How to Know If You’re Growing in Patience—or Just Giving Up

Columnist

The right kind of waiting can save us. The wrong kind will destroy us.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

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

Whenever some terrible atrocity comes to light in the news cycle these days (in other words, about every 15 minutes), I hear the question “But what can we do?” I usually urge prayer and patience. The first part I have no doubts about, but I’m starting to realize the second one needs more context. That’s because, just like faith or hope or love or grace, the word patience often stands in for a cheap imitation. The right kind of patience can save us; the wrong kind will destroy us.

Last year, Leon Wieseltier wrote in his journal Liberties a kind of jeremiad against patience. It is, he wrote, the virtue those of us who believe in democracy often commend against all kinds of revolutionaries and enthusiasts, and rightly so. Still, Wieseltier wrote, patience can also be paralyzing when we don’t know where the line is between wise acceptance and unwise resignation. As he put it, “Sometimes patience has the lamentable effect of turning a player into an umpire, and umpires have no sides.”

Those words made me wince because they called to mind Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to the “white moderate” pastors who told him they agreed with his goals but he should wait patiently for justice. Noting his own consistent commitment to nonviolence and persuasive witness, King wrote, “I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”

King wrote and spoke very differently when addressing a different audience than those who remained silent “behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.” Many, after all, concluded King’s movement was too patient, too slow. Some decided his patience just wasn’t working. We can see why someone would come to that conclusion a full decade after the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision with Jim Crow still in effect all across the South. To those, King counseled patience. This difference wasn’t inconsistency.

If someone thinks he or she has sinned too much to be forgiven, I am not going to say “Obey God” and walk away—not because obedience is unimportant but because what that person will hear, with an already-faulty view of obedience, is “Work harder.” But if another friend tells me he’s been caught embezzling money but it really wasn’t that much, and if the company wanted him not to do it, they should have paid him more, I am not going to say simply, “Rest in God’s grace.” Again, that’s not because he shouldn’t rest in God’s grace but because he has a wrong definition of grace.

Patience is indeed what’s called for in this time and in all times. Patience is worked in us by the Spirit. But the efficacy of this virtue requires that we know what it is and isn’t. Let’s look at some common views of patience.

First, think about cynical patience. This is what King called out in the Birmingham pastors. This kind of patience says, “You’ve got to be realistic” or “Idealism is for losers.” It acts as a moral sedative against doing what is right and accepts the Devil’s account of reality—that force is ultimate, that cruelty is power.

Second is demoralized patience. Those with this kind of patience wait not because they trust but because they have given up. Demoralized patience is waiting without hope. Over time, it loses the ability even to imagine a different kind of future.

In reality, the first kind of fake patience feeds on the second. Most people aren’t calculating and opportunistic. But for those who are—the cynics—nothing is more of an obstacle than people who actually hope—who aspire to something better. The cynics often tell people to be patient when what they really want is for the demoralized to shrug and say, “Well, it is what it is.”

Sometimes what feels realistic or reasonable or mature is just a way of saying to oneself, “Nothing meaningful is coming. Adjust yourself accordingly.”

In the days of the prophet Ezekiel, the problem was not just with exiles who feared God had forgotten them but also with those who were left behind in their homeland. They concluded that injustice and violence would continue: “The Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see” (Ezek. 9:9, ESV throughout).

This pattern of thinking ends with the cynics leading the demoralized to hopelessness—right where the cynics want it. And God denounced the cynics, who had “disheartened the righteous falsely, although I have not grieved him, and you have encouraged the wicked, that he should not turn from his evil way to save his life” (13:22).

But neither of these false views is what the Bible means by patience. Paul wrote of endurance, a patient bearing-up under suffering, this way: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame” (Rom. 5:3–5). He then wrote that “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (8:25).

This is hopeful patience. It recognizes delayed outcomes but does not decay expectations.

In fact, Paul wrote that waiting with hope is not passive but active, even when we don’t know what to do. The Spirit prompts us, after all, to “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved” (vv. 23–24). That’s full of lament but not despair.

If what we define as patience makes us less able to determine what is wrong, it is not patience of the Spirit. Patience instead lets go of the need to control timetables or to have hopes that are immediately measurable.

Hopeful patience does not refuse to bear witness. Often this kind of patience cannot see the next steps to take, but not because it no longer believes there’s a way forward. Sometimes hopeful patience doesn’t know how to achieve justice, but not because it has concluded that injustice is inevitable or that good and evil are the same.

Impatience, on the other hand, leads first to frenzy and then compliance. When we expect everything to be immediately made right, we become frantic when it is not. For some people, that then means forcing change to happen—even if it mimics the ways and means of the unjust. If Martin Luther King Jr. had decided to fight Bull Connor with fire hoses and attack dogs of his own, he would have lost regardless of who won—it would just create a contest to find which Bull Connor was bigger.

Even for those who retain moral integrity and authority, a waiting that isn’t energized by both hope and lament will lose heart—and give up. Eventually, the impatient look around for what does seem to work, and often they find the same thing the cynical propose and the demoralized accept.

The patience of the Spirit is different because it conforms us to the patience of God himself. If we misunderstand that, we miss it all. In The Perilous Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic, author Karl Bell explores how the chaos of the oceans led to the genre of “cosmic horror” by such writers as H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and other monsters are terrifying because they are, in a sense, patient. They slumber in waiting because they do not care about human beings at all. They represent a meaningless, unfeeling universe. But that is not the patience of the God and Father of Jesus Christ.

The impatient look at the injustice and suffering of the world, and they conclude, as do the cynical and demoralized patient, that everything will be this way forever (2 Pet. 3:4). They cannot see that the patience of God is active: “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (v. 9). Patience with hope keeps checking in, even if that means asking, “How long, O Lord?” or sighing in utterance too deep for words.

Patience is not Zen-like detachment. That’s why some of the most patient people I know feel as if they’re impatient. And some of the people who think they are patient are just procrastinating or scared or numb. If you are anguished and unsure of what to do, pray—stop and just say that in the presence of God. You will find that you are either appealing for God to intervene or praying for him to bring to mind what he is calling you to do.

Patience endures suffering, but it doesn’t cause it. Patience endures evil, but it doesn’t endorse it. Let’s wait, but not as those who have no hope.

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

News

Christians Provide Food, Medicine, and Spiritual Hope at Venezuela’s Border

Hernán Restrepo in Cúcuta, Colombia

After Maduro’s ouster, ministries in Cúcuta, Colombia, don’t know if Venezuelan migrants will return home or if more will flee.

The Simón Bolívar International Bridge on the Colombia-Venezuela border.

Image courtesy of Hernán Restrepo

On a sweltering Sunday in Cúcuta, Colombia, the worship team at Casa Sobre la Roca prepared onstage in the cool, air-conditioned sanctuary as parishioners, many from the city’s upper-class neighborhood, mingle before the first service.

Unnoticed, a grey-haired man with deep wrinkles etched in his face and a trash bag in his hand limped to a seat in the last row. Minutes later, a younger man with a trimmed goatee holding his own plastic bag slid into the seat next to him. Their shoes were worn from days of traveling from their home in Valencia, Venezuela, to the Colombian border town of Cúcuta.

Jonathan Coche-Vásquez and his uncle Frank González left Venezuela on January 2 and first heard about the US military capture of President Nicolás Maduro on the radio a day later, when they were already in Colombia.

The news brought them new hope for their country. But as the days passed, that elation dissipated as Venezuela’s Chavista leadership remained in power. They were encouraged to hear that officials with the US State Department had arrived at the embassy in Caracas to assess reestablishing diplomatic ties, as well as that opposition leader María Corina Machado would meet with President Donald Trump, which ended up happening on January 15.

“We know things are going to change. We hope it will be for the better, but no one knows how long it will take,” González said. “We decided to leave the country because the hunger and poverty we experienced in our city, Valencia, couldn’t wait. We want to get to [Colombia’s capital of] Bogotá to find work in gardening or construction.”

Image courtesy of Hernán Restrepo

Jonathan Coche-Vásquez and his uncle Frank González.

The night before, the two had slept in the Colón Park, a popular spot for Venezuelan migrants and displaced Colombians due to its enormous trees that offer respite from the relentless heat. But as they slept, robbers stole their backpacks and the little money they had. All they had left were a few changes of clothes that they hauled in their garbage bags. On Sunday, they stepped into Casa Sobre la Roca after a church member invited them to the service.

The pastor preached about the meaning of truth, interspersing his sermon with political commentary about Colombia’s upcoming elections. Despite struggling with fatigue, González and Coche-Vásquez listened attentively, shedding tears at the final moment of reflection on Jesus’ words in John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

Like González and Coche-Vásquez, two in three Venezuelans who have left the country would not want to return without security guarantees and a reinstatement of rule of law, as they fear state repression, poor quality of public services, and increased insecurity. Cúcuta, the main city along the porous 1,370-mile border separating Colombia and Venezuela, is often the first stop for Venezuelan migrants escaping poverty and violence.

As a result, in the past decade, Christians—many of them Venezuelan refugees themselves—have opened shelters, soup kitchens, medical clinics, and churches to aid the new arrivals. More than 215,000 Venezuelans now call Cúcuta home, along with 37,000 in the nearby city of Villa del Rosario.

Uncertainty remains after the US military strike on Caracas. Ministry workers don’t know whether they’ll see an influx of Venezuelans coming into Colombia or an exodus of refugees returning home. Either way, they are eager to help in whatever way they can.

One of them, Ediober González (no relation to Frank), has helped distribute food for migrants through organizations such as Samaritan’s Purse since 2018. A Venezuelan Baptist pastor, he and his family decided to flee the country in 2015 after seeing his children’s school teach a propagandistic history of the Cuban Revolution.

“I understand that [people] are fleeing not only poverty but also the lack of freedom in our country,” he said.

Image courtesy of Hernán Restrepo

Ediober González

Maduro had led Venezuela since Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013, and under his authoritarian rule, 8 million people left the country due to hyperinflation, political repression, gang violence, and a shortage of food and medicine.

Since arriving in Colombia, Ediober González noted that Cúcuta had received two major waves of Venezuelan migrants—the first following the country’s economic collapse between 2016 and 2018, and the second during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 as inflation increased dramatically.

He recalls that during the two previous waves, rivers of people could be seen waiting to cross the Simón Bolívar Bridge, the main border crossing between Colombia and Venezuela, every day. Thousands more crossed through informal paths, taking advantage of the shallow waters of the Táchira River.

Today, the bridge is much emptier. A week after Maduro’s ouster, only a few migrants could be seen walking into Colombia carrying heavy backpacks. TV news reporters from around the world gathered by the border to interview migrants and immigration officials. Meanwhile, traders carrying bundles of clothes, toys, and medicines crossed the bridge to sell their wares in Venezuela.

Seeing the migrants resting on the sidewalk after crossing the bridge reminds Ediober González of Philippians 4:12—“I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want”—a verse that has helped him through difficult times in Colombia.

Despite having studied literature at a top Venezuelan university, Ediober González worked odd jobs upon arriving in Colombia: painting houses, selling bread, and making cakes. Up until four months ago, he worked for the Italian nonprofit Terres des Hommes, delivering food baskets to families at risk of malnutrition. But with the shutdown of USAID, the organization had to close its operations in the city.

Without that aid, more migrants are begging for money to pay for bus tickets to other cities in Colombia where they can find work and food. While Ediober González found the work of secular nonprofits meaningful, it also presented challenges to his Christian faith. In the past, he has disagreed with the content of their workshops on gender and sexual health. In one case, he turned down a job that would have made him recommend abortions to pregnant migrants.

Currently Ediober González is looking for work while making a little money on the side by giving rides in his car. As the deacon of his Venezuelan church in Cúcuta, he also takes on preaching responsibilities. His wife is a schoolteacher in the city.

After crossing the Simón Bolívar Bridge, many migrants head to the city of Villa del Rosario outside the southern edge of Cúcuta. Here the rent is cheaper, and the hillsides are dotted with unpainted brick houses with tin roofs.

In 2021, the Venezuelan National Baptist Convention, with the help of resources from the International Mission Board, opened a migrant shelter called Casa de la Misión in the city. The three-story building includes showers, laundry stations, and a doctor’s office, as well as two dormitories that can accommodate six men and six women.

The shelter’s doctor, Bruno Mendive, is originally from Caracas. Frustrated by continuous power outages and the lack of medicine, which made his work nearly impossible, he packed up his belongings, strapped them to the back of his bicycle, and rode to Colombia.

In 2020, he put his medical skills to work to treat the migrants who arrive at Casa de la Misión with heat exhaustion, dehydration, and blisters on their feet, as well as respiratory and gastrointestinal problems.

“The Venezuelan migrants I care for are glad to realize that a fellow countryman is helping them; they feel more at ease,” Mendive said. These days, he sees an average of 50 people a day. During the height of the previous migration waves back in 2021, the shelter received as many as 600 visitors a day.

Mendive said he feels grateful to God for the opportunity to help not only his fellow Venezuelans but also Colombians displaced by violence. In 2025, more than 100,000 people fled the Catatumbo region, north of Cúcuta, due to clashes between National Liberation Army guerrillas and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s 33rd Front, a ccording to the Ombudsman’s Office.

Mendive recently accompanied humanitarian missions to nearby towns like Tibú and El Tarra, providing medical care, especially to children.

“More than advice, migrants need to talk,” said Venezuelan pastor Boanerges de Armas, director of Casa de la Misión and pastor of Global Missionary Baptist Church, which meets in the shelter. “Here, we give them food, clothing, and medicine. But we also listen to them and then pray for them before they continue on their journey.”

De Armas knows the pressures they face and the worries they have about family back home. He is cautious when he speaks about current events with his daughter, who still lives in Anzoátegui, Venezuela. She told him that the government sends “social fighters” to inspect citizens’ phones. If they find any anti-regime photo, meme, or WhatsApp conversation, they can detain the offenders, accusing them of attempting to undermine the peace of Venezuela.

Image courtesy of Hernán Restrepo

Boanerges de Armas

He noted the shelter also serves as a missionary training center, using a three-year curriculum created by the Venezuelan Baptist Convention. So far, hundreds of young Venezuelans have come through the program to learn not only theory but also the practical skills of being a missionary and helping the community they are in. Through the program, 70 students have gone on to plant their own churches.

William Lacle graduated from the same program while living in Venezuela, before moving to Colombia in 2020 to become a missionary. During the pandemic, he and his wife would go to the Simón Bolívar Bridge and pass out food to fellow Venezuelan migrants, at times giving out 1,000 bowls of soup a day, he recalled.

“God has placed in my wife and me a great love for migrants,” he said. “Then God placed in our hearts the desire to establish a church and a soup kitchen. When we were looking for a place to do it, and we visited this hill [in Villa del Rosario] for the first time, I began to cry inexplicably, and I knew it was here.”

Image courtesy of Hernán Restrepo

William Lacle

Today, Lacle pastors Missionary Baptist Church Mi Alto Refugio, a small brick church just two miles away from the shelter. He’s constructing a second floor to the building to expand the capacity of their community dining hall, which currently provides hallacas (Venezuelan tamales) for breakfast and rice with sausage for lunch to hundreds of children, thanks to donations from the Christian nonprofits Blooms and Root and Semilla de Trigo Association.

On Sunday, 20 people filled the pews of his church, a mix of Venezuelan migrants and Colombians displaced by guerilla fighting. Lacle stood at the pulpit to preach about Romans 8:6—“The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace.” A little more than a week after Maduro’s capture, he said that “the only way to have peace in this changing world is by believing the Word of the one who never changes.”

De Armas and Lacle believe that change will only come to Venezuela if the entire Chavista power structure—not just Maduro—is arrested. That includes Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who is now Venezuela’s interim leader; her brother Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly of Venezuela; minister of the interior Diosdado Cabello; and minister of defense Vladimir Padrino.

“Maduro was like their puppet,” Lacle said. “Until they also leave power, Venezuela will not change completely. A tree may give you shade, but what gives it stability are all its roots. If you don’t cut the roots, the tree will remain standing. That’s what’s happening in Venezuela.”

Until that happens, the Venezuela migrants in Colombia won’t be able to return, he said. Lacle recognizes the strategy of Chavismo—the socialist political movement that brought Hugo Chávez to power—in the face of this new power vacuum.

“Socialists are experts at stretching out the process,” Lacle said. “Just like guerrilla groups in Colombia, they always say, ‘Let’s have a dialogue’; they buy time, rebuild their strength, wait for the waters to calm, and then stay in power doing whatever they want.”

The local Colombian churches in the border region also minister to the migrants and the displaced. For instance, Casa Sobre la Roca runs a home for orphaned girls in Cúcuta, providing them with food, clothing, and education until they graduate from university. Currently, it houses 34 girls. The church also operates similar shelters in eight cities across the country.

At the church’s Sunday service, Jesús Alberto Monsalve Cardozo was easy to spot sitting in the front row with the other church leaders in the congregation of 450 people. He is over six feet tall with white hair.

The leader of the marriage and prayer ministry, Cardozo was once a colonel of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces of Venezuela, where he was so well known for his faith among the military that many referred to him as “the Pastor.”

He decided to leave the military in 2021, months before his promotion to the rank of general. He said he felt God call him to full-time ministry and convict him to step down, as accepting the new position would force him to participate in publicly known alliances with drug traffickers.

Afterward, he left for Colombia. Since then, he has held different jobs: a librarian, a pet medicine salesman, and the operations director for a security company. Despite the difficulties of adjusting to his new life in Colombia, none of it compared to his sadness in learning about the ever-deteriorating situation in his home country.

In his daily conversations with his mother, who is still in Venezuela, he hears the struggles she and other elderly Venezuelans have getting the medical care they need.

Image courtesy of Hernán Restrepo

Jesús Mansalve Cardoso

When news of Maduro’s ouster reached him, Cardozo’s first thought went to his family in Caracas. Yet he also felt relief, believing that God’s justice had finally arrived. He noted that a violent disruption is often needed to change the status quo in long-standing dictatorships.

“Nothing will change until a disruptive element begins. In Venezuela, that disruption began with Maduro’s capture,” Cardozo said. “What I see Trump really seeking is to first introduce a disruptive element so that there can be a transition, without the country falling into total anarchy.”

He noted that he and his wife would be open to returning to Venezuela if things change; however, it’s currently too dangerous for them. “But I’m very excited about the idea of returning, not only to continue my ministry as a preacher in the Armed Forces but also to contribute with my knowledge to the reconstruction of Venezuela,” he said.

At the end of Casa Sobre la Roca’s service, the pastor invited those attending the church for the first time to receive Jesus into their hearts. Frank González, the Venezuelan migrant, stepped forward with tears in his eyes. Jonathan Coche-Vásquez remained seated. His feet hurt too much for him to stand up. But both said they prayed the prayer of faith.

Would they return to Venezuela if things turn out well? “Of course,” González replied as he and Coche-Vásquez lifted their garbage bags and resumed their journey toward Bogotá. “That’s where our home is. That’s where our family is.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article named the wrong nonprofit that Ediober González said recommended abortions to migrants.

Culture

Guerilla Art For Grit City

J.D. Peabody

Two friends are taking Tacoma by storm with paper and ink.

Lance Kagey (L) and Tom Llewellyn (R) standing in front of a display of their hand-printed posters.

Image courtesy of Sierra Hartman

Paper was once a far more precious resource. Sometimes, our ancestors would scrape markings from parchment, clean it, and start anew. Historians call these documents, inscribed with layers of text, palimpsest. Often, visible traces of past writing remain underneath the new words. I couldn’t help but think of that age-old practice as I stepped into the basement of Lance Kagey’s home last month.

Palimpsest is a good word for it. The bottom level of Kagey’s historic house in Tacoma, Washington, is a study in bygone eras adapted ingeniously for reuse. Old wooden cabinets line the perimeter, holding trays upon trays of vintage letterpress wood type. Artwork and artifacts from decades gone by fill the remaining wall space.

In the middle of it all stands an industrial relic that’s been given a new reason for life: a cylinder letterpress, complete with a manual crank. Rows of freshly inked pages often float above the machine, hung to dry with clothespins like laundry.

What the printing press churns out could also be called palimpsest, with layers of color, words, and meaning. This art is part of a creative endeavor known as Beautiful Angle, the brainchild of Kagey and his equally creative friend, Tom Llewellyn. Roughly once a month, the two men develop a new poster design and then print a short run of about 100 copies. Using wheat paste and staples, they hang their completed work all around Tacoma.

This effort to engage with their city, crafting physical art in a world gone digital, has now been unfolding for more than two decades, generating a substantial body of work and an enthusiastic fan base. The artwork is compelling, the messages provocative, and their reach surprising.

I had the chance to sit down with Kagey and Llewellyn in that basement studio to hear more about their work, their fierce loyalty to their locale, and the role faith plays in this unique undertaking.

Image used with permission.

How did this whole thing start?

Kagey: I had taken some letterpress classes and fell in love with the old-school process of printing.

You mean the kind that Gutenberg invented, with the movable type?

Kagey: Exactly. It’s the printing method where you press one color of ink onto one page at a time. We found this 1952 Challenge proof press on eBay for $50. But it was in Ohio, so it cost me six times that much to have it shipped here.

Wait. You’re saying you invested in a press before knowing what you wanted to do with it?

Kagey: That’s right. Well, we knew we wanted to make art.

Llewellyn: We came up with the poster project very quickly once the press was here. We’re both big fans of street art.

Street art being public art that’s not officially authorized by anyone.

Llewellyn: Right. The beauty of street art is that you’re not waiting on an editor or publisher or mediator between you and your audience. If you don’t care about getting paid, you can create whatever you want. And that’s worth a lot.

Kagey: Street art posters have a long history. We decided, “What if we just made one poster a month?”

Llewellyn: We wanted a schedule that would be sustainable over the long haul. Now here we are, 23 years later, still going.

Why did you choose posters as your art form?

Kagey: Art that goes up unofficially can come down unofficially. We’re making art that is meant for people to peel off the walls or telephone poles and take home for themselves.

Llewellyn: A poster is a very specific medium with three levels of impact. You have the drive-by impact where something cool turns your head. Then there’s the impact of stopping to read the words. And then if you take it home and hang on your wall, it has an ongoing impact.

Image used with permission.

For the uninitiated, why bother going old school with the printing? Couldn’t you do the same thing more quickly and cheaply with Photoshop and a color printer?

Kagey: The process is a key part of the end product. I don’t see this press through a nostalgic lens. It’s a tool that we are pushing to use in innovative ways.

Llewellyn: Every single print that comes off of the press is unique. Each has slightly different flaws or levels of ink. Sometimes there are imperfections in the wood blocks themselves that add character you wouldn’t get from a digital copy.

Kagey: The limitations of analog make the design better. We had one poster concept where I knew I wouldn’t have enough letters in one particular wood type for all the text. If I don’t have enough E’s in one font, I have to choose a different typeface for certain words. That creates design choices in real time.

The Christian artists I know are constantly wrestling with how to express the truth about themselves (which includes their beliefs) without their art becoming simplistic propaganda. How have you navigated that tension?

Llewellyn: This isn’t an evangelistic project. We both grew up soaked in church, so biblical language shows up regularly in our work. We talk about our faith all the time, but we talk about lots of other things, too. There’s no hidden agenda.

Kagey: I’ve been reading Makoto Fujimura’s Art and Faith. Part of his thesis is that we are creators made by the Creator. It is in our nature to make. The making itself is the thing.

Llewellyn: Sometimes in Christian circles there’s almost a mentality that as long as art is faith-based, quality doesn’t really matter. To me, that’s verging on taking the Lord’s name in vain. The opposite should be true. Art made by people of faith needs to be astonishingly good and honest.

The thing about work of the caliber you two are doing is that it gains widespread attention and accolades. That raises the question: Why limit yourselves to Tacoma? Why keep this goodness local?

Kagey: The simplest answer is that Tacoma needs our love. When we started, the city still had that “ugly stepsister syndrome.” People always focused on Seattle. No one ever talked about Tacoma.

Llewellyn: There’s something compelling about a city that needs you. It’s like that quote from G. K. Chesterton: “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”

Kagey: We’re not just cheerleaders for Tacoma, though. We talk about its flaws, too.

Llewellyn: We refer to Tacoma as the “holy city,” picking up on the biblical idea. We want this community to see its own sacredness in the midst of its ordinariness.

Image used with permission.

It makes me think of Jeremiah 29, where the Lord instructs the exiles to seek the prosperity of the city where he sent them. What is it you hope your work is doing for Tacoma?

Kagey: When we first started, we were just putting the posters out there, expressing ourselves. But our art has become much more of a community event. And we realized part of our goal was to have people connect around a common activity and build relationships.

Llewellyn: Now often, there will now be 50 people gathered before we even arrive to hang posters. And while they’re there, they’re interacting, asking each other which posters they have, comparing tools they’re using to take down posters. It’s become a community rhythm.

Kagey: The repetition has been key. The only way to get into the cultural consciousness of a place is to keep showing up in the same place and not spread out too much.

Llewellyn: We have to keep the focus on one little area and go deep rather than broad.

Over two decades in, is it still fun?

Llewellyn: Definitely. We’ve been friends for so long. We’re just relaxed with each other. Even after all this time, there’s something very Willy Wonka-ish about putting blank paper in one end of the press, turning the crank, and watching that first poster come out the other side. It’s still pretty magical.

J. D. Peabody is the author of the fantasy trilogyThe Inkwell Chronicles as well as Perfectly Suited: The Armor of God for the Anxious Mind. His website is www.jdpeabody.com.

- More from J.D. Peabody

Ideas

Protesting in Church Is Wrong. So Is Immigration Theater.

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

Demonstrators should not disrupt worship services. ICE should be competent, cool-headed, and constrained by the Constitution.

Source Images: Don Lemon, Youtube

This past Sunday in Minnesota, a group of protesters barged into a Southern Baptist church in Saint Paul during the worship service. Chanting “justice for Renee Good” and “hands up, don’t shoot,” they spread out in the aisles and refused to leave.

🚨BREAKING: William Kelly and a mob of anti-ICE extremists stormed a Cities Church in Minneapolis, disrupting a worship service and hurling baseless accusations that one of the church’s lead pastors is an ICE agent. pic.twitter.com/QYl7q9gkwz
— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) January 18, 2026

Alerted ahead of time by the organizers, former CNN host Don Lemon showed up too. Though he said on camera that he wasn’t there as an activist, Lemon described the disruption in a transparently approving tone, endorsed a “traumatic” experience for kids at church as “what protesting is about,” and later accused the targeted congregation of an “entitlement [that] comes from a supremacy, a white supremacy.”

Amid the demonstration, Lemon inanely insisted to the preaching pastor at Cities Church, Jonathan Parnell, that the whole thing was merely an exercise in free speech that the congregation should tolerate—or even welcome—in their sanctuary during their worship.

This is bunk. Protesters should not disrupt worship services, and anyone with the scantest constitutional knowledge knows that what these demonstrators did is not the free speech our First Amendment protects from suppression by the state.

Demonstrators should stay out of church services for many reasons. One is a matter of federal law, which explicitly prohibits attempts to “interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.” They should also stay out because of property rights. For though a church is generally open to all comers, it is still private property with all the privileges that entails, including the right to exclude unwanted speech and assembly.

But most of all, protestors should stay out because disrupting worship is wrong, regardless of the demonstrators’ cause or the worshipers’ religion. It is wrong because it is a disordered assertion that your politics matter more than their devotion to God.

It is wrong because it is an announcement that no inch of space, no moment of time, no seriousness of purpose may be exempt from our volatile national discord—that there is no such thing as sanctuary.

It is wrong because it is not what you would want done to you.

Now, I don’t say this because I’m opposed to these protestors’ cause. I’m not confident in my interpretation of the videos of Good’s death, but I lean toward believing the shooting is unjustified. I hope she does get whatever insufficient, temporal justice we can muster on this side of eternity.

More broadly, I’m long since on-the-record as favoring pretty open immigration laws. This isn’t a view I hold lightly or ignorantly. I understand why so many are reflexively bothered or angered by scenes of chaos at the border. I don’t want chaos either, and I easily agree with the 8 in 10 Americans who want to deport people who are here illegally and have been convicted of violent crimes. I also understand how rapid, high-volume immigration strains red-state border communities flooded by migrants on account of their location—and deep blue cities flooded by migrants on account of their foolishly expansive welfare guarantees.

Even so, my preference is something far more akin to the relative simplicity of the Ellis Island system than anything we’ve seen in my lifetime, with particular welcome for people oppressed by Communist and other totalitarian regimes. Much of what ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is doing in Minnesota strikes me as inefficient, theatrical, harsh, and deliberately disruptive.

Moreover, the Twin Cities were my home for eight years, the bulk of my adult life, and I’m sad to see them in turmoil once again. I just watched a video on Reddit that appears to show door-to-door raids in my old neighborhood. I’ve run past those very doors time and again. I’ve walked our dogs and strolled our babies there. It’s not right.

This is an immigrant-heavy neighborhood, but the immigrants, many of whom arrived as refugees after helping the US in the Vietnam War, are not a problem. On the contrary, their arrival helped transform that neighborhood from a notorious stretch of porn theaters and prostitution to one of the best concentrations of Southeast Asian restaurants in America. It’s certainly not perfect—we lived near a crime-ridden nuisance bar, and one time I watched a man flee the cops through my next-door neighbor’s yard, handgun still in hand. But immigrant families weren’t the people patronizing that bar, and that man was an American.

The immigrants on my block were quiet. A multigenerational Hmong family grew vegetables in their flower beds and had family cookouts with a 20-gallon soup pot in their garage. They were good neighbors. Is someone pounding on their door without a warrant, shouting for their papers? And if they’re churchgoing—as they may well be, for there are many Hmong congregations in Saint Paul—will ICE barge into their services, as the Trump administration has expressly allowed? It is a deeply American instinct that drives me to say: Leave them alone.

After each fresh outrage, many well-meaning people develop a common tick. X is wrong, of course, they say, and I’d never endorse it. But when you consider how bad Y is, well …

I want to be very clear that I do not suffer from that tick. The conjunction I am using here is not but. It’s and: Demonstrators should not disrupt worship services. And immigration enforcement should be competent, cool-headed, and constrained by the Constitution.

One of Lemon’s interviewees, a congregant at Cities Church, got it exactly right.

“I don’t necessarily agree with everything that’s going on in the Twin Cities right now,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s good to fight fire with fire. I think it’s good to speak up. I think it’s good to protest, but I think it’s better to do it in a peaceful way. [This] is trespassing. … This is a house of God.” Next week, may he and his church worship in peace.

Bonnie Kristian is deputy editor at Christianity Today.

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Books

Review

What to Do About Reparations

Haleluya Hadero

A new book values justice for Black Americans, but its secular thesis only goes so far.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Penguin Random House

More than a decade ago, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates successfully pushed reparations into the contemporary conversation with his seminal essay on why, after 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, and decades of discriminatory housing policies, the United States owed a debt to African Americans that it simply could not wish or wave away.

Calls for reparations have been around since the end of the Civil War, when Union general William T. Sherman and the federal government promised to allot some 400,000 acres of confiscated land in the American South to newly freed Black families—an order that became known as “40 acres and a mule” and was ultimately foiled by President Andrew Johnson.

Roughly a century and a half later, the Black Lives Matter movement, Coates’s work, and the nation’s renewed focus on racial injustices paved the way for reparations to gain momentum in some corners of the political left. In 2019, Democratic politicians, who rely heavily on the Black vote, were pressed to answer questions about where they stood on the topic. State and municipal reparation efforts also grew. The city of Evanston, Illinois, dispensed payments to Black residents (or their descendants) who were affected by discriminatory zoning policies from 1919 to 1969. Various institutions, including prominent and often elite universities, launched their own efforts while liberal states like California and Maryland waded into the waters.

As political winds shifted, however, many efforts have slowed. Federal legislation focused on reparations to Black Americans has never really been on the table, and it seems highly unlikely that it will be on offer anytime soon. But in her new book Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past, Georgetown University law professor Dorothy Brown argues reparations are critical not only for reckoning with slavery but also for building our future. Reparations, she believes, are vital for America to bind up its racial wounds.

I approached Brown’s secular book on the topic with an already-favorable view of reparations, though not only for the conventional reason of supporting Black flourishing. I have come to believe that reparations can be done in a way that resonates with God’s justice, as distinct from secularized “justice.” Reparations as an exercise in white ethnic shame or self-laceration would be wrong, a step away from reconciliation. But reparations carefully and fairly designed for the country to correct past injustices, make right on its broken promises, and help us move forward as a single integrated people is, in my view, a good—and biblically defensible—project.

As Christians, we take this posture in our individual lives of faith: Whenever we do not meet the requirements of God’s law, we repent by not only acknowledging our sins of omission and commission but also making a change in our actions, literally an about-face. Applying this concept to our national sins, Christians should wrestle with how restitution completes a process of national repentance.

While reparation does not require assuming white Americans have inherited the guilt or sin of their ancestors (a reasonable concern from skeptics, in accordance with Ezekiel 18:20), it does involve US institutions like the national government and other living entities, which have overseen and participated in injustices, paying the debt they have accumulated over centuries.

And though this issue is often debated along partisan lines, the basic principle of reparations is not the purview of any one political party. In fact, it’s deeply biblical. Reparations is simply a politically charged term for a well-attested biblical principle of restitution.

In Exodus, for example, we see God instituting laws of restitution for various forms of theft and damage (22:1–15). The principle persists in the New Testament when Zaccheus promises to “pay back four times” anyone he has defrauded and is applauded for it by Jesus (Luke 19:1–10). America isn’t ancient Israel, and Zaccheus was talking about his own personal sins. But as we think about what justice looks like now, it’s worth, in my view, taking these principles seriously both individually and corporately.

Reparations are not a quick fix for what ails America’s racial disparities. Nor are they, as Brown acknowledges in her book, a panacea for Black poverty. We will need many other reforms and changes to solve American racial disparities. But this could be an indispensable step in repairing our torn social fabric.

Brown’s book offers more than an argument for reparations. It offers brief practical considerations for how the country could implement them. In under 220 pages, Brown makes a scrupulous and compelling argument: Black Americans were not only brutalized by chattel slavery but also excluded from government-backed mortgage programs, business loans, land, and other opportunities. This argument even converted some opponents to supporters in focus groups she conducted. Still, while Brown’s book is backed by robust historical research, I found some of her arguments to be lacking, particularly her stance that all Black people in America—not just American descendants of slaves—should be eligible for payments.

Brown writes for a skeptical audience, which is a good approach for this topic. Reparations remains a fraught topic for politicians and an unpopular idea among most Americans, who largely view restitution as both impractical and unnecessary (the only exception here being Black Americans, who mostly support the idea). Brown, a Black tax lawyer, says she herself was a skeptic until “very recently.” She changed her mind after realizing the US paid reparations for the deaths of Italians, specifically Sicilians, who were lynched by white mobs in the South between 1890 and 1910.

The book details how over time the US government has also paid reparations to other groups: President Ronald Reagan signed a law in 1988 giving $20,000 to surviving Japanese Americans who had been put into World War II internment camps. The US has given Native American tribal nations cash payments (up to $1.3 billion in total) for lands the government seized during the 18th and 19th centuries. Even some white slave owners were compensated during the Civil War to soften the blow of losing slaves emancipated by President Abraham Lincoln.

If the country awarded reparations to those groups, then why not, she asks, to Black Americans who suffered during chattel slavery and in its aftermath? Brown writes,

The failed effort to provide land to newly freed families was followed by 150-plus years of exploiting black labor and building white wealth, via different means. You could work for your former enslavers under onerous “sharecropping” agreements that made them rich and kept you poor. If you refused, your unemployment would make you guilty of the crime of “vagrancy” and allow you to be locked up and “leased” to individuals, small businesses, and large companies like U.S. Steel to work for no pay. Blackness was criminalized.

At times, those mechanisms did not prevent blacks from achieving self-sufficiency, and through some miracle, black people still managed to own things and benefit from their own labor. … States employed racially discriminatory legal actions like eminent domain to do the same, while sundown towns—places where black Americans could work but had to be gone by sundown or put their very lives at risk—made sure black people were forbidden from living there, much less building wealth there.

Brown further explains the downstream modern effects: Racially restrictive housing covenants and decades of redlining prevented prospective Black homeowners from buying homes, which hampered wealth creation.

While the US government has aided the creation of wealth for some Americans, Brown notes how Black veterans returning from World War II could not benefit as much as white veterans could from the GI Bill, an instrumental government move that grew America’s modern middle class. In more recent decades, sentencing disparities for offenses tied to crack and powder cocaine, though not explicitly discriminatory, have led to the disproportionate incarceration of Black people.

While Brown’s research is strong, her clarity on what realistic change could look like unfortunately is not. Citing various studies, she notes that the total cost of labor worked during slavery, loss of free time (which she notes is difficult to measure), and other losses from institutional harm can easily rack up to eye-popping dollar amounts.

But after she provided all the critical historical lessons, it was disappointing she didn’t write more on what could be feasible and realistic regarding compensation for those harms. From my own vantage point, one idea I’ve found to be persuasive is for the national government to compensate every African-American family in the amount of the nation’s racial wealth gap, though of course other structural reforms are important to reduce racial disparities. Brown however punted the answer to a theoretical presidential commission she hopes would be created to study the topic.

Ultimately, Brown provides a strong argument for the need for reparations. But as she acknowledges, the devil is in detailed policy prescriptions, and her own book fails to deliver on the details.

Where she does describe details—Brown’s idea of reparations includes both direct cash payments and legislative reforms in various areas like education, taxation, and criminal justice—she doesn’t adequately wrestle with how bundling them together will likely mean the former will be forestalled while politicians continuously debate the latter.

Brown also largely ignores the topic of fatherhood and the two-parent household. Many have long blamed family breakdown as the sole reason for Black poverty. While that’s untrue, it is true the nuclear family is good (Gen. 2:18) and its goodness has been recognized socially through positive economic impacts. But Brown fails to acknowledge this component in a meaningful way. She touches on it only briefly, dismissively mentioning it in an aside about some high-poverty states using block grants given by the federal government.

While it is a strong book with some weak spots, the most pressing problem I see is her assertion that reparations should go to all Black people in America, not merely the descendants of slaves. While I understand where she is coming from—Black immigrants can face discrimination akin to that facing African Americans—it doesn’t seem to have reached a level to warrant reparations. Rather, reparations should primarily be for those who suffered under the institution of slavery and bore subsequent injustices, predominately affecting African Americans.

More than half of Black immigrants in the US arrived after the year 2000, including my own family, who immigrated from Ethiopia. Black immigrants who came to America during periods of legal segregation and disenfranchisement should be eligible for some form of reparations, while others who encountered injustices more recently can seek standard redress in courts. It doesn’t strike me as just to give historical reparations to newer immigrants who weren’t part of the original chain of harm, especially considering that some, such as Nigerian Americans, have a median household income above the average American and white American household incomes.

Brown’s work helpfully addresses reparations skeptics and provides some useful starting points for readers to understand the US history of injustice toward African Americans. The facts she assembles are valuable. But Christians cannot merely adopt her secular framework. We must interpret the facts in light of the Bible’s view of justice and, from the sturdy ground of God’s Word, move forward into acts of repair.

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

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Theology

The Gospel Is Good News Before It’s Good Advice

Peter Coelho

Yes, Christianity can improve your life, build social cohesion, and foster respect for reality. But more importantly, Jesus is our Savior.

Lucija Ros / Unsplash

Christianity is having a moment in the West. Influencers and thought leaders are going public with their Christian convictions in a way that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. Ross Douthat is commending the faith in the pages of The New York Times in a robust and forthright way. Christians in the UK are actively entertaining the possibility of revival. New vistas for evangelism and engagement are opening up. There appears to be a genuine feeling of need for a transcendent God, a heavenly Father, particularly among younger generations. The claims of the Christian faith are receiving renewed and serious interest, praise God.

For many, this new attraction in Christianity is about its social utility and personal benefits. Podcaster Joe Rogan, for instance, has said that living according to the “principles of Christ” has proven good and satisfying. The writer Derek Thompson, an agnostic, has concluded that religion “works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism.” British journalist Louise Perry converted after considering Christian sexual ethics. “Observing quite how sociologically true [Christianity] is was very persuasive to me,” she said.

At one level, we can give a very clear amen to these impulses. Rogan’s sense of the usefulness of the principles Jesus taught is a recognition of Jesus’ wisdom and authority. The capacity of the faith to inform and shape our common life is real. The convictions of the Christian faith accord with reality. The law of the Lord is pleasing and useful; following Jesus makes us more human. That there are tangible, real-world benefits should not be surprising.

But as thinkers including sociologist Peter Berger have pointed out, historically, when the Christian faith is embraced as a useful commodity, the results are unavoidably self-liquidating. There is a risk, that is, in emphasizing the utility of Christianity. We might lose sight of a very simple truth about the Christian faith: The gospel is good news before it is good advice.

This pertains to both sequence and priority. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus begins his earthly ministry with the announcement “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (4:17). And in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus opens his public work by drawing on the language of Isaiah, describing his anointing specifically in terms of verbal proclamation (4:14–20). These episodes precede other teachings by Jesus and are the context in which those teachings are offered.

As many scholars have noted, the word we translate “gospel” has its etymological roots in the idea of a public announcement. In Greek, the term euangelion, or evangel, has to do with military victories. In Christian usage, it became a pronouncement of God’s triumph in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom of God frames all his preaching, teaching, and deeds of power.

Rogan-style openness to the wisdom of Jesus is a step along the way. But that wisdom must be located—and kept—inside this complete sequence of events.

The crowds around Jesus often recognized his words as carrying weight, having authority. Yet their engagement with him was frequently fragile and ambiguous. It was often fleeting, connected only to the most tangible benefits of his presence: bread and miracles. It was not a step toward a more ultimate destination. It was not acceptance of Jesus’ overarching pronouncement or recognition of their own humility and desperate need. It was not a willingness to “count the cost,” to submit to the way of the Cross and the lordship of Jesus. It was not a reception of the whole euangelion.

And without that reception, we cannot live according to the “principles of Christ.” Without the gospel, we are unable to live in the way of Jesus, and any attempt to do so will prove unfruitful in our lives and societies. As a matter of sequence, then, the Good News comes before good advice.

This is also a matter of priority: It reflects the priority of grace in the gospel. Psalm 119 testifies of the blessedness of God’s law: Happy are those whose lives accord to it. Yet the pattern of Jesus’ own ministry, with his proclamation of the kingdom preceding his teaching and ministry generally, reflects Israel’s trajectory in the Old Testament. The law is given at Sinai only after God’s gracious deliverance in the Exodus. The law, by which the people of Israel are instructed in true freedom, comes only in the context of their freedom already won by Yahweh.

The law is a blessing and a life-giving thing as it arises in this context of God’s deliverance and Israel’s dependence upon him. But human beings, frail and weak as we are, are unable to live according to that blessing in and of ourselves. This is what Martin Luther identified as the pedagogical use of the law: While the law is a blessing and guides us in the way of wisdom, it also exposes our sin and our need for a savior. And only by that Savior’s rescue are we empowered to live into the law and lay hold of its tangible benefits.

Our reception of the Good News—our humble acceptance of Jesus as our Savior and embrace of him as the one who brings God’s kingdom near—is essential to our obedience to God’s law. The gospel is the means by which a “more complete subjection and affection towards our Liberator [has] been implanted within us,” to borrow a phrase from the early church father Irenaeus of Lyon. This implanted affection, the love of God poured out in our hearts, is a necessary element for us to benefit from the moral teachings of Jesus and the social advantages of our faith.

At the end of Douglas Coupland’s remarkable novel Life after God, the narrator realizes and reveals, “My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone.” It’s true that there are salutary practical benefits of the Christian worldview. But this very personal and vulnerable realization is what the church must, in participation with the Holy Spirit, continue to proclaim and seek to elicit from our hearers.

As we come in dependence, recognizing our lack and need (Matt. 5:3), we receive grace, God’s unmerited favor, such that the Spirit gives us the power to live according to the law (Titus 2:11–12; Eph. 2:8–10; Ezek. 36:26–27). Joy, gratitude, and love for our Savior are far more potent and sustaining forces for obedience than a dispassionate recognition of the tangible benefits of a particular system for moral order (John 14:15). It is only as we are empowered by gratitude, wonder, and praise for God that we can enter fully and sustainably into the good way of Christ.

People come to Jesus in all kinds of ways. If a fresh recognition that Christ teaches a better and more human way of life is drawing people to our faith, how wonderful. But the church must pray for—and insist upon—a deeper recognition of the gospel in its fullness. Jesus does teach and embody the good, true, and beautiful way to be human. More than that, though, as our Redeemer and Savior, he makes it possible for us to walk in that way.

Peter Coelho is the rector of Church of the Ascension, an Anglican parish in Pittsburgh.

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Ideas

‘Think of It As a Best Friend and Youth Pastor in Your Pocket’

Interview by Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

A Q&A with the cofounder of a Duolingo-style “Christian AI” app aimed at Gen Z.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Creed, Pexels, Unsplash

The “Christian AI” market is getting crowded.

At Gloo, users are “getting more personal” with their chatbot “than with most pastors.” Pray.com’s AI-generated Bible videos are styled like video games and replete with dramatic monsters and sexy ladies.

New to the scene is Creed, which bills itself as a “digital companion for churches and believers.” CT spoke over Zoom with Creed cofounder Adi Agrawal about the app’s tech, business model, user base, and goals.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

First, to make sure our readers have a good sense of what Creed does and how you do it, tell me about your tech stack and training. What large language model are you using as the base for the app, and what are the specific resources that you use to train it?

Think of the product as a Tamagotchi meets Duolingo for a Christian.

Think of it as a best friend and youth pastor in your pocket that you can talk to about any questions, be it your personal life, be it faith questions, be it your Bible studies. It’ll give you answers rooted in Scripture, but it’ll also build on that relationship over time. It remembers things you tell it. The more you talk to it, the more personalized it gets. It develops personalized faith paths for you, and it’ll help you answer questions and find community around you so you can discover Christian events. If you’re not affiliated with a church, it’ll recommend churches for you to go to. So it’s not just talking to a screen.

On the back end, we’re not building our own models. We’re using off-the-shelf models from OpenAI, Google, etc. But we noticed that everyone’s using ChatGPT, and people are asking it super personal questions like “Should I get a divorce? Was I the wrong one in this situation?”

ChatGPT will give you an answer, but whose values determine that answer? Who is determining what those values are? That’s a little bit of a black box, but the values are determined by a few companies in Silicon Valley.

So how do you set guardrails around that? How do you make sure the answers you get back from the AI are something your pastor or your church leader or your parents would agree with?

We take off-the-shelf models and fine-tune them on Scriptures—30 different versions of the Bible. And then on top, a few nonbiblical texts as well, like the texts of C. S. Lewis or a few other, broader Christian authors.

Then we also use denomination-specific teachings. Different denominations have pastors and priests whose teachings are widely accepted, so we use a few of those. Our offshore teams annotate those texts and label them to ensure some level of denomination-specific accuracy. For the same question, what you might expect as a Southern Baptist is going to be different from what you expect as a Catholic.

Then the third layer is church-specific nuances. We work with churches in our partner network directly so they can go set their values on “topic X” on top of that denomination-specific nuance. Right now we only have 12 or so churches in our network, and we’re building that out.

And then we set very, very strict guardrails. One of the big issues with AI is hallucination. How do you ensure it’s giving you actual answers? How do you ensure it’s not just making things up? So every answer passes through three filters of checks.

And any kind of sensitive topic—say, transgender rights or gay marriage—we are not going to give you like, “Oh, you should do this” or “You should not do this.” We’ll cite Scripture, and then we’ll tell you to go talk to your pastor or go talk to your parents. A very middle-ground approach where we as a company are not being prescriptive. We want to be very sort of value-neutral, and we want you to go talk to actual trusted authorities.

If there’s any mention of self-harm or harm to others, we have a human who will intervene and will be like, “Oh, do you want me to call up your parents?” or “Do you want me to call up this hotline for mental health issues?” We want that human intervention layer in case there’s something that’s super alarming.

You’ve mentioned parents, and that plus your description of Creed as an AI youth pastor makes me think your target audience is teenagers. Is that accurate? Can you give me some sense of your typical or ideal user demographics?

Yeah, initially we went to market with a focus on Gen Z. It’s a bit surprising though: About 60 percent of our users are 15- to 30-year-olds. Then I’d say the fastest growing demographic is 50- to 70-year-old women. That’s another 30 percent, and then 10 percent is 30- to 50-year-olds, a mix of males and females.

We found unexpected success with demos other than Gen Z, so now we’re trying to make it more age- and gender-neutral in terms of the design and the tone of the AI’s answers. If you use the app today, the way it talks is very Gen Z. But we’re implementing a new voice where it’ll essentially reflect back your own personality and your own voice. It’ll adapt to you. If you use emojis, it’s going to use emojis. If you use full sentences with capitalization, it’ll like that.

You said in your fact sheet that you had 200,000 users in the first four months. Do you have a number for daily active usership yet?

Daily active users are around 25,000.

Okay. And then turning toward the business side, you mentioned in your fact sheet that you got funding from Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun. Is your cohort with them ongoing? And I’m also curious about how much funding you were awarded.

We started Speedrun in July of this year. When you start, you get $500,000 from them. We finished Speedrun in October, and then after we finished, we raised $4.2 million.

That is speedy. Accurately named! I would guess that as you’re working with these venture capital folks, you’ve presented a business model for what to do after that initial funding. What is the model going forward?

It’s very similar to Duolingo. It’s monthly and annual subscriptions on the consumer end. And then we also offer in-app purchases in addition to the subscription. So think of e-commerce, or very similar to gaming [with] in-app purchases.

I haven’t used Duolingo in a long time, so I’m not sure: Is there any advertising? Is there sale of user data, or is it just those direct user purchases?

Just those [direct purchases]. We were going back and forth on whether we should show ads. There are pros and cons. If you show ads, you could potentially make more money, but it really ruins the user experience if you’re chatting about deeply personal issues and suddenly seeing ads. People start to question where their data is going. So we’re going to hold off on ads and purely go with subscription revenue for now.

Turning from tech and business, I’m interested in your goals for Creed. I think the single most surprising thing in the fact sheet you sent was this sentence: “If you tell your companion that you are feeling sad, it will pray for you.” For me, that raises the question of what your team understands prayer to be. What do you think it is and how you think it works?

When it says the companion will pray for you, it’s more like it’ll pray with you. It’s not going to pray for you. It’s more like, “Oh, do you want to pray with me? And how are you feeling?”It’s almost like generating personalized prayers for you that fit your mood and fit the way you like to be prayed with.

I think the beauty of AI is it’s not pushing something at you. Rather, it’s working with you to build something in collaboration. So this prayer would be very customized to how you’re feeling and the way you like to pray. You can tell the companion, “This is how my church or my pastor taught me how to pray,” or you can give it a YouTube-style sample prayer.

There’s no simple, one-size-fits-all approach to this. How you need to pray can look very different from person to person.

Just to make sure I understand, you’re saying it would write a prayer that the user would say as opposed to the chatbot praying in its own voice?

Yeah, this would write a prayer, and it’ll basically speak the prayer out loud with the user. So it’s almost like a friend would do it. Like you’d ask a friend, “Hey, can you pray for me?”And then you both would pray that together—

Speaking in unison.

Yeah, speaking in unison. Then there’s this other feature we just launched. It’s almost like a prayer wall where you can have other users pray for you. Say you’re in a remote town in Tennessee, and you don’t have a church community or a lot of friends around there, and your mother’s sick, and you want prayer. Other users will join you in that prayer. We launched that two days ago, and we’ve already seen a good adoption of that feature.

I read an article in which a pastor was thinking about this kind of product and specifically about prayer. He made a point that I’ve not seen elsewhere, and I’m interested in your response to it. He said the difference, perhaps, is that one of these prayers is by a soul saved by Christ and the other is written by a program; and, whatever the implications of that, which might God prefer? Does God want to receive a prayer written by a machine?

That’s a very valid point, and you could go philosophically down that whole rabbit hole, but I think our end goal is helping people out in times of duress.

And sure, a machine-made prayer is definitely not up to the standards of a prayer written by an actual human. But in that situation, if that machine didn’t write a prayer, that prayer would not have happened. So we’d much rather have a prayer, even if it’s of a slightly lower quality, than no prayer at all.

I think that’s how I think about it, but I think that’s a very valid point in terms of what God prefers. God would probably prefer a human-quality prayer, but it’s hard to scale that service to 3 billion Christians worldwide.

Of course. I think maybe the alternative would not be that they would turn to a custom human-written prayer, but that they would just pray.

Half of our users are folks who very recently turned to God and Christianity. We’ve noticed they use this almost as an introduction to exploring more about the body of Christ and reading the Bible. A lot of them are not familiar with that whole process of praying or what’s the right way to pray—or even getting the words into their minds, in terms of how you compose that prayer. So we don’t want to supplant them praying for themselves; rather we want to build that habit into them.

That’s good transition to another question I had. I was struck by the fact sheet’s mention of “Duolingo-style daily quests such as daily prayers/devotionals—the more of these quests that you complete, the more points you accrue, opening up richer devotionals, faith milestones, and tailored guidance.”

And I was baffled by this idea of gamifying the practice of faith and then apparently—correct me if I’m wrong here—withholding the best discipleship materials until people level up or maintain a streak, like in Duolingo. If we’re dealing with new Christians, people who really need help, wouldn’t we give them the richest devotionals off the bat?

We’re not withholding devotionals. The way it works is the more points you get, the more sort of rewards you win. These rewards aren’t discipleship frameworks. It’s more like you can customize your character. You can open up new characters. You can buy a hat for your characters. It’s more those sorts of rewards versus actual texts or devotionals. Those are open to everyone, starting day one.

The characters—you sent images of users holding the screen with what looks like a sheep. Is the sheep—and maybe later other characters—what you all had in mind when the fact sheet described Creed as “embodied” with a voice, personality, and memories?

Yeah. A lot of chatbots—like ChatGPT, Claude, all of them—are abstract chat forms. But our whole thing was: Can you make this more embodied? Can you give it a personality with a voice, proactively following up with users?

That is what we mean by “embodied” versus the more abstract chatbot forms. This idea of embodied companions has been one of the biggest trends in consumer AI over the past couple of years. Most of these embodied AI companies are AI boyfriend or AI girlfriend apps.

Just to clarify, you don’t mean a physical piece of hardware, like Friend. You mean the image on the screen?

Yeah, this is on the screen. This is not a physical thing.

So these other embodied AIs are sexualized, weird, romanticized companions. They’re all millions in revenue, but they’re so toxic, and it’s so unhealthy for the future—not just the future of Christianity, but also the future of our younger generations, that people are spending hours per day having weird, sexualized interactions with these AI boyfriends and girlfriends.

Our initial motivation was to appropriate that same technology but use it to get people closer to God, learn more about the Bible, get them out and discover community instead of having weird interactions.

Yeah, one thing I appreciate in the fact sheet was your policy of cutting people off after an hour of use. That that is a real distinctive you don’t see with a lot of the big names in AI.

The more time you spend, the more money they make. It is a very unhealthy cycle.

Right. That’s a great caution to have. I do wonder about blurring the lines by using “embodied” this way, because having an avatar isn’t usually what we mean when we say “embodied.” It’s a picture instead of text, but it is on a screen still, right? It’s not embodied.

Yeah, I agree with that interpretation. It’s not truly embodied, I guess.

Okay. As I was preparing for this, I was thinking about when Paul writes to the Galatians, and he’s very worried about them. He says he’s in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in them, because he’s their pastor and he loves them.

When I think about a young, lonely Christian who maybe has moved to a new city, is struggling to find friends, struggling to get plugged into a local church community—when I think about that person being told that this program is going to be their source for pastoral care, it honestly makes me sad.

And it strikes me as a pretty dark vision for the future of Christianity and the future of the local church. I do appreciate your sense of the importance of pushing people to go find a local congregation, pushing people to get off the screen. I want to affirm that. But on the other hand, it seems to me that merely by offering pastoral care with no pastor, you’re kind of giving up on the local church at a level so fundamental that those tweaks may not matter.

At the very outset, this is not a replacement for pastoral care. And when you download the app, one of the first things you’ll see is “Find church events near me,” “Find a church near me.”

We very much positioned this as a “Christian best friend” app. We are not that pastoral authority. Best case, we might be a youth pastor, but we’re definitely not any kind of authority. We want to push you to actual resources.

And we’re acting very much as lead generator for local churches. As a company, and for me personally, local churches are a backbone of our future, and they need to be revived. Obviously they’re going through a very challenging time now, and we want this app to pull people off TikTok and introduce them to the faith, introduce them to local churches, help provide local pastoral care. I think that’s the funneling role we see our app playing.

I assume everything’s very data-driven. You have the data to make sure things are working the way as intended. If at a certain point—a year, five years down the line—you are not reliably getting data that people are getting off the internet and becoming meaningfully involved—joining, volunteering—in a local church community, what do you do?

If at any point we notice we’re trying to funnel them to actual, real-life engagement, and they’re not doing that, I think that means we failed in our mission as founders and building this company.

And I think at that point, we’d probably want to pivot the business and do something else entirely. That mission is just so central to why we started doing this. And if we fail in that, I think we failed as founders of this company—and at that point it would be better to even shut this down than to get people addicted to some phone game and not go out into the actual world.

Correction (January 20, 2026): An earlier version of this article mistitled Adi Agrawal.

- More from Bonnie Kristian

News

India Moves to Close Camps for Thousands Displaced by Manipur Violence

Divya Chirayath

With nowhere to go and poor camp conditions, one church plans to buy land for its congregation to live on.

The relief camp in Manipur where Lamjagou Vaiphei lives with his wife, three children, and seven other families.

Image courtesy of Lamjagou Vaiphei

It’s been more than two years since Lamjagou Vaiphei, a fish farmer from the northeast Indian state of Manipur, last saw his home. He watched as Meitei militant groups burned down his entire village in Kangpokpi, including his church, during the ethnic violence that erupted between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities in May 2023.

After escaping the violence, he and fellow villagers have been living in a community-run relief camp in Churachandpur, about 107 kilometers away. Returning to their village is unsafe, Lamjagou said, as Meiteis still occupy a stronghold around the area. The government hasn’t mediated any peace solution between the communities.

The unrest began in after the High Court of Manipur asked the government to grant tribal status to the Meiteis, Manipur’s largest ethnic group. It makes up 44 percent of the population, and the people are largely Hindu.

This upset the majority-Christian Kuki-Zo community, which makes up 25 percent of the population and mostly occupy the hill area. They feared that if Meiteis gained tribal status, they would lose their own protections and land.

Peaceful protests escalated into violent clashes between the people groups, with more than 60,000 people displaced and 260 killed.

Since 2023, the displaced have lived in more than 280 internally displaced people (IDP) camps across three districts of Manipur. Last July, the government announced that it would close all camps at the end of the year and instead provide prefabricated housing to people who cannot go back to their villages.

“We feel that even after December, there will be around 8,000 to 10,000 people who will not be able to go back,” Manipur State chief secretary P. K. Singh said in July. “They will be allowed to stay in some 1,000 prefabricated houses we are building.”

Now three weeks into the new year, the camps remain standing, but no one knows for how much longer. Manipur’s current chief secretary, Puneet Kumar Goel, said that they have resettled about 10,000 displaced people from more than 2,200 families and that several thousand more houses are under construction.

But no family in Lamjagou’s camp has received any housing assistance or official updates on rehabilitation.

“Our village was openly burned down, we are not provided any resettlement, we are not provided any security,” Lamjagou said. “Still the government says it will close down the relief camps. Where should we go now?”

On January 12, thousands of IDPs, volunteers, and civil society agencies staged a rally in the state’s capital of Imphal, voicing their prolonged struggles of living in relief camps and demanding immediate rehabilitation and resettlement. They held placards that read “Let us return home” and “Resettlement is a right, not a favor.”

Currently, Lamjagou, along with his wife and three children, lives with seven other families in a community hall that was converted into a relief camp to accommodate victims of the violence. He says the living conditions in the camp are cramped and unhygienic. The seven families share a common toilet and a makeshift bathroom, with only a plastic tarp and wooden sticks providing privacy.

Up until November, the government provided supplies to relief camps that included rice, oil, potatoes, and toiletries. Since then, the government replaced these supplies with a direct cash transfer of 84 rupees (about $1 USD) per day to each displaced person living in relief camps. While Lamjagou prefers the cash transfer over supplies as it lets him choose what to buy, he says the amount is insufficient. “We barely manage,” he said. “We buy the lowest quality of rice and supplies and cannot afford nutritious food.”

Mary Thombing, a social worker at the Hope Charitable Trust in Churachandpur, has visited several camps of displaced Kuki-Zo Christians. Overcrowding and poor sanitation facilities are major concerns in these camps, she says.

“In most camps, toilets are either makeshift, inadequate, or completely unavailable,” Thombing said. “As a result, thousands of IDPs are compelled to defecate, bathe, and wash in open spaces, including riverbanks, roadside areas, and fields, with absolutely no privacy. Women and girls are especially vulnerable.”

Apart from improving camp conditions, Thombing believes the government must establish a strong security framework to guarantee the safe return and resettlement of displaced people.

“The Kukis know that returning to their old villages is not just unsafe but potentially fatal,” she said. “Their homes must be rebuilt, compensation provided, and long-term rehabilitation plans implemented in consultation with community leaders and humanitarian organizations.”

Lamjagou and other families in his relief camp worship each Sunday afternoon at a local Presbyterian church about 5 kilometers away. His childhood friend Lalkhup Vaiphei (no relation) pastors the congregation of about 150 members, all of whom are IDPs living in nearby relief camps. Sunday school teachers hold classes in the church courtyard for the children. From the tithes collected, the congregation pays a small rent to the church and a salary to the pastor.

Lalkhup is a trained pastor and the executive secretary of the Vaiphei Baptist Churches Association (VBCA). Of the seven VBCA churches in Manipur, Meitei militant groups destroyed six in the 2023 violence. Lalkhup, who fled his home on the VBCA Imphal campus in May that year, lives in rented accommodations in Churachandpur district.

As the relief camps in the area face closures, the church is stepping in to help its congregations. Lalkhup said the church plans to buy a plot of empty land with money collected from the few congregation members who still have an income, mostly government employees. Most other members are farmers who have lost their livelihoods in the violence.

They are looking at a 3-hectare tract that they can divide into 80 equal plots of 4,000 square feet each. Each plot will be sold to a family in the church for 100,000 rupees ($1,110 USD), which Lalkhup said could be paid for in small installments once they’re able to get back on their feet and earn money.

With donations from Christians in Southern India, the congregation has also started constructing a church building. Lalkhup noted that the construction will take a long time as the funds come in intermittently. Until then, they plan to continue gathering at the rented Presbyterian church.

Lamjagou said he plans to buy a plot of land and build a home there. Back in his village, he had a small fish farm where he raised and sold fish. The violence destroyed his farm, and he has no source of livelihood in the relief camp. His wife has sold a few mosquito nets that she stitched, but the earnings have been meager and unsteady.

His hopes of rebuilding his life hinge on finding a new job and getting financial support from the government or donors.

“I hope to pay for the land slowly if I can find some work,” Lamjagou said. “If the government provides any support for housing and resettlement, or if well-wishers sponsor us, we can build a home. … We just hope that God, in his grace, will make a way.”

Meanwhile, Lalkhup noted that shepherding his flock in the midst of a humanitarian crisis has been difficult.

“With church members coming out with empty hands, no homes, and no land, establishing a church from scratch is not easy,” he said. “I have to frequently visit every household in various relief camps, wherever they are. I have to have a very close relationship with all members. Only then can we walk together and start over again.”

- More from Divya Chirayath

News

Influential Chinese House Church Faces New Crackdown

Joy Ren

UPDATE: Two of the detained face charges of “inciting subversion of state power.”

People praying at Early Rain Covenant Church in 2018.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Facebook

Key Updates

January 21, 2026

Two of the Detained Charged with "Inciting Subversion"
January 16, 2026

Influential Chinese House Church Faces New Crackdown

January 21, 2026

Chinese authorities formally charged Li Yingqiang, an elder and the current leader of Early Rain Covenant Church, with “inciting subversion of state power,” according to a church prayer letter. This was the same charge brought against founding pastor Wang Yi in the church’s first major crackdown in 2018. Wang is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence. The church also confirmed that another detained Christian who serves in Early Rain’s outreach ministry, Lin Guibiao, faces the same charge.

Authorities released seminary student Song Haibing on January 19 after detaining him for “obstructing law enforcement by state security organs.” The letter also disclosed the detention locations of those taken into custody and confirmed that deputy deacon Jia Xuewei, with whom the church had previously lost contact, has been detained.

“The use of ‘inciting subversion of state power’ against pastors and church members whose only ‘crime’ is peaceful worship represents a grave abuse of China’s criminal law,” said ChinaAid’s Bob Fu in a statement. “This case illustrates once again how the Chinese Communist Party weaponizes national-security charges to criminalize faith, silence conscience, and intimidate religious communities.”

January 16, 2026

Last August, Corey Jackson of the persecution ministry Luke Alliance separately asked the leaders of Zion Church and Early Rain Covenant Church, two of the most well-known Chinese house churches, whether they anticipated a crackdown. Both said yes, due to a recent increase in government harassment, threats, interrogations, and short-term detentions of its leaders. They expected the new wave of persecution to begin at the turn of the new year.

Yet by October, Chinese authorities had detained pastor Jin “Ezra” Mingri along with nearly 30 pastors and staff at Zion. The prediction was more accurate for Early Rain in Chengdu, as police came knocking on the doors of its leaders and members on January 6, detaining at least nine people, four of whom were quickly released. Meanwhile, the church has lost contact with one of its deputy deacons.

Jackson noted that as churches have changed the way they operate—splitting into smaller groups that meet in different locations and expanding online services—the police have also updated their tactics. “What we’re seeing is more effort from the central government to curb these larger churches that also meet online,” he said.

Currently, police have not given family members any formal notices of criminal detention and refused to disclose relevant information about the case, including the specific charges Early Rain leaders and members are accused of, where they are being held, and the length of their detention, according to a church prayer letter. This has made it difficult for their legal team, who have not been allowed to meet with the detained, to help. Earlier, authorities had said they were suspected of “national security-related crimes.”

“We are not arrested for ordinary reasons, but because of our faith—and even in these circumstances, we seek to bear witness to Christ not only to the world, but also, when possible, to police officers and government officials,” a source close to Early Rain who was previously a missionary to Chengdu told CT. He asked not to be named due to security concerns. “We also believe it is a chance to speak to the global church.”

Both Zion and Early Rain faced crackdowns in 2018. In September of that year, the government banned Zion, detaining Jin and other leaders for several hours before releasing them. Then in December, authorities arrested Early Rain pastor Wang Yi and dozens of other leaders, sentencing Wang to nine years in prison for “inciting to subvert state power” and “illegal business operations.” Li Yingqiang, an elder and the current leader of Early Rain, spent about eight months in prison.

Yet afterward, the churches continued to meet online and in smaller groups. In the intervening years, police would occasionally detain Early Rain’s pastors and elders but typically only held them for 15–30 days. But this time, the coordination and scale of the arrests “marks a significant difference,” according to the former missionary.

Another difference is that this time, authorities not only detained leaders but also their wives. At 11 a.m. on January 6, police arrived at Li’s home in Deyang, Sichuan. They searched his home and took Li into custody. Officers later also brought his wife, Zhang Xinyue, and their two children, a 14-year-old daughter, Carlson, and an 11-year-old son, Xiao Di, into the police station.

At 9 p.m., police officers separated the children from their mother, escorting them back to their apartment, and kept them under surveillance, according to the church prayer letter. The next day, officers allowed them to stay with their grandmother.

“Despite being minors who committed no offense, they were forced to go to a detention facility,” the former missionary said. “This is deeply inhumane.”

As word of the detentions trickled through Early Rain group messages, the remaining leaders set in motion plans to keep the congregation informed, meet the concrete needs of the families of the detained, and ensure that small group gatherings and online services would continue uninterrupted. They called for a day of fasting and prayer among church members while also sending out public prayer letters that have been shared widely on social media.

They’re also providing practical help. After tracking down where authorities are holding the detained, members are sending packages full of food and clothing. They are delivering homemade meals and checking in on the families of the detained, including the pregnant wife of Dai Zhichao, a preacher at Early Rain who is currently being held in Deyang City detention center.

Beyond those arrested, other church members have also been affected by the crackdown. In the days following the initial arrest, police summoned many of the church members for questioning and placed some under surveillance. In one case, authorities beat church member Chen Yunfei at the entrance of his residential compound, warning him not to speak out on the social media site X anymore. The beating left him with bleeding and swelling in his face, and he needed to get four stitches above his eyebrow.

On Sunday, several church members said police placed them under surveillance and prevented them from leaving their homes to attend church. Community workers told them they had to report their whereabouts daily. But most members were able to gather as they had in the past—in small groups watching an online service. One of the other leaders preached on the Book of Luke in lieu of Li.

“Our approach is this: No matter what happens, we continue with expository preaching,” the former missionary said. “We do not make these events the center of the church’s preaching; rather, we allow the direction of the biblical text to guide how we understand the current environment of persecution. We will, of course, apply the Scriptures to this persecution and share with the congregation the situations facing the affected families.”

Sunday was supposed to be Li’s last time preaching before going on a three-month sabbatical to provide rest as his wife suffers from depression. Instead, “God has now placed him in prison for his rest,” the former missionary said.

Currently, Early Rain has 600 members split into three congregations. Despite the regular harassment the church has faced, it has continued to grow since the 2018 crackdown, Jackson said.

Members facing detention or police interrogation for the first time are worried and frightened. “No matter how much one prepares, we are always underprepared,” the former missionary said. Meanwhile, those who have experienced it before know that “while inside [the police station], they experienced shock and fear, but also God’s grace and protection.”

Early Rain came onto the Chinese government’s radar as it grew in prominence with a large church in Chengdu, a classical Christian school, a growing seminary, a pro-life ministry, and a ministry to the families of political dissidents. Wang, a former lawyer, was also outspoken about the government persecution of house churches and called for President Xi Jinping to repent for his sins.

In Wang’s 2018 Declaration of Faithful Disobedience, which the church published 48 hours after his detention, the pastor affirms his respect for government authority as permitted by God but argues that when the state opposes the gospel and interferes with the church, Christians must practice nonviolent, faith-based disobedience.

The former missionary countered the government’s claims that Early Rain was engaging in politics. “We are not engaging in politics; rather, it is the government’s politics that have entered the church,” he said.

The preparations Early Rain had made for a crackdown like this has helped it practically and spiritually. In 2022, Li and Zhang recorded a short video of themselves singing a hymn for their children in case of future arrest.

“Carlson, Xiaodi: If there comes a time when you cannot see Mom and Dad, remember the song we are singing today,” Li said.

They then sang the hymn “As the Mountains Surround Jerusalem” while smiling at the camera: “As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people. The Lord watches over you and protects you, from this time forth and forevermore.”

Update (January 29, 2026): CT’s sources provided additional information on the detention of Lin Guibiao.

- More from Joy Ren

History

Through a Storm of Violence

Daniel Silliman

In 1968, CT grappled with the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, CT Archives

Vietnam violence escalated in 1968 when Communist fighters on a national holiday launched a surprise attack, the Tet Offensive. CT reported on the six American missionaries killed in the fighting.

A blast shattered the calm of the warm tropical night. The tan-walled house, one of three in the Christian and Missionary Alliance compound at Ban Me Thuot, was blown apart. Killed immediately was mission worker Leon Griswold, a retired insurance man from White Plains, New York. His daughter Carolyn, 41, was badly hurt. The local Viet Cong had begun their part of the bloody Tet lunar New Year offensive.

Missionaries in the adjoining residences nursed Miss Griswold through the next day. The Rev. Robert Ziemer and the Rev. C. Edward Thompson realized they were vulnerable to more attacks, even though their concrete buildings were virtually within earshot of American military outposts. They dug a trench out of a garbage pit, just big enough for the whole staff to huddle down for the night.

As expected, the Viet Cong blew up the other two homes. When daylight broke, the two men decided they would appeal to the Viet Cong to get Carolyn to a hospital. They were shot dead on the spot. Then the guerrillas strafed the trench, killing Thompson’s wife and 42-year-old Ruth Wilting, a nurse from Cleveland. …

The Viet Nam war has many peculiarities, and one is that missionary activity has continued despite the military escalation. There have been few wars in which organized evangelistic effort has been carried on as aggressively as it is in this one. Says the Rev. Louis L. King, foreign secretary of the CMA, which has done the bulk of the Viet Nam missionary work: “Far from sounding the death knell to evangelism, the war has opened new doors of remarkable opportunity, and people are generally more responsive than they were.”

In April, CT reported on the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and tried to calculate the national consequences of the loss.

Rarely had a clergyman so shaken a nation.

“I have seen the promised land,” said the gifted orator Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the night before he was shot. But his death carried no promise, only ironic dramatization of the impasse between races in America today, for a paroxysm of rioting, looting, arson, and murder in dozens of cities constituted a violent aftermath as senseless as the slaying in Memphis. A machine gun on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D. C., symbolized the nation’s barely concealed terror over what the coming weeks—and years—would bring. …

Although he was in the public eye only a dozen years, the 39-year-old Baptist minister at his death was probably the American most admired in many other nations. At home his power and glory were on the wane. The 1966 Chicago drive failed to yield lasting results. Newsmen saw his Washington Poor People’s Campaign as a last lunge to outflank militant black separatists, reaffirm the philosophy of effective nonviolence, and reassert King’s civil-rights leadership.

What that campaign, scheduled to begin this week, would have done to King’s movement is impossible to guess now. But friends and foes alike were edgy when a King-led march in the Memphis garbagemen’s strike degenerated into lawlessness, just days before the murder.

King lived daily with the knowledge that he was marked for death. When it came, its violence set in bold relief the tragic predicament of the nation.

Founding editor L. Nelson Bell—always critical of efforts to push racial integration—blamed King for his death. Even though the Civil Rights Movement was nonviolent, Bell said “civil disobedience, seemingly so innocent, has brought in an era of lawlessness and bloodshed.” The lead editorial in the magazine called King’s death a “brutal and outrageous murder” and mourned the apparent failure of the movement he led.

Avowedly as an apostle of nonviolence, King courageously led the struggle against racism. He disowned arrogant concepts of black power but encouraged nonviolent civil disobedience in the name of “higher moral law.”

King was under increasing constraint to intensify the coercive force of his protest to secure swift social change. In the last article he wrote before he was slain he said, “The tactic of nonviolence … has in the last two years not been playing” a transforming role (Look, April 16 issue). He blamed “white racism” for dividing America and asserted that “we need, above all, effective means to force Congress to act resolutely.” His program called for a series of summer “mass nonviolent protests” beginning in Washington, D. C. …

At the same time, legal structures create only the formal possibility of a just society. Desperately needed is a cultivation in American life of the simple Christian virtues of love of neighbor, good will toward men, and a spirit of reconciliation. Here the evangelical churches—if they can find the courage—stand remarkably positioned to reach across racial lines and encourage a new spirit of brotherhood. … The task of the Christian community is to rescue those who are slowly dying of the prejudice and hopelessness that leaves men strangers to the full dignity of human nature as God intends it.

Evangelicals found hope on college campuses in 1968. CT reported that Christians were witnessing to hippies, and the “flower children”—who had once dropped out of society to pursue peace, love, sex, drugs, and music—were turning to faith in Jesus.

Ask Southern Baptist evangelist Arthur Blessit, 27, who runs “His Place,” a coffeehouse on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Or converted hippie Ted Wise, 30, who heads “The Living Room,” an evangelical beachhead in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.

Sunset Strip clubs and sidewalks are clogged nightly with thousands of teens, including each night some 500 who jam into “His Place” for free coffee and sandwiches, gospel “rock, folk, and soul” tunes, and midnight sermons. Result: “Five or six receive Christ every night,” reports Blessit.

Blessit, who believes in “taking the gospel where the action is,” has also scored conversions among the “booze, dope, and sex” clientele at the famed Hollywood-A-Go-Go club during by-popular-demand Tuesday-night shows. His program: “groovy music, testimonies of ‘name’ Christians and former drug-users, and my messages—with no pulled punches.” His associate, Leo Humphrey, 33, recently led club coowner Rose Gazzarri to Christ.

Editor in chief Carl F. H. Henry shared his conversion testimony in 1968.

God stabbed my conscience that night and pinned me to the ground with a fiery bolt of lightning. … I was a newspaperman preoccupied with man’s minutiae when God tracked me down; the Word was pursuing a lost purveyor of words. In this encounter, my own semantic skill meant little. When, shortly after the Almighty One had used lightning to pierce my soul, a university graduate prodded me to pray, I found myself at a loss for words. There I was, a Long Island editor and suburban correspondent quite accustomed to interviewing the high and mighty of this world, yet wholly inept at formulating phrases for the King of Glory. …

My altar rail was the front seat of my automobile; we parked it beside the waters of Great South Bay, locked the doors, and knelt to pray. Phrase by phrase I repeated the words of my friend. … Somewhere in the echoes of eternity I heard the pounding of hammers that marked the Saviour’s crucifixion in my stead.

The presidential campaign heated up that summer—and there was more violence. Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of the president assassinated just five years before, was himself assassinated. Billy Graham told CT he cried.

Evangelist Billy Graham said he learned of the tragedy when a friend called him at four in the morning. Graham said he then spent several hours in meditation and prayer.

“I don’t weep often,” the evangelist declared, “but today in this beautiful sunshine I wept … for the country that has declined so much in its morality and spirituality.” Graham said the Kennedy shooting “is symbolic of what is happening throughout the country and much of the world.”

CT editors tried to grapple with that symbolism and the grim reality of a nation wracked by political violence.

The American dream is turning into a nightmare. The stunning shock will serve the nation best if the initial disbelief yields a new awareness that the American temper is changing. “The world has gone mad,” remarked Senator Henry Jackson, when informed of the assault on Kennedy. But the grim fact that madness now stalks the streets from Washington to Los Angeles, in a land that long has been a symbol of hope around the world, compounds the tragedy. The worsening crime rate and widening violence in America can only add to the spirit of contemporary despair.

We extend Christian sympathy to the Kennedy family and urge the prayers of believers everywhere in their behalf.

CT looked at the campaign of another candidate for the White House in 1968, publishing a report on Christian support for George Wallace, champion of the “Jim Crow” laws segregating people by race.

The latter-day Crusade of avowed segregationist Wallace has taken on the tinge of a religion—a civil religion, to be sure. A young Birmingham minister who has watched the numerous Wallace drives in Alabama describes the White House bid as “a campaign with messianic ring.” Wallace, he explains, seeks to present himself as the saviour of the United States, a prince of hope, swinging his broad sword in a holy war against evil. …

But the Southern Committee on Political Ethics headed by former Southern Baptist President Brooks Hays charged this month that the Wallace candidacy is based on fear and hostility and racial conflict, and that Wallace has “welcomed the support of many acknowledged and outspoken racists and has given them and their views a platform and a legitimacy they could not otherwise have achieved.”

Wallace won more than 9 million votes and carried majorities in five states. Electoral victory went to Republican Richard Nixon, a former vice president. CT noted he received an unofficial endorsement from Billy Graham.

Evangelist Billy Graham said in Dallas five days before the election that he had voted for Nixon by absentee ballot. …

The evangelist, probably the nation’s best-known and most-respected clergyman, said he would make no speeches for Nixon. “I am trying to avoid political involvement. Perhaps I have already said too much, but I am deeply concerned about my country. It is hard to keep quiet at a time like this. I feel like this is going to be the most important election in American history.” …

Graham said he had come out for Eisenhower in 1952. In 1964 “everybody knew by implication that I was for Lyndon Johnson,” he said, recalling that the two went to church together the Sunday before the election. In the two weeks before that election, Graham got 1.2 million telegrams urging him to endorse either Johnson or Barry Goldwater. His 1968 statement drew about 200 complaint letters, compared to about 60,000 letters his office receives daily.

Graham was happy for Nixon’s election but also said, “I almost feel sorry for the next president, because he will be heading into the eye of a hurricane.” At the end of 1968, CT attempted to describe the storm.

It will take the greatest kind of leadership to reweave these holes and unite the country once again. To this end the President-elect deserves the support of every American and the prayers of each believer.

Nixon … faces the burden of unprecedented problems at home and abroad. … With all these problems on the horizon, it becomes altogether fitting and proper to underline the conviction that the root of human turmoil is theological. As leader of the free world Nixon will need to exert all due influence to treat the symptoms, and his office of authority is ordained of God to do so. But it is left to the churchmen of America, clerical and lay, to address the spirit of man to the end that he will see his need of divine grace and yield to the will of the Almighty.

Americans found a reason to look up at the end of 1968. Three astronauts “slipped the surly bonds of earth” and flew a spaceship to an orbit around the moon. They broadcast from there on Christmas Eve and included a reading from chapter one of Genesis 1. CT’s news editor wished them well.

The biblical writers invite man to study the wonders in the skies as tributes to God’s handiwork. And the Apostle Paul declares under inspiration that “God chose to reconcile the whole universe to himself, making peace through the shedding of his blood upon the cross—to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, through [Christ] alone” (Col. 1:20, NEB).

The noted English Bible scholar F. F. Bruce says that “the more that men discover about the universe of God, the more cause they have for admiring his wisdom and power.” …

In the past God has used the heavens as an instrument to bridge the gap between men and himself (e.g., the Star of Bethlehem). Surely we can pray, “Lord, do it again.” …

All of which is to say that some of us are for you. Bon voyage. In the name of the One who traveled farthest.

- More from Daniel Silliman

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