Small Evangelical College Stands Out for Diversity

David Roach

Houston’s College of Biblical Studies, where three-quarters of students are Black or Hispanic, finds ministry partners in DTS and Tony Evans.

Courtesy of the College of Biblical Studies

In an era when conservative evangelicalism and multiethnic urban ministry increasingly find themselves in tension, the College of Biblical Studies (CBS) is combining them.

The school averages 500 undergraduate students per semester online and across three campuses: Houston, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. As its bylaws require, the student body is strikingly diverse.

In Houston—a majority-minority city—about half of the students are Black, a quarter Hispanic, and a quarter other ethnicities. The Indianapolis campus also has 50 percent Black students and 25 percent of other ethnicities, but the remaining quarter of its students are Burmese.

The church is “not one single group of people,” said Chanelle Coleman, a 2021 CBS graduate and current student resource advocate at the college. CBS “does a great job of embodying what the kingdom of God and the body of Christ should look like.”

Self-described by the college’s doctrinal statement as inerrantist, noncharismatic, and premillennial, CBS’s commitment to ethnic diversity and training urban students has yielded ministry collaboration with Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) and author Tony Evans.

CBS offers bachelor’s degrees in biblical counseling, biblical studies, organizational leadership, and women’s ministry. A partnership with DTS, whose Houston extension shares a campus with CBS, allows students to earn a master of arts with one additional year of study. A program launching this spring will let students earn a DTS master of theology degree with two additional years of study.

The academic program is supplemented with discipleship. Juniors and seniors participate in a spiritual formation program utilizing materials written by Tony Evans. This year, faculty and staff also are beginning a discipleship program using Evans’s Kingdom Man and Kingdom Woman books. President Bill Blocker said CBS is “looking to deepen” its relations with Evans.

George Floyd’s 2020 funeral in Houston put the college’s philosophy to the test in its own city. Students discussed the situation at length, Blocker remembers. One student said Jesus came from heaven to the needy and held authorities accountable, and he argued Christians should demonstrate for justice following Floyd’s death. Another countered with Romans 13, which demands that Christians respect government authorities. Demonstrating at the funeral would make the students “seem like trouble-causers.”

Together they devised a way forward. The group went to the funeral to pray for demonstrators on both sides of the conflict. Impressed by their thoughtful approach, a nephew of Floyd’s talked with them and later enrolled as a student at CBS.

CBS was founded in 1976 as Houston Bible and Vocational Institute. Initially, classes were held at KHBC, a Christian radio station in Houston. Quickly, the school turned its focus to biblical and theological training, which led to its current name. CBS moved to its present two-acre campus in 1994. Indianapolis and Fort Wayne campuses were added in 2019 when CBS merged with Indiana’s Crossroads Bible College.

CBS is part of an uptick in mergers and partnerships among smaller colleges over the past few years, as schools combat enrollment declines and financial pressure. According to data from the Chronicle of Higher Education, of the 435 four-year private colleges with under 1,000 students, half are Christian colleges.

From its inception, CBS confronted the lack of conservative theological training for Black ministers. In the era of Jim Crow, many theologically conservative colleges and seminaries excluded Black students. That contributed, for example, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s enrollment at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania for his seminary training and Boston University for his PhD.

Yet liberal schools didn’t deliver the conservative doctrine valued by historically Black churches. Later, when conservative schools began admitting Black and brown students, some failed to contextualize the training for an urban setting.

CBS sought the best of both worlds—conservative theology and contextualization for the inner city. Most of the college’s students can’t pay tuition, so CBS is funded largely by donors, whom Blocker must sell on that vision.

“There’s only one thing that can transform the heart and regulate the mind, and that’s the Word of God,” said Blocker. When you allow [potential donors] to understand the authority of Scripture and how it impacts [students’] lives, who would not invest in that?”

As CBS approaches its 50th birthday, new tensions confront it. While many students come from urban and multiethnic churches, some professors and administrators and administrators attend larger evangelical churches. Blocker, for instance, is a member of Second Baptist Church in Houston, a Southern Baptist megachurch. CBS also affirms traditional evangelical stances, including complementarianism in gender roles and a pro-life view of abortion.

Though CBS doesn’t emphasize the label evangelical, observers have wondered whether that brand of instruction can persist among urban students in an era when some Christians of color have rejected evangelicalism as inconsistent with their worldview.

So far it has. Political science professor Marvin McNeese’s classroom demonstrates how. In teaching American politics, he encounters diverse student views. Some students—usually older African Americans—say the Founding Fathers “were racists and therefore could not have been Christians,” McNeese said. Other students stick up for the Founding Fathers and claim America is a Christian nation.

On this and other issues, opinions tend to vary along racial lines. Most Black students lean Democratic in their politics, McNeese said, while Hispanic students trend Republican. The political affiliations of white students vary. The key to unity among students is getting them to judge all opinions—political and otherwise—by the teachings of Scripture.

“We bring them together in the classroom studying the Scriptures,” McNeese said. “The light of the Scriptures, as well as just being able to recognize that we’re all in the same boat before God, [does] the lion’s share of the work.”

Coleman, a Black single mother of two, said her classes at CBS were a “safe space” because everyone was committed to learning, honoring God, and “keeping Christ at the forefront.” She loved seeing grandmothers and men recently released from prison study together.

“Just because you’re having those debates and those discussions doesn’t mean that you don’t love your brother and sister,” she said. “Sometimes it’s very much trying to gain an understanding and to find the common ground.”

The balance between evangelical theology and ethnic diversity may seem like it shouldn’t work. But it does. Blocker calls the college’s unique relational chemistry “grace relations.” It was on display recently in a men’s discipleship group led by the president.

A student living in the city asked the group to celebrate with him because he and his girlfriend were moving into an apartment together. Another said that was wrong. The group examined Scripture together, concluding cohabitation before marriage was immoral. Then they called the student’s girlfriend and led her to faith in Christ on speakerphone. The couple didn’t live together until they were married six months later—with two members of the discipleship group as groomsmen.

“These guys have crossed racial, ethnic, cultural lines,” Blocker said, “and you can’t pull them apart one from another.”

David Roach is a freelance reporter for CT and pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama.

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News

Decline of Christianity Shows No Signs of Stopping

Daniel Silliman

New study projects that the religious identity in the US will drop below 50 percent by 2070.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Pew Research Center isn’t ruling out a future religious revival in America.

But given the country’s steady trends away from faith affiliation, experts don’t know what it would look like.

Analyzing surveys about religious identity and religious “switching” going back to 1972 and trying to project the American religious landscape out to the year 2070, they can’t even say what demographic signs might indicate a coming swell of conversions.

“We’ve never seen it, and we don’t have the data to model a religious reversal,” Pew senior researcher Stephanie Kramer told CT. “There are some who say that revival never happens in an advanced economy. After secularization, you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. But we don’t know that. We just don’t have the data.”

The data they do have, from 50 years of research by the General Social Survey and Pew’s own survey of 15,000 adults in 2019, indicates the current trend is inexorable. People are giving up on Christianity. They will continue to do so. And if you’re trying to predict the future religious landscape in America, according to Pew, the question is not whether Christianity will decline. It’s how fast and how far.

In a new study out today, Pew projects that in 2070, Christians will likely make up less than half the US population.

Currently, 64 percent of people say they are Christian, but nearly a third of those raised Christian eventually switch to “none” or “nothing in particular,” while only about 20 percent of those raised without religion become Christian. If that ratio of switching continues at a steady pace, then in roughly half a century, only about 46 percent of Americans will identify as Christian.

If the rate of switching continues to accelerate, as it has since the 1990s, the percent calling themselves Christians will drop to 35.

The rate of change could also slow down. “Trends don’t tend to continue forever,” Kramer said, “and there’s probably a core of Christians who are committed and never going anywhere.” If the future takes that path, Pew predicts slightly less than 40 percent of the population will say they are Christian in 2070.

“While the scenarios in this report vary in the extent of religious disaffiliation they project,” the study says, “they all show Christians continuing to shrink as a share of the U.S. population, even under the counterfactual assumption that all switching came to a complete stop in 2020.”

Few of the people leaving Christianity appear to be joining other religions. In America today, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and all non-Christian faiths account for about 6 percent of the population. There isn’t enough information for researchers to isolate differences between these groups. They project that, overall, non-Christian faiths will double in America by 2070, mostly by having children and raising them in the religion.

The dramatic change, according to Pew, will come with the “nones.” People who say they don’t have a religious identity—though many still embrace some Christian beliefs and engage in various spiritual practices—are projected to rise from about 30 percent today to as much as 52 percent in 50 years.

“Modeling the Future of Religion in America” is a new enterprise for Pew, which has previously focused on landscaping religion in America, not trying to predict where things will go. The picture the study paints, though, is not that different from what Pew and other religion researchers have been saying in recent years.

Public Religion Research Institute founder Robert P. Jones wrote an obituary for “white Christian America” in 2019, based on changing racial demographics and trends in religious disaffiliation.

Gallup started regularly giving people the option of “none” on a religious preference question in 2008. The number of people giving that answer immediately started increasing. In 2012, Pew reported that nones were “on the rise,” prompting scores of analyses on the phenomenon.

Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University, wrote in his 2021 book The Nones that there was a time when the religiously unaffiliated appeared to be “no more than a rounding error.” But then they “zoomed past 10 percent of the population by 1996, crossed the 15 percent threshold a decade later, and managed to reach 20 percent by 2014.” When he downloaded the raw data from the General Social Survey in 2018, the unaffiliated roughly equaled Catholics and evangelicals in size.

Pew’s new report does, however, clearly identify the mechanism driving the change. By isolating different demographic factors, it shows that declining Christian birthrates and non-Christian immigrants are not significant causes.

The main reason is switching—Christians deciding they are not Christians anymore. This mostly happens to people between the ages of 15 and 29, according to the report, with an additional 7 percent of Christians disaffiliating from the faith after the age of 30.

“Switching out has been happening steadily, which didn’t used to happen,” Kramer told CT. “It used to be that if you met someone on the street, and their father and mother were Christian, then they were Christian too. That’s not always true anymore. For about a third of people, that’s not true anymore.”

Pew does not have a theory about why more people are switching. The research center focuses on the data, leaving explanations to others.

Some, building on the work of the late sociologist Rodney Stark, have argued it’s caused by denominations growing more liberal. According to this argument, if a church emphasizes all the same issues and concerns as left-leaning political activists, then there’s no reason to do the extra work of belonging to a church. They point to shrinking mainline churches. The United Church of Christ, the first mainline denomination to embrace same-sex marriage, lost more than 40 percent of its members in the 17 years after that decision, for example.

Others have connected the trend to conservative politics, arguing evangelical association with Republicans is driving young people away from church. The rise of the exvangelical moment and the uptick in the number of nones in some election years is cited as evidence.

It could be that both Left and Right are having this effect, but Kramer cautions that the trend in the US appears similar to what researchers have seen in other countries, where the political landscape looks completely different. Perhaps it’s not the decisions of churches driving the change, but broader social developments.

Many sociologists, going back to Max Weber, have argued that secularization is inevitable as society advances. Globalization, industrialization, and technology make it harder and harder for people to believe. The biggest change that’s visible today, though, isn’t really a rapid change in beliefs but affiliations. Atheists remain in the single digits in the US. But while many nones affirm the existence of God and even pray, they don’t want to be connected to a religious group or identity.

“We don’t know what all is driving this,” Kramer said. “There are some theories that make sense, but we don’t know.”

As the researchers charted the possible paths for the future, they tried to keep in mind what they didn’t know and the data they didn’t have. Extrapolating from trends doesn’t account for the kind of dramatic events that shape generations.

“It is possible,” the report says, “that events outside the model—such as war, economic depression, climate crisis, changing immigration patterns or religious innovation—could reverse the reverse current religious switching trends.”

Revival could happen. There’s just nothing in the current data that indicates it will.

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Theology

What Happens When You Ask Thousands of Evangelical Women About Sex

Ericka Andersen

Sheila Gregoire’s research has Christians across the spectrum correcting harmful assumptions and bringing new attention to women’s pleasure in marriage.

Source Images: Envato Elements / LWA / Getty

When it was published last year, Sheila Gregoire’s marriage book, The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended, came as a stark contrast to what many Christians learned from the church about sex and marriage.

Drawing from her own research, including a survey of 22,000 Christian women, the Canadian author affirms that sexual pleasure is for women too—and chronicles the damage done to women, men, and their relationships when people operate on distorted views of sex in marriage.

Gregoire’s critique of earlier iterations of Christian resources has put some on the defensive, but for many, it’s a refreshing change in approach. Women from Reformed believers to progressive stalwarts have found solace and healing in her teachings—and some pastors, professors, and counselors are also beginning to shift their approach as a result of her findings.

“I think Sheila’s work brings a much-needed balance to conservative church circles,” said Craig Flack, a pastor from Findlay, Ohio, who has used The Great Sex Rescue in his pre- and post-marital counseling. “So many works largely ignore female pleasure, and then people wonder why women may not enjoy intimacy.”

Gregoire targets the idea that men “need” sex and their wives are there to provide it—a premise she sees in books like Love and Respect, The Act of Marriage, and Every Man’s Battle.

Her survey showed that Christian women were taught that boys would push their boundaries and they were responsible for keeping them from going too far. In marriage, they saw their role being to never deprive their husbands of sex and that doing so kept their husbands from using porn. Christian women in Gregoire’s survey were less likely to enjoy sex, talk openly with their husbands about their sexual desires, or have a partner who prioritized their sexual pleasure if they believed those teachings.

Though Flack doesn’t agree with “every area in the book,” he said he’s changed the way he counsels couples to incorporate directly addressing the wife’s pleasure, real intimacy, and “how it brings mutual sexual joy.”

The Great Sex Rescue took off largely based on word-of-mouth recommendations, personal testimonies, and Gregoire’s own discussion on Twitter. Gregoire said she is encouraged to be making headway with individual pastors like Flack and Christian therapists, who have learned from her research and are incorporating her approach into their work with couples.

She has seen Christians from a variety of denominations unite against what she views as a misguided and male-focused view of sex that’s been preached or quietly accepted among evangelicals for years.

While other Christian authors have criticized purity culture teachings in general, Gregoire has deliberately named the teachers she believes are responsible for perpetuating harmful ideas about marital sex. “The only way to stop the hurt is to do this in public,” she said in an interview with CT. “And if those authors were truly committed to serving the sheep, they would welcome it.”

Fellow authors, though, say her quotes and presentations of their teachings come out of context. Focus on the Family (which published Emerson Eggerichs’s Love and Respect) released a statement saying Gregoire “has seriously misread and misjudged” the book. Shaunti Feldhahn, whom Gregoire mentions multiple times in her book, issued a statement saying that accusations against her were “inaccurate” and “calculated attacks.”

She previously told CT how even her early work is subject to her current criticism—she pulled old blog posts as a result of what she learned in her research and is committed to course-correcting with her new material.

Kevin Schulz, a pastor in the Mennonite Brethren (USMB), has purchased Gregoire’s “Honeymoon Course” for multiple couples. Gregoire’s work, he said, is “a much-needed counterpoint to the one-sided and biased church teaching” of the past.

Gregoire is committed to a Christian sexual ethic but identifies areas where she believes Scripture has been twisted to harm marriages, create pain for women, and perpetuate abuse.

For example, Matthew 5:28 says, “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” When young men are told that looking at a woman is lusting after her, Gregoire said, women become immediately objectified as sexual objects. “Is looking lusting?” asks Gregoire in her book. If the answer is “no,” she says, that changes a lot.

In her research and in response to the book, women recounted negative sexual experiences ranging from dissatisfaction and pain to abuse and trauma. Courtney Wright said reading The Great Sex Rescue opened her eyes to abuse in her former marriage of nine years, where she was coerced into sex, strangled, and treated “like a servant.”

“I’ve rediscovered my strength and courage to speak up,” Wright told CT.

Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, a coauthor of the book along with epidemiologist Joanna Sawatsky, recounted the horror stories from women like Wright, who suffered abuse only to defend it in their own heads or have their pastors respond, “Well, it’s technically not not allowed in the Bible.”

“The number of people who we talked to in these horrific situations where their husbands were addicted to porn, to the extent that they were forcing them to act out what they'd watch,” Lindenbach said in an interview. “And they would have Shaunti [Feldhahn] and [Emerson] Eggerichs and [Stephen] Arterburn’s words in their head, saying, ‘But if I can meet his needs, then maybe he'll be able to stop.’”

Some Christian leaders, however, think her pointed concerns are worth response and amplification. Sean McDowell is a theologically conservative speaker and author of a new book on sexuality for teens, Chasing Love. McDowell has advocated for Gregoire’s work, even inviting her to speak in one of his classes at Biola University.

“I think they should certainly engage her ideas because I think she’s raising some fair questions and these are consequential issues,” said McDowell of those whom Gregoire criticizes.

McDowell said he was drawn to her work because it challenged him to think about marital sex in a new way, and he respects how Gregoire always points readers back to Scripture.

“So much of the teaching we’ve had on sexuality is male-centric,” McDowell said. “I think we’ve adopted that within the church uncritically.”

Along with Gregoire’s work, McDowell sees positive movement in the evangelical world when it comes to sexual teaching. His new book is part of Lifeway’s renewed True Love Waits movement.

Gregoire’s corrective is part of a wave of authors who adhere to a traditional Christian sexual ethic but are offering a critique or alternative to purity culture, including Talking Back to Purity Culture author Rachel Welcher, as well as Christopher Yuan, Sam Allberry, and Nancy Pearcey.

Christian therapists and counselors are also working against damaging or abusive sexual relationships in marriage. Julie Hilton, a licensed social worker in Georgia, often recommends The Great Sex Rescue to clients.

“They have described feeling validated, understood, and even angry,” Hilton told CT. “I believe her work is helping women heal and encouraging healthy marriages.”

Halie Howells, a therapist in Illinois, calls Gregoire’s approach “monumental,” and one of the only resources of its kind. “She is providing new language, new expectations, and new connection for married couples while integrating faith,” Howells said.

This point of female arousal is nearly always missing or downplayed in Christian sex books, Gregoire asserts, while men’s sexual desire is the focus. “Your wife can be a methadone-like fix when your temperature is rising,” wrote Arterburn in a line Gregoire made infamous from Every Man’s Battle. She’s concerned that sentiments like these objectify women and ignore their own desires and pleasure in the relationship.

Gregoire’s survey found that Christian women report vaginismus, an involuntary muscle spasm, at twice the rate of the overall population. As many as 1 in 5 reported a condition that made penetration painful. Their findings suggest this may be due to the fact that Christian women who see sex as an obligation lose their sense of autonomy in sex and become more likely to force themselves into sex even if it’s painful.

When I put a call out for self-identified “theologically conservative” women who have benefitted from Gregoire’s work, my inbox was immediately flooded with hundreds of messages from women eager to share their stories. Complementarians and egalitarians alike have applauded Gregoire’s primary message that Christian couples have been misguided on the purpose and pleasures of sexual intimacy for both husband and wife.

“I think Sheila’s work validates what so many women feel and have felt for so many years but have been unable to articulate,” wrote one reader, Talia Bastien Reha. She said she appreciated how Gregoire’s work “points to the heart of Jesus.”

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News

Fuller Theological Seminary Names New President

Emily Belz

The seminary’s sixth leader, David Emmanuel Goatley, is an academic, pastor, and missions agency leader rooted in the Black church.

Incoming Fuller president David Emmanuel Goatley

Courtesy of Fuller Seminary

Fuller Theological Seminary, which until recently was the largest Protestant interdenominational seminary in the country, named Black church theologian and missions leader David Emmanuel Goatley its next president.

Goatley, who leaves a post at Duke Divinity School to begin in January, says he wants to counter the “partisan poison” he sees in American evangelicalism, and turn students’ eyes to the testimonies of the global church. And like presidents in higher education everywhere, he also faces the problem of declining enrollment.

He will be the first Black president at the 75-year-old institution. Outgoing president Mark Labberton said when he announced his departure last year that he hoped his replacement would be a woman or person of color.

Goatley has a Baptist background but is centered in the Black church. Ordained in the National Baptist Convention-USA, he pastored a Black Baptist church in Kentucky for nine years, then spent the next 20 years as CEO of a historic Black missions agency, Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society.

“There’s a certain representation that is important … The journey of which I am part matters,” Goatley told CT. “I am a Black person in the United States, which means some of my story has to do with discrimination and segregation and slavery, and all of that helps to give insight to how I handle myself and how I seek to handle creation and engage with other people.”

He added: “It also means something significant that Fuller Theological Seminary was able to take seriously the candidacy of a Black man. They did not explicitly or implicitly rule me out. I’ve had that happen to me before.”

As it has expanded programs for online and nontraditional students, Fuller emphasizes its ethnically diverse student body and aims to grow its global reach. At around 3,000 students, the historic California school is only outnumbered by Dallas Theological Seminary and Southern Baptist–affiliated institutions among Protestant seminaries. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is at the top of the list for enrollment, according to the Association of Theological Schools.

Fuller’s leadership the past 30 years has come from Presbyterian and Reformed traditions. Labberton, who was president for a decade, is ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Richard Mouw, a Reformed theologian, served as Fuller’s president for 20 years before that. The seminary has always described itself as evangelical, though it doesn’t fit into neat evangelical categories. It has allowed an LGBT student group on campus but also successfully defended in court its code of conduct for students, which includes a traditional Christian sex ethic.

Goatley, who spent time in 35 countries while leading the Lott Carey missions agency, thinks US seminaries can be limited to “a Euro-centered vision, or a Western North Atlantic vision of theology.”

“It’s not that that’s bad,” he said. “But there are other sheep that the Lord has. There are other voices. … I’m not saying we need to do away with European and Western North Atlantic insights and frameworks. What I’m saying is we don’t need to rely exclusively or primarily on that alone.”

He recalled being in Liberia on the eve of its civil war, going through checkpoints guarded by teenagers with guns but also seeing churches continuing to work faithfully through wartime.

“One of the challenges we have in the United States is to come to the realization that we are not the axis of the universe,” he said. “We are not the center of what God is doing. We need to … come alongside our siblings in other places of the world where God is working despite the challenges that people are experiencing.”

His own education at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary took place before the “conservative resurgence,” when he said “Southern and Fuller were more similar in temperament and theological trajectory.” That experience gave him intellectual rigor, he said, but it included an “over-reliance” on European-centric theology.

“Fortunately I was nurtured in a household and a church that had a commitment to missions, both nearby and globally, so we had glimpses of what God was doing other places,” he said. “My theological formation was not exclusively grounded in the institution where I got degreed.”

Jimmy Mellado, a Fuller board member and the CEO of Compassion International, said Goatley was chosen from about a thousand candidates, and that the board voted for him unanimously. Mellado sees Goatley as carrying forward a global vision for the school: “We’re not looking for a 180-degree turn here.”

The board appreciated that Goatley is a “holistic leader,” said Tom Lin, a Fuller board member and the head of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Goatley brought a background as a pastor, organization leader, missions agency leader, and academic.

“He’s going to lead ethnically diverse leaders in an ethnically diverse world,” Lin said. “I was one of the first nonwhite presidents of a large national evangelical organization, Jimmy [Mellado] and I share that. I understand the challenges Dr. Goatley will face. … People will want him to speak to particular issues in the Black church because he’s a Black leader, or assume that he’s going to lead it in a direction that’s this or that because of his ethnic background. We chose him because he’s an outstanding candidate.”

Lin added: “He holds dearly that the evangel that Jesus proclaimed is truly good news.”

Goatley does want a more positive gospel vision for US church leaders, who are in danger of a “partisan, politicized, polarized poison, that takes our eye off Jesus,” he said. “We have to work in that toxic environment without succumbing to the poison.”

The seminary, he acknowledged, will have to deal with more practical matters too like declining enrollment and making education affordable. He said the pipeline from churches to certain graduate programs “has burst.”

Seminaries without denominational ties, like Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, have suffered financially and seen enrollments drop. Fuller has similarly gone through financial turmoil and enrollment decline in recent years. Enrollment has dropped from about 4,000 in 2019 to 3,000 now.

Saddled with debt, Fuller closed some satellite campuses and put its historic campus in pricy Pasadena, California, up for sale in 2018, with the idea of moving to a less expensive area in Pomona. That would also have made it less expensive for students.

But in 2019 the school reversed course, citing high construction costs in California and “differences” with the city of Pasadena over the sale. It reduced some of its Pasadena footprint.

The school’s most recent tax documents show that it has trimmed down annual expenses by about $8 million since 2015 but has been operating in the red for some years, with a $14 million deficit in 2017.

Mellado said more recent financial news, which the latest 990s from 2019 don’t capture, is better: The seminary posted two years of revenues exceeding expenses, and the school is 85 percent to its goal of raising $150 million.

Goatley sees the cultural and financial task ahead: that Fuller will have to make the case for seminary education globally.

“The world needs good churches, churches need good pastors, organizations need good leaders,” he said. “We can help.”

Correction: This story has been updated with 2021 data on enrollment from the Association of Theological Schools.

- More from Emily Belz

Books

Review

Christian Celebrity Isn’t a Problem to Fix, But an Eye to Gouge Out

Jake Meador

Katelyn Beaty’s critique of evangelical fame-worship is wise but overly tame.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source Images: Envato Elements

There’s a scene in The Fellowship of the Ring in which Bilbo Baggins, the hero of the earlier book The Hobbit, has just received a small bit of counsel from his friend Gandalf the wizard. Gandalf tells Bilbo he needn’t attempt a task that would be challenging and quite likely deadly. And it makes Bilbo suspicious: “I have never known you to give me pleasant advice before,” he says. “As all your unpleasant advice has been good, I wonder if this advice is not bad.”

Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church

Katelyn Beaty (Author)

Brazos Press

208 pages

Though Bilbo turned out to be mistaken in this case, there is still a lesson in his words: There is such a thing as making a problem too easy. And there are times where that error can yield devastating consequences.

This thought came to mind while reading Katelyn Beaty’s book Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church. The book has much to admire. Beaty, a writer and former CT editor, is a keen observer of power dynamics within institutions and movements, for starters. She also is a good student of contemporary technological trends, with a well-developed understanding of how digital technology has transformed and exacerbated the problems of fame and celebrity both in the church and outside.

What’s more, I found her prudent counsel for how we might curb the worst excesses of celebrity to be wise and admirable. Her conversation partners in the final chapter are, if predictable, also wise: Henri Nouwen, Eugene Peterson, Andy Crouch, Dallas Willard.

Pulling punches

Yet for all its merits, I found the book to be ultimately too moderate in its critique. While Celebrities for Jesus is a wise book, it is also, for a certain type of evangelical, a relatively pleasant book, if I can borrow from Bilbo. As Beaty profiles the many cases of egregious moral failure and abuse of power by Christian celebrities ranging from Mark Driscoll to Ravi Zacharias to Bill Hybels, she consistently tries to keep the fact of evangelical celebrity separate from the abuse of evangelical celebrity, holding out hope that we can have one without the other. Effectively, she holds out hope that you can have the huge online platform, get the massive six-figure book deal, enjoy the luxurious mansion, and be okay as long as you recognize the dangers of celebrity and don’t abuse your power.

In one passage she writes,

Christian leaders should always ask whether their spending signals modesty or opulence—especially to those they are ministering to. The point here is not that private jets are always evil (although, on the whole, I’d argue their problems far outweigh their temporary conveniences). Or that nice meals, second homes, and expensive clothes are always and everywhere wrong. The point here is that all these things in our time signify lavish displays of wealth. To keep the worldly lure of money in check, Christian leaders should cultivate financial modesty—and ask others to hold them accountable to it.

There is a tension between discussing problems inherent to celebrity and problems dealing with the abuse of celebrity. Teasing the two apart is seldom easy. Yet it seemed like much of the book’s rhetorical firepower was fixed on the latter rather than the former. Thus there are points where Beaty’s analysis suggests that we might avoid the pitfalls of celebrity if only the celebrities themselves would cut back on ostentation and excess, instead adopting healthier habits (and even pursuing a kind of obscurity).

But this doesn’t altogether work, as the passage above illustrates: If you have a private jet, you are being opulent. There is not a modest way of buying a private jet or, to use another example Beaty offers in that chapter, a $2,000 purse. By refusing to just say no to these displays, Beaty shrinks back from saying the hard thing and gives readers an out from the problem she’s highlighting. By pulling her punches in this way, Beaty tames the force of her critique.

Yet the fuller, more assertive version of Beaty’s critique is precisely what American evangelicals need to hear today.

Think, for instance, of the seeker-sensitive movement, which fueled the rise of Christian celebrities like Robert Schuller, Hybels, Driscoll, and Carl Lentz, giving birth to modern evangelical celebrity culture as we know it. One could easily read that movement as an attempt to make the gospel intelligible to modern America. This is a noble task; indeed, it is the missionary imperative to which every Christian community is called.

And yet this missionary task must be taken up in a certain way. There is a distinction to be made between pursuing intelligibility and allowing a more chameleonic loss of all distinctiveness. And too often the evangelical world has fallen into the latter while seeking the former. To take the “attractional” movement as but one example, it so elevated the task of evangelization that theology, Christian ethics, and the church’s liturgical life were all considered, to varying degrees, dispensable. Provided that people were getting “saved,” virtually anything became justifiable.

And yet what exactly is salvation if not an encounter with God that transforms us by calling us to a life of discipleship and, relative to many of our peers, strangeness? This indifference to discipleship is perhaps why so many churchgoers—as many as a quarter to a third, according to estimates I’ve heard from pastors—stopped going to church once COVID-19 disrupted their churchgoing habit. It shouldn’t surprise us that the attractional movement appears to be paving the way for more wholesale capitulations to culture, as seen in the political capture common among both conservative and progressive evangelicals today, to say nothing of the graveyard of scandal-plagued churches and discredited leaders.

When I survey the wreckage of evangelical celebrity, I don’t see any reason for moderation. The seeker-sensitive movement and its natural descendant, online church, is the evangelical version of the eye that we must gouge out and cast into the fire before it condemns our entire movement to those flames. Yet Beaty seems hesitant to go there. Even as she ends the book she writes, “To be sure, screens are not inherently evil, nor are large churches, social media platforms, or charismatic personalities.”

But this is, again, too pleasant a thing to say to contemporary evangelicals. I don’t know of anyone arguing that screens are inherently evil, but I know of many people who seem understandably concerned about the ubiquity of screens in public worship. They’re worried, quite reasonably, that in a screen-addled society, we’re further eroding our ability to catechize and disciple Christians in an actually different, actually Christian way of life.

Moreover, given the utter failure of discipleship and catechesis that has marked evangelicalism for so long and is now so obvious, I see little reason to defend large churches or large social media platforms either. Large churches can centralize resources in enormously helpful ways, but then so can a well-run denomination. And a well-run denomination made up of hundreds of small churches will have greater immunity to celebrity problems, as well as being better set up for aiding people in Christian discipleship. If your church is larger than 500 people, it’s probably time to do a plant. If you’re spending enough time on social media to build a large platform, it’s probably time to leave.

Kill the lizard

The counsel Beaty offers, in short, seems to be that celebrity is basically intractable, and evangelicals just need to do a better job relating to it. And if that is the solution, then Beaty has written perhaps the best possible version of that book, with its realistic and sober-minded conclusions and its close discussion of the goods of friendship, obscurity, and a hidden life.

But when I consider the state of evangelicalism—and particularly the way that both the evangelical Right and Left have basically given up discipling their people against the established grains defined by Fox News, TikTok, Instagram, and a therapeutic culture more generally—I can’t help concluding that Beaty’s final chapter falls short in assessing how celebrity has deformed our churches and communities.

There is something about it which calls to mind a scene in C. S. Lewis’s novel The Great Divorce. In it, a ghost enters the outskirts of heaven with a small lizard on his shoulder, the lizard (basically) representing some past sin that keeps him from God. For several pages, the ghost and an angel debate whether killing the lizard is necessary. The ghost struggles to give the angel permission to kill it, but when he finally does, both he and the lizard are transformed into something so beautiful they look almost celestial. The ghost’s fear had been misplaced: He thought killing the lizard would kill him, when in reality the lizard itself was killing him.

To relate this back to Celebrities for Jesus: There are problems in calling for a prudential application of wisdom rather than wholesale transformation. But there are also larger problems that can only be resolved, or escaped, through more radical forms of repudiation. And from my perspective, Christian celebrity looks like a lizard we should kill rather than continue carrying around, however cautiously or reluctantly.

It’s possible I am wrong, of course, and that calling on Christian leaders to distance themselves from social media, break up their megachurches into smaller neighborhood parishes, and fully repudiate the lavish lifestyles of Hillsong preachers is asking too much. But when I survey the American church today, I see no reason to think celebrity of any sort should be preserved. And I see many reasons to think it’s leading us to hell.

What’s funny is I’m not sure Beaty disagrees. But because she seems to vacillate between “celebrity is salvageable if we’re wise” and “celebrity is dangerous and corrosive of Christian community,” I’m left wondering.

Jake Meador is editor in chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is the author of What Are Christians For?: Life Together at the End of the World.

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History

We’ve Sung ‘Amazing Grace’ for 250 Years. We’ve Only Just Begun.

Daniel Johnson

Why John Newton’s famous hymn is still so powerful after so long.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source Images: Envato Elements / Hymnary / Malik Skydsgaard / Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash

The hymn has known so many lives.

“Amazing Grace”—250 years old this year—has been sung in churches and at funerals. It is a civil rights anthem, a civil religion anthem, a folk song, and a pop culture icon. It has been featured on The Simpsons, Cheers, and Star Trek, and it gave expression to America’s grief in the days and weeks after 9/11. It’s been covered by devoutly Christian artists, such as Johnny Cash and Aretha Franklin, but also by Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, and the Dropkick Murphys.

In 2016, Coldplay began the encore of a headlining set at Glastonbury Festival with a sample of “Amazing Grace” sung by Barack Obama during his eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, one of nine Black Christians killed by a white supremacist in a church in Charleston. The British band pulled together many resonances of the song—cultural, political, and religious.

This is a hymn that has served as a first stuttering utterance of faith, as last words at death’s door, and as a joyful benediction over festival revelers.

But why this hymn? There are others on the theme of grace, others that express deep theological truths, and even others that are as easy to sing. But “Amazing Grace” stands head and shoulders above any of them. It is, by far, the most popular and successful hymn of all time.

It would be impossible to say definitively why this hymn occupies this special space after 250 years, but I think it’s because it speaks to so many situations. The hymn’s many lives show us the power it has had to touch human experience and give people the words they needed. The legacy of the hymn is not in its brilliance—there are many “better” hymns, measured in technical terms—but because it does two things brilliantly.

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First, the hymn unifies people. The truths of the words resonate across boundaries of time and culture. And second, the hymn allows the singer to tell their own story. “Amazing Grace” has stood the test of time because you and I can both find language that articulates our experience of life and faith.

Newton’s genius lies not in his skill as a wordsmith, but in his pastoral ability to bring the truth of Scripture into people’s hearts, lives, and mouths. And for 250 years, countless millions have joined this song, singing their own stories in unison.

The story of the hymn is as surprising as the story of its writer, Anglican evangelical clergyman and reformed slave trader John Newton.

Newton’s life has been well documented: His mother died in his infancy, he later joined his father at sea, and he eventually became a slave trader. This profession was abhorrent even to many who had no ethical qualms about enslavement itself, and Newton was apparently so morally repugnant in this context that even his colleagues were appalled. He was eventually marooned in West Africa.

“I was in effect, though without the name, a Captive and a Slave myself,” Newton later wrote, “and was depressed to the lowest degree of human wretchedness.”

He was rescued from West Africa and headed home. On the voyage, his thoughts turned to his mother’s faith during a violent storm. In the coming years, he embraced evangelical Christianity and was eventually appointed minister in Olney, Buckinghamshire. It was here that his friendship with William Cowper blossomed, and the pair began writing the hymns that would later become the Olney Hymnal.

Newton’s evangelical Anglicanism embraced a good bit of Calvinist theology, but he also was grounded in practical and pastoral concerns. He described himself as being “more of a Calvinist than anything else,” but qualified that by adding, “I use my Calvinism in my writing and preaching as I use sugar. I do not give it alone, and whole; but mixed and diluted.”

His hymns were no exception. Newton was insistent that they be “designed … for the use of plain people.” He wrote, “If the LORD whom I serve, has been pleased to favor me with that mediocrity of talent, which may qualify me for usefulness to the weak and poor of his flock, … I have reason to be satisfied.”

Newton’s practice was to write hymns to be sung following his sermons. When he preached on 1 Chronicles 17:16 –17 in January 1773, he introduced his congregation to the hymn “Faith’s Review and Expectation” (which was only later retitled “Amazing Grace”). The hymn gave voice to King David’s thankfulness at God’s grace in the covenant promise of a kingdom that would endure through all generations. In six verses, the story of grace moves from conversion to providence to the hope of peace as he passes within the veil of death.

Newton had a lavish perception of God’s grace, as he himself had experienced it. He wrote that Jesus has “unsearchable, inexhaustible riches of grace to bestow.” It was grace enough for everyone in heaven, and more besides. “The innumerable assembly before the throne have been all supplied from his fulness,” Newton wrote, “and yet there is enough and to spare for us also, and for all that shall come after us.” Amazing grace indeed.

This grace would provide from first to last, Newton believed. There was grace enough in Christ to lead David, Newton, and all of us “safe thus far,” and it would surely lead us home. Newton wrote that “we need sovereign irresistible grace to save us … we cannot watch, unless he watches with us; we cannot strive, unless he strives with us; we cannot stand one moment, unless he holds us up.”

When Newton published the hymn, it enjoyed only modest reception. It was not published widely in its first few decades. Perhaps there weren’t enough people looking for a hymn to fit a sermon on 1 Chronicles 17.

Another issue was that in the early years, it was sung to at least 20 different tunes. It was only in 1835 that William Walker paired the text to tune of “New Britain,” which is now the tune inextricably linked to the words. Still, it struggled to catch on. The 1907 edition of the landmark Dictionary of Hymnology describes how “Amazing Grace” had almost ceased to be published in Britain. Then, editors seemed to think that fair, since it was “far from being a good example of Newton’s work.”

They noted, though, that it was used extensively in America. It received regular use at revivals and camp meetings of the early 19th century and then became a standard in the repertoire of D. L. Moody’s song leader Ira Sankey.

In America, the hymn lost its association with 1 Chronicles and became instead a statement of personal testimony—a hymn about being born again. At the same time, it became attached, rather unexpectedly, to American abolitionism. Harriet Beecher Stowe included it in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Some of the words we sing today were actually first added to the hymn by Stowe. She took a verse from the hymn “Jerusalem, My Happy Home” and added it to “Amazing Grace.” It wasn’t uncommon at the time for verses to migrate from hymn to hymn; the words about “when we’ve been there ten thousand years” had previously jumped from “Jerusalem, My Happy Home” to “Go On, Dear Pilgrim, While Below,” before Stowe, bringing Newton’s hymn into her fiction, borrowed them for an additional verse. That version was republished by renowned composer and song leader Edwin Othello Excell in 1910, along with the tune for “New Britain.”

Excell axed three of Newton’s original verses and brought the now-common concluding verse into the hymn. He’s also the one who permanently fixed the words to the “New Britain” tune. He made sure American churchgoers knew the hymn, too. Before his death in 1921, he published it in 14 significant American hymnals, which cemented his version in American church culture. (It didn’t make it back to Britain, curiously enough, until 1964).

There is, at the same time, a parallel history of the hymn among Black Christians. As enslaved believers learned the hymns of white Christians, some tunes resonated and found a new home. “Amazing Grace” spoke about hope in the midst of suffering and oppression, the possibility that one who was lost could be found, one bound could be free.

Black Christians took the song and made their own. The first two gospel recordings were made in New York City in 1926 by Rev. H. R. Tomlin and Rev. J. M. Gates.

The definitive gospel version was recorded in 1947, by Mahalia Jackson with Apollo Records. She sings only the first verse in a legato performance delivered almost a capella with sparse organ accompaniment.

When she later joined the civil rights movement, Jackson regularly performed alongside Martin Luther King Jr. She sang in Selma, at the March on Washington, and at King’s funeral. Her version of “Amazing Grace” brought a new life to the history of the hymn.

During this time, the song was also a staple of the folk scene, performed by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez. In December 1970, Judy Collins released an a cappella version. Following the success of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Let it Be”—both of which owe a debt to hymnody—Collins’s single topped the charts in Britain and America. The songs of camp meetings and justice marches could be heard mingling with popular music on the radio.

Just two years later, Aretha Franklin released a double album titled “Amazing Grace,” recorded at the New Temple Baptist Church in Los Angeles. One reviewer at the time said she was taking people back to church. Another, in a retrospective, wrote, “Her voice was chilling, making it seem as if God and the angels were conducting a service alongside Franklin, Rev. James Cleveland, the Southern California Community Choir, and everyone else in attendance.” It is considered the best album of her career and is the best-selling live gospel recording to date.

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By the time America was dealing with the terrorist attacks of 2001, “Amazing Grace” was a religious song that everyone reliably knew, even if they didn’t go to church. It could be used in national mourning, alongside patriotic songs like “God Bless America,” as a way to bring people together, or to help them grieve and channel their sorrow.

But the many lives of “Amazing Grace” didn’t end when it was pressed into civil service by president George W. Bush or by president Barak Obama a few years later. The hymn received another rejuvenation when Chris Tomlin recorded a version for a biopic film of abolitionist William Wilberforce. Newton appears in the movie as an old man looking back in sorrow at his involvement in the slave trade. Tomlin sang four of Newton’s original verses and added a new chorus, singing, “My chains are gone, I’ve been set free / My God, my Savior has ransomed me.”

Licensing records show that Tomlin’s version is regularly played in churches, the contemporary music style introducing the hymn to yet another generation of Christians, who may well adopt, adapt, and repurpose “Amazing Grace” in the future.

I think that’s a good thing. There is a danger that appreciating hymns becomes a retrospective affair, where we sing them out of commitment to tradition or heritage. But the success of “Amazing Grace” does not lie in the way it draws the singer back to the past—the civil rights march, the frontier revival, or the small parish church in rural eighteenth-century England. Its success lies in the way it propels the singer forward. Newton’s words, as he dramatically and pastorally articulated David’s wide-eyed wonder at the grace of God’s covenant, carry us forward. When we fill our lungs to sing this song, we are asked to remember how grace has brought us this far, but also how it will lead us home.

The covenant God made in 1 Chronicles 17 was a covenant that would outlive David. It is a covenant finally fulfilled in the eternal reign of Christ. When we’ve been there 10,000 years, as that added final verse says, we’ll have only just begun. Each of us singing the hymn, whether we’re aware of Newton’s original intentions or not, can make those words their own.

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Each person who sings of the precious grace that appeared “the hour I first believed” recounts their own conversion experience. Each person who sings of the dangers, toils, and snares that they have been brought through can recount different trials. The universality and individuality of suffering are sung with one heart and many voices. And as the hymn expands into different contexts—revivals, cotton fields, concert halls, civil rights marches, churches, and movie theaters—it pushes us all toward the reconciling love of Christ.

Newton could not have imagined the life that his hymn would have. But he did hope that others would be able to resonate with his hymns. He hoped that his hymns, “being the fruit and expression of my own experience, will coincide with the views of real Christians of all denominations.” And today, “Amazing Grace” has achieved this.

For 250 years, the hymn has comforted, converted, challenged, and encouraged those who sing it. I suspect it will continue to do so for another 250, at least.

Daniel Johnson is a PhD researcher at the University of Leicester, writing the work of Isaac Watts. He is also head of academic development at the Nexus Institute for Creative Arts.

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News

China’s ‘Mayflower’ Church Wants to Come to America: ‘This Isn’t Fleeing. This Is Leaving Egypt’

Angela Lu Fulton

After more than two years in diplomatic limbo in South Korea, Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church is now in Thailand, trying to seek refugee status.

Members of the Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church in China prepare to submit their applications for asylum at the United Nations refugee office in Bangkok, Thailand.

AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit

Pastor Pan Yongguang and nearly all of the 61 members of his Chinese house church have arrived in Thailand. The congregation left the southeastern city of Shenzhen for South Korea between 2019 and 2020, trying unsuccessfully for months to gain refugee status.

Last month, the group left Jeju Island for Bangkok, hoping to appeal to the UN refugee office. Their search for a home continues as they hope to make one more move in the near future, this time to the United States.

It’s a search that has come at a significant cost.

The congregants of Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church (SHRC) left their professional jobs, their homes in Shenzhen, and elderly parents—just before the start of the pandemic. Pan has shouldered the responsibility of not just the spiritual care of his congregants, but the logistics of everyday life—including work, housing, medical care, safety, and travel—in foreign countries. He’s also faced pushback from some Chinese churches who believe he should stay and face persecution rather than run away.

But he believes he’s following God’s call to lead his church to greater freedom, like the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower: “For the flock’s spiritual blessing I’ve invested more and paid a higher price,” Pan said. “Nobody flees like this with kids and women from one county to another. This isn’t fleeing. This is leaving Egypt.”

After quietly leaving the South Korean island of Jeju in late August, Pan announced his congregation’s latest whereabouts to the world through a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on Monday. That same day, congregants applied for refugee status at Bangkok’s UN refugee office. Their hope to resettle in the United States has the backing of US officials including former Representative Frank Wolf, head of the US Commission on Religious Freedom.

In the meantime, the group faces dangers in Thailand. Not only do many in the party need extensions on their tourist visas or risk being in the country illegally, they say they are being monitored by Chinese operatives and fear repatriation to the Mainland. One family is still stuck in Jeju as the Chinese consulate won’t give their newborn daughter a passport, rendering her stateless. This stress is pushing the members of the “Mayflower church” to the brink.

“I often pray and ask God for more grace and strength,” said Pan. “These past two years were difficult to bear. They’ve been the hardest time in my pastoral ministry.”

Leaving the homeland

Nie Yunfeng began attending SHRC in 2012 and for several years taught at the Christian school started by the church. She remembers law enforcement pressuring the landlord to evict the school and church, causing them to constantly move locations. Police would barge into worship services or classes, telling them to break up their meetings.

The pressure increased after the implementation of the revised religious regulation in 2018, with church leaders facing increased monitoring and interrogations. Police insisted Pan shut down the school, disband the church, and stop contact with churches in the West (SHRC is tied to the Presbyterian Church of America).

So when Pan concluded the only option was to leave China, Nie was convinced, especially as she considered her children’s future. In the fall of 2019, she and her two children arrived in South Korea, where Pan and her initially uncertain husband had been scouting out a place for the church to go.

“In China we are unable to see the true information,” she said of her husband’s change of heart. “When my husband investigated things in Korea, he could see the truth and [leaving] became more urgent.”

About 60 congregants, half of them children, joined them on Jeju Island, a tourist destination off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula.

Once in Jeju, they were surprised to find the Korean government typically rejects nearly all asylum claims from Chinese nationals. Without legal status, many of the formerly middle-class congregants worked menial jobs including washing dishes and harvesting vegetables.

Pan said many people were exhausted from the labor-intensive work that paid meager wages. Jeju winters were cold and snowy, unlike steamy Shenzhen where winter lows are temperate. Some received calls from people claiming to work at the Chinese consulate asking them to come pick up packages, which they feared was a trap. Back in China, police harassed church members who stayed behind and questioned the family members of those who left.

Nie said she doesn’t regret leaving China, but things became more difficult when her father-in-law was diagnosed with liver cancer. Her husband, who is the only son in the family, wanted to be there to care for his father, but they realized that if they returned, they would face repercussions and never have another chance to leave.

Despite the challenges, the church was able to worship together freely each Sunday, first at a rented space, then in a Korean church that allowed them to use their building, and finally at a hotel dining room. Nie said she could finally worship in peace, no longer fearful if they’d be raided or jumping at the sound of a knock on the door.

She is grateful her children have been able to securely attend the church school—in China, many of these schools have been closed and parents forced to send their children to government schools. Nie gave birth to a baby while in Jeju in 2020 and now is 34 weeks pregnant with their fourth child.

Journey to Thailand

This February, SHRC lost the final appeal of their original asylum case. In order to avoid deportation, the entire congregation refiled their asylum claims, which cost $1,000 per person.

After Korean and US officials informed the church members they were unlikely to receive refugee status in Korea, Texas-based persecution advocacy group ChinaAid suggested a possible pathway out: getting the whole group to Thailand, where they could appeal to the UN refugee office. Unlike Korea, Thailand is not party to UN refugee treaties, and so the agency—rather than the government—can directly process and determine refugee cases.

In a vote, church members decided their best move would be to go to Thailand. So in August, the group moved to yet another new place where they didn’t speak the language or understand the culture. With Nie’s due date fast approaching, she and her family arrived in Thailand first to receive medical care due to complications in her pregnancy.

Once in Thailand, the church faced increased dangers they didn’t experience in Jeju: People they understood to be Chinese operatives tailed the group, taking photos and videos everywhere they went, according to Pan and other sources. When they dropped off their applications at the UN refugee office on Monday Monday, Pan noticed a car parked across the street with a man inside videotaping them. Later, two strangers sat nearby and videotaped them as Associated Press journalists interviewed Pan and the church members.

“After arriving in Thailand, I truly felt the danger,” Pan said. “Even though in Korea I knew Thailand would be more dangerous, these past few days I’ve seen that it’s much more dangerous than I imagined.”

Church members worry the Chinese government could take them and repatriate them back to China, where they would likely face severe punishment, a not-unfounded fear.

They’re also concerned about the family who is unable to leave Jeju. After a WSJ reporter reached out to the Chinese consulate in Korea inquiring about its refusal to grant the baby a passport, an officer called the family warning they were harming national security, according to ChinaAid’s Bob Fu. The officer then urged them to write a confession admitting that they were wrong for leaving China and that the church forced them to go to Jeju. In exchange, the consulate would give them the baby’s passport, Fu said.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, Fu and US officials are advocating for the Biden administration to resettle the group in the United States. Churches in Texas have already agreed to sponsor the congregation after their arrival, providing housing, living expenses, and help settling in. The US has often provided resettlement or humanitarian parole for people facing persecution from the Chinese government, including formerly detained Uyghurs, human rights activists, and house church Christians (including a family from Early Rain Covenant Church.)

In response to CT’s inquiry, the US State Department said it did not comment on individual cases but was committed to helping victims of religious persecution around the world.

Pan said his rapidly thinning hair is a sign of the stress he’s been under leading the church in the wilderness these past few years. At times, he said, he felt so weak that he didn’t think he could carry this responsibility. He’d take walks with his wife, talking and praying about his troubles.

Reading and meditating on Psalms has also brought Pan solace, he said. The church typically sings psalms every Sunday and at the beginning of each school day, so the laments and worship of David and the psalmists are well worn on their lips. As the church members all lived in the same building in Jeju, he would hear different families singing the psalms through the walls, a beautiful sound of praise.

When congregants come to him homesick and longing for their family in China, Pan reminds them of their true home: “On earth, Christians are sojourners. We can keep moving forward, but Thailand isn’t my destination; neither is the United States. We are walking toward our heavenly home.”

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

Culture

Is the Future of Christian Music on TikTok?

Rachel Seo

Independent artists like Montell Fish have found success on social media platforms rather than traditional labels.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source Image: Sincerely Media / Unsplash

Montell Fish is a Christian musician whose songs took off with tens of millions of streams. But unlike artists who have risen through the ranks of CCM, his main platform isn't a worship stage.

The 24-year-old artist went viral on TikTok from his bedroom, where he recorded himself, wearing a T-shirt and black bandana, playing the guitar, and singing in falsetto, “Why don’t you talk to me like you used to?”

His calming, “lo-fi” (low-fidelity) music stands in stark contrast with the high production value of today’s top worship bands. In a world that increasingly defies labels and genre, Fish represents a slew of indie faith-based artists who are finding success on platforms like TikTok and skipping the format and industry contemporary Christian music CCM was long built upon.

For these artists, independence from the traditional constraints of the music industry means greater freedom to explore—and redefine—what it means to be a successful “Christian” artist. With this freedom, though, comes greater responsibility for artists over their career direction and renders other essential parts like financial sustainability more unstable.

Previously known as one of the artists behind the music project Lord’s Child and a YouTuber who uploaded videos like “3 Ways to keep your focus on Christ,” Fish began uploading TikToks in October 2019.

On September 7, 2021, he uploaded a clip of himself sitting in his bedroom, with a sound titled “fall in love with you” playing in the background. The song snippet stands out for its tranquility; it seems content to takes its time, a contrast to TikTok’s fast pace. The video accrued over 3.3 million views, a consecutive YouTube video of Fish playing the song accumulated more than double the original’s views, and listeners have streamed the subsequent Spotify release 92 million times.

Yet Fish released these tracks on his own and didn’t put any paid promotion behind it, according to his manager, Patrick Bradley.

The music industry has shifted rapidly over the past few years, largely because of platforms like Spotify and TikTok. The advent of streaming has made it harder for artists to generate revenue—platforms like Spotify pay about $.004 per stream, whereas in prestreaming days, consumers had to buy entire albums. In a world that places increasing emphasis on the playlist versus the album, record labels have consolidated.

With 60,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify every day, it’s harder than ever for music artists to gain traction on a widespread scale. Even more, the demise of the traditional structure of the music industry has led to the demise of traditional genre categories. Gone are the days of “pop,” “rock,” “hip-hop,” “R&B,” and “CCM”; music genres have increasingly split further and further apart into various tiny microtrends.

Initially popularized in the 1960s and 1970s during the Jesus People movement, Christian contemporary music—defined by Andrew Mall in God Rock, Inc., as “less by its musical characteristics … than by its lyrical content, representing a biblically grounded Christian worldview”—peaked in popularity in the ’90s and has been on the decline over the past decade due to a changing market and cultural climate.

“The traditional modes of engaging with CCM have been in decline for a long time,” said Leah Payne, a professor at Portland Seminary who is writing a book on Christian contemporary music for Oxford University Press. For as long as CCM has existed, mainly white evangelical artists have dominated Christian radio charts.

“New platforms like TikTok that sit outside that model make it possible for different kinds of artists to thrive,” Payne said. “I think the question I have is: How will these artists sustain themselves and how will they continue to connect with their audiences?”

Indie Christian artist Antoine Bradford sees platforms like Spotify and TikTok as a means by which he’s been able to build a full-time music career. After becoming a Christian, he began writing music as a means of expressing how his faith shaped his life. “I saw that there was a need for Christians to be vulnerable and talk about mental health and just the struggles of what it means to be a Christian,” he said.

In 2017, he independently released “Safe,” a love song to his wife based on Ephesians 5; it’s since accrued over 6 million Spotify streams. The success of the first song inspired and enabled him to release EPs like “Dear Struggling Christian” and “Even in the Dark,” plus an album, “Light Will Find You,” in 2021. It also allowed him to embark on tours with other independent Christian artists, such as Lovkn’s One Big Family Tour.

Bradford is a full-time musician now; he appreciates the flexibility that not being signed to a label affords him, but that means he handles everything in his career, from fundraising to designing merchandise and album artwork.

While Bradford supports himself by doing music, other artists like John Jin Han and Sarah Juers don’t consider making music full time as essential to their long-term plans. To them, creative freedom in their spiritual expression is a larger priority than financial subsistence solely from their music.

Juers sees her music as ministry. An independent artist who works a full-time customer service job, Juers prefers not to rely on her creative work as a means of economic survival, but instead sees it as a way for her to connect with people and glorify God.

“My biggest goal in life is to be authentically myself and to walk humbly with God,” she said. “If I try to be too much of a brand or some sort of figure, I think it just takes away the authenticity and the ability for people to really connect.”

Beyond that, she adds, “For me, my soul is the most important thing in this world. How many people listen to me and follow me doesn’t matter. My relationship with God is the most important thing.”

Han, an independent Christian musician affiliated with Southern California–based Isla Vista Worship, describes his music as on a spectrum between secular and Christian. He submitted his dissertation for his PsyD in clinical psychology this year with the goal of becoming a psychologist and pursuing music in tandem with that career.

“Creativity was definitely always a value for Isla Vista Worship, but more importantly than that was that we wanted to host the presence of God and really write songs for our community,” he said. After he moved away from Isla Vista, however, he realized that he wanted to keep creating music: “It started with a couple worship releases, indie worship, indie Christian. The more and more I wrote these songs, the more I realized I wanted to write other songs about my story as well.”

Han’s experience writing worship music made him want to branch out and write faith-based music outside of the worship genre. He writes songs for young adults struggling with their faith and for “Asian Americans who feel out of place in white spaces.”

Faith informs different Christian artists’ definitions of success, with platforms like TikTok and Spotify enabling them to pursue their creative vision independently. But the attention they’ve found organically suggests there’s an audience that cares deeply about Christian art outside the constraints of the Christian contemporary music machine or even the booming worship music industry.

For artists like Fish, TikTok virality has opened the door to cross over into the mainstream market without ever having been fully under the umbrella of Christian music, which is perhaps indicative of a wider audience hungry for music woven with religious themes.

“I’m still very much a faith-centered person, and I love Jesus,” he said in a recent interview with Billboard. “But I think a lot of my art has taken a different way of telling those stories.”

Fish released his album JAMIE on July 22, the first installment of what he says is a “three project trilogy” on Instagram. His manager announced on Instagram earlier this year that the two had started an independent record label and signed a deal with Virgin Music Label and Artist Services, an offshoot of Virgin Records for independent record labels. Fish is touring this fall following his festival performance at Pharrell’s Something in the Water festival in June, and he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on August 11.

He sang his song “Darling” while sitting on a bed onstage—a callback to his origins on TikTok as well as a reminder of just how far he’s come. “I’m finally letting you go,” he sings. “Letting my control.”

Rachel Seo is the social media coordinator at Variety.

- More from Rachel Seo

History

More than One Good Samaritan

Interview by Daniel Silliman

Q&A with Jewish scholar Steven Fine on the history of a biblical minority.

Edits by Christianity Today / Source Image: WikiMedia Commons

The Good Samaritan shows up in Jesus’ parable in Luke 10 without much explanation of where he came from. And then he exits the stage, presumably to go back to life with the rest of the Samaritans. But what is a “Samaritan”? Why did they matter to Jesus and his first followers?

A new exhibit at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, opening on September 15, promises to expand our understanding of these biblical people. CT spoke to Steven Fine, a Jewish scholar at Yeshiva University, about the history of the Samaritans, their relationship to Jews and Christians, and how they can help us better understand the Bible.

If a regular churchgoer knows one thing about Samaritans, they know there was one good one. When Jesus tells that story, why does it matter that the Samaritan is a Samaritan?

What Jesus does in the story is miscast the part. The Samaritan should have been stereotypical bad guy in the first century, and here he is, he stops to help.

The story takes place in a horrible dry place in the Judean desert. It’s very uninviting. The priest has a reason for not stopping. Then the Levite, who helps in the temple, walks by and doesn’t help. You would expect the next stage of the story to be an Israelite. But it doesn’t go that way. It’s the Samaritan.

He’s the guy who is least likely to do the right thing, in the popular imagination. But he stops to help! That’s completely unexpected. That breaks the story. That’s why it’s such an interesting story.

Now I got to tell you, in Jewish literature not too long after, there is a rapprochement between Jews and Samaritans.

How do they come together? What does that look like?

After the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70, we find Samaritans moving into Jewish regions, and in the texts you find things like rabbis saying, Oh yeah, you can eat Samaritan matzah for Passover. No problem.

It didn’t last a long time. The division comes and it goes and it comes and it comes and it goes. In the Middle Ages, they often live together. They don’t intermarry, but they live together.

When we get to more recent history, it’s the British and American Protestants and then the Zionist movement that saved Samaritans from destruction in the 19th and 20th century. Providing food. Providing political support. Real practical help.

A lot of people don’t know that the Samaritans are still around, that there’s a contemporary community. How many are there and where are they?

There are more than 800 of them today. About half of them live in Nablus, in the West Bank near Mount Gerizim, and half live in a Tel Aviv suburb.

American Protestants and early Zionist leaders saw them as Israelites who never left the land. They embraced them and supported them, and there’s been this conscious interest from people of goodwill to get them the resources they need to stay alive.

In the 1840s, they were almost completely wiped out when Muslim authorities said, Well you’re not Jews, which we tolerate as “people of the book,” but you’re not Muslim, so you have to convert or be killed. They had been destroyed in Damascus and they weren’t doing well in Cairo, and this was sort of the Alamo for these people. This was the last stand. The Samaritans in Nablus went to the British consulate for help, and the consulate influenced the chief rabbi of Jerusalem to write essentially a letter of recommendation—They are Israelites who believe in the Torah of Moses. That was enough to save them.

In 1900 there were 119 or something. Now there are enough Samaritans to fill two 747 airplanes.

You’re a Jewish scholar at a Jewish university. CT is an evangelical magazine, and I don’t know that we have any Samaritan readers. Why should Jews and Christians be interested in this pretty obscure group of people?

The Samaritans are a great place for us to deal with complexity. They’re not Jews and they’re not Christians. They’re not Israelis and they’re not Palestinians. All of the questions of identity and place come up. The Samaritans show us all the sites of complexity.

There has been so much scholarship on Jews and Christians, especially since the 1990s. If you walk through the book tables at the Society of Biblical Literature, it’s like Jews and Christians, Jews and Christians, Jews and Christians. But with the Samaritans involved, we see it’s not just those two, a twosome; it’s a threesome. When you see that, you see how all the issues that come up in the relationship between Jews and Christians—like how do you read the Bible or who is God or what is the importance of worshiping the right way—get more complicated with the third group included, and that’s the Samaritans.

To back up a little bit, can you give me a brief history of the Samaritans?

Let me give you two different timelines. The Samaritan timeline is that Moses took the children of Israel out of Egypt and Joshua crossed the river and went to Mount Gerizim. So far so good, right? The tabernacle was set up on the top of Mount Gerizim and life was good. They consider it a period of blessings.

Now the Samaritans have the Torah, but besides that they have oral traditions—they don’t have the prophets and the histories.

Everything went well until the priest Eli decided to abscond with the tabernacle and go to Shiloh, and then David did the ultimate abomination of going to Jerusalem. Solomon built a temple there, and from the Samaritan point of view, those people left the true religion behind.

Now the Jewish timeline is that everyone was together and the northern tribes went bad and the southern stayed good and there was a split, which continues to this day. That’s the one we know from the Bible.

After the Assyrian exile, there’s also all these non-Israelites who are brought in and they intermarry with the Samaritans, and for the Jews, that lowers their status.

How much of the division should we think of as theological—a dispute over the proper place to worship—and how much of it is division over ethnic purity and who is married to whom?

No, no, that’s too Protestant. This is Judaism! You can’t differentiate the two. You hear what I’m saying? That’s where this issue lives.

There has been 2,000 years of literature—whether it’s the woman at the well asking Jesus, What are you doing here? or in rabbinic literature, the rabbis walking through Nabulus and Samaritans saying, Why are you going to Jerusalem? The holy mountain is right here! This is a long conversation.

Was that encounter common, where someone is walking by the Samaritans on the way to Jerusalem and gets these questions, like when the woman at the well asks Jesus about worshiping on the mountain versus in the temple?

Yes! Remember, all these people were walking to Jerusalem. It was the only way to get there. So for the Samaritans, all these Jews are walking by their mountain and they’re like, Are you out of your mind? You’re going to walk another day and a half? We have the mountain. And by the way, folks, we have the water.

In the rabbinic literature, there are all these stories about Samaritans heckling people going to worship in Jerusalem. It’s all on that same road that Jesus was walking.

What did worship at Mount Gerizim look like at the time Jesus was asking that woman for water?

Well, the problem is, there was no Samaritan Josephus. Remember, we wouldn’t know much about first-century Jerusalem if it wasn’t for Josephus, writing stuff down, trying to explain things to the Romans. And there wasn’t a Samaritan doing the same thing for Mount Gerizim.

But my guess is it’s pretty close to worship in Jerusalem. There’s pilgrimage to the holy site and when they get there, there’s a sacrifice, and they’re reading Torah scrolls together.

Museum of the Bible

Samaritans on Mount Gerizim

After the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, the Jews are exiled, so that’s how we end up with a diaspora. What happened to the Samaritans?

The Samaritans had a horrible situation under Rome. When it would have helped them to be seen as Jews, they weren’t. When it didn’t help, they were. They weren’t part of the revolt, but they got implicated in that, and Pontus Pilate killed a bunch of them. But when Jews had an exemption that said they didn’t have to sacrifice to the emperor, Samaritans didn’t, so they were punished if they didn’t assimilate to the Roman state religion.

Occasionally the situation is so horrible that the Jews help them. And other times it’s divide and conquer, and the Romans or other rulers pit them against each other. All the time, in all the literature on both sides, you see them working out this relationship: We’re the same. No, we’re different. No, we’re all children of Israel. Yes, but you’re wrong.

Let me give you an example. In the 16th century, this rabbi in Constantinople gets a question: We got a Samaritan Torah curtain. Somebody came to town and said we couldn’t use it. Can we use it? So what does this rabbi do? He does what rabbis do and thinks it through, right-side up to upside down, to show that Samaritans are not idolaters, and if they’re not idolaters, then they can use it. At the end of the text he says, They’re not idolators. They have images of doves on this curtain but they’re not praying to doves. It’s fine. But you know what, don’t use it!

Add the Samaritans to the story, and it complicates things! That’s why it’s so interesting.

What will people see in this exhibit at the Museum of the Bible?

We have artifacts from Samaritans from all over the world. We have a film where we collected stories from Samaritans. We called it Tales of the Samaritan Elders, where we asked them, “What is important to you to share? What do you want your grandchildren to know?” So the Samaritans tell the story of the Samaritans.

Another part of the exhibition is what Jews, Christians, and Muslims have said and done with the Samaritans. There’s that version of the story and the history of the interpretation of the Samaritans and the political questions about their existence.

It will open the evening of September 15, and you can see it through the end of the year. Then it goes to Bibel Haus in Frankfurt, Germany, from March through July. After that I’m hoping we can package it for smaller venues, Jewish community centers and Christian colleges, and maybe it can come to where you are! I hope everyone gets a chance to see it.

Correction: The Museum of the Bible exhibit will run through January 1, 2023.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Inkwell

The Hermit and the Holy Trinity

Sally Thomas

Photography by Alex Autio

Alone, he lives with them, who never live
Alone. Beginning Compline as the twilight
Steals upon the hills, the cool blue nave
Of his known world, he sees the deepening night
Swing wide for him its starry mystery-door.
Beyond and in it all, the Persons wait,
Communed in silence. There is nothing more
Than what they are, alive, awake, unblinking
In joy. These psalms and canticles will pour
Out to them his own desire, his thinking —
Not his alone, but always their shared thought,
A spring of words. His prayer’s an act like drinking.
What freshens him transfigures him, as moonlight,
Given and given back, makes darkness bright.

Sally Thomas is the author of Motherland and the novel Works of Mercy. She is also the Associate poetry editor at New York Sun.

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Pulling punches

Kill the lizard

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