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and one of the original four congregations formed by Dutch immigrants at the founding of the influential Calvinist denomination in America in 1857.

Now, nearly 168 years later, First Church is also preparing to be one of the first to leave in a split over the denomination’s stance on LGBTQ inclusion.

“As a leading voice for the use of women’s gifts, for ethnic diversity and justice issues, and for rigorous debate, First Church insists that faithfulness requires them to separate from the denomination that has reflected them and nurtured them,” Thomas Hoeksema, a regional representative of the CRC, told Christianity Today in an email. “They are clearly grieving.”

The CRC is the latest in a line of American churches riven by debates over homosexuality, from the Episcopal Church USA, to the Mennonite Church USA, to the Church of the Brethren, to United Methodist Church. Typically, it has been those on the traditionalist side of the debate who have felt forced to leave. The CRC, however, codified its opposition to homosexual sex in 2022, and in 2024 it instructed all congregations to either come into full alignment or separate.

Twenty three of the CRC’s nearly 1,000 congregations have officially notified the denomination of their intent to disaffiliate, but still more are having crucial conversations before taking any official action. In Classis Grand Rapids East, 10 churches are in the process of disaffiliating. Some, like First Church, once thought they had found a way to navigate doctrinal differences without disrupting denominational unity.

The historic Grand Rapids congregation began discussing sexuality in 2018, according to David Jacobs, chair of First Church’s leadership council, which is made up of its ministers, elders, and deacons. There were many different views, and the council sought to find some unity while allowing a lot of latitude.

Ultimately, First Church articulated its position like this:

“Recognizing the differences of Biblical interpretations regarding same-sex marriage and acknowledging that we are in a place of uncertainty, we move to invite all members of First Church to full participation in the life and ministry of the congregation. Neither sexual identity nor being in a same-sex relationship will impact a person’s membership or ability to fully participate at First Church.”

According to Jacobs, this was not an affirmation of same-sex relationships.

“We interpreted this as an inclusive but not affirming stand,” he told CT. “We never said that we interpret Scripture to say that God affirms same-sex marriages. We said that we wanted to operate in a way that includes everyone in the life and ministry of the church.”

Some members of First Church did feel compelled to leave because of the statement, Jacobs acknowledges. And the denomination did not find the compromise acceptable either.

According to a large majority of delegates to the CRC’s synod, the denomination needs to be clear on its teaching about sexual morality. It isn’t acceptable to allow some to offer caveats and give themselves congregational exemptions.

“We are a confessionally Reformed denomination, and we want to embrace that. We want to pursue that,” said Cedric Parsels, reporting from the synod for the Abide Project, a group that upholds the CRC’s historic view on sexuality.

The CRC does not claim ownership of individual church buildings through a trust clause, so the division of the denomination will probably not entail the same legal struggles seen in other splits. But people on both sides of the CRC division said they feel great sadness as they prepare to part ways.

Hoeksema served as a church visitor in Classis Grand Rapids East, representing the denomination to congregations that announced plans to leave the CRC.

According to denominational procedure, the purpose of the visit is, in part, to dissuade churches from disaffiliating. Hoeksema said there wasn’t much arguing, though.

“We are there to listen, to empathize with the difficulty of staying faithful to their discernment of God’s call, and to share what we know of the larger picture of what churches are doing,” he said. “We do not see our job as persuading churches to stay. We sometimes offer things to think about that haven’t been considered yet, and we ask probing questions to help church council members be clear in their thinking.”

First Church voted 143–16 in favor of disaffiliation.

Congregations staying in the denomination feel hurt by the separation too.

Darrin Compagner, the pastor of Shawnee Park CRC, which is just about three miles from First Church, described the disaffiliation as similar to Velcro pulling apart.

“We have family, friends, colleagues, neighbors in the disaffiliating churches,” Compagner said. “The statements they make, the decisions they make all impact us.”

The historic importance of First Church adds to the pain too. Many other congregations have looked to First Church as an example. It led the fight to welcome women into leadership and was out front on social justice issues.

But at some point, the disconnect was just too great, Compagner said.

“They thought they were taking the lead and the denomination would come around,” he told CT. “They presumed it would go like women in ordained office, and they were shocked when it didn’t.”

The 2022 synod vote was 123–53 for codifying the traditional views of sexual immorality. The 2024 vote was 134–50 against allowing congregational variance.

CRC general secretary Zachary King said he knows some people think that the denomination is forcing out First Church and others with different views on LGBTQ inclusion, but that’s just not true. Those congregations have moved out of alignment with CRC beliefs.

“We think we have stood on the position the church has had for the past 2,000 years, and at least on paper we have tried to do that in a gracious way,” King said.

The founding CRC congregation has not decided where it will go after finalizing its disaffiliation this spring. The church is considering several options, Jacobs said. It could become independent. It could join the Presbyterian Church (USA), a mainline denomination with a similar commitment to Calvinism. It could join the United Church of Christ, which includes many historic Reformed churches but has a congregationalist form of government.

First Church could also join the Reformed Church in America, the denomination it left in 1857 to found the CRC.

“But we are not going to make our decision on sentimental grounds,” Jacobs said.

The final vote will take place on Sunday, March 2. Later that month, the church has planned an event called Night of Remembering. Jacobs said the planning team envisions it “as a time of storytelling and remembering all the good things about our 168 years in the Christian Reformed Church.”

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Books

Review

The Meaning of Womanhood, in Whole and in Parts

Kate Lucky

How a “history of the female body” speaks to similarities and differences between the sexes.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

My friends and I talk about our bodies all the time. We ask for advice; we ask for healing prayer. Some of our ailments are more general: ear infections, stomach bugs, clogged sinuses, tight shoulders. But many are particular to our womanhood. Periods can be painful. Sex can be painful. There is pain while breastfeeding; there is relief when the tears caused by childbirth heal.

These conversations are intimate. But women’s experiences of their wombs and breasts are anything but private, argues the new book Immaculate Forms, a “history of the female body in four parts” by historian and classicist Helen King. Public understandings of the breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb have shaped how women are perceived and how women perceive ourselves.

King, an elected lay member of the General Synod of the Church of England, writes out of an interest in “how medicine and religion [have] worked together as gatekeepers over bodies.” The result of that interest is a sprawling compendium of quotations from gynecological handbooks, anatomical ephemera, and legends. Immaculate Forms is much too long and too uneven in its analysis of these texts, but it engagingly advances a couple of interrelated theses.

The first, and strongest, is that beliefs about bodies have “real-life implications for the people whose bodies they claimed to describe.” Now-discarded theories about blood flow, body heat, and a “wandering womb” have determined how women’s illnesses were diagnosed and treated through the centuries, with prescriptions of cold baths, scent therapy, and even “leeches applied to the labia.”

Medical hypotheses also shape social realities. Does the clitoris play a role in procreation, or is it solely for pleasure? Our answers influence norms around the “importance” of female sexual experience and the role a woman is imagined to play in conceiving her children. How necessary is a torn hymen in defining virginity? Answer “very” to that question and you’ll get bridegrooms displaying bloody sheets as proof. Are breasts for admiration or for nourishment? There’s a bigger question beneath that one: How can women be both lovers and mothers?

These debates run through the historical material King dusts off and details; she’s as able a guide to Hippocrates and Aristotle as she is to novels, myths, and manuals. If anything, Immaculate Forms suffers from overanalysis, an overflow of dates and names. But that’s not necessarily a problem for a reader in need of context, unfamiliar with the four-humors theory or ancient surgical practices.

When King turns to Christianity, though, her analysis isn’t too deep; it’s too shallow. That’s unfortunate, since many of the materials she cites—particularly regarding Eve and the Virgin Mary—are as fascinating as they are bizarre and occasionally upsetting. King includes stories of saints drinking Mary’s breast milk, early-church theologians and poets musing over the mechanics of a virgin birth, and theories about Eve’s egg count. She discusses post-Fall pain in childbirth and troubling accounts of clitoridectomies.

Too often, the conclusions King draws—from these texts and from the Scriptures she quotes—are oversimplified at best, glib at worst. Take, for example, her assertion that “Christianity praised breastfeeding,” rooted in a single 17th-century child-raising pamphlet and the prevalence of artwork depicting Mary feeding her infant. Or her comment that “the Judeo-Christian story of Eve make[s] clear that women are an afterthought to Creation,” judging from the order of events in Genesis. King is clumsy and inconsistent on complicated theology about the interplay between body and soul, Christ’s divinity and humanity. She includes asides—like the way “Christianity … queers its own imagery by thinking of Jesus as having breasts” and “the idea that Jesus had a hymen”—that feel like unnecessary provocations rather than helpful lines of inquiry.

King’s quips aren’t always incorrect, per se. But they’re less convincing when they seem to flow from an underlying animosity. Christianity, she asserts, has a “long history of seeing women as physically inferior.” While the religion has “had to manage the centrality of a womb in its foundation story, Christian writers still found ways to use this to denigrate women,” she laments. “In the 1990s, conservative Christian groups in the United States created ‘purity culture,’” she explains, “which expected everyone to abstain from sexual activity before marriage.” (The phrasing of this sentence implies King’s scorn not just of that culture, but of chastity itself.) “Despite the revolutionary tenor of the words of the Magnificat attributed to her,” she observes, “Mary can come across as a surprisingly empty character. The focus is on her submission to God.” Here, submission implies repression.

In her introduction to Immaculate Forms, King acknowledges that “women’s bodies and blood were never out of reach of the Jesus of the Bible” and that Christianity’s basis “in a man born of a woman means that it has always had at least the potential to see bodies in a positive way.” But by the conclusion, she is reiterating that men are “the human default” for Christianity, that “Christianity has never lived up to what it promised in terms of a positive view of human bodies in general, nor the body of the believer in particular,” and that Christian ideas about women’s bodies “have always been tied up with patriarchy.”

These lines comprise a second thesis: Christianity has never benefitted women or their bodies. It’s a thesis that takes the significant pain women have experienced at the hands of the church as an inevitability, not the painful result of sin. At the same time, it’s a thesis that disregards how the church has dignified us as women, valuing us not for our bodies’ ability to produce heirs but for our participation in the body of Christ. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” writes Paul in Galatians 3:28. This is a radical declaration of equality, not patriarchy.

The Galatians verse was top of mind as I parsed King’s third thesis—the most interesting and relevant to our contemporary debates about gender and sexuality. “Understanding of these four parts [breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb] has changed over time—positing at some times that women are basically the same as men, at others that they are entirely different,” she writes. “Neither a blanket insistence on difference nor an enthusiastic embrace of similarity is helpful for women.”

I think that’s exactly right. When women are classified as a strange human subtype, ruled by voracious wombs and swollen clitorises, spurting milk and falling into fits, then they’re “other,” treated with suspicion and even disgust. But when they’re proclaimed no different from men, they’re also done a disservice: Medicines are measured incorrectly. The symptoms of heart attacks aren’t noticed.

Despite her book’s framing as “a history of the female body,” King questions whether “any of my four parts [are] necessary for someone to be a woman.” I take her point. Women have mastectomies; women have hysterectomies. Those women are still women. Identifying gender has never been as easy as running down a checklist of body parts. A small percentage of people are born intersex. Hormone levels vary from woman to woman and man to man. Some people experience the pain of gender dysphoria.

And yet Immaculate Forms reads less as an argument for sex and gender’s irrelevance or inscrutability than an argument for their importance. Though King insists that “sex and gender identity have never really been clear from the body,” she’s presented an entire book about sexed body parts—womb, breasts, hymen, clitoris—that shape gendered experience.

King encourages readers to think of sex and gender “as a spectrum,” evidenced by the fact that “men have breast tissue, which can sometimes produce milk.” She also suggests that “the clitoris can be seen as a female penis” and that “Christian legends, too, included male pregnancy.” (To support this latter claim, she cites a single medieval poem about Saint Anne’s origins and speculates about Adam “as a pregnant man” because “his body opened to produce a new person.”) But her book is first and foremost a book about women, as people not limited, diminished, or “worse than” because of their bodies but irrevocably shaped by them nevertheless. Note the group chats between me and my friends.

Just as Scripture does not endorse breastfeeding over infant formula, it does not set objective standards for hormone levels or weigh in on delivery-room decisions about determining the gender of intersex babies. What it does “endorse” is that physical bodies matter. Male and female, God created us. And both difference and equality have their place for a people who are one in Christ.

Kate Lucky is senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

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News

Ukrainian Christians Plead with Trump Administration

Jill Nelson in Washington

“We are looking not just to end the war, but we need a just peace.”

A Ukrainian man surveys the ruins of a Baptist church in Kostyantynivka. More than 600 religious buildings have been damaged since the Russian invasion.

Madeleine Kelly/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Ukraine sent its largest-ever delegation to Washington, DC, last week to rally support for more military defense and plead with Donald Trump not to pull the plug and make a deal that favors Russia. Pastors and religious leaders in the delegation fear that time is running out.

“We know that President Trump is working on the new negotiations to help bring this war to an end,” said Igor Bandura, vice president of the Baptist Union of Ukraine. “We are here to pray, to advocate, to share our experience, and to remind the American people and American politicians that we are looking not just to end the war, but we need a just peace.”

American conservative and evangelical support for Ukraine has waned as the war has gone on and the Republican Party under Trump has grown increasingly skeptical of international alliances. Past efforts to shore up support for Ukraine among Republicans have yielded results, though, so the delegation remained hopeful, despite deep concerns.

The delegation included nearly 200 Ukrainian pastors, priests, politicians, and wounded soldiers. They traveled by train and car across Ukraine’s border with Poland last week to catch international flights, since airports in Ukraine have been shut down for three years. Hundreds more Ukrainians who live in the US crossed the country to join the delegation at events in Washington throughout the week.

Some of them attended the International Religious Freedom (IRF) summit and listened to Vice President JD Vance, who has adamantly opposed continued military aid. He didn’t directly speak to the looming US-led negotiations or explain why anyone should believe Trump’s claims he can swiftly end the war.

But Vance did address the issue of religious liberty, which Ukrainian Christians think should be a critical factor for Americans questioning their support for Ukraine.

“Part of our protecting religious-freedom initiatives means recognizing, in our foreign policy, the difference between regimes that respect religious freedom and those that do not,” the vice president told the crowd. “The United States must be able to make that distinction.”

The authors of Mission Eurasia’s latest report on Christian persecution strongly agree. They hope their presentations throughout the week convinced American leaders there is a clear distinction between Ukraine and Russia on this point.

According to their report, which they shared with the US State Department and people attending the IRF summit, at least 47 religious leaders have been killed as a result of Russia’s invasion. More than 600 churches and religious buildings have been damaged. Russia expels pastors from the territory it controls and shuts down churches that aren’t Russian Orthodox.

“Russians call us American agents, American spies, because we have a lot of Christian believers, brothers and sisters, here in the American Bible Belt,” said Pavlo Unguryan, a Ukrainian Baptist leader and a member of the delegation who has met with House Speaker Mike Johnson several times.

The fate of the war will matter a lot for religious liberty, according to delegation members. If America wants to stand against religious persecution, according to Baptist World Alliance leader Elijah Brown, it needs to stand with Ukraine.

The future freedom of Ukraine may also determine whether people in Europe get to hear about Jesus. The country has more than 2,000 Baptist churches, Brown said, that would be threatened or at least limited by a Russian victory.

“Prior to the war, they were the fastest-growing Baptist communities in all of Europe,” Brown told Christianity Today. “They’re at the heartbeat of gospel witness across Europe.”

Delegation members also spoke of the horrors of the war and the tragic personal costs. Some, like Yaroslav Bazylevych, barely escaped death.

Five months ago, he said in a documentary shown in Washington, a Russian missile hit his home in L’viv, a city in Western Ukraine that was more than 500 miles away from the frontlines. Bazylevych’s wife and three daughters, ages 7, 18, and 21, ducked into a stairwell for safety.

But the stairway collapsed in the strike, and Bazylevych lost his entire family. They are 4 of the more than 12,000 civilians who have died in Russian attacks in the three years since the full-scale war began.

“I would like Ukraine to receive a lot of help from Americans in order to overcome the Russian aggression,” Bazylevych said.

Members of the delegation told CT they were not opposed to a peace plan. In fact, some hope Trump will be successful at negotiating a deal to end the fighting. But they want a good deal and a good plan.

“For us, refugees from the Russian-occupied territories, a good plan is a fair plan,” said Mykhailo Brytsyn, a pastor who was expelled from his city by Russian troops. “ A fair plan is when Russia withdraws its troops from all occupied territories of Ukraine.”

Former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, who plans to run for president again when the war is over, told CT he wants Trump to be decisive and believes he can make a real difference if he negotiates well.

Poroshenko said he wanted to tell Trump that “we really count on you and we really trust you. … Your slogan, ‘peace through strength,’ is exactly what Ukraine now needs, and exactly what Russia now needs, and is exactly what the free and democratic world needs.”

But the American president has not seemed especially interested in Ukrainian strength. Nor has he appeared to be moved by stories of religious persecution and oppression. Last week he commented that Ukraine could be surrendered to Russia but that the US might continue offering military support if there were some kind of financial arrangement.

In an interview on Fox News, Trump said he wants “the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earth.” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky seems willing to accept that.

Ukrainian Christians, meanwhile, are praying, talking to leaders in Washington, and reminding themselves to trust God.

“As believers in Christ, we understand God controls history. He controls kings. He controls everything,” Baptist leader Pavlo Unguryan said. “So we are praying, we’re fighting, and we pray for wisdom for the new president and the new administration.”

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Inkwell

An Igbo Joke Told in English

Chine McDonald

Conversations with the So-Called Secular

Porcelain Bowl with Mixed Fruit, a Silver Salver and a Glass of Wine by Juriaen van Streeck

WHAT’S THE WORD for feeling at home and displaced at the same time? I feel like this often—at home and displaced in Nigeria, the country of my birth; at home and displaced in the UK, which I have called home since I was four years old.

I feel it most when I’m sitting, or dancing, in a room full of my relatives. My people, the Igbo ethnic group of southeastern Nigeria, are unapologetically loud. We speak loudly. We get married loudly. We christen our children loudly. We die loudly. Our celebrations are marked with a level of exuberance that matches the importance of these rites of passage.

My people love words. When we gather—often in the late hours after a family event, when we have slipped off our shoes and taken off our tight gele head ties—we sit down to gist, and my uncles begin to tell their stories. They are long, stretched-out tales. They are jokes we’ve all heard before: poking fun at people from neighboring villages, spinning an unlikely yarn about what happened when the Igbo man met the lion, each caught somewhere between fable and gibe.

Some of the world’s greatest storytellers have come from among us: Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, along with Chinua Achebe, who begins his iconic tale, Things Fall Apart, with this: “Among the Igbo, the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.” We pride ourselves on it, this innate expression of truth and connection through story.

It’s in our blood.

THERE IS SOMETHING in the familiarity of these stories. I remember sitting at the feet of my elders as a young child, soaking in that atmosphere of storytelling. I would hang on every word, and when it got to the punchline, we’d all erupt in laughter—except me. The thing was, though the story was told in English, the punchline would often be delivered in Igbo, our mother tongue—that is what made it so funny. But I, not knowing the language well, would look puzzled, and then my parents or an aunt or uncle would try to explain it to me in English, but the joke lost its power in translation.

It was here at the foot of my relatives’ feet, sometimes in the sticky heat of Nigeria, that I felt both at home and displaced. I was at home with my family—people who looked like me, nestled within the comfort of resemblance—but an uneasy sense of displacement reared its head at the punchline or when conversations in Igbo swirled around me, and I felt like I did not understand an important part of me. Perhaps the most important.

Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to a man in his language, that goes to his heart.” When I hear my mother tongue, it sounds like a long-forgotten memory; something buried deep inside me that wants to be unearthed. It feels both strange and familiar. It feels like home, albeit a home I have never lived in, and yet long to return to. It’s like that feeling I have when I leave the house and can’t shake the niggle that I have forgotten something—a part of me left behind. My mother tongue is my heart language, but for me and many first- and second-generation immigrants, this mother tongue is a language we don’t speak.

WHAT’S THE WORD for the moment when you just can’t remember the word you’re looking for, and you reach back into the annals of your memory, mentally running through a dark tunnel of letters and phrases until you find it illuminated? What’s the word for that feeling of relief when you remember it?

As I get older, or perhaps it was ever thus, I find myself grasping for temporarily forgotten words often, especially when I write. While writing this paragraph, I have already had to search my mind for the words annals, illuminated, and grasping. I have birthed two children, and I’ve read that a mother’s brain pushes out unnecessary information—like people’s names, colors, the names of kitchen utensils—to keep the important information in. Without the right language, though, we falter.

Earlier this year, I stood outside the gates of a 14th-century chapel in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside of Paris. Our party of three, two Brits and an American, were there to see the “Black Madonna of Paris”—also known as the statue of Our Lady of Good Deliverance—which had long been a focus of prayers by well-known pilgrims like saints Vincent de Paul and Francis de Sales. The statue is housed in the chapel of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Thomas of Villeneuve, but the sisters did not seem to want to let us in.

One of the nuns stood sternly at the gate to keep us out. Perhaps it was the language barrier that was the real problem. She was speaking quickly in French, and my rusty A-level comprehension could not keep up. We all looked puzzled—the sister communicating in French, and us trying to guess what she meant. Eventually, we sought the help of a passerby, an Australian who attempted to translate for us, and were soon let in. The language barrier was temporarily crossed, thanks to the help of a translator—a bridge for us to cross the chasm of misunderstanding.

WHEN IT COMES to communicating our faith, we need such translators to act as bridges between people of faith and those for whom the language of faith has become alien. What’s the word for a society that has lost this language of faith?

Many years ago, I sat with a friend over brunch, and together we attempted to articulate what each of us sensed was our calling from God. Mine was this: to communicate the good news of the Christian faith to a world that no longer understands it. This is what I have dedicated my life to. In all that I do—in my writing and speaking and storytelling—I want to act as a bridge between the sacred and the so-called secular. I want to translate the wisdom of Scripture for a “Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted” world, as Walter Percy writes in Love in the Ruins—a world that no longer speaks the language of faith, one for whom this language is lost.

I often think of Acts 17, where Paul at the Areopagus is attempting to speak the language of the culture to communicate the heart language of faith. Some listeners simply don’t get it: What is this babbler trying to say? Some are curious. Listening to Paul, they feel the pang of recognition of a lost language that connects them with the God in whom they live and move and have their being. A call back to something they had forgotten, that they couldn’t quite put their finger on, even amid a cacophony of Grecian deities.

I frequently think about this passage in my work leading Theos, a think tank attempting to tell a better story about the Christian faith to a world that often does not have the language to understand it. In the UK, much has been made of the 2021 census figures, which showed a significant decline in the numbers of people describing themselves as Christian in England and Wales. For the first time, this number is less than half of the population.

Perhaps the public’s comprehension is just a little rusty. Many older people were raised in the Christian faith—they know the words to hymns and can recite Bible passages they learned in Sunday school. Perhaps they never spoke the language of faith at all. Many of the younger generations find the church completely alien, as it was never been part of their experience.

The figures show, though, that people are still searching; they’re longing to converse in these ancient languages of faith. We see it through the numbers of nonreligious people, those who would call themselves “spiritual”—who seek after God in tarot and crystals and manifesting. Something within them is longing to reconnect with the heart language they never knew they could speak.

THERE ARE THOSE, young and old, in the Anglo-American world who feel the tug of the spiritual. Though they cannot put words to it, they feel it when they walk into a vast cathedral and sit in the stillness in the presence of the numinous. They cannot articulate why this place might feel at once otherworldly and yet also like coming home. Some might try to name this feeling with vocabulary that does not quite do it justice. Supernatural? Mystical? Magical? It feels just like retelling an Igbo joke in English—it doesn’t quite hit the spot.

Language fails us. The experience gets lost in translation. If I describe this thing simply as God, there may be a hundred different images running through another’s mind. There is a place for language, but sometimes language is not enough. Sometimes what is required to translate the heart language of faith is to show and not tell.

Sometimes, our task as translators is to make people feel what we are trying to say rather than tell them. Or perhaps it is essential to do both. That’s why we at Theos don’t just publish beautifully written reports, filled with insight and argument and statistics. We also try to engage the heart through photography and animation and music and poetry. The heart language is so often spoken through the arts. It’s here that we might find the vocabulary without words to communicate deeper truths. Paul knows this, which is why at the Areopagus he connects the truths he is trying to convey about God with the Greeks’ “own poets.”

This place, where Paul stands to tell truths about God, is a gathering of the governing council of Athens. It was where important people conversed and decided on how things should be. In traditional Igbo culture, we have our own Areopagus of sorts. The obodo is a space outside where benches are placed under a network of trees. It is in this place that people gather together to discuss community matters and tell each other stories. It is not a space for the elite, but for all.

I HAVE A DISTANT MEMORY of watching Tales by Moonlight, which took its name from the concept of an obodo, as a child in Nigeria. Though Sesame Street was much-loved in our house, it was this weekly Nigerian children’s program with its folk tales and fables that helped to teach me something of the importance of story: the communication of deep truths about what it is to be human. Here, I learned that truth and beauty are found in community.

I wonder whether the memory of the obodos of home were evoked when Igbo people, who had been enslaved and taken from our shores, met under the trees. It was in these spaces, away from the prying eyes of their slave owners, that their moonlight tales spoke of a God who could break their chains. It is here the Negro spirituals were created, putting words to the language of divine liberation.

I worry about the future of Igbo, about a distant time when no one will speak it. Just as religion is in decline, so are many of the world’s languages. In fact, it is thought that of the 7,000 documented languages spoken in the world, 1,500 languages may be extinct by the end of the century. Just as secularism squeezes out faith until fewer and fewer people speak it, almost half of the world’s languages are in danger of becoming extinct; squeezed out in favor of globally dominant languages. According to one study, a language is lost every three months—but this rate could triple over the next 40 years.

I worry about how to teach my children both my language and my heart language. I want them to learn Igbo, to know they come from a people who are proud, generous, hard-working, and who tell great stories. And I want them to speak the heart language of faith, for it not to become rusty or forgotten or cast aside, but for it to be a living, breathing relationship with God.

The lingua franca of the age has been secularism—at least in the global north. For some, the ideal is a society in which this is the dominant language spoken, while the languages of faith are privatized, pushed to the sidelines, spoken in hushed whispers. My children need us to translate, to pass on this heart language to them as they grow in a world that might lose the tools with which to speak about it unless something is done.

TO KEEP LANGUAGE ALIVE we must keep speaking it, even when it is easier not to. A few years ago, I stood in front of 800 people at St. Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London to deliver a talk, alongside other panelists and speakers, for the book launch of Ben Lindsay’s We Need to Talk About Race. As I stepped up to the podium, ready to deliver my 12-minute speech, I felt an overwhelming urge to sing the words of an Igbo worship song that I had planned to read out:

Imela, Imela (Thank You! Thank You!)
Okaka, Onyekeruwa (Great and mighty creator of the world)
Imela, Imela, (Thank You! Thank You!)
Eze m Oh (My King)

There was something redemptive for me in this moment, singing a song of praise to God in my heart language, my mother tongue, despite feeling rusty and inadequate, and like I wasn’t quite saying the words right—and to have done so in this vast cathedral, an iconic part of the London skyline. Perhaps it didn’t matter that I wasn’t pronouncing the words exactly right. What mattered was that I was saying them, practicing this language in conversation with the Creator God. Just like with our faith, in language, in speech, in conversation, in community, there must always be grace. And perhaps that is all that matters.

Chine McDonald is a writer, broadcaster, director of the religion and society think tank Theos & Author of Unmaking Mary: Shattering the Myth of Perfect Motherhood & God is Not a White Man.

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Ideas

The Tithe That Binds

Myles Werntz

Contributor

We’re happy to tackle church disunity over age, race, and politics. But the Bible has a lot more to say about wealth.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Many pixels have been spent in recent years trying to sort out how and why American society—and American Christianity in particular—is so divided. In the church, a new cottage industry has emerged promising to help us mend our fences.

The usual suspects make regular appearances in our stories about church division: the boomers who never got on board with the seeker-sensitive movement, the white southerners who largely failed to heed the testimonies of their Black-church neighbors, the vehement partisans on both sides of the aisle.

In recent years, much work has been done to address these divisions over theology, race, and politics. But another source of division, one identified in Scripture more than any of these, has largely been ignored: wealth.

If we’re looking for what pulls American Christians apart—both throughout culture and within particular churches—we cannot make full scriptural sense of the problem without thinking about money. And our hesitancy to bring it up is all the more reason to do so, for the Bible is full of counsel about the divisiveness of wealth.

Before I continue, however, it’s important to name what I do not mean. To speak of money as a source of division is not to say we as Christians should feel bad about being able to pay our bills and provide for our families. Some Christians are called to voluntary poverty, sure, but not all. I’m also not suggesting Christians are uncharitable with our wealth. On the contrary, a growing body of evidence suggests that Americans who go to church (and other houses of worship) give more money to charitable organizations, and that generosity with time also corresponds to religious belief. Even after the tumult of the pandemic, Christian giving has mostly stabilized.

We should also recognize that the Old Testament—where wealth is often seen as a sign of divine favor—can complicate how we think about money. The wealth of Abraham marks him as blessed by God, for example. Job’s initial wealth is connected to his faithfulness (1:1–3, 9–10), and Ecclesiastes says possessions come from God’s hand (5:19–20).

But for every equation of material wealth with blessing, the Old Testament also gives us pictures of wealth creating division among God’s people. Consider Solomon, who oppressed his own people to build the temple and homes for foreign dignitaries (1 Kings 5:13–14; 9:24, 12:4), or David, rebuked as a rich man oppressing a poor peasant (2 Sam. 12).

The New Testament makes even clearer the temptations of wealth and money’s ability to divide God’s people. The Letter from James alone should give us serious pause: It links our desire for wealth to preferential treatment (2:1–7) and to murder, covetousness, fights, and quarrels (4:1–3). James warns the rich in particular that hoarded wealth corrodes, distorts, and leads to other sins, like defrauding and oppressing the poor (5:1–6). We should take note. And when Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us the story of a law-abiding man who did not follow Jesus because of his wealth, we should take note of that too (Matt. 19:16–30; Mark 10:17–31; Luke 18:18–30).

The teachings here are stark and consistent. It is not that those with money are necessarily immoral but that wealth attracts tempting problems: prestige, power, luxury, flattery, the illusion of self-sufficiency.

In 1 Timothy 6:17–19, Paul identifies not just the love of money as an issue but wealth itself as a dangerous source of alternative hope:

Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.

This sheds light on James’s wisdom of how wealth divides a congregation. Money shapes us, schooling us in how we hope, how we think of ourselves and others, what kind of lives we seek. This is how wealth can divide a congregation.

When early Christians pondered these passages and wealth’s power, some, like Clement of Alexandria, emphasized the disposition of the heart: Great wealth is not a problem, he taught, so long as one is generous, for the virtuous could not be hurt by their possessions. But Clement also recognized that, realistically, few are capable of this kind of virtue.

A more common interpretation was that of John Chrysostom, who preached six different sermons on Lazarus and the rich man to demonstrate the dangers wealth poses. And as eminent historian Peter Brown demonstrates, Chrysostom was far from alone in his approach. Early Christians frequently understood wealth to be toxic to the soul, and they encouraged rich to rid themselves of their wealth throughout their lives. As church historian Helen Rhee has shown, preachers in the early church warned of the dangers of riches for the sake of wealthy souls.

Evaluating this status in absolute terms is notoriously difficult: One can be manifestly poor in America and yet wealthy by global standards. But in any case, Scripture and the early church, in their warnings about wealth, emphasize persistent generosity and persistent use of our resources for the sake of others. To treat wealth as indifferent is to invite it to shape our loves, our practices, and ultimately, our ways of gatherings as the people of God. The point in these warnings is that wealth and the pursuit of wealth does work on us, and that the Christian should hold wealth loosely as a result.

So what do we do if wealth finds us? Sometimes this may happen to us as Christians through no fault of our own—inheritance, hard work, or skills that particular societies value may bring great money our way, like it or not.

Whatever the circumstances, the counsel of Scripture and the early church is clear: Wealth comes with danger. We may like to think we’ll be virtuous enough to handle it well, but if we are wise, we will doubt that instinct. The greater our wealth, the greater our folly to think we will succeed where David and Solomon failed. Sin, including division from other Christians, is more often than not how Scripture depicts such stories ending.

Looking at wealth as an explanation of divisions in the American church doesn’t require us to dismiss or downplay other factors like age, race, and politics. Rather, it helps us see a fuller picture. For example, older generations have typically been able to accumulate more wealth than younger generations. Partisanship correlates with income, too. White Americans have more wealth than any other Americans, and average incomes vary substantially among Christian denominations.

Wealth shapes who our companions are. We might not want to admit it, but studies consistently demonstrate the role wealth plays in shaping where we go to church, whom we befriend, who is beside us in the pews. And if we only attend to other sources of division, wealth operates unseen, an invisible influence over every part of our lives, a silent danger.

Thankfully, the guidance of Scripture and the first Christians still holds: Use wealth for good, and quickly.

Accumulation of great wealth is not an opportunity for license, for building bigger barns (Luke 12:16–21). It presents Christians with an obligation to prompt service and generosity. In the congregations of the New Testament, we see a mixture of rich and poor, of those with great means and those with less. The wealthy have responsibilities the poor do not. Paul fittingly names and thanks those who host the churches’ gatherings because they are the ones with the means to make those meetings possible—and often to cover the expenses of the church at large, to pay for buildings and the livelihoods of ministers and missionaries.

“Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required” (Luke 12:48, RSV). As Henri Nouwen wrote in his little-read book on fundraising, the giving of wealth becomes a way for the giver to share in the mission of the church. Generosity redirects wealth to meet real needs, not least the need to avoid the grave spiritual risks of riches.

Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

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Where Humility Leads to Lots of Home Runs

Emily Belz in Dallas

Dallas Baptist University is a small school with one of the top programs in college baseball. What’s the secret to its greatness?

The Dallas Baptist University baseball team celebrates a walk-off win.

Eddie Kelly / Dallas Baptist University

Coach Dan Heefner had a question.

It was the first week of school at Dallas Baptist University (DBU), and the August sun was hot over the small Christian campus nestled into the hills along a shimmering lake on the outskirts of Dallas. Heefner ducked into an air-conditioned meeting room near the baseball field and stood in the front. The room was packed with young men.

Unexpectedly for DBU’s size, these men form one of the best teams in college baseball.

“Who are you?” Heefner said.

They are student athletes. Baseball players. They want to go to the College World Series. But Heefner, head coach of the team since 2008, thinks it’s important for them to realize they aren’t just athletes.

“If your identity is that you’re a baseball player,” he said, “you’re going to need it: ‘I have to be drafted. I have to play. I have to be an all-American.’ You need it. That’s a heavy burden. You can be on top of the world, and you can crash fast.”

Then he started talking about Paul in the Bible—“a high-drive guy”—and how he was very successful at what he did but had to find himself, his real identity, in Christ.

“Christ died for our sins according to the Scripture and rose on the third day,” Heefner said, quoting 1 Corinthians 15 from memory. He kept going, rattling off the whole passage.

Then he had had another question.

“What are we trying to do here? What is the most important thing?” Heefner asked the room.

“Be present,” said one player.

“Be a man built for others,” said another.

It’s the kind of answer you learn by heart if you play for Heefner. Alumni of the small school’s baseball program repeat it frequently when asked to explain the success of the team, what it meant to them to play for Heefner, and how it shaped them. They say being a “man built for others” is about humility, and humility is a pillar of the program.

DBU is, in many ways, a humble school. About 2,400 students live on DBU’s campus, which is small enough that they can walk from one end to the other in just a few minutes.

But the baseball team is something else. The DBU Patriots have made it to the Division I playoffs 13 out of the past 17 seasons that Heefner has coached. In that time, the team has a remarkable .667 winning record. The only other teams to have that kind of success are elite programs at comparatively massive universities. Louisiana State University has an undergraduate enrollment of 33,000. Texas A&M has 61,000.

But this modest Christian school is a baseball powerhouse. It is one of the top ten schools producing major-league draft picks. Players come into Heefner’s program wanting to go to the major leagues, and many have made it to the top.

But he reminds them, over and over, that getting to the majors is not really what this is all about.

“A big verse for us as a program has been Psalms 115, which says, ‘Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory because of your love and faithfulness,’” Heefner told CT.

He recited the verse from memory, sitting in his office at DBU. The office is probably not that different from a lot of college coaches’ offices, with trophies from triumphs past and pictures of his family and former players. But the shelves are also full of theology books from Jerry Bridges, Tim Keller, and others.

“That [verse] brings up the next question: What does that mean, to glorify God?” Heefner said. He answered his own question with another verse off the top of his head, Isaiah 43:7, saying, “‘Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory.’ He created us to glorify him.”

Glorifying God is reflecting God’s attributes, he explained.

“Should we be striving to be great on the field? Absolutely! Because we’re trying to imitate him,” he concluded.

Heefner himself played for Elliot Johnson, who is in the coaching hall of fame, and learned a lot from him about coaching and being a Christian. Today, Heffner is a remarkable coach, especially when he teaches hitting, alumni of the program said. Other schools have tried to recruit him away from DBU, but he has stayed because he likes how openly he can integrate faith into the rhythm of the team. You can’t talk to him for more than a few minutes before he’s weaving paragraphs of Scripture into conversation.

For Heefner, integrating faith into training is essential for a group of young men to be happy playing baseball together. He really cares about players’ friendships. Heefner thinks players listen to each other more than they do to coaches, so those relationships are key.

The baseball players live in townhouse dorms together. And most of them participate in a voluntary program called The Oaks—a spiritually focused group for the team led by players and former players.

Tom Poole, a senior and a slugger, said those were the things that drew him from Calgary, Canada, to play for DBU. He started out at a school that was not religious but then transferred to DBU.

The Christian discipleship aspect was new and “what I needed,” Poole said in an interview. Last season he was the team’s designated hitter and was very active in The Oaks’ study group, where he has found deep friendships with his teammates.

“I can’t get enough of it,” Poole said. “The baseball game is cool, but being with everyone else is way cooler.”

Part of what Heefner is offering his players is a vision of biblical masculinity that pushes them to be their best—and remain humble.

Heefner said there was a time when he was worried humility wasn’t a useful virtue in baseball. He said to himself, “We’ll stink if we have a bunch of humble baseball players.” But then he was convicted that the Bible talks about humility constantly and he couldn’t pick and choose what parts he liked.

Humility, in his view, is critical to being a team. The way Heefner talks about biblical humility to his players is being “others focused.” You can be humble and strive to be great. You can be humble and be part of a great baseball team.

“If we create an environment where you can reach your full potential, and then at the same time you’re totally sold out to being a great teammate, it’s an unbelievable place to show up to every day,” he said.

Baseball people might say Heefner’s a master of player development. But Heefner calls it discipleship. For him, discipleship should be players’ top priority, then their college education is next. Winning baseball games comes third.

Winning’s still important, though. The team attracts good players because of Heefner’s proven record of making them better. Nate Frieling, who was a coach under Heefner and is now senior associate athletic director at DBU, sees an evangelistic logic to this.

“If he … doesn’t help them get better at baseball, they’re not going to care what he has to say about his faith or the Bible,” Frieling said.

Players often find relief in Heefner’s Christian message. The pressure to please their coaches, their parents, their teammates, and potential big-league scouts is constant. But he tells them to “honor, glorify, and please God” and then “trust him with the results.”

It’s not the typical way colleges recruit top players. This is especially true now that NCAA rules allow players to transfer to different schools without penalty. Since athletes can also make money from their personal brands, known as their name, image, and likeness (NIL), and since NIL collectives have formed around big programs to recruit and pay players, bigger schools draw bigger funding, promising bigger payouts to potential players.

That’s a problem for small Christian colleges. What they have to offer, instead, is deeper relationships and spiritual discipleship. That’s always been the special ingredient at DBU. While DBU’s baseball program has a hot reputation, Heefner makes clear in recruiting that Christian discipleship is a big part of what the team does.

He’ll help players get better at baseball. But he’s also going to teach them the Bible’s answer to the question “Who are you?”

It worked for Matt Duce. He was a catcher on the team from 2015 to 2018. He was drafted by two major-league teams and played in the minors for the St. Louis Cardinals.

He said he noticed that many first-round draft picks didn’t have great relationships with their coaches or teammates. They always had the mentality that they wanted to move on quickly, move up to the next level. That wasn’t true at DBU. Duce had nine groomsmen in his wedding: One of them was his brother, and the other eight were DBU baseball players.

“When I got here at 18, I saw a coach that had pretty much memorized the Gospel of Matthew, and he was incredible coach,” said Duce, now the athletics director at DBU. “And it just clicked. It was what I had been searching for all these years.”

Alumni of the baseball program recite the same Bible verses Heefner does, like Psalm 115:1 (“not to us, Lord”) and Isaiah 43:7 (“created for my glory”).

Duce quoted John 15:5, where Jesus tells his disciples to abide in him.

“We should all just be having an abiding relationship with Christ,” he said. “And then, because of that relationship, you can go hit a ton of home runs and do so for a greater glory.”

He laughed and added, “It’s fun to be good.”

DBU will play the first game of the season against North Dakota State on February 14. The game will be broadcast on ESPN+.

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Wire Story

Wheaton Tangled in Online Spat Over Trump Appointee

Kathryn Post - Religion News Service

The college said “unchristian comments” led it to delete a message congratulating alumnus Russell Vought.

Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought

Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

On Friday, Wheaton College publicly congratulated Russell Vought, a conservative activist and architect of Project 2025 who attended the evangelical school, for his confirmation by the US Senate as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Within hours, hundreds of Vought’s fellow alumni had complained that Vought’s agenda contradicted the values they had been taught at Wheaton.

By Saturday morning, the college had deleted the post, and a new social media barrage, this time from Vought’s supporters, had begun.

The college has defended its original post, and its subsequent pivot, as “deliberately non-partisan,” as its institutional commitments demand.

“Wheaton College congratulates and prays for 1998 graduate Russell Vought regarding his senatorial confirmation to serve as the White House Director of the Office of Management and Budget!” said the now-deleted social media post on Friday.

One commenter responded that Vought was not only working at cross-purposes to Christian values but to his fellow alums: “The work that he is doing negatively and directly impacts countless other Wheaton alum who are seeking to be the hands and feet of Jesus in this country and around the rest of the world,” the commenter said, per screenshots of the exchanges that were deleted along with the original post but obtained by RNS.

SAD! https://t.co/TaXfiuWHc1
— Russ Vought (@russvought)
SAD! https://t.co/TaXfiuWHc1
— Russ Vought (@russvought) February 8, 2025

?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>February 8, 2025

After deleting the post, the college backpedaled, writing, “On Friday, Wheaton College posted a congratulations and a call to prayer for an alumnus who received confirmation to a White House post.” On Saturday morning, it wrote, “The recognition and prayer is something we would typically do for any graduate who reached that level of government. However, the political situation surrounding the appointment led to a significant concern expressed online. It was not our intention to embroil the College in a political discussion or dispute.”

In an email to RNS, Wheaton College spokesperson Joseph Moore said the deletion of the initial post was “in no way an apology for having expressed congratulations or for suggesting prayers for our alumnus.”

“The social media post led to more than 1,000 hostile comments, primarily incendiary, unchristian comments about Mr. Vought, in just a few hours,” wrote Moore. “It was not our intention to embroil the College or Mr. Vought in a political discussion or dispute. Thus, we removed the post, rather than allow it to become an ongoing online distraction.”

The decision, however, led to further backlash from conservative alumni and activists. Wheaton alumnus Eric Teetsel, chief executive officer of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank founded by Vought in 2021 and credited for advising on Project 2025, called the decision an “act of cowardice.”

“Nothing about (the school’s) behavior was biblical or resembled the values Wheaton purports to stand for, and by deleting the post and apologizing the school has—yet again—compromised instead of standing firm for what is good, right, and true,” wrote Teetsel on social media site X, citing recent appearances at the school by Christian figures who oppose Trump.

Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget at the end of President Donald Trump’s first term, is listed as an author of Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second term in office, and has recently spoken about his desire to traumatize federal workers and to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, according to ProPublica. Last week, The Atlantic reported that while Project 2025 called for limiting USAID’s funding, the president’s actions to shut down the agency and freeze foreign aid went beyond what was included in the proposal.

Vought has also been a behind-the-scenes leader in opposing critical race theory in churches and school boards and has openly supported forms of Christian nationalism.

One Wheaton graduate who has worked on foreign assistance inside and outside the federal government said she agreed with Wheaton’s decision to delete their congratulatory post. “There are Wheaton alumni out there who really do follow Jesus’ teaching in the gospel, but they aren’t always the ones who are powerful, and so it’s incredibly frustrating to see those who, I think, don’t necessarily embody the gospel taking power in the Trump administration,” she said.

As an example, she cited Vought’s support of freezing foreign assistance and decision to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from predatory practices, as “deeply against the letter and spirit of the whole biblical witness.”

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Died: Wayne Myers, Missionary Who Taught Mexican Evangelicals to ‘Live to Give’

Livia Giselle Seidel

Through fundraising for small congregations and building roofs for churches, the American embodied generosity during his 75-plus years of ministry.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Ministerios Cash Luna, Flickr

Wayne Myers, who boosted church construction for thousands of congregations and promoted a culture of giving generously throughout his 75-plus years of ministry in Mexico, died peacefully at his home in Mexico City on February 1 at the age of 102.

Known for his motto, Vivir para dar y vivir para servir (“Live to give and live to serve”), Myers built relationships with pastors of megachurches, midsize churches, and tiny village gatherings, frequently guest preaching at and leading fundraisers for them. Through partnerships with church leaders, he cared for widows and orphans, distributed food in remote parts of the country and in Indigenous communities, and organized weeks-long evangelistic campaigns.

From the pulpit, Myers always smiled at the congregation, praising God regardless of his circumstances. He frequently exclaimed, “¡Aleluyita!,” adding his own Spanish customization to the common praise. Known for the moral and financial integrity of his ministry, Myers often proclaimed that a life of faithful obedience to the Lord is “dulce como un mango” (“sweet as a mango”).

Myers touched thousands of Mexican evangelical churches, a reality he often acknowledged through self-deprecation.

“We have not raised 6,000 churches; we have helped to build them up,” he once said. “If I had raised 6,000 churches, Paul the apostle would ask for permission to leave heaven to study my methods.”

Many local leaders saw him as the most influential missionary in Mexico in the last hundred years.

“Paul said that he had on himself the marks of Christ,” Efraín González, senior pastor at Centro de Avivamiento Naucalpan, said at his memorial service last week. “Mexico could very well say that it bears the marks of Wayne Myers’s ministry.”

William Wayne Myers was born on August 31, 1922, to farmers in Morton, Mississippi. He gave his life to Christ as a teenager when his cousin, who was serving as a missionary in Argentina, shared the gospel with him during a visit home. His cousin also advised his new Christian relative to attend a local Baptist church.

“That church took me to the foot of the Cross,” Myers later recalled. “But they left me there!”

During World War II, Myers enlisted in the US Navy, where he served aboard the USS Enterprise. During his 19 months on what would become the country’s most decorated ship, he was struck by the faith of some of his fellow sailors.

“I saw a small group of believers full of the Holy Spirit. … They prayed hard!” Myers later shared. While at first intimidated by the group that prayed so loudly that “their prayers could be heard from the stern all the way to the bow,” he eventually joined them.

One night, in the middle of a prayer session with the group, Myers said he encountered the Holy Spirit for the first time.

“During five hours, that glory that resurrected Jesus from the grave washed all over me, revealing Jesus to me in a whole new dimension,” he later recalled. “He called me to serve him.”

After his military service, Myers attended a Bible college in Pasadena, California. There, in addition to attending 22 hours of classes a week, Meyers began to pray anywhere between 4 and 15 hours a day. During one of these times, “[God] told me in an audible voice, ‘Son, I’m calling you to Mexico to serve my whole body, not to raise a body for yourself,’” he said.

Obedient to his calling, Myers left for Mexico, unable to speak Spanish and without a specific destination. “I had one thing going for me when I went to Mexico,” he later remarked. “I knew that I knew nothing.”

During his first years there, Myers floated from city to city, serving in various churches’ children’s ministries and organizing small evangelistic events. He helped fundraise for local pastors who wanted to share the gospel on the radio, work he continued throughout his life.

In the 1960s, Myers befriended Gordon and Freda Lindsay, the evangelists and missionaries behind Christ For The Nations college (CFN) in Dallas, joining forces with them on their church infrastructure projects. After Gordon passed away in 1973, Myers continued partnering with Freda, accompanying her on overseas ministry trips to promote CFN missions projects. In 2023, the ministry even named an award in his honor.

Though Myers’s preaching and personal faith had strong charismatic influences, he never aligned with a particular denomination and served alongside churches across the theological spectrum. In the beginning of his ministry, Myers mainly served with Assemblies of God and independent Pentecostal churches. But as nondenominational churches became more common, he extended his counsel and resources to the Mexican evangelicals planting these congregations.

“I abhor sectarianism because it is born of a spirit of superiority, and this is the opposite of the spirit of Jesus Christ, who came and served us even to the death on the Cross!” he said.

When Myers was preparing to move to Mexico, he said he heard God give him clear instructions regarding the financial support of his ministry. He could not disclose personal needs, he could not buy anything on credit, and he could not borrow money from anyone.

These calls for financial faithfulness shaped Myers’s family life and ministry. Miguel, who Myers and his wife, Martha, took in at age 12, recalled how Myers once pawned the family refrigerator in order to fulfill his financial pledge to help a small congregation.

Myers frequently preached on generosity. He believed without a shadow of a doubt that “we only own what we give away,” explaining that what Christians gave away was an investment in heaven. He also taught that not giving to God according to income forced God “to reduce our income to match our giving.”

Despite his willingness to preach at churches like Casa de Dios, controversial pastor Cash Luna’s $44 million state-of-the-art congregation, Myers never wavered in his messages on Christian financial charity.

Beyond Mexico, Myers supported orphanages in Central America, Asia, and Africa and founded an initiative to help pastors’ widows. Myers also helped fundraise and build connections for missionaries who translated the Bible into various indigenous languages in Mexico and across Latin America.

Over time, the church construction ministry that Myers had started years earlier added 6,000 roofs to congregations in Mexico, as well as Ecuador, Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa. Myers kept a handwritten log of projects he believed God had asked him to support. (Some said the number had surpassed 10,000 by the end of his life.)

As he grew older, Myers struggled to slow down. When he was 90, his doctors told him that his heart was only working at 50 percent and advised him to radically reduce his ministry commitments. Nevertheless, Myers continued to preach up to four times a week, and at the age of 101 he was still preaching one-hour sermons, inviting those present to give their hearts to Christ if they had not done it before.

“We honor the legacy of a true hero of the faith,” wrote Marcos Richards, pastor of Comunidad Olivo, one of the largest churches in Ciudad Juárez and Myers’s close friend. “An example like few others of generosity, integrity, and dedication to the gospel.”

Myers is survived by his three biological children, David, Rebecca, and Paula, along with Miguel and several grandchildren. His wife, Martha, died in 2021.

- More from Livia Giselle Seidel

Books

Review

Ross Douthat Bets on Belief

Brad East

The Catholic journalist’s new book updates Pascal’s wager for our secular-yet-spooky age.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Something is happening. Christianity is having a moment. Our culture is shifting. Whether this change will be minor, temporary, or tectonic, we cannot know. Nor can we know where it will end—or even whether it will be good.

What we can say is that much that was certain is now up for grabs. Much that seemed settled has been shaken up. Old orthodoxies are under assault. Will new ones emerge? Or will the real article, orthodoxy proper, reemerge as the only viable answer to the restless longings of human hearts?

Time will tell. For now, we should be keen to read the signs of the times. Intellectuals are converting. Atheists are softening. Agnostics are hungry. No longer are believers on the back foot, defending alleged irrationality before a hostile consensus. Crystals and hexes, seances and saints, meditation and manifesting, angels and aliens, goop and God—the whole syncretistic bundle is out in the open now. Religion is afoot in the public square.

Not that it ever went anywhere, except underground. It’s true that measurable, institutional forms of religion have been in decline—and not only in Europe, where the loss is most pronounced, but also here in the US, where religiosity has always been more spectacular, entrepreneurial, and grassroots, reveling in its disestablishment.

Scholars like Phil Zuckerman are right to hold Christians’ feet to the fire on this point: Narrowly defined, the secularization thesis is demonstrably true. Millions of people in the West now live lives devoid of formal religion and default to supposing the supernatural is of no relevance to their daily concerns. This is genuinely new in human history.

But the secularization thesis is often overextended into a false story of inevitability and materialism. As it turns out, post-religious people are not thoroughly disenchanted. They may not attend church or pray, but they’re quite open to a spooky cosmos. Indeed, many appear to take it for granted. And because living with Mammon for a master is as soul crushing as Jesus long ago warned, materialism has its discontents. We were made for more. We were made, full stop.

Why everyone should be religious

Ross Douthat, a Catholic columnist for The New York Times, has written a new book in response to this moment and to the readers he’s trying to reach. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Douthat makes a Pascalian pitch to the curious among the post-secular crowd.

Blaise Pascal was a French thinker who lived 400 years ago. His too was a time of religious and technological upheaval, one straddling the end of the Middle Ages, the Reformation’s fresh divisions of Christendom, and the beginnings of “enlightened” modernity. In such a time, and in response especially to religion’s cultured despisers, Pascal wrote that the first task for Christian thinkers is “to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect.” This is just what Douthat sets out to do, and he likewise follows Pascal in stressing the existential urgency of religious questions and the necessity of placing one’s wager.

“It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal,” as Pascal put it. “Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance.” And though we may (or may not!) have more than a week to live, inaction is impossible. You cannot choose not to choose. Your life is your seat at the table, and you must play the cards you were dealt. Declining to play is not an option; folding is itself a play.

Pascal famously chose to wager: “I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.” Douthat doesn’t quite take this tack, but Pascal’s confidence and resolution, his unwillingness to let the reader off the hook, are present on every page.

This approach to religion is present in all Douthat’s writing. As a conservative Catholic writing for a liberal audience in the Times, Douthat is an expert at fine-tuning tone to topic and readership. In his previous books and columns alike, Douthat is cautious, coy, patient, and pleasant, ready to present different perspectives or to challenge the assumptions of whoever is reading his words.

Matters of first importance, though, Douthat doesn’t soft-pedal. Morally and politically, he plants his flag on abortion and same-sex marriage. Theologically and philosophically, he refuses to budge on the shortcomings of secularism and the strengths of theism. Atheism and scientism aren’t merely vulnerable to criticism; they’re absurd. The existence of God—indeed, of angels and demons and the whole spiritual realm—isn’t simply plausible or probable. It’s far and away the most rational interpretation of the evidence.

Back in 2012, responding to New Atheism’s cultural influence, Francis Spufford wrote a wonderful book called Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. For Douthat, there is no “despite everything.”

A rational argument for mere religion

To understand Douthat’s method, recall a scene from the end of the third Indiana Jones film. Indy is faced with a choice: Let his father die or take a leap of faith. The leap in this case is literal, a physical step into a chasm with nothing to hold him up. He takes the step, and by a miracle of movie magic, doesn’t fall. There was a bridge in front of him all along, invisible to the human eye.

For some, this is a picture of true faith: a passionate, even reckless jump into the unknown, based on blind trust, not reason. Douthat demurs. As he writes, “Joining and practicing [some faith] is fundamentally a rational decision, not just an eyes-closed, trust-your-friends-and-intuitions jump.” You can and should consider the case in your mind.

Moreover, whatever the social benefits of church—and they are many!—they aren’t the place to start. They’re a byproduct of the thing itself, and that’s of interest only if it’s true. That’s why Douthat opts to “start with religion’s intellectual advantage: the ways in which nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us, while the religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us.”

This is not a case for mere Christianity, then, so much as “mere religion.” Though Douthat ends the book with a chapter explaining why he is Roman Catholic, his aim is to clear the ground for religious commitment in general, to show why Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews as much as Catholics and Protestants are not exotic residue of a superstitious past.

“Reason still points godward,” he writes, and you don’t have to be a scholar to see it. Douthat’s self-described “unsophisticated” argument begins by showing why a religious perspective on reality is reasonable, then pushes the reader to grasp why that matters.

His goal isn’t to get readers to Mass. But it is to get them somewhere. Moving from a vague agnosticism to a vague theism isn’t going to cut it. Ambivalence is the enemy. “Life is short and death is certain,” he writes at his most Pascalian. Readers who are spiritually asleep must wake up. Only once they’re awake can they come to considered judgments about the reality they finally see.

Weird religion in an enchanted cosmos

It bears repeating that Douthat is not primarily writing to Christians or even to members of other religious traditions. He is writing to atheists, to agnostics, to open-minded but decidedly nonreligious seekers. More than anything, he is offering a permission structure, from one reasonable modern to another, for people to take their first steps toward the supernatural without feeling as if they are betraying their class, their education, their own minds. And he’s trying to capitalize on this odd moment for as long as it lasts, while strict scientism is in retreat and a broad spiritual openness is on the rise.

If Douthat were preaching, I’d be the choir. But he’s not, so the question is whether he succeeds for a reader who isn’t a Christian, much less a theologian. He does, for at least three reasons.

The first is the modesty of his goal. He isn’t demonstrating with certainty that God exists, in the manner of William Lane Craig or Edward Feser. He’s standing alongside readers, directing their gaze to a transcendent explanation for their own observations and experiences. There’s an audience for precise logical deduction, but the audience for this kind of argument, rooted in ordinary features of daily experience, is bigger by far.

Second, Douthat’s interreligious generosity is unfeigned; he really would prefer a reader embrace a religion other than Christianity than remain irreligious, agnostic, or noncommittal. And Christian convictions anchor this preference: For Douthat, the truth of Christian revelation is not an all-or-nothing affair. Neither the Shema nor the Nicene Creed requires the total falsehood of every idea, text, and practice of every other spiritual tradition in the world. Much good and many true things may be found there, and adherents are not wrong to prize them.

Further, Douthat believes in divine providence. A step toward Christ outside the church is nonetheless a step in the right direction. In this he takes Christ at his word: “Everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt 7:8).

None of this is to suggest Douthat is nonchalant about idolatry or the dangers of the demonic. On the contrary, he warns readers about excessive interest in the occult and defends belief in hell, the Devil, and exorcism. Yet he sees the spiritual lethargy of hard materialism and the listlessness of agnosticism as the true enemy of our time. The same Christ who promises to meet every honest seeker face-to-face also promises to vomit the lukewarm out of his mouth (Rev. 3:16). Douthat wants readers of his book to be hot or cold by the end, with no one left in between.

The last strength of Douthat’s case is his steadfast willingness to be weird. For this he is unapologetic. Jacques Vallee popularized the term invisible college to describe people who take the UFO phenomenon seriously. In effect, Douthat believes there to be a similarly unseen and equally disreputable society of believers in the uncanny, the ecstatic, the inexplicable. After all, “When intellectuals stopped taking mystical experiences seriously, actual human beings kept on having the experiences.”

It is here that conversations among Christians about enchantment, or “re-enchantment,” are most relevant. As scholar Alan Jacobs has argued, it is not necessarily better to live in an enchanted society than in a disenchanted society. Moderns, for all their faults, do not cut out living hearts to appease the gods, while the enchanted ancients were often dominated by bloodthirsty demons. The gospel announced by the apostles, then, neither enchanted nor disenchanted an otherwise pagan cosmos. It went to war against pagan gods under the banner of Christ. It proclaimed the end of their tyranny and deployed the power of Christ’s Spirit to prove it.

We neither can nor should want to return to a world before Christ’s victory over the powers. But we must recognize that ours is a world still spiritually contested, and Believe does this well.

If, as the church teaches, the arid machine of the materialist universe is false; if, as Jesus’s life and ministry show, angels and demons populate this world; if, as Scripture and tradition hold, spiritual reality is far stranger than even most Western Christians want to admit—then we already live in an enchanted cosmos. Our words and deeds, our preaching and worship should reflect it.

We should, that is to say, live in the real world, the world the gospel claims to describe truthfully. We should not seek a false shelter in the spiritual vacuum of secularism. There is no such thing. Every God-ridden place turns out to be haunted, in one way or another.

Douthat advises: Wake up and look around you. That eerie presence you sense or suspect is not a fiction. Whether a human ghost or the Holy Ghost or something else entirely, it is all too real. Accepting that is the easy part. The hard part comes next: Place your bet.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

- More from Brad East

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Ross Douthat Bets on Belief

Why everyone should be religious

A rational argument for mere religion

Weird religion in an enchanted cosmos

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