A Buddhist Nun Walked into an Anglican Church

How God pursued me even when I was certain I’d already found truth.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Unsplash

On a warm summer’s day in 1991, I sat in Amaravati Buddhist Monastery, a temple north of London, my heart full of confusion and inner turmoil. I had begun seriously to doubt my faith.

It didn’t make sense. I thought I had found the truth in Buddhism and had given up everything necessary to become a Buddhist nun seven years earlier. In the temple led by American monk Ajahn Sumedho, life was strict and disciplined, involving many ascetic practices designed to simplify daily existence and help us detach from earthly things. Our lives were based around meditation practice; we were celibate, slept little, and ate only one meal a day. I was known for my strong faith in Buddhism, and had not ever really doubted the purpose of living by its teachings.

Until now.

Suddenly I found myself, with my shaven head and robe, spontaneously rushing down to the traditional Anglican church in the nearby village. “I’ve got to talk to somebody, I’ve got to understand what’s happening to me,” I thought.

Upon entering, I looked around anxiously for the priest. “Could you pray for me, please?” I asked when I spotted him. “I’m very confused.” Unfazed, he graciously guided me to the Holy Communion rail and asked me to kneel. He laid his hands on my shoulders and prayed. As he did so, I broke down sobbing uncontrollably.

As the tears abated, the priest’s compassionate eyes met mine, and he said, “We need to talk.” We agreed to meet the following week.

After being prayed for, I felt a great release of the emotions and conflict deep inside of me. I was expectant that this man of God might be able to help me. How things had changed from my certainty about Buddhism to barely being able to contain my excitement about my appointment with an Anglican priest!

Finding solace in Buddhism

I was born in 1956 near Liverpool, England. Both my parents were unusually bitter and angry towards the church, my mom preferring to visit palm readers and fortune tellers instead.

My father, having grown up in an orphanage, said that the only thing he ever got from the church was the money he stole from the offering bag to alleviate his hunger. My brother and I naturally took on the opinions of our parents.

I left home at 18 to study in London. I led quite a self-indulgent lifestyle, including partying and promiscuity. However, upon finishing my studies, I was beset by questions: “Who am I?” “What's life about?” My spiritual side, which had been suppressed for years, now demanded answers.

At age 21, the search for truth became my life’s quest. Living in London provided me with a plethora of spiritual options. I met a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk and began to frequent his temple. He was a patient, scholarly man who appeared to have answers to my questions.

I especially liked that God was nowhere to be found in Buddhism. Buddha taught that he was only a man and that his insights were due to his own endeavors and intelligence. His spiritual goal was to be completely free of suffering. After a period of various spiritual practices and intensive meditation, Buddha concluded that to exist in any form whatsoever—for instance, as a human, animal, or ghost—would give rise to suffering. He claimed to have found the way that led to the end of suffering.

Buddha’s goal of nirvana is described as extinction, or not to be born in any form at all, where all becoming ceases. This felt to me like a breath of fresh air after experiencing the other extreme of self-indulgence and world-weariness.

Over the next six years, my commitment to Buddhism increased. This included going on a Buddhist pilgrimage in India and attending meditation retreats in Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Several years into this spiritual journey, while staying in a temple in northeastern Thailand, I decided I wanted to become a Buddhist nun with Ajahn Sumedho’s community. So in 1984, I boarded a plane back to England and prepared to join Chithurst Forest Monastery.

A Christian awakening

As an ordained nun, I rarely if ever doubted the teachings of Buddha. However, with time, it became clear that God was reaching out to this rebellious one. One evening in the temple, we watched The Law of Love, a documentary about Jackie Pullinger, a British Christian missionary serving the poor in Hong Kong. (The mother of the film’s producer was a Buddhist and shared it with us.) I saw Jackie and her helpers praying in the name of Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit. God moved through them to touch and heal people, including drug addicts who were miraculously freed from their addictions.

Beyond their physical healing, I could see they had a certainty in their spiritual life, a deep inner freedom and truth that I was searching for but now knew I had not found in Buddhism. It made me feel spiritually destitute and barren, as though I had nothing by comparison.

Something deep and foundational within me had been disturbed and awakened. A huge spiritual struggle ensued which lasted for months. I found myself seeking to learn more about Christianity, including reading Jackie’s books, then rejecting it again for Buddhism by trying to “let go” of that desire. It was an unbearable tension: two forces pulling hard in opposite directions, vying for my commitment.

However, as the weeks passed, I experienced an overriding desire to attend church, to be baptized, and to pray—even though I didn’t really know what those things meant.

In the height of my confusion, I rushed to the local church that Sunday morning. When I met with the priest a couple of days later, he read to me Jesus’ words in John 14, telling me to not let my heart be troubled. He was preparing a place for me in his Father’s house: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”

The priest told me he believed the Lord had touched me and that I had come to know God. I knew deep inside that what he said was right. One week later, I disrobed and before long left the Buddhist temple. One of the nuns wept, asking what had happened to my strong faith. Another was concerned, warning me that “if you change your mind and decide to come back, you’ll have to start from the beginning again.”

I did not argue with them, instead remaining silent. What had happened to me perplexed the nuns and monks that I had lived with for so long, but they treated me with respect.

Nothing wasted in God’s economy

I returned home to Colchester, a town in Essex, where I joined an amazing church. There the pastor and his wife taught me the basics of the Christian faith and nurtured me as a believer. After three years, I joined Jackie Pullinger's ministry in Hong Kong, a truly fruitful period of learning and growth.

However, after a few years, I started to feel something else stir in me—a clear call to Thailand, where about 95 percent of the population are Theravada Buddhists. What a profound apprenticeship God had given me by allowing me to delve so deeply into Thai Buddhism!

I arrived in Bangkok in late 1999 with a suitcase and a vision to help disciple and strengthen Thai Christians in their faith, and have been based in Thailand ever since. I spent the first 10 years in Bangkok and I now live in Ubon Ratchathani, not far from the Buddhist temple that I used to visit. My main ministry focus involves leading a discipleship and inner healing ministry to help Thai Christians, whether church leaders or new believers, grow and mature in their faith.

Most of the people that we help come from a Buddhist background. My own experience with Thai Buddhism has been invaluable: Whether I’m with Thai Christians or Buddhists, they recognize that I have some understanding of where they are coming from and can often speak into their experience.

Once redeemed by Jesus, it seems that nothing is wasted in God’s economy.

This article has been adapted from Esther Baker’s two books: I Once was a Buddhist Nun (IVP UK, 2009) and Buddhism in the Light of Christ (Wipf and Stock USA, 2014). Esther’s name is a pseudonym due to sensitivities in Thailand where she is based.

- More from Esther Baker

Books

Review

Rainn Wilson’s Spiritual Revolution Gets Spirituality Partly Right and Jesus Mostly Wrong

Daniel G. Hummel

“The Office” star offers a welcome critique of privatized faith. His other ideas are harder to swallow.

Rainn Wilson

River Callaway / Contributor / Getty

I promised myself only one The Office reference in a review of Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, written by Rainn Wilson, the actor who portrays Dwight Schrute on the show. So here goes: In season five , Dwight and his longtime girlfriend, Angela, the most religious person on the show, break up. Dwight is crushed and confides to a coworker, “She introduced me to so many things. Pasteurized milk, sheets, monotheism, presents on your birthday, preventative medicine.”

Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution

Rainn Wilson (Author)

Hachette Go

304 pages

Where Dwight was a latecomer to the merits of monotheism, Rainn Wilson has made promoting it a major part of his life’s calling, bending his significant celebrity and resources to projects that promote human spirituality in media, entertainment, and social activism. Soul Boom is his latest effort and, despite its shortcomings, is one of the most compelling non-Christian apologetical works I have read.

Anticipating shared values

Wilson is a member of the Baha’i faith, a religion introduced in the 19th century by Baháʼu'lláh (1817–1892), who claimed to receive a new revelation that, roughly speaking, placed him in the genealogy of “Manifestations of God” stretching back to Abraham and including Krishna, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Muhammad. The religion now claims around six million followers globally.

The teachings of Baháʼu'lláh, as well as his son and grandson and the Universal House of Justice, the faith’s governing body since 1963, are quite ecumenical. For starters, they draw widely from world religions to form the basis of their teachings. In addition—and more provocatively, at least from this Christian’s perspective—the faith rejects the exclusivist claims of world religious leaders, making figures like Jesus far less consequential than he appears in any historic Christian creed.

All that said, Soul Boom, which calls for a worldwide spiritual revolution along the lines of “an ever-advancing civilization” and “collective” spiritual maturity, is a powerful presentation of the Baha’i faith’s perspective on spirituality. After putting down the book, readers will likely appreciate the Baha’i faith’s amiability and think highly of Wilson’s character, whatever they think of his views.

The book is funny, irenic, and regularly revealing. At one point Wilson describes how his attempts to develop a television show exploring spiritual themes met rejection in Hollywood because God was deemed “too controversial.” As Wilson observes, the depths of depravity, violence, and voyeurism on television go deeper every year, but somehow God is a “four-letter word.” Someone so familiar with elite cultural production brings a potent and trenchant critique of its aversion to anything overtly spiritual.

Like all good apologetical works, Wilson’s book starts by anticipating shared values and then moves toward claims that might be a harder sell for outsiders. The second half of the book suggests (in somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion but seriously enough) that we need to create a “new religion” called SoulBoom that will help usher Wilson’s real interest—a global spiritual revolution advancing spiritual progress and cosmic unity. This religion looks a lot like the Baha’i faith, which includes no clergy and promotes practices of prayer and meditation. In making his case, he diagnoses many problems Christians would also highlight in American society: consumerism, loneliness, violence, and partisanship. His solutions, however, are harder to swallow.

Soul Boom failed to make a convert out of me (among other reasons because following his religion would make one a … Boomer?). Even so, the book is valuable for its contribution to a broader spiritual dialogue and as a skillful apologetic for the Baha’i faith. Wilson wishes his readers to embrace a spirituality that adheres to some key precepts drawn from his faith tradition. Christians, who in many contexts today might find themselves with only slightly more cultural resonance than someone from the Baha’i faith, can take note of the way Soul Boom searches for cultural common ground and offers its distinctive prescriptions to the uninitiated.

Key to Wilson’s winsomeness is that Soul Boom is laced with popular culture metaphors. In the dominant one introduced in the first pages, Wilson describes the “twofold path” of spirituality through two television shows: Kung Fu and Star Trek. The former represents the personal, internal journey toward mental wellness and self-mastery, while the latter represents what Wilson calls the “spiritual evolution of a species [humanity].” Both pathways, in Wilson’s telling, are needed, even as spirituality in 21st-century America has largely focused on the themes of Kung Fu. But to quote Star Trek’s Captain Picard, “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” Wilson is keen on getting readers interested in the social potential of spirituality.

I work at a Christian study center serving a large public university, so the trends of “nones” and the “spiritual but not religious” are present every day. Wilson should be lauded for breaking down the artificial “privatization” of spirituality that reduces faith to an individualistic pursuit of self-actualization or a distant set of dogmas. To the extent that SoulBoom’s spirituality fosters values that make it possible for people to become more Christlike, Christian readers can affirm the value of Soul Boom’s intervention.

At the same time, Wilson treats Christianity like Star Trek does religion. Star Trek is often as condescending to religion as any of the Hollywood shows Wilson critiques, a lesson I learned while becoming a Trekkie as a missionary kid in the ’90s. In describing one species’ development, for example, Captain Picard remarks, “Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural … the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear.”

So, while Wilson is friendly to world-religious figures like Jesus, his compliments smell like they could have come from Picard. Jesus taught the Golden Rule and called for justice. He also claimed to be the Jewish Messiah, to be the only way to God, to be the king of an unseen kingdom. He died and rose again, which, if true, would be the hinge point of all history. It is no surprise that these teachings, which are present even in the parts of the Gospels that SoulBoom acknowledges, are completely absent from Soul Boom.

Human and divine agency

I read Soul Boom right after another book, Biblical Critical Theory by Christian scholar Christopher Watkin. Among the merits of Watkin’s biblical approach to critical theory is teasing out what makes the biblical understanding of the world distinct. Two overriding Christian commitments are that the God of the Bible is a personal God and that the biblical worldview is “emplotted” in a storyline of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that shapes everything the Bible talks about and teaches.

These two features of the biblical portrayal of reality oppose SoulBoom at a fundamental level. In the first case, the God of SoulBoom, like the God of the Baha’i faith, is something far different than the God of the Bible. In the second case, SoulBoom, like the Baha’i faith, has a very different (if equally clear) story line: The world is moving toward a unity of spirit and matter, with human spirituality as the driving force.

Here’s the rub: Wilson’s “emplottment” of Jesus into the story line of SoulBoom conscripts Jesus and the Bible into a narrative—and an entire worldview—the biblical authors wanted nothing to do with.

The God of SoulBoom is distant and elusive—a “Big Guy/Gal/Force/God/Creator thingy,” in Wilson’s words—that mostly just has “our best interests in mind.” Although Wilson’s theism moves beyond a vapid “spirituality” and includes a public, rather than simply private, dimension of faith, it does not do enough to differentiate itself from what sociologist Christian Smith has termed “moralistic therapeutic deism.” In contrast, the God of the Bible is engaged and relational, constantly drawing close to his creation and expressing love, concern, anger, and sacrifice toward humans, who reflect God’s own image.

The story of SoulBoom concerns a humanity that must essentially save itself by living up to and evolving its own spiritual potential. If so, writes Wilson, humanity will “mature and collectively make increasingly moral, compassionate choices” to achieve cosmic unity and “arise from the individual to the whole.” The story of the Bible goes in the opposite direction. It tells of a good creation dashed by rebellion and sin and the king of that order working to make things right, with salvation that is for us but not because of us, culminating not in humans ascending into unity with God but in God’s descending and dwelling with his creation.

The agency of the story in SoulBoom lies with humanity. As Wilson states, it is people who must change, through “recognizing that we are, in fact, spiritual beings having a collective human experience” who can be open to “the soul-level transformations we’re going to need to make.” The agency of the biblical story is God’s. It begins with God creating and ends with God dwelling; we work as co-stewards and God works through us, but we are never the stars of the show.

Further contrasts only reinforce the point that the biblical story chafes within the boundaries of SoulBoom and thus in the prescriptions for Wilson’s spiritual revolution. Like in the Baha’i faith, SoulBoom’s reduction of Christian truth to humanistic moral insights that align with other world religions makes the original appeal of Christianity problematic and the remaining appeal little more than one of taste.

An oasis, not a destination

Even so, Christians can affirm some ideas that Wilson advances, none more than the truth that answering the question of “Who am I?” must begin outside oneself. Every force in our culture pushes in the opposite direction, from debates over identity politics to our culture’s commodification of personal identity. In the Bible’s understanding, the question of “Who am I?” transforms (in Watkin’s phrasing) into “Whose am I?”—an interrogation that launches us on the road to Jesus. As with Augustine in his Confessions, it ushers us deeper and deeper into the paradox of losing oneself for the sake of the gospel in order to find our true identities in Christ.

Wilson affirms a generalized version of this basic truth that, if widely adopted by his nonreligious readers, would be progress indeed. His aim is to “advance a conversation about the importance of the divine dimension of existence and how it can influence our lives and our futures, collectively and individually.” This echoes C. S. Lewis’s self-diagnosis that he possessed “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Lewis called this “joy,” an emotion that Wilson also affirms as the antidote to the world’s cynicism. There is more, though no less, to this world than what our senses apprehend.

In a Western world devastated by disenchantment, disillusionment, and cynicism—functionally materialist in its institutions—a more robust recognition of a spiritual dimension to reality can be an oasis. The value of Soul Boom is not so much the new religion of SoulBoom but Wilson’s apologetic for monotheism in a culture increasingly averse to organized religion. Even if Wilson’s view falls far short of the beauty of the Christian witness, Christians can accept Wilson as an ally in holding forth for a deeper and wider sense of reality that includes the supernatural.

Yet while Wilson’s contribution might lead us to an oasis, it is hardly the destination. If I do the reverse of Wilson and “emplot” SoulBoom into the biblical story line, we realize quickly that it cannot contain the mysteries of the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Second Coming. It cannot make sense of one modern hymn’s contemplation of the ancient mystery, “Yet not I, but through Christ in me.”

On its own terms, SoulBoom does resemble Star Trek. Implicitly, SoulBoom treats those things that make Christianity unique as remnants of Captain Picard’s “superstition and ignorance and fear.” In fact, Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was an avowed atheist and opposed organized religion in all its forms. Yet not all writers for Star Trek were quite as hostile. In a later series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, produced after Roddenberry’s death, a devout religious character named Kira is confronted with the idea that all cultures should believe in each other’s gods for the sake of self-fulfillment and galactic peace. Rather than assent to this pragmatic approach to religion, she instead points out, “There’s just one thing—we can’t both be right.”

It is only from this vantage point of unbridgeable difference, paradoxically, that a truly openminded exploration of spirituality can begin—one that takes the various traditions on their own terms rather than presuming they fit together into some harmonious spiritual whole. Using Wilson’s categories, SoulBoom remains stuck in the frame of Roddenberry’s vision of Star Trek, when what we need in our cultural conversation about spirituality is a dose of Deep Space Nine that moves us toward, rather than away from, the biblical story.

The apostle Peter understood early on who Jesus is. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” he says in Matthew 16:16. Any true spiritual revolution will seek not to diminish this bold claim but rather to understand its vast implications. And it will center the question that prompted Peter’s reply and on which a true grasp of Jesus’ nature depends: “Who do you say I am?”

Daniel G. Hummel is a historian and the director for university engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation.

- More from Daniel G. Hummel

Theology

Can People Change? ‘Ted Lasso’ Revived an Ancient Debate.

Han-luen Kantzer Komline

Like the TV show’s characters, Pelagius and Augustine wrestled with this core human question.

Ted Lasso and the AFC Richmond soccer players in a team huddle.

In a time when societal consensus, let alone advancement, seems painfully unattainable, the quirky television comedy Ted Lasso has struck a chord—as evidenced by its previous four Emmy awards and third nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series.

This soccer-themed runaway hit, featuring an unwitting Kansas football coach turned British soccer manager, premiered on Apple TV+ in August 2020 in the eerily uncertain early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over three seasons, and even with a major drop-off in quality in the third, the show has offered some welcome comic relief and a strong tonic for pessimism.

The series acknowledges how helpless it can feel to be human: “Yeah, it might be all that you get. Yeah, I guess this might well be it. Well, heaven knows I’ve tried,” its theme song laments. But at the same time, Ted Lasso illustrates the transformation that can result when people resist acquiescence and challenge one another to grow. It resonates with viewers because it probes and, to some extent, gratifies a longing we all have: We want to see things get better.

At the heart of the show is a question one of the characters raises in the series finale. Roy Kent has just experienced a spectacularly abject failure in his efforts to improve himself. Overwhelmed with dejection and remorse, he is tempted to give up. Will he never learn? In despair, he confides his doubts to his friends and poses the question: “Can people change?”

Roy’s confidants do not leave his question hanging, proposing three different answers.

The first comes from the savvy and sardonic reporter Trent Crimm, a man whose profession is dealing in cold facts: “I don’t think we change per se as much as we just learn to accept who we’ve always been.” It is no accident that this perspective finds expression first. It is a foil to the answers that follow, but also expresses a response common these days. If there is such a thing as personal improvement, it is more a matter of authenticity than of alteration.

Holding on to the notion of human progress after the terrors of the 20th century, whether individually or societally, seems like naive hubris at best. At worst, it seems like an excuse to impose one’s ideology on others in the name of advancement. Trent’s reply is the characteristic answer of our age. The quest for change is a fool’s errand; be satisfied with honesty and self-acceptance instead.

But a second voice pipes up with an alternative—a proposal from a character named Nate Shelley.

More than anyone else in the series, Nate demonstrates just how radically and suddenly people can transform, both for better and for worse. “Oh no, I think people can change. They can,” he insists. As he speaks, viewers conjure up the metamorphoses of his character and of nearly every other major persona on the show. Yet as the scene continues to develop, no one in the room seems quite satisfied with his response. He makes things sound too easy. In this sense, Nate’s glib “yes” is no more accurate than Trent’s fatalistic “no.”

Leslie Higgins, the club manager and sweetly awkward resident sage, takes the third swing at the question. Higgins rejects neither of the proposals on the table but offers a third approach, incorporating insights from both. “Human beings are never gonna be perfect, Roy,” he says. “The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can. And if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving towards better.”

In other words: Changing oneself is an uphill battle, where one never reaches the crest of perfection (Trent is right); but incremental advances are possible (Nate is right too). The secret to growth is recognizing one’s own neediness and accepting help from friends along the way; but we also can’t demand too much of ourselves.

This conversation illustrates the ethos of collaborative, incremental improvement that the show itself advocates. Like engineers of a fine Japanese car, the interlocutors finesse the machinery of their response to Roy’s question before Ted pronounces the verdict on Leslie’s response: “Add that right there to our list of perfect stuff. Ding ding ding.” Meaning, this is as good an answer as one can realistically expect—Yeah, I guess this might well be it, in other words. But is it?

Roy’s question is a timeless one. Over a millennium and half ago, a debate broke out that lends us some perspective.

The Pelagian Controversy takes its name from an earnest, idealistic ascetic who was persuaded that the primary threat to Christian discipleship was that Christians would give up on change. We still have a letter he wrote to a young noblewoman named Demetrias in which he articulates his philosophy of human potential, issuing dire warnings about the dangers of self-underestimation. “Recognize your own strengths,” he urges. Don’t impose false boundaries on yourself. “It is possible to do anything which one really wants to do.”

Zealously intoning these inspiring exhortations to any Christians of his day who would listen, Pelagius was the Nate of the early fifth century.

Trent’s conviction would have been Pelagius’s worst fear. To believe that change is impossible was, for Pelagius, the kiss of spiritual death. So desperate was Pelagius to avoid fatalism’s cold embrace that he risked condemnation as a heretic.

At the same time, Pelagius had more in common with Leslie than the stereotypes caricaturing him as the anthropological arch-heretic might suggest. Pelagius did, when push came to shove, acknowledge the necessity of help along the way, and especially the transformative power of forgiveness—which is also a crucial theme of Ted Lasso. But, as with Nate, Pelagius’s focus was not the difficulty of positive change. His opinion was that change was easily attainable, if one but believed. Like Nate, Pelagius stressed the possibility of change over its attendant challenges.

The most famous debate partner of Pelagius was Augustine of Hippo, the North African bishop who, more than any other extrabiblical thinker, went on to shape the beliefs and piety of Christians in the West, both Catholic and Protestant. Augustine has a reputation for being a dour pessimist, the grim yin to Pelagius’s sunny yang. If Pelagius was a Nate, so the story goes, Augustine was the ancient Trent, whose bleak theology of sin squelched any hope of meaningful advancement in this life.

Yet just as Pelagius was more complex than his stereotypes suggest, Augustine was more than the inverse of Pelagius. Augustine too thought pursuing change was vital. He vehemently proclaimed the need for change. Christians, he argued in his famous treatise On the Trinity, should make “daily advances.” They should grow in justice from spiritual infancy to adulthood, he told the faithful. Christians need to pray, but they also need to do more than just pray to be made better. They need to get up off their backs and work: “We too have got to do something. We’ve got to be keen, we’ve got to try hard,” he urged.

So Augustine also preached the imperative of change. But in contrast to Pelagius, Augustine stressed the rockiness of the road to growth and transformation. Pelagius’s refrain was It’s easier than you think. Augustine insisted, It’s impossible on your own. One needs constant help—to consider change, to want to change, to initiate change, and to see a desired change brought to completion. And even then, it won’t be easy.

Augustine, much more than Pelagius, gave an answer in the spirit of Leslie’s. He stuck with chastened realism on the question of how hard it is to improve. And he adopted a maximalist stance on how much assistance from without is required. In these respects, Leslie’s answer and the ethos of the show itself is profoundly Augustinian: Moving forward is hard. One inches along in fits and starts. And it requires help to eke out personal progress.

But Augustine takes the necessity of aid a leap beyond Leslie’s response. Because, for Augustine, self-help alone won’t do—just as all the therapy, friendly encouragement, and camaraderie in the world won’t amount to a lick of good on its own. We need a remedy that runs deeper. In the end, Augustine did not think that lasting—or ultimately satisfying—change would come through the independent operation of any kind of creaturely assistance, as excellent and important as many human forms of help can be.

To change for the better, people need more. They need help that comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, from whom every good and perfect gift comes down (James 1:17). Nate says: Yes, people can change. Leslie tells us how: With difficulty, and by getting help. Augustine identifies the kind of help we truly need: The power of a love that is nothing short of divine.

The ultimate change we long for, Augustine believed, is not only a gift from God but is the gift of God. The giver becomes the gift itself—God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. Only when God gives the gift of God, pouring out God’s very self—God’s Spirit of love—into us, are we set free to change in the radical way we long for.

The fullest embodiment of the change we desire—the goodness, truth, and beauty we hope to taste and see in our own lives and encounter in the lives of others—is, in the end, not any abstract benefit we might receive but an actual person who has walked the earth.

We wait to experience this God face to face with groaning and eager expectation (Rom. 8:19-39), but also with the confidence that our transformation can begin now, through God’s Spirit who is love.

Han-luen Kantzer Komline is Marvin and Jerene DeWitt Professor of Theology and Church History at Western Theological Seminary and Theologian in Residence at Pillar Church in Holland, Michigan. She is the author of Augustine on the Will and, with Mark Noll and David Komline, co-author of Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity.

- More from Han-luen Kantzer Komline

The Bible Story That Explains Australia: Jezebel and Ahab’s Violent Vineyard

Andrew Judd

The biblical story of Naboth’s vineyard teaches non-indigenous Christians like me how God views the injustice that made Melbourne.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

As an increasing number of Australians realize, our nation was founded on the legal lie that the continent was terra nullius, “nobody’s land.” The truth is that Aboriginal people had been living on the lands now called Australia for at least 65,000 years by the time the first Europeans arrived. However, since British law said no one was here, most settlers didn’t bother making treaties.

One exception was John Batman, who was born in Australia to a convict father and a free mother who had paid passage to keep the family together. After encountering challenges trying to access a land grant in other regions, Batman staked out land near Merri Creek, otherwise known as the home of the Wurundjeri nation, and signed a treaty with them that exchanged handkerchiefs, flour, and other supplies for most of what is now Melbourne.

Even if their signatures weren’t faked, the most the Wurundjeri people possibly agreed to was temporary hospitality. They considered the land as something they belonged to, not as a possession that could be sold as under English law.

In the end, it didn’t matter. In 1835 the governor responded to Batman’s treaty with a letter in the king’s name: The treaty was invalid because the land already belonged to the crown. Within a few years, most of the indigenous inhabitants in that region were either killed or forcibly displaced far from their ancestral home.

While the themes in this story show up across Australia’s history, this is the particular story of the land on which I live and work. I first learned about it while preparing to preach on 1 Kings 21 at a church near Merri Creek where the treaty was signed. I don’t often like to compare myself with biblical villains—especially not Ahab and Jezebel, two of the wickedest rulers in the Bible. Yet when we read about what God judged them for, the violent entitlement and casual cruelty with which European settlers stole Melbourne sound uncomfortably familiar.

Ahab ruled the breakaway northern tribes of Israel in the ninth century BC. The Bible paints him as one of their worst kings. He “did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him” (1 Kings 16:30), which was no small effort. He and his wife Jezebel routinely break Israel’s covenant with God and drag Israel deep into idolatry, building a temple of Baal and violently persecuting the prophets of God. Elijah the prophet famously challenges him and his 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel with a contest to see which god would answer their sacrifice with fire (1 Kings 18).

Yet God’s covenant spans the horizontal as well as the vertical; he is enraged by injustice on earth no less than by offenses toward heaven. So, in 1 Kings 21, God’s heavy judgment on Ahab is traced back to an incident involving a field and a relative nobody named Naboth.

Naboth owns a vineyard that has belonged to his family for generations. Unhappily for Naboth, however, the vineyard is next to King Ahab’s palace. When Ahab decides that Naboth’s vineyard is the perfect place for a vegetable patch, he asks Naboth if he can buy the field.

Naboth says no. “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors” (v. 3). I mentioned above why the Wurundjeri elders would never have agreed to sell their land to Batman; in a similar way, godly Israelites like Naboth saw themselves as custodians, rather than owners, of their ancestral land, which could never be sold permanently (Lev. 25:23).

Incensed that Naboth has repudiated him, Ahab returns home to sulk. He refuses to eat dinner and lies in bed feeling sorry for himself, before a frighteningly powerful political leader pays him a visit.

Jezebel eviscerates Ahab for moping. “Is this how you act as king over Israel? Get up and eat! Cheer up. I’ll get you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite” (1 Kings 21:7). She writes letters in the king’s name and arranges for Naboth to be falsely accused and executed on blasphemy charges.

Suddenly, Ahab finds the field available. Cold, decisive, and deadly efficient, Jezebel has little pity for those in her way. Ahab jettisons any qualms he has with his wife’s actions and seizes the murdered man’s field for himself.

Often it can appear that the names and stories of those like Naboth, who have found themselves in the cross hairs of those acting with impunity, have long been forgotten to history. Yet God remembers. Through the prophet Elijah and a couple of eavesdroppers, God delivers a chilling message: One day, dogs will lick up Ahab’s blood on the very ground where Naboth’s blood was spilled (v. 19).

The prophecy comes true three years later, when Ahab picks a fight with the neighboring nation of Aram at Ramoth Gilead and dies from a stray arrow in battle (1 Kings 22). As the cleaners are washing Ahab’s blood from his chariot, a pack of dogs comes and starts drinking from the bloody puddle, as prophesied, in Naboth’s field.

It’s the beginning of the end for Ahab’s dynasty. Two sons succeed him. The first (Ahaziah) dies, and then, during a reboot of the battle that killed his father, the second (Joram) is wounded and returns to Jezreel to recover. Ahab’s former general, Jehu, is sent on a mission from God to finish him off and take the throne for himself. He scores an arrow through Joram’s heart and dumps his body in Naboth’s field—once more fulfilling Elijah’s prophecy in 1 Kings 21.

Jehu was one of the soldiers who, years earlier, overheard Elijah’s words of judgment: “Have you not murdered a man and seized his property?” (1 Kings 21:19) As he ends Ahab’s dynasty, he declares that justice has finally come for what Ahab and Jezebel did to Naboth (2 Kings 9:25–26).

“Remember how you and I were riding together in chariots behind Ahab his father when the Lord spoke this prophecy against him: ‘Yesterday I saw the blood of Naboth and the blood of his sons, declares the Lord, and I will surely make you pay for it on this plot of ground, declares the Lord,’” Jehu tells his chariot officer. “Now then, pick him up and throw him on that plot, in accordance with the word of the Lord.”

Have you not murdered men, women, and children and seized their property?

Those who live, work, and worship on stolen lands are advised to tread thoughtfully. God hasn’t forgotten what happened here in Australia. He has humbled kingdoms greater than ours for less.

Indigenous Australians haven’t forgotten how they lost this land either. For Stan Grant, a prominent journalist and Aboriginal man, the injustice tests his faith:

Where was God when our land was invaded? Where was God when we were killed in the Frontier Wars? … I was raised by people with hope in God. A hard hope. The despairing hope of a people forsaken. A people who wait for God's justice.

These injustices took place long before I was born. Yet we nonindigenous Australians inherit together the guilt as surely as we inherit the land itself. Like Ahab, we have enjoyed the proceeds of crimes done in our name. Ahab himself did not arrange the murder, but the order went out in his name, and he was unjustly enriched by it. Likewise, God holds Jezebel and Ahab’s heirs accountable for the sins of the house of Ahab as a whole (1 Kings 21:21–24).

While individualistic Western culture struggles to recognize corporate sins, a biblical theology of sin reveals that God regularly holds groups of people responsible for their corporate sins, even generations later. These corporate sins call not for denials of individual culpability but for corporate repentance on behalf of the community (Josh. 7; Ezra 9; Dan. 9; 1 Cor. 5).

Even Ahab recognizes the need for public repentance when confronted by the wickedness Jezebel has done in his name. After Elijah delivers God’s judgment, Ahab responds by acknowledging his sins with public actions: sackcloth, fasting, and humility (1 Kings 21:27). Because of this repentance, God delays judgment and allows his family to remain for one more generation.

Nonindigenous Australians are beginning to repent of the sins done in our name by acknowledging that the places we live and work tell a history that precedes European settlement. Later this year Australians will vote on whether to formally acknowledge indigenous Australians in our constitution and facilitate a consultative indigenous Voice to Parliament.

Whether or not this legislative proposal succeeds, many Australians will continue to acknowledge indigenous inhabitants in more local ways. For instance, recently my son’s class opened a school assembly the way an increasing number of events in Australia are marked:

We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people as the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today and pay our respects to elders past and present.

Two decades ago, few practiced “acknowledgements of country” outside activist circles. But with increasing support for reconciliation between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians, it’s become common to hear these statements (or a “welcome to country” given by an indigenous person with ancestral connection to that place) as a prelude to a sporting match or at the landing of an airplane.

For nonindigenous Australians (like me), acknowledging that this land belonged to a specific people, like the Wurundjeri people, shows respect for their humanity and culture, as well as their continuing struggle to survive as a unique and irreplaceable culture in the wake of European colonization.

Many nonindigenous evangelical Christians have eagerly adopted this practice, seeing it as a way to love their indigenous neighbors. Some even incorporate acknowledgments of country in Sunday services.

A minority of Christians worry that acknowledging country might be inadvertently participating in “pagan spirituality” by invoking ancestral spirits. Those who genuinely believe this should of course spare their consciences.

Other skeptics dismiss acknowledgments as mere secular rites that risk becoming rote. This underestimates the true danger of reciting liturgies: Over time, they have a profound potential to change us for the better.

But for me, as an Old Testament scholar, I understand these acknowledgements as reflecting the character of God we see in the Ahab story—and indeed throughout Scripture. God seeks not just true worship but also true justice. God holds groups accountable for corporate sins. God opposes proud oppressors but shows grace to those who humbly repent.

Nonindigenous Australians cannot undo what was done in our name. We cannot revive the generations cut short by disease or violence or recover lost languages and cultures. We could offer to leave, but most of us have nowhere to go.

It’s humbling to acknowledge something we have little power to right. But time and time again, we observe in the Bible that repentance marks the first step in obedience. For myself and my fellow nonindigenous Australians, following God begins by asking forgiveness for the lie of claiming this continent as “nobody’s land.”

Andrew Judd lectures in Old Testament and hermeneutics at Ridley College, on Wurundjeri land now known as Melbourne, Australia.

- More from Andrew Judd

News

What Anti-Trafficking Experts Think of the Hit Movie ‘Sound of Freedom’

Emily Belz

Ministries and former law enforcement have some caveats to add to the film about Operation Underground Railroad’s Tim Ballard.

Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel) is a former Homeland Security agent on a mission in 'Sound of Freedom.'

Courtesy of Angel Studios

In a field crowded with franchises like Indiana Jones, the unexpected box office success of the summer is a movie about child sex trafficking, Sound of Freedom. Based on the story of Operation Underground Railroad’s Tim Ballard, the small-budget film has earned $45 million since its July 4 release.

The movie tells the story of Ballard (Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in 2004’s The Passion of the Christ) becoming frustrated with his work as a Department of Homeland Security agent arresting pedophiles. He wants to rescue the children being sex trafficked, but he says at one point, “Most of those kids are outside of the US.”

He quits his job and goes rogue to track down a brother and sister who have been trafficked, traveling to Mexico and Colombia. He and his assembled team try to set up an Epstein-style island sex club to entrap traffickers and rescue the children.

This isn’t an explicitly faith-filled film, aside from Ballard quoting Mark 9:42 (“It would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck …”) as he’s arresting a pedophile. The real Ballard is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But the film has drawn a Christian audience concerned about trafficking. It is distributed by Angel Studios, the same company that distributed The Chosen (as of May, Lionsgate is now The Chosen’s distributor). Sound of Freedom had been dead in the water after its distributor Fox Latin America dropped it in 2019. But Ballard said in an interview with Fox News that he was visiting the set of The Chosen when he met Angel executives: “They made a deal in five days.”

In real life, Ballard’s anti-trafficking organization, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), became known for the types of dramatic rescue operations depicted in the film. Ballard also runs the Nazarene Fund, which has rescued Yazidis and ran private airlift operations to rescue persecuted Afghans out of Afghanistan after the US military exit in 2021.

Staffers with experience in anti-trafficking ministries that CT interviewed recognize that this is a movie, so the story will be dramatized. But they want audiences to understand that a lot of anti-trafficking work in the US looks different from what’s in the film.

Prior to the film, organizations already encountered the idea among volunteers that they were going to go on dramatic rescues.

“We’re not taking doors down. We’re not taking people over our shoulder,” Jeff Shaw told CT. Shaw is the chief program officer for Frontline Response, a Christian anti-trafficking organization based in Atlanta that has operations in Georgia and Ohio. Shaw was “blown away” by the movie and is recommending it to people, but has caveats: “Even child trafficking victims that have been ‘taken,’ most of the time, they’re resistant to being rescued, because they’re not in that psychological space, either. So a big part of our trainings is deprogramming our volunteers into what their expectation should be about how people are going to respond to them, and what sex trafficking looks like.”

Rescue operations do happen, experts told CT, but they are often a small part of anti-trafficking work. Anti-trafficking ministries in the US do the less dramatic work of offering hot meals during street outreaches, having safe houses available that involve long-term rehab and recovery, educating and supporting children at risk of exploitation, training employers to recognize trafficking, and collaborating with law enforcement. Sometimes ministries’ work looks like poverty fighting, addiction recovery, or relationship building.

“It’s great that [the film] is raising awareness,” said Suzanne Lewis-Johnson, a former FBI agent and a Christian who worked on child trafficking cases in Ohio for a decade. “But if we become too hyperfocused on what we think trafficking looks like, we miss the real thing. We tend to base our programs and approaches on the anomaly. … We’re going to miss what’s under our noses if we think it’s these people overseas moving through networks.”

Sudden abductions of children as depicted in the film do happen, she says, but that’s not typical. Traffickers in the US usually traffic people that they know, according to statistics from Polaris, an anti-trafficking organization that runs the US National Human Trafficking Hotline. Polaris describes the “top three recruiter types” as family members or caregivers, intimate partners, and employers.

“We’ve had survivors say to us, ‘I didn’t know I was trafficked because it didn’t look like what it looks like in the movies,’” said Beck Sullivan, the chief program officer at Restore, an anti-trafficking organization that works in New York City. Sullivan, too, thought the movie was good for raising awareness, and she appreciated the closing text in the film that notes that the US is among the largest consumers of child sex, showing that the demand problem is domestic. But: “It’s important for people to get educated on what it looks like in their town.”

Some of the trafficking fighting methods depicted in the film—creating an island where Ballard and his team ask traffickers to bring children, or one character buying children out of sex trafficking to free them—could inadvertently create more demand for trafficking children and worsen the problem.

“You can’t help but ask the question, ‘Did they go take more kids away from their families in their communities to come meet this demand?’” said Shaw from Frontline Response. “It’s complicated.”

Shaw saw the film in a packed theater and as he was sitting there, he was thinking to himself about what the millions who have seen the film will do next.

“What can this American audience that watches this film of something that’s happening in Central and South America do to get activated locally?” he said. “We’re not going into the rainforest in a motorboat to … rescue children.”

He hopes people will look up anti-trafficking organizations in their communities. He remembered a 2011 sex trafficking documentary, Nefarious, that provoked an outpouring of support and volunteerism for anti-trafficking organizations. At Frontline, after that film came out, he remembered packed trainings and onboarding people “as fast as we could” to do tasks like outreach or manning hotlines.

Many of those people became long-term volunteers, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, some consistent volunteers pulled back. And while Frontline still has many volunteers ready to do a service day here and there, the organization hasn’t gotten back some of those consistent volunteers it relies on.

He hopes to see the Nefarious effect again—“people’s hearts getting broken, God calling people into the work, and then them committing themselves to it.”

“I think as Christians, we want to go get everybody saved, as opposed to meeting people where they’re at,” he said. “Maybe [trafficking survivors] leave the safe home and go back, and then they come six more times before they decide to stay. It’s really being prepared to let that process unravel in God’s timing.”

Bob Rodgers is the CEO of anti-trafficking ministry Street Grace, which is focused on helping children in Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. Street Grace has partnered with OUR in the past. He thought the film was well done but that it depicts a “sliver” of what trafficking can look like.

“We’re grateful to the film and the attention that it draws to the issue, but it’s important for people to realize that that’s not necessarily what trafficking looks like in Houston or DC,” he said. “It’s our kids in our communities being bought and sold by people in our communities.” He’s not criticizing the film—“it was not filmed to be a domestic or local issue”—but he wants audiences to know what domestic organizations are doing.

Street Grace, for example, focuses on using technology to interrupt demand for child sexual exploitation and has long-term programs to keep children out of trafficking situations. On an average day, Street Grace is doing corporate trainings, talking to law enforcement, and instructing children in youth leadership academies about leadership skills, healthy boundaries, and how to protect themselves online.

Rodgers is hopeful that the film has people interested in the issue, and it comes at an important moment. The pandemic “kind of disrupted everything, while trafficking and sexual exploitation exploded as the entire world was pushed online,” he said. He said anti-trafficking groups have had a hard time keeping pace with “the bad actors” online.

Lewis-Johnson, the former FBI agent who is now CEO of No More Trafficking, left the bureau in part because she wanted to be able to talk to Christian audiences about what trafficking is really like.

“We want to do the big giant thing,” she said. But fighting trafficking “requires all of us to do what seems like the small things, consistently, together.”

She said rescue operations by inexperienced people can be botched because traffickers are good at deception—“They try to make the good guy look like the bad guy.” And she has encountered well-intentioned nonprofits that mishandled trafficking situations because they didn’t have experience—buying a ticket for a woman to go back to her trafficker, for example. In trafficking cases, “you’re trying to put a puzzle together, and you don’t have the picture on the box or know how many pieces there are,” she said.

“The reality is, there’s more evil in the world than what you know,” said Lewis-Johnson. “No single human is the answer—I know from what I saw that there is a good God who is restraining people [from evil]. … If we humble ourselves and pray, we will see the tide turn.”

- More from Emily Belz

News

Wire Story

Churches Continue to Sing Hillsong and Bethel Despite Controversies

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Study: Worship leaders say they don’t care what music tops the charts, but trust peer recommendations and what they have heard at conferences.

Worship service at Bethel Leader Conference in 2019.

Courtesy of Bree Anne/Unsplash/Creative Commons

For the past decade, a handful of megachurches have dominated worship music, churning out hits such as “Goodness of God,” “What a Beautiful Name,” “King of Kings” and “Graves Into Gardens.”

And though churches like Australia-based Hillsong and Bethel Church in California have met with scandal and controversy, worship leaders still keep singing their songs.

A new study released Tuesday found that few worship leaders avoid songs from Hillsong and Bethel, two of the so-called Big Four megachurches that dominate modern worship music.

The study found that most worship leaders connect with songs because they’ve experienced them firsthand at a conference or by listening to them online, or because a friend or church member recommended them—rather than seeing the song at the top of the charts or on a list of new songs.

Elias Dummer, a Christian musician turned marketer who is part of the research team behind the study, said most worship leaders think they have good reasons for picking the songs they use in worship. But they may not be aware of how social forces—like the popularity of certain churches—affect their choices.

“While people say that that they care about the songs—they pick the same four churches over and over again,” said Dummer.

The new study is based on a survey of more than 400 church worship leaders in the U.S. and Canada that was conducted in the fall of 2022—drawn from both social media groups of worship leaders and an email list from a major music publisher.

Worship leaders were asked what they thought about the pace of new music being produced, how they picked new songs, what they thought the motivations were behind new songs and whether they’d pick a song—or avoid it—based on the artist or church that produced it.

Only 16 percent of worship leaders said they were less likely to choose a song with ties to Hillsong, while about 1 in 4 said they were less likely to choose songs with ties to Bethel (27%). More than half of worship leaders said they were likely to choose songs with ties to Hillsong (62%) while nearly half (48%) said they were likely to choose songs with ties to Bethel.

Researchers also found that recommendations from friends on social media (54%), congregation members (56%) and church leaders (76%) made it more likely that worship leaders would choose a song. Hearing a song at a live event (76%) or streaming online (70%) also made it more likely they’d choose a song.

“The most influential factors in discovering a new worship song are peer endorsements and personal experiences,” according to the study. “Worship leaders mainly trust their friends and fellow church leaders to provide them with song recommendations.”

Just under half (47%) of those worship leaders were concerned about the number of new songs available for churches to sing. The study found the big four churches release about 40-50 new songs each year, on top of the hundreds of songs available from other sources—from modern hymn writers to artists on YouTube.

About 40 percent said there is a bit too much new music, while a small number (4%) said they were “completely overwhelmed” by new music. A quarter (27%) said they could handle more music.

That last number surprised research team member Marc Jolicoeur, worship and creative pastor at Moncton Wesleyan Church in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

“We can’t exactly say why they would want more songs, whether that means they’re looking for more diverse theological views, for more diverse styles, or more diverse voices,” he said.

Only a third of worship leaders thought songs were written with the needs of local churches in mind, while slightly more thought songs were divinely inspired. Just over half (57%) thought songs were inspired by something that happened in a writer’s life. Few believed songwriters wrote songs out of obligation to a contract.

For his part, Dummer said worship songwriters likely do have contractual obligations to meet—and it is unlikely they have moments of personal spiritual inspiration for all of the songs they write.

“There’s a lot of throwing things against the wall,” he said.

Still, it’s more likely that worship songwriters are writing from personal experience than from trying to communicate theological principles, said research team member Shannan Baker, a postdoctoral fellow at Baylor University. That’s in part because it would be easy to get things wrong by using the wrong phrase or word.

Baker said she’d done some interviews with writers who said they often start writing sessions with other musicians by talking about what’s going on in their life and seeing if a theme emerges. She also said that despite the popularity of megachurch-driven hit music, worship leaders often consider songs on a case-by-case basis, rather than thinking about where those songs came from.

Glenn Packiam, a former worship leader and songwriter turned pastor, said understanding how songs get written—or how they get chosen for worship—is a complicated task. And it often starts by trying to figure out what song, or what message, works best in a local congregation.

“Our No. 1 priority was to write songs for the people in our church,” said Packiam, who led worship for years at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. “We wanted to write songs that helped the church find language for the various experiences that we’re going through.”

He pointed to a song called “Overcome,” written by Jon Egan, a colleague of his at New Life in the early 2000s. That song became a rallying cry for the church when New Life pastor Ted Haggard resigned in scandal and later, when the congregation was reeling from a shooting at the church.

“That song ended up being a gift for our church,” he said.

Packiam, now pastor of Rockharbor Church in Costa Mesa, California, went on to study worship music as a ritual while earning his doctorate. He said that once songs go out into the world, they will mean different things in different contexts. That may provide comfort to those grieving or inspiration to those facing a challenge. The songs have a life of their own once people begin to sing them in worship.

Packiam believes there are more than consumer forces at work in worship songs.

“I don’t want to look at a particular song or a particular church that’s making music and say, oh gosh, it’s just a conglomerate machine,” he said. “What if the Lord is blessing this and causing it to produce fruit?”

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

News

Quran Burning in Sweden Singes Muslim-World Christians

Jayson Casper

Rejecting the act of an atheist “Christian” refugee, church leaders escape the ire of protests in Iraq and Pakistan.

Protesters in Iraq hold up the Quran in response to the burning of a copy of the Quran in Sweden.

Hadi Mizban / AP Images

Following the burning of the Quran in Sweden last month, Christians in the Muslim world have been vocal in their condemnation.

But some expressions of disapproval may have been forced upon them.

“Christian religious figures … [must] state their positions regarding this explicit crime,” stated the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq. “Their silence puts them in a position of refraining from criminalizing and condemning it.”

The Sunni-based group had plenty of reasons to be offended. The stunt occurred in front of the Grand Mosque of Stockholm on the first day of Eid al-Adha, one of two primary Muslim holidays. And prior to being lit on fire, the Quran was kicked about and stuffed with bacon—provocation against Islam’s prohibition of pork.

But the greatest Iraqi ire may have been that the culprit was one of their own—and a Christian. Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old father of two, sought refuge in Sweden sometime after 2017. But his checkered history had many Middle East Christians criticizing him as well.

In fact, he is an atheist.

His Instagram post announcing his act declared his lack of faith in anything save secular liberalism. Citing the protest as an act of democracy in defense of freedom of speech, he also asked for financial support. And it is reported that upon arrival in Sweden, he volunteered for a far-right party known for its opposition to Muslim migrants.

But earlier, he worked for Shiites.

Momika professed admiration for Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), who was killed with Iran’s Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in 2020. Under the PMF’s command he enrolled with Christian compatriots in “The Spirit of Jesus Brigades” in the common fight against ISIS.

He also tried founding his own political party in Iraq, the Syriac Democratic Union. The established, similarly named Christian party in Syria denied any connection to him.

“He is a showoff who wants the spotlight,” said Habib Ephrem, president of the Lebanon-based Syriac League. “He has no specific ideology and stirred up controversy in the Muslim world—for nothing.”

Some observers speculated that Momika’s aim was to create conditions in which it would be impossible to deny his citizenship request and send him back to Iraq.

At least it has given Christians an opportunity for witness.

“What happened in Sweden was an unwholesome use of the concept of personal freedom,” said Ara Badalian, senior pastor of Baptist Church in Baghdad. “True Christianity is characterized by love, tolerance, and rejection of violence and hatred.”

The patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East spoke similarly.

“We call upon the governments of all countries, particularly the Swedish government, not to allow these actions perpetrated in the name of ‘personal freedom,’” stated Mar Awa Royel, who quoted Ephesians 4:32. “This is what the Bible teaches us: Be kind to one another.”

Hind Kabawat, former deputy head of the United Nations-affiliated Syrian Negotiations Commission Office, framed it in terms of the Golden Rule. Momika’s actions serve only to prompt Islamic attacks on Christianity.

“If he delved deeper into the Christian religion to which he claimed to belong, he would find that it prohibits and condemns what he did,” said Kabawat, a Presbyterian from Damascus. “But he does not care where things will go, or how many people will be affected by his behavior.”

Ephrem, in condemnation, also defined his religion in opposition to Momika.

“Love is the essence of Eastern Christianity in its yearning for the dignity, freedom, and equality of every human being,” he said, “and in its respect for diversity, pluralism, and anyone who is ‘other.’”

Love, kindness, and dignity, however, are not always experienced in the reverse.

“It was most certainly a vile act, one that is inexcusable and completely condemned,” stated a bishop in the Chaldean Catholic Church, requesting anonymity to comment freely. “However, it is also a bad precedent, as it goes to show the anger that Christians feel about being persecuted.”

And from Momika’s hometown of Qaraqosh, one resident put it plainly.

“I am not sure if I feel safe anymore,” this anonymous Christian stated.

The Swedish embassy in Baghdad was briefly stormed amid mass demonstrations, which Momika’s one-time Shiite allies called for. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey also issued condemnations—which called into question Sweden’s NATO application.

Protests extended as far as Pakistan, where terrorist threats were issued.

“No church or Christian will remain safe in Pakistan,” stated Nasser Raisani, spokesman for Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, vowing to make the country “a hell for Christianity.”

Like their brethren in the Middle East, Christian leaders in Pakistan clearly condemned the burning of the Quran. But they also asked for protection.

Terrorist groups “have been allowed to operate unchecked by the state,” stated Ata-ur-Rehman Saman, coordinator for the National Commission for Justice and Peace, which advocates for human rights on behalf of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Pakistan. “This is making life miserable for [Christians].”

One Christian leader, requesting anonymity so as not to jeopardize his ministry, told CT that the situation is not fair. Expressing full sympathy for Muslims about the Quran burning in Sweden, he chided his government for failing to take action against atrocities against Christians.

On the same day two Christian youths were jailed on accusation of blasphemy against Islam, a Christian cleaning woman was raped and murdered. Local believers pray, advocate, and appeal to the authorities—but little gets done.

“I don’t know if we can do anything more than this,” he said. “What is done against us gets swept under the rug.”

And Peter Calvin, a Pakistani Christian leader, is feeling apprehensive.

“We are not afraid, but we feel the heat,” he said. “The Lord has protected us in the past, but it will be several weeks—if not months—until this incident is forgotten.”

Still, putting the anger in context, he praised the Pakistani people. Religion is personal, and convictions are to be respected.

Meanwhile, despite nationwide protests, not one report has surfaced about attacks on the religious minority. In preventing such attacks, he credited both the actions of authorities and the quick condemnation from Christian leaders.

But he also made a distinction.

“We would not react in anger if someone did this to the Bible,” Calvin said. “If they did, our retaliation would be to pray for them.”

They will soon have an opportunity. In Sweden, amid new protest applications to burn the Quran outside a mosque, one person requested to burn the Torah and Bible outside the Israeli embassy.

The furor has impacted Swedish society. With an 11-point rise from February, 53 percent of the population now favors banning the public burning of religious books. The Swedish Christian Council expressed its solidarity with Muslims, and the government is looking into a law that would require at least partial reintroduction of a blasphemy law scrapped in the 1970s.

Kabawat, also the director of the interfaith and peacebuilding program at George Mason University, supports such a measure. Local bodies have done well to condemn Momika, framing the protest as his individual act alone. Reactions from the Muslim world will vary—some ignore while others exploit.

But Sweden must not become a country where insulting religion is tolerated.

Wary of religious freedom issues around the globe, the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) treads cautiously.

“We must maximize freedom for every individual, while maximizing welcome for every community,” said Wissam al-Saliby, advocacy officer for the WEA. “We need to have this conversation.”

Heading evangelical engagement with the United Nations in Geneva, Saliby was the first non-state representative to speak at Tuesday’s special UN Human Rights Council (HRC) meeting in response to the Quran burning. He emphasized that human rights are the responsibility of the state, while securing pluralistic societies are the responsibility of all.

So his first word, jointly delivered with the World Council of Churches, was to condemn the incident in Sweden. Back in 2012, the WEA acted similarly against Florida pastor Terry Jones—after the secretary-general first personally visited Jones in a failed effort to stop his Islamophobic protest.

Wherever evangelicals have significant social and political capital, Saliby told CT, they must consistently call for the protection of minorities. Not only is it the right thing to do, but evangelicals are also minorities themselves in much of the world. Blasphemy and anti-conversion laws should be repealed, for example, because the public square must be open to all people of faith as well as to those with none.

Some feared the UN push by offended nations would revive past efforts to forbid “defamation of religions” in international law.

“Muslim states are beyond this now, and behind-the-scenes negotiations were initially constructive,” said Saliby. “But the HRC resolution still included vague language implying a nexus between the desecration of sacred texts and banned hate speech. This led most Western states to vote against the resolution that should have been adopted by consensus, and to emphasize that it is the role of their respective judiciaries to verify whether specific acts amount to banned hate speech.”

The final tally was 28 for and 12 against, with seven abstentions.

Every society—even in the West—defines freedom differently, Saliby continued, and the WEA must keep to an international minimum as it represents evangelical opinion. Hate speech is a significant societal problem, and the global WEA body endorses the UN-backed Rabat Plan of Action to determine when it crosses the line into incitement to violence.

The Christian minimum, however, is drawn instead from the image of God.

“Our ability to reject God and his love,” Saliby said, “establishes the absolute right of freedom of expression, religion, and the changing thereof.”

Secure in God’s love themselves, all Christians should condemn Quran burnings.

“Insulting religions does not reflect our Christian witness,” said Saliby. “Our Lord and Savior is bigger than this.”

Editor’s note: The article was updated with additional information and quotes after the UN vote.

- More from Jayson Casper

News

SBC Study Raises Concerns about Lack of Worship Leaders

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Decline in children’s music ministries bodes ill for future, scholar says.

Tom Keenan / Lightstock

Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) music ministries seemed like they were thriving in 1938. The instruments in churches across the denomination were valued at more than $10 million (the equivalent of nearly $217 million today). Fanny Crosby was the most popular songwriter. And vocal quartets, especially male quartets, were in great demand.

But as the Sunday School Board of the SBC surveyed more than 1,000 churches that year, it noticed one dire problem. The SBC was facing a shortage of qualified music ministers.

“We must point out,” the board wrote, “the greatest single need for a program of better music in Southern Baptist churches—the desperate need for well-trained choir leaders in the churches.”

Eighty-five years later, some things haven’t changed.

“There just aren’t enough people out there to serve as worship leaders,” said Will Bishop, associate professor of church music and worship at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Bishop is the author of the first large-scale study of music in SBC churches in nearly 100 years. “A Snapshot of Southern Baptist Church Music: 2022,” as yet unpublished, surveyed 127 congregations across the country, asking them 111 questions about the music in their worship services.

Bishop’s work differs from the last big study of SBC music in scope and size. The 1938 survey had 1,381 respondents (out of 28,844 SBC churches) and asked each of them 24 questions. It focused on practical concerns like the total monetary value of the instruments in each church, the church budget for paying musicians and purchasing sheet music, the makeup of church musical ensembles, whether the choir was robed, and the use of mimeographed bulletins.

Bishop has a much smaller sample of churches—not enough to be representative, but enough to serve as a snapshot of SBC church music today. He also has a much wider range of questions. As someone responsible for training future music ministers, he wanted to know a lot of details. He asked about the frequency of choir use, how often new songs were introduced, and what percentage of music ministers had non-music responsibilities as part of their jobs (the answer: 58 percent). Bishop also inquired about hymnals, orchestras, vocal teams, and worship leaders’ titles.

Some of the details he has turned up are fun and quirky: Three percent of the churches reported they have at least one harp player in the congregation. Secular songs sometimes used in SBC services include “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas; “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” by John Denver; “Man in the Mirror” by Michael Jackson; and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a South African song popularized in the 1950s and ’60s by the Weavers and the Tokens.

More seriously, the study paints a picture of a denomination adapting and changing while also holding on to musical tradition. Despite declining membership over the past several years, the SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with more than 46,000 congregations. Bishop’s survey shows that many of those are still singing Fanny Crosby’s hymns. She ranked second among the 127 churches in the study, surpassed only by Chris Tomlin.

According to Bishop’s study, Tomlin is the author or co-author of about 1 out of every 25 songs sung in SBC churches today.

The data corroborate recent research about consolidation in the worship music industry and the small circle of influential songwriters producing chart-topping worship songs. Of the 10 living songwriters with the most widely sung music, eight are affiliated with Passion, Bethel Music, Hillsong, or Elevation Worship.

Much of the industry caters to the needs of megachurches, which have the resources to recreate the high production level of audio and video recordings by popular artists. Bishop worries that a lot of the research on worship music is skewed that way too. Most studies rely on data from Christian Copyright Licensing International or streaming platforms. He suspected they were not capturing an accurate picture of SBC worship, which includes many small churches that don’t have a lot of resources for music production.

“You hear a lot of folks say, ‘Southern Baptists do this or that,’” Bishop said. “I found myself wondering, ‘What do Southern Baptists actually do?’ I may think I know based on my experience, but I’ve only been part of a few churches.”

About 20 percent of the churches in Bishop’s survey have 50 or fewer people in the pews every week; 30 percent have between 50 and 100. Some reported data wouldn’t show up in a search of copyright license reports. One in five SBC churches sing more hymns than modern songs. One-third sing an equal number.

As he got into the nitty gritty of the survey data, though, Bishop became most concerned about the music ministry pipeline. Few SBC congregations seem to be emphasizing the kind of programs that encourage young people to pursue worship music training or to participate in music ministry at all. Only 44 of the 127 congregations he surveyed had an active children’s choir. Less than 10 percent had a youth choir.

“Churches have not prioritized training young people to do worship ministry,” Bishop said. “We’re not thinking about the future.”

As an educator who works with current and future worship ministers, Bishop was most worried by the responses to the question: “Can you name a young person in your church who 1) has expressed a call to or interest in pursuing a vocation in church music/worship, or 2) you could envision pursuing a vocation of church music/worship in the future?”

Half of the respondents said no. Another 10 percent said they weren’t sure.

“Music is a way to disciple,” Bishop said. “I see bad things on the horizon when I see bad numbers for youth and kid ensembles.”

Brady Paul, pastor for worship ministries at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, agrees it’s important to create opportunities for children and youth to participate. His church, which participated in the survey, has a 20- to 30-person choir, a 12-piece orchestra, and a worship band that all regularly play throughout the year. Members of the church with musical skills are encouraged to join.

“Choirs and orchestras open up a wider door,” he said. “As pastors, we’re called to equip the saints for ministry. Ensembles are more ministries for the saints to be involved in.”

Paul says that’s how he learned. He developed a love for music and a sense of belonging in the church through his participation in choir. He learned to play by ear, sing, and collaborate in church ensembles. He also had a strong model to follow: his father, a worship leader in SBC churches for more than 25 years.

At the same time, Paul has seen how difficult it is to recruit and retain passionate young people for music ministry. When he began pursuing a degree in worship arts at Oklahoma Baptist University in 2016, he was one of eight students in the program. By his last year, he was one of two.

Fewer people raised in church choirs and ensembles mean fewer people considering music ministry as a career path, so the widespread lack of opportunities for young people to explore and develop musical abilities in their churches worries Bishop.

“It’s not like we can push a button at seminary and out pops a worship leader,” he said. When he encounters pastors and church leaders looking for new worship leaders coming out of SBTS to fill positions in their church, he asks them, “Who do you have to send us?”

There’s no quick fix for the problem, but Bishop believes he knows where to start: “Find a way to invest in the young people in your church.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Wire Story

Black Churches Concerned About Expulsion from SBC

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Letter from the denomination’s National African American Fellowship says vote on Saddleback and Fern Creek could “disproportionately impact” minority congregations.

Voting at SBC annual meeting.

Courtesy of RNS - Emily Kask

Earlier this year, Southern Baptists expelled five churches from the nation’s largest Protestant denomination for having women as pastors.

Now, the leader of a fellowship of African American Southern Baptist pastors wonders if their churches will be next.

In a letter last week, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s National African American Fellowship asked to meet with the denomination’s president, saying the SBC’s recent decisions to expel churches with women pastors had caused “division within the SBC and may disproportionately impact NAAF affiliated congregations.”

“Many of our churches assign the title ‘pastor’ to women who oversee ministries of the church under the authority of a male Senior Pastor, i.e., Children’s Pastor, Worship Pastor, Discipleship Pastor, etc.,” wrote the Rev. Gregory Perkins, pastor of The View Church in Menifee, California, and president of the NAAF.

He also said a proposed amendment to the SBC’s constitution to bar churches with women pastors violated the autonomy of local churches—a vital Baptist belief.

During the recent SBC annual meeting, local church delegates, known as messengers, voted to affirm the decision to expel Saddleback Church in Southern California—one of the denomination’s largest churches—and Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville. Those two churches had appealed an earlier decision made by the SBC’s Executive Committee that they were no longer in “friendly cooperation” with the convention.

Three other expelled churches—including two predominantly Black churches where women had succeeded their late husbands as pastors—did not appeal.

Messengers also voted to change the SBC’s constitution to bar churches with women pastors. That proposed change would only allow churches to be part of the convention that affirm, appoint or employ “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.” The change must be ratified at the SBC’s 2024 annual meeting in order to take effect.

“This may signal to churches in the SBC that do not believe that women should be the Senior Pastor but allow women the usage of a pastoral title, or appoints a woman to a pastoral role, are no longer welcome in the SBC,” wrote Perkins.

Among the churches that hold the belief that women can lead in non-senior pastor roles is the church Perkins pastors, which has one woman on staff with the title of pastor. He wrote that many of the more than 4,000 congregations in the NAAF hold that view as well.

Perkins said that leaders of the NAAF respected the SBC’s democratic process and that messengers had the right to vote their conscience. However, they asked for a time of “prayer and dialogue” to discuss the consequences of the votes at the SBC meeting.

The letter, sent by email, was also posted on the NAAF website. That website also includes a link to a document with more details about how the decisions made by the SBC could affect churches. That document urges pastors to take an active role in the discussion over the issue of women pastors.

“You must be an active participant in this conversation and decision-making process as it has long-term implications for your church and other NAAF affiliated congregations,” the document advises.

While SBC churches cooperate to fund missions, seminaries and other ministries, each local church is autonomous. They choose their own pastors, own their own buildings and control their own finances.

Perkins said that Christians who believe the Bible may come to different conclusions about how to apply its teachings. He said churches should engage in a “vigorous, yet constructive dialogue.”

“To disfellowship like-minded churches who share our faith in Jesus Christ, our belief in the authority of Scripture, our mandate to carry out the Great Commission, and our agreement to give cooperatively based upon a local-church governance decision dishonors the spirit of cooperation and the guiding tenets of our denomination,” he wrote.

The letter was addressed to SBC president and Texas pastor Bart Barber and copied to board members and officers of the NAAF, as well as staff at the SBC’s Executive Committee.

Barber confirmed he had received the letter.

In recent years, the SBC has touted the growth of Black, Hispanic and other diverse congregations in the convention. However, a number of high-profile Black churches have left the SBC in recent years over issues of race and politics.

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

He Built a University, Sheltered Fleeing People, and Worked for Peace in Congo. Then He Was Arrested.

Interview by Morgan Lee

The government detained Lazare Sebitereko Rukundwa in June and is holding him without charges.

Lazare Sebitereko Rukundwa plants a tree in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Photo used with permission.

The Congolese government is holding a Christian leader in prison and not releasing any information about where he is or what he’s charged with. Lazare Sebitereko Rukundwa does not have access to medication, and the Red Cross has not been allowed to see him, according to several people close to the situation.

Rukundwa’s arrest came after a United Nations report stated he led a campaign encouraging people from his ethnic group to take up arms. He has long been an advocate for peace in the region and categorically denies the report, which he says is based on a false accusation.

“It’s obvious that this group of UN experts have made an error by its informants with malicious intentions aimed at tarnishing my name and endangering my life,” he wrote in a statement. “Sharing false information is a weapon that destroys innocent lives.”

After a previous arrest, Rukundwa was released for lack of any evidence to substantiate the allegations. But some officials complained, and he was arrested again.

Rukundwa is president of Eben-Ezer University of Minembwe and has dedicated his life to education, development, and empowering churches in Eastern Congo. He played a critical role in bringing solar power to the region.

“Lazare is among few people in those mountains who is respected and loved across the tribal lines, even from communities in constant conflicts and fighting,” says his friend of 25 years, Freddy Kaniki.

CT Global managing editor Morgan Lee spoke with him before his arrest about the challenges currently facing Christians in Congo and the hope he holds for change.

How have your life and work been impacted by the persistent unrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

More than 80 percent of our region has been destroyed, and very few places now remain. We have had a lot of killings. We have conflicts with bullets. We have a humanitarian crisis.

The conflict that has lasted from 2017 up to now has been 100 percent manipulated by politicians and from there become tribal. It’s destroyed villages, livestock, and crops and caused people to flee their homes. Starting in 2019, we started hosting thousands and thousands of internally displaced people who were coming in with no help at all.

We turned our university into a humanitarian agency and turned churches and schools into shelters for these displaced people, and every house became a shelter for up to five families. We have shared food, clothes, and whatever we’ve had.

We have gone out to talk with the government. I have met the president, many ministers, ambassadors, and humanitarian agencies in and out of the country. We are accredited in Kinshasa, the capital. We have written reports and shared letters looking for help. But the government hasn’t helped and neither have UN agencies. No one wanted to come and help.

Currently, we don’t see prophetic voices coming from the ground standing against what is happening. We hear a few voices, either in the social media or in some churches, but we don’t see the body of Christ going to the media, using radio or television, or even visiting the areas that have been affected.

Where are you in the DRC?

We live in the eastern part of Congo, which borders Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania. Before the partition of Africa, people were scattered all over the area. So drawing national boundaries divided families between those countries.

Within eastern Congo, we live in Minembwe, a very mountainous region and very remote place. We live in the heart of villages, a small area that has been developed by the locals themselves. Our university is actually in the middle of all these villages. We have several different tribes, including the Banyamulenge who are Congolese Tutsis, the Bembe, the Bafuliru, the Banyindu, the Bashi, and many other small groups. This is an area that draws people from different races because of agriculture and livestock.

It is very difficult to reach the area. There are no roads and very limited ways of communication. In the past, we had bad roads, but around 2017, when the wars started, it limited the number of cars arriving.

Now, the only way we really have out of the area is by air. We have a small airstrip.

My university was the first ever to be introduced in the area, which was quite an adventure. But of course, when you don’t have any person to do it for you, you create with God. In Minembwe, God worked with churches and local NGOs and individuals to actually replace the government and bring the development that they want.

How did Christianity arrive in Minembwe?

British Assemblies of God missionaries first came in the area and then were followed by the Swedish and Norwegian Pentecostal churches and by the Catholics.

The Banyamulenge, who were the majority ethnic group living in the area, were actually the last to convert to Christianity. The Banyamulenge resisted until the early ’50s when there was a big wind of revival and they started converting by themselves.

We asked the old people who were there what happened, and they told us they didn’t understand. There was this wind of revival, the Spirit of God moved across the forests and the savanna where they were living, and people just moved from one place to the other, looking for the church or for a pastor or an evangelist to pray for them.

Today, about 90 percent of the whole area are Christians.

Now, the question that you probably ask me is “If 90 percent of Congolese are Christians, how is there a war?”

Yes, exactly. That’s the question I had.

Just after independence, we had all this war, conflict created by the greedy Europeans who had colonized Africa. In Congo, we had the Belgians and King Leopold. Almost 10 million Congolese were killed by the brutality of colonialism.

There is a trend of conflicts and killings, which don’t necessarily come because of the Congolese themselves but are an inheritance from the colonial past. And since independence, we have not been very lucky to have good leaders or good governance.

Probably the other issue is Congo has deep reserves of all minerals that are needed in the world. Everyone would like to come and have them for themselves. It brings me back to the Bible where it says that the devil comes to steal, kill, and destroy.

But this is not just an issue for the Congolese. Anyone who is using a phone, a laptop, an electric car today, anything solar powered, anyone who is using material that is originally coming from these troubled countries should also be reflecting on this.

Sure, we can take it and use it to get rich. But if we have the Spirit of God in us, we should reflect on this reality.

Is the violence targeting Christians?

The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a militant Islamic group, is targeting churches in the western province of North Kivu. This is a very recent development. The ADF will kill people without any distinction.

Churches have also been destroyed with villages by the armed groups of Mai-Mai. The Mai-Mai will come, kill, and destroy the village, properties, and community infrastructure, including churches, schools, and clinics.

Recently, churches that belonged to Banyamulenge in Goma, the capital of North Kivu, were completely destroyed—only because the people who pray there belong to the Banyamulenge community or Tutsi communities.

Are evangelicals participating in the violence?

If 90 percent of the population of Congo profess to be Christians, then all the problems that are happening are being done by Christians.

There is insecurity everywhere, people fear for their lives, and we don’t see prophetic voices. When you know that you are in an area controlled by armed groups and if you dare to tell them to stop, you will be the victim. It’s not everyone who is willing to give his or her life for others. So you find that there are many people who see what is happening as evil, but they fail to denounce it.

I’ve talked to bishops and pastors in different regions and countries, but everyone seems to be not very interested. The rebels are working together. But we fail to see the church working together.

How has your university helped bring peace in this current conflict?

Our university has become one of the pillars of hope in this area. We have been able to not only work with others to provide food, but we have also been able to provide education. We have been able to give our conference hall to the displaced churches.

Many of the members of those churches have received food and seeds. I was encouraged to see them bringing the harvest to the church and sharing seeds with others who don’t have any.

You create a space for people to come and feel the peace that comes from God. You create a community within the crisis—a community that works together, a community that supports one another. They share not only food; they also share laughter.

One way of giving hope … is to be the church in the midst of wars and crisis and conflict, where now we can say, “I was sick; you gave me medicine. I was hungry; you gave me food. I was bereaved; you gave me condolences. I was naked, and you clothed me.” This is the church that God wants to see.

The world we live in has conflict everywhere. But the church is here to be the salt and to be the light, where we may not do everything, but at least we play our part.

How can readers help your situation?

There is definitely a range of things for those who want to intervene.

We have hundreds of widows anyone can help. We also have our clinic, where anyone who wants to can pay for salaries of nurses or doctors or provide medical supplies. You can contribute seeds or agriculture or livestock or help us find another water source.

We have a primary school, a secondary school, and vocational training for those who cannot go through the university or those who cannot finish high school. We have single mothers, many of [whom] were raped or got pregnant in some other hard circumstance, some of whom are minors. We bring them through vocational training.

There are also Christians all over the world who can lobby for peace. They can speak on behalf of the thousands of those who cannot speak and ask their governments to learn about the crisis of Congo.

We need to ask the humanitarian world why they are not helping Minembwe.

For those who want to intervene in prayers, we need peace. It feels like the powers of darkness are hovering over the eastern Congo. Pray for our leaders. It is absolutely vital that God fill our leaders with the Spirit of God and the spirit of leadership and lead them to end this war. Pray for our neighbors, that God will give them goodwill in contributing solutions to the Congo rather than fueling the conflict.

Pray that maybe the national companies that are involved with or envy the minerals of Congo, that God can talk to them. The Congolese need to become shareholders in the mining to end poverty.

Does the conflict challenge your faith?

Yes and no.

Today, the displaced churches from at least six different denominations have come together to form a church called Umoja, the word for unity. They pray together in the same building, and we have actually left it for them.

All of this work has been done by local people helping the internally displaced people. The local people themselves worked together and supported one another. Now we have about 10 villages that have been rebuilt around Minembwe.

Today, I can say many people have chosen to work together, not waiting for anyone else to come and do it on their behalf. The government is absent; humanitarian agencies are absent; politicians are absent. But I see hope coming. I see peace, and the possibility of rehabilitation, reconciliation, and stability.

There are those that through the conflict, through difficulties, through all these challenges, faith becomes firm.

But we also see others have actually lost their faith. We see Christians who were stealing other people’s cows. We have seen them getting involved in violence and destroying the houses of others. We have seen them killing other people.

Faith can be strengthened through conflict and through difficult times, but we see also that it can actually be weakened.

- More from Morgan Lee

Share

In this series

Finding solace in Buddhism

A Christian awakening

Nothing wasted in God’s economy

Share

Share

Anticipating shared values

Human and divine agency

An oasis, not a destination

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share