We Are Not Workhorses

In a culture that champions power, Proverbs 21:31 reframes what strength and victory look like for Chinese Christians.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

I moved to Australia from China three decades ago. One reason I felt drawn to live in the country was seeing wild horses running freely on vast, dusty plains. Their carefree spirits charmed me to move away from the concrete jungle I grew up in.

Today, my experiences with feeding and riding brown-haired colts along the beach have become a treasured part of sabbath rest for me in the busyness of life and ministry.

Scripture often portrays the horse as a symbol of military power, royal authority, and fearlessness in battle. The NIV translation, for instance, mentions the animal 176 times.

In the Old Testament, we encounter the mighty Egyptian horses and riders that God hurled into the sea in Exodus 15 and the 12,000 horses (or charioteers) that King Solomon possessed as a sign of his riches in 1 Kings 10. In the Wisdom Literature, God interrogates Job about the source of a horse’s strength and fearlessness, vividly describing its leaps, snorts, and fierce charges towards the enemy (39:19–25).

In the prophetic books, visions of horses as agents of divine action and triumph recur, like the four spirits of heaven appearing in the form of red, black, white, and dappled horses in the Book of Zechariah (1:8; 6:1–8). And in the Book of Revelation, the image of Christ and the heavenly armies riding white horses showcases the pinnacle of God’s authority (19:14).

Yet for all its positive depictions of horses, the Bible exhorts us not to trust in the strength of a steed but rather to trust in God’s might and sovereignty, as Proverbs 21:31 declares, “The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but victory rests with the Lord.”

This verse offers a rich perspective on what victorious living ought to look like for Chinese Christians who celebrate the Year of the Horse this Lunar New Year. Scripture exhorts us not to define victory as attaining personal or political success but to regard it as Christ does: a giving up and surrendering to God’s plan and purposes.

Like Scripture, Chinese culture holds the horse in high regard. The Chinese zodiac says that people born this particular year are hardworking, active, and energetic and are supposedly best suited to be architects or entrepreneurs.

Popular Chinese idioms use the horse (ma) to signify vigor and vitality at an individual and communal level. One idiom, ma dao cheng gong, describes achieving success through persistent effort and confidence in one’s abilities—much like a horse triumphantly galloping toward the finish line in a race. Another idiom, long ma jing shen, articulates how a person or community is filled with a vigorous and courageous spirit.

Decorative depictions of the horse are also a mainstay in many Chinese homes and offices. Statues of the fierce, sleek beast are often displayed facing doors or windows to attract positive qi (energy) as a means of boosting wealth and fortune, according to feng shui (Chinese geomancy).

These modern-day perceptions of horses in Chinese culture arise from the ways that political and national strength have been defined in Chinese civilization across the centuries.

Ancient Chinese people regarded horses as a key resource for transportation, productivity, and warfare. The Terracotta Army, which was created in the late third century BC to protect the first emperor of China, Qinshi Huang, in the afterlife, comprises life-sized sculptures of soldiers, horses, and chariots. The golden age of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618–917) was also famous for producing decorative glazed horses in sancai (three-color style) to extol the nation’s prowess over others.

China may not rely on the horse anymore, but it still seeks to exert its power through transport and industry. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive worldwide project implemented by the Chinese government in 2013 that is also known as the New Silk Road, aims to connect China with Eurasian countries via roads, railways, ports, and maritime routes.

Chinese Christians have expressed enthusiasm about BRI, noting that it may offer opportunities for believers to live and work among communities with limited access to the gospel. However, this view underestimates the pitfalls in sharing the gospel cross-culturally, particularly when intermingled with economic and political power.

Such evangelism and outreach may well make the same mistakes that colonial-era missions have made in history. This form of missions risks imposing a culturally and socially bound gospel without an attentiveness toward, and empowerment of, local believers.

Proverbs 21:30 reminds us that “there is no wisdom, no insight, no plan that can succeed against the Lord.” Victory—or how to carry out missions effectively as Chinese Christians in this case—is found in the knowledge that it is the Holy Spirit, not political, economic, or social influence, that causes fruit to flourish on hard ground and causes the gospel to spread.

Within the Chinese church, our understanding of what being “horse-like” is can also backfire. Just as a horse’s value lies almost entirely in what it can carry and how far it can go, Chinese Christians may unconsciously operate with a similar framework in how they relate to God and ministry.

Here, a person’s commitment to ministry is often measured by his or her level of perseverance, endurance, and ability to bear hardship (or “eat bitterness”). In such environments, victory tends to be defined by refusing to rest until every task or commitment is completed. Consequently, people experience exhaustion and burnout, especially in paternalistic church structures where it may be hard to disregard an elder or pastor’s authority as a church member.

But Proverbs 21:31 subverts this cultural inclination to rely on our own “horsepower” (human effort) as a symbol of strength and victory. While discipline and obedience are valuable, the verse resists the illusion that our individual abilities are what help us secure success.

The danger lies not in the hard work we do in building up the kingdom of God, but in allowing this work to become ultimate. Work without reliance and rest quietly shifts faith from God to human capability.

This proverb shapes a posture of humble readiness within us. God’s people are to serve him faithfully while surrendering outcomes they cannot control to him. Fruitfulness is not guaranteed by strategy or strength but is received as a gift. We are not to treat people as “workhorses” but walk alongside them at the pace and revelation of God’s love.

The truth that “victory rests with the Lord” in Proverbs 21:31 frees us to act wisely without anxiety or coercion. We are called to work diligently and prepare fully for “the day of battle”—fighting against dark spiritual forces threatening Christian faith and unity—and recognize God’s presence and provision all the way.

Still, victory is not merely winning wars, whether physical or spiritual; rather, it is placing our full trust in the Lord who alone gives life, joy, and peace.

One of the clearest illustrations of what strength and victory ought to look like for Chinese believers comes from Jesus entering Jerusalem on a humble donkey, rather than a fearsome horse (Matt. 21:5).

Here, the reign of God is established not by force, conquest, or relentless forward momentum, but through self-giving love expressed in compassion, peace, and justice. Jesus’ authority, in stark contrast to worldly powers, is expressed in meekness, an unassuming persistence that accomplishes God’s purposes over time.

The counter-cultural image of Jesus riding a donkey in this Bible passage also speaks of an intentional lowliness, a downward mobility that Christ invites us to imitate. What would it look like for Chinese believers to become a lowly “donkey” ridden by the Lord? Can we become “the foolish things of the world” God chose to shame the wise (1 Cor. 1:27)?

The horse remains a powerful symbol of courage and might in Scripture. These are virtues the church should not abandon. But the gospel reframes how we ought to understand depictions of the horse in Chinese culture.

Chinese Christians are not to function merely as war horses driven toward success. In all we do for God, we are to be shaped by love, bounded by humility, and sustained by rest.

Like the prophet Jeremiah, who committed his life wholeheartedly in response to God’s call to “run with the horses,” as Eugene Peterson puts it (Jer. 12:5), we can pursue life with purpose and excellence, resting in the confidence that God already holds the ultimate victory over sin and evil through Jesus Christ.

Xiaoli Yang is an Australian Chinese theologian, spiritual director, and poet. Her recent publications include Chinese Christian Witness: Identity, Creativity, Transmission and Poetics.

- More from Xiaoli Yang

News

Families of Venezuelan Political Prisoners Pray for Their Release

Hernán Restrepo

The acting president proposed an amnesty law, yet hundreds remain in prison.

A woman holds a candle during a vigil to demand the freedom of Venezuelan political prisoners.

Ronaldo Schemidt / Getty

On the evening of January 17, dozens of people gathered outside Zona 7 detention center in Caracas, Venezuela. Holding candles and signs calling for the release of political prisoners, they joined pastor Luis Méndez in prayer: “We cry out for freedom for innocent political prisoners. Let the prison gates be opened throughout this country, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Behind him stood police in full riot gear.

Since January 9, the family members of political prisoners have held vigils outside some of the 120 detention facilities in Venezuela, including El Helicoide, El Rodeo I, Tocorón, Ramo Verde, Yare, and Zona 7. Some wore black and white shirts reading, “Free all the Political Prisoners,” as they lit candles, sang worship songs like “Way Maker,” and knelt in prayer. At one vigil, people wore chains around their necks while holding up a Venezuelan flag.

The families are pressing the acting government in Venezuela to make good on its promise to release the country’s political prisoners following president Nicolás Maduro’s capture on January 3. The government had said it would release political prisoners as a gesture of goodwill and willingness to respond to US demands.

Since then, the interim government led by Delcy Rodríguez claims to have released more than 600 prisoners. Yet human rights group Foro Penal found that only 383 political prisoners have been freed, while about 650 remain behind bars.

After 21 nights of vigils, Rodríguez announced on January 30 that she would propose an amnesty law to the National Assembly. The law would drop the charges imposed since 1999, the year Hugo Chávez rose to power, against all political prisoners.

Yet relatives of the prisoners and human rights organizations remain skeptical about the announcement.

“We welcome with optimism, but also with caution, the announcement of the amnesty law that will encompass all political prisoners and those persecuted in Venezuela,” Alfredo Romero, director of Foro Penal, said in a statement. “We hope that this step will contribute to justice, freedom, peace, and national reconciliation.”

Marcos Daniel Velazco, whose father, Julio, is still being held in Zona 7, agreed. “The amnesty law will only make sense when all political prisoners are freed,” he told CT. “Since the announcement was made, there has been no real, large-scale gesture of release and forgiveness for political prisoners.”

Velazco said his father’s only crime was driving a bus for supporters of opposition leader María Corina Machado during the May 2025 elections.

“My father was kidnapped by the regime and disappeared for 49 days,” said Velazco, who currently lives in the US. “We learned of [his arrest] only when the Caracas court handed down a 30-year prison sentence, falsely accusing him of terrorism and of attempting to lead a plot to assassinate Diosdado Cabello, the minister of the interior.”

But Velazco said Julio is neither an activist nor a politician. Rather, he is a meat-products distributor and a Christian passionate about sharing the gospel message with everyone he encounters.

Velazco believes the real reason for his father’s arrests is that the government wants to use him as a pawn to gain more information about Machado through Velazco, who is friends with the Nobel Peace Prize winner. After Machado met with US president Donald Trump on January 15, she ran into Velazco outside the US Capitol building and gave him a big hug.

Born into an evangelical family, Velazco became interested in politics at a young age, joining the Christian Democratic Party. He studied political science at the Central University of Venezuela and led groups of youth aligned with the opposition party Vente Venezuela.

When he first heard authorities had detained his father, he was shocked.

“I didn’t feel hatred but a lot of helplessness in the face of injustice,” he said. “Seeing a family member kidnapped as a consequence of the work one does is very, very painful.”

He worries about his father’s health, as the detention centers are overcrowded and unsanitary, with the Venezuelan Prison Observatory recording 25 deaths of political prisoners since 2015.

Since Maduro came to power in 2014, the regime has detained nearly 19,000 political prisoners and held them in 120 prisons around the country. The most famous is El Helicoide, a former futuristic shopping mall Chávez transformed into a massive prison and torture center. Instead of housing luxury stores, it holds prisoners captured by the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN).

Josnars Adolfo Baduel spent four years inside El Helicoide, where he faced beatings, electric shock, and suffocation, according to his sister Andreina, who heads the Comité por la Libertad de los Presos Políticos (Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners). At one point, prison guards hung him from his tied wrists for days.

“We have been persecuted with cruelty simply for having the last name Baduel,” Andreina said.

Andreina and Josnars’ father, General Raúl Isaías Baduel, was responsible for restoring Hugo Chávez to power after the coup attempt against him in 2002. In return, Chávez appointed him commander of the army in 2004 and minister of defense in 2006.

But a year later, his relationship with Chávez broke down as he spoke out against the dictator’s constitutional reform that would keep him in power and turn Venezuela into a socialist state. For this, authorities imprisoned Baduel in 2009 and again in 2017. He died under unclear circumstances while in prison in 2021. Authorities also detained his three sons, including Josnars, who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence for the crime of “conspiracy.”

Two years ago, authorities moved Josnars to El Rodeo I prison, where Andreina said he is allowed weekly visits. Yet “he has asked me not to go see him,” she said, “because I could be arrested due to my activism for the freedom of all political prisoners.”

Another prominent political prisoner is Leocenis García, a presidential candidate for the ProCiudadanos party. After he shared a video on social media denouncing Maduro for electoral fraud, SEBIN detained García on September 11, 2024, accusing him of terrorism. A few months before his arrest, García spoke to CT about how Maduro sought to court evangelical voters. Yet “with faith in political leaders—both government and opposition—disappearing, people have increasingly clung to religious beliefs,” he said at the time.

García’s father, who bears the same name, feared the worst on the night of Maduro’s capture, as Diosdado Cabello, Maduro’s right-hand man, had threatened to kill political prisoners if the United States launched military action against Venezuela.

Now García’s father sees the prisoners being used as leverage in Chavismo’s negotiations with Trump.

“They are releasing people selectively,” the senior García said. “Political prisoners are like bargaining chips for this regime.”

Since last year, he has been able to see his son every Saturday. He is also allowed to bring him food and hygiene products, which his son shares with other inmates who still can’t see their families.

Meanwhile, Velazco noted that in the detention centers, the number of evangelicals is growing.

“We have a lot of Pauls and Silases in Venezuela’s torture centers,” said Velazco, who has heard stories from the families of political prisoners. “I’m sure their prayers will break chains and bring about their release. Many went in as unbelievers and have been transformed and touched by the Lord inside.”

One of the converts is former opposition congressman Freddy Superlano, also detained in El Rodeo I, whom his wife, Aurora, saw for the first time in 18 months on January 24. “Don’t stop praying for us. Don’t stop praising God, because we can hear you from inside, and we are praying with you,” she remembers him stating before saying goodbye through the security glass that separated them.

Like Superlano, more detainees have been allowed visits since Maduro’s ouster. Julio Velazco’s wife was able to see him for the first time on January 27, nearly 150 days after his arrest. She found him thinner but hopeful, convinced that the day of his freedom was near.

Behind bars, he said he draws strength from Isaiah 41:10, a verse he memorized with his children when they were young: “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

Theology

When Christians Contemplate Assisted Suicide

Russell Moore

Columnist

Answering a reader’s tragic question requires more than a sound theology of hell.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Unsplash

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

A reader of my newsletter asked me if he might be going to hell.

Actually, the reader’s question was quite a bit more nuanced. He’s a Christian, a committed follower of Jesus. He’s also suffering from a debilitating, painful, and slowly terminal disease. Let’s call him Max. He lives in Canada, where physician-assisted suicide—or “aid in dying,” as the euphemism goes—is now legal and ubiquitous. Max says he is not at all suicidal. He is not tempted to die. But, he notes, he is looking at himself right now. Who can tell what state of mind he will be in in five or ten years? Who can predict what will tempt him later, when he might be much weaker?

What if, Max wonders, a future version of himself were to make a decision he would never make right now—maybe because his disease blurred his thinking or simply because he’s in a different place spiritually. Would he go to hell?

Max’s question is in some ways a very old one but in other ways a pressing matter. In Canada, medical assistance in dying (MAID) has expanded at lightning speed—from terminal illness to chronic suffering and now, in principle, to mental illness alone—making it one of the most permissive regimes in the world. In parts of Europe—such as the Netherlands and Belgium—eligibility has widened to include those with psychiatric conditions and, in some cases, even minors. Here in the United States, several states allow physician-assisted suicide, but only for the terminally ill and with tighter procedural limits. But it’s not hard to see that the framing of assisted dying as compassionate is advancing culturally.

There are at least two angles to Max’s question, and all of them make me sad. The first is the gospel angle. I was hesitant to say to him, “You will not go to hell.” That’s because I was afraid that if indeed some future version of him changed his mind in a darker direction, he might use that as reassurance to choose to die. Yet if I were to use the threat of hell as a useful rhetorical tool, would I not be doing the very thing I most oppose—turning the gospel into a means for manipulation? Even worse, would I be doing what Jesus never did: breaking a bruised reed, snuffing out a faintly burning wick?

What Max needs to hear right now is John 3:16–17: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (ESV throughout). In other words, God’s love for Max is real. God is not a bigger version of Faust’s Devil, looking for loopholes in a contract in order to damn one who has come to him.

The very fact that Max is asking this question means his real question is whether he’s really loved or whether God loves him for his stability and strength right now. This suffering man wants to know if it’s true that, as the apostle Paul wrote, “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). If none of that can sever his union with Christ, a future mental illness won’t either.

But the second angle is the personal suffering this question reveals. Max didn’t say this, but I suspect his question is not just about uncertainty of his own resistance to temptation in the future. It may also point to an even more tragic fear: Is my living a burden to those around me?

“Will I go to heaven?” might be a request for straightforward theology, but it also might hint at something else. Have you ever been somewhere, maybe a dinner party, where you wondered, Have I stayed too long? Is everyone being polite but secretly wishing I would just leave? Maybe Max is worried about that kind of future and doesn’t know what pressure he will face then, even if it’s unspoken.

In the social Darwinism of this time, many people see human life as something calculable. Am I contributing? Am I useful? Am I wanted? If human beings are just machines made of meat, those calculations make sense. And if the law of nature is our morality, then few things could seem more natural than a stronger animal snuffing out the life of a weaker one to keep it from dragging down the rest of the herd.

But if human life is something more—a mystery that somehow discloses a sign of God himself—then to treat that mystery as the sum of its contributions is a long disobedience in the wrong direction.

And that brings me to the third angle: culture and policy. Consider the cultural context in which these questions of “assisted dying” are unfolding: aging populations, overwhelmed health systems, loneliness, marginalization of those with disabilities, economic anxiety, and a growing sense that everyone must justify their own continued existence. The signs are not promising when we look at the prospects of war, political collapse, and technological upheaval.

In the background is a key question: Is human life to be protected precisely when it feels most burdensome, or should it be optimized and monetized and, when it no longer “works,” discarded like an obsolete digital app? The question is not just about Max—although it would be worth asking even if it were—but about what kind of society we are becoming. It is about whether we respond to despair with relationship or with an exit sign.

This question is precisely what is so cruel about Max even facing this choice. What was once framed as a right becomes, in the fullness of time, a responsibility. We shouldn’t judge Max for wrestling with this awful possible temptation. He might well see an entire society saying to him, “Why don’t you just die already?” Max needs a community willing to bear his burdens—not just the burden of his illness and suffering but also the burden of his despair.

If Max has put his trust in Jesus, he is not going to hell. But if we’re not careful, the rest of us could act like the Devil. And we should turn back from that before it’s too late. We should see “assisted dying” for what it is—an exploitation of the weakest among us just to keep us in our illusion that a life with suffering is no life at all. As Jesus told us, “For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes!” (Matt. 18:7).

After his resurrection from the dead, Jesus appeared to Peter and the other disciples by the Sea of Tiberias. Peter must have had ringing in his mind the words Jesus had spoken to him before everything went sideways: “Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:31).

Here Peter was—having run away and denied his Lord. But there Jesus was—not in judgment or anger but with the same words he said on that same shore years before: “Follow me” (John 21:19).

What Max should think about, should he ever waver—and what I should think about if I do too—is how Jesus defined what it means to follow him: “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go” (v. 18).

What Jesus meant by “Follow me” wasn’t summed up in Peter’s coming strength—his sermon at Pentecost, his plowing the way for the Gentiles to enter the church, his escapes from the Roman authorities. It was defined here by the very moment when Peter was at his weakest, in his deepest suffering and despair, in his helplessness to control his future. That’s following Jesus too. In many ways, that’s when following Jesus really starts.

Max, if you have put yourself in Jesus’ hands, you’re not going to hell. God loves you and draws near to the brokenhearted. Of all of the things you have to carry right now, worrying about God’s perception of you is not one of them. He hears and saves all who look to him for mercy through Jesus, full stop.

I want to encourage you to live. That’s not because I am worried you will go to hell. God’s mercy is greater than all our sin. It’s because your life is worth living. Your life is a mystery—indwelt by God—even when you don’t feel like it. You are not alone. It’s okay to pray now for future Max, but you don’t need to store up the grace you will need then. It’s already in the future waiting for you. I can’t imagine the suffering you face or will face. But Jesus loves you, this I know.

If you are in immediate danger or are thinking of harming yourself, please, right now, reach out to someone local who can help you stay safe. If you’re in Canada or the United States, you can call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Someone will answer 24 hours a day and can connect you with people who will listen and help you find care nearby.

Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Ideas

We Are Obsessed with Gender

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

With incoherent language trickled down from academic theorists, we think and talk about gender incessantly—and to our detriment.

Illustration by Mallory Tlapek / Source Images: Pexels, Wikimedia Commons

I would just like to point out,” said Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat speaking from the House floor, “that I think it’s very interesting that my colleague from South Carolina [Rep. Nancy Mace] is so obsessed with the issue of trans people—using horrible slurs to talk about them—when many people in this body have received gender-affirming care.”

Jacobs wasn’t referring to lawmakers who have undergone medical transition, of whom there is exactly one. Her argument was rather the increasingly common notion among trans advocates that cosmetic and reparative plastic surgery, treatment for hormonal disorders, less permanent cosmetic alterations, and even cancer prevention may be swept into the same category as a vaginoplasty performed on a male. Jacobs continued:

Filler is gender-affirming care. Boob jobs [are] gender-affirming care. Botox is gender-affirming care. Lots of my colleagues have received gender-affirming care. And let me be clear: I think everyone should have access to the gender-affirming care that they need.

This is nonsense, not least because no one needs cosmetic filler. But it is perhaps a predictable nonsense in a culture as fixated on gender as ours.

America has long been consumed by sex: having it, wanting it, denying it, describing it, commodifying and coercing and containing it. But this conscious fixation on gender is comparatively novel.

We think about gender too much. We talk about gender too much. We are ruminative—mulling, mulling, mulling what it means to be a woman; to feel like a “real man”; to be masculine but not toxic or feminine but not retrograde; to flout stereotypes and profit from them; to willingly choose the only option our grandmothers ever had; to cut into our bodies to make them meet the very social standards and vanities we denounce.

Our obsession, if I may borrow the single word Jacobs got correct, is not limited to one side of the culture war. To be sure, the left-wing version is the more obvious and disquieting—gender theory and the elective, sometimes gruesome and unsuccessful surgeries it is deployed to justify. This is a milieu that at once makes too much of our body parts (“bodies with vaginas”) and too little of our embodied sex as part of an integrated whole (“trans women are women”).

The right-wing version is more familiar, though lately expressed in technologically novel forms. Tradwife influencing is big business. Burly men who drink whiskey, grow big beards, wear flannel, and record Reformed theology podcasts are a trope for good reason. President Donald Trump’s supporters work up AI images that plop his head onto cartoonishly masculine bodies.

Or consider Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who apparently prepared for her move from congressional and state politics to the White House with an Instagram-inspired makeover: tight clothes, long and flowing hair, new teeth, and what looks to my eye to be considerable use of injectables. Noem made news early in her tenure for a series of photos and videos that seemed designed to remind their beholders that, though filling a stereotypically masculine role in a historically male sphere of life, she is not only a woman but also an attractive and uncannily youthful one.

The American church has not escaped this obsession. We too talk endlessly about manhood and womanhood (biblical or otherwise), masculinity and femininity, gender roles and whether our conception and execution of them is Christlike or worldly. Sometimes it seems we attend more to the conversations and cultural trappings around the male and female experiences than to males and females themselves.

When I was a child, gender was a polite euphemism for sex, deployed when you wished to distinguish between male and female but could not bring yourself to enunciate the word that also signified the act of copulation. That usage lingers, but it is not what I mean when I say we are fixated on gender.

Exactly what I do mean is difficult to pin down—not because it’s uncertain in my mind but because it’s uncertain in our culture. The way we now speak about gender in popular conversation is downstream of the convoluted work of academic gender theorists, the most recognizable of whom is Judith Butler, known for her conception of gender as a sort of performance. (If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a taste from a 2021 interview: It is “anti-feminist, homophobic, and transphobic,” Butler alleged, to insist “that sex is biological and real.”)

The exact schema of gender theory depends on the thinker. For some, gender is an expression of sex; for others, it is wholly independent of sex; for yet others, the relationship is different still. But as most of us have adopted the newer uses of gender without any knowledge of that theoretical history, two colloquial definitions will here suffice.

Sometimes we distinguish between gender and sex as I have implicitly done in the first section of this article: Sex is the biological fact, while gender is about the cultural expectations, norms, and habits related to each sex. Gender as “a social construct” is the common phrase.

In my marriage, I am the spouse who gave birth because I am female (that’s sex). I’m also the spouse who wears a dress to our cocktail parties because that’s the conventional attire for such an occasion in the modern West (that’s gender). In this usage, sex and gender are related. Sex is the primary or foundational element, while the expectations, norms, and habits of gender may be questioned or changed, whether deliberately or organically. My husband could not choose to give birth, but I could choose pants for our next party.

At its best, gender in this sense is a useful word for talking about what we expect of and assume about one another in connection to the realities of sex. It can be a tool of prudence and grace. At its worst, however, this understanding of gender devolves into rank stereotyping and sets the stage for the second colloquial usage.

Sometimes we speak about gender as Catholic scholar Abigail Favale critically described in The Genesis of Gender: “the sex of the soul, the innate manhood or womanhood that may or may not ‘align’ with the sex of the body. In this understanding, gender is decidedly not a mere construct, but is rather a pre-social reality, the inner truth against which the body must be measured.” Here, an internal conception of gender is the primary or foundational element, while the sexed body may be questioned or changed through hormonal and surgical intervention.

It is incoherent to hold to these two colloquial ideas of gender simultaneously. Gender cannot be both an external social construct and an internal, indisputable sex of the soul. It cannot be both secondary to biological sex and its unquestionable override. Yet in practice, particularly in conversations around gender dysphoria, that incoherence is blithely ignored.

It works like this: Drawing on the second usage, trans advocates announce the existence and primacy of gender identity. Some people may imagine that being trans is a choice, the sole trans member of Congress, Sarah McBride, told The New York Times. “That’s not what gender identity is,” McBride said. “It is much more innate. It is a visceral feeling.”

But what exactly does that feeling entail? What does it mean to feel like a man or a woman? How would a member of one sex—who has only ever experienced life as that sex—have any true knowledge of the internal experience of the other? We can imagine, sure. But how would we know?

This is when the worst version of the first usage is pulled into play: You feel like a woman if you like stereotypically female things. You feel like a man if you enjoy stereotypically male things. A little boy who plays with a princess dress-up set is conforming to norms for girls (gender in the social usage); therefore he may be said to be a girl (gender in the soul usage).

McBride and allies might cry foul here, contending that it’s not so simple as this, that a playtime predilection would not set anyone on the path to medical transition. Maybe not, but in many cases I think my simplification is slight.

“If girlness and boyness no longer reside in the body, there is no other ground for these concepts except stereotypes,” Favale observed. And so, “when a girl recognizes that she does not fit the stereotypes of girlhood, she is now invited to question her sex rather than the stereotype.”

It is unsurprising, then, in transition stories, to hear a ruminative concern for what social-gender is supposed to say about soul-gender. In 18 Months, Shannon Thrace’s memoir of her husband’s transition and the resulting dissolution of their marriage, she repeatedly describes “endless ruminating.”

“Since you came out, we haven’t had a single pleasant evening,” she writes, addressing her ex-husband. “You’re obsessed with your appearance. You’re fragile and quick to fight. You cry yourself to sleep.” She mourns “the days when we snapped green beans on the porch. Concerns about your gender consume our days and keep us up at night.”

Or consider the account of a detransitioner named Céline Calame, who wrote on her Substack last summer about life after a regretted mastectomy:

It is odd for me to look at myself in the mirror. … My chest feels simultaneously flat and full. When I focus on it, this between-feeling makes my head hurt and stomach twist. I grasp myself—where am I? How long have I been gone? What could my body have been if I had never thought of “woman” as an identity I had to feel in order to be, and had never pursued these medical interventions?

Calame’s final what if points toward the way out of this ruminative cycle. Being a man or a woman, as Christian author Leah Libresco Sargeant told me in an interview, is not dependent on our feelings or actions. It is a fact, a biological reality, a relational necessity, a given, and a gift of God, though a gift we may sometimes struggle to understand.

Rejection of that givenness is unmistakable in trans medicalization. But our culture’s far broader tendency to ruminate on gender, Sargeant said, likewise “implies that being a man or a woman is something you can fail at”—and therefore a project in which you must pursue some measure of success.

The better understanding, Sargeant said, is that “there are men and there are women, and both men and women are called to virtue.” Sex is a given, but virtue is not, and our individual pursuits of virtue may well be shaped by our sex and gender (in the social sense). “Virtue is what you can fail at,” Sargeant continued, drawing on the work of Sister Prudence Allen:

You can be more or less virtuous—more or less anything—but sex is a bedrock thing about you. It can’t be threatened by, say, the fact that you wear jeans or don’t. You can grow further into virtue, and when you’re brave as a woman, you’re always brave in a womanly way. That’s not because the act of bravery is different. You’re brave in a womanly way because you are a woman. Your gender is never imperiled.

Now, your soul can be imperiled. You can be more or less virtuous. You can be more or less of what God has asked you to be—which is not necessarily the same as what he’s asked the man or woman next to you to be. But whatever you do, you are always doing it in a womanly way.

The claim here is not about different standards of morality for the sexes. In her newest book, The Dignity of Dependence, Sargeant approvingly quotes Teddy Roosevelt remembering his father’s instruction that “what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man.” Yet a man’s cowardice might well be distinguishable from a woman’s, and a woman’s courage may take a different shape than a man’s.

What would it mean to understand that we can’t fail in being a man or a woman? That it’s a given that “male and female he created” us (Gen. 1:27)? How could it break our culture’s gender fixation?

To begin, we can be free of the taxing and ridiculous idea of gender affirmation. If a woman is something I am, not something I must somehow feel or do, then there is no way to make me more or less a woman. There is no way to diminish my sex—and no way to affirm it. There is nothing to achieve, no performance to perfect, no lack to which I can add. I can decide to play by the current rules of social-gender or not, but even in that case affirmation is the wrong word.

So down with contorting ourselves to fit silly stereotypes, with self-justifying performances, with cutting off healthy body parts and putting acids inside our faces to fashion ourselves into visions of man and woman that are all surface, no substance—all rumination, no relational responsibility.

“When gender remains rooted in sex—when womanhood refers to femaleness rather than the embodiment of a feminine stereotype—this allows ‘woman’ to be a much roomier box,” Favale wrote. To me, that sounds like freedom, a reprieve to focus on better and more needful things in service of God and neighbor (Gal. 5:6, 13). It’s not like Jesus gave sex-segregated versions of the Sermon on the Mount.

I don’t think about my own sex or gender much anyway. But in this I suspect I’m the oddity. Not everyone wants a roomier box. “Most people have strong sense of being men or women,” noted theologian Alastair Roberts for the Theopolis Institute.

At Wisdom of Crowds, journalist Christine Emba extends that point, arguing that a generic aim toward virtue is not enough for many people, especially many men. “Young men and boys are telling us, often literally, that they desperately need and desire direction, norms, and a concrete rubric for how to be a man—not just a ‘good person’—and that in fact the lack of said norms is causing considerable distress,” Emba writes.

In practice, she believes, a set of ideals “capacious” enough for the experiences of male and female alike is unlikely to be “thick enough to live on.” Virtue is virtue, yes, yet because “difference demands specificity,” an injunction to “‘Just be good’ isn’t enough.”

Many, perhaps most, people would agree. They want some assurance that they’re being a man or a woman as they ought to be. The perpetual uncertainty of rumination has proved to be of no help, but a universal call to virtue may seem insubstantial. We need virtue not in the abstract but, suitably to the subject at hand, embodied in relationship.

The internet untethered us from the body, from the concrete relationships that really elicit our sense of ourselves as male and female,” Roberts told me in an interview. “Things like being a husband, father, son, or brother—this sort of thing is very grounded.” Our increasingly isolated, disembodied way of life will tend to “elicit rumination,” he argued, because it requires us to craft a sense of self and purpose as male or female for and by ourselves.

“In the past, that would largely be given to you, and it would be something that was evoked in you by the grounding realities of your existence”—chiefly your relationships, Roberts said. “My body says that I’m male, and ideally, my embodied relationships ground that sense for me. Like walking on the floor, I don’t have to think about it.” With too few of those relationships, we think and overthink, perform and consume in search of some substitute source of grounding.

These alternatives won’t satisfy. Sargeant recounts in The Dignity of Dependence that a reader once wrote to her describing exactly this problem. Single and nearing 30, he had an instinct that being a virtuous Christian man would entail sacrificial care for others. But, he told Sargeant, “I feel like I can’t really know if I’m ‘doing life right’ or being as charitable toward my fellow humans as I could because there are no particular, instantiated person[s] for me to love.”

Most Christians would not talk about our culture’s sex and gender woes in terms of “grounding” or “rumination.” But I suspect, with Roberts, that our “concern to get a sort of ‘biblical masculinity’ or ‘biblical femininity’ is often responding to these same anxieties.” There may well be a place for that work, but I’m increasingly convinced a less direct approach is better. Rather than meet overthinking with even more thinking, or answering anxiety about measuring up with another standard to reach, we should focus on growing in grace and love in the relationships God gives us. Focus on life in community—especially family, but also in friendship, neighborhood, school, work, and church.

Community “gives context within which virtues can be shown and reputations can be built or destroyed,” Roberts said. Seek out enduring community, he advised. Learn from elderly couples with long marriages. Invest in institutions and help young people get their start. Aspire to imitate the good men and good women you know, to emulate their model of maleness or femaleness conformed not to stereotypes but to Christ.

Bonnie Kristian is deputy editor at Christianity Today.

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Culture

I Failed to Mature as an Artist—Until I Learned to See

Wendy Kiyomi

Drawing is a way of entrusting what I can see to the care and attention of God.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

My husband and I moved into a low-ceilinged basement apartment on a snowy day in January. The landlord was related to a prominent Nigerian poet, which boded well for our literary future, I thought. Combining our books into a single collection was one of the first tasks of our young marriage.

I was unpacking a box of my husband’s when I pulled out a book I’d never seen before. I stood upright to get a good look: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.

“What’s this book?” I called to my husband, holding it up.

“From an art class I took,” he said.

I turned it over and read the summary. On the back were before-and-after student drawings. The “afters” were sophisticated self-portraits. I felt a stab of envy.

In preschool, some of my work had gotten my parents excited about my creative potential. They commissioned little ink drawings from me that they cut to size and printed in our family letter at Christmas time. They signed me up for private art classes. I went weekly to a neighborhood studio, where I worked on textured paper with waxy pastels that lay side by side in a neat, boxed array.

I failed to develop as an artist.

There was some household discussion about this. Most of the blame landed on the art teacher—she was apparently not a serious instructor. I was more inclined to chalk it up to my own defects. Privately, I found the whole thing alarming. In class, I didn’t know what was going on. Drawing was not like reading or math, which I had picked up seemingly without effort.

The best I could manage was mimicry. I memorized step-by-step procedures that made it seem like I could draw. My proudest achievement was a little dog-grass-rainbow cartoon that pleased my 8-year-old, anxious-to-succeed heart to no end and that I reproduced for friends and relatives for years. It was flat and trite, but at least it looked like I knew what I was doing.

I never quite learned to draw. That’s not to say I couldn’t draw some when I wanted to. In school, I drew scenes from Oliver Twist and Watership Down, and I was pleased with them.

But I admired work by people who actually could draw, like my friend Dan. His senior-year art show featured a bold painting of a man whose shouting mouth opened like a tunnel for a twisting road, running out against a fiery turbulent sky. He was even commissioned to paint a tiger on the floor of the basketball court. It was beautiful.

Maybe what I admired most was how the true “art kids” spent time drawing as though it were just as important as classes like chemistry and calculus. Art was fine as a hobby, I thought, like tennis—except I only played after school and on my own time. Drawing wasn’t really something serious to study. It wasn’t going to get me into college or a prestigious career.

“When did you take an art class?” I asked my husband, emerging from my reverie.

“In high school,” he said.

I frowned at this. I had never taken an art class in high school, or any time other than with the neighborhood instructor. I’d never permitted myself to try to learn to draw. I wasn’t sure I could handle it if I turned out to be bad at it.

My husband is very talented, but I had seen enough of his skill set to doubt that he was any more likely than me to excel at drawing. Indignant, I wondered: How come he got to learn to draw in high school, and I didn’t?

“Why did you take an art class?” I asked.

“I wanted to,” he said.

I thumbed through the book’s pages and glimpsed a full-page illustration. I stopped to look: Igor Stravinsky by Pablo Picasso, depicted upside down.

Drawing “Igor Stravinsky” upside down, the author explained, was an exercise to help students train their artistic perception. Most of us see with habitual “left brain” patterns that are symbolic, verbalized constructs: Here is an orange; that is a hat. When we learn to draw, these preconceptions often get in the way.

We need a perceptual shift into a more “right-brain” mode that is more interested in shape and tone, lengths of line, arcs of curves, and spatial fit. Learning to draw, Edwards claimed, is mainly about learning to see.

I thought that was interesting. But I had boxes to unpack, studying to do, and a marriage to figure out. I closed the book and put it into the empty place on the shelf.

Twelve years later, I was a mother to three young children who had come to our home on a late summer day from their previous foster family and were now ours for good. Daily life seemed precarious. Simply getting through the day was too much to do most of the time. My husband and I threw ourselves into caring for them. We had a frantic sense that through our individual effort we might be able to undo the damage done in their early childhood and halt the effects of reactive attachment disorder or fetal alcohol syndrome.

By the time the kids were in bed each night, I was depleted and keyed up. Most people in this state probably turn to television, but the idea of lounging there, unproductive, was hateful to me. I felt stunted and wanted to do something “improving.” I wanted to handle physical materials. I pick at my nails in times of stress, and they were a mess now. I needed to keep my hands busy.

So, one day in late fall, I pulled Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain down from the shelf and started reading.

Almost everyone can learn to draw, Edwards says, just like almost everyone can learn to read. If we can just shift out of the symbolic view—what we think we see—to see what is truly there, then we can draw. All it takes is some training in the five perceptual skills, seeing “edges, spaces, relationships, lights and shadows, and the gestalt”—the coherent whole.

I wanted to see that way.

I got out paper, pencil, and eraser and set to work on Igor Stravinsky upside down. After three quarters of an hour, I made my last stroke and turned the paper right side up. It resembled Picasso’s original. I smiled with satisfaction. Not bad.

Emboldened, I darkened the negative spaces around a wooden chair. I sketched my hand, marking the crevices in my knuckles and the moons of my nailbeds and the curves of my finger pads. I timidly shaded a saltshaker and avocado with hatch marks, then crosshatched them with more confidence.

Drawing people was intimidating. The book warned me about not giving people a “chopped-off skull” by underestimating how big the back of the head is. Even Vincent van Gogh, who learned to draw at age 27, had “problems of proportion” early on, giving people outsized hands and chopped-off skulls. But by age 29, he was a skilled portraitist.

My first portraits were from photographs. I drew my daughters in various poses and then my sister in a three-quarters profile view. I didn’t cut off her skull, but I messed up the placement, and her features were a bit crammed onto the paper. I put it in a frame above my sink, pleased to see her familiar smile in my own pencil marks. When she visited, I showed her.

“Look, I drew you,” I said expectantly.

She glanced at it. “That does not look like me,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I was taken aback. “That looks exactly like you.”

She pursed her lips. We didn’t discuss it further.

When she left, I kept it right where it was. It looked exactly like her, and I liked having her near, even if she didn’t appreciate it.

My husband was a sitting duck as a live model, and I tried to draw him—once while he was leaning back on the sofa with his legs crossed as he talked on the phone with his brother, another time as he typed on his laptop.

These drawings were okay. They didn’t have skull problems, but the mouths didn’t look right. Mouths are hard. If you study them carefully, they are more line-and-shadow than lip, and very unforgiving. The merest dip or lift makes your loved one into a monster or a clown.

In the winter, we traveled to visit family. The children had never flown before. They were anxious and out of sorts to begin with, and the new surroundings only dysregulated them further. They also got sick and spent the week vomiting and running fevers.

On the return trip, I was sad and exhausted from the stress of caregiving. There was bad weather in the northeast, and we got into our seats late in the evening. My daughter badly needed sleep but was nervous and squirmy. I laid her head in my lap and covered her with a jacket. She fell asleep. I sat still for a while, then gingerly reached down for my drawing pad and set about sketching her sleeping face. I traced her round cheek, the delicate arch of her eyebrow, the tiny flare of her eyelashes, the folds of her ear. I was struck with tenderness.

“Absolute unmixed attention is prayer,” writes Simone Weil. I see what she means. That drawing from the airplane, when I see it now, brings me to that exact posture and state of feeling. I see the vulnerable beauty of her little face before me, but I feel also the heft of her body, the care I took not to jostle her, the drone of the jet engines, the gratitude for the gift of her sleep, and the temporary reprieve from worry. I saw her, I believe, somewhat as the Lord himself sees her: beloved and under his care on this difficult, uncertain path of life. And what I have seen will not be taken away.

Choosing what to draw is one of my major hang-ups. I want to draw the important and beautiful things—the smooth-skinned faces of my children, my mother’s hands, my dog’s velvety snout, the sweep of cirrus clouds across the sky. But they are complicated. I have neither the skill nor the time to capture them.

Most instructors say that subjects are all around, and the most ordinary things are great for drawing. Office supplies on your desk. Dishes piled in the sink. The bare trees crossing limbs overhead.

These still-life options are easier because they don’t move. The more compelling scenes are fleeting. Friends alter their postures, cityscapes blur, animals shift, water moves, weather changes.

At church or gathered with friends, in waiting rooms or meetings, in restaurants and on sidewalks, I sometimes sit back and try the perceptual shift. What could I draw? The water glass on the table? The young man bent over his phone? The worshipers standing in song? I case the joint, watching.

Author Wendell Berry’s fictional barber Jayber Crow spends his many slow hours watching his little town. “I was always on the lookout for what could be revealed,” he says. “Sometimes nothing would be, but sometimes I beheld astonishing sights.”

Jesus’ initial call to his disciples is simply Come and see (John 1:39). Jesus requires very few specific tasks of his disciples, but he is insistent that they watch and “see” what he is about.

After Jesus has risen, his disciples realize their salvation is at hand and declare it simply: “We have seen the Lord!” (John 20:25).

I have not yet reached a level that good artists achieve, of being able to draw from memory. I can put down only what is right in front of me—and only if it doesn’t move too fast.

The pastor at our church preached recently on Luke 7. Jesus is reclining at table with Pharisees when a woman walks in to anoint his feet. Everyone is aghast, but Jesus beholds her joyfully. He turns to his host and asks, “Do you see this woman?” (v. 44).

“Well, of course the pharisees saw her,” my pastor said. She was all too visible. They looked and saw scandal. They missed the color and tone, the gestalt of what Christ saw, the hidden power of God’s inbreaking kingdom.

How often do we too fail to mark the signs of his kingdom?

What do I see, pen and paper before me? Do I see and worry about my children’s struggles and careless mistakes? Yes, but I cannot draw them. My son reading a book, the way he looks self-consciously down while talking—these I might draw. I see my daughter tidying the kitchen and the way her smile spreads across her face. I treasure them and ponder them in my heart. Seeing is the way of love.

In each image I attempt to draw, I am forced to acknowledge how much I must leave unseen. My powers of sight cannot encompass all that is there. I cannot see all the wisps of cloud striating the sky. I cannot draw each filament of curl on my son’s head. I cannot catch the exact lines of amusement in my friend’s smile.

To produce a good drawing, an artist must know when to stop. Art can be ruined by trying to put in too much. I must leave undrawn thousands of snowflakes clumped on the branches of a red cedar, myriad glinting droplets shivering on the twigs of a young maple. These are exquisite beauties that yet must remain undrawn and mostly unseen by all but their Creator.

Drawing is a way of entrusting what I can see to the care and attention of God, who is El Roi, the “God who sees” (Gen. 16:13). The Lord’s seeing is not merely passing notice but rather a powerful activity of loving concern.

When God intervenes in Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac, Abraham looks up and sees a ram nearby, caught by its horns, and offers it in sacrifice instead. He names the place, “The Lord Will Provide.” The verb rendered provide is the Hebrew word for see (Gen. 22:14).

I pray only as I partly see, and the Holy Spirit must see all and intercede for all that needs the Lord’s attention. The cares furrowing my husband’s brow are only partially seen by me, his closest companion. My children’s futures, too, the Lord must provide for. He is the shepherd of their hearts, their lives’ pains and pleasures, and all they must experience and learn.

My drawings are not always as I would wish, yet I am drawn to marvel at the provision of the One Who Sees. He alone will redeem all my errors in perception; and he is healing all things, hidden and visible, whether I can draw them or not.

Wendy Kiyomi is an essayist whose writing on the trials of faith, complexities of adoption, and delights of friendship has appeared in Plough Quarterly, Image Journal, Christianity Today, Mockingbird, the Englewood Review of Books, and at wendykiyomi.com. She lives in Tacoma with her family and is a 2023 winner of the Zenger Prize for journalistic excellence.

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Theology

Jesus Did Not Serve Grape Juice

Brad East

Contributor

Why reopen debate about what we serve for Communion? Because it matters that we follow God’s commands.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

When I teach evangelical college students about the practicalities of Communion, I’ll often begin with the Last Supper, with Jesus and the disciples, because it raises some straightforward questions. I’ll ask them: Should we obey Jesus? Should we celebrate the meal as he instituted it? Should we do what he said? Should we use what he used, eating what he ate and drinking what he drank?

Obviously, they respond—but then they catch themselves. On second thought, their churches don’t do that. And it occurs to them that they can’t quite offer an explanation why.

Some of their churches have taught them that the Communion elements don’t matter at all: Cheez-Its and Minute Maid will work in a pinch. Whatever’s on hand can do the job. Why be such a legalist? God doesn’t care. It’s about the intention of your heart.

COVID-19 lockdowns exacerbated this attitude. While most churches fasted from the Lord’s Supper if they couldn’t assemble, some encouraged families and even individuals to “self-serve” at home. Apart from questions of spiritual solemnity, communal ritual, or pastoral authority, the practical matter of what to use was answered by whatever was in the fridge and pantry. I suspect that not a few young people’s assumptions about Communion were formed quite powerfully during that time—and not for the best.

Years after the pandemic, with those unusual circumstances past, Communion is once again little discussed in many Christian circles. This may be because, in certain respects, it is a rare point of relative Christian unity. We disagree over so many things that it is always a joy to be able to say that “all Christians agree” about anything. But regarding the sacraments, happily, all Christians agree about three important things:

First, though we disagree about whether there are more than two sacraments, all Christians agree that there aren’t fewer than two: baptism and Communion. And if you twist their arms, Catholics, Orthodox, and Christians in other “high church” traditions will generally admit that these two are the most important.

Second, all Christians agree that Jesus himself instituted both Communion and baptism and commanded his followers to continue practicing them until his return from heaven.

And third, all Christians agree that the church ought to celebrate baptism and Communion in accordance with God’s will, starting with Jesus’ own words in the Gospels before turning to the teaching and practice of the apostles in the rest of the New Testament.

Now, it’s true that I’ve overstated a little. Some Quakers don’t celebrate Communion; Baptists avoid the word sacrament; and many traditions persist in denying the validity of other Christian groups’ practice of Communion, baptism, or both. We remain divided, even here. I don’t want to gloss over that.

Nevertheless, Christian unity is worth pursuing. Last year I wrote an article for CT in which I called on evangelicals and other Protestants to embrace a higher view of baptism—of its necessity, its efficacy, and its power. I wanted to make the strongest possible case primarily because of what I believe is Scripture’s own teaching, but secondarily to draw divided Christians together. What I didn’t address was baptism’s practice, avoiding entirely the question of sprinkling or dunking babies or adults.

Here I want to do something with Communion, only reversed. That is, instead of discussing the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, I’d like to address its practice. I want to show you that, whatever we understand to be happening in the meal, our practice of it can converge.

There’s much to discuss here, not least the frequency of the Supper’s celebration as well as its placement and importance in worship. But I’ll limit myself to a single practical question: What should we eat and drink? While this may seem like a minor matter, I hope to convince you it is anything but.

Start in the Upper Room, at the Last Supper of Jesus mere hours before he was betrayed by Judas (Luke 22:12; 1 Cor. 11:23). There’s little doubt that, when Jesus instituted what we call the Lord’s Supper, he and his disciples shared unleavened bread and wine (Mark 14:12–25).

This was, after all, not just a Passover meal but also the Feast of Unleavened Bread (v. 1; Luke 22:1), and according to the Law of Moses, “if anyone eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day [of the feast], that person shall be cut off from Israel” (Ex. 12:15, ESV).

Moreover, Jesus refers to having drunk “the fruit of the vine” from the shared cup (Mark 14:25), and this is a biblical shorthand for wine (Num. 18:12; Deut. 18:4; 28:30; Josh. 24:13; Zech. 8:12, ESV).

Most churches, to be sure, are not as casual about the elements as those that allowed Cheez-Its at home in 2020. They use unleavened bread, generally some kind of wafer. But that’s only half of the meal. The other half is the problem: They don’t use wine. This is the sacramental pebble in the evangelical shoe.

By contrast, most of the world’s Christians, including many Protestants, do use wine in Communion. That includes some Methodists, many Presbyterians, and all Lutherans and Anglicans, along with the Orthodox and Catholics. Those who don’t use wine tend to be “low church” evangelicals: Baptists, Pentecostals, Churches of Christ (my own tradition), and a variety of nondenominational believers. Instead of wine, these groups tend to use grape juice.

My students usually hail from these churches, and they’ve never given the grape juice a second thought. So it comes as quite a shock to them to realize, first, that they’re not following Jesus’ stated instructions; and second, that this is a radically new development in church history, having nothing to do with divisions stemming from the Reformation.

Far from being a scriptural or doctrinal matter, grape juice in Communion was introduced by the American temperance movement. It was made possible by Mr. Welch himself, a teetotaling Methodist minister in the late 19th century who pioneered a way of preventing the process of fermentation in the sweet juice squeezed from grapes. This enabled believers who wished to abstain from drinking alcohol to do so every day of the week, Sunday mornings included.

Since then, grape juice as both a drink and a substitute for Communion wine exploded in popularity—here in the States and as an export abroad. There are millions of Christians around the world who now use grape juice in the Lord’s Supper because American missionaries bringing the gospel also brought a novel cultural practice—a product not of centuries-long Christian tradition but of temporary domestic conflict in America over whether drinking alcohol was compatible with following Jesus.

All this raises a fundamental question: If Jesus used wine in his institution of his Supper, does that matter? Did Jesus—does God—care whether what we drink from the Communion cup is fermented? And if he does, why?

The best way to approach these questions is to consider the nature of the elements as symbols. This, too, is a matter about which all Christians agree: Whatever else they may be, the bread and wine are symbols, and what symbols do is symbolize. They are signs, and signs signify. They are significant. They are pregnant with meaning. They are eloquent without words. In and of themselves, they point beyond themselves. They are inaudible arrows, drawing your gaze to what lies beyond them.

Symbols work because of what they are—and because of what they are not. The shape and color of a stop sign are not incidental to its meaning. The number of stars on the American flag is not accidental. And I’ve never heard of someone getting baptized in oil, tar, or urine. Water is a loaded symbol: It is clear, clean, and pure. And even as it’s good for washing, it’s also good for drowning.

These rules about symbols apply to Communion as well. The bread is unleavened because this is the new Passover meal for God’s new covenant people (Luke 22:20). We have been delivered by Jesus from the Pharaoh of sin, death, and the Devil, and this is our sustenance for the journey, at once the bread baked in haste (Ex. 12:8, 33–34) and the manna from heaven in the wilderness (John 6:25–59). It is the bread of the new and final exodus—the Lord’s own body broken for our sake (Luke 9:31; 1 Cor. 11:24). Therefore, 1 Corinthians 5:8 (KJV) instructs, “let us keep the feast”!

If the type of bread is so significant, it would be odd if the contents of the cup were irrelevant. But as it happens, Scripture has much to say about wine. In fact, wine is ubiquitous in the Bible. It’s not usually prescribed, as in 1 Timothy 5:23, but it’s everywhere, in story and prophesy and theology alike. Cutting it out of Communion is almost like cutting out these verses—a teetotaling Jefferson Bible.

There is Melchizedek, the king of Jerusalem and priest of God, who brings out bread and wine to share with Abram (Gen. 14:18)—a type of Christ in every one of these respects (Heb. 5–7). There is the role of wine in libations commanded as drink offerings in the Law (Lev. 23:13; Num. 15:1–10). There is the promise of God to the Israelites that he will richly bless them when they possess the land: “He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers. He will bless the fruit of your womb, the crops of your land—your grain, new wine and olive oil—the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks” (Deut. 7:13).

In the Psalms and the Prophets, the language of wine—of vines, vineyards, and winepresses—becomes a symbolic world unto itself. God uses the language of wine to speak of Israel as his beloved and to warn of wrath and judgment—or to do both at once, as in Isaiah 5:1–7. One theologian goes so far as to refer to the extraordinary “oino-theology” of the Bible’s “typology of wine.”

When Jesus—not only the master interpreter of Scripture but its very author—takes up the cup at the Last Supper, he is drawing on all this and much more. And it is crucial to see that none of this is foreign to our own culture today. It’s not merely what wine meant “in Bible times.”

Compare the symbolism of wine and grape juice for us. The one signifies adulthood, maturity, festivity, and celebration. It’s valuable and, as in Jesus’s own ministry (John 2:1–11), capable of marking an occasion as momentous, meaningful, and memorable.

Grape juice signifies children. Preadolescence. It’s what parents and teachers offer to young kids as a treat instead of water. It’s cheap and mass-produced. No adult goes to a restaurant and asks for a glass of their finest grape juice. No man impresses his date by buying her a bottle of grape juice. A teetotaler wedding might have sparkling grape juice, but even there the juice requires something more to be special.

Biblically, grape juice signifies nothing—except perhaps its eventual transition into wine, as in the Nazirite vows of abstention found in Numbers 6:1-4. And culturally, it signifies worse than nothing—assuming that we want to take our practice of the Supper seriously. And yet for millions of Christians, juice has become an unquestioned substitute for wine, one of the most richly significant and important symbols in all of Scripture.

Jesus instituted both unleavened bread and wine on purpose—that is to say, with purpose. These are signs that, in the Bible and in human culture alike, mean something. And if Jesus did this on purpose, then it remains his purpose now. We don’t have to wonder what the Lord’s will is here. His will is that we use what he used in his institution of the Supper.

And why not? There are no good reasons at the general level for churches to systematically substitute grape juice for wine in Communion. There may be local, person-specific, or missionary situations that raise reasonable questions about exceptions to the rule. But for an exception to work, there has to be a rule. And the rule is—or rather, ought to be—wine.

There’s an irony here that cannot go unremarked. Strict teetotalism and principled abstention from wine as forms of Christian piety have their roots in American evangelicalism. But as I have written at CT, that generational strictness has been loosened in recent decades. All the evangelicals I know now drink—and so do their parents, who once abstained.

Whatever the virtues of this change (and I don’t want to be glib about the downsides, which are all too real), it has produced a bizarre situation in many churches. Evangelical pews are filled with adult believers who drink wine at home but not in the Lord’s Supper. We have perfectly inverted the 19th century: avoiding alcohol only on Sundays.

Surely we can agree that, practically speaking, this is the worst of all possible worlds. At least it made a certain kind of sense for Christians who never drank at home to avoid wine at church too. The present inconsistency is simply too much to bear.

Be that as it may, the reasons to reintroduce wine into Communion practice are not themselves practical but theological, biblical, and ecclesial.

To use wine in the Supper would bring our churches into alignment both with the rest of the global church and with Christian tradition prior to Welch’s grape juice. It would bring them into alignment, too, with Scripture’s rich symbolism of the fruit of the vine. And finally, it would bring them into alignment with—I want to say, obedience to—the teaching and practice of the apostles and of the Lord Jesus himself.

There is no better reason than that.

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.

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Culture

How A Pastor’s Book Inspired a New Rom-Com

Haleluya Hadero

Mike Todd’s book, Relationship Goals, gets a spotlight in a film aimed at both Christian and secular audiences.

Kelly Rowland as Leah Caldwell and Clifford “Method Man” Smith as Jarrett Roy in Relationship Goals.

Amanda Matlovich / Prime / © Amazon Content Services LLC

When I was in grad school eight years ago, YouTube’s algorithm recommended I watch pastor Mike Todd’s sermon series on relationships, aptly called Relationship Goals.

I hadn’t heard of Todd before, and at that point not a lot of other people had either. He was a young pastor shepherding Transformation Church, which was then a small congregation in Tulsa. When his sermon on relationships went viral, however, that changed.

Many young Christians—particularly those who are Black—were attracted to his approach and delivery. The sermons were biblical, funny, and relevant (especially for those of us who didn’t know what we were doing in our 20s). Todd’s ministry grew into a megachurch, and the sermon series inspired a popular Christian relationship-advice book. After seeing the success, Amazon greenlit an idea by Hollywood producer DeVon Franklin to transform the book into a romantic comedy, released Wednesday on Prime Video.

The roughly 90-minute film—also called Relationship Goals—stars singer and actress Kelly Rowland (of Destiny’s Child fame and Beyonce’s best friend) as Leah Caldwell, an ambitious staffer on a fictional morning show in New York called Better Day USA. Leah has plans to replace her boss as the program’s top producer once he retires. But the network overlords are concerned about her ability to be a team player, and they bring in another candidate to compete for the role.

That decision removes the façade of control Leah felt over her life, which Rowland told me during a brief conversation in January is partly what attracted her to the role. “I go through … [the process] of just letting go, I’d say every other quarter or maybe every quarter,” the singer said.

Leah is disappointed by what’s being asked of her and becomes even more annoyed when she learns she’ll be competing with a well-known TV producer whom she once dated and who cheated on her. To prove to her boss that she can be a team player, she swallows her pride and works with her suave ex, Jarrett Roy, on a Valentine’s Day segment about Todd’s book. Jarrett, played by the rapper Method Man, tells her the book helped him turn away from his player ways.

Viewers will spend most of the movie trying to determine whether Roy’s maturation is genuine and whether Leah’s character will open herself up to love. The film also traces how the book impacts Leah’s two close friends, played by actresses Robin Thede and Annie Gonzalez.

When I sat down for an early preview of the movie, I didn’t have high hopes. The last DeVon Franklin film I watched, produced with Tyler Perry, trafficked in a lot of cliché tropes. I expected Relationship Goals to be more of the same, but I was pleasantly surprised. Rowland’s character is compelling and believable, and the situational humor (especially from Gonzalez’s tired-of-bad-dates character) was good enough to elicit several laughs from my husband and me as we watched the film together.

Method Man, whose real name is Clifford Smith Jr., also delivered a decent performance as Jarrett. The movie could have spent more time teasing out what exactly about the book and faith—which his character says is “hotter than ever”—made Jarrett change how he thinks about relationships. But for a lighthearted romantic comedy, those flaws are forgivable.

That said, Relationship Goals does have explicit Christian elements. It shows the morning-show crew traveling to Tulsa to record an interview with Todd and his wife, Natalie, who portray themselves. The two leading characters also attend a worship service at the real Transformation Church, where Todd gives a brief sermon.

Even with those types of scenes, the writers made sure the film didn’t emphasize Christianity so much that it could turn off secular viewers. “I love love,” Rowland told me. “I love rom-coms. And I love [that] the faith aspect of it … wasn’t force-fed down our throat as much as allowing these characters to be human, honest, and real.”

The movie is heavily marketed toward Christians, and many people who follow Todd will likely check it out. Todd told me he put in his two cents wherever he could. But it’s not a Christian movie per se, he and Franklin said during separate interviews. That point was communicated clearly in one scene (spoiler alert) where the two leads sleep together, and there was no dialogue afterward about the act being wrong, nor any movement to tie up the moral loose ends.

Todd noted he wanted to cast a “wider net” with the movie and appeal to people who weren’t already believers. The goal was “to make a movie that had Christian principles in it [and] that transformed people in their everyday” lives, he said. He wants his preteen daughters to watch it, but not until “a few years from now.”

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

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News

Bracing for ICE Raids, Haitians Get Temporary Reprieve

Andy Olsen in Springfield, Ohio

A federal judge on Monday extended deportation protections for Haitian immigrants. While they waited for the ruling, pastors in Springfield, Ohio, gathered and prayed.

Faith leaders pray at St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Springfield, Ohio.

AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao

Two songs in, the fire official interrupted. Another 150 volunteers needed to leave the overcrowded church before worship could continue.

More than 1,000 people descended Monday morning on a special church service in Springfield, Ohio, to sing and pray and wave signs on the day before deportation protections were set to expire for more than 300,000 Haitian immigrants across the United States.

Visitors came from as far away as Florida and Washington, DC. They parked blocks from St. John Missionary Baptist Church, some of them linking arms to steady one another as they traipsed over snow and slush. They spilled out of the sanctuary and into the foyer and out the door.

Tim Voltz, a pastor at Champion City Church, told the crowd it was “a defining moment for our city.”

“This isn’t political talking points,” Voltz said in an interview afterword. “This is real life for us.”

While the country’s largest Haitian communities are in South Florida and New York, central Ohio took an improbable leading role in America’s immigration debate in 2024, after then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance repeated false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were stealing and eating pets.

The ensuing media frenzy—and traumas like dozens of bomb threats—tore the community apart. Before the maelstrom, the city had attracted an estimated 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Most of them had Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a legal designation granted by the US government to groups from countries experiencing armed conflict or other disasters.

The Trump administration ended or attempted to end TPS for more than a million immigrants from different countries last year. Protections for Haitians, the largest remaining group, were set to expire Tuesday night. Organizations across the country called for prayer and support.

Churches and other faith groups in Springfield have spent months preparing for the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents might amass in their city. They’ve hosted trainings on constitutional rights and have helped hundreds of immigrant residents get passports and birth certificates. They have passed out orange whistles like those that became the soundtrack of Minnesota’s anti-ICE protests.

Roughly 20 Springfield congregations have collaborated to establish safe communication networks and to lay groundwork for emergency food distribution and childcare.

And on Monday, all those preparations culminated in a worship service.

Speakers, mostly local evangelical and mainline pastors, stepped into the pulpit and preached about the immigrants who are everywhere in the biblical narrative. They invoked the kingdom of God and the soon-returning Christ, and they prayed for Haitians to receive an extension of TPS.

Their prayer was answered—but not until everyone had gone home for the night.

Geoff Pipoly, a Chicago attorney representing a class-action suit challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s move to end TPS for Haitians, stood near the back of the sanctuary and joked about the heat from so many people in the room. “Hard to believe it’s winter outside,” he said.

Pipoly was reasonably confident the court would temporarily block the government from deporting Haitians before their protection expired at midnight. He’d had a feeling ever since the oral arguments earlier in January. Judge Ana C. Reyes, of the Federal District Court in Washington, asked the government’s lawyers, facetiously, if they thought Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem could end TPS for virtually any reason. Could she end it simply because she doesn’t “like vanilla ice cream”?

“Yes, your honor,” they eventually replied.

In the worship service, Pipoly checked his phone constantly. Reyes’s decision was due any moment; he thought he might even see the emailed opinion while the crowd was still gathered, and they could celebrate or mourn together.

While he waited, pastor Carl Ruby spoke from the front. “Welcoming immigrants is as important as welcoming Christ himself,” he said. “Rejecting them is, in Christ’s own teaching, a form of rejecting him.”

Ruby’s congregation, Central Christian Church, sits at the heart of Springfield’s fight for Haitian immigrants. Viles Dorsainvil, a former pastor who runs the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, attends Central. Dorsainvil’s brother, a physician who fled Haiti in 2021 on a tourist visa and now works in Springfield as a registered nurse, is one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs.

Haiti has, for more than a decade, been on a Dantean descent into ever-more desperate levels of hardship. Thousands of Haitian immigrants were first granted TPS by the Obama administration in 2010, following the earthquake that laid waste to much of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

In ensuing years, the government continued extending protections and deeming Haiti unsafe for return. A devastating cholera epidemic triggered the withdrawal of United Nations security forces. Into the power vacuum swept legions of heavily armed gangs that now control an estimated 90 percent of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, kidnapping, pillaging, and warring with relative impunity.

During his first administration, President Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to end TPS protection for Haitians. Following the 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse and a spiraling hunger crisis, the Biden administration renewed and expanded TPS protections for Haitians already in the United States.

“Temporary protected status exists precisely for a moment like this,” Dorsainvil told the crowd at St. John. He referenced Nehemiah, the Old Testament figure who rebuilt Jerusalem’s crumbling walls.

“In Haiti today, the walls are broken as well—the wall of security, the wall of governance, the wall of basic human dignity,” Dorsainvil said. “Forcing Haitians to return under these conditions is neither safe, humane, nor just. The crisis is real. The suffering is real. And until the walls are built and the people are safe, return is not an option.”

Springfield is divided in opinion on its outsized Haitian community. Immigrants have helped revitalize the city, opening restaurants and small businesses and building homes in a city that had been a poster child for Rust Belt decline.

While the Trump administration insists it seeks to end deportation protections to pursue dangerous criminals, officials in Clark County, where Springfield is located, say they have charged almost no Haitians with violent crimes.

But many residents—Ruby, the Central Christian pastor, calls them “a vocal minority”—see Haitians as burdening public services, slowing down lines in the grocery store, and driving up local rent. In an online survey conducted by a local newspaper, slightly fewer than half of respondents said Springfield would be better off once TPS protections ended.

“It will be nice to get our city back,” wrote one respondent.

In Ohio and elsewhere, Haitians are disproportionally employed in hospitals, senior homes, and home health care. At the church service, Keny Felix, senior pastor of Bethel Evangelical Baptist Church in Miami and head of the Southern Baptist National Haitian Fellowship, reminded the audience that Haitian workers also undergird the travel and hospitality industries, including airports and cruise lines.

“Extending TPS for our Haitian brothers and sisters is not just an economic issue, but it also reflects who we are,” Felix said. “We protect the vulnerable. We do not return people to danger.”

Reyes’s ruling finally arrived in Pipoly’s inbox on Monday evening.

In an unvarnished 83-page opinion that opened with a quote from George Washington, Reyes criticized the government for failing to demonstrate that Haitian TPS holders pose any public harm. She questioned how Noem could conclude that Haiti is safe for return, a legal condition for the cancellation of TPS, when other federal agencies warn that Haiti is unsafe for travel “for any reason.”

Reyes wrote it is likely that Noem “preordained her termination decision … because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”

“Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it,” the judge wrote.

The decision will almost certainly be appealed, a process that could stretch on for months. A higher court might choose to leave deportation protections in place while it considers the case, or it might choose to lift them.

But for now, Pipoly said, “ICE raids should not start.”

Pastors said Haitians wept at the news Monday night.

The decision will “lower the pressure quite a bit and ease the fear,” Dorsainvil told a reporter on Tuesday. He said he wants to get back to church on Sunday and tell his congregation, “God still speaks today.”

Andy Olsen is senior features writer at Christianity Today.

- More from Andy Olsen

Ideas

Tearing Apart ‘The Old Thread-bare Lie’

Marvin Olasky

Editor in Chief

Black journalist Ida B. Wells exposed Southern lynching.

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

Born into slavery in 1862, Black journalist Ida B. Wells educated herself and, during the late 1880s, wrote for Christian publications “in a plain, common-sense way on the things which concerned our people.” She added, “Knowing that their education was limited, I never used a word of two syllables where one would serve the purpose.”

Wells described in 1886 her sense of God’s sovereignty: “God is over all and He will, so long as I am in the right, fight my battles.” Her diary in 1887 noted,

Today I write these lines with a heart overflowing with thankfulness to My Heavenly Father for His wonderful love and kindness; for his bountiful goodness to me, in that He has not caused me to want, and that I have always been provided with the means to make an honest livelihood.

Wells made her biggest impact in local journalism as part-owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1892 after a mob lynched three Black men. One of them was Thomas Moss, a postal worker, Sunday school teacher, and friend of Wells. She was godmother to one of his children.

Wells told the real story: A white store owner had maliciously accused Moss and his friends of crimes because their shop, People’s Grocery, had drawn customers away from the white-owned store. Wells recommended in her newspaper that Black people “leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us.”

Two pastors migrated from the city with their entire congregations. White housekeepers had a hard time hiring maids because many fled to Chicago. Other Black people boycotted the streetcars and walked instead. Officers of the City Railway Company came to the Memphis Free Speech office and pressured Wells to use the paper’s “influence with the colored people to get them to ride on the streetcars again.” Instead, she penned a bold editorial and, foreseeing the reaction, headed to New York.

The editorial began, “Eight negroes lynched since last issue … five on the same old racket—the new alarm about raping white women.” Her most potent paragraph:

Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.

The suggestion that some white women lacked virtue brought a sharp reaction from other Memphis newspapers. A Daily Commercial writer huffed, “That a black scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern whites. But we have had enough of it.” An Evening Scimitar writer proposed “to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison.”

A mob broke into the Memphis Free Speech office, damaging Wells’s press and vandalizing the building. Wells could not safely return to Memphis. Shestudied accounts from white newspapers along with statistics from the Chicago Tribune, and she wrote an article in The New York Age that documented 878 lynchings from 1883 through the first half of 1892. She criticized lynch mobs but didn’t stop there: “The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are … accessories before and after the fact.”

Citing the movement of Black people out of Memphis after the three lynchings, Wells urged Black people to use their economic power to force change. The white Memphis residents who had hoped to shut up Wells instead saw her lynching exposé reach tens of thousands more people than it would have had she stayed in Memphis. The New York Age printed extra copies to send throughout the South, including 1,000 to Memphis. Donors paid to publish the exposé as a pamphlet: “Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases.”

Wells received a boost from a famous former slave, 75-year-old Frederick Douglass:

Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. … If American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.

Wells hit the lecture circuit in the Northeast and in England.

Her street-level reports of lynchings reached a wide audience and brought unflattering attention to the practice and to the South, where few spoke out against the evil. It turned out that 1892, the year of Southern Horrors, was the peak year for US lynchings: 231, according to statistics from the Tuskegee Institute. The horror continued but gradually declined. Sadly, while some states passed anti-lynching laws, lynchers were almost never penalized. Congress remained inactive until early in the 20th century, when the House of Representatives passed anti-lynching legislation—which Senate filibusters killed.

In 1894, Wells moved to Chicago, and the following year she married lawyer and journalist Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a widower with two children from a previous marriage. She added four more children during the next decade and made motherhood her primary occupation. She also established Chicago’s first kindergarten prioritizing Black children, located in an African Methodist Episcopal church, and volunteered with civil rights and women’s suffragist groups.

She continued some journalistic work and in 1917 wrote investigative reports for The Chicago Defenderon the East St. Louis Race Riot.

Wells died in 1931 with little recognition from other journalists, but the National Association of Black Journalists and other groups have now established awards in her name. In 2020 she received a Pulitzer Prize special citation “for her outstanding and courageous reporting.” In 2022, Congress passed a federal anti-lynching law as a symbolic way of belatedly recognizing the nearly 6,500 lynchings that took place in the US from 1865 into the first half of the 20th century.

This short account draws from a chapter on Ida B. Wells in Marvin Olasky’s Moral Vision (Simon & Schuster, 2024).

- More from Marvin Olasky

News

European Evangelicals Tailor Anti-Trafficking Ministries

Ken Chitwood

As laws and attitudes on prostitution differ from country to country, so do the focuses of local nonprofits.

A street performance by Abolishion to raise awareness of human trafficking and sexual slavery in Athens, Greece.

NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty

When Cristhina first arrived in Bologna, Italy, more than a decade ago, she was surprised by how public prostitution seemed to be.

Girls stood along suburban roads and in family neighborhoods, sometimes in broad daylight, visibly soliciting passersby in cars and on foot. “They were everywhere,” she recalled. “Downtown, residential areas. Being prostituted out in the open.”

Cristhina, a Colombian who grew up in Florida and studied social work, learned about the realities of abuse and exploitation in the sex industry through her volunteer work in Miami. Feeling called to bring her knowledge and experience to Italy, she moved to Bologna after college in 2013 to join what was then a small outreach to prostitutes at a local church called Nuova Vita (New Life). Cristhina asked to use only her first name due to threats from traffickers, pimps, and the Mafia.

Before she arrived, church members under the leadership of an American missionary approached women on the streets with cups of hot tea, baskets of snacks, and handwritten notes listing helpline numbers and safe houses. Volunteers received training from ministry workers in Greece and the Netherlands.

“The idea was to listen,” Cristhina said. “To befriend them. To share hope and a way out.”

In 2011, the church converted the outreach program into a full-fledged ministry called Vite Trasformate (Transformed Lives), which works with women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation.

“In the evangelical world [of Italy], we were among the first doing outreach in this field,” Cristhina said. “It’s grown since, mainly through the influence of American missionaries.” Cristhina herself received training from a Chicago-based outreach ministry.

Cristhina said the long-standing efforts of evangelical ministries in the United States have been key in apprenticing those on the frontlines in Europe. The European evangelical anti-trafficking movement, which emerged about two decades ago, has now spread to cities like Amsterdam, Rome, Naples, Berlin, and Athens.

Yet these ministries face unique challenges due to the differing legal statuses of prostitution and solicitation across the continent. As a result, they need to tailor their responses country by country.

For example, in Germany prostitution is legalized and regulated as a profession with specific laws. Sweden and France employ the Nordic model, which penalizes the buyer of sex but not the seller. In Lithuania, both buying and selling sex are criminalized.

Italy, Cristhina said, has a sort of legal limbo that offers little clarity or protection. Prostitution exists in a gray zone: Selling sex is allowed, but brothels and solicitation in public (street prostitution) are prohibited. The result, Cristhina said, is that sex workers get caught in a “tolerated and unregulated” trap that allows exploitation to flourish.

“The law provides an easy way out for the government,” she said, with women often punished for being taken advantage of.

This is where ministries like Vite Trasformate step in.

Data on sex work in Europe reveal that sexual exploitation is the most common form of human trafficking reported in the European Union, accounting for nearly half of registered victims in 2024.

Criminal activity involving sex work is often linked to trafficking rings that are highly mobile and prey on people mostly from outside the EU. Traffickers use technology—mostly social media and messaging apps—to identify vulnerable women, build trust with them through fake personas, and lure them with empty promises of jobs, education, or romantic relationships that can quickly turn coercive.

Many of the women Cristhina encounters come from Nigeria or Eastern Europe, some arriving via Mediterranean migrant routes. None of the women she’s met, however, wanted to do this. “Most were coerced,” Cristhina said. “Even when it looks voluntary, they don’t control their money, their movements, their lives.”

Italy’s cultural attitudes, she said, can compound the harm. Some view the women as criminals, others as individuals who have freely chosen prostitution. In her experience, social services frequently fail to recognize coercion or trauma, leading to revictimization. “They are treated like perpetrators when they are victims,” she said.

Cristhina’s ministry responds with practical care: accompanying women to doctor appointments, helping with documents, contacting shelters, and assisting with job training. After the COVID-19 pandemic pushed much of the sex trade indoors and online, Vite Trasformate shifted to phone and digital outreach with existing contacts or women whom volunteers connect with online. This strategy allowed the ministry to encounter new populations, including transgender migrants and women advertised through illegal apartment brothels.

Meanwhile, in Hungary, where prostitution is legal but tightly regulated, Zsuzsa Mecséri-McNamara works with women across four cities through the Christian nonprofit Set Free. She said her teams, much like Cristhina’s ministry in Bologna, focus on local needs.

High-profile cases involving children’s homes have led Mecséri-McNamara and her team to focus on education at schools and care facilities. For instance, news of the Szőlő Street scandal gripped the headlines as a series of revelations exposed widespread and systemic mistreatment of children in state-operated care facilities, including accusations of human trafficking and forced labor. So the Set Free team provides training and raises awareness to prevent young women from being groomed or otherwise lured into prostitution.

“Growing up in a state home, a lack of stability, lack of education, coming from broken families—too many in Hungary are vulnerable to trafficking,” she said.

But Mecséri-McNamara emphasized that national responses must be backed by Europe-wide coordination. Set Free, for example, now spans 14 countries and more than 55 projects, linking prevention, education, and survivor care across borders. Mecséri-McNamara said she could not do her work without drawing on the resources and experience of her partners in Europe and abroad.

This transatlantic evangelical presence has also drawn criticism.

Scholars like religion professor Carly Daniel-Hughes argue that some evangelical groups blur distinctions between trafficking and consensual “sex work,” relying on sensational narratives that fuel moral panic and marginalize prostitutes who emphasize agency or labor rights. She also questions whether evangelical definitions of freedom risk imposing what she considers conservative norms around sexuality and family life.

Cristhina acknowledges the tension but rejects the idea that her work is about moral control. Vite Trasformate’s safe house—opened in 2023, with a second apartment added this year—serves women of all faiths. “We don’t force religion on anyone,” she said. “Each woman has her own story and her own process.” One current resident is Muslim.

Cristhina noted that internally, ministry workers call the people they work with “treasures” to reflect a theological conviction about human worth, not a denial of complexity. “We emphasize what has happened to them,” she said. “Trafficked. Exploited. This is about restoring dignity.”

Gian Luca Derudas, pastor at Nuova Vita, said Vite Trasformate is a “vital” ministry for his church and the city of Bologna. “For 14 years, I have seen the vision grow and take root, bringing real transformation,” he said. “As a church, we have witnessed miracles—women finding freedom, healing, and restored dignity as people created in God’s image.”

As the ministry grows and develops, seeing more women emerge on the other side of exploitation, Derudas said he hopes Vite Trasformate can be an example for churches in other cities to follow.

But rebuilding life after exploitation, Cristhina added, is slow and fragile—especially for older women aging out of prostitution or migrants navigating hostile systems. “Only the strong survive,” she said quietly. “But the gospel changes the way you treat others. And that changes everything.”

- More from Ken Chitwood

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European Evangelicals Tailor Anti-Trafficking Ministries

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