European Evangelicals Tailor Anti-Trafficking Ministries

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

Culture

How ChatGPT Revealed a False Diagnosis

Luke Simon

A devastating cancer diagnosis wrecked a young couple. But after five years of uncertainty, a chatbot changed everything.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash, WikiMedia Commons

On December 18, 2020, during the COVID-19 shutdowns, a quiet wedding unfolded in a small church in rural Missouri. The pews were almost empty—parents, siblings, and close friends spaced far apart. The rest watched on Zoom as the officiant’s voice carried through the sanctuary:

“Cole, do you take Kiley to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward …”

Cole Lemasters was 18, hours removed from his calculus final. Kiley Daniels was 18 too, her hair pinned beneath a simple veil. High school sweethearts, hands clasped and eyes locked and grins wide, this was the kind of couple that might make you wonder, Is this just puppy love?

“… for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health …”

For many couples, those words are abstract promises meant for a distant future. For Cole and Kiley, sickness had already come.

The July before their wedding, Kiley collapsed from a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. The scans revealed glioblastoma—the same aggressive brain cancer her father was battling. By November, her father had died. In July after Kiley’s seizure, the doctors predicted she herself had only three months left.

So at 18, Kiley wrote a will, picked out a casket, and planned her wedding.

“… to love and to cherish …”

Glioblastoma is ruthless. Median survival: 14 to 18 months. Fewer than 10 percent of those diagnosed make it five years. The clock was ticking.

“… till death do you part?”

As the officiant finished his question, Cole—knowing he might not be promising the rest of his life but only the rest of hers—looked at Kiley and smiled:

“I do.”

After a quick honeymoon in Kansas City, where doctors and family were close, the couple stuck around, living in Kiley’s parents’ basement while waiting for the pandemic to pass.

By spring, life settled into a very fragile routine, but a routine nonetheless. Cole enrolled at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Kiley moved with him, working part-time and doing small projects. College didn’t make sense when doctors said she might not outlive the year.

Then again, nothing long-term made sense. They didn’t talk about kids or careers. They learned to live in short intervals, one MRI to the next. “Every three to four months, we repeated the same cycle: scan, wait, pray,” Cole said.

Yet somehow the result was the same every time: no regrowth or recurrence. “By some extraordinary grace,” Cole said, “every scan was showing stability.”

Eventually, those three-month increments turned into a year. Then another. Then another. In 2024, Cole graduated and found a job in Columbia. Kiley, having earned her associate’s degree at Moberly Area Community College, was working part-time as a barista. And in July 2025, she celebrated five years since doctors told her she had three months to live.

Kiley was a living, breathing miracle. And for the young couple, every day was a day to be grateful.

Yet even in their gratitude, Cole couldn’t shake the thought: How is this possible? Is this truly a miracle? Or a statistical anomaly?

“Less than 1 percent of glioblastoma patients are under 20,” he said. “Only 4 to 7 percent live five years without recurrence. Do the math—that’s a 1 in 20 million chance. Put those together and you’re talking about lightning-strike-odds… but even more rare.”

Cole believed God could do the impossible, but the improbability still gnawed at him. So after Kiley’s latest MRI, he tried something new. Highlighting the radiology report with his cursor, he copied and pasted it into ChatGPT. The chatbot doesn’t always give solid health advice, but Cole hoped the artificial intelligence program could help him untangle the dense verbiage. “Anyone who has had to read one of these reports knows that it can be some of the most cryptic language ever digested,” he said.

The report read like the others, with one slight difference: “There is a tiny, newly developed ovoid enhancing focus within the high left frontal subcortical white matter anterior to the resection cavity with corresponding FLAIR hyperintensity.”

“Try to make sense of that with a degree in journalism,” Cole quipped.

ChatGPT explained this as a common side effect of prior treatment. Nothing alarming. But when he asked more questions—about past scans and her original diagnosis—the program suggested a plot twist: Kiley may have been misdiagnosed.

Cole knew this couldn’t be true. Kiley had consulted some of the best experts in the country. There was no way their doctors had run five years of tests and treatments on a misdiagnosis. They would have found this out by now. Right?

His curiosity got the best of him. Feeling as if he was dipping into conspiratorial waters, he asked ChatGPT to elaborate.

It explained that in 2021, a year after Kiley’s diagnosis, the World Health Organization reclassified brain tumors with an IDH1 mutation. If Kiley’s original scan included that mutation, her cancer would no longer be classified as glioblastoma, but IDH-mutant astrocytoma—which would still be serious but far less aggressive.

That sent Cole digging. If he could find Kiley’s initial biopsy report from 2020, he could check to see if she had tested positive for this IDH1 mutation. Fortunately for Cole, his mother-in-law had given him a box of Kiley’s old medical records earlier that week in case he ever needed them. He needed them now. So setting aside his Tuesday evening, he began to dig.

“When the first few pages discussed an appointment for a flu shot she got in 2005,” he said, “I knew I was in for a long evening.”

Page after page went by—five years’ worth of pages about cancer. Five years of confusion, fear, and waiting. Five years of seizure scares and medical bills. Five years of three-month increments. Five years with a death sentence.

For Cole, it felt as if five years had passed that Tuesday night when he pulled another sheaf from the box and found precisely what he was looking for: the initial biopsy. He dusted it off like an archaeologist and began skimming. But it didn’t take long before he realized that, yet again, the report was nothing but medical jargon, too sophisticated for him to understand.

And so he began uploading pages from the report into ChatGPT, one after another, letting the AI sort through the data until, eventually, one hour and 60 pages in, the model located the line he was looking for in the molecular genetics report. The line with the mutation, the line with the answer, the line with the power to change their future. IDH1 R132H mutation—positive.

“My initial reaction was like I was reading some sort of crazy state secret, like aliens were real or that Tupac was alive,” Cole remembers. “Still, I was cautious. Her doctors at the time were experts. But the IDH mutation wasn’t always routinely tested then, and the classification standards differed. So we brought this to her current neuro-oncologist, who confirmed it. … She was indeed misdiagnosed. Not by error but based on what was known at the time.”

For five years, they’d believed Kiley had one of the deadliest cancers known to medicine, with a recurrence rate still above 60 percent even after years of stability. Now they were hearing that her cancer followed a different path. IDH-mutant astrocytoma, a tumor with a median survival of 7 to 15 years, a five-year survival rate near 50 percent, and a recurrence risk under 5 percent after five stable years.

And Kiley had just hit that five-year mark.

Her treatment plan would now shift from aggressive, end-of-life vigilance to long-term management—fewer emergency assumptions, more measured monitoring, and care aimed at preserving life rather than bracing for its end.

“This doesn’t erase the weight of it all,” Cole said. “The fear, the grief, the exhaustion. Kiley has been living under a sentence she didn’t deserve. But now that sentence is lifted.”

Kiley calls it a “good hurt.” For five years, she lived as if death were always at the door. She planned her funeral. She encouraged others battling glioblastoma. Now she wrestles with the reality that she never had it.

“I still feel a strange survivor’s guilt,” Kiley said. “For a long time, it felt like I had narrowly escaped something deadly. Even now, it’s hard to make sense of being here when others aren’t.”

“God has walked with us every step of this journey,” Cole said.

God was there in the diagnosis. He was there when Kiley’s father passed. He was there on their wedding day and through the five years of waiting. And in a way they never imagined, God even showed up in an AI chatbot—without which that biopsy report, the line that changed everything, would still be buried in a box collecting dust.

And now they see God’s kindness in giving them something they didn’t think they’d ever have: time.

“Her life expectancy is no longer measured in months but in decades,” Cole said. “She can breathe again. We can dream again.”

For the first time in their marriage, they can imagine beyond the next scan, dreaming of a house, careers, even children.

“From the beginning, we believed our story wasn’t just ours,” Cole said. “It’s about asking questions, seeking truth, and trusting that God is still working even when the road seems unchangeable.”

The vows they spoke on their wedding day—“in sickness and in health”—still hold. But they are no longer bound to the same ticking clock.

“I won’t say that ChatGPT saved her life,” Cole said. “But I believe God used it to save our future.”

Luke Simon is the Co-Director of Student Ministries at The Crossing. He is an MDiv student at Covenant Theological Seminary, and his writing has appeared in publications including The Gospel Coalition and Mere Orthodoxy. Luke lives in Columbia, Missouri, with his wife, Gisele.

- More from Luke Simon

Books

Review

Women Considering Abortion Need to Hear the Truth

Ericka Andersen

Becoming Pro-Grace rightly challenges churches to greater compassion but fails to reliably promote the rights of unborn children.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, IVP

Data consistently show that most women facing unexpected pregnancies do not turn to their churches for help. Even though 7 in 10 post-abortive women identify as Christian, many say they would never tell a pastor or fellow believer they were considering abortion or seek support from their church afterward. They are twice as likely to report receiving a judgmental response than a compassionate one.

Angela Weszely is cofounder of ProGrace, a ministry that has spent years listening to such women—and she’s increasingly uncomfortable with practices she witnessed in some pro-life pregnancy centers. She felt some centers sought to “persuade or manipulate women regarding their pregnancy decision and religious beliefs,” which she considers unhelpful to women in vulnerable situations. Ultimately, these experiences led her to reevaluate the church’s posture on abortion overall.

In Becoming ProGrace: Expanding the Abortion Conversation Beyond Life Versus Choice, Weszely urges Christians to move away from polarizing political positions when it comes to abortion and instead adopt what she calls a “pro-grace” mindset that gives women and their babies equal significance.

For Weszely, abortion is a “complex moral, political and social issue,” requiring more than a simple life-versus-choice framing. She argues that in pro-life contexts, “a woman’s agency seems to be at odds with a child’s well-being,” which makes it difficult for Christians to genuinely uphold the equal worth of both mother and baby.

Guest writers reinforce this theme in an essay at each chapter’s end. Wheaton College’s Amy Peeler suggests that God honored Mary’s agency when Gabriel announced Jesus’ birth: Gabriel “waits to hear what she says” before departing. Another contributor argues that “part of human dignity is human agency,” even in cases of unintended pregnancy.

Weszely also highlights the profound identity shift that occurs when a woman learns she is pregnant. She quotes one woman who said, “I don’t get to keep my life either way,” capturing the way pregnancy immediately reshapes a person’s future. These moments are among the book’s strongest, helping readers understand why women facing crisis pregnancies often feel scared, isolated, and ashamed.

The chapter on adoption is equally compassionate. Weszely notes that giving a baby up for adoption involves “the death of a woman’s identity and the death of the potential relationship with the child,” which explains why mothers often feel it is more painful than abortion or the choice to parent. She rightly challenges simplistic portrayals of adoption as a tidy, pain-free alternative.

The book cites research showing that many Christian women believe forgiveness does not extend to terminated pregnancies or that church members will gossip about them if they reveal they’re pregnant out of wedlock. Weszely argues that church culture often signals judgment more than grace, leaving women to struggle alone. Her call for churches to become safe, supportive communities even before a pregnancy is an important corrective.

While Weszely highlights genuine failures in Christian discipleship and community, the framework she proposes contains theological and practical weaknesses.

The book includes arguments about agency, most notably Peeler’s claim that Mary’s consent to pregnancy by the Holy Spirit parallels modern questions of reproductive autonomy. Yet this analogy falters. Women (in the vast majority of cases) with unexpected pregnancies have already consented to the possibility of pregnancy by having sex—something Scripture doesn’t treat as an intrusion on agency. If Weszely disagrees with Peeler’s framing, she does not take the opportunity to make that clear.

More importantly, the book doesn’t sufficiently grapple with the fact that another human life is involved, sometimes focusing on the mother’s emotions and experience at the expense of recognizing the reality of the child. Human agency, after all, ends where another person’s life begins. A framework that does not hold this moral reality at the center cannot offer the full Christian truth about abortion. Weszely’s work makes clear that she is committed to the value and dignity of the unborn child, but her messaging here is muddled.

She’s also critical of those who would influence women one way or another in their decision. Weszely writes, “The end goal of our listening is not to influence the people we listen to, but rather to be influenced ourselves by their experience and the connection we share.”

This posture of listening has pastoral value, but taken as the primary guiding principle, it loses the moral guidance necessary for scriptural leadership. Christians are called to listen with humility but also to speak truth in love, especially when a child’s life is at stake. Framing influence as inherently manipulative misunderstands the nature of Christian discipleship.

Helping a woman affirm her child’s life is a good and necessary thing, though Weszely is right that Christians don’t always do this as gently or wisely as we should.

Weszely critiques the church’s “50-year history of communicating a primarily political approach to abortion” and suggests this approach has divided Christians and pushed younger generations away from the faith. She warns that “laws … are not designed to build a community that can facilitate grace-led conversations.”

Yet she simultaneously encourages Christians to advocate for policies such as paid maternity leave, expanded health care access, and childcare support to reduce the pressures that drive women toward abortion. These suggestions are wise, but they reveal an inconsistency in one of the book’s main arguments: If policy solutions matter for supporting women, they matter just as much for protecting unborn children. Her reluctance to apply her own logic to pro-life legislation leaves a theological and ethical imbalance that the book never resolves.

Weszely also questions pregnancy centers that advertise services without explicitly stating they do not provide abortions. This criticism fails to acknowledge the crucial, sacrificial role these centers play in providing diapers, formula, counseling, clothing, emotional support, and community for women—resources that Planned Parenthood does not provide.

And while Weszely writes that “grace and truth are not contradictory,” the book suggests that pro-lifers are wrong to bring “an agenda” into conversations with women considering abortion. Weszely is right to call pro-lifers to prioritize listening to women and sharing the truth of God’s love, but her wariness of seeking to persuade or “change the thoughts and behavior of others” may signal to readers that abortion is a morally neutral choice. We can have deep grace for both pre- and post-abortive women without underplaying the truth that abortion takes the life of a child made by God.

To her credit, Weszely pushes Christians to remember what God is for, not only what he is against. She rightly reminds readers that God’s grace makes it possible to leave a life of sin and challenges churches that celebrated Roe v. Wade’s overturning without also mentioning support to vulnerable women as well.

Compassion alone cannot replace clarity, and empathy cannot replace discipleship, even in those precious few moments available to save the life of an unborn child. Abortion is both political and theological, and Christians must be able to hold both realities without fear or apology.

Even with inconsistencies, Becoming ProGrace contributes meaningfully to the church’s ongoing self-examination. It reminds us that women facing crisis pregnancies need more relational, practical, and spiritual support than many churches currently provide. If the body of Christ can become a place where women already know they—and their babies—are valued, more of them might seek help before choosing abortion. The challenge for the church is not choosing between woman and child but offering compassion and understanding for both.

Correction (March 9, 2026): This review has been updated to more accurately reflect the book’s argumentation.

Ericka Andersen is a freelance writer living in Indianapolis. She is the author of several books, including Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith.

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Books

Excerpt

We Can’t Manifest the Good Life

Elizabeth Woodson

An excerpt from Habits of Resistance: 7 Ways You’re Being Formed by Culture and Gospel Practices to Help You Push Back.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, B&H Books

Each year, the most-used dictionaries—like Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, and The Oxford English Dictionary—choose a word of the year. According to Merriam-Webster.com, the word of the year is determined by their lexicographers, the people who compile dictionaries. They analyze a large amount of data to identify words that make an impact on our conversations. The words that make it to the top of the list usually highlight the social trends and global events that defined the year.

While some of the words from the past few years, like demure, relate to a fun viral video, others tell a more interesting story about our habits and the way we try to bring our lives back into a state of peace by controlling them.

In 2024, the word manifest was searched nearly 130,000 times in the Cambridge Dictionary, making it their word of the year. Manifest is defined as the use of “methods such as visualization and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.”

As a word in our English vernacular, manifest has been around since the early 1300s. However, it was not until the 2020 pandemic that the word’s usage skyrocketed in our global culture. Popularized by celebrities like Simone Biles, Oprah, and Ariana Grande, posts and videos about manifesting spread quickly on social media. Whether it was a new relationship, job, movie role, or Olympic medal, people began explaining their success, using the phrase I manifested this. This then gave rise to different manifestation experts and influencers who, for a small nominal price, could help you learn how to make your dreams reality.

Connected to other self-help movements like the power of positive thinking and the law of attraction, manifestation invites you to believe that you can turn your dreams into reality through the following steps:

Visualize your desires, being specific about whatever it is that you want.

Ask the universe or a higher power for it, which can happen through prayer, meditation, or a vision board.

Start working towards your goals in “co-creating” with the universe or your higher power.

Attract your desires by cultivating positivity, using affirmations, or practicing gratitude.

Here’s the thing: outside of “co-creating” with the universe, these steps are not entirely untrue or unable to bring any positive change to your life. Creating a plan, praying about that plan, and taking intentional steps to accomplish the plan all while remaining positive will sometimes produce the results you want.

The problem is that these steps create a formula of sorts that seems to provide a no-fail plan to achieve our best lives. So much so that when people say, “I manifested this,” it sounds like by the magic of their hard work and good planning they made whatever they wanted to appear. It is as if they are Vanna White from Wheel of Fortune making a letter on the screen appear with the simple touch of a finger.

But formulas are only as good as their inputs, and manifesting assumes you control all the inputs.

When our lives are devoid of peace, our culture’s false story of self-empowerment leads us to believe that we can resolve our situation through our own diligence and tenacity. Yet this pathway has hidden costs and advantages that are rarely shared when presented.

For example, some people who claim to have manifested a profitable business after quitting their 9-to-5 job leave out a few important details. They don’t mention the money they saved up before they quit or the large network they built while still working their 9-to-5 that was used to promote their product. Their well-curated Instagram video and coaching course gives you the impression that all it took was visualization, positivity, and hard work. In reality, a good portion of their success may have come from life circumstances that gave them a unique advantage.

On the other hand, while being intentional about our life choices can get us closer to our goals, sometimes, no matter how hard we work, things do not go in our favor. We can do all the things to manifest good health and still get cancer. We can try to manifest a spouse and stay single for years. Sadly, when the formula we’ve created doesn’t work, we rarely question the formula, but attribute our failure to user error.

This makes us insecure and fragile, as we turn inward when life goes in an unexpected direction. Instead of blaming the formula for misleading us, we blame ourselves. After ruminating on our inadequacies, we are left wondering, If I can’t work my way out of a difficult situation, then what hope do I have that things will get better?

If this weren’t enough, self-empowerment’s invitation to solve our problems through unlimited information doesn’t include the disclaimer that the people we will learn from might not be telling the truth. While we may have access to all the answers we could ever want, we will still be responsible for deciphering which ones are the best or the most truthful. As we embrace the path of self-education, we will learn a great deal of information but lack the wisdom required to use our knowledge well. Both online and offline, our overconfidence will cause us to misapply our knowledge in ways that are disastrous.

The false gospel of self-empowerment promises that we can control our lives and thereby attain our own peace, a belief that assumes that on our own we can see well enough to navigate through the world. But the inescapable reality is that our control and our vision are limited because we are limited. No matter how good our plan is, we can never account for the unexpected things life will throw our way.

What if instead of trusting in our limited abilities to obtain our peace, we trust in the one who is limitless?

Elizabeth Woodson is a Bible teacher, a theologian, an author, and the founder of The Woodson Institute, an organization that equips Christians to understand and grow in their faith.

The following excerpt is from Habits of Resistance: 7 Ways You’re Being Formed By Culture and Gospel Practices to Help You Push Back by author Elizabeth Woodson published by B&H Publishing.

- More from Elizabeth Woodson

News

How to Organize a Healthy Protest

The Bulletin with Chris Butler

Pastor and political strategist Chris Butler draws on Martin Luther King Jr.’s wisdom when planning action.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Cosmos

Since federal agents arrived in Minneapolis under direction from the Trump administration to arrest and deport illegal immigrants, protestors have responded with vigor to what they perceive as an invasion of their city and unlawful actions by ICE agents.

From individuals like Renee Good and Alex Pretti who engaged on city streets with federal agents to the group of protestors who interrupted a worship service at Cities Church in St. Paul, locals are expressing their distaste for the administration’s methods using a variety of tactics. Some track and report ICE movements and actions in neighborhoods. Others meet federal agents with signs, whistles, and chants. Still others gather food to distribute to immigrant families afraid to leave their homes.

To better understand the protests of recent weeks, The Bulletin sat down with pastor and political strategist Chris Butler, who directs Christian civic formation at the Center for Christianity and Public Life. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation in episode 245.

How would you describe what you saw at the protest at Cities Church?

Chris Butler: As an organizer and somebody who’s participated in lots of protests, I saw a bad protest action. Creative protest is an important part of our political culture, but this seemed like a tactically and morally bad action.

Russell Moore: I’m not sure how the leaders of this protest wouldn’t have said this action was at least counterproductive; and I would probably agree with them about the shooting of Renee Good, the actions of ICE in Minneapolis. But this was not a well-chosen way to express that. It actually hurts the cause of drawing attention to Renee Good.

Interrupting worship would always be a bad strategy for protests, but that’s especially true when you’re dealing with a time when we’ve had church shootings. At the end of it, we knew what was going on, but nobody would’ve known that at the moment. That’s not a way to decelerate and cause people to actually think reasonably about how we get justice in Minneapolis.

The pray-in movement during the Civil Rights Movement was a very different kind of protest. The pray-in movements said, “We’re going to participate in worship and pray.” The disruption actually happened from the churches that were attempting to throw them out.

What are the appropriate boundaries for protesting?

Butler: A lot has been lost in our protest and justice culture. I started organizing and doing justice work as a 12-year-old, and I’m grateful for the chance I had to learn from senior citizens and folks who were much older than me.

A protest action has to be part of a larger process for justice. First, you have to be really clear about what you’re trying to achieve. The goal should be to achieve some kind of concrete improvement in people’s lives. If, for example, we’re trying to de-escalate ICE action in Minneapolis, that needs to be the goal, not just to bring attention to my group because we want the attention.

Then, there are steps in the process. Martin Luther King in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” lays out the process well. He talks about gathering the facts and making sure that there is injustice. Then there’s a step of negotiation and the process of self-purification. If you’re a Christian doing this, that language works well. Even in secular environments in the old days, there was a lot of training and thinking that went into an action. Whatever action we do needs to encourage empathy, not fear; so there’s a lot that needs to come before direct action.

Moore: Dr. King was right about the process of this. He’s also right in saying to the ministers in Birmingham, I’ve spent time talking about the fact that we cannot carry out moral objectives with immoral means. The reverse is true also. You’re going to have people always looking for where the inadequacy is in the way that people are protesting. Because of this, make sure that you are carrying out that protest in a way that is both personally moral and that is actually addressing the consciences of those you’re trying to address. This didn’t do it.

Butler: If you call a news reporter and say, “Hey, we’re going to pick up the phone and call this church down the road and talk to them about this pastor on their staff with whom we have a conflict,” news reporters aren’t going to show up. That’s not going to get clicks or be on social media. Sometimes, you can get things done in ways that don’t attract social media but win improvements for people in their lives. You want to start in those places. If you can accomplish that without disrupting other people’s lives, then you should.

How do you gauge the effectiveness of a protest?

Butler: You have to wait to see the effectiveness of a justice campaign; but the actions that we take, especially when you’re doing direct action, should begin with a goal in mind. For example, your goal might be that a congregation signs a letter rebuking the ICE office. Without a specific goal, it becomes really hard to tell whether a protest was effective or not.

When you think through the direct action that you’re going to take, you have to ask yourself, How are we going to apply pressure to this person who can give us what we want, in a way that’s actually going to get them to give it to us? Oftentimes, antagonizing that person in outlandish ways won’t get that done. This process creates accountability for us. Way more things are involved in the process of direct action than just showing up in a place and doing a thing. Too many times, in lots of different protest situations that I’ve been privy to in recent times, folks are not taking that robust approach. It’s much more reactionary.

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Died: Claudette Colvin, Unsung Civil Rights Pioneer

Haleluya Hadero

As a teenager, Colvin challenged Montgomery’s segregation law and prevailed.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

On a March day in 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin boarded a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Under Jim Crow laws, Black riders were forced to sit in the back or give up their seats if the white section became full. Colvin sat with other Black passengers. But when a white woman boarded the crowded bus, the driver ordered the teen and three other passengers to move out of their row. Some moved, but Colvin remained seated.

The Birmingham native has often said she couldn’t move because history had her glued to the seat. The bus driver called the police, who dragged Colvin off the bus and arrested her. She was subsequently taken to a local jail. “Because I’m Baptist, I started praying. I recited the 23rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer,” Colvin once recounted to a group of students at Boston College. She was released from jail three hours later after she made bail.

Colvin’s arrest generated buzz. In the aftermath, Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black leaders met with city and bus-company officials. But Black leaders also chose not to make Colvin the symbol of their cause. Instead, they waited nine months until a similar act by Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.

In the decades that followed, Colvin’s contributions to civil rights were mostly overshadowed by Parks’s, and Parks became one of the most widely renowned figures of the movement.

During an interview with NPR in 2009, Colvin said Black organizations felt Parks would be a better representative for the movement since, unlike her, Parks was an adult at the time.

Black leaders were also considering other factors. After Colvin was arrested, she became pregnant by a married man. That soured her case even more among civil rights leaders who believed making a young, single mother the face of the movement would attract negative attention. (Later on, Colvin said was the pregnancy was the result of statutory rape.)

By contrast, Parks was a secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and was already well-known among organizers. She also had a lighter skin tone and was middle-class, unlike Colvin, who grew up poor and had darker skin. Colvin believed those things, namely colorism and classism, also contributed to her being sidelined. “Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class,” Colvin told NPR. “She fit that profile.”

But over time, the unsung civil rights pioneer also came to terms with her “raw feelings” about the situation, she told The New York Times in another interview in 2009. “I know in my heart that she was the right person,” she said of Parks, whom she remembered as a kind woman who let her spend some nights in her apartment after the March arrest.

Even though Colvin didn’t become the face of the movement, she did testify as a plaintiff in a landmark case that made its way to the US Supreme Court and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation.

Shortly after her arrest, Colvin moved from Alabama to the Bronx, in New York City. According to her family foundation, she worked 30 years as a nursing assistant at a Catholic nursing home. She died last month, at age 86, in Texas.

Until her death, she remained “grounded in faith,” a representative of the foundation told CT. She was last a member of St. Matthew Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, Texas.

People gathered to celebrate and commemorate Colvin’s life in late January at Greater Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. During a eulogy at the service, Arthur Lane, the pastor of the church Colvin attended in Texas, read from Psalm 37 and drew parallels between Colvin’s life and the life of David. Lane said despite the struggles both went though, the Lord did not forsake them.

“Although [Colvin] was overlooked for decades, she is a testament that history could forsake you, but God in heaven could never forsake you,” he said.

Lane added that Colvin testified God was with her in her different seasons, whether that was in jail in Alabama, during her move to the Bronx, or in her successful attempt to expunge her juvenile record in 2021.

“God does not forsake the righteous who stand up for others,” he said, “because God remains faithful to the righteous [even] when society and its system fail to celebrate them.”

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Ideas

Saying ‘Welcome the Stranger’ Is Easy. Hosting a Toddler Is Not.

Carrie McKean

Contributor

A conservative pastor I know opened his home to children whose parents were deported. His witness has me examining my comfortable life.

Pastor Elias Rodriguez with three children he flew to Venezuela to reunite with their mother after she was deported without them.

Image courtesy of Elias Rodriguez.

Elias Rodriguez has legally crossed the Texas-Mexico border hundreds of times. He knows every efficiency, like which crossings to use when or whether a snaking line of brake lights means you should stop for dinner in El Paso or hold out for tacos on the other side. He’s on a first-name basis with many Border Patrol officers, and he’s never had trouble crossing until last month. But now he’s being detained and questioned by American authorities each time, held for hours and subjected to intense questioning.

Rodriguez thinks he can explain this sudden scrutiny. At Thanksgiving, he escorted three Venezuelan children to be reunited with their mother in Venezuela after she was deported from America without them. His best guess is that the trip put him on some kind of Department of Homeland Security list.

A dual American and Mexican citizen, Rodriguez is also the pastor of a network of evangelical churches on both sides of the border. Each winter, he travels south with trailer loads of donated supplies for outreach events he helps host in and around Juárez, Mexico, that pair evangelism with a hot meal and gifts.

Since that Venezuela trip, the pastor has been detained for about two hours each time he’s come back to the US. He’s been asked about drug and arms trafficking—even threatened with arrest.

These encounters are “inconvenient and unnerving,” Rodriguez told me. “Sure, it makes me uncomfortable. But I told my wife if this is the cost that I have to pay for making sure those kids get to be with their mother [in Venezuela] again, it is worth it. I’d do it all over again.”

Over the last few months, as I researched the story of these left-behind children and the Rodriguez family’s efforts to help them, that willingness to live with discomfort became a constant theme—and a source of personal conviction.

Would I do what Elias Rodriguez and his wife, Sandy, have done? I’ve asked myself more than once. They dropped everything to drive across Texas and pick up three kids they had never met, taking (unofficial) custody of them indefinitely while working out an improbable plan to get them back to a country with dangers well beyond most Americans’ comfort zones—and with no direct flights to or from our shores.

And now that those three children are reunited with their mother, the Rodriguezes have taken in two more children in a similar situation. Another American family nearby is also voluntarily (and unofficially) fostering strangers’ children: 1½- and 5-year-old girls whose parents were deported without them.

Both American families are my friends, and when I see them putting Matthew 25 into practice, I’m confronted with my own uncomfortable hesitations. To go and do likewise would make my family uncomfortable. A common retort from immigration restrictionists asks whether immigration supporters would be willing to take new arrivals into their homes. If I’m honest, if they’re toddlers, I’m not sure.

After all, I already have a lot of responsibilities on my plate: family, church work, and an endless calendar of appointments to which I must drive my kids. The thought of suddenly and indefinitely adding more children to the mix—children who miss their parents, who may be markedly younger than my own, who may not speak English—well, suffice to say it’s a daunting prospect. Undeniably uncomfortable.

Image courtesy of Elias Rodriguez.

One of the children reuniting with her mother.

Rodriguez doesn’t fit into neat political boxes, and that’s not comfortable for most of us either. He supports strong border policy and yet shelters migrants. He believes people who break the law should be deported—including the mother whose children he returned to Venezuela—and yet he took her children into his own home. Amid a storm of extremism, this conservative pastor is a lighthouse of both mercy and justice. He has eschewed our culture’s dangerous alchemy of high-minded public judgment and street-level disengagement in favor of true service in the model of Christ.

This commitment to integrity over personal comfort is what must distinguish the church, Rodriguez told me. “Obedience to the Lord will always carry a cost,” he said. “It is will always have a price tag, and sometimes the price tag is that you don’t get to have an easy life. It is not going to be comfortable.”

I don’t think it’s just my Texas twang talking when I say that I don’t think there’s much difference between the way all and our sound, though I guess you can test my theory. Try saying these phrases out loud and decide for yourself: God of all comfort. God of our comfort.

And whether they sound similar or not, the American church has blurred their meanings. Too often, what the Bible says and what we hear are two different things—and the difference matters enormously.

In 2 Corinthians 1:3–5 (ESV), Paul writes to the church in Corinth, a city then known for worldly power and prosperity, decadent living and luxurious comforts. This was a church, that is, with which we middle class Americans have a lot in common. Here’s how he opened the letter:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

I’m sure all and our don’t sound so similar in the original Greek. But I wonder if those early Christians struggled as much as I do with conflating the two. Because here’s the uncomfortable thing about that verse: It’s really not about our comfort at all.

For all the talk of Christian nationalism and the conservative-versus-liberal battles that dominate this age, Rodriguez believes the fundamental problem with today’s American church is that most of us have grown enchanted by a false god of our own comfort. We have accepted sloppy seconds—a nice life, nice stuff, nice neighborhoods, and nice friends—in exchange for any uncomfortable situations that put us squarely in need of God’s comfort, with which he promises to bless us when our lives are dangerous or unpredictable. As safe and predictable as these lives we’ve built for ourselves seem, when we functionally worship the tawdry pursuit-of-our-own-happiness idols we’ve constructed, can we see how dangerously close we are to gaining the whole world yet losing our very souls (Matt. 16:26)?

This is not the way of Jesus, who promises us abundant life—life abundantly full of more than our own comfort.

As a winter storm descended over much of the United States last week, millions of us stayed at home—iced in and increasingly focused on ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). As tensions escalate, I worry that simplistic partisan opinions about federal immigration enforcement have a way of dangerously freezing us in place.

Here’s what I mean: Armed with nothing more than the knowledge of how someone voted in 2024, most of us could place a winning bet on where that person lands on any number of complicated political and social issues. And though most of us fancy ourselves free thinkers, the truth is, few of us are. We tend to take up the party line, even to the point of refusing to listen to people on the other side. This makes us feel like we belong. And it can feel so principled, but in practice, we’re picking at the threads of our fraying social fabric.

For us as Christians, this is a moment that demands more than attention or anger or sympathy. It demands that we turn toward peacemaking. It demands we imitate Jesus in tangible care for the people right in front of us, including those—like the tax collector who hosted him for dinner (Luke 5:29–32) and the unclean woman who washed his feet (7:36–50)—who make us uncomfortable. Jesus did not speak in platitudes or diatribes. He did not deal in vague generalities or broad stereotypes. He drew near to broken people, even at the cost of his own reputation (Mark 3:21).

One reason we need to follow Jesus even to uncomfortable places is what happens to us when we finally draw near in the same way. The things we once assumed were simple become far more complex. And that’s a good thing! In this fractious age, growing in understanding is how we become repairers of the breach and restorers of the paths between us (Isa. 58:12). I’ve seen it play out in my own community these last few weeks as a whole band of Christian women in my town has joined a group text to coordinate practical aid for these children in our friends’ care.

The women in the text chain are mostly politically conservative and supportive of strong immigration policies. Most probably voted for Donald Trump. Many of us in the group, at some time or another, have probably nodded along to talking heads on cable TV offering proposals of simplistic solutions for complex problems. But the group text demands deeds, not words. We are coordinating meals and securing car seats and dropping off clothes and toys. Some women have helped buy airplane tickets. Some have offered to babysit, while others have held little hands while crossing busy streets.

All this is simple too, but it has brought us each to see the faceless, nameless “immigration issue” with a lot more complexity. It has taught us to see both good and bad, broken systems and broken laws, mothers and children, justice and mercy.

These tensions are uncomfortable by human standards—they can make us feel like outsiders in our preferred tribes and transform us into people who are more difficult to politically manage and control, which feels risky. And yet as we step into these uncomfortable places, God “draws near to us in our fear and uncertainty and pain and suffering,” as Rodriguez said to me. In the messiness of it all, we’re met by the God of all comfort—not merely our own.

Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.

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Ideas

Seeing Black History Through Scripture

Rann Miller

Similarities between the African American and Jewish experience can help us think biblically about human dignity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Memorials and remembrances are important. We remember the past not just to remind us of where we’ve been but also to help us move forward in the right direction. And every February, Black History Month gives us a chance to do just that.

Commemorations of Black history dates to “Negro History Week,” which was created by historian Carter G. Woodson in 1926—100 years ago this year. Woodson chose February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Black communities were already celebrating both men, and Woodson thought the weeklong event could be a way for teachers to review all the Black history they had taught students within the previous year.

Woodson wanted Black students to learn about the accomplishments of African Americans and, in turn, be inspired to emulate “the examples of those who achieved in spite of tremendous handicaps.” Many of those handicaps, of course, were due to anti-Black racism. It was never Woodson’s intention for Black History Month to obscure that reality. But it’s fair to say much of our contemporary commemoration leans more toward acknowledging Black achievement than spotlighting historical injustices and how they impact us today.

Throughout history, African Americans have been a despised people. The US Constitution declared our ancestors to be enslaved noncitizens. That language remains in place to this day, albeit without legal force. During the Civil War, we were looked upon with resentment and hatred for resisting enslavement and formally fighting for our freedom. That hatred manifested into institutionalized racism through Jim Crow, which existed in the North as it did in the South, and inspired Nazis and Afrikaners alike.

Today, our communities struggle with police brutality, challenges to landmark voting rights protections, and as recently seen through the removal of a slavery exhibit in Philadelphia, efforts by the Trump administration to sanitize our history. Our experience is an enduring struggle to affirm our humanity within a society whose power structure continues to deny it. And in many ways, this struggle mirrors the experience of Judeans under Roman occupation and of Jesus, who was despised yet without sin.

Christians generally know that Roman occupation was oppressive and overarching, touching every aspect of life. But the day-to-day aspect of the brutality is less known. Though King Herod was a visible representative of Roman authority, the Roman military was even more so. Roman soldiers demanded goods and services in the form of labor for whatever they saw fit. They also used rape to terrorize and demoralize occupied peoples, just as white slave owners did so in the US against many slaves.

When Judeans resisted and rebelled against Roman authority, crucifixions were used—much like lynching in the 20th century—to quell dissent and solicit compliance with Roman rule. Quintilian, the Roman historian, is thought to have said: “Whenever we crucify the guilty, the most crowded roads are chosen, where the most people can see and be moved by this fear. For penalties relate not so much to retribution as to their exemplary effect.”

In the same manner, Black men left hanging from trees sought to remind Black people of their place within white society. As Billie Holiday famously sang, the men were strange fruit left to rot—an analogy that can be extended to our God, who too was left to rot on a cross after he was beaten, flogged, mocked, and humiliated (John 19).

I’m not the first person to point out this parallel, but it’s something I think about often. How we see Jesus, after all, should impact how we see other people—as image bearers of God who have worth and value.

But concerns about dehumanization still ring true in our country, particularly currently against immigrants who find themselves scared and vulnerable to the federal government’s overreach. It’s an experience African Americans are all too familiar with. And thus, the lesson is one we—both as Americans and as Christians—must learn repeatedly.

We can recognize Black History Month appropriately this year if we strive to ensure everyone, regardless of their race or immigration status, can be treated as the image bearers they are.

Our commemoration of Black History Month should not be redundant and lacking power. It should not be dominated by businesses who seek to profit off people and movements. Nor should it merely seek reconciliation without also moving toward restitution.

Instead, let us honor the accomplishments of the past by working to eliminate any “tremendous handicaps” that can and do hinder Black people—and anyone from a historically oppressed group, for that matter—from accomplishing great things. Let us also celebrate the goodness that has come from Black people in the places racism has put them and end the racism that put them there.

Rann Miller is an educator and freelance writer based in southern New Jersey. His writings on race, education, and politics have been featured in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Salon. Miller currently serves as a youth ministry teacher at The Perfecting Church in Sewell, New Jersey.

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Trump’s Visa Suspension Leaves Adoptive Families in Limbo

Hannah Herrera

The government doesn’t provide a blanket exemption for international adoptions but will examine them case by case.

The Dowey family and their adopted daughter, Grace, who is currently in Haiti.

Images courtesy of Lifeline Children's Services

Grace and Dave Macchioni sat down excitedly for a call with their adoption agency in mid-January. After more than a year of submitting background checks, financial records, and other paperwork, they finally had a travel date to pick up their soon-to-be adopted daughter: January 24.

In Colombia, they would reunite with 14-year-old Zuli then head to the US embassy in Bogotá to obtain a visa to bring her home. Yet over the call, the case worker informed them that earlier that day, the Trump administration had issued a visa freeze for 75 countries, including Colombia.

The Macchionis recalled the case worker didn’t seem concerned and assured them it was probably an oversight. But the couple felt something was wrong.

“We looked at each other, and once we hung up the phone, I just bawled,” Grace Macchioni said.

The Macchionis first met Zuli through a hosting program called Project 143. She spent a month in their Rhode Island home in 2024, where she experienced snow for the first time, attended a ceramic painting class, helped Macchioni’s aging mother walk to her appointments, and bonded with the Macchionis’ two sons.

“She became a part of the family,” Macchioni said. As soon as she left, the couple started working on the adoption process.

At the beginning of January, the Macchionis had a video call with Zuli, who had been transferred from her foster home to a waiting facility ahead of their arrival. Grace Macchioni showed her the bedroom she had prepared with all of Zuli’s favorite things–a purple butterfly bedspread, butterfly paintings, a Colombia nightlight to remind her of home, a wall hanging of a Spanish Bible verse, and figurines of Stitch from Disney’s Lilo and Stitch.

“Are you happy?” Macchioni recalled asking Zuli.

“I prayed to God for this,” she responded.

Now the Macchionis, like hundreds of families in the international adoption process, have no idea when they’ll be able to bring their adopted daughter home. They canceled their flights as well as the caretaker they had hired for Macchioni’s mother. They called family members who were planning to stay with their boys and informed Dave’s work he would not be taking leave.

The State Department’s January visa freeze temporarily halted the issuance of all immigrant visas for 75 “nationalities at high risk of public benefits usage.” It came on the heels of President Donald Trump’s December presidential proclamation, which banned immigration from 39 countries and could last until the end of his term.

Past visa suspensions have always included a blanket exemption for adoption visas. Yet the December travel ban and January freeze do not.

The announcement sent shock waves through the adoption community. While grappling with the news of an indefinite delay on top of years of waiting and extensive vetting, adoptive parents mobilized. They shared their stories on social media, made calls, sent letters, signed petitions, met with their representatives, and urged others to do the same.

Last Friday, the Congressional Coalition on Adoption wrote a joint bipartisan letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, urging him to reinstate the categorical exemption for adoption visas, provide pre-travel exemptions to adoptive families, or issue clear guidance on how to apply for case-by-case exceptions.

On January 28, the White House released a guidance instructing families to proceed in the adoption process, saying, “Consular posts have been instructed that intercountry adoptions are eligible for National Interest Exceptions under the current presidential proclamation and should be processed on a priority, case-by-case basis.”

Karla Thrasher, vice president of international ministries at Lifeline Children’s Services, the largest evangelical adoption agency in the country, said the adoption community is celebrating the news while still advocating for the categorical exemption to be reinstated.

“The visas are going to be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis, and we’re just not quite sure what that means at this point,” Thrasher said. “Is there still a chance that a visa could be denied? And if so, what is that criteria? There’s still a lot of clarification that we’d like to see.”

Christine Deason of Louisville, Kentucky, is in the process of adopting a 7-year-old from Thailand. She and her husband never thought that getting a visa would be an issue in her two-and-a-half-year-long adoption process.

She said she doesn’t understand why the visa freeze would not have an exemption for adoption visas, since its stated purpose is to prevent the entry of immigrants who will become a “public charge,” or use government benefits.

Most adopted children become citizens upon entry to the US, and the public charge rule only applies to noncitizens. Also, the adoption vetting process requires submitting extensive financial documentation, including the records of a designated guardian should something happen to the adoptive parents.

“Time and time again, we’ve had to prove ourselves financially stable,” Deason said, adding that they’ve even postponed big purchases, like buying a house or car, to prevent any change in their records that could cause delays.

The Deasons are hoping to bring their daughter home in April. Her room has been ready for two years, and in the corner sits a pile of wrapped presents—one for every birthday they’ve missed since she was born.

“We were very excited about traveling in April, because she turns 8 in May,” Deason said. “Fingers crossed, we’re not gonna miss another birthday.”

Parents adopting from the 39 countries included in Trump’s December proclamation have now spent a month and a half in limbo.

Ashley and Ted Dowey of Camden, South Carolina, have been in the process of adopting their 10-year-old daughter, Grace, from Haiti for more than five years. After countless setbacks, the couple finally received their adoption decree from Haiti, meaning Grace is legally their child and Dowey is legally her last name. But since the announcement of the travel ban, they have no idea when, or if, she can come to the US.

“We expected delays from Haiti from the beginning,” Ashley Dowey said. “But the last thing we expected was to get almost to the end and then for it to be the [US] that’s causing a delay. That was really shocking and disappointing.”

Grace has been in an orphanage her whole life. She loves music, spaghetti, and the color yellow. The girl lives in a particularly unstable part of Haiti, so the Doweys have completed many hours of trauma training to prepare for her arrival. They speak with her once or twice a month on Zoom, and Dowey noted that she always asks, “When do I get to come home? When do I get to come live with you guys?”

Dowey is holding onto a line from Psalm 68:6: “God sets the lonely in families.” She prays this can be true for Grace soon.

Meanwhile, back in Rhode Island, Grace Macchioni said she is feeling “very hopeful” to hear the White House announcement that adoptions are eligible for exemptions. “There’s power in numbers,” she said, noting the adoption community’s petitions. “I’m hoping this is really a move forward.”

She spoke to Zuli on Wednesday, who she said seemed “restless” in the temporary waiting facility. “I reassured her,” Macchioni said. “I said, ‘Once they give us the green light, we’ll be there.’”

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After Their Kids Survived the Annunciation Shooting, Parents Search for Healing

Emily Belz in Minneapolis

Families in the same Anglican church watched their young children deal with trauma, anxiety, and grief. They found one solution: each other.

A note reading " I Love You Fletcher" is left outside Annunciation Church and School on August 30, 2025 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Fletcher Merkel was killed in the shooting.

Photo by Stephen Maturen / Getty Images

Minneapolis lay under a blanket of snow and single-digit temperatures as parishioners poured into church on a Sunday morning in early December last year. They piled jackets into a coatroom and grabbed cups of strong coffee from the dispenser in the lobby. In the sanctuary of Restoration Anglican Church, vertical stained-glass windows sent shafts of light across the pews.

A regular sight in the small balcony next to the organ now is three families, all close friends: the Revells, Holines, and Sharpes. Their children attend Annunciation Catholic School and were there the morning of August 27, 2025, when the student body gathered for the first Mass of the school year and a shooter fired through the sanctuary windows from outside, riddling the Catholic church with 116 bullets. Two students were killed—Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10—and 28 were injured.

In all, six families at Restoration Anglican have children at the school. All survived the shooting unharmed, but they’re dealing with the aftereffects of what one parent likened to a military ambush. Some of the children have nightmares and don’t sleep well. Loud noises or flashing lights or simply being alone can send them into an anxiety tailspin. The parents are fragile too.

The stained-glass windows lining Restoration’s sanctuary are similar enough to those at Annunciation that the children had a hard time returning to church services. So the Sunday after the shooting, Restoration church staff set aside space for the families to worship in the balcony so the kids feel less exposed. For the first few weeks, ministers brought Communion to the families.

Trip Sharpe, 8, who survived the shooting, likes sitting in the balcony.

“Being down there, no,” he told his dad Will Sharpe recently. Why? his dad asked. Trip said he liked just having their family around. Will Sharpe and Mary Marshall Revell are siblings, so some of Trip’s balcony buddies are his cousins.

Trip’s best friend, Fletcher, was killed in the shooting. Trip helped lead a procession at Fletcher’s funeral, holding hands with Fletcher’s brother. Trip’s dad, Will Sharpe, gave a eulogy. Trip can list off his friend’s birthday and tell stories about fishing trips they took together.

Ash Revell, whose big sister Ansley also survived the shooting, zoomed a car over the balcony pews during the service. Nearby was June Holine, a fourth grader who ran with her teacher out of the school during the attack.

June’s little sister Olive, a first grader, also survived. Annunciation has a buddy system for Mass, pairing older students with younger ones—Olive’s buddy laid on top of her during the shooting, then covered her head as they ran out.

The parents still worry in the balcony. Will Sharpe has to pray each service to keep violent images of a potential attack in church from entering his head. His sister, Mary Marshall Revell, struggles with the same thing, her imagination playing over and over what the shooting was like for their kids.

At the front of the sanctuary, two Advent candles were lit, and a child read Isaiah 11:1–10:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. (v. 6, ESV)

“Does God interrupt the chaos of the world?” asked rector Rick Stawarz in his sermon on the passage.

Stawarz and his wife, Molly Stawarz, the pastor of mission at Restoration, had enrolled their 3-year-old, John, at Annunciation’s preschool. When they got word of the shooting, they drove as fast as they could toward the school. They couldn’t get close with all the activity around the school, so they ditched their car and ran, Rick losing his Birkenstock sandals and forgetting to turn off the engine. They found their son and “kissed him like crazy,” Rick said.

John had not been in the sanctuary—he was blessedly oblivious, thanks to a calm teacher who had them play “the quiet game” in their classroom during the attack. As John walked out, he was entranced by all the police and fire trucks; he asked to dress up as a firefighter for Halloween.

America’s ongoing scourge of school shootings not only takes lives but also leaves a pool of surviving children who carry the horror with them. More than 398,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the Columbine shooting in 1999, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.

Research has shown long-lasting effects on surviving children—like struggling with depression or dropping out of school—but it has also revealed children can be incredibly resilient.

“The field of post-trauma is really big and developing all the time. There is so much we don’t know,” said Anna Mondal, a Christian counselor who specializes in trauma.

The families at Annunciation discovered quickly that there is a national infrastructure to respond to school shootings: trauma centers for children, parental support groups. Organizations showed up in Minneapolis with therapy dogs and bunnies, a big hit with the children.

Annunciation brought in the Washburn Center for Children, a local counseling group, to provide onsite mental health professionals for two school years. As Washburn’s chief clinical officer, Jenny Britton, described to me the close-knit community at Annunciation and how essential that is for trauma recovery, she took a call about an Annunciation student who needed help.

Yet even with all the resources, mass shootings tear an unimaginable hole in a community.

“You keep seeing the fracture continue to spread,” said Will Sharpe, Trip’s dad. Parents of kids in other school shootings have warned Annunciation parents that every step after the event—like deciding whether to reopen the site of the shooting or how to memorialize it—could bring dissension.

“It was pretty shocking … how much it takes to clean up the pieces,” said Emily Collings, who leads the children’s ministry at Restoration and coordinated care for the families of child survivors. She sat in meeting after meeting discussing what to do next: how to support the families, how to navigate kids’ questions in Sunday school, whether to change the classroom locks. One parent asked her about hiring an armed guard.

All of it makes Collings angry at the shooter—such devastation wrought in so few minutes.

But the families at Restoration, taken together, might have something special that could speed their recovery—and help their kids bounce back and understand what happened. These families are seeing the value of close relationships in a trusted faith community in a country where people often suffer individually, out of sight.

Americans are becoming less and less socially connected. As their isolation grows, so do problems with their mental health. But even recovery from crises is often an individual activity with a therapist.

Scientists widely consider social connection one of the strongest predictors of survival at any stage of life. And research on mass shootings has shown that a religious community helps in recovery. The survivors and families at Restoration are learning this—but remaining in community is itself a struggle sometimes.

“Showing up to men’s prayer, showing up to church—showing up has been something that we’re telling ourselves to do. It’s not coming naturally,” said Anders Holine, the dad of June and Olive, who survived. “There are days where I just want to move to the woods and cut ties and be safe.”

But after church events, he said he almost always feels encouraged, renewed. It helps that Restoration’s rector personally understands his family’s terror.

The families say they feel comforted even as they struggle to find meaning in the tragedy.

“You’re not just making sense of it yourself. You’re making sense of it for your kids, who are asking, ‘Why?’” said Anders.

“It’s unnatural, what we experienced,” said Mary Marshall Revell.

Anders Holine and Will Sharpe went to high school together in a Twin Cities suburb but didn’t really know each other. When they were students, Will said, he was getting in trouble while Anders was “pursuing church and making good decisions.” They became friends after Will turned his life around.

Now their families live across the street from each other—a few blocks from Annunciation—and hang out all the time. They walk their kids to school.

Mary Marshall Revell is Will’s sister and also lives less than a five-minute drive away, with her husband, Micah Revell, and their two kids, Ansley, 9, a third grader at Annunciation, and preschooler Ash, 5.

The Holines, Sharpes, and Revells all go to church together. Will and his wife, Kacie, recommended Annunciation to their rector’s family, the Stawarzes.

The day of the shooting, Will and Anders walked their kids to school and then split off. Will went to a grocery store nearby, Anders went home. As Will walked back, he passed the campus. Trip and Fletcher and one of their friends called out to him from a window, laughing. Will laughed too but told them to get back to class. He returned home, took the family dog on a walk, then heard gunshots.

He hopped in the car to get to campus, parked in an alleyway next to school, and ran into the school parking lot. He found an older woman lying on the ground, shot in the leg. Then police came around the corner and told him to get away because they were concerned about a second shooter. Like other parents, he was desperate to find his son. (He knew kindergarteners, including his daughter, didn’t go to Mass.) Trip was in the church, a few rows up from his friend Fletcher.

Anders also heard the gunshots and drove to the school. First responders were just arriving. He saw a police officer come through the church doors with injured children. As the police opened the door, he went into the crime scene to find his girls Olive and June.

But his girls weren’t there. For the parents, the half hour of not knowing their children’s fate was hell. Some kids were hiding under pews. Others had run out at the start of the shooting and were in buildings around the area. They eventually reunited at a gym.

In the chaos of the shooting Ansley Revell, the third grader, tripped and fell over a shoe someone had lost, and then someone stepped on her finger. She got out, and she remembered her friends crying, but parts of her memory are blank.

“I want to remember all of it, but my body won’t let me,” she said, sitting on her couch next to her parents. “I can’t picture it in my mind.”

Ansley remembers that after her parents collected her, an officer checked off her name, noting that she was okay, and her mom and dad said she could have whatever she wanted for lunch. But she felt sick to her stomach and couldn’t eat. She had a popsicle, which helped. The kids may have blocked out the shooting, but they remember the food they ate that day—mostly pizza. Ansley had a smoothie bowl.

After the shooting, the three families piled in at the Sharpes’ house. The kids watched TV downstairs for hours, which they’re not normally allowed to do. The parents sat together upstairs, numb. They stayed at the Sharpes’ house until late. When the parents learned Fletcher had died, they pulled the children aside to tell them.

Ansley immediately went to Trip, knowing he would be upset, and they started talking, said her mom, Mary Marshall. The parents said the children sometimes found it easier to talk to each other about the shooting than to them. But now the kids ask deep questions about it at random times, like on the way to school.

One of Will’s friends came over the night of the shooting. They sat on the front steps, and Will cried, the first time he let himself lose it. Micah Revell lost it in his kitchen after he put his kids to bed. Micah’s dad, John Revell, got into full-time police chaplaincy in 2012, ministering to first responders in Newtown, Connecticut, who struggled after the Sandy Hook shooting.

The evening of the shooting, Restoration held a prayer vigil. After that, the three families said they ate more meals together than not, sometimes with the Stawarzes as well. They didn’t wallow in feelings about the shooting—sometimes they were just hanging out—but these times were a relief when other people either avoided talking about the event or wanted to move on quickly.

“Having the ability to process and talk through with each other was such a gift from God,” said Will.

Britton, from the children’s trauma counseling group, said well-meaning people often ask questions like “How are you doing?,” which can sometimes feel hard to answer, especially for kids. Instead she suggests having a normal conversation that is not about their recovery, like “I am so happy to see you today. I heard you joined the basketball team.”

The day after the shooting was Ansley’s birthday. Collings, the children’s pastor, pulled together a birthday gift and care package.

“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, that must have been a horrible birthday.’It was a pretty good one,” said Ansley.

Restoration started a meal train for the families. Anders discovered there were skilled sourdough bread bakers in the church after several delicious homemade loaves showed up at his home.

“They had already, within a very short amount of time, thought through all of these ways to care for us so that we didn’t have to think of those things,” said Mary Marshall.

Will was asked to do a eulogy for Fletcher’s funeral. He processed it with his counselor and then with Rick Stawarz and prayed every morning for the right thing to say. He felt intimidated by the glare of attention. What came to him was Psalm 23: “I lack nothing” (v. 1). He clung to it. At the Restoration service before the funeral, Stawarz anointed him with oil. People laid hands on him and prayed.

Will had coached Fletcher in soccer, football, and basketball. In the eulogy he talked about the gift of being welcomed into the Merkels’ circle, then told the family, “We are here for you, and we are not going anywhere.”

He quoted 1 Corinthians 15 and said, “Because of Jesus, death has had no victory over Fletcher. … He is safe. He made it to his heavenly home, and boy do we miss him.”

After the funeral, the Sharpes, Revells, and Holines ate dinner together. By the end of the evening, they were even laughing.

“I remember looking around and thinking, Okay, this is how we’re going to survive this. Because we have this,” said Mary Marshall.

Courtesy of Anders Holine

Three families—the Holines, Sharpes, and Revells—whose children survived the Annunciation shooting go to the same church.

Before the shooting, Micah Revell said the three sets of parents were struggling with some level of numbness with their faith. Now church is what brings out his emotions, even if he has felt disconnected during the week. Communion especially feels like “tangible comfort,” said Micah. “This really is the physical presence of Jesus.” The parents all brought up falling back on the sacraments and liturgy of the Anglican tradition.

Discussion of sorrow and suffering is “built into the way that the Anglican church, or our church, approaches daily life and the world,” said Sharpe, who is new to Anglicanism. The Holines and Sharpes weren’t at Restoration a year before the shooting, but Mary Marshall feels they were all drawn together into the same church as a gift.

“Church has always been really hard for me … for most of my life,” said Mary Marshall, mentioning some hurtful experiences at recent churches. But the time her family has been at Restoration has been “life-giving and healing,” she said. “Their response and their care for us—it couldn’t have been more different.”

Molly Stawarz said the Anglican tradition places a high value on kids’ involvement in church because of the belief that they can have a relationship with God—and, Rick Stawarz added, they can practice spiritual disciplines.

“This is a place where their kids are being given the space to process this—not just individually but to process it liturgically,” said Rick. “Whether they realize it or not, they’re being connected to the weekly rhythms of our church and the prayers of our church.”

In September, about two weeks after the shooting, June and Trip were scheduled to be baptized at Restoration. They both wanted to go forward with it. Usually the Anglican tradition does sprinkling baptism, but many in the congregation come from Baptist backgrounds, so the church does full immersion, too, which is what the kids did. June wore an Annunciation T-shirt. Anders told himself to keep it together as he watched, going into a sanctuary for the first time since the shooting.

“It’s the very basics of Christianity that I really should have practiced—fundamentally trusting God with your future, trusting the unknowns, entrusting your kids’ lives,” said Anders. “Am I really doing that? I’d rather have safe circumstances and just be safe physically. The Bible is really challenging. … I can’t pave my own road.”

Anders said June dried off from the baptism, they ate a quick lunch, and they went to Harper Moyski’s funeral.

Rick reflected on the baptisms later: “Yes, be reminded that by Christ’s death and resurrection, you are united to him, and nothing can separate you from him. You are claimed by him, united with him, and received into the household of God, which is both a local church reality, but it’s also this heavenly, cosmic reality as well. You belong to Jesus.”

But the parents still discover unexpected “pockets of pain,” as Will described it. The power flickered in the Revells’ house recently, and Ansley sprinted to Mary Marshall, screaming. Mary Marshall just held her. Ansley’s whole body was shaking.

“She has a really good game face, and I do believe she’s sharing with us, but there’s a lot more going on inside,” said Mary Marshall. The therapist the Revells see told them they didn’t need to rush her into therapy but should wait until she is ready—advice echoed by other therapists CT interviewed.

June Holine sleeps with her Bernedoodle sometimes because nights are hard now. She said if she could, she would have 50 dogs, and then she could crowd-surf on them.

“To have those friendships in place with these friends that are also at their church, and then the broader church community that we have, is going to be really good for Ans,” said Micah.

The Anglican families have felt cared for by the Catholic community at Annunciation, too. The parents go to a weekly meeting with other Annunciation parents at a local pizza place, where they’re forming a parents advocacy group that, among other things, is looking at pushing gun reforms. “The grief and helplessness is getting channeled into ‘Okay, what can we do?,’” said Mary Marshall.

One snowy night in December, Beth Holine, Anders’s wife, proposed to the parents a name and mission for their nonpartisan advocacy organization. Anders was watching their girls at home and followed the meeting on Zoom, and the Revells squished behind a table with other parents. The room was packed, and the floors were wet from snowmelt.

“I would love for there to be some kind of broader Christian response that can really make a change in our country,” said Molly later about the gun debate. “We are uniquely equipped to enter these incredibly difficult dialogues.”

Life goes on, with sports, parent meetings, and birthday parties, but the shooting comes up. When June’s basketball team lost recently, the winning team gave them bracelets as consolation because they were from Annunciation.

Recently, the Sharpe, Revell, and Holine children went back into the Annunciation sanctuary for the first time since the shooting. The parents noticed that June, Trip, Olive, and Ansley wandered to the choir loft on their own and prayed for the families of Fletcher and Harper.

Meanwhile, Restoration’s worship director, Derek Boemler, and another church musician, Chris Gisler, released a new worship song for their church that they wrote in response to the events:

“There is a refuge in your wings
A help in troubled times
You cause the broken heart to sing
And you’re singing now in mine.

“May I know the Comforter
May I know the God of peace
May I know the one who holds the stars
Is holding on to me.”

“The One Who Holds the Stars,” courtesy of Derek Boemler:

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