Some Evangelicals Want a Third-Party Option, Even Without a Chance at Winning

The American Solidarity Party is a small but growing alternative to the Trump-Biden race.

Peter Sonski and Lauren Onak are running on the American Solidarity Party ticket.

Courtesy of the American Solidarity Party

Charlie Richert would really like to stop voting for his dad.

But in the last couple presidential election cycles, the 30-year-old attorney in Indianapolis has been unable to square his conscience with picking either the Republican or Democratic party nominee, so he’s resorted to writing in a name.

“There’s no way I can escape having my faith inform how I vote,” said Richert, a nondenominational Christian who grew up Republican. “Unfortunately, we’ve been kind of stuck in a doom loop of candidates at the presidential level that I’ve just not felt comfortable voting for.”

This year, he’s not drawn to alternatives like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Cornel West. “Maybe I’ll write in Abe Lincoln this year. Sorry to my dad, but a new name to write in would be fun,” he said.

He recalls seeking to convince his classmates in an eighth-grade mock election that they should support Mitt Romney, but his chagrin with the Republican Party’s presidential nominee tracked with the ascension of Donald Trump.

In a year when both major party presidential candidates are viewed unfavorably by a quarter of Americans, many find themselves less excited about the two options at the top of the ticket. But, like Richert, that doesn’t mean they’re ready to go for third-party options.

The third-party candidates running in 2024 span the ideological spectrum, from independents Kennedy and Princeton University professor Cornel West to Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Then there are the more obscure party or candidate options—the Prohibition Party, Andrew Yang’s Forward Party, Maryland politician Jason Palmer, and that man in Texas who changed his name to “Literally Anybody Else.”

Perhaps the most promising third-party attempt, the No Labels Party, drew in funding with its centrist messaging, but its efforts failed before Election Day. The party ended its presidential campaign last week after being unable to find “candidates with a credible path to winning.”

RFK Jr. has emerged as the top third-party candidate this race, polling just under 12 percent, higher than any third-party candidate since businessman Ross Perot in 1992. The son of former attorney general and senator Robert F. Kennedy, his popularity is aided by his high-profile last name.

After failing to make headway in the Democratic primary, Kennedy opted to run as an independent. He is only on the ballot in half a dozen states, but his campaign is on a signature-collection blitz and has vowed to get on the ballots of all 50 states this fall.

Kennedy has said his campaign is “a spoiler for President Biden and President Trump.”

It remains to be seen which major party candidate would be hurt more if Kennedy’s strong polling translates into votes come November. But both parties are taking the threat seriously, with the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee (and Trump himself, for that matter) going after the independent candidate.

“I suspect at least some of the support for RFK Jr. is really just a potholder for the anger and dissatisfaction with Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” said Mark Caleb Smith, a political scientist at Cedarville University in Ohio.

Kennedy is Catholic and at times has appealed to his faith in interviews and on social media. His policies span the ideological and political spectrum, and he’s best known for his environmental activism.

He’s also antiestablishment and was a vocal critic of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and he has criticized the impact that had on the right to religious assembly. He’s pro-choice and believes that the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning a national right to abortion was a mistake.

For evangelicals seeking candidates who reflect their values and beliefs more closely than either of the major parties, some have backed indepedent candidates or found new political homes in lesser-known third parties.

Dale Huntington, a 41-year-old pastor of City Life Church in San Diego, California, landed on the American Solidarity Party (ASP), a small but growing Christian party founded in 2011. Its platform is largely shaped by social teaching from Catholic thought.

He found out about the group because of evangelical author and professor Karen Swallow Prior, who is a member of ASP’s advisory board.

“I don’t support the death penalty or abortion. I am largely anti-war and anti-police brutality,” Huntington said. “I would say voting for a third party is choosing to acknowledge the system as it is has become broken.”

Huntington used to alternate between Republican and Democrat tickets but ultimately felt like neither was holistically pro-life.

In 2020, the American Solidarity Party ran its first evangelical presidential nominee—retired teacher and former Evangelical Free Church elder Brian Carroll (whom CT reported on at the time).

Carroll had long had his doubts about the Republican Party’s level of commitment to pro-life policies. But it was the GOP’s hardening on immigration, education, and other issues in 2016 that made him defect entirely.

After that, he went looking for other options. When he stumbled upon the ASP, he said, “[I] read the platform once and I said, ‘Yes, this is it.’”

When Carroll ran, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns made campaigning difficult. It also was a challenge for volunteers to garner signatures during lockdowns. Despite that, they had some success. Last presidential election, the American Solidarity Party made it onto the ballots of 8 states—and received write-in votes in 31 states. They drew over 42,000 votes in total.

“We’d love to double the number,” Marcos Lopez, party chair, told CT.

Ballot access is a huge challenge, he added, for a party facing limited financial resources, a small pool of volunteers, and stringent state requirements to get on the ballot.

Despite challenges, interest in the group is growing. There was a surge in volunteer signups online after Super Tuesday last month, when it became clear that November would bring a Donald Trump and Joe Biden rematch.

Party members acknowledge that winning is not in the cards, but they believe a third option allows Americans who reject the “lesser of two evils” argument to vote in a way that respects their conscience and sends a message.

“Whether you’re Catholic, whether you’re Baptist, whether you’re a nondenominational evangelical, whether you’re Orthodox—anyone who is serious about their faith, and anyone who’s serious about wanting to see these policies grounded in advancing the common good—anyone who wants to see those things happen is willing to come to the table,” Lopez said.

The issue of abortion has been a particular draw for religious individuals, Lopez said. “We’re looking at an issue in November where neither [Republican nor Democrat] candidate really fits the label of pro-life. … In many states we’re going to be the only pro-life option people can vote for, and that’s a very sad reality. But it is a reality, and that makes our work even more important.”

Abortion can be a deal breaker for some evangelicals when it comes to crossing the aisle to support Biden. While the Trump campaign has highlighted pro-life wins (such as the Dobbs decision), Trump has presented a softer approach to the issue in recent days.

On Monday, he said it should be left to the states to carve out individual abortion policies. “At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart, or in many cases, your religion or your faith,” he said in a video statement.

On Thursday, he said in response to a reporter that he would not sign a federal abortion ban.

This year, Peter Sonski, a former editor for the National Catholic Register, is the American Solidarity Party candidate. Sonski, 61, has been a member of both the Democratic and Republican parties throughout his life but was frustrated that neither fully matched his religious convictions.

“We want to protect human life, give it all the protections of the law,” Sonski said of his party. “At the same time, we recognize there are many more things that the government can do—and society in general can do—for women who have needs in pregnancy … health care, expanded child tax credits, better housing options; all of these are factors.”

The father of nine and grandfather of six brings the experience of an elected official to the role: He serves as a school district member for the board of education for Connecticut’s 17th District. He tapped Lauren Onak, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mother and community organizer, as his vice president candidate.

Preparing my annual baccalaureate sermon, I thrashed about for an appropriately generic, one-size-fits-all biblical text for those who don't believe the Bible. I seized upon Numbers 13-14, Moses' sending of the spies into Canaan to scout the Promised Land for the arriving Hebrews.
This class of graduates seemed tentative, unsteady, uncertain of their future in a downsized, devoluted American economy. This seemed the perfect text for a final sermon on their way out of Dear Old Duke.
The Hebrews stand at last on the threshold of the Promised Land. What lies ahead? Two groups of spies are sent out to reconnoiter. At the end of 40 days, they return with their respective reports for Moses and Aaron-a majority report and a minority report.
"The land is plentiful," said the minority, "but the cities are strongly fortified."
"Let's go take the place!" exclaims Caleb. (Caleb means "dog," take it as you will.)
The majority report is more pessimistic. "The people over there, why, they're like giants! Next to them, we looked like grasshoppers!"
The majority report begins by saying that the Canaanites are men, then it says they are big men, finally calling them
"Nephilim" (cf. Gen. 6:1-4). Giants!
Actually, the majority and the minority reports agree to a great extent. The difference lies in the response. Caleb says, "Let's go for it; God is with us!"
But the people of Israel have a different reaction. "We should have died in Egypt! We had it better back in slavery!" they cry. "We're going to die out here, eaten by these Canaanite giants!"
You can see where I was moving with my sermon: Don't worry, graduates: you can do it! We can build cars and computers as well as the Japanese! The economy will get better! Let's go for the Promised Land-or at least a 2 percent higher GNP!
Yet, what interested me in this text was not the Israelites' positive or negative attitudes, nor mine, nor those of the graduates. It was God, the one who had set this story in motion, who caught my attention.
When the Hebrews stop their whining, God gets angry. He says to Moses, loud enough for everyone in Israel to hear, "How long will I have to put up with these people? I'm going to choose a good people to love, then I'm going to kill all of you!" (Num. 14:11-12, author's paraphrase).
Moses tries to reason with the Lord: "You don't want to do that."
God: "I'm God. I can do anything I want."
Moses: "How is it going to look to the Egyptians? You've gone to all this trouble to bring us out of slavery, only to kill us? All the other nations will talk about it. Their gods will say, 'Yahweh is good at liberation, but he can't pull off occupation.' Wasn't it you who said you were 'slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love'?"
God: "All right, all right. But I am not going to let you in until everyone who fell for that lousy report is dead."
Suddenly, I no longer wanted to preach my little, conventional Power of Positive Thinking sermonette on success. I wanted to preach about a God who was large, prickly, anthropomorphic, a lot like us. I wanted to be in the presence of a God who needed mortals like Moses to go up and reason with him, in prayer, to hold him accountable to his promises, a God who had feelings and was capable of being hurt by the people he loved.
This is the God Israel has taught us to love. This is the God who, though often angry with us, never gave up on us; still, despite our fears and disbelief, still loves us, even yet.

William H. Willimon is dean of the chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Onak was raised a Democrat but defected to the Republican Party due to her interest in the pro-life movement. But a number of things caused her to break with the party, culminating in the birth of a daughter with a rare genetic syndrome and seeing how the social safety net of a “blue state” like Massachusetts benefited her daughter’s special needs.

It was “seeing the importance for this social safety net very much in action and having to push back against this mindset of, if you need help from the government, it makes you somehow weak,” she said.

She joined the American Solidarity Party in 2021, following the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest, believing it offered a “reasonable voice in politics.” At 35, she’s just old enough to join the presidential ticket. She believes her candidacy is important for other disillusioned millennials.

One of those millennials is Bob Stevenson, a 40-year-old pastor in Chicago who found himself frustrated with having to choose which convictions to prioritize when he went to the ballot box.

He felt like he had to pick between unborn babies or immigrants and people in poverty.

“It’s almost like, that’s a red thing or that’s a blue thing. And I’m like, that’s a Christian thing,” Stevenson told CT. Although he said no party is perfect, he found the American Solidarity Party “straddles those concerns in a way that partisan politics don’t. So that was deeply attractive to me.”

Third parties have a tough uphill battle, largely due to the two-party structure that dominates American politics.

“We do have an abundance of third parties,” Smith said. “They just can’t seem to rise to the point where they have a significant impact. Most of that is because the two major parties absorb them.”

But third parties still have an effect: Smith gave the example of the Green Party elevating climate and environmental issues, which resulted in Democrats incorporating more of those concerns into their platform; or Republicans (at least in days past) leaning more libertarian and drawing voters away from the Libertarian Party. Other examples include the abolition of slavery and universal health care.

Smith says that rather than third parties or candidates becoming competitive, major changes in American politics usually happen within the vehicle of a major party. Or, at times, a major party falls by the wayside only to be replaced, such as the Whigs, who were replaced by Republicans.

“It isn’t that a third party rises up and it’s competitive. It’s one of the two major parties just implodes, and then this party steps forward and kind of picks up the pieces and you see something else emerge,” Smith said.

While the framework of Republican and Democratic parties has been in place since 1856, Smith said dissatisfaction with the options is at a “pretty significant and historical” level: “We keep seeing that in primary results on both sides of the aisle—even though the contest has been settled for a long time—that both candidates are getting pretty significant pushback.”

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley continues to garner primary votes, despite dropping out after Super Tuesday’s primaries confirmed she had no viable path to the Republican nomination for president. On the Democratic side, progressives organized to lodge protest votes to send a message to Biden in Michigan’s Democratic primary, racking up more than 100,000 “uncommitted” votes.

But that may not translate to large numbers of Americans choosing to send a statement by voting outside the major parties on November 5.

Americans unhappy with their options may be more likely to tune politics out and sit elections out entirely. Those who head to the ballot box despite frustration and alienation from both major parties, Smith noted, “are a fairly small group of people.”

Christians who vote third party are aware that they’re a minority. But they think there are some things more important than making a pragmatic choice. Stevenson said when friends or family found out he planned to vote third party, they looked at him like he had his “head screwed on backwards.”

But he believes that “it’s a way for us to bear witness in the United States where Christians have historically, over the past couple of decades, aligned themselves with a political party and have shown themselves to be political opportunists and pragmatics.”

“I think it’s an opportunity for us to offer a different way. We can be like, actually the way of Jesus doesn’t look like an elephant or a donkey.”

Correction: Brian Carroll had served as an elder in the Evangelical Free Church, not the Evangelical Covenant Church.

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Testimony

How a Chinese-Born Research Scientist Became a Daring Online Evangelist

Sean Cheng

CT’s outgoing Asia editor recalls how God led him to America, toward the Christian faith, onto the internet, and outward to serve the global Chinese church.

Courtesy of Sean Cheng

I was born in southwest China, in the Ganzi (Garzê) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan Province. Only a few days after birth, I was sent to Chengdu, the province’s capital city. My sister and I were raised by our grandmother while my parents, both medical doctors, were sent by the Communist Party to the rural Tibetan area many high mountains away from the city, where children could not get a decent education.

I knew at a very young age that I had to get outstanding grades to enter college and avoid living in the cold and poor mountainous area. I studied hard and excelled in school.

At age 16, I went to Shanghai to study chemistry at Fudan University, one of China’s top schools. This was in the 1980s, after China had opened its door to the world. At this time, Chinese universities were quite liberal and tolerant of free thinking, and Fudan was known as one of the most “Westernized” universities.

In college, I began to rebel against indoctrination into official Communist ideology, and I wanted to learn more about Western thought and culture. But my worldview had been influenced by years of atheist education. I thought I did not believe in anything and had no interest in any religion.

After graduation, I went back to Chengdu and started to work in a research institute as a polymer scientist. After work, I played a lot of mahjong, gambling late into the night, but I was unhappy in my heart. After the crackdown on the student movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, I was heartbroken and lost. (I witnessed similar forms of violent suppression on the streets of Chengdu.) I sank into deep darkness and hopelessness. I could not find an answer to my heart’s questions, and life became meaningless and unbearably painful. I decided that I would leave China and go to America for graduate study, and I began preparing for the relevant tests.

Meanwhile, I started reading a lot of books on philosophy and religion. Most of the books I found on Christianity treated it negatively, but I also became friends with a few Christians at the “English corner” by the Jinjiang River in the center of Chengdu.

Arriving in America

In 1990, to make some extra money, I went with a British expedition team to the source of the Yangtze River in the Tibetan areas of Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai Provinces, serving as their interpreter. Out of 30 people on the team, 27 were Christian, and they used hovercrafts to go upstream on the Yangtze and access remote Tibetan villages, where they would do charity work. I spent more than a month with them on the Tibetan plateau.

We traveled on dangerous roads, braving snowstorms, mudslides, and other forms of severe weather. The team’s official Chinese hosting company, whose primary interest was making money for themselves, created additional difficulties on top of cultural, political, and natural challenges. But I observed how the British Christians prayed when facing adversity, and how they worshiped God joyfully, singing guitar-led hymns in their tent. I was moved by their genuine and selfless love for the Tibetan people, and I found myself wishing for their kind of life and faith.

In the summer of 1992, I received a graduate school admission letter from the University of Alabama, and I waited outside the US consulate in Chengdu for four days and four nights to apply for a student visa. The I-20 paperwork certifying my admission was lost when the school mailed it the first time. I had to make a very expensive international phone call to request another copy, which I finally received on the third day in line outside the consulate.

In August 1992, I arrived in America with $42 in my pocket (that was all my savings—one of my relatives bought me the flight ticket). I was ready to start pursuing the “American dream” of freedom, democracy, happiness, and scientific achievement.

But what I found was salvation in Christ. I joined a Chinese Bible study group on campus and became a Christian soon thereafter. Because I had no car, I relied on Chinese friends to take me around for shopping and other things. Christians from the fellowship offered their help, and on Friday nights they would take me to their Bible study, even though I was there mostly for the Chinese food.

Early on, I often debated with the Christians about theories of creation and evolution. Yet I was increasingly moved by the Christian charity these friends showed to me, especially because of the sharp contrast between Christian love and the “we should hate our enemy” teachings I had absorbed from my Communist education. I realized that their ability to act out sacrificial love came from faith in God, the same faith that inspired the British Christians’ love for the Tibetan people.

I also began to realize the hatred and other darkness in my own heart, and my need for salvation. On a Sunday in October 1992, I was sitting in a pew at Tuscaloosa First Baptist Church. The pastor preached an evangelical sermon about Christ’s cross and God’s love. I was moved to tears. When the pastor asked if anyone would believe in Christ and go forward to the pulpit, I stood and walked to the front, and the pastor held my hands as we prayed. I was baptized in that church only two months after arriving in the US.

Internet evangelism

After I graduated with my master’s degree in 1995, I started working in the US chemical industry, first as a scientist, then as a research and development manager. The work brought me to Arizona, then New Jersey, and then Maryland. At the same time, I grew spiritually and served in local Chinese churches.

It was also in 1995 that I started writing about Christianity on the primitive Chinese internet. Pretty soon I began engaging online with non-believing Chinese intellectuals in China and overseas. This made me one of the earliest Chinese Christian apologists on the internet.

Even though there were only a few online Christians then, Christianity was one of the hottest debate topics on the early forums that sprang up on the Chinese internet during its infancy. Debates about science and Christianity appeared on a list of “Top 10 Chinese Internet News” in 1996 and 1997, and I was one of the few Christians named on the list.

In 1996, I became one of the earliest volunteer coworkers for the ministry Chinese Christian Internet Mission. We uploaded apologetic and evangelistic materials on our website for people in China (the government hadn’t yet erected its “Great Firewall” of censorship). I also started my own personal gospel website, “Jidian’s Links,” in 1998. (Jidian is my penname, and in Chinese it is the name of the biblical figure of Gideon.)

At the end of the1990s, many Chinese online forums became popular. Christians, including myself, were active on those platforms, dialoguing with intellectuals in China about Christian faith. Many influential Chinese intellectuals were involved in such conversations.

When more useful internet platforms such as blogs, Douban, Weibo, Zhihu, and WeChat became popular in the 2000s and 2010s, Chinese Christians quickly took them up for evangelistic purposes. I started writing blogs, gradually expanding my focus beyond apologetics to cover culture and current affairs. In 2012, a collection of my blog essays, The Search and the Return, was published in China. In an official Chinese Communist Youth League journal article published that year, the author called me one of the most influential “internet missionaries” that Chinese youth should be aware of.

Protection and providence

But my evangelism in China was not limited to online writing. Before the Chinese government tightened its control on religions in 2018, there was a golden window of 10 or 15 years when evangelism was possible inside the nation itself. During this period, I went back to China two or three times each year, giving evangelistic “free and public seminars” at Christian bookstores and coffee houses run by house churches while meeting Christians and seekers in many Chinese cities.

In 2011, I became a full-time Christian worker. I joined the Chinese media ministry Overseas Campus Ministries (OCM), based in California, to serve as director of its evangelism division and chief editor of its magazine and media platforms. Through our WeChat account, we reached more than 70,000 subscribers before government censors blocked and deleted it. And we organized a Christian blogger “circle” in China to inspire and foster more Christian authors. I answered nearly 300 faith-related questions on Zhihu before my account was censored in January 2020.

While with OCM, I also served diaspora Chinese churches in North America, Asia, and Europe as a speaker and preacher. In 2019, I joined an international mission organization as a “diaspora and returnee missionary.” In January 2022, I was “seconded” to Christianity Today to serve as Asia editor. In my two years at CT, we have published not only hundreds of Chinese translations from English, but also dozens of articles originally written in Chinese. I will continue to serve the global Chinese churches through my mission work as well as my media ministry.

When I came to the US 32 years ago, my parents expected that I would become an outstanding scientist. I did well as a scientist in the chemical industry, but my parents never anticipated that I would give up that career and become an internet missionary writer and editor. Many of the Chinese forums I frequented no longer exist today, but occasionally I still get direct messages from Chinese Christians who say they knew me through my online presence when they were still atheists. Some have gone on to become full-time ministers or missionaries. They are amazed that I am still actively evangelizing on the internet and through Christian media.

Thinking back on my journey of life, I am more convinced than ever before that I have nothing to boast in except God’s grace. He worked in my heart when I was struggling in China. He led me onto the internet, and into apologetics and missions, in his own timing. My journey has been full of his protection and providence. As one hymn puts it, in words I can heartily affirm, “by his own hand he leadeth me.”

Sean Cheng is a Christian writer, media editor, and diaspora Chinese missionary based in Maryland. In 2022, he published a book in Chinese, Above All Things, on the topic of science and Christianity.

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Books

The Church Loses When Our Arts Communities Die

Conor Sweetman

Christian writers and artists need communities of like-minded creatives so we can best serve both the church and the world.

Blend Images / Walter Zerla / Getty

I can remember the moment small literary magazines entered my life and established a subtle but dominating influence. I was talking with my dad about some classes I was taking at the end of my undergraduate years, and I shared an idea that had recently popped into my head: “I want to start a magazine. I’ll invite some friends who like to write and are into photography to feature their work. I’ll print 10 or 20 copies and see what happens.”

Surprised, he pointed at a maroon-covered, finely printed journal lying on his desk, the word Image emblazoned across the top. Below the title, a description: Art. Faith. Mystery. As the dean of students at a Christian liberal arts university, he knew his way around a landscape that I was just beginning to roam.

The direction of my life was permanently altered at that moment. I found a world that took seriously the things I loved: faith, books, imagination, the creation of culture, and the development of craft. It lit a fire in my chest. But ten years later, it feels like that world is crumbling—or is at least on quaking ground. In February, Image announced it was shuttering after 35 years of operation for financial reasons—and then, in March, joyfully reversed its announcement after an outpouring of support. Other small magazines and presses haven’t made the same comeback, and Christians in the Visual Arts announced it was disbanding last year.

From my vantage, these closures don’t demonstrate a lack of energy, talent, or interest in arts and literature in the church. In some ways, the arts and faith movement—led by writers, painters, poets, and photographers who live by a drumbeat not usually highlighted in Christian community—seems to be swelling to a crescendo.

But the lack of institutional viability and support is palpable. Major streams that watered the literary and artistic ecosystem of the American church seem to be drying up all at once.

Budding artists and seasoned writers feel left to fend for themselves, as seen in widely discussed reflections from Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Jen Pollock Michel on the publishing world. Creative gatherings for Christians are often difficult to fund and organize; there’s a precarious feeling that their existence must be constantly justified. It’s no coincidence that so much Christian writing today is in a personal and confessional mode—there’s a quiet cry going up from artists in our pews to have genuine spiritual and aesthetic community.

Small magazines can fill that need, serving as “experiential labs and community hubs for rising and established writers and thought leaders,” said Sara Kyoungah White, a former editor at the Lausanne Movement who is now a copyeditor at Christianity Today.

White found community, she told me, in small magazines like CT’s Ekstasis (the magazine that came out of that conversation with my dad), Foreshadow, and Fathom. Writing in those pages allowed her to explore her faith through the kind of nuance and poetry that have grown rare in these didactic times. She could engage with the works of like-minded creatives and re-enter the literary and cultural landscape with a Christocentric lens. Such communities evoked those of artistic and literary greats like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and James Joyce, who gathered in the salons of Paris.

But you don’t have to be a writer or artist yourself to benefit from flourishing Christian literary and artistic communities. “The best way to think about literary publications is as part of a larger ecosystem of ideas,” said Paul J. Pastor, senior acquisitions editor at Zondervan, in an interview.

“Any ecologist will tell you that the resilience and vibrancy of an ecosystem depends on the ‘little’ guys just as much as—and sometimes more than—the ‘big’ guys,” explained Pastor. “Just like in a forest, where the ‘keystone species’ holding an ecosystem is often a type of creature overlooked or invisible to most people, so there is a specific and important contribution of the small literary publication that may well be essential and irreplaceable—and only fully seen by the wider collapses that follow when it goes away.”

Without that hindsight, though, institutional support for this kind of community can be a tough sell in the church. A literary magazine may not bring in new converts or keep the church lights on. Why should we financially support work that doesn’t have quantifiable, utilitarian value?

Most succinctly, we should do it to foster a vibrant and beautiful culture in the church. God has embedded a hunger for beauty in the human spirit, and God’s own interest in beauty is evident in his Word. We see it in the artistic call of Bezalel to weave pomegranates with red, purple, and blue thread onto the robes worn into the Holy of Holies (Ex. 28:31–35; 35:30–35); in the masterful poetic structure of the Psalms; in the epic language of apocalypse and prophecy.

As Christians, it is our responsibility to be aware of how we are satiating our hunger for beauty. Are we developing a taste for what is good and an aversion to the acrid flavor of evil? Are we more influenced by beauty that orients us to the strange and unexpected work of God in the world—or by political slogans and self-help books?

The power of the small literary magazine is in its ability to confront us with new ideas, to expand our palates to the overlooked, the strange, the serendipitous, the delightful. This will never be very measurable, but that does not make it unnecessary. “The contributions of ‘small’ writers and literary publications are immense, but their influence can be difficult to trace,” Pastor told me. “You can’t know how an image or idea developed in a poem or short story may awaken something in a reader who, years later, will write or paint or talk or sculpt it out, perhaps for an audience of millions, perhaps just for one person whose life may be saved, and in turn—who knows?”

“But,” he added, “what such artists need, what such a movement needs, always, is a passionate and supportive audience.”

Groundbreaking storytelling requires backing and bulwarks. In the mid-20th century, that looked like “grants, residencies, affiliations, and academic positions.” In the Renaissance, it was elite patronage. Perhaps now, we need a new model to make room for what Anne Snyder, editor of Comment, in an interview called “the necessary wrestling with tougher stuff: arguments, substantive debates, being unafraid to be political when necessary, the hard calls that choosing the Jesus Way necessitates … a combination of cultural chutzpah and a delight in the imago Dei.”

That may seem like a daunting or even risky proposition, but Pastor is hopeful. “There is a new generation producing absolutely remarkable work,” he said, “and while the organizations that support us are fragile, it has always been that way.” A century from now, he predicted, ours will be remembered “as a renewal moment in Christian literature. And all of us get to participate in it.”

The ceaseless work of creation, education, and tending to the depths of the human spirit will continue. But we can advance it with bold and creative institutions tasked with bridging image and word, mind and spirit, for the sake of the church.

Humans will satisfy this hunger for beauty one way or another. As God’s people, we should host the feast.

Conor Sweetman is the director of innovation and collaboration at Christianity Today and editor of Ekstasis.

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Books

Review

Why Defend Your Faith If You Live in the World’s Most Christian Continent?

Agnes Makau

Apologetics in Africa offers resources to both believers and skeptics where the church remains largely unequipped to respond to attacks on their faith.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

For most Africans, there is no dichotomy between sacred and secular realms. While this holistic approach to life has great merits, it can also serve as a sponge, soaking up all kinds of spirituality. Christian apologetics acts as a gate to lock out syncretism and false teachings.

Apologetics in Africa: An Introduction

Kevin Muriithi Ndereba (Editor)

404 pages

$26.93

As 1 Peter 3:15–16 reminds us, we should be prepared to defend the faith while “keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.” In other words, apologetics is a gentle conversation about faith, not a fight to be won. Apologetics in Africa: An Introduction offers answers to both believers and skeptics on a continent where Christians remain largely unequipped to respond to attacks on the faith they embrace.

This is by no means the first book on apologetics in Africa, but it is long overdue, distinguished by the diverse authors’ unique perspectives on selected topics in apologetics. In a continent where the danger of syncretism is very real, effective apologetics is desperately needed, not just as an academic topic but in the daily lives of believers.

Hailing from Kenya, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria, and Uganda, the contributors to Apologetics in Africa approach Christianity as a faith that has been widely accepted throughout the continent but requires contextualization. These 16 essays on cultural and practical issues give direction for the integration of faith and life in the African Christian church, which has been influenced by African traditional beliefs, colonization, Western thought, and contemporary global trends. (Despite its title, the book primarily speaks to issues in sub-Saharan Africa, and all of its contributors hail from Anglophone countries.)

Christian theology in the African context must be complemented by apologetics, because believers need a faith they can explain. Moreover, faith grows when it is open to examination. Therefore, apologetics can be considered a crucial subset of African theology, and this work rises to the task—even though it is modestly titled an “introduction,” as an invitation to further discussion. After all, the task of apologetics never ends.

The historical plot

The Kenyan gospel musician and apologist Reuben Kigame wrote, “Christian apologetics has its deepest roots in North Africa.” In a way, this book is revisiting the topic of apologetics in Africa after a long hiatus, but with a focus on contemporary issues. Suitably, editor Kevin Muriithi Ndereba, the head of practical theology at St. Paul’s University in Kenya, opens Apologetics in Africa by looking back to Augustine, Tertullian, and others who lived in North Africa when the “default mode of missions” was apologetics.

Ndereba describes apologetics as multidisciplinary and as a beneficiary of other disciplines—which is an important observation because the questions people ask about faith are not confined to a particular category. When an academic curriculum includes a course on apologetics, it is typically an upper-level course. That’s because students need a strong reservoir of background information to enable interdisciplinary integration in their work on apologetics.

The book’s arrangement into four issue categories (biblical, philosophical, cultural, and practical) implies the development of a wide-ranging discourse that can guide scholars and others engaging in African apologetics. Of course, biblical issues are a good place to start, because there can be no defense of the Christian faith without a biblical foundation. In that section, Kenyan New Testament scholar Elizabeth Mburu’s article “Is the Bible Reliable? Biblical Criticism and Hermeneutics in Africa” is particularly well articulated. Mburu’s approach combines two perspectives—classical questions and contextualized hermeneutics—for the purpose of a believer’s transformation.

Pertinent doctrinal topics for a diverse Africa

Africa is a diverse continent with 54 countries, more than 3,000 tribes, and enormous variations in cultural beliefs and practices. Accordingly, though African readers may find areas of commonality in this book, they will also need to reflect theologically on their unique interests and contexts in order to engage in apologetics effectively.

In the face of this cultural diversity, it is imperative for African believers to understand some key biblical doctrines to build a firm foundation for their inferences. To me, three doctrines stand out as particularly central. The first is well covered in this book, the other two less so.

Christology

This key topic, especially the person of Christ, does not have close parallels in African traditional belief systems. But as South African theologian Robert Falconer writes in his chapter “An African Apologetics for the Resurrection,” the historical truth and reliability of Christ’s resurrection is what makes Christianity worthy of our exclusive affiliation.

In an application of Christology to an African cultural context, Ndereba contributes a chapter on “The Doctrine of Christ and Traditional Eldership Rites: mbũrĩ cia kiama.” Mbũrĩ cia kiama can be translated as “goats for the council.” The term refers to the traditional Gikuyu practice in which a man who has qualified for the status of eldership gives goats to the council of elders.

Ndereba commends this tradition for recognizing the value of mentorship but also raises a dilemma: How should Christians approach the practice? Do African Christians still need to perform animal sacrifices in order to take status and responsibility seriously? How can they align that practice with Christ’s redemptive sacrifice? The process of contextualization cannot simply imbue African traditional practices with Christian significance, because their meanings may not align.

Christian apologists in Africa should examine their own culture closely and discern appropriate analogies for their setting. However, converts to Christianity should be taught the whole counsel of God even where there are no obvious similarities to their culture.

It is common for authors contextualizing their theology in Africa to highlight aspects of Christology that find similarities in African traditional beliefs—mostly the work of Christ—and shy away from unfamiliar concepts such as the person of Christ. Yet the doctrine of the person of Christ is central to Christianity and attracts key apologetic questions: How can God have a son? Does Christianity have more than one God? How can three gods be one? How can Jesus be both human and God?

When we are explaining the person of Christ, adaptations of or analogies to African traditional beliefs are inadequate and must be referenced with a disclaimer. Here are two examples.

Christ as the ancestor: Christ is often presented in this way in Africa because he is the mediator between Christians and the God of the Bible. But Christ is also God himself, and he is alive, whereas the ancestors are considered the “living dead.” Furthermore, we can communicate with God through Christ, but communication with or through African ancestors would be considered divination and therefore unbiblical.
Christ as an elder (or elder brother): As Ndereba appropriately explains, the position of an elder in Africa has historically been a significant role. But many of those considered elders today may not attract as much honor as previously; moreover, many in the younger generation are detached from their traditional background and need different analogies they can relate to. Additionally, in African tradition, the elder brother is considered equal to the father, and he takes over the father’s responsibilities in differing degrees depending on the community. But the analogy between Christ and the eldest brother would not be pleasing to all African Christians, as its impact would be influenced by people’s experiences. Many elder brothers are enemies to family progress, and Christ does not fit that description!

Pneumatology

Whereas Christology receives thoughtful treatment throughout the book, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit (pneumatology) does not receive prominent attention in the biblical issues section. It would have been a useful addition, as this doctrine has been abused in church and cultic circles, or sometimes unfortunately neglected.

In some instances, people struggle to discern the difference between demon possession and the power of the Holy Spirit. This problem has made the whole topic of spiritual warfare difficult for most African Christians, and many of them trek from church to church looking for a prophet to rescue them. As a result, these believers are living in bondage, not liberation. There is a pressing need to discuss the person and work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of African believers, so as to distinguish it from the role of demons and other spirits as understood in traditional African beliefs.

Ecclesiology

With regard to the doctrine of the church, important issues arise when African Christians try to align their practices on church ordinances with the ways in which African communities have traditionally recognized rites of passage such as birth, puberty, death, and burial.

One rite of passage this book does scrutinize is marriage, especially the cultural practices involved with it. As Zimbabwean theologian Primrose Muyambo explains in her chapter, African dowry practices (known as lobola) can easily cause Christians to compromise their faith, since marriage is considered a huge milestone in an individual’s life and becomes a status symbol within the community.

Although lobola may affirm the value of women, in modern Africa it has become materialistic, often causing bitterness and conflicts. Muyambo points out that parents of educated young women are demanding large amounts of money or expensive items such as houses, water tanks, or cellphones as dowry payments. Due to the high costs, some couples have resorted to cohabitation, despite the church’s opposition. The African church must align this rite of passage with Christian practices so as to help parents adapt and to support young Christian couples who seek to marry.

Similar problems arise around other rites of passage not discussed in this book. Since some church ordinances seem mysterious in their symbolic meaning and could appear to have parallels to traditional African rites of passage, magic, and occultism, addressing these matters is crucial for African apologetics. Church leaders must identify primary areas where compromise of one’s faith can occur due to cultural demands and contemporary worldviews, because syncretism is thriving in the African church and creating major apologetics dilemmas. Believers need biblical principles that enable them to know what to discard and what they can appropriately transfer from their culture to Christianity. Ugandan pastor Rodgers Atwebembeire’s chapter “Apologetics and Cults in Africa” demonstrates what is happening too often and provides a warning for the danger that Christianity in Africa faces if the church is not established on sound doctrine.

Overall, despite the noted omissions, this book should encourage further research and reflection on practical apologetics issues in Africa. (It would be wonderful if the book also sparked the development of more accessible and affordable apologetics resources as well.) The authors’ contributions are an antidote to intellectual and emotional barriers to faith, and the contextualizing approach to hermeneutics prepares believers to give an answer for the faith they profess in their contemporary cultural setting.

Agnes Makau is dean of the School of Theology at Scott Christian University in Machakos, Kenya.

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Books

Review

Why Defend Your Faith if You Live on the World’s Most Christian Continent?

Agnes Makau

Apologetics in Africa offers resources to both believers and skeptics where the church remains largely unequipped to respond to attacks on their faith.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

Apologetics in Africa: An Introduction

Kevin Muriithi Ndereba (Editor)

404 pages

$26.93

The historical plot

Pertinent doctrinal topics for a diverse Africa

Christology

When we are explaining the person of Christ, adaptations of or analogies to African traditional beliefs are inadequate and must be referenced with a disclaimer. Here are two examples.

Christ as the ancestor: Christ is often presented in this way in Africa because he is the mediator between Christians and the God of the Bible. But Christ is also God himself, and he is alive, whereas the ancestors are considered the “living dead.” Furthermore, we can communicate with God through Christ, but communication with or through African ancestors would be considered divination and therefore unbiblical.
Christ as an elder (or elder brother): As Ndereba appropriately explains, the position of an elder in Africa has historically been a significant role. But many of those considered elders today may not attract as much honor as previously; moreover, many in the younger generation are detached from their traditional background and need different analogies they can relate to. Additionally, in African tradition, the elder brother is considered equal to the father, and he takes over the father’s responsibilities in differing degrees depending on the community. But the analogy between Christ and the eldest brother would not be pleasing to all African Christians, as its impact would be influenced by people’s experiences. Many elder brothers are enemies to family progress, and Christ does not fit that description!

Pneumatology

Ecclesiology

Agnes Makau is dean of the School of Theology at Scott Christian University in Machakos, Kenya.

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Theology

The Book of Job Gives Us Good News for an Unfair World

Ellie M. Wiener

The book reminds us that life is unjust, but so is the gospel of God’s grace.

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

Life is unfair, and that is a problem.

All humans seem to have an “unfairness radar” that goes off whenever we encounter senseless injustice. From trite examples provoking our frustration, such as someone cutting us in line, to those that deeply grieve us, like a young mother of three fighting terminal cancer, we mourn with an acute sense that the world is not as it should be. Or consider unfairness on a global scale, as the news barrages us with unrelenting reports of armed conflicts and natural disasters—as we struggle to register the staggering counts of individual lives upended or ended by relentless forces of harm.

Last year, a terrorist attack by Hamas in Israel killed 1,200 unsuspecting people and made another 253 people hostages, followed now by over 31,000 reported deaths and an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In the same year, a series of earthquakes in Turkey and Syria killed nearly 60,000 people, injuring and displacing millions more. This is not to mention the over 3 million COVID-induced deaths, which have been reported globally in the few years since the pandemic sent the entire world into a frenzy. And the fallout of these events will continue to reverberate throughout bereaved and unsettled communities for a very long time.

We often cope with injustices by looking away and medicating with distractions, since sustained eye contact with misfortune is uncomfortable. Or we may—sometimes rightly, sometimes self-righteously—angrily blame the various parties involved, desperately trying to account for the unaccountable. We are gratified when any positive changes result, yet we are also aware of how powerless we are to reverse the diagnosis, divert the bullet’s path, or end the suffering across the sea.

And in all this, we wrestle with a God who could have intervened but did not.

According to a 2021 Pew Research Center study, conducted in light of the coronavirus outbreak and other tragedies, over 60 percent of American adults had given thought within the past year to “big questions such as the meaning of life, whether there is any purpose to suffering and why terrible things happen to people.” For millennia, difficult circumstances have led people to ask questions about the nature of the Being responsible for the nature of reality as we experience it.

How could an infinitely powerful and thoroughly good Creator God be governing this world, as the Bible claims, when the world seems to be in such a messy state? Especially when those who are innocent and faithful to him suffer inexplicably? At the very least, shouldn’t God spare them from the unfair arithmetic of having good things subtracted and bad things added to their lives?

As formidable as these questions are, I am heartened to know the Bible takes them seriously and refuses to offer tediously thin answers. In fact, the Book of Job confronts the issue of unfairness head-on, and with admirable honesty. Rather than abashedly apologizing for an incompetent deity, it boldly commends a tenacious trust in the Creator of this good yet groaning world. And in the process, it points ahead to the figure of Jesus as God’s ultimate answer to the question of unfairness.

Many of us are familiar with the book’s premise: Job is the paragon of piety, living with genuine allegiance to God and enjoying a superlative level of flourishing (1:1–5). However, he is suddenly struck with a comprehensive loss of his wealth, children, and health—“without any reason” (2:3). Two chapters in, the rattled reader surveys the once rich yet still righteous Job, now sitting alone with torn clothes on an ash heap, miserably scraping the boils off his skin with a broken piece of pottery.

In this way, the book deliberately sets up an abrasively incongruous situation: What happens if the most righteous person imaginable is subjected to the most devastating suffering imaginable—just short of losing his very life? Is living in allegiance to God worthwhile amid such baffling, offensive unfairness? What does it take to sustain gritty trust in God when it seems he’s abandoned you?

After Job’s stalwart initial responses to his calamities (1:20–21; 2:10), three of his friends come to comfort him, at first sitting by in sympathetic silence (2:11–13). And then the verbal floodgates open. As the four of them launch into protracted debate cycles (3–27), the dialogue devolves into futility and animosity as Job’s friends have no room to be mystified by his plight. Surely, they contend, actions and consequences exhibit reliable correspondence. Do good, and you get good; do bad, and you get bad. It only seems fair, right?

They think Job’s woes indicate that his character must be compromised by some secret sin, and that he would be restored if he would only make a penitent return to God. Their rigid paradigm for how God orders the world lends them a neat explanation for suffering and a guaranteed way out.

But Job is far from convinced. Like the reader, he knows that he has done nothing to deserve this suffering. There is no explaining away the unfairness. Hovering on the brink of death, Job rails against God, whom he regards as responsible for his anguish and for allowing such a breakdown of justice in the world. In his experience, it feels as if God is rushing on him like an attacking warrior, piercing him with arrows and slashing him open (6:4; 16:6–17; 19:6–12).

These are raw, audacious words of accusation. But for all his brash speech, Job is no angry atheist. He addresses God persistently and directly, refusing to turn his back on him—even as he vacillates violently between despairing of an adequate response from God and confidently anticipating it. After all, where else could an ostensibly God-forsaken God-fearer turn but to God himself?

Eventually, Job’s friends’ attempts to make sense of his plight are exhausted, and Job seems to be more frustrated and alienated than he was before. His longing for God’s voice to enter the fray has become unbearable. And, at long last, after 37 restive yet disorienting chapters, God answers from the whirlwind (38:1; 40:6). Evidently, God’s silence did not mean either absence or apathy since it’s clear he had indeed been listening all along. His eloquent speech borrows language from the human debates but cuts through their impasse with his reorienting perspective.

Yet God’s answer to Job is surprising and may even seem callous and irrelevant. Feeling no need to excuse or explain why Job is suffering, God instead launches into soaring poetry. He rebukes Job for speaking beyond what he understands in a way that maligns God’s way of sustaining and governing his world (38:2). God then paints a portrait of his creation, which is emphatically brimming with life and masterfully superintended by his benevolence. And he underscores how humans, with their narrowness of comprehension and control, are vastly inadequate to be gods over such a creation.

The Creator has crafted the sort of world where boisterous animals can frolic freely (38:39–39:30) and rain falls even on desolate land where no one lives (38:25–27). And although this world contains forces of chaos, far too wily for humans to handle, they are ever under God’s thumb (38:8–11; 41:8–11). Indeed, God reliably secures order and justice in his world—banishing the wicked with morning light as effortlessly as one shakes out the folds of a garment (38:12–15; 40:10–14).

What has all this poetic whimsy to do with Job?

In his perplexity and pain, Job had extrapolated something about the character of God based on his experience, imagining a deity who could be malevolently capricious toward him and the world. Yet God challenges that presumption: Is Job really in a position to indict God, dictate the terms of their encounter, and demand that God justify his suffering? Dispelling any delusion of entitlement, God makes abundantly clear that he is responsive but not coercible. And rather than letting our human experiences interpret God’s character, God invites us to flip the script.

In other words, the Creator is wise, sovereign, good, and just. That is the starting point. As his creatures, humans are simply not privy to everything he knows and does. God allows the mystery of his comprehensive design and hidden activity to persist, when all we can see from our vantage point is the unfairness of a given circumstance.

So the crisis of decision for the boil-covered, ash-bound Job hovers in the air as he is left to answer the same questions that unfairness surfaces for all of us: Are we (still) willing to trust God when he tells us he is not accountable to us? Can we be satisfied with the assurance that God knows what we cannot understand and governs what we cannot control?

Job is. Now “seeing” God for himself, Job has been satiated by God’s answer (42:1–6). As Bill and Will Kynes write, “In the midst of such a personal struggle we don’t need a theology seminar, we need a word from God himself. Job felt personally betrayed by the treatment he was receiving, and more than anything, he longed to meet with God.” In the end, the bracing “realness” of an encounter with God, who shows up for his servant, is the only thing capable of lifting Job from desolation to renewed hope and trust.

But then something else, quite unexpected, happens: God beckons Job to pray for his three friends so that God’s dangerously hot anger toward them may be quelled (42:7–9). But—the disgruntled reader protests—how can God possibly expect Job to intercede for these conspicuously un-interceding friends who deserve judgment for their failure of friendship toward their suffering companion? And can God’s mercy, mediated by his suffering servant Job, actually accomplish justice?

Apparently, it can. Job prays for his friends, and, because of his obedience and God’s favor toward him, they are spared. And then, in a stunning sweep of divine mercy—while Job is still in the process of interceding for his friends and securing their forgiveness—God restores Job’s fortunes, leaving him with “more than” what he had at the beginning (42:9–17).

As it turns out, grace is also unfair. Or, rather, grace at first seems unfair to humans who assume that the world works based on you-get-what-you-deserve logic. Actually, grace is the ordinary fabric, the natural operating system, of an existence designed and inhabited by the God of superabundant generosity.

Journeying with Job from chapters 1 to 42, I cannot help but sense the theological inertia of the entire book moving inexorably toward Jesus, the ultimate righteous sufferer, consummate friend who intercedes, and God’s decisive answer to all injustice. But while a virtuous Job suffered unwittingly, just short of death, through no fault of his own—thinking God had become his enemy—the perfectly righteous and blameless Jesus knowingly walked into the forsakenness of a sinner’s death, through only the fault of our own.

Jesus was not merely a man who prayed for his failing friends—he is the Son of God who died for friends whose failure had earned their death. God himself bore the crushing unfairness of our death so that he can be eternally “unfair” in his grace toward us by giving us life we could never demand or deserve.

In the end, Job’s solace was God himself—being satisfied by God’s long-awaited answer, by “seeing” him (42:5). In the same way, Jesus is the One who answers humanity with his very presence with us and for us. Our soul-deep solace is seeing the God who answers unfairness by climbing inside it, dying because of it, and transforming it by his resurrection to hand it back to us as his grace.

Without minimizing what remains harrowingly unfair in this world, Jesus addresses it by arranging the unjust discrepancy of his innocent suffering to be our only hope. Alongside Job, we struggle with pain and loss that defy human calculus—but then again, divine generosity also confounds our math. Why should the Creator send showers on a wasteland (Job 38:25–27) and on the unjust (Matt. 5:45)? Why should the Father send his willing Son to save rebellious sinners?

When we grapple with inexplicable suffering in our lives, we want a “Why?”—but like Job, what we really need more than anything is a “Who.” We need to see God answering us with himself in the person of Jesus. And because he already has, when our hearts cry out with longing to see him with our own eyes, we can be assured that in due time, we too will behold our God and end up somewhere inconceivably “more than” where we started (1 Pet. 1:3–9; 5:10).

Ellie Wiener is currently working on a dissertation on the Book of Job as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge.

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News

Record-Setting Betting Weighs on College Athletes

Emily Belz

As players face new pressures from bettors upset with their performance, chaplains in the NCAA are trying to help students remember their imago Dei.

Iowa's Caitlin Clark dribbles in the women's college basketball championship against South Carolina. The game drew record-breaking bets.

Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

The odds are bringing little favor to college athletes, who are facing more pressure over their performance from bettors.

South Carolina’s defeat of Iowa for the women’s NCAA championship on Sunday drew record-breaking betting numbers. BetMGM announced that the game had drawn the most bets of any women’s sporting event ever.

Last year, bettors placed more than $15 billion in bets on the men’s college basketball tournament, according to the American Gaming Association. A major weight on players are prop bets, which are usually bets on details of an individual’s performance—like the number of rebounds from Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark.

The NCAA estimates that a third of student athletes have been harassed by bettors. It has raised alarms and now is examining how betting and social media more broadly affect student athletes’ wellbeing.

“Indirectly, I think players notice that. They may hear it from a fan walking off the court,” said Roger Lipe, who ministers to college coaches and players through Nations of Coaches and is chaplain for the Southern Illinois University men’s basketball team. Lipe was at the Final Four women’s games over the weekend and the concurrent coach’s conference in Cleveland, Ohio.

In his 30 years of ministry, a conversation on gambling was often a part of preseason meetings. Betting on sports has been happening for a long time, legal or not, Lipe pointed out.

But the legalization of mobile sports betting in states across the country means that it’s much easier for fans to bet, and less taboo. Chaplains have to adapt, Lipe said.

In his work, Lipe does book studies with coaching staff, goes to practices, and prays with anyone before or after a game. He notices that student athletes are feeling more like commodities, and said those in ministry can counter that feeling with trusting relationships.

“When I’m talking with players on the floor, I’m almost never talking with them about results,” Lipe said. “Performance, yep, that’s part of who you are. But you are more than that. What kind of friend are you? … What kind of pressure are you dealing with this week?”

March Madness drew some attention to the harassment that college athletes have experienced, especially in regard to prop bets. Purdue center Zach Edey told The Athletic that people asked him to send them money on Venmo for their lost bets on him.

In the midst of the tournament, the NCAA announced that it would be lobbying states across the country to ban prop bets “to protect student-athletes from harassment and … to protect the integrity of the game.” Louisiana state officials announced a ban on prop bets during the tournament.

“You want to say you’re mature enough and it doesn’t bother you,” Duke basketball player Ryan Young told The News & Observer in March. “But that stuff gets to you.”

Some athletes have been charged with betting on games themselves. But mental health experts told CT that only a small percentage of athletes have problems with gambling. The bigger issue is the psychological burden that betting adds to student athletes focused on their performance.

“It’s one of those invisible weights they carry … whether they’re actively thinking about it or not,” said Brian Smith, who works with the nationwide sports ministry Athletes in Action.

Timothy Fong, a psychiatrist and the codirector of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, would like to see more chaplains and churches be involved in supporting athletes through these pressures. He also sees from his work that athletes are feeling more like “a stock, a commodity.”

Fong said athletes might be more willing to talk about their problems with a trusted spiritual leader than with a medical provider like him. For that reason, he urges chaplains to “educate themselves about the world of gambling, what impact it can have on [students’] bodies, brains, and minds.”

“When you start asking, then they start talking about it,” Fong said. “If you didn’t ask, they don’t bring it up. … They might not realize it’s leading to their depression, anxiety, and burnout.”

Fong has seen the vitriol toward athletes over lost bets in the chat section of one sports app he checks for scores, and he’s heard about it from student athletes who come to him for care.

“It sometimes gets pretty nasty,” said Fong. “The athletes I work with … they say, ‘It just sits inside me.’”

Smith from Athletes in Action wants sports ministry staff to focus on teaching students their value as image bearers of God—the opposite of a commodity. LSU star Angel Reese brought that to mind when she said about getting harassed online, “I’m still a human.” Smith suggests some kind of “made in the image of God” campaign.

He also said Christian athletes can look out for their teammates, who may be experiencing pressure over their performances and prop betting.

There’s “a biblical ethic to look out for people who are being treated poorly,” he said.

One issue with chaplains building deep relationships and trust with players is that there is more turnover on teams than there used to be. NCAA changes in the last few years mean athletes can now enter the “transfer portal” and change programs without the penalty of sitting out a season or more. That means top teams are made up of a lot of transfer students poached from lesser programs.

As a result of student athletes moving schools more often, chaplains may have less time with them. Linsey Smith, staff care director for Athletes in Action and a chaplain to a women’s pro volleyball team herself, thinks that college chaplains should learn more from pro sports chaplains who are always working with athletes who might leave at any moment.

“The time you get to develop an athlete, instill your team values in them, and shape the culture of your team is now so truncated,” she said. “If [athletes are] unsatisfied, they put themselves in the transfer portal and they’re gone,” which is tough if a coach is “trying to create a norm.”

Student athletes now also have the option of pulling in name, image, likeness money on their personal brand, a reason many transfer to bigger and better programs. But that often means having a big social media presence to build their brand, which exposes them to more harassment. Fong has seen some athletes opt out of social media altogether for their own sanity.

Lipe, the longtime chaplain to athletes and coaches, thinks harassment of students from gambling is just one of several challenges for college sports right now. He heard little from coaches at the Final Four about sports betting because they’ve accepted it as an element of the game they can’t control.

“It’s one thing for us in sports ministry to bark at it if we have a moral issue with gambling,” he said. “That’s the environment we’re given. So we have to serve well in light of that environment.”

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News

After Taiwan’s Powerful Earthquake, Christian Aid Groups Work to Rebuild Lives

Angela Lu Fulton

On an island where Buddhist disaster relief is prominent, Christians work with churches to care for children and families.

A person walks past an area of a damaged building following an earthquake in Taiwan.

Annabelle Chih / Stringer / Getty / Edits by CT

When a 7.4 magnitude earthquake hit the east coast of Taiwan Wednesday morning, Carissa Wang, branding communication director of World Vision Taiwan, was on the Taipei subway on her way to work. She felt the carriage sway more than usual, and then it stopped at the next station as an announcement alerted passengers that service had ended due to an earthquake.

Wang and her World Vision colleagues immediately began putting disaster relief protocols into action, assembling their emergency team and reaching out to local government officials to coordinate relief at evacuation centers. World Vision social workers also began to contact the 3,000 sponsored children and their families in the epicenter of Hualien to make sure they were safe and find out if they needed help.

Wednesday’s quake was the worst to hit Taiwan in 25 years, damaging buildings and causing landslides. Images from Hualien, a city on the country’s east coast, showed a red brick building leaning at a 45-degree angle after its first floor collapsed. Large rocks tumbled down the side of mountains and blocked roads into the tourist destination of Taroko Gorge, trapping people at a hotel.

Yet Hualien sustained surprisingly little damage for an earthquake of such magnitude. As of Monday, 13 people had died, and only one of them was killed due to building damage. Most of the others were hit by falling rocks. Ten people are still missing and more than 1,000 were injured.

The low loss of life is attributed to Taiwan’s earthquake preparedness, as the government improved and reinforced building codes after a deadly earthquake in 1999 killed 2,400 people. Public education on earthquakes is widespread, and disaster relief groups are well-trained and respond quickly. Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organizations in Taiwan, said that within 30 minutes of the quake, it had set up a service center to pass out blankets and emergency financial aid.

Although Christians make up less than 5 percent of the population, Christian aid groups including World Vision Taiwan, Mustard Seed Mission, and 1919 Food Bank have an outsized influence on disaster relief. The groups each have their niche and are working side by side to care for the victims. Groups like Tzu Chi and Red Cross Taiwan specialize in rescue and immediate relief, while Christian groups are more focused on caring for children and families in the impacted area, dealing with the emotional trauma of the quake, and reaching indigenous villages where they have existing relationships.

Through this collaboration, “evacuees have a place to stay, and those of us from Christian groups can accompany them and pray,” said Jeffrey Lee, CEO of Mustard Seed Mission. “Our role in this earthquake aftermath is that we seek the emotional stability of the children and the elderly.”

Working together in the shelters

After the earthquake, staff at the Hualien branch of 1919 Food Bank, part of the Chinese Christian Relief Association, drove to the most impacted area and got in touch with their government contacts. They then helped set up evacuation centers at a school, a park, and a gymnasium.

The evacuation shelters demonstrated how the relief groups worked together. Tzu Chi, which is headquartered in Hualien, quickly brought in temporary beds and set up four-walled tents without a roof to provide privacy for the evacuees. The organization came up with the idea for these privacy barriers after a magnitude 6.2 earthquake hit Hualien in 2018, killing 17. The Red Cross provided tents, food, water, and other necessities.

Due to their experience running a food bank, 1919 was tasked with collecting and distributing donated food and water as well as bringing in their mobile kitchen to make food for victims and frontline workers. Samuel Chang, director of the 1919 Food Bank, said that staff filled in wherever needed: Some helped check people in or provided power banks for people needing to charge their cell phones, while others comforted and prayed for people who arrived frightened and distraught.

In the shelters, World Vision set up children’s care centers, where staff worked to calm and distract traumatized children through activities such as singing and drawing, Wang said. They also helped watch the kids as parents returned to pack up belongings from homes deemed unsafe to live in.

Members of Mustard Seed Mission, a Christian community development nonprofit, sought to help aid workers by providing massages. Lee noted that many of them are exhausted and themselves impacted by the earthquake but because of their job, they can’t show that they’re scared. The masseuses not only relieved their physical tensions but served as friendly listeners, providing counsel and comfort.

The nonprofit has a vocational training center in Hualien, which it opened up for the government to place evacuees who need special care—for instance, the elderly or families with young children—and for whom the center’s dormitory is more comfortable than a school auditorium. Every day, Mustard Seed houses and feeds about 60 people.

Learning from Buddhist counterparts

Chang of 1919 (which in Chinese is a homophone for “need help”) observed that there are things Christian groups can learn from Tzu Chi, a group rooted in humanistic Buddhism. Master Cheng Yen, a Buddhist nun in Taiwan, founded the organization in 1966 in response to the suffering of the impoverished community where she lived. Three Catholic nuns visited Cheng, and as they discussed their religions, they asked her why Buddhists weren’t setting up nursing homes, orphanages, and hospitals if their religion teaches love and compassion for all living beings. Convicted, she began collecting donations for the poor and needy.

Today, the international humanitarian group claims to have 10 million members active in 100 countries and territories around the world, engaging in medical aid, environmental protection, and disaster relief.

In Taiwan, Tzu Chi is the most prominent relief group and are experts at what they do, said Chang. Most impressive is their ability to mobilize their members to donate and volunteer when disasters occur. He’s found that, when working alongside Tzu Chi members at a disaster site, they are always willing to take the most thankless and menial jobs—like cleaning the bathroom—whereas sometimes Christians are less willing to do so.

Chang believes the different groups complement each other well. To accommodate their religious dietary restrictions, 1919 prepares vegetarian meals for the Buddhist Tzu Chi volunteers. Tzu Chi has also invited 1919 leaders to meet with their monks to coordinate disaster response among the indigenous groups, many of whom are Christians and have closer connections to Christians organizations.

Lee agrees: “Even though we come from different faiths, in this circumstance, it’s a great match as we care for these people.”

Encountering God in the disaster

Most of the Christian groups’ work occurs outside of the immediate rescue and relief efforts, among the children and families whom they typically serve. To do that well, they often partner with the local church, which can better gauge a community’s needs, said Chang. “The church is local, they know every family and they know every neighbor’s needs,” he said.

The organization works with about 1,500 churches in Taiwan (one-third of the total number nationwide), helping to set up food banks and afterschool centers and to provide financial assistance. After the earthquake, 1919 reached out to partner churches to find needs that they can assist with. For instance, they are working on a partnership with IKEA to provide furniture to some of the earthquake victims, as well as replacing televisions or water tanks to help families return to normalcy.

“We hope that through these social services, they can see the values of our faith and the comfort that our faith can bring in their trials,” Chang said. “We hope that through the gospel and caring for their welfare, they can encounter God even in the midst of this disaster.”

World Vision and Mustard Seed both arrange sponsorships for children in impoverished communities and work in community development. World Vision staff visited their sponsored children to check the structural integrity of their homes and to determine whether repairs are needed. They found that about 180 of their families in Hualien have been impacted by the earthquake, either because the family’s home is unsafe to live in or because the parents lost their jobs.

World Vision is also involved in rebuilding the children’s confidence and security, especially since the region experienced more than 400 aftershocks following the big quake. In communities where resources are already limited, getting people back to normal life is even more important to ensure that kids stay in school and income remains stable.

“In terms of water and food, there is enough as the people of Taiwan are full of love,” Wang said. “But what we need to work on is rebuilding the homes, dealing with the children’s trauma, and quickly returning them to their ordinary lives.”

Providing aid to indigenous groups

Another focus of Mustard Seed, founded by American missionary Lillian Dickson after World War II, is on Taiwan’s indigenous people, who often live in remote mountainous areas. About 70 percent of indigenous people in Taiwan are believers, as many were receptive to the gospel shared by foreign missionaries due to the ostracism they had suffered from the Japanese and ethnic Hans in the lowlands.

After the Hualien earthquake, landslides along curving mountain roads blocked access to some of these indigenous villages. Because Mustard Seed partners with these churches, they were able to quickly find out where the needs were. On Friday, Lee said that one village told them they were running low on food and clean water, so staff loaded up a truck with 70 food packs and about 850 water bottles to deliver to them. Suddenly it started to rain, causing concern about the road conditions.

So they switched gears and decided instead to bring the aid by train. They asked the railway authorities if they could pack the goods onto the train car, and the authorities agreed. About a dozen people hauled the food packs and water onto the train, and when they reached the station near the tribal village, strangers helped them move the goods off the train. Villagers met them at the station and brought the supplies the rest of the way.

“Because we have the same Christian faith, it’s very natural for us to trust each other during this rescue process,” he said.

Long-term, all the Christian groups intend to prioritize dealing with the emotional and mental health of those affected by the quake. Many of the families in Hualien had to repair their homes after the 2018 earthquake, only to have another large-scale earthquake hit six years later, said Chang. As many live in fear of the next earthquake, he believes the church can play a role in providing counseling to locals. He’s looking for Christian counselors to go to Hualien and provide these services through the church. Mustard Seed is seeing similar needs and also recruiting counseling students and teachers from Taiwan’s seminaries to help families in Hualien. “Even for nonbelievers, prayer and professional consultation can calm emotions after trauma,” Lee said. “We hope to provide for not only their physical needs but also for their psychological stability.”

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

Church Life

Would Jesus Overturn Your Board Table?

Stacy Kassulke

I served on the RZIM board. Christians in many leadership roles can learn from my failures.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

The room was hot, and I stared at the pristine white table in front of me, being careful not to lift my eyes, my muscles tense. To my left were members of the International Board of Directors of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), seated at the table and joining on video. To my right were lawyers. One of them was preparing to read to us the 12-page report of a months-long investigation into sexual assault allegations regarding the ministry’s founder, Ravi Zacharias.

The tension was palpable. The boardroom seemed too dim, although that suited the mood; some of us weren’t ready for bright lights.

My experience as an RZIM board member would completely change the way I view ministry today. I believe many ministry boards are broken—or at least deeply unprepared for the challenges they may face—and my aim is to start a conversation on how that can be remedied.

When I speak of “boards,” I’m using the term broadly. You and people you know may not serve on the board of an internationally known nonprofit, like RZIM at its peak. But you may serve on your congregation’s elder board, as a deacon, or as a member of the vestry or the pastoral search committee. You may advise your children’s Christian school or informally help steer a local food bank or the Sunday School planning committee at church.

The hard lessons I learned will be applicable to almost any kind of group leadership arrangement, especially in ministry contexts but also more broadly. That said, specific needs and circumstances will vary, so I’m sharing my lessons as questions that Christians in board leadership should seriously ask themselves and their colleagues.

1. Should board members be required to engage in continuing education?

Not only was I ill-equipped to be a board member, I was unprepared for the onslaught of crises that would engulf the ministry throughout my short tenure. From what I observed, even the longtime board members were unprepared for what seemed like “unprecedented times”—the catch phrase during those years.

Looking back, one problem was that those were not, in fact, unprecedented times. Ministry leaders fail. Red flags aren’t noticed—or worse, they’re willfully ignored. Understanding theories of institutional betrayal and how abusers often confuse and verbally attack their victims while deflecting responsibility has been helpful in my quest to make sense of RZIM’s trajectory. But it would have been much more helpful to have known all of this before the crises occurred.

If you’re serving on a board, consider what knowledge gaps you may have that could limit your ability to serve well. What high-level questions keep coming up for you in meetings? What other perspectives might you need to understand? Are you not just willing but eager to learn and grow? How can you acquire the knowledge and skills you need for faithful service and push your colleagues to do the same?

2. Whom do you choose as board members?

The RZIM board was overwhelmingly comprised of Ravi Zacharias’s family and friends. They were all highly invested in the ministry and the man; they donated their time, their expertise, their money, and their contacts because of that personal relationship. From my outsider perspective, they all seemed to have very similar skill sets. Loyalty was highly prized.

I was an unexpected addition to this group and the first woman to ever sit on the governance committee. I had no relationship with Ravi, and I didn’t lead a successful company or have an impressive contact list. This put me at a tremendous disadvantage when voicing concerns. The skills that other board members saw as helpful when I was in agreement with them—my willingness to learn new things, my eagerness to listen, and my ability to be vocal about things I believed in—became liabilities when I disagreed.

On your board, how are members chosen? I don’t only mean the procedures, which are certainly important but are often established by by-laws or denominational rules outside your control. I also mean what qualities and skills are preferred at a cultural level. Do you take spiritual gifting and spiritual maturity into account? How do you round out the roster beyond the officer roles? Are you looking for unexpected people that may offer a unique perspective?

3. How do you think about giving?

For many nonprofits, it’s a given that most board members are chosen for their ability to donate and raise funds. After my time with RZIM, I see this as a dangerous pairing of power and money. Wealth should not be the measure of a leader’s commitment, faith, or contribution to an organization. This metric can encourage a sense of entitlement in board members and provide a false sense of security to the leadership team. When board seats are only filled with those who provide the ministry with monetary stability, there is a power imbalance in the structure that can and often does lead to unhealthy relationships.

Is your board overlooking potential members because of their inability to give significant monetary gifts? Have you unconsciously come to assume bigger always equals better? How can you make sure to remember the widow’s mite and that wisdom and wealth do not reliably coincide?

4. How does your board communicate?

Truth and transparency have always been important to me, but never more than they are post-RZIM.

The organization had an executive committee that met separately and privately, away from the full board. That committee made all the important decisions, and to my recollection, during my year of service, the full board never once received or reviewed their minutes. The committee would send recommendations to the rest of the board, and our votes were strongly encouraged to be unanimous. I observed—and was told—that abstention was better than a “no” vote. As the abuse crisis continued to unfold, this silo of secrecy within the board caused major problems, as did similar “normal” RZIM procedures.

Does your board have a similar secret oligarchy? Is secrecy the default or the exceptional measure at your organization? Is it necessary to invoke legal danger to force board members to do the right thing? Does fiscal protection of the institution always take precedence? Are board members adapting the world’s “spin” for ministry use? Are you willing to tell the full truth to yourselves and others, even if it’s potentially disruptive?

5. What does accountability look like?

Board members are supposed to provide institutional accountability for the ministries they govern. But who provides accountability for the board?

As the RZIM saga unfolded, we heard multiple calls for the board to resign from both donors and key individuals outside the inner circle. The board did not want to resign. I heard excuses such as, “We should be the ones to fix this” or, “If we resign, who would lead?” This board failed to take a sexual predator out of ministry but continued to reject calls for transparency, even demanding anonymity for themselves—refusing the barest accountability of being publicly named.

Before a crisis comes your way, it is vital to establish answers to the following questions: Is there a point at which a board has shown itself incapable of self-correction? What would need to occur to disqualify board members from serving? Does a grave public failure require public repentance? How will your board self-assess or subject itself to external assessment? Concretely, what does accountability look like for you?

6. Who do you think you are?

Being on the board of a global multimillion-dollar ministry is a status symbol. Once people found out I sat on the RZIM board, they were impressed, curious, and fascinated by the power they perceived me to hold.

Internally, the general ethos of the board was that Jesus needed us to do this work. Twitter banners proudly displayed photos of board members on RZIM stages or with celebrities connected to RZIM. There were Facebook posts about the great work the board was doing for the kingdom. We had special dinners, fancy hotels, beautiful facilities, and a general feeling of superiority. Social media was a way to brag about accomplishments until it became clear it could also be a conduit of demands for accountability.

Does your board comprehend the kind of servant leadership that must come with so much responsibility? How much of their identity do members find in their board role? How do we make sure power is always paired with responsibility, not only in our formal rules and procedures but in our hearts?

RZIM’s unofficial motto said no question was off limits. But as a board member, it became clear to me that this was not true. I encountered institutional failure firsthand. I failed—at first, to even believe the victims, and then, in my attempts to reform a broken system.

But failure doesn’t have to be defining; rather, it should be refining. For me, it has fueled a passion to help members of other boards forestall the kind of dysfunction and abuse we did not prevent at RZIM. Instead of hiding and deflecting responsibility, Christians in leadership roles must freely admit and correct institutional and personal failure alike. We should be the first to recognize that every one of our failures can be redeemed by a God who has offered us full and complete forgiveness.

The stakes are high, but ministry boards can and should be a place where the best examples of servant leadership are found. So ask yourself: Would Jesus overturn your board table?

Stacy Kassulke is passionate about encouraging individuals to use their unique giftings to make things right for the sake of Christ and his kingdom. She served on the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries from February 2020 to March 2021.

- More from Stacy Kassulke

News

Died: Joseph Kayo, the Kenyan Leader Who Revolutionized Worship in East Africa

Moses Wasamu

His Pentecostalism put him at odds with many but the Deliverance Church founder stood firm in his convictions “to bring back the glory of God back to the Church in these last days.”

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Joe Kayo Ministries

Joe Kayo, known by many as the father of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement in East Africa, died on November 2, 2023. He was 86.

Kayo founded churches in four countries: Deliverance Church Kenya, Deliverance Church Uganda, Juba Pentecostal Church in South Sudan, and Family of God Churches of Zimbabwe. At the time of his death, he was leading the Christian Family Church in Nairobi.

Kayo described his ministry as a place “where the power of God is seen working with tangible manifestations, to bring back the glory of God back to the Church in these last days.”

Kayo embraced his spiritual calling as African nations were gaining independence from their European colonizers. His vision of creating churches, led and financed by Africans, that contextualized the Christian faith within African culture caught fire throughout East Africa. It also was at odds with many of the churches that traced their roots back to Western missions and with which he tangled frequently over worship styles and the presence of the Holy Spirit.

“This is the man God used to break barriers and rocks that stood in front of the charismatic movement and Pentecostalism in East Africa,” said J. B. Masinde, a bishop at a Nairobi congregation Kayo had founded, in 2019. “He paid a price … this man carries scars that some of you will never understand in your life.”

The eldest of six children, Joseph Kayo Nyakango was born in Nyamira County, western Kenya on May 5, 1937. When he was 12, his mother died, and he dropped out of school prematurely due to lack of school fees. In despair, Kayo sank into drug abuse and petty crime. Later in life, he would narrate how he attempted to take his own life three times without success.

More hardships came with young adulthood. Around 1954, Kayo was imprisoned for eight months after he left his job at a sugar company to take a new one. (Because this punishment did not seemingly fit the offense, some have speculated that something else was amiss.) In 1957, while living in the coastal city of Mombasa, he fell seriously ill and was hospitalized. According to his ministry website, his nurses gave up on him, leaving him at a crusade organized by American televangelist T. L. Osborn. While there, Kayo committed his life to Jesus Christ and was miraculously healed.

Soon after that, Kayo experienced the Pentecostal baptism of the Holy Spirit and began testifying widely to God’s power. Formerly a night club musician who entertained with his guitar, Kayo now began using the instrument to lead worship at the very same clubs, at a time when mainstream churches still used organs.

“I love music and I began to play the guitar in Mombasa before I got born again. I said, if I can change this thing and play it for God’s kingdom, why not? … I found it was very effective,” he later said. “The guitar itself is not sinful. … It is just an instrument, just like the piano … and the songs I sing are totally scriptural.”

By 1960, Kayo had established congregations in the Kenyan coastal cities of Mombasa and Kilifi. From Mombasa, he moved back home to Nyamira, but his family members, who worshiped ancestral spirits, denounced his newfound faith and beliefs. The hostile environment prompted Kayo to relocate to Kisumu, a Kenyan city on the shores of Lake Victoria, where he lived with the American charismatic missionary Derek Prince.

In the late 1960s, Kayo moved to Kampala, Uganda, where he stayed for nearly a decade. Alongside several other Christian leaders, he pioneered the Pentecostal movement there, serving as an itinerant preacher, speaking at schools, colleges, and universities, and preaching on the streets.

As his meetings began to attract huge crowds, mainstream churches associated with Western denominations felt threatened. At the time, many of them had a formal, regimented style of worship, and speaking in tongues was a new phenomenon for them. Confronted by this new expression of Christianity, accompanied by reports of miracle healings and deliverance experiences, many accused Kayo of manipulating people and sheep stealing.

“Kayo, in his characteristic stubbornness and grit, was not moved by [these] allegations,” wrote wrote Damaris Seleina Parsitau in her thesis on the history of Deliverance Church in Kenya. “He believed that God had called him to bring back vitality into the Church of Jesus Christ, a Church which had become lukewarm, ineffective and irrelevant in the African context.”

Over time, Kayo, who spoke Ekigusi, Dho Luo, Swahili, and Luganda, received speaking invitations for rallies, conventions, and camps from the countries he had called home as well as Tanzania and Rwanda. His proficiency in English, honed by studying the language as a young person and practicing it with Westerners, made it possible for him not only to preach in English but to expand his ministry as far as Zambia.

As he fielded these speaking invitations and held open-air meetings, Kayo avoided organizing gatherings on Sunday mornings, so as not to compete directly with nearby congregations. But in 1970, after months of immensely popular Monday prayer meetings and Saturday revivals in Nairobi, he and fellow leaders decided to start a Sunday service. On November 22 of that year, 56 people attended the inaugural Sunday worship event.

Kayo led Deliverance Church until 1977, when he stepped down and moved to the United States amidst accusations of adultery and lack of financial accountability. In his absence, the church continued to expand and formalize its structures and hierarchy.

After spending time in the US, Kayo returned to Kenya and started Christian Family Fellowship Church. He wrote numerous books and became the publisher of Revival Digest, a magazine published through his own Joe Kayo Ministries. Beyond Africa, Kayo ministered in Canada, South Africa, England, Japan, and Hong Kong.

Kayo did not hesitate to criticize prosperity preachers. The FAQ page of his website includes a statement that “If the preacher teaches that God cannot bless you unless you give them money, it is false.” To an inquirer who wondered why he did not encourage people to invest in local pastors’ ministries, Kayo responded, “If that offended your pastors, then I have no apologies to make, money is not the gospel.”

In 2004, Kayo reconciled with the leadership of Deliverance Church. Following his death, the General Overseer of the Deliverance Churches in Kenya, Bishop Mark Kariuki, conducted his memorial service.

Kayo leaves behind a widow, Rose; three sons, Junior, James and John; and several grandchildren.

- More from Moses Wasamu

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Arriving in America

Internet evangelism

Protection and providence

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The historical plot

Pertinent doctrinal topics for a diverse Africa

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Working together in the shelters

Learning from Buddhist counterparts

Encountering God in the disaster

Providing aid to indigenous groups

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1. Should board members be required to engage in continuing education?

2. Whom do you choose as board members?

3. How do you think about giving?

4. How does your board communicate?

5. What does accountability look like?

6. Who do you think you are?

Share

Share

Share