An Ode to the Long Season

Why fans love a game designed to break their hearts.

Brayan Rocchio and manager Stephen Vogt of the Cleveland Guardians celebrates Rocchio's walk off three-run home run to defeat the Texas Rangers 9-8 in ten innings and win the National League central division on the final day of the regular season.

Nick Cammett / Getty Images

Major League Baseball, what’s not to love?

A lot of people don’t love it, and for good reason. Some batters swing for home runs, even with two strikes, instead of trying to make contact and advance a runner. Some pitchers are just throwers, not artists painting the strike zone. Some $30 million players are whiners. Besides, football has more smashups, basketball a constant flow.

And yet, Major League Baseball’s regular season, with its relentless, day-after-day 162-game pace, is a test of character. That’s particularly true at season’s end, where after 161 games some playoff spots depended on the last day’s results: In the American League, for example, Sunday’s games made the Toronto Blue Jays champions of the east and the Cleveland Guardians winners of the central division.

To get another sense of closeness at the edge in baseball as compared to other sports, in the American League the best team won only 8 percent more games than the sixth and last team to make the playoffs, and 40 percent more than the worst team in the league. In the National Football League, by comparison, the best team won 40 percent more games than the lowest team to make the playoffs, and 367 percent more than the worst team in the league.

The song that still chokes me up at the end of each NCAA basketball tournament, “One Shining Moment,” is about one kind of tension:

The ball is tipped,
And there you are.
You’re running for your life. …
Time is short,
And the road is long.
In the blinking of an eye,
Ah, that moment’s gone.

But the MLB season, which started at the end of March, is not short: six months with “games” every day.

Little League events should be games. MLB contests are not. Savannah Bananas exhibitions are fun like an annual trip to the circus, but the season that just concluded required long diligence in the same direction. Paul thought lengthy competition was worth remembering. He wrote to Timothy about his hard season: “I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near.I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:6–7).

Two millennia later, two writers captured this sense of perseverance and persevered themselves. Roger Angell wrote at The New Yorker for over 70 years and died at age 101 in 2022. Bart Giamatti left the presidency of Yale University and became MLB’s commissioner in 1989 but served only five months. He died of a heart attack at age 51, eight days after banishing Pete Rose from baseball for gambling.

Sin affects sport as it does everything else, yet Angell wrote this in The Summer Game: Baseball “requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge. … Baseball’s clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher’s windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch.”

Is that tension bad, and should we shun the result: someone wins, someone loses? Paul drew from earthly experience when he wrote to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize” (1 Cor. 9:24). A baseball season is not spiritual life or death, but it’s more than entertainment, for as Giamatti wrote to the Americans, “Winning is not everything but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.”

For those with a strong spirit, baseball is full of frustration. By “character” I don’t mean the ability to come up big in the clutch, exciting though that is. It’s more a batter not going small when he hits a line drive—but directly at a fielder.

Character is dealing with disappointment. Baseball is the sport that best reflects a fallen world in which a person can do what’s right—and life goes wrong. As Giamatti wrote, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”

And when a fielder makes an error? Angell wrote, “What really makes baseball so hard is [its] retributive capacity for disaster if the smallest thing is done wrong, and the invisible presence of defeat that attends every game.” Character is also bravely standing up when a small thing done wrong becomes crushing.

Angell described a postgame television close-up of a future Hall of Famer after the Boston Red Sox were one strike away from winning the 1986 World Series, then failed: “Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face …. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry.”

The American League and National League playoffs begin Tuesday.

- More from Marvin Olasky

News

Black Clergy and Christians Grapple with Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

Haleluya Hadero

Many say the activist’s inflammatory statements on race should inform how we remember his life.

Charlie Kirk speaking on stage at America Fest 2024.

Josh Edelson / Contributor / Getty

Many Black pastors and Christians are contesting the fond memorialization of conservative activist Charlie Kirk within the political right and pockets of evangelicalism, saying they denounce Kirk’s assassination but can’t honor the legacy of a man who used harmful racial rhetoric.

The divide mirrors a national rift over how to remember the influential 31-year-old, who was fatally shot this month while speaking at a college in Utah. Kirk’s death sparked renewed fears about the rise of political violence in America and ushered in heated debates about the activist, a close ally of President Donald Trump who organized young conservatives across the country.

Supporters of Kirk, including some who spoke at his memorial service earlier this week, have lionized the activist as a martyr who died defending Christian values. But in pulpits, media interviews, and social media posts, many Black leaders and Christians are highlighting a litany of Kirk’s past statements they consider insulting, racist, and out of line with Scripture. That, they say, should also color how the country recounts and remembers his legacy.

“I agree (we need to) lament over his unfortunate, senseless and I’ll go so far as saying demonic murder,” said Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas. “We can all identify with a wife losing her husband and children losing their father.”

But, McKissic added, “we cannot overlook the fact that his remarks about race are unfortunate and reprehensible.”

Kirk’s critics point to several statements the activist made over the years including a comment he made while discussing crime on his radio show in 2023: In urban America, he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.”

That same year, Kirk said four prominent Black women who supported affirmative action—including former first lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—“do not have the brain processing power” to be taken seriously and “had to go steal a white person’s spot.”

Separately, a news story published last year quotes Kirk as saying Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake” because it ushered in a “permanent DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) “bureaucracy.” While discussing DEI programs another time, he said he wanted a “cookie-cutter” pilot and not someone named “LaQueesha James.”

After the assassination, the Southern Baptist Convention released a statement of lament and a call for justice: Christians are “rightly grateful for Charlie Kirk’s public witness to Christ,” pro-life causes, and “a host of other moral issues.” Kirk, who founded the youth organization Turning Point USA, went onto college campuses, set up a table, and debated with students on a range of hot-button issues, including gender and sexuality.

“We rightly appreciate the profound impact Charlie Kirk has had on our young people, inspiring them to live with bold conviction and take righteous action,” said the statement, which listed leaders of various SBC entities as signatories.

But the SBC did not mention any areas of disagreement. McKissic, whose church loosened ties with the denomination in recent years, said that in 2009, the SBC passed a resolution applauding the electoral victory of former president Barack Obama while also criticizing some of his policies. He criticized the “double standard” on X, saying, “Along with the unanimously agreed upon lament, … why can’t you mention the areas of disagreement?” One SBC-affiliated pastor who has done that from the pulpit, though, has suffered backlash.

The most widely circulated criticisms of Kirk have come from progressive voices within the traditional Black church, which has historically spoken out on social and racial issues. Howard-John Wesley, senior pastor of Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, said in a sermon at his church that the activist “did not deserve to be assassinated.” But at the same time, Wesley said he was “overwhelmed” seeing the US flag at half-staff and honoring a man who had “spent all of his life sowing seeds of division and hate into this land.”

“How you die does not redeem how you lived,” the Baptist pastor said in a passionate sermon which received applause from the congregation. His statements have since made the rounds on social media, as have similar pulpit statements by other prominent Black pastors, including Atlanta’s Jamal Bryant and Frederick D. Haynes III, the senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.

Others have taken a more subdued tone. The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the largest Pentecostal denomination in the US, said in a public statement that comments on Kirk’s death “from individual leaders that do not reflect love, healing, and compassion” do not represent its official position.

“Even in moments of disagreement or division, the Church must stand as an agent of healing, a beacon of light and reconciliation. Our denomination’s voice is one of compassion, not condemnation,” said J. Drew Sheard, COGIC’s presiding bishop. Meanwhile, Patrick L. Wooden Sr., a COGIC bishop who oversees churches in three East Coast states, is encouraging people to do their own research into Kirk instead of listening to sound bites.

“Many times, some of those voices that you trust—they’re just simply not telling you the truth,” Wooden said in a video posted on his church’s YouTube page while recounting how Kirk had penned a supportive foreword for a book written by his son-in-law, John Amanchukwu. “He said this … about a Black man,” Wooden noted after reading the foreword. “That doesn’t sound like a racist to me.”

A subset of Black Christians say that they acknowledge Kirk has made racially harmful statements but that emphasizing it so quickly in the aftermath of his assassination also sends the wrong message.

“I’m disappointed in both sides and how they’ve responded,” Justin Giboney, a Black minister who leads a Christian civic organization called the And Campaign, told the rapper Lecrae on a podcast episode released this week. “Even if you look at it from the center-left of the church, I think we missed an opportunity, because one of the biggest parts of moral clarity is rightly ordering and prioritizing things.”

An honest discussion about Kirk and his statements needs to be had, Giboney said, but “the number one lesson the church should have wanted people to get out of this was that this was tragic, wicked, and it never should have happened. A lot of people on the left said that, but then they said ‘but’ real quick” so they can frame the narrative around his life.

Giboney concluded, “The problem is that it got very tribal.”

- More from Haleluya Hadero

News

A Sudden Death: Voddie Baucham, Who Warned the Church of Fault Lines

Kate Shellnutt

Known for confronting critical theory, moral relativism, and secular ideologies, Baucham died a month into leading a new seminary in Florida.

Photo courtesy of Voddie Baucham / Edits by CT

Popular Reformed speaker and author Voddie Baucham Jr. died suddenly after suffering a medical emergency on Thursday. He was 56.

Throughout his ministry career, Baucham appealed to the authority of Scripture while speaking of clashes between Christianity and secular worldviews around social justice, critical race theory, moral relativism, and religious tolerance. The father of nine advocated home education and family discipleship.

After serving nearly a decade in Zambia, Baucham was just a month into his first semester as president of Founders Seminary in Cape Coral, Florida, when he died. In a video with Founders Ministries president Tom Ascol, Baucham said he was excited to be “training men with sharp minds, warm hearts, and steel spines” in the new program.

Founders Ministries announced his death Thursday evening. The ministry asked for prayer for his family and quoted Psalm 116:15, which says, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (ESV).

I hoped never to have to make this post. Pray for the Bauchams. A warrior has died. https://t.co/4p9vjEzhfK
— Tom Ascol @tomascol (@tomascol) September 25, 2025

Baucham had undergone quadruple bypass heart surgery in 2021, flying from Africa back to the US for urgent treatment for heart failure. At the time, he said he was “in the final stages of a catastrophic event, and within an hour or so of death.”

After his death, leaders across Reformed and Southern Baptist ministries grieved online. Ligonier Ministries, G3 Ministries, Westminster Theological Seminary, the Center for Baptist Leadership, Doug Wilson’s Canon Press, Answers in Genesis CEO Ken Ham, and The Gospel Coalition all posted tributes.

“Voddie was a Reformed preacher who loved the truth. But note what you see in his sermon videos: tears. He had a soft heart. He loved his hearers. He knew the gospel’s power,” wrote author and professor Owen Strachan.

In his speaking and in books like Fault Lines, By What Standard?,and It’s Not Like Being Black, Baucham challenged Christians to resist cultural assimilation and defend biblical convictions in the public square. “The culture doesn’t dictate truth,” he frequently emphasized. “The gospel dictates truth.” In Family Driven Faith and Family Shepherds, he described Christian parents’ responsibility to disciple their kids. He stressed the importance of husbands and fathers.

Baucham’s message grew even more determined in the past decade as progressive Christianity, racial justice, and LGBTQ movements continued to swell. He argued that social justice was not interchangeable with biblical justice and that modern ideology around racism positioned it as a systemic issue rather than sin within the human heart.

Baucham wasn’t raised in Christianity and often spoke of God finding him when he wasn’t even searching. His mother, Frances, was a teenager when he was born in California in 1969. His young parents married quickly and briefly, but his father left by the time he was a toddler.

Baucham spent almost all of his childhood as an only child, living in south-central Los Angeles. His mother was hardworking and no-nonsense but also a Zen Buddhist who prayed regularly at home. When Baucham was 12, he and his mom moved to South Carolina to live with his uncle, a Marine who had served in Vietnam. It was the first time he could remember having a man in the house.

After attending high school in Texas, Baucham aspired to attend the Air Force Academy but ended up going to New Mexico State University to play football. On the campus in Las Cruces, Baucham heard the gospel for the first time as a college freshman.

A leader with Campus Crusade for Christ, Steve Morgan, walked him through reading the Bible and answered his questions about God and sin. Within a few weeks, Baucham came to faith while crying on the floor of the locker room.

The next year, he transferred to Rice University in Houston and played football there with a towel saying “PHIL. 4:13” tucked into his pants. He preached on Sundays at a local church that several players attended. “I go for God in everything I do,” Baucham said, already a licensed Baptist minister as a college sophomore. “That includes football.”

The young preacher met and married Bridget Wilson the summer before his junior year, and they soon welcomed their first child. He ended up transferring to Houston Baptist University and joining a Southern Baptist church to get a scholarship. He wrote in his book Fault Lines that he asked the registrar two questions: “1) What is a Southern Baptist church? and 2) Where do I find a black one?”

Baucham went on to study at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and speak at several Southern Baptist schools and state conventions. Inspired in part by Promise Keepers’ calls for racial reconciliation and New Testament verses on Christian unity, Baucham put away the “Afrocentric T-shirts” he wore in colleges, stopped seeking out only Black churches, and started serving in spaces where he was in the minority.

Baucham taught and pastored at several Baptist churches in Texas and beyond. In his first book in 2004, The Ever-Loving Truth, he wrote that “diversity is not a biblical mandate. Nor is it realistic.” A CT review of it that year said such an assertion was surprising to see from an African American author.

Committed to homeschooling his growing family, Baucham also spoke out against Christians sending their kids to government-run schools. He called on Southern Baptists to leave public schools and to investigate whether local school districts promoted homosexuality.

Baucham planted Grace Family Baptist Church in the Houston suburbs in 2006. That year, he also visited Africa for the first time, staying with fellow Reformed Baptist pastor Conrad Mbewe during a conference.

Baucham visited another half-dozen times before moving to Lusaka, Zambia, with his wife and seven youngest kids in 2015 to help launch Africa Christian University. He served as the founding dean and a divinity school lecturer at the university for nine years before returning to the US last December.

In addition to taking on his role at Founders Seminary, Baucham led Wrath and Grace, a media ministry “confronting and creating culture for Christ,” and continued to speak at church events. He had scheduled a tour in Canada in October.

Baucham leaves behind his wife, nine children, and several grandchildren. His oldest daughter, Jasmine Holmes, is also a Christian writer and educator.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Ideas

Why Many Black Christians Reject the Evangelical and Mainline Labels

Jessica Janvier

The history of a prominent church pastored by MLK in Alabama shows the reason African Americans often don’t embrace either term.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

(This is the third in a series. Here are the first and second articles).

Americans know a lot about Martin Luther King Jr., but the evangelical legacy of the church he pastored in Montgomery, Alabama, is a lesser-told story.

Like many African American churches, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (now Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church) grew from the evangelical tradition of the antebellum era. Yet the congregation’s history and development reflect the Black church’s complicated relationship with the movement.

For the third installment of this series, I wanted to write about why many Black churches with evangelical roots and beliefs don’t identify with the label today. I’ll be exploring that question through the story of Dexter, which has played a seminal role in American history.

The roots of the influential congregation date back to an enslaved preacher named Caesar Blackwell, who, during the Second Great Awakening, drew large crowds by preaching the gospel. At that time, spiritual life in Montgomery reflected the religious landscape of the country before the Civil War. The city had fervent revivals, a passion for evangelism, and Christian communities focused on spreading the message of the Cross.

Often, these practices crossed the color line. The number of Baptists in the city, for example, grew in part because of revival meetings that brought together white and Black people. Some interracial mission work emanated from the conviction that everyone was a sinner in need of God’s grace and saving redemption. But at the same time, Black people (and a growing number of Christians among them) were living under the bondage of slavery and racial oppression.

Dexter, for its part, began in Montgomery’s First Baptist Church, a white congregation that opened its doors to Black converts swayed by evangelical preaching before the start of the war. When Black congregants grew numerous enough to form their own congregation, they met with supervision in the basement of the church and, for the first time, elected their own leaders.

After the Civil War, newly emancipated slaves were encouraged by the 13th and 14th amendments and anticipated that old marks of inferiority, such as segregated church seating and white paternalism, would dissolve.

However, when leading postbellum theologians and white church leaders doubled down on racial hierarchy, a growing number of Black Christians left racially mixed congregations and formed their own churches. Among them were the Black congregants of First Baptist Church. In 1867, they established the first independent Black Baptist church in Montgomery. Then about ten years later, some members split off and formed Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The congregation soon selected Charles Octavius Boothe, a prominent and influential preacher, as its first pastor.

Boothe, born as a slave, was representative of the devout Black Baptist community around him as well as the leaders who shepherded Dexter in the decades to follow. He first encountered the gospel through his family, including his grandmother, whom white and Black people alike sought out for prayer due to her fervent spiritual life. Boothe’s family life, however, was interrupted when he was abruptly sold to a white man at the age of six.

Evangelical passion for sharing the gospel came in tandem with the harsh realities of slavery. Still, the true “gospel story,” Boothe said, “bound me to it with cords which nothing has been able to break.”

When the Civil War ended, Boothe dived into ministry as a part of his newfound freedom and became an ordained minister. This period presented an opportunity for the Black church to lead the African American community in establishing its own institutions, embracing racial uplift and planting churches that had all the marks of evangelical faith. Boothe joined with other newly independent Black Baptists and formed a convention that planted churches and sent missionaries throughout the war-torn South and abroad, both to share the gospel and to do works of charity.

After a short tenure as the head of Dexter, Boothe left to pastor another church and began serving as the president of Selma University. Dexter continued its “evangelical ministry” into the 20th century, church historian Zelia Evans said. But over time, the church’s theological scope widened with the advent of the Social Gospel.

The 20th century brought on fierce debates between theological modernists (who were often aligned with the Social Gospel) and fundamentalists. Those disagreements culminated in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, which ushered in a wave of denominational splits between the two camps. But for the Black church, things were more complicated. Black Christians saw both groups had something valuable to offer.

Fundamentalists like Dwight L. Moody sustained their passion for evangelism and their concerns for doctrinal faithfulness. But they were not as concerned with the bleak reality Black people faced in the post-Reconstruction South. Their disengaged response to the rise of Jim Crow laws and the uptick in racialized violence, supported by a segment of white theologians, was distasteful and hypocritical. As a result, a significant number of Black churches rejected the racial politics played by many fundamentalists while supporting the movement’s doctrinal opposition to theological liberalism.

Many of Dexter Avenue Baptist’s early 20th-century ministers attended Virginia Union University, a popular training spot for Black preachers that exposed students to the Social Gospel. When they entered ministry, some pastors—such as Robert Judkins and those who immediately came after him—advocated for racial equality while maintaining their evangelical orientation. They upheld the authority of Scripture and were bold about preaching the gospel, sending out evangelists and missionaries at home and abroad.

When the Civil Rights movement began to pick up around the middle of the century, the church was drawn further into the Social Gospel. Leaders like Vernon Johns and Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized America needed to overcome its centuries-long racial caste system. In their sermons, they never contested Dexter’s doctrinal commitments. However, they made it clear that orthodox beliefs alone would not improve their predicament as oppressed people. Black Christians, as a result, directly confronted racial injustices (including through a prominent boycott organized at the church).

As white evangelicals separated themselves from the fundamentalists in the mid-century, leading evangelicals like Carl Henry did disavow fundamentalists’ inability to call out the ills of society. But not everyone got on that train. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) rejected invitations from Black clergy to participate in civil rights marches or direct action campaigns. Meanwhile, the National Council of Churches, a predominantly mainline ecumenical body that currently includes some Black denominations, took them up on the offer. The result was that white evangelicals missed out on participating in Black Christian history during one of its most defining moments.

For many African American believers, the NAE’s approach to evangelical Christianity did not fully capture the ideals of faithfulness. Evangelicalism, as portrayed by those who proudly carried its name, strove for intellectual orthodoxy and a passion for evangelizing the world, but it only timidly applied that same faith toward social issues. Over time, organizations like the National Black Evangelical Association emerged to fill the void. But for the most part, African American Christians never came to embrace evangelical as a self-descriptive title.

In the decades following the Civil Rights Movement, evangelicalism’s association with political conservatism has not done much to convince the Black church to reassert its evangelical roots. Nor have the developments of new theological movements, such as Black liberation theology and womanism, that have created often unspoken factions within some major Black denominations. Nonetheless, studies, such as Marla Frederick’s Between Sundays, show that though many (if not most) Black laypeople do not identify as evangelicals, they embrace the authority of the Bible and the tenets of the wider evangelical tradition.

Today in Montgomery, the antebellum roots of the evangelical tradition still show at Dexter Avenue Baptist, which holds services every week. The church is affiliated with the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a denomination that emphasizes social justice and estimates its membership at 2.5 million.

The congregation did not make a representative available for an interview on its current-day activities. Its public-facing materials show an embrace of the “Romans Road” form of evangelism, faithfulness to the Scriptures, and Christ-centered charity work. Still, the modern-day descriptor of evangelical isn’t always a useful label for congregations that see racial equity as an aspect of gospel fidelity. The term may describe the church’s roots. But the contemporary understanding of the label in the US doesn’t describe its present.

Jessica Janvier is an academic whose focus crosses the intersections of African American religious history and church history. She teaches at Meachum School of Haymanot and works in the Intercultural Studies Department at Columbia International University.

- More from Jessica Janvier

News

Pastor Abducted in Nigeria Amid Escalating Kidnapping Crisis

Emmanuel Nwachukwu

UPDATE: Armed gangs said Audu Issa James died while in captivity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Emmanuel Nwachukwu

Key Updates

October 14, 2025

Family Learns of the Death of Pastor Audu Issa James.
September 26, 2025

Pastor Abducted in Nigeria Amid Escalating Kidnapping Crisis

October 14, 2025

James’s family learned that Audu Issa James died during the night on September 9. Theophilus said the bandits informed the family through a negotiator nearly a month later after the pastor’s death. The kidnappers claimed he went to sleep and didn’t wake up.

“He was diabetic and probably died from the pain of captivity and his underlying health issues,” Theophilus said. The bandits buried James at an unknown location. James’s family has sought police help, but Theophilus told CT they are unwilling to help.

“There is no closure for us,” he said. “Our only consolation is that his death was somehow peaceful.”

September 26, 2025

After dinner on August 27, pastor Audu Issa James bid his wife, Beshi, and two of his children good night. He then went to bed. By 11 p.m., barking dogs woke him.

Four gunmen stormed Ekati village in Kwara State in north-central Nigeria and made their way to the parsonage. James resisted, but they proved too strong. The bandits demanded the money of Evangelical Church Winning All Ekati, but James didn’t have it. They tied his hands, covered his eyes, and took him away.

James, 65, is only one among at least 145 Christian clergy in Nigeria kidnapped from 2015 to 2025. The Open Doors World Watch List recorded at least 2,830 Christians kidnapped in Nigeria in 2024, “far more than other countries in the same year.”

Kidnappers were also active in neighboring states: They snatched pastor Ayodeji Akesinro from his home in Upenme in the southern state of Ondo a day after James. Another group kidnapped pastor Friday Adehi of the Christian Evangelical Fellowship of Nigeria in Itobe, a city in the north-central state of Kogi, after a church service on August 24.

“We don’t even know for sure what [the kidnappers] want,” said Gabriel Dunia, Roman Catholic bishop of Auchi. Dunia’s comments came after gunmen attacked Immaculate Conception Minor Seminary in Ivhianokpodi, Nigeria, on July 10, killing a security officer and abducting three seminarians. “We see a growing pattern of attacks directed against Christian communities and institutions,” he said.

In June, armed bandits disrupted the peace in Patigi. Local hunters tried to fend them off. Their homemade guns were no match for the bandits’ sophisticated rifles. The bandits killed at least 15 hunters, then abducted farmers and traders.

“It had been going on for a little long before it happened to my dad,” James’s 34-year-old son Theophilus said.

Trouble also festered within. Young men in their late teens and 20s bragged about earning money by telling kidnappers about rich villagers.

Ten days before the kidnapping, James warned the youth in his church to avoid this dangerous path. The church also took an offering for some of its projects, drawing kidnappers’ attention and making him the next target.

James’s abductors contacted his family on the morning of August 28, demanding a ransom of 100 million naira ($67,000 USD)—an impossible sum for villagers.

The kidnappers halved their demand after hours of negotiation. James’s family bargained for a payment of 5 million naira ($3,000 USD) to get him back, which the bandits settled for on September 7. The family sold all they could and borrowed from friends. On September 9, family friends took the money to a bush path in Ekati. Then the abductors changed their mind and insisted on receiving the balance of 45 million naira ($30,000 USD).

“They refused to release him. Baba is still with them,” Theophilus told CT. “Our mother has been heartbroken.”

Kidnappers have also killed hostages after payment of ransoms. In July, kidnappers killed at least 35 people they abducted from a village in northern Zamfara state despite receiving a ransom of 1 million naira ($665 USD) for their release.

The government said the killers would be brought to justice, but it has made no arrests.

Theophilus remains wary of another phone call: “We will have to tell them [the kidnappers] we don’t have any money again. We have sold all we own.”

Kidnappings escalated in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta region in the early 2000s when militants began abducting oil workers for ransom and political gain. The crime has since spread nationwide, with bandits kidnapping and ransoming people as a means of making money.

According to research by SBM Intelligence, a Nigerian-based geopolitical research firm, at least 4,700 people were abducted and 2.56 billion naira ($1.7 million USD) ransoms paid between July 2024 and June 2025. SBM Intelligence blamed the Nigerian government for failing to dismantle bandit networks and address the root causes of kidnappings.

Extremist groups such as Boko Haram and Fulani militants also kidnap Christians in remote areas. Their chilling intent, according to missionary Isaac Agada, is to sow fear and stop missionary efforts.

“Once they discover that you are a Christian or this is a Christian community, you become the major target,” Agada said. “And if you’re a missionary or a pastor, then you are a more special focus.”

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom urged Nigeria to address the “impunity” enjoyed by perpetrators and address Nigeria’s problem of Muslim-Christian violence.

More than two years into Nigerian president Bola Tinubu’s tenure, critics say the government is not doing enough to deliver on promises of enhanced security.

“The [government’s] inability to effectively gather and utilise intelligence has contributed to the current security challenges facing the country,” said Opialu Fabian, a security consultant.

A 2022 law banned ransom payments for kidnapped persons and imposed a minimum 15-year jail term for violators. Abduction is punishable by death if victims die or life imprisonment if they don’t.

However, the country’s centralized police system weakens implementation. The Nigeria Police Force (NPF) remains under federal control. Governors lack authority over the NPF due to concerns about potential abuse for political purposes.

In early September, Governor Dauda Lawal of Zamfara State decried the national government’s inability to fight the bandits. The governor responded to an incident in Shinkafi local government area, where bandits had attacked and security forces had refused to act without federal approval.

“We cannot do anything beyond our powers,” he said. “If today I have the power to give orders to the security agencies, I can assure you, we will end banditry in Zamfara within two months.”

Gideon Para-Mallam, a Christian missionary based in Plateau state, told CT state governors should be empowered to tackle banditry in their states. Para-Mallam argued the failure of the Nigerian government to admit Christian persecution has contributed to why the government hasn’t implemented structural changes to the security apparatus.

“The worst is the denial of the reality of pastors being persecuted,” Para-Mallam said. “There is very little sympathy towards these pastors.”

- More from Emmanuel Nwachukwu

Books

Review

The Liturgy of American Charisma

Paul Matzko

Historian Molly Worthen studies dynamic leaders, eager followers, and their shared efforts to “consecrate a new reality.”

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

At a 2016 rally in South Carolina, future president Donald Trump ended his stump speech with an unusual appeal: “It’s all morphed into one big beautiful package. And the package is called you, but maybe it’s in the form of me. The beautiful package that we’re going to do. And you’re going to be so proud. And you’re going to be so happy. And you’re going to win again.”

Trump’s strange crescendo supplies one of the closing anecdotes in historian Molly Worthen’s absorbing new book, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. This could appear odd at first glance given that Trump, despite abounding with charisma, might not seem like an obvious example of Worthen’s core subject, charisma’s spiritual power. But Trump and his adherents illustrate something essential about her definition of charisma as something fundamentally relational.

A charismatic leader offers followers an opportunity to feel connected to a grander narrative, which imparts a sense of greater importance to their lives. As Worthen observes, they believe they have surrendered to something larger than themselves, gaining entry into “an alternative world in which followers find that they have secret knowledge, supernatural promise, and special status as heroes.” While this relationship grants the charismatic leader great power or prestige, it remains fundamentally an exchange, “a liturgical act” in which the two parties “consecrate a new reality.”

Yet this charismatic relationship is simultaneously powerful and brittle. Drawing on the thought of sociologist Max Weber, who analyzed the relationship between charisma and authority, Worthen notes that charismatic leaders must ultimately prove the authenticity of their divine mission through the flourishing of their followers. “If they do not fare well,” she writes, then the leader “is obviously not the master sent by the gods.” Thus, charisma is “an alloy of authoritarian and democratic impulses, strong enough to overturn social orders, yet somehow so weak that it melts away if followers cease to honor it.”

To return to the charisma of Donald Trump, his personal story often follows this kind of framing. His gilded wealth and political success supposedly confirm that he lives a #blessed life, from his victories over bankruptcy to what he said was the divine redirection of an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania. He then invites his followers to participate in his blessing, joining his grand struggle to make America great again while pouring out his anointing on their own finances, communities, and aspirations.

Yet the spell can break if the promise goes unfulfilled. If, say, Trump’s tariff and immigration policies were to hamper American prosperity or tear apart families and communities, followers might come to reject him as a false prophet.

Charisma, then, depends on a leader’s ability to craft a message in tune with the anxieties and insecurities of a particular place and time. In the case of America over the last half century, many of those core anxieties have arisen in response to secularization, which Worthen defines as the process by which traditional institutions—in both religion and politics—lose influence over our lives.

We see these patterns in declining rates of church attendance, waning trust in political parties, and networks of civic and communal participation giving way to habits of “bowling alone” (to use Robert Putnam’s memorable phrase). But none of this saps people of their fundamental need for spiritual succor. Secularization merely opens a void for charismatic entrepreneurs, who offer to fill it with a force of personality and a grand narrative.

This is hardly new. For example, in the 1830s, the “burned-over district” of Western New York witnessed waves of religious revivalism, democratic revolution, and economic transformation. With established authorities and institutions swept aside, a range of treasure –hunters, millenarian prophets, and metaphysical entrepreneurs rushed in to take their place.

The resulting upheaval birthed groups as diverse as Joseph Smith’s Mormons, the Millerites (named after lay Baptist preacher William Miller, who predicted that Jesus would return to earth around 1843), and the spiritualists poking at the veil between the living and the dead. Despite substantial differences in theology and practice, these groups united around their rejection of Puritan theological conventions and their embrace of common-sense realism—a belief, in Worthen’s words, that “humans perceive the world directly and reliably with their senses.”

This kind of confidence naturally fuels a measure of skepticism toward the claims of expertise and the weight of educational credentials. As David Reese, a New York City medical doctor in the 1830s, put it, charlatans

have only to decry all existing systems, denounce all the learning of the schools, condemn and revile all prevalent opinions on any and every subject, and they will find here a great multitude of disciples, who will eagerly listen to their oracular teachings, and drink in wisdom and knowledge with the most marvelous credulity.

This sensibility should not strike modern readers as particularly alien. One might as well be discussing contemporary suspicions of university-produced expertise or calls to “Make America Healthy Again” fueled by widespread distrust of the medical establishment.

The similarity between anti-elite sentiments in the 1830s and the 2020s illustrates another of Worthen’s core contentions:, that charisma is cyclical. Charismatics see–saw from generation to generation between those inclined to tear down existing social institutions and those seeking “metaphysical conquest” or mastery over social anxiety through a kind of spiritual scientism. While tracing this crooked path, Worthen constructs a taxonomy (at times overly rigid) of the five types of charismatic leaders: prophets, conquerors, agitators, experts, and gurus. Each type may respond differently to the challenges of a particular era, but they do so in ways that echo across the generations.

Consider for instance, what fundamentally unites the 19th-century occultist “investigator” who explored the afterlife at a seance and the 21st-century podcast host who proclaims the liberating power of “do[ing] your own research.” Both figures embody a rejection of expertise, differing only in the specific authorities they spurn, whether Puritan divines or pointy-headed academics with worthless pieces of paper on their walls.

Worthen makes these kinds of surprising connections throughout the book. She does not draw neat lines between sacred and secular modes of charisma. After all, they flow from similar ideas or impulses.

For instance, Worthen observes common tendencies within the various countercultural movements of the 1960s–1970s, lumping together charismatics as ostensibly dissimilar as left-wing activist Angela Davis, end-times writer Hal Lindsey, Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, and faith-healing preacher Kathryn Kuhlman. Each movement, Worthen writes, “acted upon a deeper … emotional substrate” rooted in disenchantment with established authority and a desire for “personal experiences that felt real and important when so much around them seemed phony and pointless.” Worthen, in other words, invites readers to consider the fundamental spirit of a given age, not merely how it manifests in particular figures or movements.

Along the way, she conveys both the breadth and the depth of the American religious tradition, from Shakers and spiritualists to Mormons and mesmerists. Familiar figures like Puritan dissenter Anne Hutchinson appear alongside more unfamiliar names, like Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, whom Worthen calls the “Kongolese Joan of Arc.” Or Benjamin Lay, the abolitionist Quaker radical and “holy fool” who shocked his Philadelphia congregation by plunging a sword into a Bible filled with fake blood to dramatize God’s judgment against slaveholders. At times, readers might lose Worthen’s through line amid a welter of anecdotes, but her vignettes are vividly told.

Worthen takes the figures often relegated to the periphery (if they are mentioned at all), like Lay and Kimpa Vita, and places them back in the main line of the American religious tradition. In this way, she avoids the survivorship bias that crops up in certain historical accounts that assume a movement’s numerical growth and chronological persistence are reliable measures of its significance.

If Worthen’s book contains one major omission, it pertains to the role of technology in cultivating and amplifying charisma. Spellbound includes ample references to charismatic use of mass media technology, especially radio, from the likes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles Coughlin, and Rush Limbaugh. Yet the book provides little substantive analysis of this phenomenon. For Worthen, “new media technology has always shaped the expression of American charisma, but it has never been the marrow.”

This may represent a needed corrective to ritual invocations of Marshall McLuhan, for whom “the medium is the message.” And yet it is not mere happenstance that many of the charismatic entrepreneurs Worthen so ably describes were also pioneers of new mass media, from Robert “Fighting Bob” Shuler and Aimee Semple McPherson in Roaring ’20s Los Angeles to televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in 1980s Virginia.

New technologies and communications have allowed a dizzyingly diverse array of charismatic insurgents to leapfrog incumbent denominations and stale institutions. Whether it is tales of fortune-finding magical seer stones, the social media lamentations of Donald Trump, or visions of the imminent return of Christ, all stories—even the prophetic ones—rely on a means of distribution to break through the noise.

This does not diminish Worthen’s accomplishment with this book. She offers a compelling corrective to the blander species of religious history produced for a churchly audience, which has a habit of sanitizing the past, stripping it down to a dutiful trudge from forefather through forefather that eventually arrives at the front steps of the First Baptist (or Methodist or Presbyterian) Church down the street. Worthen restores a sense of wildness to the history of Christianity in America, inviting the reader to glimpse the charismatic bonds that entice and enchant us all.

Paul Matzko is a historian specializing in the intersection of politics, religion, and technology in modern America. He is the author of The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took On the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement.

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Culture

Christian Gamers Find Their People

Ann Byle

Video-game developers, speculative fiction authors, and table-top enthusiasts got together to play at an expo for “Christian storytellers in popular culture.”

Illustration by Kate Petrik / Source Images: Getty

Chris Skaggs remembers a day a decade ago when he presented a workshop on Christian gaming at the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) International Christian Media Convention. Not one person showed up. Plus, he says he got shade about his interest and work in the industry.

This past year, Skaggs spoke again at NRB’s media convention on the same topic. The room was packed. And no shade this time.

Skaggs is founder and chief operating officer of Soma Games, which makes adventure and interactive fiction titles such as The Lost Legends of Redwall series andThe Reluctant Redemption of Verity Lux. He’s also founder and executive director of the Imladris community, a nonprofit professional trade organization for game developers who are Christians.

The Christian gaming industry includes not just video games but also speculative fiction presented in game form, cosplay, film (a natural sideline for game companies), board games, comics, graphic novels, and other media. Once viewed with suspicion as the kingdom of the Devil—think the panic over Dungeons & Dragons—gaming now has a reputation as a valid artistic medium among many Christians, whether for educational, entertainment, or evangelistic purposes.

Nowhere was this more evident than at the first-ever Realm Makers Expo, a “fan convention featuring Christian storytellers impacting popular culture” held this summer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Do you love science fiction and fantasy, but also make your spiritual growth a high priority?” asks the Realm Makers website. “Have you found that you’re a little too weird for the usual church crowd, but don’t exactly fit in with the sci-fi convention set either? Now there’s a place for YOU to find community with people a lot like yourself!”

Though the larger expo is new, Realm Makers has been hosting a writing conference for speculative fiction authors since 2013. Back then, the conference hosted about 60 people. This year’s combined conference and expo drew about 1,100 and featured workshops on developing platforms and negotiating contracts alongside workshops like Fight Scenes 101 and Comics: From Concept to Creation.

This year’s expo also intentionally coincided with the Christian Game Developers Conference (CGDC), which brought about 120 more people to Grand Rapids. Founded in 2002, the first CGDC drew about 30 people; its numbers have ranged between 30 and 70 from then on, so this year’s attendance represents a big jump. In total, there are about 2,500 in the CGDC community, “from missionaries in the field with an idea for a game to those working at the highest, AAA level of game development, from hobbyists to professionals, from those making only Bible-based games to those who are Christians in the broader industry,” said board president Brock Henderson.

Henderson is head of game development at Salvation Poem Project, the Christian media company behind the feature film Light of the World and the video game Clayfire, slated to debut in 2027. Clayfire offers an immersive fantasy world inspired by the Gospel of John, in which players “encounter saving grace and bring light back to the darkness—all while inspiring [players] to live their own lives for Jesus.”

With 3.2 billion gamers in the world, Henderson said, “the digital space is a whole new place to take the gospel to.”

A fraction of those 3.5 billion gamers showed up at Realm Makers Expo, where wizards, elves, various Star Wars characters, hobbits, and lots of folks wearing lace-up boots, belts, and bustiers wandered the aisles perusing dozens of booths and tables featuring game developers, spec fiction authors and publishers, universities with gaming majors, photographers, creators of dragon jewelry, and more. The conference’s Costume Parade showcased hobbits, wizards, Jedi warriors, aliens, and creatures of all varieties.

As I traversed the exhibition hall, it became clear how common it is for a given franchise to span books, films, and games, creating multimedia universes for kids (and adults) to explore. One corner booth showcased S. D. Smith’s Green Ember book series for middle-grade readers, in which rabbit heroes fight to save rabbit-kind. Two screens encouraged kids and adults (this author included, who couldn’t remember which buttons did what and started to get motion sick) to grab a handset and start playing Helmer in the Dragon Tomb, an interactive game that will release the same time as the book by the same name. It’s the 12th title in the Green Ember universe.

“Green Ember books have always been stories kids take with them,” said Smith. “They create art, play games in the yard, make up adventures. The game is another way for kids to access the story. We also hope it’s a gateway for kids who love video games to step easily into the reading world.”

Then there’s Lightgliders, an educational, virtual world for kids ages 6–12 created by Derek Holser and Zach Fay. In this case, what began as a digital product now has accompanying books. Bryce and the Lost Pearl, the first volume of seven, relates the origin stories of teenagers who come to alternative world Glideon from different places and times. “We moved into the books because of the opportunity we were given to expand the story. We call it Narnia for the digital age,” said Fay.

Today, the Lightgliders universe includes character creation, games, puzzles, virtual events, journaling, and Bible-based weekly activities, plus lessons and reflections emailed to parents or group leaders. Over 100,000 kids in over 100 countries have subscribed over the decade Lightgliders has been in existence. Holser said that “the game is designed as a way to redeem screen time for kids.”

Perhaps the most well-known of these franchises is Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga (first released starting in 2008 and re-released in 2020), now an animated television series by the same name. The Wingfeather Saga: Adventures in Glipwood video game, published by Angel Studios and developed by Soma Games, was released on the Roblox platform in March 2023.

“When it opened, the game was in the top five of Roblox games,” said Chris Wall, executive producer of the TV series. “It was important for us to help families and fans extend their experience with the Wingfeather world. With an interactive game, players can really get into it and wrestle with the same challenges the world presents.”

It wasn’t just video-book-game franchises for kids represented at Realm Makers Expo. Products that appeal to all ages were part of the scene as well. The Jake Muller Adventures, an audio-drama series complete with zombies and spiritual truths, appeals to older listeners: “The enemy comes to deceive, steal, and kill. Jake’s weapons are the whole armor of God.” Allies of Majesty, a role-playing game “of biblical proportions,” promises custom avatars, complete with a companion app.

Joe Bragg is creator of The Christian Board Gamers Podcast and the 4,600-member Christian Board Gamers Facebook community, where users comment on games they’ve played, gloat about purchases, and talk about new games they’re creating. The top games of 2024, according to Bragg, are, from fifth to first place, Draft & Write Records, Skyrise, Ezra and Nehemiah, River of Gold, and Forges of Ravenshire. He bases his ratings on everything from ease of play to “table presence.”

Bragg is also behind the organizations Meek Heroes Gaming and Love Thy Nerd, which “exists to be the love of Jesus to nerds and nerd culture.” “Gaming is continuing to grow,” he said, pointing to new collaborations (including with Realm Makers) and new products on the horizon such as “testimonial games,” speaking into real-life concerns like the joys and struggles of marriage.

“I want to start partnering with ministries that explore the game space. … [We can] help them test the waters,” said Bragg. “We feel like we’re entering a new season. God is lining up things such as ministries, investors, and collaborations. And there are warmer receptions to games that share faith.” With mobile game The Serpent & the Seed, for example, the creators hope that its players will “discover the supreme source of hope that is contained within the Bible’s pages.”

Yet it’s not all fun and games in the industry. Wingfeather producer Wall has experienced video games as an ongoing challenge for some faith communities. The church, he worries, has “given up on recognizing that the creation of art is an act of the kingdom of God. There is discomfort with mystery, the unexplainable and unresolved.”

Skaggs of Soma Games and Imladris said, “The church is way, way behind. It’s a great embarrassment to the church that I found ten Christian universities and colleges in this country with a gaming program with a total of about 400 kids, but one secular school down the street from my house has 600 students.”

America, he said, leads the world in gaming and is making a huge cultural impact. But in Christian gaming? No.

“Games will change the culture for better or worse, just like film did in the last century,” said Skaggs. “Yet in the church context it’s considered distasteful to game. There is grant money for other Christian art forms, but they say no to games. There is a barrier to this media.”

That barrier is multilevel. First there’s the often-misplaced desire to imbue gaming with what Skaggs calls “evangetainment,” making sure games teach Christian principles at the expense of their design. A few players may want that dynamic, “but it will never go mainstream and never influence the world for Christ,” he said. “We can’t slip a fish symbol on it and call it good.”

Christian game developers also need to produce more games more quickly—and that takes cash: “We need to make thousands, but the chokepoint is money.”

Skaggs encourages those who work in the secular gaming industry to consider adding churches to their virtual landscapes: “There are churches everywhere in every town. And what about spiritual people in your game? … There should be an underlying assumption in your work that Christians are there.”

Most fundamentally, “we need to be letting players know they are loved and valued in the church,” said Skaggs. “The huge thing Christians need to get is that gaming isn’t just a toy for kids. It’s remarkably social. … That component is reshaping everything.”

Gaming isn’t just sitting in dark basements; it’s meeting online and in real life, connecting both from consoles and around tables. It’s gathering together at a place like Realm Makers, where elves hug hobbits and swords are only for show, where the vibe, overwhelmingly, is “I’ve found my people.”

Ann Byle is a writer living in West Michigan. She is the author of Chicken Scratch: Lessons on Living Creatively from a Flock of Hens.

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Culture

Revival of the Nerds

Jaclyn S. Parrish

On Twitch streams and in Discord chats, “nerd culture” ministers reach out to a demographic long misunderstood by the church.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: Getty, Adobe Firefly

A cloaked figure scurries across the screen, swords flashing. In a lower corner of the display, we see a shot of the gamer running the show. His audience appears as a string of text messages above his head, sporting handles like “tinysnorlax1” and “MarneusThrax.” The gamer is playing for a live audience—a typical day on the streaming platform Twitch, where an average of more than 2.24 million viewers concurrently watch streamers either chat live or play games like Path of Exile, League of Legends, or Minecraft.

But this is different. This is ministry.

The gamer is Dustin Phillips, associate and youth pastor of a small church in Tyler, Texas. Along with ministering to his in-person congregation, Philips also streams from his church office with the wholehearted support of his congregation. To folks like tinysnorlax1, he’s PastorDoostyn.

Right now, he’s playing the ninja-themed action-adventure game Sekiro and explaining how his viewers can learn more about his faith. A chat member has inquired where to get started in learning about Christianity, and PastorDoostyn has advised the person to read through the Gospel of John. “Look at me!” he chuckles over his headset as his character dodges assailants. “I’m just running around … trying not to die and telling people about Jesus.”

And he’s not the only one.

PastorDoostyn is part of a growing phenomenon we might call nerd-culture ministry. Like sports-ministry practitioners, these believers seek to offer the love of Christ on the common ground of shared interests. But instead of soccer goals, it’s The Elder Scrolls. And unlike athletes, this demographic often feels ostracized by the Christian community. “Because of the things that they enjoy,” PastorDoostyn explained, “they feel rejected by the church.”

A growing community of Christian nerds is working to change that.

For Christian streamers like PastorDoostyn, Twitch isn’t just a platform to publish content—it’s a place to build community. AkiAndFam, a family team of streamers (husband, wife, daughter, and son), have been streaming games like Destiny and Final Fantasy since 2019 with the goal to “create a home for people who don’t have one.” They’re honest and real online, both goofing off and sharing about their struggles.

The authenticity of the family’s interactions has created a vulnerable space for viewers too. During one stream, an anonymous chat member expressed recent suicidal thoughts. Aki (dad) and Momma Peach (mom) immediately stopped the game and focused their full attention on the participant, taking time to encourage the person and point the way toward appropriate mental health resources. The viewer left the stream encouraged and remains a thriving member of Aki’s “fam” today.

Nerd-culture ministry requires mental, emotional, and social endurance, not to mention a hefty dose of discernment. “Pastors know this,” explained Christian gamer JateLIVE, who works as a freelancer and streams 40-plus hours a week, “but I don’t think they know it at the level that I do, because I am playing games and talking to people all day.” Streaming requires nonstop conversation—talking with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people at once—on topics that range from Star Wars to mental health, all while trying to simultaneously scale mountains, battle sorcerers, and survive on alien planets.

Not all nerd-culture ministers are streamers. Charles Sadnick is the director of Beneath the Tangles, an anime ministry which “bridges the divide between anime fans and the Christian church.” The ministry’s blog, video, and podcast content celebrates the Japanese style of art and animation, making connections between the gospel and works such as Attack on Titan or Fullmetal Alchemist.

They also host a lively online community in the asynchronous chat platform Discord and even maintain several digital small groups that gather for Scripture study, prayer, and mutual encouragement. “We don’t want to be your church,” Sadnick explained, “but we also realize that we may be the strongest and most frequent Christian influence in your life.”

Then there’s Love Thy Nerd (LTN), which the website says “exists to be the love of Jesus to nerds and nerd culture.” In addition to maintaining a content platform and Discord community, LTN also holds regular mission trips to gaming conventions like Gen Con, where the ministry shows up not just to witness but to work.

“One of the really easy things we can do is come in and staff the booth[s], run demos, and help sell [game developers’] products,” said LTN president Bubba Stallcup. He believes these volunteer hours are essential to sharing the gospel with the gaming community. “We need to earn the right to speak this really heavy truth of the love of Jesus, … and they’re going to be far more accepting … if they know that I care about the things they care about.”

“Earning the right,” as Stallcup called it, is essential to evangelism in nerd culture. Church hurt, he said, is the largest challenge his ministry faces: “We as the church have at best marginalized and at worst demonized nerds and nerd culture.”

Some nerd-culture ministers think the fix for that marginalization is to start fresh. Matt Souza pastors XP Church, a fully online “church for gamers.” Like PastorDoostyn, Souza used to serve an in-person congregation in his offline hours. But after several years of pastoring by day and streaming by night, he hit a wall. Gospel presentations would take place in his chat, and he’d direct viewers to join local churches—only to hear someone had been turned away for showing up in a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) shirt. “If these gamers can’t find a church that they can go to,” Souza remembered thinking, “I’ll make one for them.”

XP Church isn’t alone. Lux Digital Church is “a digital church expression … created by gamers, for gamers.” Lead pastor Mark Lutz and his team started Lux in hopes of building something to “offer a lot of people who’ve been driven from the church.”

In Frankfurt, Germany, Philipp Bonin and his team have planted Nerch, which holds services both in person and online. Not unlike America’s “Western heritage” churches, Nerch is a plant designed to serve a particular subculture—but attendees are nerds, not cowboys.

The rhythms of XP Church, Lux, and Nerch are familiar: music, preaching, small groups, outreach. But sermons follow the style of a Twitch stream—viewers drop their comments and questions in the chat, and the preacher responds in real time. Small groups observe Bible study and prayer, then play games together afterward, much like an in-person group sticking around for small talk. Lux invites its email subscribers to play D&D with the same posture in which brick-and-mortar congregations hold church softball leagues, and Nerch does outreach at local cosplay conventions.

For many nerds, though, real-world worship still appeals, and Steve Valdez at SavePoint Ministries is here for them. SavePoint steps in where streamers leave off, connecting nerds with churches in their geographic areas. People who’ve had spiritual conversations in Twitch chats can connect with SavePoint and find congregations that are prepared to meet them at the door (and maybe compliment their Star Trek shirts on the way to the coffee bar).

Valdez reports that not being taken seriously by churches is his biggest hurdle, without question. Even when not contending with pastors who “still think that video games are for kids and that Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons are witchcraft,” his calls frequently get brushed off to a youth minister despite the fact that he’s seeking a church home for a married, 30-something father of two.

Not all churches are so leery of their nerdy neighbors, though. Giles Hash of Disciple Gaming, for instance, works with local churches to set up tabletop role-playing game nights on their campuses, not only for youth but also for young adults.

Nerd-culture ministry has grown deep and wide enough that practitioners are beginning to meet in person for training and mutual encouragement. The Nerd Culture Ministry Summit (now entering its third year) gathers ministers like Hash, Lutz, Stallcup, and JATELive for several days of keynote presentations, breakout groups, and late-night D&D sessions.

Larger, more established parachurch organizations are beginning to pick up nerd-culture ministry tactics as well. The Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board held its first virtual reality (VR) mission trip, connecting an American church with an online community in Japan, with plans for in-person follow-ups to come. Jason Martin is a video game designer who volunteers with Youth With A Mission; his current projects include a cozy birdwatching game entitled Look to the Birds, inspired by Matthew 6:26.

Cru is regularly using gaming outreach methods at the college level, and its Jesus Film Project is making inroads into VR thanks to the help of Alexander Lyons, a digital-environment artist and 3D asset creator whose work is being used on platforms such as Roblox and VRChat. For Lyons, the colossal popularity of gaming makes such ministries a veritable necessity: “If gaming is the culture, that’s where we, the church, ought to go!”

And while many lifelong nerds are aging into their 30s and 40s, gaming ministry is still a lively phenomenon among teenagers and students. Brad Hickey, director of gaming at Dordt University, not only runs the campus Gaming Guild but also teaches courses such as “Engaging the World of Gaming,” which equips students to pursue their love of games in concert with their love of Christ. John Merritt, head esports coach at Warner University, is building this Christian university’s esports program with expressly redemptive intent. “To the gamers I’m a gamer,” he said, “that I might save some.” Satellite Gaming is running the ministry playbook in esports, putting on afterschool gaming groups in partnership with public schools.

For these younger players, the fallout from the Satanic Panic is lore, not lived experience. Satellite Gaming’s executive director, Jamie Harris, rarely even bothers using the word nerd with the students he serves, simply because the term isn’t meaningful for them. When the entire football team plays Fortnite, it’s hard to think of gamers as a target for scorn (or swirlies).

For adult nerds, though, past pain remains a barrier to the gospel. “Turn or burn!” protestors are fewer and farther between at Gen Con, but attendees remember when there were more. Nerd-culture ministers are familiar with this pain because they carry it as well. “Church was not fun,” recalls Momma Peach of AkiAndFam. “It was really painful at times. It was really hard. And I walked away from church for a very, very long time.”

In this context, explained Stallcup, a gospel presentation often starts with an apology for how the church has failed nerds and a commitment to do and be better. “It may not be my fault,” said Stallcup, “but it is my problem.”

Jaclyn S. Parrish is a geek and gamer who has written for The Gospel Coalition, Christ and Pop Culture, and Love Thy Nerd. She is working on a book about the theology of fun.

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News

Where Refugees Were Seen as an Opportunity from God

Ken Chitwood

In Sweden, a church continues to advocate evangelism of Muslims, despite criticism from all sides.

Asylum seekers arrive at a train station in Malmo, Sweden.

Johan Nilsson/AFP via Getty Images

Joakim Lundqvist never thought he would be pastor to hundreds of people named Muhammad.

And yet, in the wake of Europe’s influx of asylum seekers from conflict zones in Muslim-majority countries including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, he and his church, Livets Ord (Word of Life) in Uppsala, Sweden, saw their own dramatic increase in newcomers—many of them Muslim.

And many of them interested to learn about Jesus.

In the last ten years, Lundqvist said Word of Life has seen more than 900 Muslims convert to Christianity and 450 graduate from the charismatic megachurch’s Bible school.

Founded in 1983 by Ulf Ekman, the church has grown into a significant force within the charismatic movement, with thousands of members in Uppsala and international centers around Europe and in Russia, the Middle East, and Asia.

As debates around immigration in Europe have resurged in recent days, rhetoric remains emotionally charged across the continent. Populist voices continue to frame migrants—particularly Muslims—as a threat to European identity. Mainstream political leaders urge more nuanced dialogue with an appreciation for multiculturalism and respect for the tradition of human rights.

Lundqvist takes a different approach. He says the whole situation might just be “God doing a new thing.”

Though he personally feels there have been issues with Europe’s immigration and integration systems, he told CT that he also believes “inside every problem is a possibility. And the possibility here is the mass conversion of Muslims in Europe.”

A decade after a record 1.3 million migrants arrived in Europe in 2015, churches like Lundqvist’s have undergone massive changes, many of them welcoming asylum seekers and new converts from countries where missionary efforts have often been frustrated.

Lundqvist—who now serves at a Word of Life church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and another in Dallas, Texas, but continues to preach regularly in Uppsala—told CT that when migrant and refugee arrivals to the EU were at their peak, his pastoral team received a “prophetic word.”

Rather than complain about what they saw as “liberal immigration laws,” they felt called to embrace a “new wave of missions,” seeing “an opportunity for the Gospel” in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. Sharing the vision with their members, Lundqvist and other pastors got to work. No strategy was disregarded, no method not given a chance. They put up “Refugees Welcome” signs and hosted parties where they made gospel presentations. They engaged in street evangelism, targeting newcomers and the neighborhoods where they lived.

They also pioneered brazen mission initiatives in Muslim-majority countries. In one particularly controversial move, Lundqvist announced in July 2016 that the church would use drones to drop thousands of “pill box”-sized Bibles over territory controlled by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The tactic was criticized because of drones’ association with violent military intervention, but Word of Life’s mission pastor defended the move, comparing it to Bible smuggling during the heights of the Cold War.

The efforts, for all the controversy they courted, were effective, according to Lundqvist. “We found it much easier to share Jesus with Muslims than with everyday Swedes,” the pastor said, “to the point that 75 percent of those who accept Christ at our church are former Muslims.”

Across Europe, church leaders and missiologists say a notable number of Muslim migrants and refugees have embraced Christianity over the last decade. Explanations of the conversions run the gambit: some attribute it all to God, some to cynical attempts to game the asylum-system, and some to sociological factors, like the need to belong.

Reliable statistics are hard to come by. According to Duane Alexander Miller, an Anglican priest and scholar of contextualization and conversion at the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Madrid, some estimates may be exaggerated. Nevertheless, the numbers suggest something significant is happening.

“We are seeing more conversions from Islam to Christianity in the last 60 years than in all the years since the birth of Islam,” Miller said.

Even so, Miller urges caution. Not only are there questions around the reliability of the numbers cited and conversions in the opposite direction, but there are also other challenges, he says.

Discipleship, spiritual growth, and church rendition are often difficult. Attracting a large number of converts at a church is no guarantee that those people will continue in the faith in five, 10, or 50 years.

“Getting a person to convert or be baptized can be, relatively speaking, quite easy,” Miller said.

The strangeness of the new community, combined with pressures from family and friends, can take a toll on new converts. To Christians tempted to celebrate when they see big numbers or hear stories like Word of Life’s, Miller cautions, “It’s not a time to pat ourselves on the back; the work has just begun.”

Some scholars have also been critical of the conversions, pointing out that while Word of Life and churches like it present themselves as welcoming, they can also cultivate anti-Muslim attitudes.

Emma Sundström, a doctoral student in theology at Uppsala University, studies the conversion narratives—testimonies—of Muslims who have become Lutherans.

The testimonies are not all the same, she said, but vary a good bit by context. In East Africa, for example, converts often talk about the power of Christianity, miraculous healings, and how they saw prayers answered. In Europe, she heard far less about the supernatural.

“You get this sort of different view that conversion is about church being a place where they felt welcomed and found a home,” she said.

That is sometimes paired with aggressive criticism of Islam. This makes sense, Sundström said, as converts want to make it clear why they changed from one religion to another. On the other hand, it can also be because of the language coming from churches like Word of Life. She worries the social implications of rhetoric that makes it seem like all Muslims are bad.

Word of Life has faced criticism for this. The church’s founder once declared Islam an “anti-religion” filled with violence and hatred. Though Muslims are monotheists, he claimed it is nothing like Christianity and Judaism. Ekman even said that Quran has no concept of peace or forgiveness—claims that Islamic experts and Muslims point out is simply untrue.

The church’s publishing arm has also released a book portraying Islam as a global threat and raising alarms that, because of declining birthrates, European Christians going to be replaced.

Word of Life has distanced itself from the publications, saying the church does not endorse every line it prints, and the congregation does not all agree on every issue.

Word of Life’s conversions have also been called into question, even by migration authorities arguing that conversions may be more about cultural assimilation or procuring asylum than genuine religious transformation.

As Word of Life continues its work in Uppsala, it remains a testament to the complexities and challenges of religious outreach in a multicultural Europe.

Miller defends the church and others like it. He said Christians working to convert Muslims is one of the complexities of multiculturalism, but people of faith should not have to shirk from the religious responsibility to evangelize.

“I’m not a polemicist, but Christians should, in good conscience, have the freedom to claim that Christianity is better than Islam,” said Miller. “They should do what they feel called to. It’s good to have a variety of approaches.”

The church maintains their mission is rooted in love. Lundqvist said Christians must be up front with what they believe, even if it offends. At the same time, he believes love will overcome any issues people might have with him or the Uppsala church.

“I think that’s the road,” Lundqvist said. “Be full of love for God and for these people. Then, even controversial elements will be less of a problem.”

- More from Ken Chitwood

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