The Best Christian Kids TV Shows, Not Tells

Series like The Wingfeather Saga bring children along for the adventure of following Jesus.

Image Source / Getty

I picked up the first book reluctantly. Was I really going to spend my children’s nap time reading children’s fiction? But The Wingfeather Saga had been recommended to me by so many fans that I eventually joined the throngs of Christian adults and kids who’ve enjoyed the series.

From the start, author Andrew Peterson captivated my imagination, building a world I could recognize while pushing the limits of familiarity. Aerwier has a bookshop with a nerdy owner; the three Igby siblings enjoy exploring its packed shelves. So normal! But just across the street is a city prison run by lizard monsters called Fangs. Not so normal.

The Wingfeather books have since been adapted into an animated series; the second season premiered at the beginning of this month, with new episodes released weekly. I remember the Christian animations from my childhood—Bibleman, Psalty the Singing Songbook, and VeggieTales —as either simplistic retellings of Bible stories or moralizing lessons. These shows did a fine job of teaching me what God expected. But they didn’t captivate me with the idea of following Jesus.

The animated Wingfeather, by contrast, is lighthearted and sincere, witty without resorting to gimmicks. It cultivates endearing characters without creating familiar Christian caricatures.

What makes a good Christian children’s show? Here are four things The Wingfeather Saga does well that I hope would be true of any Christian program that I watch with my kids.

The show invites kids along for the adventure.

One of the quickest ways to bore kids is to talk at them. Shows that offer not much more than monologues, telling children what they should think and do, will rarely capture their hearts.

This principle of active participation applies across our discipleship efforts. We find that when kids are invited into the life of the church—praying, reading, and serving—Sunday worship becomes more than rote attendance. When they’re invited into daily rhythms of confession, apologizing, and asking for forgiveness (and when it’s not only asked of them, but expressed to them by an adult who is in the wrong), they grow to see sin and reconciliation differently.

By inviting kids into the life of faith—by taking them along with us, rather than just telling them what to do or think—we are much more likely to capture their hearts, rather than to just dictate their behavior.

Season 2 of The Wingfeather Saga does an incredible job (even better than season 1) of inviting kids to come along for the ride as characters explore, face challenges, and learn lessons. As the adventure unfolds, kids are invited to use their imaginations. They’ll watch wide-eyed as the Igby children encounter a massive sea monster who’s seemingly called out of the deep by the youngest’s singing; they’ll shudder as they’re chased up trees by toothy cows that live in the darkness of the woods. They’ll enter a world of creative play, even as they learn eternal truths about the world, themselves, and God.

The show draws a clear distinction between good and evil.

The Wingfeather Saga has good characters who live honorably and bad characters who prize selfish gain. Evil is represented physically; the oppressive Fangs drip with venom. They delight in taking the lives and livelihoods of innocent Glipwood residents, bringing to mind the one who comes to “steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10).

At the same time, those who seek to live for the larger kingdom—like the Igby grandfather who’s never forgotten all that the Fangs took from his family—are well-worn and well-traveled, with clear eyes and weathered hands. These characters either recall or learn the freedom that is possible, inching their way toward it even as they work their gardens day after day.

By making good and evil obvious, young viewers are more easily able to conceptualize the two kingdoms at war in Wingfeather, and to connect the lives of the characters they wish to emulate with their own daily experiences. The Igby children rebel against injustice, loyally fight to protect each other, and maintain the good name of their family—worthy virtues for young and old alike.

“Good” doesn’t necessarily mean “tough” or “popular.” The Wingfeather Saga helps kids understand that some of the most courageous characters aren’t the most physically capable, like little sister Leeli, whose mangled leg causes her to limp. Peet the Sock Man’s off-putting personality has estranged him from society; but his valiant efforts to protect and aid the Igby children reveal that he’s merely misunderstood.

The show acknowledges the complexity of the human heart.

Even as we want our kids to understand the world’s moral order, we also want to acknowledge the complexity of the human heart. We all struggle with longings for approval, comfort, and ease, even at the cost of our dignity or another’s well-being. And yet all of us, no matter our failings, can also be redeemed.

In Wingfeather season 2, townspeople grapple with their own self-seeking tendencies; they’re faced with difficult choices between doing what is right, and doing what feels good in the moment. They learn that sometimes leaders are afraid, and that showing bravery in one moment is not a guarantee of bravery in the next.

By resisting oversimplification, we help children understand the temptations they themselves are likely to face—sometimes unsuccessfully. Will they speak out when someone is being treated unfairly, even if it might turn them into the target? Will they risk their own comfort to protect someone they love? Will they welcome those others exclude, willing to be associated with the lowly and outcast? No matter how often they miss the opportunity God has given them, his grace abounds.

The show introduces new questions, even as it answers others.

One of the greatest strengths of The Wingfeather Saga is its ability to lay some essential groundwork about God and human nature while introducing other questions for kids to explore.

Season 2 may leave its young viewers with a sense of confidence in their ability to identify evil. But it may also leave them uneasy about the darkness that hides in all of our hearts. The show might demonstrate that living with integrity often comes with a reward in the end. But is integrity “worthwhile” when the payoff doesn’t seem obvious or inevitable?

One key way that kids grow in their faith is by asking some of these more complicated questions. In the same way that we don’t want to talk at children about who God is, we also don’t want to answer all the questions for them at once. Of course, as parents, caregivers, teachers, or other important adults in their lives, we want to be a source of confident reassurance. But we also want to empower and equip them to do some wondering on their own, without too quickly offering solutions.

Many Christians are understandably hesitant about television as a discipleship tool, and I get it. With two little ones in my care, we intentionally limit screen time and more often than not opt for books over TV.

But there is something powerful that happens when adults and children sit down to enjoy a show together; and that would be my encouragement for those thinking about queuing up Wingfeather or other Christian programming. Follow up your viewing with discussion; listen to the scenes and details that resonated with your kids, and share your favorite parts, too. Formation can happen anywhere—even on the couch.

Amy Gannett is a writer and Bible teacher passionate about equipping Christians to study the Bible through The Bible Study Schoolhouse. She is also the founder of Tiny Theologians, a line of discipleship tools for children.

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Theology

Filipinos and Americans Diverge on Trusting Pastors

Hannah Keziah Agustin

Studies find that while less than a third of Americans trust church leaders, 90 percent of Filipinos do.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Lightstock

While less than a third of Americans rate clergy as highly honest and ethical, across the globe in the Philippines, 91 percent of the public trusts religious leaders, according to EON Group’s 2021 Philippine Trust Index. Respondents of the survey ranked pastors as the most trusted leaders in Filipino society, compared to a Gallup poll that found clergy in the US ranked lower than 10 other professions, including chiropractors and police officers.

“When people outside of church find out I’m a pastor, their demeanor changes out of respect,” said Aldrin Peñamora, director of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches’ Justice, Peace, and Reconciliation Commission. Some people even ask him for prayer.

The disconnect is rooted in cultural differences, religion’s role in society, as well as the impact of church scandals. Still, pastors from both countries noted the importance of having pastors engage with their congregations and local communities to build trust.

Drivers of trust in the Filipino church

In the Philippines, Catholics make up 80 percent of the population, while evangelicals make up about 3 percent. Catholicism came to the Philippines through Spanish colonialism and stuck as Filipinos made their faith their own. Today, the Catholic faith has become a cultural attribute of Filipino life.

The high view of church leaders also reflects traditional Filipino values, said Peñamora: “Filipino culture values respecting the elderly, which spills over to their submission to people in authority, including religious authority.”

In the Philippines, older people are considered wise, and they provide a sense of order and direction to the life of the community, Peñamora said. The root of this respect is utang na loob, defined as “the sense of obligation to return a favor to someone.” Because the older generation paved the way for next generations to enjoy certain privileges, younger people feel indebted and want to give back to their elders. Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Anna Cristina Tuazon writes that utang na loob isn’t a transactional relationship but an acknowledgement of a malasakit, “an act of compassionate sacrifice that goes above what is expected.” The debt is never fully repaid.

According to the EON survey, the number one driver of trust in the Filipino church is when it “has integrity and espouses honesty, providing a full accounting of its funds and other resources.” Other drivers include having a wide reach (including global connections), and maintaining a separation of church and state. Despite recent scandals in Filipino Protestant and Catholic churches, Filipinos of all ages still trust the church: 85 percent of Gen Z responders said they trust the church, as well as 89 percent of millennials, 95 percent of Gen Xers, and 97 percent of baby boomers.

As a result, Peñamora said that many congregants are eager to emulate what ministers are doing, including evangelizing and serving in church ministries.

Francis Egenias, the chairman of the board of the Philippine Missionary Institute, said that most congregants trust religious leaders to guide them in matters of faith. “Filipinos listen to their leaders out of respect, even when they don’t like what is being said to them,” Egenias said. Yet that doesn’t mean that people are heeding their words, as “sermons enter one ear and exit the other.”

For instance, even though the church speaks out on practices like vote buying—where candidates give money to people in exchange for their votes—or playing the illegal gambling game jueteng, Christians continue to do these things, Egenias said.

“Filipinos do both the profane and the sacred,” Egenias said. “They go to church even when they don’t obey. They listen to their pastors as long as they don’t interfere with their vices.”

Filipino Americans caught between two worlds

This high trust is also seen in Filipino American communities, three-quarters of whom identify as Christian, mostly Catholic. Father Perry Leiker of Los Angeles’s St. Bernard Catholic Church noted to the Los Angeles Times that nearly half of the church’s parishioners are Filipino American. “They’re just very expressive of their faith and very proud of their faith, and I think they find a lot of support in their faith,” he said.

However, that trust can easily be broken in both Catholic and evangelical churches. Gabriel Catanus, lead pastor of Garden City Covenant Church in Chicago, has observed that Filipino Americans raised in white evangelical megachurches often become disillusioned by organized religion because of the hurt and spiritual abuse they experience.

“[Filipino Americans] are treated like the help in churches, seminaries, and Christian colleges but do not have a voice in leadership,” Catanus said. He finds that people with marginalized identities suffer most from the worst parts of institutional life.

In response, he builds trust with his multiethnic congregation by allowing Filipino Americans to receive and build community without the expectation to serve. He is also intentional about educating them on the historic and systemic realities upon which institutions are built and inviting them to consistently follow the person of Jesus.

Filipinos’ trust in the church, whether they are in the homeland or in the diaspora, is shaped heavily by their experience with the church leaders, Catanus said. They long for a shepherding presence whom they can confide in during times of hardship and strife.

“We need to have leaders who listen to God and to people and who are willing to listen to people who suffer,” Catanus said. “When you do that, you cannot rush.”

Breakdown in institutional trust

For the larger American population, the distrust of pastors is representative of the country’s own values and culture.

“The decline in trust in religious institutions is a part of the larger decline in trust in all institutions,” said Daniel Hummel, research fellow in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Americans are highly individualistic in how they understand the world, and this bleeds into the role of the church.”

Instead of being a mediator, the church becomes a place where one goes to meet one’s needs, Hummel said. This cultural reality makes it harder for trust in institutions to be sustained because it is easy to opt out of a fellowship when it no longer serves one’s needs.

Also, church attendance today remains lower than pre-pandemic levels, making it more difficult for church leaders to build personal relationships with their congregants. As a result, there are fewer points of contact between clergy and those outside the church.

In CT’s January article on why Americans no longer trust pastors, Nathan Finn, executive director of the Institute for Transformational Leadership at North Greenville University, pointed to several factors for this change: clergy sex abuse, political polarization, and evangelicals’ countercultural moral positions. Finn said this decline in trust is notable “especially among those who have either had bad church experiences or whose worldview assumptions are already at odds with historic Christian beliefs.”

In the Black church, some see a failure of leadership as clergy stay silent amid injustice.

“Black churches turn the other cheek to issues that plague our world,” said Taylon Lancaster, senior pastor at Third Baptist Church in Springfield, Massachusetts. “Black clergy are silent on the issues that Christians should’ve cried out loud about.”

Building trust is needed in both contexts

Despite the differences in how pastors are viewed in the two countries, leaders from both stressed the importance of building up the credibility of churches in their context to witness to the gospel.

In the US, Lancaster believes the church can build trust by caring about the issues that communities are facing and acting as a transformative presence that holistically meets people’s needs. This requires religious leaders to create space for people to share their concerns.

Sandra Maria Van Opstal, cofounder and executive director of Chasing Justice, noted that, to build trust, “churches must be honest, repent, and confess when they’ve done something wrong, even when it’s hard to do as an institution.”

She has observed that in communities of color, it can be difficult for Christians to walk away from their congregation because many of their relationships are wrapped up in the structures of the church. “The church is integral to the flourishing of marginalized people,” she said.

The church is where people in her community find food and financial support, and where they connect with people from similar ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. This is why Van Opstal finds it necessary for churches to be intentional in creating an environment where trust can grow. Although Filipinos have high trust in their church leaders, evangelical churches still have to intentionally build relationships within their communities.

Over in Quezon City, Philippines, Chonabelle Domingo, executive director of Mission Ministries Philippines (MMP), believes “the evangelical should be creative in doing outreach.” Her ministry builds trust within her community by offering early childhood education to low-income families. The ministry started after she saw that she was more welcomed into homes as a teacher than as a preacher. “When God’s love is extended to children, it leads to meaningful community engagement,” she explained. MMP designs its curriculum to care for students holistically.

Meanwhile, the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) actively engages in interfaith and inter-political dialogue and develops good relationships across different groups. “We need to engage in society on different levels,” director Peñamora said. “Neighborliness, regardless of differences, is part of our mandate as Christians.”

That’s why PCEC is active in relief distribution when natural disasters like typhoons or earthquakes strike. With support from PCEC, many evangelicals built houses for Muslims in Lapayan, Lanao del Norte, after the 2017 Marawi siege when ISIS-affiliate militants overtook the city. The group was also heavily involved in peacebuilding in the region, and have seen that building relationships with the community have helped with lessening animosity among people of different faiths.

Peñamora longs for the local church to form relationships in the community that are not imperialistic or hierarchical. He believes church leaders should not be passive or apathetic to issues happening outside of church walls. Instead, churches need to meet people where they are, as Jesus did, and be worthy of trust.

“The more we get involved within the community, the more we are trusted,” Peñamora said.

- More from Hannah Keziah

Church Life

For the Warming of the Earth: Worshiping in the Age of Creation Care

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Christian artists work at the intersection of music and climate change.

Bernd Dittrich / Unsplash

Christians love to sing about creation. Hymns like “How Great Thou Art” describe the beauty of creation that moves the church to sing, “I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder / Thy power throughout the universe displayed.”

Nature can also be a source of confusion or anxiety for believers as they observe eclipses and earthquakes and try to discern God’s role or intent in their unfolding. And as climate change more visibly impacts humans, the natural world can seem increasingly hostile, even as it remains a source of inspiration and joy for the Christian.

Where is God’s hand at work? And how should we respond to mysteries and chaos in our prayers and worship?

British scholar Mark Porter believes the Christian imagination can hold a complex view of creation—as can music. His research looks at the intersection of music, faith, and climate change, showing ways to engage nature beyond using it as a signpost of God’s glory, contending also with its beauty, chaos, fragility, and brutality.

“There’s not just one thing that nature imagery does,” said Porter. “It can do something besides inspire an individual to look to God in worship.”

Porter’s forthcoming book For the Warming of the Earth: Music, Faith, and Ecological Crisis describes how faith communities and organizations are responding to climate change and environmental crises with music, such as Resound Worship’s Doxecology album, the activism of groups like Christian Climate Action (CCA), and Catholic song festivals centered on Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical, Laudato Si’.

It’s not a how-to book for worship leaders looking to more explicitly address creation care or environmental justice, but the resource offers a window into a variety of Christian practices and postures around worship and creation.

Classic songs like “For the Beauty of the Earth” and “This Is My Father’s World” and more recent offerings like “God of Wonders” turn observations of aesthetic and sensory wonder into outpourings of praise. Their verses describe ornate details and panoramas, punctuated by laudatory refrains like “Christ, our Lord, to thee we raise / This our hymn of grateful praise” and “God of wonders beyond our galaxy / You are holy, holy.”

Porter, a senior lecturer at the University of Erfurt in Germany, pointed out that the popular hymn “When Peace, Like a River (It Is Well with My Soul)” offers a more multifaceted acknowledgement of humankind’s relationship with nature.

“You have ‘when peace, like a river’ and ‘sorrows like sea billows,’” he said. “Nature is there as both potentially comforting and potentially threatening.”

The mystery of nature—its majesty and violence—has always been a fount of creative inspiration for Christian artists, but most popular hymns and worship songs put nature imagery to use in one particular way: as a way to be moved to praise.

“It’s just me and God and nothing else,” said Porter. “That’s a fairly recent development. And I think there are ways to go back into Protestant thinking and rescue some things.”

The charismatic influence in these songs, though, also brings a willingness to look for God’s hand in everything. “From that perspective, God can use anything to speak to us, a butterfly or a bird,” he said.

Climate change is still a contentious issue among American Christians, with roughly half of white evangelicals saying that the phenomenon is most likely caused by natural processes—across all Americans, only 28 percent hold that view.

But while many evangelicals may be skeptical of projections showing escalating climate change–related deaths and the human contribution to environmental change, they are more likely than other Americans to believe that God causes natural disasters.

Most Christians reject animism—attributing divine power or “ensouledness” to creation—but still look for the hand of God in natural events. So while the issue of climate change may cause division, Christians broadly pay attention to changes in the environment, whether watching for signs of apocalypse or human-caused damage, and they find these changes meaningful.

They also take notice when natural disasters cause human suffering, which, in Porter’s view, may be the thing that starts to move more Christians’ opinion on the issue. He’s seen churches on both sides of the pond grow more comfortable with the language of environmental and social justice than they were 10 and 20 years ago.

“There was a lot of suspicion in the church in the UK about engaging with social justice,” said Porter. “It was widely thought, That’s something that liberal churches do.”

Recent books like Kyle Meyaard-Schaap’s Following Jesus in a Warming World and scientist Katharine Hayhoe’s Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World offer Christian perspectives on living faithfully in light of climate change, but the issue remains on the fringe.

Porter pointed out that the musical initiatives and projects he writes about in the book are still very much on the periphery of their denominations and traditions, but they may be part of bringing climate conversations into more evangelical churches.

“The practices in this volume do not all rest on a sense of hope,” Porter writes in the book. “Some do not orient themselves to the future, some center on loss, and others are deliberately cautious about voicing a hope they are not sure they can really believe in. Some, in other words, might be suitable accompaniments even in a world that remains irretrievably broken.”

Some Christians criticize the nihilism of climate change advocates who talk about irreversible damage to the earth. But even if they reject nihilism as counter to the gospel, Christians may feel stuck or lost when it comes to engaging in climate justice activism. Hayhoe argues that this stuckness, not disinterest, is the stumbling block for most people.

“The biggest problem is not the people who aren’t on board; the biggest problem is the people who don’t know what to do,” Hayhoe said in an interview with The New York Times. “Connect the dots to your heart so you don’t see climate change as a separate bucket but rather as a hole in the bucket of every other thing that you already care about in your life.”

For the musicians in Porter’s book, singing, performance art, composition, and gathering in nature are all means of connecting faith, community, and creation.

Hopefulness isn’t a throughline in Porter’s book, but it is a common theme among many he spoke with.

“A lot of people involved in climate change activism are struggling to hold on to hope and it’s something that people of faith are able to offer, I think,” said Barbara Doye, one of Porter’s interviewees. Doye is an activist and musician who adapts hymns and folk songs as part of the Forest Church movement.

The interviews and vignettes in Porter’s book aren’t meant to be prescriptive—few of us will be convicted to engage in performance art or start a Forest Church—but it can help Christians see music as a way into climate work.

For those unsure where to begin, Porter points to the simplicity of the first chapter of Genesis: “God said it was good.”

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/4gyEvrfcj0BWex36X48Ucc?si=956f60b96b924f49

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Ideas

Biblical Literacy in a Postliterate Age

Brad East

Contributor

We must always be people of the Word, but we’ll have to reimagine deep engagement with Scripture.

Atahan Demir / Pexels / Edits by CT

Christians are readers. We are “people of the book.” We own personal Bibles, translated into our mother tongues, and read them daily. Picture “quiet time” and you’ll see a table, a cup of coffee, and a Bible spread open to dog-eared, highlighted, annotated pages. For Christians, daily Bible reading is the minimum standard for the life of faith. What kind of Christian, some of us may think, doesn’t meet this low bar?

This vision of our faith resonates for many. It certainly describes the way I was raised. As a snapshot of a slice of the church at a certain time in history—20th-century American evangelicals—it checks out. But as a timeless vision of what it means to follow Christ, it falls short, and it does so in a way that will seriously impinge on our ability to make disciples in an increasingly postliterate culture, a culture in which most people still understand the bare mechanics of reading but overwhelmingly consume audio and visual media instead.

We can see how this literacy-focused idea of Christianity will fail in the future by looking to the past. For most of Christian history, most believers were illiterate. Reading the Bible daily wasn’t an option because reading wasn’t an option.

This doesn’t mean Scripture was irrelevant to ordinary Christians’ lives. But the sacred page wasn’t primarily a private matter for personal devotion; it was a public matter heard in the gathering of God’s people for worship. The Bible was the church’s book—a liturgical book, a book whose natural habitat was the voice of Christ’s body lifted in praise. To hear the Word of God, you joined the people of God. Lectors read aloud for the benefit of all.

In these contexts, an injunction to read one’s Bible daily would’ve been as meaningful as advice about how to refuel one’s private jet. For us, looking back, the lesson is that what we take for granted about following Christ may not be true for all believers, always and everywhere. What’s appropriate or even necessary in our time and place may not apply to others. Discipleship practices may be more dependent upon technology and wider social practices than we often realize.

Consider, for example, the effects of the printing press, public education, and mass literacy on the church. Tales of a dark age in which church leaders suppressed literacy so often miss their mark because it’s impossible to have a reading public without cheap books, and it’s impossible to have cheap books without the printing press. The habits and purposes of reading occur in a society, in a culture, in a massively complex moral and technological environment. Reading that strikes us as necessary in one time and place will be unnecessary—if not imprudent or outright impossible—in another.

Moreover, it’s not self-evident from Scripture itself that the Christian life is inherently a reading life. How could it be, when every book of the canon was written at a time when most of God’s people could not read? In this light, our emphasis on personal, private reading of Scripture appears to be a modern innovation distinct not only from much of Christian history but from biblical history as well.

So literacy cannot be synonymous with faithful discipleship. That is a given. The question is what role it plays once mass literacy is our social reality. In many traditions, the church’s answer over the last few centuries has been to put a Bible in people’s hands as soon as possible and as often as possible, and to encourage Bible reading as a central component of one’s daily walk with Christ. Christians are readers today because of the remarkable vision and untold labor on the part of mothers and fathers in the faith going back a dozen generations.

For those of us who have benefitted, the only fitting response is gratitude. I often hear jokes among friends about growing up with “sword drills” and “Bible bowls.” Some claim they can still list all the Davidic kings from Solomon to the Exile. The jokes are always laced with thanks, and with a tinge of nostalgia. They may have rolled their eyes 30 years ago, but now, with kids of their own, they look back to an analog church childhood with a dawning realization of how much has been lost.

That next question—what we’ve lost—is perennial, but lately it has become acute regarding the state of the next generation’s literacy, their ability to engage fluently with a given text. In February, writing at Slate, Adam Kotsko sounded the alarm on college students’ reading comprehension. In March, on Substack, Jean Twenge shared empirical research backing up Kotsko’s concerns.

The statistics are dismal. In 2021 and 2022, for example, 2 out of 5 high school seniors reported not reading a single book for pleasure in the previous year. This is about four times as many compared to 1976. Other studies suggest similar things about American adults, especially men.

Each year, I teach hundreds of undergraduates of every class and major, and these reports jibe with my own experience. My students are mostly non-denominational evangelicals attending a private Christian liberal arts university in West Texas. I like to give them an anonymous survey that asks a single question: How many books have you ever read cover to cover? My only provisos are that the book couldn’t have been assigned by a teacher and that it had to be above an eighth-grade reading level (say, harder than Harry Potter). Most students’ total is below five. Many list two, one, or zero.

The reasons for this decline in long-form literacy are surely many. Like others, I’m inclined to lay the lion’s share of the blame on television, streaming, smartphones, and social media. But whatever the causes, this is our reality.

American society is no longer composed of readers of books and other written works that require sustained, rational attention—if it ever was. In the words of Neil Postman, the “typographic” culture birthed by Protestantism no longer exists. This is as true inside the church as it is outside the church.

The practical question, then, is not whether this is our world but what to do about it. How do we interact with Scripture when mass literacy as we have known it is no more?

In a recent book, Jessica Hooten Wilson writes the following:

Against the seduction of screens, we must return to the love of the book, beginning and ending with the Bible but including other books that enlighten Scripture for us and show us how to live like Jesus in our own time and place. Reading must be a daily spiritual practice for the Christian. A life of reading counteracts the malformation of screen and digital technology.

Likewise, in a recent essay responding to Kotsko and other elegies for lost literacy, Alan Jacobs writes that “many parents are putting up a fight” against childhoods void of books. In evangelical churches and classical Christian schools, habits of reading are still being modeled, taught, and “centered” in what it means to be a believer, a neighbor, a citizen. First at Wheaton College and now in the Honors College at Baylor University, Jacobs sees the imprint left on these students, who are products of an odd subculture for which “reading was an integral part.”

As a fellow reader, teacher, and parent of bookish kids, far be it from me to dissent from Jacobs’s conclusion that “abject submission isn’t inevitable. It turns out that resistance isn’t futile after all.” It is possible to raise children to be readers, to teach them to love reading. My goal with students is the same: to convert as many of them as I can from the lure of the screen to the love of the page. Occasionally I succeed. The fight is worth it, no matter the odds!

Nevertheless, I fear we educators and parents—and with us, pastors and elders—are not seeing the forest for the trees. Recall Hooten Wilson’s claim: Reading must be a daily spiritual practice for the Christian. Is this true? We’ve already seen that it can’t be true without qualification. But granting its context and intent, does it ring true then?

No, I don’t think it does. And the same goes for students at Wheaton, Baylor, and classical Christian academies. These are noble battles, but they remain minor skirmishes in a losing war—indeed a war that has already been lost at the national level. By and large, Americans young and old do not read books, and every trend line is pointing in the wrong direction.

Actually, pause on that last phrase: “the wrong direction.” This betrays my own class and bias. Must everyone be a reader—meaning, a daily reader of books for pleasure? Is reading an essential part of the good life? An essential part of the Christian life?

I’m not so sure. To be clear, I can’t claim to have definitive answers to these questions. What I have are tentative ideas that call for further exploration, not least by churches and Christian educators. Let me close with a few of them.

First, we are in the midst of a seismic technological shift that has already shaken the ground beneath Christians’ feet. We should not continue pretending that the old world is still with us. This includes the nature of ordinary believers’ relationship to the Bible.

Second, Christians exist within a larger social environment. If visions of daily discipleship are contingent on both technology and the wider culture, and those influences are vastly different than they were one or two centuries ago, then we should expect discipleship practices to differ as well. This does not mean we compromise on doctrine, the necessity of spiritual discipline, or our duty to love God and neighbor. It does mean that our disciplines and duties will take different forms in different circumstances—and that we must carefully discern whether we are clinging to longstanding forms because they are essential to our faith (e.g., prayer) or simply because we are nostalgic.

In a culture where most people are not daily readers of books, most Christians probably will not be daily readers of the church’s book either. Unless, that is, we believe that private, individual reading of the Bible is so foundational, so nonnegotiable that our churches ought to devote extraordinary resources to making it a countercultural possibility in the life of every ordinary believer.

Such churches would not only found and support classical academies. They would also commit to being consistently countercultural in the face of the whole ecosystem of digital technology: no screens in worship; no AI in preaching; no streaming online; no smartphones in the building; no presence on social media; no Bible apps in Bible class—only physical Bibles brought from home. Churches like these would be clear-eyed and undeceived about the nature of the threat. They would not try to have their cake and eat it too.

I’m open to that approach. But unless we’re willing to go that far, it seems to me that churches in the modern West should accept that we live in a postliterate world and therefore must minister to a postliterate people. Concretely, this means accepting that most church members are not and never will be readers, and that this is not a problem—that it does not make them less than other believers, that it does not preclude their maturity in the faith and service of God.

The upshot of this acceptance would be a changed vision of the Christian life. This too would have us looking to the past, as well as to contemporary liturgical traditions with models of worship carried over from a premodern illiterate age. Those of us in communities defined by personal Bible reading have much to learn from them.

Our congregations would not cease to be centered on God’s Word. But we would be centered differently than we have been in the past. Perhaps we need more—much more—oral reading, even memorization and performance, of the Scriptures in the assembly. Perhaps we need longer and more detailed exposition of the text in the sermon. Perhaps we need to reimagine what “biblical literacy” can mean: not necessarily the reading and rereading of one’s personal Bible, but a mind, imagination, and vocabulary shot through with the stories and characters and events of Holy Scripture.

Or perhaps not. These suggestions are tentative, as I said. I’m open to others, as all of us should be. But alternative visions are what we need. Christians have not always been readers, and it seems that for the foreseeable future, a majority of Christians will not be readers anymore. Discerning a durable form of faithfulness for this new and uncertain time is one of the pressing challenges of our day.

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

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Surrogacy Makes More Babies. Pro-Lifers Should Still Oppose It.

Katy Faust

Church leaders can offer clear moral and ethical guidance for a practice that violates biblical mandates.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Pexels

On April 8, the Vatican issued Dignitas Infinita, a 20-page document rejecting a variety of practices that violate human dignity. Unsurprisingly, these included human trafficking, violence against women, abortion, euthanasia, sex change, and child abuse. It also included surrogacy.

This isn’t the first time the pontificate has come out against this “deplorable” practice, which “fails to respect the dignity of [the] child” and “violates the dignity of the woman.” Pope Francis made waves in January when he condemned surrogacy, noting that “a child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”

Evangelical Christians and pastors value the life of the unborn. That’s why we march across the capital on freezing January mornings and pray outside of abortion clinics. Our motivation for child protection must also lead us to confront the ways children are impacted by the baby-making industry as well.

But when did you last hear your pastor address the issue of surrogacy from the pulpit? Odds are, never. Protestants have a dearth of official guidance on reproductive technologies. While some are clear on abortion, very few denominations have clear teachings on IVF, let alone the much rarer practice of surrogacy.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary ethics professor Andrew T. Walker told The New York Times that when he suggested introducing a resolution about artificial reproductive technology at the denomination’s annual convention, his colleagues hesitated.

Some Christians are directly involved in surrogacy and see their role as a calling to help families have children, as CT reported in 2018. But many Christian bioethicists cite concerns. While there’s no Bible verse that commands, Thou shall not hire an economically vulnerable woman to gestate your custom-ordered baby, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t clear biblical guidance on surrogacy for Protestants.

Infertility alone should not guide our thinking, even if longing for children is a God-given desire. Christians have a distinct responsibility to protect children. Thus, when considering reproductive technologies in general, and surrogacy specifically, it is children’s rights and needs that should rank highest.

While there are a variety of adults involved—intended parents, surrogate mothers, sperm/egg sellers, lawyers, fertility doctors—along with their individual interests, from the child’s perspective, surrogacy always requires loss.

As I’ve detailed elsewhere, surrogacy splices what should be one woman—mother—into three purchasable and optional women: the genetic mother, or egg “donor,” who grants the child their biological identity; the birth mother, with whom the baby develops their first, critical bond; and the social mother, who provides daily female care to maximize the child’s development and satisfy the child’s longing for maternal love.

For children, none of these three mothers are optional. Studies have shown that if children never know their genetic mother, they often experience identity struggles. If they lose their birth mother, some believe that children experience a “primal wound” that makes bonding, trust, and attachment more challenging. And if they are deprived of a social mother, their development is impacted.

No matter what form it takes—traditional or gestational, altruistic or commercial, commissioned by gay or straight adults—surrogacy takes something away from the child. It’s not a loss that results from a fallen world, where parents who cannot or should not care for their child seek to redeem that loss through adoption. It is the infliction of an intentional loss simply because an adult wants it that way. And that violates several biblical mandates.

First, surrogacy goes against God’s protection of children. God insists that his people take child protection seriously. It’s one basis on which Job pleads his innocence: “I rescued the poor who cried for help, and the fatherless who had none to assist them” (29:12). Child sacrifice is listed among the reasons God condemned Israel to Babylonian exile (Ezek. 16:21). And even if an unborn child was harmed when the mother was accidentally struck, God insisted on proportionate punishment for the offender—an eye for an eye, a life for a life (Ex. 21:22–25). Chief among our concerns for children must be their safety and overall well-being. Surrogacy threatens both.

Second, God’s definition of a religion that is “pure and faultless” includes looking after “orphans … in their distress” (James 1:27). Adoption is one of the greatest ways we care for orphans. As the former assistant director of the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world, I was charged with upholding state, national, and international standards to ensure that adults were properly vetted and screened prior to child placement. We also ensured that money never flowed from intended parents to birth parents; otherwise, it was no longer a valid adoption but child trafficking. In adoption, adults shoulder the load in an attempt to relieve children of the burden of parental loss.

Surrogacy, on the other hand, often involves legally orphaning children via a “pre-birth order” that preemptively strips children of a relationship with genetic/birth parents. There are no adoption-like requirements for intended parents to undergo screenings, vetting, or background checks. Surrogacy also relies on direct payments to genetic/birth parents, which is arguably a form of child trafficking.

Christians are also called to defend the fatherless. The Old Testament includes dozens of commands to defend and protect the orphan. Children raised outside the protective umbrella of their parents’ lifelong marriage experience drastically diminished physical, mental, academic, and relational health, exploitation, and poverty. In biblical times and now, the fatherless stand out as a demographic deserving of distinct protection because they are distinctly vulnerable.

Never before, however, has humanity faced the phenomenon of “the motherless.” A woman is required to be connected to the child for the first nine months. After birth, biological systems chemically knit together mother and baby, making post-birth abandonment of the child unlikely. Historically, if the mother died during or soon after childbirth, the baby would often die as well. Only surrogacy enables what is utterly foreign to the human race—a motherless baby.

Some surrogacy apologists point to the lack of data on children who grew up from birth without a mother as evidence that there must be no harm. The absence of data is actually the greatest alarm bell. The data on the harms of fatherlessness are well known. The statistics on motherless children, given that children have an even greater bond with their mother during the first three years of life, would likely be much more devastating.

Whenever you read of God’s admonishment to protect the fatherless, it’s safe to assume the mandate applies to the motherless as well. Far from protecting the motherless, surrogacy manufactures the motherless.

Finally, God calls his people to sacrifice for the vulnerable. A biblical meta-principle runs throughout Scripture: The strong are to sacrifice for the weak, not vice versa (Ps. 82:3; Jer. 22:16; Prov. 31:8–9). God warns of cruel punishment for adults who would cause “little ones” to stumble (Matt. 18:6). He demonstrated his “sacrifice for the weak” principle on a cosmic scale when Christ, the strongest of all, died for the ungodly “while we were still powerless” (Rom. 5:6). Surrogacy violates this meta-principle because it always requires the weak (children) to sacrifice for the strong (adults).

Sisters and brothers of the Reformation, we don’t need a papal encyclical, decree, or motu proprio. We have the all-sufficient Word of God, which directs us to reject any practice or process that victimizes children.

Katy Faust is founder and president of the global nonprofit Them Before Us and coauthor of a book by the same name. She speaks and writes on why marriage and family are matters of justice for children.

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News

After United Methodist Split, Some Conservatives Remain

Yonat Shimron - Religion News Service

Study: 24 percent of clergy in North Carolina are still opposed to same-sex marriage.

A United Methodist church in Cherokee, North Carolina.

Wally Holden / unsplash

After the departure of thousands of traditionalist United Methodist churches from the denomination over the past five years, it might stand to reason that those congregations remaining in the fold are more progressive and open to ordination and marriage of people in same-sex relationships.

But the picture is far more mixed.

A new report from the Religion and Social Change Lab at Duke University that looked at disaffiliating clergy from North Carolina’s two United Methodist conferences or regions found that even after the departures, 24 percent of North Carolina clergy remaining in the denomination disagree with allowing LGBTQ people to get married or ordained within the denomination.

“At least some amount of ambivalence over LGBTQ+ issues among UMC clergy is likely to persist for years to come,” the report concluded.

After a four-year COVID-19 delay and the departure of about 7,600 churches—a loss of 25 percent of all its US congregations—the denomination is likely to reconsider the issue of human sexuality when it convenes its top legislative body April 23–May 3 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Given that the denomination is a worldwide body, with hundreds of delegates from Africa and the Philippines, areas far more conservative in their views of human sexuality, it’s unclear whether the measures stand a chance of passing, even as the US delegation is far more open to such changes.

Overall, the Duke report finds that disaffiliating North Carolina clergy were much more politically and theologically conservative than those who chose to remain. Some 85 percent of clergy who left the denomination disagreed with the notion that “all religious leadership positions should be open to people in same-sex relationships.”

Leaving clergy members tended to be more homogeneous in their beliefs and to lead somewhat smaller and more rural churches. Nearly all (94%) of leaving clergy were white. More than a fourth of leaving clergy—26 percent—were licensed local pastors, meaning they were not ordained and had less advanced ministerial training.

But the report paints a picture of a reconstituted denomination that, at least in North Carolina, is politically and theologically diverse. Based on clergy’s assessments of their own congregations, 59 percent of remaining congregations are evenly divided between Republican and Democratic parties, 2.2 percent lean Republican, and 18 percent lean Democratic.

“It would be a mistake to say that the denomination in the US has moved to being virtually uniformly progressive,” said Lovett Weems, director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, who did not consult on the report. “Clearly, those who left were almost universally conservative politically and theologically. But those staying show a more mixed picture.”

A total of 671 churches across North Carolina left the United Methodist Church: 325 congregations in the North Carolina Conference, covering the eastern half of the state, and 346 congregations in the Western North Carolina Conference, covering the western half. The report was based on the two conferences’ updated clergy records and compared with a 2021 longitudinal survey of clergy.

Those churches accounted for some 139,361 members and thousands of others who attended regularly or sporadically. The southeastern region of the US has the most United Methodist churches.

The study also showed that 59 percent of North Carolina pastors staying in the denomination said they are at least somewhat more liberal than most people within their congregation.

“For a long time, studies have shown that clergy in mainline denominations tend to be a bit more liberal than their membership. And this just kind of takes it one step further,” said Weems. “We should recognize that the denomination is still more middle of the road than on the progressive end of things.”

- More from Yonat Shimron - Religion News Service

Books

Finding an Uncontainable God Within Finite Poetic Spaces

Interview by Joey Jekel

Eastern Orthodox poet Scott Cairns reflects on his new collection, his journey of faith, and poetry’s capacity to apprehend inexhaustible realities.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Fans of the Harry Potter series might recall the magical tents from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In the film version, when the Weasleys take Harry and others to the Quidditch World Cup, the audience sees rows and rows of small tents, seemingly designed to sleep only one or two people. Harry is confused as he witnesses the others walk into a single tent, which can hold much more than its external size betrays. Once Harry follows suit, he stands in awe at a spacious interior containing several bunkrooms, a dining room, and a large living room.

Lacunae: New Poems

Scott Cairns (Author)

Paraclete Press

112 pages

This scene gives a helpful image for the ideas and realities Scott Cairns takes up in his new collection of poems, Lacunae. Cairns is an Eastern Orthodox poet whose work, besides ten poetry collections, includes essays, a spiritual memoir, and the text of two oratorios. Many of the poems in Lacunae concern the mystery of divine things, infinite in scope, somehow fitting within finite spaces and times. Just as Harry Potter was surprised to find all that was contained within an ostensibly small tent, one is shocked to find the fullness of God contained in Mary, and even more so, contained within every Christian by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Joey Jekel, a writer and classical educator in Texas, spoke with Cairns about Lacunae, as well as the nature of poetry and the theology that informs his own.

To borrow language from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, could you give a brief account of your “sacred history?”

I was raised as a Baptist, albeit a Baptist of what we might call a particularly brittle sort. I suppose the saving grace of those years was that my parents wore our community’s fundamentalism relatively lightly. My father liked saying that a Christian should seek to “be winsome, in order to win some.” In any case, I never felt as besieged as some others seemed to feel; in fact, the profound love of God that I learned in that community kept me feeling deliciously free, unafraid, and welcoming.

In college, thanks to the example of my older brother, Steve, I first began reading what we call “the fathers of the early church,” and it was in their witness that I recognized that so many of the resistances I had felt toward what I heard in our Baptist church were based on historically sound intuitions. In those years, I had thought that I was the heretic, but it turned out I was mistaken. It would take me many years of reading in that early tradition to eventually find my way to Orthodoxy in 1998. When I did, I felt that I was coming home.

You use the words nous and noetic frequently in your poetry and nonfiction writing. Can you explain how and why you use these words?

Early on in my slow journey to the fullness of the faith that one finds in Orthodoxy, I noted a range of unsatisfactory dichotomies I had nearly inherited as a result, in large part, of the church’s split between East and West. Certain of those dichotomies result from unfortunate translation, and the choice, in most translations, of rendering nous as “mind” is perhaps one of the most unfortunate.

While the word has evolved somewhat over the millennia, most of our early church tradition understands it as being more than mind, or reason, or thought; it is better apprehended, as the late Bishop Kallistos Ware has characterized it, as the “intellective aptitude of the heart.” In other words, it’s the meeting place of intellect and felt knowledge, the meeting place of mind and heart.

Orthodoxy has taught me that the human person is best figured as a complex animal, one with a soul—a spirit—and bearing noetic relationship to the one God. And since our God is characterized in the interpersonal terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we also bear noetic relationship to other human persons. In fact, you could say that our very personhood depends on these relationships.

We are not—contrary to what I had gathered in the church of my childhood—bodiless intellects. We are not aspiring to transcend our bodies. We are not angels, nor are we fixing to become angels. We are, however, fixing to become like God; made in his image, we are called to grow into his likeness—never eclipsing his endless and inexhaustible holiness, but by our adoption and identification with Jesus, becoming like the God who called us into being.

Can you explain “Isaak the Least,” a name to whom you attribute many epigraphs and poems throughout your collections?

My journey to the Eastern church involved some three decades of reading in the writings of the early church. I had come to embrace much of what I read in those texts, but when I came upon The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaak the Syrian, my heart finally came home. Those homilies led me down the final stretch of road to a place where I recognized in writing many of the countless intuitions I had glimpsed along the way. When I was formally brought into the Greek Orthodox Church, I was brought in as Isaak, with Saint Isaak of Syria being—as we say—my “namesaint.” The character of Isaak the Least became a fictive speaker in much of my work since then.

Iconography features heavily in your work, none more than Our Lady of the Sign in Lacunae. Could you talk a bit about the role of iconography in the Orthodox faith and in this current collection?

The icon is itself something of a theological assertion. Icons of Christ, in particular, are understood to be a confession that Christ was both God and a fully human person who could be depicted in the icon. I’ve often bristled a bit at the commonplace description of icons as “windows into heaven.” That notion seems to emphasize a distance and otherworldliness of God and his saints. The profound activity of an icon is, rather, an insistence of Christ’s presence here with us, as well as the insistence that the saints—so great a cloud of witnesses (Heb. 12:1)—are also here with us. The illusions of time and distance are mitigated by our being in the midst of those historical moments and those historical persons we cherish.

As for the lovely icon on the cover of Lacunae, it is a familiar one that graces the dome over the altar spaces in most of our churches. In Greek, it is identified as Πλατυτέρα των Ουρανών, or the “more spacious than the heavens” icon, and it speaks to the fact that the uncontainable God was nonetheless held within Mary’s human womb. This gesture speaks to the heart of what I mean when I speak of the poetic operation of language; I’ve often characterized that operation as the presence and activity of inexhaustible, indeterminate enormity apprehended within a discreet space. My sense of that essential quality of poetry is what led me to fix upon this notion of lacunae—openings or spaces that suggest more than they appear to contain.

I’m recalling that odd passage in Colossians, where Paul avers that he rejoices in his sufferings for the sake of the church, saying that in his flesh he is filling up “what is still lacking” in the suffering of Christ (1:24). That is an unfortunate translation, given that we are loathe to imagine that anything is lacking in anything Christ performs. My own translation would not be what is lacking, but what is yet to be done—which is, I dare say, the offering of our willing participation in this suffering.

Your poetry covers the topic of distraction and getting away from it. How is a Christian supposed to deal with the distractions of life?

I guess the best answer is to pray without ceasing. One must develop a constant sense of God’s nearness, an awareness of his being always with us, which assists our moving through all manner of distractions, whether they arise from cruel or ignorant people, natural or unnatural tragedies, our sufferings, or our own sin. So far as I know, the best path for developing that sense is the Jesus Prayer: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” For over two millennia, many believers have depended on that practice to help maintain this clarifying sense of God with us.

The Orthodox liturgy is also profoundly helpful in this regard. The practice of living through the full church year, assisted by a sequence of services, also makes our faith not just a grip of propositions, but a developing sense of who we are and whose we are.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, makes a connection between the art of poetry and the art of living. Do you see a connection between these two endeavors?

I think that our primary art must be the shaping of ourselves. I also think that any endeavor that we can rightly call a vocation is best understood as a means to better apprehending who we are and what we are called to become. So, yes, for those called to the art of poetry, that calling is utterly connected to the art of living, of living well and in a way that enhances our own spiritual journeys, even as it enhances the journeys of others.

Success in the art of poetry and in the art of living depends on a deeper development of the art of prayer. Early on, I tended to resist the associations of poetry with prayer, but, in my dotage, I have given up that resistance. So long as we understand that prayer is less about petition than it is about communion, and so long as we understand that poetry is less about expression than it is about pressing language for illumination, then we can glimpse how each can serve the other.

Could you explain the concept of apophatic theology, or a humility before mystery in Scripture? What is the value and beauty in this theological approach?

Theology comes in two flavors—the cataphatic and the apophatic. Both approaches are witnessed throughout the church, both now and historically. The cataphatic approach—which, broadly speaking, is more comfortable making definite statements about God and his nature—is perhaps the more familiar in the West. And the apophatic—fair to say—holds primacy in the East.

The greatest dangers of a cataphatic approach can be seen whenever a pastor or theologian presumes to explain away the mysteries manifested in the Scriptures, whenever a glib paraphrase threatens to eclipse an inexhaustible text. The Eastern church privileges a more Hebraic, more rabbinical approach to theological commentary, offering a provisional sense of what a passage might offer. This modest gesture in the face of mystery strikes me as a far preferable disposition compared to the arrogance of a pastor’s offering his own interpretation and saying of it, This is what God says.

What do you mean by saying that “there is One True Church, variously apprehended”?

I’m reminded of a trick question that I heard a while back. The question was “How many churches do you have in this town?” The only correct answer was “One.”

If the church is understood to be the body of Christ, then it must be self-evident that all of its members—despite their differences—are members of that one body.

So, yes, regardless of the familiar divisions—and the profoundly regrettable term denominations—the body of Christ is unalterably one. I also think that most historical divisions can be read as sequential diminishments of the faith.

I’m also reminded of what my first priest, Father George Paulson, said to me when I met him to say that I wanted to “convert” to Orthodoxy. He said, “Convert? What are you now? Muslim? Hindu?” He encouraged me to understand my becoming Orthodox as my “embracing the fullness of the faith” and not as a “conversion.”

So, yes, we are all—like it or not—members of one body, one church; we are simply perceiving that body variously, to varying degrees of fullness.

Is there anything else you would like to mention, either about this collection of poetry or your work in general?

Only that I don’t see any of my successive poetry collections as new departures or as manifesting novel approaches. I think of each as a developmental step in the direction I’ve hoped to be moving from the first. The poems are my way of examining my heart and mind, my way of coming to terms, if only provisional terms, with what I glimpse in the midst of that examination.

I continue to be concerned with becoming, with our collective becoming, knowing that none of us will ever cease becoming. The God into whose likeness we are moving is an inexhaustible God, and our journey into partaking of God’s holiness is an endless journey.

- More from Interview by Joey Jekel

Church Life

In Secular UK, Evangelical Alliance Experiences Record Growth

Interview by James Thompson

Leader explains why the movement is seeing its biggest membership bump in 30 years and its mission for the years ahead.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

As CEO of the United Kingdom’s Evangelical Alliance (EA), Gavin Calver sometimes compares the organization to the polarizing British breakfast spread Marmite: You either love it or you hate it.

The EA hears plenty from its critics, taking hits for stances on issues like transgender identity, and is calling on Christians who love them from a distance to actually join.

“We’re asking, ‘Will you please stand with us as someone who loves Marmite, not dislikes it?’” Calver said. “In our culture, it makes it a little lighthearted, but it needs very little explaining. People get it quickly.”

More churches, organizations, and individuals are responding to the call, and after record growth in the past year, the tally of dues-paying individual members recently topped 23,000. The total is a signal of the group’s influence to government officials and societal leaders, allowing the EA to represent evangelicals more effectively in the wider culture.

Many of the new individual members signed up when EA representatives spoke at member churches, so much of the recent growth “reflects the constituency we already have,” according to Calver. Still, the EA’s membership is becoming more ethnically diverse and trending younger, he said, with most of its growth happening “beyond the southeast of England where we were strongest to start with.”

Calver recently spoke to CT about his vision for the EA, why so many new members are signing up now, and how evangelicals in the UK are staying united despite their differences.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

For readers outside of the United Kingdom, could you give a brief overview of the UK evangelical landscape?

The UK evangelical landscape is quite diverse. For example, 25 percent of UK evangelicals are people of color. Within the Evangelical Alliance membership alone, there’s 80 different streams, networks, and denominations of church represented.

One of the great joys in my job is I get to preach in lots of these places, and the first worship song on a Sunday morning tells you where you are: how charismatic an environment, how free an environment.

We have egalitarians as well as complementarians within our membership. There’s a great diversity within it. … Like many evangelicals globally, Bebbington’s quadrilateral kind of sums us up: Hold firm to Scripture; the death and resurrection of Jesus; we’re desperate to see people converted, to reach the lost; and we want to be active in making the world like the kingdom.

https://twitter.com/GavCalver/status/1780275019093868597

You recently shared that the EA had hoped to recruit 3,000 new individual members during its past fiscal year (which concluded at the end of March), but that membership had actually increased by over 5,000, the fastest growth since the 1990s. What factors do you think are driving this growth?

We’ve really started asking again. There was a while where the EA perhaps took its foot off the gas a little bit with this. Another factor is we can’t ignore the current landscape where you could argue that some parts of the church are baptizing the culture a little, and that means the distinctiveness that evangelicalism offers brings hope. I think we are clear on stuff.

Certainly, in the UK, our access to the corridors of power is amazing. I was at [the prime minister’s residence] 10 Downing Street last week. We’re in and out of Westminster and the four governments of the UK all the time. We get to take people’s voices to somewhere they wouldn’t get otherwise.

The EA here has only really existed for two things since 1846 when it was formed: unite the church in reaching the lost in every corner of the UK, and secondly, give the church a clear and effective voice into the corridors of power. I think a lot of people are wanting their voice to be heard, and by joining the EA, we add their voice as we go into those places.

Does this strong rate of growth change your vision for the EA in the coming year? Or in the next ten years?

It doesn’t change it, but it speeds it up. … Last year I said to my board, “If you let me set a ten-year direction for where we want to go, I’ll stay for a decade to see it through.” The plan can be summed up in one sentence, and that doesn’t change. Basically, we need to stand firm theologically, whilst going for it wholeheartedly in sharing the gospel.

I know people that are good at one of those: I know great theologians who don’t know a non-Christian. And I know people who say they want to share the gospel but don’t know Scripture. Those two must go together. We must hold our nerve theologically. Do not compromise on the things that matter in the Word of God, no matter what the price tag within your culture, and then go for it wholeheartedly in sharing the gospel. For me, that’s the next ten years at the EA.

Let me be honest, if we had gotten to 3,000 new members in a year, that would have been the most in a long time. With 5,000, the Lord’s blown out of the water what we thought was possible.

A year ago, you told the Religion Media Centre that more Anglican churches would probably join the Evangelical Alliance because of that communion’s debate over blessings for same-sex couples. The Church of England subsequently approved those blessings and began offering them for the first time in December. Have these developments in fact spurred more evangelical Anglican individuals and congregations to join the EA?

We’ve seen more Anglican churches joining us than normal, and when I’ve preached in Anglican settings, we’ve seen more individuals join us than normal. So, there is no doubt that for those who are wanting to stay within the Church of England, they’re also looking for a home with us as well, and that’s exciting. … There’s no happiness on our part that [these developments have] led to that, but we are here to serve and support.

A lot of our work is advocacy. You have [Church of England] bishops in the House of Lords here, so why would an Anglican church need the advocacy of the EA historically? Now they’re not sure that their bishop is always going to say what they believe. So yes, what we predicted a year ago has come to fruition.

The EA describes itself as an “evangelical unity movement.” Evangelicalism in the US has often seemed very divided in recent years. Do you think that UK evangelicals have been able to maintain a stronger sense of solidarity? If so, why?

Look, you can pick up the UK and drop it in Lake Michigan and it doesn’t touch the sides. So let’s be realistic about the scale of where we are. Because the nation is small enough, you can have the relationships, and there’s a unity. Also, in the UK, we’ve lost our churchgoing culture. We unite or we die, so we’re united. Is that pragmatic? Is it a message from the Lord? It’s probably a bit of both. But we can’t afford competition within the kingdom.

And we don’t have quite the same marrying between evangelicalism and politics. That is quite liberating. We have a member of Parliament for the Labor Party and a member of Parliament for the Conservative Party serving on the Evangelical Alliance council. Both are members of the EA, members of our council, and represent us more widely. I don’t think that would quite happen in the same way in some other parts of the world.

Previously, you led Youth for Christ in the UK and before that served as a youth worker with that organization. How did serving in youth ministry mold you as a leader?

I learned to preach in school assemblies (you can’t do those in the US, but we can go to schools and do assemblies) and youth prisons. When people ask now if I’m nervous about preaching to a large crowd, the answer is no. I was nervous about preaching to 1,000 teenagers at a school who didn’t want to listen, or to 50 teenage lads who were imprisoned.

So firstly, there was a real grounding to it. Secondly, in youth ministry, you have to innovate. The average church leader in the UK lasts seven to ten years. The average youth worker might last a couple of years. And the reason for that is youth culture changes four times as rapidly as adult culture. The most tiring thing in ministry is reimagining. It’s not about substance, it’s about contextualization. Reimagining to reach a [different] generation. I learned skills by doing that in youth ministry that are helpful to no end in what I do now.

When you work in youth ministry … you get empowered early. And that’s important, because when Jesus wanted to change the world he started a youth group, not an elder board. According to the late John Stott, the disciples were 15 to 22 years old. I think that’s really challenging to us, because sometimes in the church if you’re not old enough, you’re not good enough.

You have set a goal of having 50,000 total individual EA members within the next decade. What gives you confidence that this is achievable, and what potential obstacles do you see to reaching that target?

The last year gives us some confidence. I think the UK is crying out for a brave and kind Evangelical Alliance that can steer them through the storms, that can keep the main thing the main thing, which is about people meeting Jesus.

But we’ll also take stands on the important issues of our time from marriage to abortion to end of life care to racial injustice and everything in between. As long as we stay on mission, and we don’t drift, and we keep our focus, and we spend more time on our knees than on our feet, I’m confident that the Lord is with us and we’ll get there.

There are quite a few obstacles. We’re living in a secular tsunami. It’s a very contested culture. There are fewer Christians in the UK than before. I’m believing for a major movement of God, but we can’t currently claim to be in one.

Another obstacle is that the UK has an aging population. Let’s be honest, of the 23,000 members we currently have, how many of those will still be alive in ten years? I don’t want to start doing that math, but some are going out the back door as well as through the front door … I have confidence that the Lord’s got this, but only a fool would look at our culture and think there are no obstacles.

- More from James Thompson

Church Life

Haitians Are Ministering at the End of the World

Andy Olsen

As Haiti is uprooted by violence, church leaders treat gunshot wounds, give up homes for strangers, and rescue dignitaries.

A man identifies a body after an overnight shooting in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétion-Ville in March.

Odelyn Joseph / AP Images

Pastor Frederic Nozil has learned to keep his head down.

Last year, the year he turned 53, gangs attacked his neighborhood in Pétion-Ville, a suburb overlooking Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They ransacked the house Nozil was renting and set it on fire. Nozil moved with his wife and two daughters to a safer community a couple of miles away.

Still, he took few chances. This year, he turned 54 at home, quietly. A handful of people from his church brought a cake. They stayed no more than an hour. “Parties attract attention,” Nozil said. “You can’t celebrate too much.”

He schedules church activities to wrap up before a mandatory curfew. He will cut a prayer service short if he has a bad feeling about a police vehicle he noticed on the street. Some of his congregation risk their lives crossing gang checkpoints on their way to the church, the Centre Chrétien International Maison d’Adoration, so he knows to expect a smaller turnout.

Ministry looks different, he figures, at the end of the world. “We are living in an eschatological time,” Nozil said.

That’s how it felt in the early hours of March 18. It was a Monday, and the bespectacled minister should have been recovering from the usual slate of Sunday demands. Instead, he shut himself in his home for two days straight as heavy gunfire echoed through the hills.

Gang members in balaclavas wound past Nozil’s neighborhood in cars and motorcycles, ascending the main road into the mountains. They shot automatic weapons and left at least a dozen pedestrians dead in their wake. They stopped in a wealthy enclave called Laboule and laid siege to its walled residences. In one home, security cameras recorded armed young men with backpacks as they forced their way into a paver-stone courtyard and peered into parked SUVs.

In a home nearby, a man escaped the assailants, and then—because anything can happen at the end of the world—he made a desperate phone call to a pastor 1,600 miles away.

Roselin “RoRo” Eustache was driving home from Walmart when Miradin Morlan’s name flashed on his phone. Eustache had been stuck in Houston for months, staying with family, unable to return to Haiti because gangs have closed the nation’s main international airport and blocked every route to his home and the mission he runs there.

When he saw the call from an old acquaintance—the former head of the Direction Générale des Impôts, Haiti’s equivalent of the IRS—he picked up to hear a panicked plea: Pastor, save my life!

Morlan explained he and his wife were fleeing Laboule on foot. Gangs had broken into their home, held him at gunpoint, tried to kidnap him, and stripped the rooms bare. They stole his cars. His private security guards ran for their lives.

As he put distance between himself and his attackers, Morlan remembered the hospital at Eustache’s mission, a place in Haiti’s south where he had once had knee surgery. The pastor had helped him before; would he do it again? Eustache arranged for a driver to meet them.

The couple took a hired motorcycle over a mountain pass and along a road that in spots is little more than a hiking trail. At one point, Morlan’s wife fell and broke her arm. After hours of travel, perhaps 20 miles, they met the driver in a town called Seguin, at the piney edge of one of Haiti’s few national parks.

“I am still in shock,” Morlan said, days later in a countryside hideout where he was struggling to find even toilet paper. “It’s really incomprehensible.”

Except, tragically, it is not.

Forced displacements are ubiquitous among the nearly 4 million people in and around Port-au-Prince. Gangs control more than 80 percent of the city, where roughly a third of Haitians live. The bandits, as many Haitians refer to them, have killed more than 1,500 people in the first three months of 2024 alone.

At least 362,500 Haitians have fled gang violence so far, according to the United Nations. Gunmen have driven residents from slums. From rural villages. From gated communities. From farms.

Mass displacement is reshaping everyday life far beyond the violence-racked capital. Gangs have outgunned the national police and pushed north, to Haiti’s quilted rice fields, and west, toward horizons outlined by plantains and sugarcane.

The ongoing violence compounds a hunger crisis that has left more than a million Haitians at risk of starvation. It is wiping out families’ savings and straining resources in already stretched communities.

Last month was the worst yet: More than 53,000 Haitians were forced from their homes. For pastors like Nozil and Eustache and Christian leaders across Haiti, displacement—really, the upending of their entire universe—has come to redefine ministry.

“This is my whole life,” Eustache told CT. Some staff at his mission, Haitian Christian Outreach, have been displaced as many as four times, migrating between schools and other public facilities that have morphed into shelters as gang boundaries shift.

Local police have turned to the mission, one staff member said. Some officers have not been paid for months, and they are struggling to find food and beds for those who were sleeping on the precinct floor. The mission had helped in the past, even loaning police Land Cruisers when their vehicles were broken down.

“I need to do something,” Eustache said. “Because whenever we need them, they’re there for us.”

Haitians often vent their dissatisfaction with politicians through a saying: rache manyok. Translated literally, it means “tear out the manioc.” It’s what a farmer does when he grabs the long stem of the plant also known as cassava and wrings it from the red dirt, tuber to leaf.

For decades, rache manyok has been shouted in street protests and deployed against elected leaders on social media. So has a punchier, related word: dechoukaj, or “uprooting.”

But Haiti has no elected leaders now; it has not held elections in eight years. In that enduring power vacuum, experts estimate that as many as 200 gangs arose.

In February, many of the gangs cemented an alliance that enabled them to vandalize government offices and break open the nation’s two largest prisons. They have threatened to complete their conquest by occupying the main airport and the National Palace, Haiti’s iconic seat of government.

This week, a new nine-member transitional governing council is beginning the task it has been handed by the United States and the 15-nation Caribbean Community: quell the violence and, by some miracle, prepare the country for elections again.

They inherit a nation being uprooted.

If you wanted to mark the destruction in Haiti with pins on a giant map, you would probably start in Port-au-Prince. You’d stick a dozen pins on the pharmacies that gangs burned near the General Hospital downtown and most of its medical facilities, which are largely inoperative.

Eventually you’d put a pin in the former campus of the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Port-au-Prince, a rare wooded oasis with a gleaming academic building that was finally rebuilt after the 2010 earthquake, only to be seized by gangs three years later in 2020.

You’d pin churches that have been burned or had windows smashed, and factories and car dealerships. You’d pin the vandalized National School of the Arts and the looted National Library, a repository of historical documents from the world’s first Black republic.

After you covered most of the capital in well over a thousand pins, you could pick almost any route out of the city and trace the decimation along the way. If you took Route Nationale 1 for a few miles, you would tag several looted compounds of American missions groups.

Near the town of Titanyen, you’d drop a pin on the campus of Christian Aid Ministries, where a group of kidnapped Anabaptist missionaries were tearfully reunited with loved ones after escaping in late 2021 and where, only months later, gangs took control of the property. Next door, at the compound of a Mississippi-based ministry, gangs punched a hole in the concrete perimeter wall, emptying shipping containers and peeling solar panels from rooftops.

All of that pinning, and you would fail to even scratch the surface. You would still be five miles from the town of Cabaret, where the police station, like many police stations before it, burned in early March.

Cabaret is a small regional hub, a town shaped like an amphitheater at a crook in the highway. What people remember is that on March 3, no one’s phones were working—fuel shortages and roadblocks often prevent cellular providers from powering their towers.

Around lunchtime, a father in the market heard someone yell, “The men are coming!” He rushed home, grabbing his four children and running. As they sprinted through gunfire, his seven-year-old son was shot in the leg.

Oltina, one of the few Cabaret residents CT interviewed for this story who was willing to give her name, had fled another town less than a month earlier. She was outside when the shooting erupted around her. Racing to find her kids, she tripped on a pot of beans cooking over a fire and burned her foot in the boiling water. For several hours she hid with her two children in a garden.

Another woman said she watched bandits kidnap her husband as she escaped with their two-month-old son.

Houses burned. Stores and market stalls—the fruit of years of labor—were abandoned. Life savings and passports and family photographs were lost as an entire community fled into the mountains.

With no phones and no way to coordinate, the displaced scattered from Cabaret, heading wherever instinct guided them or wherever they thought they might know someone.

In a village roughly eight miles away, a young mother opened her door to an older woman she had never seen before. The stranger had four children in tow, and her husband had been fatally shot in the stomach trying to defend their home in Cabaret. Their relatives in the village had no room for them.

“Pretend this is your house,” said the young mother, who asked that neither she nor her town be identified for fear that gangs would target her neighborhood.

In the same community, another woman, a twenty-something who works at the American-run ministry Real Hope for Haiti, arrived home to find more than a dozen people from Cabaret. A friend suggested they would be welcome at her place.

The ministry employee hosted 17 refugees in her two-bedroom home. She gave up her own bed. She sleeps elsewhere for now, swinging by each day to pack the clothes she needs in a plastic bag. In the evenings she prays with her houseguests; one of them, a young girl, has been suffering from panic attacks.

“Taking in strangers is hard,” the woman said. “But if God welcomes everyone, we can welcome a few people who are trying to escape from gangs.”

An official in her town estimated that several thousand people have been displaced to the village over the last year. Locals have grown accustomed, to the degree anyone really can, to outsiders roaming their streets, asking for food or a place to sleep.

At the ten churches around town, pastors say attendance is up. Some services are overflowing, with worshipers bringing their own chairs. Churches have tried to adopt displaced families to care for. People have cut bananas and breadfruit from their gardens and brought them to the sojourners. They have donated rugs and woven mats for sleeping.

Church leaders across the country report similar situations, especially in the south, where the UN says most displaced people have fled to this year.

But Lori Moise, who directs Real Hope for Haiti’s clinic, cautions that people should not get the impression that some spiritual awakening is underway, like she remembers happening after the 2010 earthquake.

“There are many who wholeheartedly hold fast to God. Others have left the church because they don’t see him answering their prayers and the suffering is unrelenting,” said Moise, whose clinic has treated gunshot wounds in survivors from several communities in recent years.

“When the gang violence first started, people prayed more and spoke of God more. I see despair falling on most people now. One quality foreigners remark about the Haitian people is their resilience and hope. I sense both are waning.”

The number of internally displaced Haitians has grown, at least partially, because leaving the country has grown extremely difficult. The main international and domestic airport in Port-au-Prince has been closed since early March, after parked aircraft were struck with bullets. The neighboring Dominican Republic has shut its border to Haitian nationals.

But it is only a pause; the flight of Haitians abroad will resume as soon as airline ticket counters reopen.

Haitians who already fled to South and Central America are driving record asylum applications in Mexico. And in the United States, 168,000 Haitians have been granted temporary residency through a Biden administration humanitarian parole program that began last year. Among them are thousands of Haiti’s best and brightest.

Almost everyone has stories of those who have left: a church in the north where the whole elder board emigrated; a mission hospital in a central region now missing a third of its staff. Haitian Christian Outreach, Eustache’s ministry, has lost eight employees—including teachers and three doctors—to the program. Pastor Nozil’s entire music team is gone. Reginald Pyrhus, pastor of Église Baptist Bérée in Port-au-Prince, says that half of his middle-class congregation has left the country, many going to the United States.

And they are not the only brain drain underway. An entire generation of college-aged Haitians is currently not entering medical school or law school or other professional programs, or, at the least, have been forced to put studies on hold. Many of those who have completed coursework cannot sit for certification exams, because the exams are not being administered. So if and when medical facilities do reopen, there will be a severe shortage of talent waiting to pick up the mantle.

“This is a big problem,” Eustache said. “It’s going to take us time to find good doctors again.”

It will also be a while before missionaries and other aid workers return. Most pulled out of Haiti years ago, heeding escalating State Department warnings to US citizens. For the few hardy souls who stayed, the March airport closure was a breaking point. Missionaries told stories of evacuations at rural airstrips and helicopter rescues by a private group using the code words Operation: Rum Runner.

David Selvey, the American director of the Haitian American Friendship Foundation, a mission that operates in the country’s central plateau, got out with a group of missionaries who crossed a river into the Dominican Republic in dugout canoes. Someone put him in touch with a Dominican pastor who drove four hours across the country to collect them at the border.

“It’s just amazing to me how quickly God’s people will step up to help people in the family of God who are in trouble or have a problem,” Selvey told CT. “And you don’t have to know them.”

Don Allensworth would like to see a whole lot more people stepping up.

Allensworth is chief development officer of Mission of Hope, a ministry that long operated out of a compound in Titanyen, between Port-au-Prince and Cabaret. Nearby campuses were breached by gangs, so it relocated to Cap-Haïtien in the north.

The ministry’s partners across Haiti are texting reports almost daily. In Jérémie, a city in the southwest, people are waking up to find children and the elderly who died overnight from hunger.

“Haiti is facing the greatest humanitarian crisis in the history of its existence right now, and it is not okay for people to starve to death,” he said. “I don’t care if you’re a Christian or not. If you’re a human, it’s not okay for people to starve to death.”

Once one of Haiti’s largest facilitators of short-term mission groups, Mission of Hope now focuses much of its energy on food aid. With gangs blocking the country’s main seaport, the nonprofit has gone as far as approaching cruise lines to find new ways to ship in the hundreds of thousands of meals it distributes each month.

But Allensworth doesn’t want Mission of Hope to become known as a food agency. He wants the violence to stop and children to return full-time to school, and the organization’s Haitian staff to be able to work without fearing for their lives.

“The Haitian people just want an opportunity to live and make decisions about leading themselves,” he said. “They need to be free.”

To help Haiti’s police liberate the country from the armed groups holding it hostage, the United Nations has sanctioned the deployment of a multinational police force of as many as 2,500 officers. Roughly 1,000 would come from Kenya. Most Haitians support a limited intervention to help stabilize the country, and Haiti’s new transitional council faces strong international pressure to welcome the security mission.

But the operation has hit multiple delays; Kenya has said it will not send the force until partner countries, namely the United States, make good on their promises to underwrite it. Republicans in the US House and Senate have so far refused to approve the $40 million the State Department has pledged to help launch the Kenya-led mission.

“We need to figure out a way to get the dollars that have been allocated to Haiti, to get them there as quickly as we can,” Allensworth said. “Now is the time to write those letters” to senators and congressmen.

Eustache says he does not know how Haiti’s great uprooting will end, or when. He is homesick. He wishes he were back in his country, praying in person with Haitians who have nothing to eat, instead of being stranded in Texas trying to persuade Americans that they have too much to eat.

But the best plan he can formulate right now is to keep telling people how much it hurts to watch his world unravel.

When he speaks about it, he seems at times on the verge of tears. “We need to continue to do what we’ve been doing, making people aware of the situation,” Eustache said. “We cannot let our candle die on us.”

With reporting by Franco lacomini in Brazil and Espeson Toussaint in Haiti.

Andy Olsen is senior editor at CT.

- More from Andy Olsen

News

Forgotten War: Sudan’s Displaced Christians Brace for ‘World’s Worst’ Hunger Crisis

Jayson Casper

Interview with leader of new evangelical alliance describes his escape from Khartoum and the pressure to pick a side.

Refugees fleeing from civil war in Sudan arrive at a transit center in South Sudan.

Luis Tato / Contributor / Getty

Overlooked by crises in Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan has now endured one year of civil war. Nearly 16,000 people have been killed, with 8.2 million fleeing from their homes—including 4 million children. Both figures are global highs for internal displacement.

The United Nations stated that the “world’s worst hunger crisis” is looming, warning that one-third of Sudan’s 49 million people suffer acute food insecurity and 222,000 children could die of starvation within weeks. Yet an international emergency response plan, endorsed by UN agencies including the Cindy McCain-led World Food Program, is only six percent funded.

Sudanese Christians feel like “no one cares.”

Five years earlier, they had great hope. In 2019 a popular revolution overthrew longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir, wanted for war crimes against his people. The new civilian government repealed the law of apostasy, removed Islamist elements from the bureaucracy, and implemented other democratic reforms. But in 2021 the general of the army, in cooperation with the leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—a government-aligned paramilitary group accused of the atrocities in Darfur—deposed the prime minister.

Continuing negotiations with civilian leaders demanded a merger of the two armed forces, but neither general could agree on terms. And while it is not clear who fired the first shot, last year on April 15 the conflict exploded in the capital of Khartoum. Much of the North African nation is now a war zone.

Yet somehow, an evangelical alliance has formed and joined two regional bodies.

Rafat Samir, secretary general of the Sudan Evangelical Alliance, witnessed the outbreak of violence firsthand. Now resident in Egypt, he oversaw the dialogue between his own Evangelical Presbyterian synod and the Sudanese Church of Christ, shuttling between safe havens in his home country and in neighboring Ethiopia.

Earlier this month, these denominational partners, which Samir says represent at least 75 percent of Sudanese evangelicals, successively affiliated with the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) regional associations for both the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa. Catholics, Anglicans, Coptic Orthodox, and various Protestant denominations account for about 4 percent of the population of Sudan, which ranks No. 8 on the Open Doors World Watch List of countries where it is hardest to be a Christian.

CT asked Samir about the impact of civil war on the church, why its WEA identity exists in two directions, and why his only remaining hope is in God:

Where were you on April 15 last year?

My home is in the Bahri neighborhood, where both the army and the RSF have bases, and antiaircraft guns were firing right outside my bedroom window, with bombing campaigns morning and night. Electricity and water services were cut. As it was Ramadan, one day I went out at sunset to find food, thinking there would be a lull in the fighting. A bullet missed me by mere centimeters.

I wanted to flee immediately, but my brother preferred to wait it out, as we have witnessed clashes before, and he anticipated it would end after a few days, as previously. Bodies lie dead in the streets, and we covered them with sand to suppress the smell. But after enduring these harsh conditions with his wife and two daughters for 15 days, he agreed to leave when a bomb hit his neighboring house.

How did you escape?

We searched three days just to find a vehicle to get us out of the city, and eventually had to pay $500 USD to travel only two kilometers (1.2 miles). We then negotiated getting a small bus with 40 other people to take us to the Egyptian border, but then the driver upped the price upon our arrival to $10,000 total. We had room only for our personal documents, leaving everything else behind.

But leaving Khartoum was entirely dependent on God’s timing.

The battle was still raging, with barrel bombs damaging the road out of town. An earlier bus was stopped by the RSF, who killed the people and stole their money. We heard that, at an army checkpoint, a later bus experienced the same thing. We were lucky—soldiers only searched our vehicles for weapons and simply wanted a bribe to let us move onward.

A friendly family in the city before Egypt gave us a place to sleep and running water. But the next day, the border was so crowded it took us three days to pass through. Some slept in the mosque, others under the scattered trees. When I finally made it to Aswan, an Egyptian friend met me and gave me a place in the German mission hospital guesthouse. He cried when he saw me.

I didn’t know why until I finally settled in and looked at myself in the mirror.

Where are others in your church?

We have over 100 members in our Bahri church. Those who took shelter there were beaten by the RSF when they attacked our building, and they had to flee. Many went to Egypt, others to Ethiopia, Chad, the Nuba Mountains region, or to South Sudan. But there, it is expensive, so several traveled onward to Uganda. A few stayed in Sudan, but renting in-country is also expensive—and for those with children there is no school.

Even a bottle of water costs up to $10.

Everyone is making as much money off this crisis as they can. So, basically, people went where they had family, could find work, or get a visa. But outside of Khartoum, most churches are still functioning. They are not at peace, but they have no possibility to leave. Evangelicals are not from the elite—most believers come from war zones in Sudan. Many don’t have travel documents, and while they can work and eat, they remain poor.

The Church of Christ members are nearly all from the Nuba Mountains, which was at war with the government. Presbyterians are majority Nuba also, with 20 percent originally from South Sudan and another 20 percent from the various tribes. I am of Egyptian descent—others are from Darfur or the Arab north.

How do you manage this diversity?

Identity is a big problem in Sudan. Our country is African, but we speak Arabic. This is why we joined both regional alliances. If you say “Arab” to someone from the Nuba Mountains or South Sudan, it means the people who killed their families, raped their daughters, and tried to Islamize them. But in the north of the country, the Arab is his friend, family, and who he wants to bring to Jesus.

When we started reaching out to Muslims, some from the south resisted, saying: We don’t want to see them in heaven, they don’t deserve salvation. I understand this sentiment. But some of our congregations operate out of their tribal identity and refuse to speak Arabic.

For a long time, many in our country wanted to call ourselves an Arab republic. We are part of the Arab League, but when we need African help, we start calling ourselves Africans. But in the end, we are Africans who speak Arabic, multiethnic in our tribal makeup.

Sudan is a crossover country—some have origins from Yemen and East Africa—and most of us are of mixed heritage. Only the Nuba Mountains and a few others are not. We were even a Christian country until the 14th century, and in the 19th century an eschatological Muslim movement killed many Christians and forced others to convert to Islam.

Presbyterian missionaries came in 1899 and started the first schools for girls, agriculture, and vocational training. The Church of Christ was established in 1920 and is the largest evangelical denomination today. But Sudan is neither a Muslim country nor a Christian country, and likewise, neither Arab nor African entirely.

We joined the Middle East and North Africa Evangelical Alliance because we speak Arabic and face similar issues with Islam and government discrimination. We joined the Association of Evangelicals in Africa because we face the same issues with ethnic identity. I checked with WEA regional leadership—it is not a problem to belong to two alliances.

How has the church been able to help?

The main thing we did was help people escape and find shelter.

Our schools in Wad Madani (100 miles southeast of Khartoum) received families and provided basic meals and trauma care. All the homes are full of those displaced from Khartoum, but then when the war reached this area, many were dislocated again eastward to other cities and Port Sudan. We also helped 15 Muslim-background believers escape abroad, as they would not have been welcomed in their original villages.

We didn’t get much help from outside; a lot is funded from our own resources. This is why we haven’t been able to do much relief work. We pray and try to give hope to the people. We urge them to remain as salt and light and to keep their children from the fighting. The easiest way to make money is to join the army or the RSF and join in the looting.

But it is clear: Now is not the time for logic or reason. Bullets are talking.

Do the churches have a political opinion about the war?

Only that we will never support war—we want peace.

Last week officials approached me to make a statement in favor of the war. I told them it is not about the army or the RSF; it is about human life. We cannot support killing and destruction.

So then they went to the same Christians they used against us during the era of Bashir, who belonged to his political party and usurped leadership in our church councils. They took nice pictures with the army general.

Did the RSF reach out to you also?

As evangelicals, both sides hate us. They burned our churches. We know how the RSF killed our people in the Nuba Mountains and Darfur, so even when they were part of the post-revolutionary government, we did not deal with them. I have met with army leaders in the past, and I met our civilian prime minister and his cabinet. But we do not engage the RSF.

We are clear that we stand for life.

Security bodies approached the Church of Christ also, which faces the same problems we do. Refusing them may put us in a difficult position later on. But we cannot lie, we cannot forget who we are in Christ.

What would you like to say to those outside Sudan?

There is suspicious silence coming from the international community. The Arab League is not helping—even in Egypt they ask us if we are still in a civil war. Our issues are not on CNN, and no one pays attention to news from Sudan.

It makes the church feel like no one cares.

No one is standing up to say: Stop the war. We don’t hear that people are praying for us. We don’t see statements from churches to represent us before their governments.

To the Sudanese abroad, I say: Settle down, it will take a while before you can return. They are not settled in their spirit, but I tell them to wait on God and avoid being negative about their nation. Eventually, many will come back and bring with them the fruit from life in other countries. Others will stay and can support from the diaspora.

But we are all aliens and strangers in this world, like Abraham, living in tents.

Do you maintain hope in God?

We never lose it—we know that God is good.

From Deuteronomy, we know he can change a curse into a blessing. From Isaiah, we know he can change mourning into laughter. And from Romans, we know he will make all things work together for good.

Like with Samson’s lion, he can turn a carcass into something sweet.

This is the only hope we have. We know the situation now is not the end. God is working, we are safe, and we manage to have enough to eat. This is all a blessing from him.

But we have nothing we can do, except wait for God to move.

- More from Jayson Casper

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The show invites kids along for the adventure.

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