Is a Ban on Conversion Therapy Constitutional?

Harvest Prude

In her Supreme Court challenge, evangelical therapist Kaley Chiles calls the Colorado law a violation of her free speech.

Members of the group "Concerned Women for America" pray outside the US Supreme Court as the Court hears oral arguements in Chiles v. Salazar.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images

In its first major case this term, the US Supreme Court seemed skeptical of arguments that Colorado could restrict counseling for minors regarding gender identity and sexual orientation without violating the Constitution.

Justices questioned whether the state’s 2019 law banning conversion therapy, along with any effort by counselors to help young patients alter gender expression or reduce same-sex attraction, amounted to viewpoint discrimination.

Colorado officials argue that professional regulation holds counselors to a high standard of care and protects children from a treatment with “no record of success.” Plaintiff Kaley Chiles called the restriction a “gag order on counselors” who want to address gender and sexuality from a place of shared convictions.

Today, over 20 states have bans similar to Colorado’s on the books, and the court’s decision could affect the landscape of Christian counseling. Other states have restrictions on the practice. Still, some states and municipalities have chosen to rescind or not fully enforce them.

Chiles, a licensed professional counselor who serves Christian clients in Colorado Springs, said she doesn’t seek to “cure” clients who aren’t looking to change, but she does want to help those who come wanting to move away from unwanted attraction or feel more at home in their bodies.

“Many of her clients seek her counsel precisely because they believe that their faith and their relationship with God establishes the foundation upon which to understand their identity and desires,” Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) legal counsel wrote in Chiles’s petition to the court to take her case.

The Association of Certified Biblical Counselors and the Family Research Council have backed her case, as has the Trump administration.

More than a decade ago, states began passing laws targeting hypnosis, shock therapy, and other controversial practices to alter same-sex attraction. Some of these legislative moves also included efforts to uphold traditional Christian perspectives on gender and sexuality. While clergy are exempt from bans in most cases, counselors who seek state licensure are not.

ADF is arguing that Colorado’s ban should be subject to the highest form of judicial review, known as strict scrutiny, to test whether it burdens free speech. Those who violate the law face up to $5,000 in fines per violation and can lose their license. Yet the law has never been enforced against Chiles or against any counselors in Colorado. ADF attorney Jim Campbell said Chiles has had anonymous complaints against her, alleging that she violated this law.

During oral arguments, Justice Department lawyer Hashim Mooppan defended Chiles’s form of talk therapy: “There is no conduct,” he said. “All that is happening here is speech.”

Colorado’s 2019 law forbids “any practice or treatment” from providing clients who are under 18 with treatment that would impact a minor’s “gender expression or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

Chiles challenged the law the same year it passed. Lower courts split on the issue, and a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit sided with Colorado. The 10th Circuit ruled that “states may regulate professional conduct, even though that conduct incidentally involves speech.” The Circuit decided that the law cleared the “rational basis test,” which is a less strict form of review of constitutional challenges.

Chiles petitioned the Supreme Court last year, and in March it agreed to hear the case.

On Tuesday, Justice Amy Coney Barrett had a lengthy back-and-forth with the lawyer for Colorado. She laid out a hypothetical case where states take “different sides” on conversion therapy based on a dispute in the medical community.

“Let me describe medical uncertainty as competing medical views,” Barrett said. “And let’s say that you have some medical experts that think gender-affirming care is dangerous to children and some that say that this kind of conversion talk therapy is dangerous. Can a state pick a side?”

Colorado solicitor general Shannon Stevenson said the law is based on a stricter standard of care the state expects from medical professionals and that conversion therapy doesn’t meet that standard.

Even Justice Elena Kagan, who is in the court’s liberal minority, asked if these laws allowed states to practice a form of viewpoint discrimination. She gave a hypothetical scenario where a gay patient is offered conflicting advice from two different doctors. If only the doctor who wants to help patients accept their sexuality is permitted to offer care, “that seems like viewpoint discrimination in the way we would normally understand viewpoint discrimination.”

Stevenson responded that “medical treatment has to be treated differently.” She went on to argue that conversion therapy does not have adequate evidence behind it. But Campbell said the ban has left Christian families in Colorado without the counseling support they are looking for. The Supreme Court will hand down a decision by June or early July.

The case, Chiles v. Salazar, is one of the blockbuster issues the justices are considering this term. The Supreme Court will also consider the death penalty, voting rights, and whether states can restrict transgender athletes from participating on women’s and girls’ sports teams. Last term, the court’s conservative majority sided with a Tennessee law banning certain types of medical transition treatments for minors.

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News

Wire Story

Tony Evans Will No Longer Pastor Dallas Megachurch After Restoration

Adelle M. Banks - Religion News Service

Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship announced that its pastor of 48 years won’t return to leadership. The church expects son Jonathan Evans to succeed him.

Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship prayed for Tony Evans after he completed a year-long restoration process.

Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship / Screengrab

Dallas megachurch founder Tony Evans, who stepped back from leading his church due to an undisclosed “sin” he announced last year, apologized to his congregation and his family on Sunday, after the elder board of his Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship announced the pastor had completed a “restoration process” and will not return to leadership of the church.

“To the flock, to the congregation, for the consternation I may have caused you with questions and wondering and uncertainty, I’m sorry,” he said as he sat on the church’s stage during a worship service and answered questions from his son, Jonathan Evans, who has been preaching regularly at the church. “I apologize sincerely for any instability that this season has caused you because you are my treasure.”

Evans, who abruptly announced he was “stepping away” in June 2024, is the first African American to have both a study Bible and a full-Bible commentary bearing his name. In addition to his church, he founded the Christian Bible teaching ministry The Urban Alternative, which continues to air his messages on radio outlets worldwide.

During the “Restoration Sunday” service, which lasted an hour and 40 minutes, neither Evans nor Chris Wheel, OCBF associate pastor of outreach, disclosed the sin that Evans described in June 2024 as requiring “the same biblical standard of repentance and restoration” he had applied to other people.

“While I have committed no crime, I did not use righteous judgment in my actions,” Evans, now 76, said at the time. “In light of this, I am stepping away from my pastoral duties and am submitting to a healing and restoration process established by the elders.”

Some churches offer or demand a restoration process of their leaders to overcome what they consider a violation of the Bible. During the worship service at the nondenominational, predominantly Black church, Wheel said Evans’s “discipline and restoration process” included counseling with professionals outside the church’s staff, “evidence of genuine repentance and godly sorrow” and pastoral mentoring.

Citing the Bible’s Epistle to the Galatians’ guidance about restoring a sinful person, Wheel said: “In keeping with this biblical framework, the elder board exercised deliberate and prayerful discretion regarding the timing, the manner of disclosing specific details throughout the restoration process. This was not done to conceal wrongdoing, but rather to uphold the integrity of the process, to protect the dignity of all involved, and prevent unnecessary speculation or sensationalism,” adding that Evans “fully submitted” to the restoration process.

Wheel said Evans also took a 12-month absence from pulpit ministry to “focus on personal growth.”

“In alignment with biblical principles and unanimous affirmation of the elder board, Dr. Evans has successfully completed this restoration journey,” Wheel said.

As the congregation applauded and cheered, Evans entered the stage.

“While he will not be returning in a staff nor leadership role at OCBF, we joyfully look forward to seeing how God uses Dr. Evans’s gifts and calling to proclaim the truth of Scripture with clarity and conviction for the strengthening of the body of Christ,” Wheel said.

Evans made a major public appearance shortly after his yearlong absence concluded, speaking at the July summit of The Family Leader, a Christian organization known for its conservative evangelical stances, in Des Moines, Iowa.

Wheel said more details about the future plans for the church will be announced at a “Vision Sunday” service, set for October 12.

“Key steps include Jonathan Evans has been appointed as an elder,” he said. “Our expectation is that he will formally be installed as the lead pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship.”

As soon as Wheel concluded speaking, Jonathan Evans led the congregation in a brief Communion service.

“Somebody celebrate our Lord for restoration, forgiveness and reconciliation,” Jonathan Evans said.

The service then pivoted to him sitting with his father for a 20-minute discussion in which the two men expressed their pride in each other, and the elder Evans thanked the church, his family and friends for their endurance and described the “bittersweet” period that had just concluded. He said those days often were filled with depression, loneliness and tears.

“It’s certainly bitter when you’ve done something for 48 years every day, every week, and then you’re no longer doing it — and it’s your fault,” Evans said. “I had to search for God, but not for a sermon.”

Asked about the hardest part of the yearlong process, Evans said, “the most important and hardest was disappointing the Lord, who had given me so much and in such a unique way.”

He said he was particularly thankful for the support of his wife, the former Carla Crummie, whom he married in December 2023, after Lois Evans, his first wife of 49 years, died in 2019.

“The way we came together was shared loss,” he said. “Our mates died a few days apart as she and her late husband were on their way to my wife’s funeral.”

Evans said he was concerned about “many things that were not true being said” on social media.

“The way they beat up on my wife who knew nothing about any of this, and then the way they came after my children and then came after the Lord,” he said. “And I was the reason why all of that was happening, on a worldwide scale.”

Speaking directly to the congregation, he said, “For anything that has hurt you from me, I’m sorry, but I’m so glad I have you and you have me.”

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Theology

You Don’t Have to Be Radical

Brad East

Most Christians aren’t monks, missionaries, or martyrs. We’re unimpressive and unsatisfactory—yet saved by God’s scandalous grace.

Dorothea Lange / Unsplash

Last year, I found myself making the rounds of Christian podcasts to publicize a couple of new books I’d written. Most of these conversations were similar, but one ended with an exchange that caught us both off guard.

The interviewer asked whether I’ve changed my mind on any big theological questions. What I took him to be asking was what I’d tell my younger theological self. To which I replied, “You don’t have to be radical to be a Christian.”

After I blurted out my answer, I had to ask myself what I meant. I didn’t have in mind the perennial vigor, earnest energy, and guileless naiveté of youth—or the renewal movements and prophetic indictments of elders these tend to generate. The “radical” trend I meant is a more specific phenomenon, one I expect is familiar to many American Christians around my age.

When we were in high school and college, to be radical for Jesus was presented as the goal of any serious Christian. The message came from youth pastors, from books like David Platt’s Radical and its many offshoots, and from earnest lyrics in Christian pop. As best as I can reconstruct it, the concept had four parts.

First, it held that Jesus’ teachings are the heart of the gospel. If you want to know what it means to be a Christian, look neither to the Old Testament nor to the apostles. Look instead to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the red letters contained therein.

Second, the radical gospel revealed that Jesus’ teachings are not what you’ve heard at church. Really, Jesus isn’t even particularly interested in church except as a place where people who are committed to living out his teachings gather to support one another. If you were raised in church, most likely Jesus’ teachings were downplayed, muted, or otherwise sanded down to keep their rough edges from drawing blood.

Third, Jesus’ radical teachings are necessarily at odds with the American way of life. At the very least, this meant some mix of individualism, consumerism, secularism, nationalism, and militarism. But it could also include elements of a standard-issue adult life in America: marriage, children, a rewarding job, a mortgage, a safe neighborhood, a decent education, savings in the bank, and paid vacation—the proverbial white picket fence. To be radical for Jesus meant sacrificing all this for his sake. You could follow Jesus or the American way, but not both.

Finally, the radical alternative to the picket fence was the kind of life you read about in church history: the lives of saints, monks, missionaries, and martyrs. Saint Francis selling all his possessions. Dorothy Day founding the Catholic Worker Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. marching in Selma and Washington. Dietrich Bonhoeffer being executed in a Nazi concentration camp.

The preeminent living example was Shane Claiborne. His 2006 book The Irresistible Revolution detailed how he’d helped establish an intentional Christian community in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia. Claiborne had spent time in Calcutta with Mother Teresa and in Baghdad with a peacemaking team during the US-led bombardment of the city. This is what it means to follow Jesus, would-be radicals concluded (whether that was the message Claiborne intended to communicate or not). Ordinary American Christians had to wake up.

Young, impressionable, precocious believers like me took that message seriously. I learned that there are Christians and there are Christians—people who profess Christianity versus people whose lives manifest their faith.

I wanted to be the latter. I wanted to be an impoverished pacifist and member of an intentional community. That’s what a plain reading of the Gospels required—I was convinced of it—and I certainly didn’t want to want to be a hearer but not a doer of Jesus’ teachings (James 1:22–25). As Jesus warns at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21, RSV throughout).

So I spent summers overseas doing mission work. I interned at a homeless shelter. I looked for ways to give, to sacrifice, to suffer. Newly married—clearly already a compromise with the world and the flesh!—my wife and I lived in an old, ugly one-bedroom apartment outside of Atlanta. One day we were driving through a wealthier neighborhood, and my wife wondered aloud what kind of house we would buy one day when we had kids and real jobs. Uh oh. I replied, with somber spiritual gravity, that I’d be happy to live in our apartment for the rest of my life.

I was promptly informed that I’d be welcome to live there as long as I was also happy to live alone.

I wish I could say that this was a wake-up call, but my self-serious piety took a long time to deflate. Now teaching at a Christian university, a husband and father of four—with a mortgage and a salary and, yes, paid time off—I can only smile when I see a similar piety in my students. So much of it is good, full of sweet sincerity and worthy of nothing but honor and encouragement. Some of it is simply developmental: This phase must be lived. It’s not meant to be circumvented, for the way is not around but through.

Nevertheless, there is something in the lure to the radical that’s worth interrogating. Why was the radical path such an attractive proposition to me and to so many others? Why do similar movements, well-meant but misguided, sometimes go wrong?

The basic appeal is obvious enough: Middle- and upper-middle-class teens could reach for something beyond their parents’ domesticity. Did Jesus come to earth and die on the cross so that suburbanites could have swimming pools and charcuterie boards? Unlikely. Surely there’s more.

The urge to be radical also played into the mild conspiracism of so much American religiosity: Jesus preached peace, but Constantine baptized the sword. Paul proclaimed martyrdom, but Augustine justified war. Peter distributed possessions to all in need, but the pope gloried in his glittering golden pomp.

In this view, the church is a corrupt or, at best, merely human institution, unworthy of our trust. If Jesus’ original teachings have been rejected or corrupted by “organized religion,” then you need to turn from your local congregation to Jesus alone—or more precisely, to the Jesus you personally find in the Gospels.

There’s an instinct here that is undeniably right. Jesus’ teachings really are hard, both to hear and to put into practice. The church really is full of flawed sinners who utterly fail to live out the way of Christ. Christians really are, in the phrasing of theologian Nicholas Healy, “unsatisfactory.” The salvation God offers us in the gospel really isn’t about earthly possessions, blessings, and happiness. And there really are features of American life that are inimical to Jesus’ life and teachings.

In this sense, the radical message is correct: Wherever churches have compromised the faith and followed other gods—mammon or Mars or any worldly idol—the call to return to Jesus is not just apt but urgent. Return to the Lord, no matter the cost. “Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first” (Rev. 2:5).

Yet in practice, the radical message reliably comes to an unhappy (if unadmitted) conclusion: Almost no one on earth is a “real” Christian. Almost no body of believers is a “real” church. The folks sitting in the pews and preaching from the pulpits simply are not sufficiently serious or committed. (In truth, the conclusion is usually comparative: not as die-hard in comparison to me, the radical sitting in judgment on them.)

Rather than accepting this grim implication, I’d like to propose an alternative: Yes, radicals are faithful believers. But their path is not the only path for the Christian life. In fact, it is so far outside the norm for most believers in most times and places that I propose that we delete radical from our Christian vocabulary.

As it happens, that’s not a novel idea. For centuries, Christians did not exhort one another to be “radical.” The word’s usage, particularly as a term of approval, exploded only in the last 50 years. Many Christians don’t realize that among the sources of this use are far-left and reactionary politics, though it has migrated toward mainstream and even centrist usage since the 1970s. In the American church, I suspect one could trace the word’s movement from political left and Anabaptist contexts via the influence of theologians like John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas at the end of the last century.

But whatever the genealogy of the term, we should abandon it for two reasons. One is that by using it loosely and frequently, we’ve drained it of its meaning. In this usage, anything can be radical, provided you really mean it. But if it can be radical to curate that cheese board or listen to Bach, to vote for a certain candidate or buy a painting from a Christian artist, then the word has gone on holiday. Suddenly, being radical has swung back to the very white-picket-fence lifestyle we earnest young Christians were trying to avoid in the first place.

Like most Christians, I know some truly radical disciples of Jesus. I’m thinking, for example, of a longtime friend who for two decades has worked in a major American city to alleviate the plight of the homeless. If we reserved radical for people like him, you’d hear no objection from me. But if that’s not on the table, it’s better to do away with it entirely.

The second reason is that most Christians are neither true radicals like my friend nor self-styled radicals like those I’ve critiqued. The vast majority of all Christians, everywhere, at all times are normies.

They are unimpressive. Unsatisfactory. Barely getting by. They don’t claim to be saints or heroes. They succeed if they make it to church on Sunday and pray before meals and bedtime. They believe in God, confess their sins, and look to Jesus for grace. And if we’re honest, that’s about it.

They are not the rich young ruler, who walked away from Jesus sad (Matt. 19:22), nor Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’ cross (Mark 15:21). They are more like the other Simon, called Peter, who refused to carry a cross and denied even knowing Jesus. They are Thomas, who would not believe until he saw the risen Lord with his own eyes. They are the unnamed father in Mark 9, who cried out to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (v. 24).

In Paul’s words, they “lead a quiet and peaceable life,” and they’re fortunate if it’s “godly and respectable in every way” (1 Tim. 2:2). Often they are failures, screw-ups, and dropouts—ordinary people muddling through. They are not what I’ve elsewhere called “spiritual Navy SEALs.” They are everyone who has called on the name of the Lord and—just as he promised—was saved (Rom. 10:13; Joel 2:32).

Christianity might be more impressive if we were all true radicals. But it would be a faith for heroes rather than sinners. It would cease to be good news for the desolate and helpless. It would be a message for the few, not for the whole world (1 John 2:2). It would be a lesser faith in quantity and quality alike.

My younger self was on fire to be radical like Jesus. That was good and right. But what I missed was the weight of sin in the world—and with it, death, suffering, affliction, sorrow, and pain. What I missed was the scope of grace, the gospel, and the church. I didn’t understand that here was offered a liberation deep enough, a healing strong enough, a forgiveness wide enough to comprehend everything fallen humanity needs.

Christianity is not reserved for radicals. The Lord does not help those who help themselves. By a miracle, he helps the utterly and pathetically helpless—of whom I am chief. That’s truly good news. It’s also a terrible scandal. And that’s the point.

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

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Church Life

From a Village of Bandits to a Village of the Gospel

Vikram Mukka

Stuartpuram in India’s Andhra Pradesh was once known for its armed robbers. Then the gospel changed them.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Youtube

Over the past four decades, octogenarian Bollaku Issak has preached hundreds of sermons. The diminutive pastor with white hair and a knock-kneed gait ends each service with the same altar call.

“If God can save a wretched sinner like me, he will definitely save you,” he says, his voice softening. “You are no different. You are loved. Just surrender. Repent and be saved.”

Often as he utters those words, tears well up in his eyes, transporting him to his life before Christ. He once lived as an armed robber, or dacoit, in Stuartpuram, an infamous village in Andhra Pradesh considered a “reformatory colony” by the British colonial government. Families lived off banditry for generations and passed it on to their children as an inheritance. In the aftermath of any major theft in the region, police invariably suspected Stuartpuram gangs.

Bollaku himself led a band of nine men, breaking into houses, trains, banks, and government offices, he recalled in a recorded testimony. He earned the moniker Bangaru Pichchuka(“Golden Sparrow”) for absconding with gold worth millions of rupees and for going on thrilling escapades. Yet years of living in hiding to escape the police robbed him of peace. Every time he tried to go straight, he slipped back into banditry with greater force. Weighed down by criminal life, he even tried to chop off his own arms, he said.

To evade arrest and charges, Bollaku bribed the police. Authorities finally outwitted him after four decades, booking him under charges amounting to seven years of imprisonment. His numerous attempts at jailbreak proved unsuccessful. The thought of spending seven years inside the fortified walls of prison, away from his children, left him feeling hopeless.

In prison, a fellow convict who had recently became a Christian explained the gospel to Bollaku. Hearing about the love of Christ and the promise of salvation reinvigorated his spirit. Over the next two months, he prayed, sobbed, repented of his sins, and learned about the Bible. He prayed persistently that somehow his prison term would be shortened to a year.

“It was a miracle!” he said in the testimony about the trial. “The prosecution could not gather evidence. The court struck down the charges against me. I was completely set free.”

After walking out of prison, he spent the next 14 years serving as a volunteer at a local church—sweeping floors, cooking, and cleaning dishes. As a spiritual life of prayer and service took root, he never returned to his old ways. One morning as he prayed, Bollaku had a vision: Jesus laid hands on him, instructing him to testify about the Good News that had turned his life around. Since then, Bollaku has sought to follow this calling.

Bollaku’s testimony is not uncommon in Stuartpuram, which in the past four decades has seen a revival as nearly all its 5,000 residents have become Christians. The “Village of Dacoits” has become Suvarthapuram, Telugu for “Gospel Village.”

“People here live out Christianity, be it in personal or professional lives,” Bollaku told CT. “God has become the center of our pursuits today. This was unheard of a generation back.”

About 20 churches dot the lanes and alleys of the village. The days of police officers descending on the village after every major theft are long over.

Today, Stuartpuram is known for its accomplishments rather than its crimes. The village has produced two weightlifting gold medalists, as well as doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers, civil servants, government ministers, and even a state police chief. Villagers owe it to Salvation Army missionaries for laying the groundwork for lasting change.

The British initially founded Stuartpuram in 1913 as a “reformatory colony” under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. The act designated certain nomadic and seminomadic tribes as “born criminals” who made a living through banditry. The Yerukulas, a gypsy community that resides in Stuartpuram, were branded as a criminal tribe. Colonial authorities visited prisons to identify Yeruluka convicts and settle them in the newly formed village. The village is named after Harold Stuart, a British civil servant who pioneered the model of resettlement colonies.

Later research revealed that equating ancestry with criminality was solely based on colonial prejudice. Yerukulas originally traded salt and grain, riding donkeys to different villages to earn a living. They made and sold brooms, mats, and baskets to supplement their income. The introduction of railway transport in the 1850s replaced traditional traders, including the Yerukulas. Then the enactment of the Indian Forest Act of 1878 cut them off from the forests where they sourced materials for their handicrafts. Illiterate, landless, and scorned by the upper caste, many of them felt they had no choice but to turn to crime.

After moving to Stuartpuram, many continued to live as bandits. In 1913, Stuart decided to turn to the Salvation Army, which had already gained a reputation for transforming criminals. Frederick Booth-Tucker, Salvation Army’s special commissioner for India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), wrote at the time, “The Gospel remedy has lost none of its ancient power when applied by those who have themselves experienced its revolutionizing and soul-reforming influence.”

Under the Salvation Army, life in the settlement was restricted. Leaders required roll call for all the residents, day and night, and banned villagers from venturing out of Stuartpuram. They established an elementary school where children learned about Bible stories and moral education, and they provided adults with employment opportunities like cultivating land or working at the Indian Leaf Tobacco Development Company Limited (ITC Limited) in nearby Guntur.

After India’s independence from the British in 1947, homegrown movements such as Laymen’s Evangelical Fellowship and the secular nonprofit Samskar Organisation continued this work, driving change through education, job opportunities, and moral reform.

Yet the stigma around Stuartpuram remained. Popular Telugu historical dramas bearing the name Stuartpuram cemented the image of its residents as dacoits. In Christian circles, however, testimonies of transformed lives began to alter the popular perception. For instance, Abba Khan Yesudas was a dreaded dacoit for 45 years. While doing time in Madras Central Prison, he—like Bollaku—heard the gospel from a fellow inmate. After his release, he became an evangelist. Another well-known figure is Christian songwriter Stuartpuram Sudhakar, whose popular Telugu songs capture his criminal past as a bandit and the new life he found in Christ.

Today, the Christians of Stuartpuram are sharing the gospel with neighboring villages. The village hosts annual gospel conventions that draw about 2,000 people from nearby towns such as Guntur, Bapatla, and Chirala, as well as distant cities like Hyderabad and Chennai. Six young people from the village recently translated the New Testament into the Yerukula language, aiming to distribute it to Yerukula communities across India, according to Chukka Paul Raju, president of Stuartpuram Grama Abhivrudhi Mariyu Sankshema Samithi, a community organization advocating for the village.

Residents have asked authorities to officially change their village’s name to Suvarthapuram to shed their reputation from the past, Raju said.

“We are no more Stuartpuram and whatever it represents,” Raju said. “Suvarthapuram alone captures the transformation that Christ has brought into this place.”

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Books

Four Truths About God for Children Who Can’t Sleep

Rachel Joy Welcher

And for the grownups—that’s all of us—who never outgrow their need for his presence around the clock.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, IVP Kids

My husband got into a bicycle accident on his ride home from work two years ago. Wet grass caused his front wheel to slip, and he crashed into the handlebars. It broke one of his ribs, which sliced into his spleen, but he didn’t know because he was in shock. He came home with a small head wound, and I fussed at him about a possible concussion. But like a typical Midwestern boy, he replied, “I’m fine,” so I settled for bringing him a bag of frozen peas for his forehead, then I left to pick up some pizza.

When I returned, he was passed out on the floor, and my toddler, Hilde, was sobbing. I got my husband to the hospital, but it was hours before they figured out that his belly was filling up with blood. Our summer plans vanished, and I spent weeks going back and forth from the hospital to our home, where our confused toddler kept asking, “Where is Daddy?”

In between hospital visits and comforting our kids, I received an email confirming that I would be a children’s book author. A year before, I had finally decided to write about Psalm 121, a passage which meant a great deal to me as a child. I wrote a simple story about a boy named Charlie who, for various and relatable reasons, can’t fall asleep. Charlie’s parents comfort him with the truth of God’s omnipresence—that he is everywhere at all times. They read Psalm 121 aloud, finding reassurance in the God who “will neither slumber nor sleep” as he “watches over” his people (v. 4).

At the time, I couldn’t have known how much I would need this story myself. I couldn’t have predicted the night when I first returned home from the hospital, put our daughter to bed, and waited until 1 a.m. for the night nurse to call and tell me whether my husband was still alive.

My young daughter, Hilde, didn’t sleep well during those weeks either. We both tossed and turned, our schedules thrown off and our hearts anxious. The following truths are for your children, but they are also for you, because we never outgrow our need for God at all times—especially at night.

1. God never sleeps.

“Behold, He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” (Ps. 121:4, NASB).

I tell my daughter, “Even when everyone else in the house is asleep—me, Daddy, and Richard—God is still awake. You can talk to him. You can know you’re not alone. He doesn’t get tired like we do.”She’s read my book—even keeps it in her bed on the top bunk—and now she wants a Bible there too, like Charlie. She can’t read yet, but she already understands that God’s Word brings comfort, that his truth is her night-light.

We have a picture of Jesus—an artist’s imperfect rendering, anyway—carrying a lamb on his shoulders. It hangs on the wall just above where Hilde places her head on her Winnie-the-Pooh pillow each night. She points to the lamb sometimes and says, “That’s me!”

I want her to know that she is never alone, even in the middle of the night when our old house, built in 1920, is settling with its creaks and moans and when the dark silhouettes of her stuffed animals look like monsters. I want her to know that prayer reaches God at any hour. As David testifies in Psalm 55, “As for me, I call to God, and the Lord saves me. Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice” (vv. 16–17).

2. God carries our burdens.

“Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you” (Ps. 55:22).

Right now, Hilde’s favorite way to pray is listing the things she is thankful for. For example, a recent prayer at dinner included thanking God for butter, trees, barbecue sauce, the Holy Spirit, and houses. But there will come a day, and sooner than I’d like, when she will have more than just thanks to lay at Jesus’ feet. She will have worries, regrets, and shame. She will have fear, confusion, and questions. I want her to know that God is not only always awake but also always willing to listen to whatever is on her heart.

In my book, I write about how Charlie is frustrated that he is supposed to pray to a God he can’t see. His mom responds with understanding, noting that she struggles with the same thing and that her solution is to tell God all about it. She invites Charlie not only to pray but also to pour out his heart before God, questions and all.

When our children realize they can talk to God about anything, they will talk to him about everything. And that’s just what we want. Of course, we’d love it if they would confide all their thoughts and fears in us, but there will be times when they whisper those words to God alone. And we can trust that God knows how to hold our children and their precious hearts.

3. God shows his love through Jesus.

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

The gospel isn’t just for the daytime. For many of us, including our children, nighttime is when our thoughts settle and we ask our biggest questions. We think back over our day, remembering the joys but also the ways we failed.

Even at age three, Hilde has such a tender conscience. While she might zip around all day like a hummingbird from flower to flower, at night she often wants reassurance. Sometimes what our children need most before they can fall asleep is forgiveness. Especially after a hard day of correction and consequences, our children need reminders that they are still loved, that their performance isn’t what determines their value in God’s sight.

It is in these quiet hours, when the sky dims and we put our pajamas on, that we can curl up beside our children—or hug them to our chests—and remind them that God’s love for his children is a “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love,” as Sally Lloyd-Jones put it in The Jesus Storybook Bible. The gospel is always the right story to tell, especially at bedtime.

4. God’s mercies are new every morning.

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam. 3:22–23, ESV).

I don’t know how things are at your house, but despite the absolute delight parenting is, my husband and I are bone-tired at the end of each day, often barely making it to bedtime with our patience intact. The idea that there will be a fresh start in the morning—that God’s mercies are new with each sunrise—is incredibly important to our little family.

New mercies definitely speak to us as parents and caregivers, but our children also need them. In fact, my daughter and I have stolen the concept of “fresh starts” to use throughout the day. When things go downhill for whatever reason, after we’ve practiced our deep breathing, I sometimes like to declare a fresh start over our house. We don’t have to wait until morning for mercy, but it really does help us sleep when we know that mercy is on the way.

Another practice I have with my little girl is letting her list some of the things she is looking forward to, come daylight. I might get her started with something like “We can make banana pancakes for breakfast, watch some Bluey, run in the sprinklers, check the garden, and teach Richard how to say new words.”Her body visibly calms down as she remembers that morning will indeed come again, and this often transforms her fear of missing out into joyful anticipation. She takes over with “And we can bake cookies and then play in the front yard, where I am the ambulance and you are the fire truck!”

It’s been two years since that bike accident, and we’ve moved on and lived through other delights and trials since, but Hilde will still occasionally ask me to tell her the story. I’m not sure how much she remembers, but I know she likes the part where I tell her that the doctors told Daddy not to lift anything but that when he finally came home and saw her, he scooped her right up.

No matter how old we are, falling asleep can take courage. It sometimes requires that we first work through what is keeping us awake, causing anxious thoughts, or disrupting our peace. Our kids need to know that they never have to work through these thoughts alone.

Even when everyone in the house is asleep, God is always awake. Even if they wake up in the dark, the darkness is not dark to him (Ps. 139:12). God is listening. He is able to carry any burden on his strong shoulders. He reminds us of his love for us through the death and resurrection of Jesus. And he can’t wait to give us a fresh start tomorrow morning.

Rachel Joy Welcher is an author and an acquisitions editor at Baker Books. Her children’s book is Charlie Can’t Sleep!: Trusting God When You’re Afraid of the Dark.

- More from Rachel Joy Welcher

News

Preservation Grants Help Black Churches Hold On to Their History

Shelia Poole

Over a hundred congregations have received up to a half-million dollars to repair deteriorating buildings and restore their place in their communities.

Cynthia Gibbs, chair of the Taveau Legacy Committee, is part of a group working to restore historic Taveau Church in South Carolina.

Image Courtesy of Cynthia Gibbs / Edits by CT

Cynthia Gibbs grew up five miles from Taveau Church, a small wooden building weathered by decades of declining membership and a deteriorating physical structure.

Outside Charleston, South Carolina, the church sits on land once owned by Henry Laurens, one of America’s founding fathers, a wealthy planter and slave owner.

At nearly 200 years old, the structure had become a shell of its former self with its story largely untold.

“Church has always played a critical role in our history,” said Gibbs, chair of the Taveau Legacy Committee. “When these sacred structures deteriorate and disappear from the landscape, so does all that history and its importance as to who we are as a people and all the contributions we have ever made.”

Black congregations of enslaved people and former slaves worshiped in Taveau decades before the Civil War, and subsequently the church also served as a Reconstruction-era schoolhouse, according to Gibbs.

The church served as a house of worship for over 175 years, first for Black Presbyterians and then for Black Methodists in South Carolina. Once the church fell to about a dozen members in the 1970s, it merged with a nearby United Methodist Church and stopped using its old building.

Even active congregations struggle to raise funds or secure financing for major building projects. For dwindling historic churches whose buildings have fallen into disrepair, it can be impossible.

Project costs add up quickly, and it’s hard to estimate how extensive or pricy a restoration could get. Older structures can require more specialized labor and supplies. Crumbling foundations and rotting wood need replacing, as do outdated plumbing and electric lines. Plus, historic buildings can be subject to regulations for preservation.

Many historic churches rely on grant funding to help cover needed repairs. Taveau began restoration two years ago. Gibbs is hopeful that future South Carolinians will be able to visit the building and learn about its history, thanks in part to funding from the Preserving Black Churches initiative of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

The grant program provides $50,000 to $500,000 to churches with an active congregation or those being considered for new uses in the community. The initiative has awarded $275,000 to help in Taveau’s revitalization and efforts to make it a destination site.

In 2025, 30 historic Black churches were awarded a total of $8.5 million in funding to support preservation work, including structural restoration and management of the funds.

Overall, $21.67 million has been awarded through 113 grants since 2023, many going to buildings in Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio.

The grants also cover technical and marketing assistance. Grant recipients are launching programs, fueling community revitalization, and educating the public on the sites’ history.

“For generations, Black churches have anchored communities and fueled movements,” said Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“Yet too many are at risk due to decades of disinvestment,” he added. “These places are not just buildings—they are living monuments to American resilience, leadership, and cultural brilliance. Equitable preservation ensures these sacred spaces are protected, celebrated, and passed on with pride.”

The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund was launched in 2017 by the Washington, DC–based National Trust for Historic Preservation. Preserving Black Churches had its first cohort in 2023. So far, grant recipients include:

· The African Meeting House in Boston, where William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832.

· St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Columbus, Georgia, the second-oldest AME church in the state. The building was completed in 1876. Over the years, water damage has affected its twin turrets and steeple and its wooden doors, believed to have been carved by former enslaved craftsmen.

At Taveau, Gibbs and others hope to rehabilitate and restore the structure, which sits on 3.7 acres and includes a cemetery, and turn it into a destination site.

The building, a surviving example of rural antebellum architecture, was built in 1935 and became a center for Black Methodists in 1847 and a hub of Gullah Geechee life (a culture that developed among African descendants on the coastal Carolinas and beyond). The funding will go toward exterior restoration to keep the church structure standing.

Historic Black churches are most common in the South and in older cities, places with high concentrations of Black residents, according to Nichole R. Phillips, director of the Black church studies program at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.

“In some respects, the importance of preserving Black churches is because the Black church is really under threat,” with more Black Protestants attending multiethnic churches, she said.

Congregations age. Younger families leave, sometimes citing the lack of women in leadership, lack of LGBTQ affirmation, or moral standards they view as outdated. And, increasingly, younger generations didn’t grow up in the Black church in the first place.

Still, churches support educational programs and scholarships. They spur local businesses. They bring people together for fellowship. The ramifications of losing a church can ripple through the community.

The grants are key because they give churches the opportunity to invest in capital projects, extending the life of the structure and keeping the doors open, Phillips said.

Another beneficiary is The House of God Church in Nashville, a Holiness-Pentecostal denomination that includes 237 churches. Founder Mother Mary Magdalena L. Tate established the denomination in 1903 in Tennessee.

“This gives our churches a better physical structure and gives them an opportunity for those historic churches to be viable,” said Delvin Moody, program director at the Keith Center, which serves as the historic and preservation grant office for the denomination.

The denomination has always been self-funded, and only recently looked to philanthropic grants for funding. The House of God Church received a $150,000 capacity grant that was used to hire an executive director and cover administrative costs associated with its five-year plan.

They plan to examine the infrastructure of the historic churches in the denomination and develop preservation efforts based on data.

Roughly 85 active congregations are deemed historic and will be aided through the Keith Center’s work “to make sure they’re strong and can plan for the future,” he said.

“They became a physical representation of our history, and when you don’t see the building, or see a building that is dilapidated or not functioning, then you miss the opportunity for younger generations to inquire,” he said. “The role of the Black church is multifaceted.”

- More from Shelia Poole

News

Two Years After October 7, Christians See Fruit amid the Suffering

Jill Nelson

Churches in Israel and Egypt provide food, aid, and a listening ear to those scarred by war.

A woman overlooks a camp for displaced people in the southern Gaza Strip, on September 29, 2025, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues.

Omar Al-Qattaa / Contributor / Getty

Images from the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and its aftermath are forever seared in the mind of Israel Pochtar.

Pochtar, a pastor at Congregation Beit Hallel in the city of Ashdod, Israel, recalled the early-morning sirens that jolted him awake and sent him peering through the windows of his apartment on the 30th floor. He watched rocket after rocket fire from Gaza, 23 miles to the south. Smoke billowed from buildings in nearby Ashkelon.

He turned to social media and saw videos of Hamas terrorists killing Israeli police officers. He thought it was fake news.

Only after seeing news reports of Hamas brutally murdering more than a dozen elderly Israelis who had gathered for a trip to the Dead Sea did he comprehend the unfolding horror: 1,200 dead and 251 taken hostage, with evidence of rape, torture, and entire families burned alive.

As he drove one of his sons to a nearby military base to report for duty as part of a massive call-up, he saw fear and confusion in the eyes of soldiers. “No one was smiling, and no one was making jokes,” Pochtar noted. He prayed for his son, said goodbye, and burst into tears.

Then he began identifying ways his church could serve a fearful and broken population.

Four months later, Fawzi Khalil, the director of relief ministries at Cairo’s Kasr el-Dobara Church, visited Egypt’s border with Gaza, where he encountered the suffering of Palestinian refugees.

Palestinians caught in the cross hairs of Israel’s retaliation on Gaza crossed the border into the Egyptian town of Sheikh Zuweid and filled a sports center that had been converted into a field hospital. An estimated 300 wounded people lined the floor of the stadium, many with missing limbs. The scene reminded Khalil of a scene in Gone with the Wind where hundreds of injured Civil War soldiers filled a train station floor.

Khalil heard people moaning and crying out in pain, and he lamented that he had no medical training. “Then the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart and said, ‘Just give them food to eat,’” Khalil said.

He returned to Kasr el-Dobara, the largest Protestant church in the Middle East, with more than 9,000 members, and launched a ministry to Palestinian refugees.

Two years later, Gaza is in ruins. Dozens of Israeli hostages—20 of them believed to be alive—remain in captivity. More than 67,000 Palestinians have died throughout the course of the war, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its death toll. On the world stage, Israel’s isolation has deepened as more Western countries recognize a Palestinian state.

Last week during Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House, US president Donald Trump laid out a 20-point peace plan and gave Hamas “three or four days” to accept it or face “a very sad end.”

The plan, which Israel immediately accepted, requires the release of all hostages within 72 hours of Hamas’s approval, followed by the release of 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and 1,700 Palestinians detained in the wake of the October 7 attacks. As part of the plan, Arab and Muslim countries agreed to help disarm Hamas, a condition the terrorist group has repeatedly refused. A board of foreign officials, headed by Trump, would oversee the establishment of a transitional government.

On Friday, Hamas accepted some elements of the plan, including the release of all hostages and the termination of its power structure in Gaza, but said other points required further discussion. On Monday, Israel and Hamas held indirect negotiations in Egypt in an attempt to iron out their disagreements.

Amid the uncertainty, Christians in the region continue to share a message of hope. Both Pochtar and Khalil said they have witnessed God at work through the suffering.

After securing funding through World Relief in early 2024, Khalil began making weekly trips to northern Sinai with teams from his church in Cairo. They delivered food, blankets, clothes, and medicine to Palestinians who arrived in Egypt with few resources.

A journalist from Gaza told Khalil about five Palestinians in Cairo who needed assistance. The church provided them with food and helped them with rent. From there, the word spread.

“Those five people told 50 others about this crazy church that came and visited with them and cried with them and gave them food,” Khalil said. “And then the 50 told another 500.” Today, 600 members of the church make weekly visits to 5,000 Palestinian residences in Cairo.

Estimates from 2024 placed the number of Palestinian refugees in Egypt at around 100,000, but Khalil believes the current number is double that. Most lack the proper documentation to work or enroll their children in school, he noted.

In one of Kasr el-Dobara’s conference rooms, Khalil welcomed Imam Saad, a Palestinian woman who worked in women’s health for 25 years at a Gaza City hospital. Her eyes reflected the sorrow she has carried for the past two years as a refugee, worried about her family in Gaza and surviving in Cairo without income.

A contact in Gaza connected her to the church for support. “You respected us as Palestinians,” she said to Khalil, extending her gratitude.

The church avoids mass distribution of aid. “We know that deep in their hearts they need prayer and they need you to cry with them,” Khalil explained. “They don’t cry when they are in a big room, but once you visit them in their home, they cry and cry, and you hear a lot of their stories.”

During one recent home visit, Khalil met a man from Gaza who had taken a bullet to the neck that paralyzed him. He made it across the border and was living in Cairo with his grandfather, who began weeping when Khalil arrived. The grandfather said he was afraid his grandson would be left alone after his death, and was glad to see someone willing to help.

“I told him, ‘The church is your home,’” Khalil said as tears streamed down his cheeks. The church provided a specialized wheelchair to help him in daily life.

During the past two years of ministry to Palestinian refugees, most of whom are Muslim, no one has refused the help of the church, Khalil said.

Meanwhile, in Israel volunteers from Congregation Beit Hallel, which Pochtar founded 17 years ago, also visit people in their homes. During the first year of the war, a group of 120 people from the church assisted the elderly and young mothers whose husbands were called to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Donning helmets and military vests, the ministry teams delivered food, water, and other necessities when it was too dangerous for people to leave their homes or bomb shelters. Over the past 24 months, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the regime in Tehran have launched tens of thousands of rockets, missiles, and drones into civilian centers in Israel.

“The difficulty is waking up in the night and running with your kids to the bomb shelter and especially [for] those who have less means and are living in the cheaper apartments,” Pochtar said in the early months of the war. “We try to visit them during the day and bring them food, prayers, [and] encouragement.”

More recently, the ministry has delivered food, bulletproof vests, mattresses, and other supplies to soldiers serving across the country. More than 1,000 Israeli security personnel have died during the past two years, including an elder’s son from Pochtar’s congregation who died during Hamas’s initial attack.

Pochtar said that since the war began, Israelis have started to seek God. “Many were disappointed in the government, in our military, because the military wasn’t ready to protect them,” he explained. “But it caused people to seek heavenly help.”

Pochtar has seen an increase in people coming to his congregation with questions about faith. Growth is also happening in other ways. More young people in his congregation are getting married—a trend he’s observed across the country.

“This war has helped many to reevaluate their lives, and many are actually proposing to their girlfriends and getting married,” Pochtar said. “And now we have a baby boom.”

Today when Pochtar gazes at Gaza through his window, he rarely sees rockets firing from the enclave. Fewer lights twinkle in the nighttime horizon, as Israel’s offensive has destroyed two-thirds of Gaza’s infrastructure.

He prays for his two sons who continue to serve in the IDF and for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza.

As the future of Trump’s peace plan is yet to be seen, both Pochtar and Khalil are praying for changed hearts in the region.

“If the Jewish become Christians and the Muslims become Christians, then the peace of God will reign,” Khalil said. “I want the leader of Hamas to live in peace and to know Christ. And the most radical right Jewish leader, I want him to know Christ and to live in peace.”

- More from Jill Nelson

Ideas

The CDC Listened to Vaccine-Hesitant Moms in My Living Room

Carrie McKean

I was surprised to find myself hosting an off-the-record chat with people worlds apart on public health. But I hope that night was a seed of something new.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Late last spring, when measles was spreading in a West Texas town less than an hour from my house, I invited a different sort of possible disaster into my home.

My husband and I pulled dining room chairs and stools into a circle in our living room and welcomed an unlikely bunch: local pediatricians, some vaccine-skeptical mothers, and two senior members of the measles response team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Our plan was to sit together and talk.

The story of this gathering is an interesting one. It started a few weeks after the outbreak began, shortly after the first child died. An editor from The New York Times asked me to write an essay about why conservative West Texans were increasingly refusing the measles vaccine despite the risks of the disease. I took the assignment, but it turned into an essay about crumbling trust in public health institutions since the pandemic.

After the article published, my inbox was swarmed with responses. Some of it was hate mail from people who thought I was dangerous—or dangerously stupid. But I also got notes from people working in public health and vaccine development who wanted to talk. Among them was Jonathan Yoder, a fellow Christian and deputy director in the CDC’s Division of Infectious Disease Readiness and Innovation.

“Your article touched on some very important issues of credibility, humility, and trust that I think are the critical pieces for moving forward in a post-pandemic world,” he said in his email. “We have a good deal of work to do to build bridges in this polarized environment. Are you interested in having a further conversation on this topic?” I was.

A few days later, while I was waiting for my daughter to finish a theater class, Jonathan called. I almost laughed at the absurdity: I’m a writer and a mother and the communications director at our church. I have no expertise in public health or medicine. That I’d be consulted by a CDC official about measles felt almost ridiculous, and I said so: “People in your position don’t normally talk to people in mine about professional concerns.”

“Yeah,” he said with a chuckle, “I think that’s part of our problem.”

We chatted for half an hour, our conversation ranging from how his faith shaped his career to his current work on the measles task force to our mutual frustration with how science became politicized during the pandemic. We didn’t agree on everything, of course, but we shared about our families and the things we had in common. As we talked, I felt my anger and suspicion toward the CDC start to soften.

Those feelings, to be clear, were nearly subconscious. I’m not walking around seething at the CDC. But like many other politically conservative Americans, including many evangelicals, I’d come to think of the CDC as a monster that kept children—my children—out of school during the pandemic. I’d begun to associate the agency with old people dying alone in nursing homes, with small businesses being forced to shut down because of how their states interpreted the agency’s recommendations, with people I know losing their jobs because they refused to be vaccinated.

My distrust of the CDC never led me to change my mind about the value of standard childhood vaccines. Yet it isn’t hard for me to understand why some people did alter their opinions. Since the pandemic, it’s understandable that the CDC is the object of so many people’s anger, suspicion, and sense of betrayal. I could feel the edges of that bitter terrain within my own heart.

That conversation changed things for me. I wasn’t talking to an opaque government institution. I was talking to Jonathan. We saw some things differently, but we agreed on a lot. And in our respective spheres of influence, we were both trying to figure out how to put back together what was broken, how to build bridges that the last half decade had washed away.

A few weeks after that first call, Jonathan accepted my invitation to move the conversation offline. We invited more folks to join us: his colleague who works with the CDC’s childhood vaccine program, my pediatrician and other doctors she knew nearby, and a couple mothers who don’t vaccinate their kids and were brave enough to talk about it to the CDC. With mutual assurances that everyone would stay civil, we set a time and arranged the chairs.

I was nervous that evening. I lit a candle, picked up a stray sock, said a little prayer, and fluffed a few pillows. The first guests looked as anxious as I felt. Only Rusty, our overly friendly goldendoodle, seemed perfectly unfazed. He bounced around in pure delight: So many new friends here to see me!

We introduced ourselves, then started talking. It was easier than I expected. That night was off-the-record, but I can tell you everyone was curious and kind. We didn’t hide our differences of opinion, but we listened and asked sincere questions. It’s harder to reduce people to an opinion you dislike when you’re looking them in the eye.

By the end of the night, everyone looked a little dazed. We weren’t sure what had happened or what good it could do in the world. The divides we tried to reach across—between the pro- and anti-vax, those who trust public health agencies and those who don’t—are too big to overcome in my living room. But perhaps we each made some change in the world within, learning to see a person where once we saw only a problem. And in the weeks that followed, I came to think that was no small thing.

In early April, the CDC began mass layoffs, with plans to eliminate one-fifth of its workforce. Anytime I’d hear about more upheaval, I’d text Jonathan to see how he was faring. Then, in early August, a gunman opened fire at the CDC’s Atlanta office, firing off multiple rounds and killing a police officer. I texted again, telling Jonathan I was praying for him and his colleagues. A few weeks later came even more reports of chaos at the agency: One month after her Senate confirmation, CDC director Susan Monarez was fired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, and several more high-level CDC officials resigned in protest.

I understand that for Americans who have been harmed by CDC recommendations, this chaos might seem like good news. But when I picture the CDC now, I think of riding on a train with no brakes, an airplane that has lost an engine, a ship navigating ice without instruments. Maybe the CDC is too big. Maybe it’s been going the wrong way. But if it goes down, the damage will be enormous.

Though many Americans seem to have an appetite for institutional destruction these days, I feel no nostalgia for the years when mothers worried about polio. And I worry about unforeseen and unintended consequences of rapid and ill-considered change. What will we fail to notice until it’s too late? Until the damage is already done?

Amid all this, I find myself often thinking back to that conversation in my living room. Maybe the problem is we’ve made our world small in all the wrong ways: We reduce living, breathing human beings to pixels on a screen, flattening them into a list of opinions to be graded against our own.

Or maybe the problem is we’ve made our world large in all the wrong ways: Rather than talking to our neighbors across the street, we shout at the cable news panels beaming in from across the country.

Or maybe the problem isn’t just scale but a lost sense of reality, a lost feel for truth and love and community. We’ve become so disoriented, so unsure of what’s real, that we tear down the very people and institutions we need to live well.

That conversation in my living room escaped these problems, I think. We made our world small in the right way and large in the right way, and we were able to do that because, for all our differences, as Christians, Jonathan and I agreed about truth. We agreed about what is good and necessary in following Christ: humility over hubris, listening over speaking, and reconciliation over revenge.

Last month, I reached out to Jonathan again—this time on the record—to see how he’s thinking about institutional trust and public health going forward. “Maybe in the 1950s, there was a time when we would all just trust our doctor or the health authorities,” he told me in an interview. “But that that ship has sailed.”

“To be effective now, we need to make sure that we’re meeting people where they are, understanding what their motivations are, and understanding what’s important to them,” he continued. “We can’t conclude that they don’t love their children or judge that they don’t love their community just because they make a different decision from the one we recommend.”

That’s possible only if experts listen at least as much as they speak—and if they respond to rejection of their advice with patience rather than force. When it became clear that the community at the center of the Texas measles outbreak wouldn’t accept vaccines, for example, Jonathan and his team changed tactics. They focused on educating the public about other ways to keep measles from spreading, like staying home when sick and knowing when to seek medical care.

“We don’t want to just put up a barrier that says, ‘If you’re not going to get vaccinated, we don’t really have anything else to offer,’” Jonathan told me. “In the case of measles, I doubt we will change the recommendation to get vaccinated. But it doesn’t mean that’s the only thing we have to offer to help you keep you and your family healthy, to keep your community safe.”

I don’t know how much or how quickly this approach can change public perception of the CDC—let alone foster trust in institutions more broadly. I do know that it’s vital for Christians in civil service and other public roles to stay the course, to treat their work as an outpouring of their faith. I imagine this must be particularly difficult right now, not only because of political upheaval but also because seeking to be a trustworthy person at an institution that has lost public trust must be deeply disheartening.

But we need trustworthy people more than ever. Our society can’t function without good institutions, and Christians are uniquely positioned to work toward the reconciliation we need. After all, outrage is not a sufficient response to everything we oppose or don’t understand.

That’s not to say outrage is never warranted. Like many, I’ve long thought we need a post-COVID-19 reckoning on public health, especially after learning some of the ways in which science was manipulated and information was controlled during the pandemic. Shouting, “Trust the science!” and issuing edicts that demolish people’s lives and livelihoods was not right during COVID, nor will it be right in public health crises to come.

But reckoning and retribution, as we’ve seen of late, are not the same thing. Chaos and confusion are not the way of Christ, for “God is not a God of disorder but of peace” (1 Cor. 14:33). Christians in positions of institutional authority can and must model a gentler and better way, a way that values people above ideology and remembers that no human expert is the source of ultimate truth.

“Science should be humble, right? Science should be saying that what I know today is only a fraction of what I’ll know tomorrow, and so I shouldn’t hold on to what I know today as if it’s revealed truth,” Jonathan mused. “We could talk about what we are learning in better ways. A stance of humility would certainly go a long way.”

Just as at my house that night, this might not seem like much of a solution. It’s no dramatic reform or sweeping federal initiative. But it does make a difference. It is a mustard-seed transformation. It is a small ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18). It is a step back toward trust.

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

- More from Carrie McKean

Inkwell

Reading at the End of the World

Interview by Cameron Brooks

A chat with renowned novelist Marilynne Robinson and how reading can train us in hope.

Images from Wikimedia. Edits by Inkwell.

The street preachers are not all wrong, you know.

We always have grounds to suppose the world is ending. Or a world, at least. Democracy, free speech, Kentucky’s topsoil—any system, institution, or resource that requires tending remains at risk of negligence and then destruction.

My friends wouldn’t label me a cynic, but I do try to stay levelheaded about these things. I am acquainted with the ways of weeds. I’ve seen good marriages choked by sins of omission as well as commission. Things fall apart, and nature abhors a vacuum. A little folding of the hands to rest, and there goes your car’s transmission.

Entropy abounds, yet few of us are content to sit by and watch the world burn. We feel responsible to do something to put things right, to stave off what little chaos we can. For Christians, this sense of obligation stems from Scripture’s many injunctions to seek justice, love mercy, promote peace, care for the poor and vulnerable—in short, to love our aching world. There are so many causes that would enlist our loyalties, so many sorrows we might alleviate. The challenge, of course, lies in deciding what to do with the time we have left.

Perhaps the last thing you’d think to do is pick up a book. What good is reading at the end of the world? Why read when you could volunteer at a soup kitchen, call your state representatives, or pull weeds?

For help parsing such questions, I recently contacted one of the most prodigious readers I could think of: Marilynne Robinson. Few living authors have so profoundly probed and disclosed the human condition as Robinson. In both her essays and novels—including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead—she helps us consider the intrinsic dignity of life and language in the face of catastrophe, and the hope it takes to keep reading.

In an email interview, Robinson shared about her recent reading interests, art and politics, artificial intelligence, Shakespeare, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Polls continue to indicate that Americans are reading fewer books for less time. Perhaps our Founding Fathers would be alarmed, but should we be? Are there goods inherent to reading books that can’t be enjoyed through other media?

A book is an ingratiating thing. It is actually yours, so long as it is in your hands. You invest memory in it as a physical object. You can mark it up, return at will to a place you have found moving or problematic, and be reminded that you change as a reader, even while enjoying the pleasure of memory. Nothing is going to go wrong with it. It never needs a charge. You can buy a book and shelve it as a promise to yourself, an aspiration.

I am not surprised that innovative forms of information and entertainment have their appeal, their own beauty. But the book—the codex—has been around for 2,000 years at least, for very good reasons.

What’s one book that preoccupies your mind these days? Why do you think that is?

My interests are always a little unusual, however predictable they may seem in retrospect. I’m reading, in translation, an essay on English law probably written by Henry de Bracton, a 13th-century jurist. I’m looking at the intertwining of humane impulses with autocratic ones to try and understand how liberal democracy arose, how its adversaries survived within it, and how these adversarial views are rationalized and encoded in earlier law.

Many “new” enthusiasms are really the resurgence of old habits and antagonisms. They are irrational, in other words, and they have an entrée into political discourse because they are also traditional.

It seems we may be on the cusp of an artificial intelligence revolution. Many have voiced concerns over the implications of generative AI for human agency, labor, and creativity. Some artists are advocating for a New Romanticism, claiming “it’s 1800 all over again.” What do you make of these developments as a writer? Where might we seek wisdom for facing AI in the years ahead?

It’s hard to distinguish a “revolution” of this kind from an effective sales campaign. It is true that vast amounts of money are being poured into this technology. It is also true that it is not becoming more reliable or necessarily returning improved profits. So much has been invested in it that more investment is needed to cover potential losses, which would certainly stagger the economy if or when the whole boondoggle collapses, leaving environmental disasters behind.

As far as creativity is concerned, AI can make coherent rehashes of randomly collected data. Artists should address their work to people who want more, who want meaning, for example.

In your article “Imagination and Community,” you argue that democracy and other large-scale communities require “imaginative love” for others with whom we may deeply disagree. Do you believe fiction can nurture such love?

Yes, if it chooses to.

Speaking of democracy, you recently described America as “two nations” contending for authority, resources, and cultural influence. How else can writers contribute to cultural reform without succumbing to mere culture war or propaganda?

Writers can produce work that is simply good in itself—sound, beautiful, attentive to the felt experience of life. We have let too much be absorbed into “politics.” In practice, politics can be beautiful in their own way when they are based on courtesy, good faith, and worthy motives. But ideally, they are a backdrop for the important work of inquiry, creativity, advancement, and just living life.

We have made a kind of religion of politics, a low-ceiled, incurious, angry one with nothing of the beauty or moral seriousness that dignifies authentic religion. At the moment, politics is very much overburdened by significances that it is not suited to carry. Art should be art, religion, religion, and politics, politics.

Turning from politics to literature, what has a writer like Shakespeare taught you about generosity?

An interesting question. He certainly exemplifies empathy. There is hardly anyone on whom his attention rests who is not given a moment of grace. I have been thinking lately about how Shakespeare was among the earliest writers in the English language to take on high subjects and popularize them further by staging them in a public theater.

An old poet in one of Shakespeare’s late plays, Pericles, says that in the deep past, songs were sung “to make men glorious.” I take him to be speaking for Shakespeare when he wishes he could have more time, and “spend it for you like taper light.”

Shakespeare, of course, knew what he was doing, giving people what was their own and would be more their own for his glorious gift. This was also the realization of his own nature as a poet, not in a self-aggrandizing sense but in the pleasure of the bond realized in providing people with their story in their language, made glorious. This is a transcendent generosity, full of the blessings of giving and receiving.

After my exchange with Marilynne, I checked out Pericles from the library and read it for the first time. The nautical play follows Pericles, Prince of Tyre, as he flees assassination by a depraved king and sails the perilous Mediterranean to rescue his wife and daughter from disaster. In the end, however, it is not Pericles who saves his family but a series of happy coincidences, which we are meant to see as divine interventions.

Early in the play, the then-bachelor Pericles is shipwrecked at Pentapolis, where friendly fishermen have just conveniently caught his shield and armor in their nets. This enables him to enter a nearby contest for the hand of beautiful Princess Thaisa. Six knights present their shields with a different emblem and phrase. Pericles goes last, his armor rusty and battered. His shield shows “a wither’d branch, that’s only green at top” and the motto, In hac spe vivo, or “in this hope I live.” Intrigued, Thaisa falls for Pericles, the two are promptly married, and they sail off into the next tempest.

Books often behave like Pericles’s shield, washing up on the shores of our lives in times of need. A book may sit unread on my shelf for years—an old aspiration or a gift from a friend—before some mysterious providence moves me to tolle lege, to “take up and read.”

Certainly, this was the case with Robinson’s novel Gilead. The book had been circulating among my peers for some time before I got around to reading it in the fall of 2018, having recently moved back to South Dakota from New Jersey. A proud but vocationally bewildered seminary grad, I found comfort in the steady voice of her character John Ames. Here was a man sharp enough for Barth and Herbert yet humble enough for Iowa!

In one remarkable passage in Gilead, Ames recalls a country church that had been struck by lightning and burned when he was a young boy. After searching the charred ruins for Bibles and hymnals, his father helped pull down the building in the rain. Ames watched from a nearby wagon with the other children as the adults worked, the women passing out food:

I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing “The Old Rugged Cross” while they saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. In those days no grown woman ever let herself be seen with her hair undone, but that day even the grand old women had their hair falling down their backs like schoolgirls. It was so joyful and sad.

The protagonist remembers the scene as one of communion, which makes me wonder: Can a book be a means of grace? I don’t mean the sacramental means of grace, but a particular paperback (or hardcover) expression of God’s general providence, no less, by which he feeds us as from his fatherly hand. Grace sanctifies and strengthens us to endure the pitiless storms of life. It aims to make us glorious. Likewise, good poems, stories, and essays encourage the kind of slow interiority necessary for virtue at the end of the world.

Nothing so mundane as reading can prevent an AI apocalypse, environmental degradation, or the collapse of civilization as such. Even so, perhaps reading can remind us, as Robinson suggests, that creation’s fate does not finally depend on human will or technique, but on God, who has mercy.

Reading thus trains us in hope. To pick up a book in this world is to raise a shield bearing “a wither’d branch, that’s only green at top.” In hac spe vivo.

Cameron Brooks is the author of Forbearance (Cascade Books, 2025). He holds an MA from Princeton Theological Seminary and an MFA from Seattle Pacific University, but he calls South Dakota home. Visit camerondavidbrooks.com for more.

- More from Cameron Brooks

News

New Archbishop of Canterbury Steps into Anglican Divides

Tim Wyatt in London

Conservatives call on Sarah Mullally, the first woman at the spiritual helm of the Church of England, to uphold biblical faith amid same-sex blessings debate.

Archbishop of Canterbury-designate Sarah Mullally in Canterbury Cathedral

Gareth Fuller / PA Images via Getty Images

Eleven months after Justin Welby’s resignation, the Church of England announced that London bishop Sarah Mullally will succeed him next year, becoming the first woman to lead the national church and global Anglican body as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Welby stepped down in November 2024 over a scandal involving church abuse cover-up. He had held the position since 2013. Many evangelicals—who make up around a third of the Church of England—had welcomed his leadership. A former oil executive turned vicar who had grown up in evangelicalism, Welby sometimes worshiped at Holy Trinity Brompton, birthplace of the Alpha course and the UK’s best-known megachurch.

As archbishop, Welby advanced significant reforms, turbocharging church planting and streamlining bureaucracy to kickstart evangelism. But he also became associated with a highly divisive plan to introduce services of blessings for gay couples, which triggered a bitter civil war between mostly evangelical conservatives and their liberal antagonists.

By the time Welby left under pressure, he had burned through much of his goodwill among fellow evangelicals. Welby’s somewhat tangential association in the 1980s with John Smyth—an influential evangelical lay leader who beat young men and had his crimes covered up by the evangelical establishment—ended up being the thing that toppled him.

As she takes office, Mullally inherits the safeguarding scandals, which have continued unabated since Welby left, and the same-sex blessings saga.

Bishops approved in principle plan to outsource safeguarding investigations and discipline to an independent body beyond the control of the bishops, but much of the detail remains to be worked out. And while gay couples can today request blessings as part of regular Sunday services, the church continues to debate adding standalone blessings closer to weddings, as well as relaxing the ban on gay clergy getting married themselves.

For several years, Mullally led the Living in Love and Faith project, which produced the prayers, though she stepped back from holding a prominent role as churches implemented the blessings.

Some evangelical leaders have cautiously welcomed her appointment, despite their deep theological disagreements. Mullally has experience working with conservatives in the Diocese of London, which contains opposition both to the blessings and to women’s ordination. John Dunnett, the head of the Church of England Evangelical Council, noted that as bishop she has shown a knack for strategic flexibility and a graciousness to compromise across deep theological divides.

The evangelical council, which has led opposition to the blessings, has called for prayers for Mullally as she takes up the role, warning of the difficult and fractured inheritance she takes on.

“We pray that God will enable Bishop Sarah to hold to the apostolic faith and call the Church of England to recommit to the historic doctrines and formularies entrusted to it,” the group said in a statement, adding that either the church must halt its “drift away from a Biblical understanding of marriage and sexual ethics” or evangelicals must find a separate future.

Similar sentiments landed from Church Society, another group of evangelical Anglicans. The organization said it hoped to meet with the new archbishop soon “to discuss the urgent need for reformation and renewal of the Church of England in biblical faith.” It also lamented that Mullally will be the third archbishop in a row who does not speak up for the traditional doctrine of the church on marriage and sexual ethics.

Women have been able to become bishops in the Church of England since only 2014. In conservative and complementarian parishes that will not work under women, a male “flying bishop” provides oversight.

With this setup, Mullally’s accession to the top job does not significantly threaten evangelicals who oppose women’s ordination. Bishop of Ebbsfleet Rob Munro, the complementarian evangelical flying bishop, welcomed her promotion.

He said while her appointment would present new “challenges” for the churches under his care, he knew Mullally had a “long track record of gracious engagement and real understanding of the particular theological convictions we hold.” Munro said he had no doubt she would uphold the 2014 settlement that preserved conservatives’ place in the church.

A female archbishop was a bigger issue for Gafcon, the international network of conservative Anglican churches beyond the UK. A statement by its leader, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda, said Gafcon received the news of Mullally’s accession with “sorrow” because the selection would “further divide an already split Communion.”

Mbanda suggested that because not all Anglicans worldwide recognize female bishops, it would be impossible for Mullally to act as a “focus for unity.” But even more problematic, he added, was her liberal approach to same-sex relationships.

“Bishop Mullally has repeatedly promoted unbiblical and revisionist teachings regarding marriage and sexual morality,” Mbanda said.

Cementing a break already declared with her predecessor, Mbanda said the Church of England had in effect relinquished its leadership of the Anglican Communion.

Gafcon plans to hold a conference of conservative bishops in Nigeria in March—shortly before Mullally is formally installed as archbishop—to take the lead on resetting the Communion.

The fractures with Gafcon and conservative Anglicans globally were largely irreconcilable long before Mullally was tapped as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. The position historically leads the Anglican Communion as “first among equals,” but Welby had already shown interest in new arrangements rather than the job automatically going to Canterbury.

Still, Mullally’s selection does reinforce the fissures between the mother church in England and its more conservative affiliates.

Closer to home, many conservative clergy and parishes have warned they too may formally quit the church if it does not turn back from blessing gay couples. Their leaders in groups such as Church Society and the Church of England Evangelical Council have demanded the hierarchy carve out a new ecclesiastical structure for them with their own bishops, synods, and canon law—effectively a church within a church—as their price for staying. The bishops have shown no interest in meeting this demand and are instead considering an expanded version of the flying bishops setup, officially known as delegated episcopal oversight.

Some evangelicals have opted to remain in the Church of England, reasoning that their liberal opponents will fade out faster than their more populous congregations, allowing them to eventually steer the church back toward their positions.

Church of England leaders generally expect Mullally to plough forward with the existing approach rather than shift either way on same-sex blessings. Currently, no one can compel churches or vicars to use the blessings against their conscience. The church parliament meets in February for a final debate on the issue, prior to Mullally formally becoming archbishop.

Leaders also look to Mullally for a similar middle-of-the-road course when it comes to church growth and evangelism. She is not seen as an energetic church planter in the mold of Welby, but neither has she shown much interest in demands from other bishops to funnel money currently spent on innovation and evangelism back toward traditional parish ministry.

- More from Tim Wyatt in London

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