Christianity and Shinto

Japanese believers must be wary of falling into syncretism again, evangelical scholar Yoichi Yamaguchi warns.

Shinto Shimenawa prayer ties.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Christianity Today interviews Yoichi Yamaguchi, director of the International Mission Center at Tokyo Christian University, on the beginnings of a Christian movement that sought to meld the faith with Shinto and Japanese nationalism and the struggles present-day Japanese evangelicals face when it comes to Shinto practices.

How did Japanese Christians and churches historically engage with Shinto?

When the first Protestant missionaries came to Japan in the mid-19th century, they taught that Shinto shrines are idolatrous. Early Japanese Christians accepted this posture, and they refused to participate in Shinto practices like worshiping at a local shrine.

But through these repeated conflicts with Shinto beliefs, Japanese Christians began to rethink whether traditional Shinto values, such as ancestral worship and emperor veneration, were truly incompatible with the Christian faith.

The Japanese Christianity (nihon-teki-kirisuto-kyo) movement, which started in the early Meiji period and lasted until the end of World War II, sought to meld Shinto and nationalism with Christian faith. Proponents of this movement believed that God had chosen Japan as the protector of Asia against Western invasion, and some even went so far as to say that Shinto values could be fully realized through Christianity or that the Japanese god Amaterasu was Jesus and therefore the emperor was a descendant of Christ.

The earliest Protestant communities in Japan, such as the Yokohama Band (the word band describes a small group of Christians) and its Yokohama church, comprised individuals who were deeply informed by nativist (Kokugaku) scholarship. Their embrace of Christianity was not a conversion out of a heritage that cherished the Japanese ethos, including Shinto, but rather a reinterpretation of it.

Can you share examples of some Japanese Christians’ reinterpretations of Shinto beliefs?

Japanese Christian leaders from the late 19th century, like Uemura Masahisa and Kanzo Uchimura, proposed viewing Christianity as a faith that was grafted onto “the way of the samurai” (Bushido). They argued that key Bushido virtues, such as honor and loyalty, paved the way for Christianity in the country.

Other Christian leaders, like Ebina Danjo and Watase Tsuneyoshi, were more explicit in attempting to wed Shinto with Christianity. Ebina supported modern values like gender equality but also held a deep conviction of Japanese superiority because of the Shinto belief that Japan was a divinely appointed country.

I once considered Christian thinkers like Ebina and Watase as extremists, but after reading the literature of the Japanese Christianity movement in their time period, I came to realize that their views were not outliers at the time. These attitudes were shaped in an environment where East Asia, including Japan, faced the threat of Western colonization.

This conviction that Japan must not fall victim to imperial powers helped to produce a generation of Christians who fused their faith with Shinto beliefs and nationalist ideals.

What kinds of tensions or conflicts do Japanese evangelicals face regarding Shinto today?

Our historical memory of State Shinto—and how it suffocated religious freedom during World War II—has fostered a sense of caution and discomfort among Japanese Christians when it comes to emperor veneration, shrine visits, and participation in neighborhood associations that engage in Shinto customs.

However, this reluctance toward engaging with Shinto has dulled in recent years, particularly among younger generations of evangelicals. There is an intensified conformity and tendency to go along with prevailing norms. Even as shrine institutions weaken, the ethos of mutual nondisruption—“Let’s live freely, help each other, and not cause trouble”—continues to exert a strong influence in Japanese society.

Today, institutionalized Shinto is declining. Yet Japanese people still highly prize Shinto ideals such as mutual respect, harmony, and restraint. This worldview encourages cultural homogeneity, making it difficult for people to ascribe to Christianity’s exclusive claims. In this sense, the ethos of Shinto may persist in a noninstitutionalized way.

The emperor, too, has undergone a symbolic refresh. He is now widely perceived as Japan’s moral exemplar instead of a divine being. Hence there is a growing sense of appreciation toward the emperor among younger evangelicals. Many feel less animosity toward the emperor and the role he plays in state-led Shinto rituals.

With this increasingly positive appreciation of the emperor and a Shinto worldview, perhaps Japanese Christians need to be alert and not fall into the slippery slope of syncretism again.

Learn more about Shinto’s key teachings, its historical and contemporary influences on Japanese society, and conversations about Christ in a Shinto-influenced culture.

- More from Kazusa Okaya

Theology

Missions and Evangelism in a Shinto-influenced Culture

Interview by Kazusa Okaya

“We must avoid both excessive fear and uncritical sentimentalism of Shinto,” evangelical scholar Yoichi Yamaguchi argues.

The interior of a Christian church in Japan.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Ben Weller, WikiMedia Commons

Christianity Today speaks with Yoichi Yamaguchi, director of the International Mission Center at Tokyo Christian University, on how Shinto poses a barrier to the Christian faith and what believers can do to evangelize more effectively in Japan.

Christians make up less than 1 percent of the Japanese population despite missions to the country since 1549. Do you think the presence of Shinto is one reason Christianity has struggled to spread in Japan?

Yes, Shinto contributes significantly to that difficulty. Shinto lacks dogma or a prescriptive moral code. If something feels right to a person’s heart, it is accepted as good.

This intuitive approach to religion permeates Japanese cultural consciousness. Japanese people are not naturally inclined to think about religion in doctrinal terms. The idea of consciously worshiping God, hearing God’s Word, and entering into a covenantal relationship with God is foreign to many.

There are also emotional and communal attachments that people may find hard to eradicate. In Japan, family members are expected to participate in Shinto rituals like funeral rites, visits to shrines, and care for their ancestors’ graves in Shinto graveyards. If people are asked to convert to Christianity, they might say, “I can’t cut off my connection to my ancestors” or “I can’t leave my family grave unattended.”

Ultimately, the largest obstacle to evangelism in Japan may be a deeply internalized identity of “Japaneseness,” which is inevitably entangled with a Shinto worldview. To become Christian would be to step outside of that cultural and familial framework. Becoming a Christian in Japan involves a level of personal commitment. It means going against familial and local expectations, as well as tradition. It is never a casual decision.

How should evangelicals approach people with a Shinto worldview when doing missions or evangelism in Japan?

Missionaries have tried to implement models of Christian discipleship from places like South Korea, but they often fail to gain traction in Japan. That’s not to say such models are wrong, but Japan is a culture where religion functions primarily as a matter of conscience. Nothing takes root unless it resonates deeply with an individual’s inner “heart.”

Of course, conscience can become distorted and is not sufficient on its own. But without it, I believe one cannot encounter God, pray, worship, or form a true relationship with the divine. Authentic conscience is not autonomy—it is conscience under God’s grace.

Because Japanese people consider religion in terms of the heart and not in terms of doctrine, a theological reflection on conscience may provide a bridge between the heart and the mind. This would be helpful for evangelism and discipleship.

What assumptions or misunderstandings about Shinto should evangelicals in Japan and abroad be more aware of?

Some devout evangelicals in Japan fear that simply passing through a torii gate, situated at the entrance to a shrine, is spiritually defiling. At the other extreme are those who become emotionally drawn to Shinto aesthetics.

In my Reading Japanese Christianity article series, I observed that a believer’s shift toward Shinto syncretism often begins with affective experiences. For instance, a person may look up at the morning sun and be moved to tears, and from that moment on, that person may turn toward a Shinto worldview, which equates nature with the gods, rather than seeing nature as God’s creation.

The traditional Japanese emotion aroused in such an encounter is called mono no aware, a bittersweet awareness of the impermanence of life—and not a reverence for the creator God.

The key is balance. We must avoid both excessive fear and uncritical sentimentalism of Shinto. It’s vital to understand what historical functions Shinto shrines have served in Japan.

Personally, I enjoy visiting shrines. I ask, “What are the people who come here seeking?” When I see someone praying earnestly at a shrine, I wonder, “What prevents them from coming to church and praying there?” This kind of inquiry is important. Christians should regard Shinto with respect and caution.

Read about how Christianity and Shinto interacted in Japan, what historical and contemporary influences Shinto had on Japanese society, and what Shinto’s key teachings are.

- More from Kazusa Okaya

Pastors

Three Surprising Advantages Small Churches Have with Gen Z

Kara Powell

New research shows that when it comes to reaching young people, size isn’t a limitation—it’s an asset.

mixetto / Getty

When it comes to church, today’s young people aren’t looking for a show—they’re looking for a home. For Gen Z, cold and institutional is out; real and relational is in.

That’s good news for smaller churches. Since 2000, national median worship attendance has dropped from 137 people to 65 by 2023, and 70 percent of churches now report fewer than 100 regular members. The trend is undeniable—but so is the opportunity. Smaller churches are often better at feeling like family. And that sense of family comes with crucial benefits when it comes to attracting and keeping teenagers and twentysomethings.

Thanks to the Fuller Youth Institute’s research with ethnically and ecumenically diverse congregations, we’ve seen these advantages show up most clearly in some smaller churches—particular those my colleagues and I describe “Future-Focused Churches.”

We define a Future-Focused Church as a “group of people that seek God’s direction together—especially in relationally discipling young people, modeling kingdom diversity, and tangibly loving our neighbors.”

After all, a church—of any size—isn’t a building. It’s a body of people. And those bodies are at their absolute best when they are wholeheartedly following God’s lead.

The definition names three priorities we’ve consistently seen in healthy, growing congregations. Grounded in what we see in Scripture, shaped by current cultural dynamics, and confirmed by ongoing research with over 1,000 churches intentionally connecting with young people, these three “checkpoints” consistently show up in congregations that are bearing fruit, especially with Gen Z: relational youth formation, kingdom diversity, and tangible love of neighbors.

Churches that share these priorities don’t just grow younger—they grow healthier. And while a church of any size can become future-focused, our research reveals that smaller congregations have three surprising advantages when it comes to reaching and discipling Gen Z.

People support what they create

When Dustin interviewed to pastor Port Orchard Seventh-day Adventist Church in Washington, one of the elders voiced a sobering concern: “If we don’t get more young people, the church is going to die.”

So Dustin got to work. Leading a church of 90 people, he made it his mission to personally connect with every young adult who visited. Soon, he and his wife launched a young adult Bible study that regularly discussed this key question: What would we like to see God do through us?

Together, the young adult group felt called to offer practical health services to their neighborhood. Their vision mobilized the rest of the congregation to host a free one-day medical clinic. It made a meaningful impact.

Later, when Dustin and some of those same young adults felt called to plant a new church 30 minutes away in Tacoma, they brought that same desire to serve the practical health needs of their city. Over the last four years, LifeBridge Church—their church plant of 50–80 members—has rallied to host 12 free health clinics, mobilize 1,000 volunteers, serve 2,000 patients, and provide over $1 million in dental, vision, and medical care.

Through both churches, Dustin saw the same truth confirmed: all generations—but especially young people—aren’t so eager to get on board with a pastor’s pre-written program. They want to help write it. They want to play a part in developing something meaningful together.

Put simply, people support what they help create. In many cases, the smaller the church, the easier it is to be part of that creation process.

Wise pastors in smaller churches recognize they have a unique part to play in mobilizing the community through preaching, mentoring, and leading. But all that work functions less like a central pipeline and more like tributary streams feeding into a larger river—one that sees the gifts of the entire community mobilized. As Dustin learned, that river grows stronger when young adults are asked to imagine how God might want to work through them—and are then coached in how to make that dream a reality.

Leadership begins with listening

On the first day of many of his leadership classes, my friend and Fuller Seminary colleague, Scott Cormode, highlights a simple phrase to his students: “Leadership begins with listening.”

When leaders take that seriously, remarkable shifts can follow.

At one Southern California church of 200 members, leaders recognized they needed to better listen to their young people. So a pastor and board member started asking teenagers direct questions:

When do you feel like you really belong in our church?

How can we see and support you better?

Their responses included a common theme: “Show up for our events outside of church.”

So they did. The church created a tradition of announcing student events every week during the worship service. Whether it’s one person or a dozen, someone now shows up to a game or concert in support of the younger congregants. By listening well, this church has become a place where young people feel seen, celebrated, and supported every week.

To practice that type of listening across generations, we recommend a listening strategy called Appreciative Inquiry. As the name suggests, it focuses on strengths—and not deficits—through questions like:

What do you love most about this church? If there’s a particular story or example that comes to mind, please share it.
Tell us about a moment when you really experienced God or felt God’s presence. What was that like, and why was it meaningful?
What is it like to be a teenager today? What do you really enjoy about this stage of life, and what is important for others in our church to know about your perspective?
What do you hope or dream for the future of our church?

When pastors in smaller churches ask these sorts of questions, they better appreciate, and can respond to, this anxious and creative generation’s pain and potential.

Experiment from the edges

Experiment. It’s a beautiful word. (Admittedly, as a researcher, I am positively biased toward the term.)

Part of its appeal lies in its implication that as we try something new, we will evaluate our progress along the way. What we’re doing is not set in stone.

Every Future-Focused Church we studied had to experiment—often wisely labeling it as such—during the pandemic. In many cases, those short-term shifts became a new part of the long-term normal.

For instance, one 75-person congregation in Scotland sought to add greater relational connection to their online worship services during the pandemic. So they opened their Zoom gatherings twenty minutes early for discussion and casual worship singing. The congregation, starved for community, embraced it immediately. When they could resume meeting in-person again, they translated that tradition to their worship services. Now, twenty minutes prior to the 10:30 a.m. service, the worship team leads “casual worship” for anyone who wants to come early.

Reflecting on this shift, one elder told us, “Before COVID, if I had suggested that we would start the services with a few casual worship songs, the shutters would have gone up. But experiments…allowed us to get around what had previously seemed as insurmountable obstacles.”

This is a powerful feature of smaller churches. When leaders make a practice of listening to congregants and involving others in change, their nimble size makes it easier to tweak current gatherings or offer something altogether new. And as leaders learn from and leverage these small wins, they can become bigger wins that change church culture and increase church impact.

Of course, God can work—and has worked—through churches of every size. But for a generation starving for authenticity and empathy, smaller churches often offer what Gen Z is looking for: belonging, purpose, and a sense of family.

Kara Powell, PhD, is chief of leadership formation at Fuller Seminary, executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute, and a co-author of Future-Focused Church.

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Ideas

Black History at the Smithsonian Can’t Be Told with Half-Truths

Haleluya Hadero

Staff Editor

No institution is above scrutiny, but the Trump administration’s planned overhaul could obscure the work of God in American history.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

J. David Ake / Contributor / Getty

When the National Museum of African American History & Culture opened in Washington, DC, in 2016, a friend and I received coveted tickets to be among the first visitors. The collection is large, and the tour was emotionally grueling, much of it concerning the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, and the Civil War fought to rid the country of that peculiar institution.

The first Smithsonian museum dedicated to Black history, it does not shy away from depicting America’s racial past, from its earliest years through the aftermath of the Civil War—including Jim Crow, race massacres, and public lynchings—through the heroism of the Civil Rights Movement, in which brave men and women were beaten, tear-gassed, and even killed as they advocated for Black Americans. The museum also highlighted positive achievements: As a country, we have made significant progress on race. Still, it’s evident in the headlines and an endless array of stats that we carry the legacy of the past with us into the present.

How Americans communicate Black history to ourselves, our children, and the world is now under intense scrutiny in Washington, where the Trump administration has announced plans to root out what it’s called a “divisive, race-centered ideology” within the Smithsonian Institution. White House aides have been tasked with a “comprehensive internal review” of several museums, including the one dedicated to Black history, with an aim of realignment with President Donald Trump’s “directive to celebrate American exceptionalism.”

What that means in practice is yet to be seen. But Trump has already said he wants Smithsonian exhibits to be less “woke,” which in his mind translates to discussions, in part, about “how bad Slavery was.” “We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums,” he posted this week on Truth Social.

It’s not wrong to want to honor the good. But Trump’s sentiment misses the point. Whether told in a book or a museum exhibit, truthful history cannot merely valorize goodness. It must tell the whole truth, preserving a clear and honest account of past events that can be passed down through the generations. If the Smithsonian museums are to be truthful, they will not deemphasize or obscure the hypocrisy exhibited by our founders and governing documents, nor the evil perpetrated against slaves, countless of whom prayed and petitioned God for deliverance. To celebrate the exceptionalism of the American Civil Rights Movement, a predominantly Christian and clergy-led project, requires telling the full story of the oppressive system these activists fought.

Sanitizing these displays will do more than distort the truth about America. It will also diminish the work of God in our history and discount the resilience of the people who put their hope in him. Theirs are examples we need in the work of justice still left for us to do.

The necessity of remembering history is clear throughout Scripture. After God delivers the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, he commands them to remember it weekly when they observe the Sabbath (Deut. 5:15). God does the same after the people cross the Jordan River, this time instructing Joshua to set up a memorial with stones that can serve as a reminder for future generations (Josh. 4). And in the New Testament, Paul tells Christians to remember the death of Christ until he comes (1 Cor. 11:23–26).

And it’s not only the good and encouraging history we’re to keep in mind. The Bible consistently records the sins of Israel and the early church, giving us an honest—and therefore often unflattering—record of human failures. Joshua recounts the sin of Peor while directing the Israelites to faithfulness (Josh. 22:17–18). Scripture tells us that Abaraham deceived (Gen. 20:2), Jacob and Esau had a bitter rivalry (27:41), the nation of Israel fell into idolatry (Isa. 2:8), and David committed murder (2 Sam. 11). Examples continue to stack up in the New Testament, which records the disciples deserting Jesus at his moment of need (Mark 14:50), Ananias and Sapphira lying to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:3), and both Paul and Jesus rebuking a fractious church (1 Cor. 3; Rev. 2–3).

Given the facts of our country’s history, it’s impossible to have a truthful African American museum that tells a purely positive story. Any effort to remake the Smithsonian in that direction would reveal a level of pride and nationalistic idolatry that’s resistant to the truth, Justin Giboney, the president of the Christian civic organization the And Campaign, told me in an interview.

This kind of falsehood will have real consequences: To refuse to look “at the flaws of our history separates us from one another,” said theologian Darrell Bock. “It prolongs our conflict” and “says you and your story do not matter to me simply because it comes from a different place than my story and challenges me to see the world differently. This erasure is not only of an account of history but of a people. It makes our neighbor invisible.”

But while Christians should be wary of efforts to diminish or sanitize history, that does not mean blind loyalty to the Smithsonian (or any other imperfect human institution). As remarkable as the African American history museum is, it has not been above reproach.

In an online portal intended to serve as an educational guide for conversations about race, the museum in 2020 posted a chart explaining what it called the different “aspects & assumptions of whiteness & white culture in the United States.” Bizarrely, the chart cited “polite” communication, “hard work” and “objective, rational linear thinking” as aspects of white culture. It alienated Black Americans from biblical principles and the Christian tradition—wrongly saying, for example, that the nuclear family and Christianity (which arrived in Africa long before European colonists did) were merely aspects of the dominant US culture that ethnic minorities had “internalized.” After backlash, the museum apologized.

Situations like that “show how the left kind of launders its agenda into what is considered ‘Black history’ and what are ‘Black issues,’” Giboney told me. “So I think there’s something there” to be critiqued, he added, “but not in any way that justifies what Trump seems to be trying to do.”

Daniel K. Williams, a Christian historian who teaches at Ashland University, said the move to inspect the Smithsonian—which comes in the aftermath of national debates about racial justice and things like critical race theory—is the first time a president has been directly involved in the communication of American history. However, there are some similarities between this moment and debates in the 1990s over national education standards. At the time, Williams said, many conservatives were unhappy that a number of universities dropped courses on Western civilization and replaced them with ones on world civilization. There was also some pushback when history courses gave more attention to marginalized groups, including African Americans.

“What conservatives said at the time was that they wanted to preserve a place for celebrating the achievements they thought had made America unique,” Williams told me. “The question was ‘Is there something exceptional about America? If so, what is it? And how do we teach it?’”

Three decades later, these debates have returned, this time pushed by a ham-fisted administration fixated on what it calls “Americanism.” And so far, the results have been disturbing. Two weeks before Trump complained about the Smithsonian’s focus on slavery, his administration said it would restore two statues commemorating Confederate figures. Earlier this summer, Trump said he wants Army bases to bring back Confederate names ditched in recent years. On Juneteenth, which marks the end of slavery in the US, his only comment about the holiday came in a Truth Social post, where he complained that there were too many “non-working holidays” in America. Taken together, these comments suggest an understanding of race in America as one-sided and ill-informed.

Passing on stories about our country’s sins and failures doesn’t mean we treat America as an eternally unsalvageable mess. Truthful accounts of the past not only demonstrate the resilience of African Americans but also speak to the strength of the American people and what the country can be.

“We want America to be great,” said Quonekuia Day, a professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. “But we want it to be great for all people.”

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

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Ideas

A Path To a Healthy Black Evangelicalism

Bryan Loritts

Being a minority in white institutions can feel frustrating. But it’s possible to navigate it without assimilation or bitterness.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

A few years ago, our son Jaden called my wife and me and said he wanted to be a pastor. When we got off the phone, I was excited and fearful. It warmed my heart to hear that my 20-year-old Black son could be a third-generation preacher in our family. But I also knew the road ahead would be tough—especially if it included stops in the land of white evangelicalism.

When my wife asked what we should do, I told her it was important to me that he spend his early years of ministry in Black institutions. The Black church had buttressed my own father and me when we felt lonely and frustrated in our ministry to white evangelicals. And if Jaden were to spend formative years among other Black believers, I knew it would provide the type of affirmation and foundation needed to withstand some expected turbulence.

As a pastor and the son of a prominent Black evangelical, I have spent decades immersed in predominantly white churches and organizations. My father, Crawford Loritts Jr., was heavily influenced by the evangelist Tom Skinner, cofounded a church with Tony Evans, and was mentored by the famed evangelical civil rights hero John Perkins. But even with these connections, I am hesitant with the phrase Black evangelical.

I’ve been thinking more about this lately after watching Black + Evangelical, a new documentary by Christianity Today and Wheaton College that highlights the history and challenges faced by African Americans who identify with the label. Recently, a longtime friend also asked me if I was comfortable with the phrase. He knew about my experiences and that I held to the core tenets of evangelicalism laid out by British scholar David Bebbington. But even though I check off each box, the last one—reform-minded activism—often gives me pause.

The dividing line between white and Black evangelicals in America, after all, is their activism—or lack thereof—on racial justice issues. Historically, white British evangelicals led by William Wilberforce took down slavery in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, it was also British evangelicals who worked to transform the prison system and push for legislation for just child-labor laws and relief to the poor. But across the pond in America, the fundamentalist-modernist controversy caused white Christians to split into two camps, resulting in a self-sorting of impulses. The modernists (the predecessors of white mainline Protestants) cared about their neighbors. But because they did not hold to biblical truths, they fell into heresy. Meanwhile, the fundamentalists (the predecessors of white evangelicals) held fast to the authority of the Bible but did not advocate for the racially oppressed.

This type of split never occurred in the Black church, which held on to the basic tenets of the faith without rejecting social action. Over time, some Black believers began worshiping in predominantly white or multicultural churches, creating a new category of Black evangelicals, many of whom have consistently spoken out about racial issues.

But what makes many Black evangelicals different is not just their activism; it’s also their distance from historically Black institutions. In the documentary, for example, almost everyone profiled or interviewed—from Carl Ellis to Tom Skinner and Jemar Tisby—spent significant time serving in spaces dominated by white evangelicals. Like many in the Black church, they spoken out against racial injustice. However, they had a remarkably different experience from others in American history who protested the white power structure and then went home to minister and serve in Black congregations.

I have often seen that when a Black person leaves a traditional Black church and is dropped into a sea of white evangelicals, the person becomes lonely and frustrated. It’s something I’ve experienced in my own life. I grew up in the Black church and then attended a predominantly white evangelical Bible college, where for the first time in my life I felt disregarded and on edge. In 1992, I remember attending chapel right after a California state court acquitted four white officers involved in the police beating of Rodney King, sparking riots across the city of Los Angeles. Not a single thing was said, nor a prayer offered for King, his family, or the city at large. I was irate and called my father to tell him, only to discover the same thing had happened at a similar type of Bible college he attended in the weeks following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

I’d like to say things have gotten much better in the 30 years since I’ve graduated from college, but they have not. In fact, there’s a strong case that things have gotten worse. When my father retired from his church 4 years ago, he told me he had never seen our nation so badly divided. It pierced my heart to hear that from a Black man who spent his early years navigating Jim Crow. It seemed as if my hero, who had spent his life immersed in white evangelical institutions, was saying, “I wonder if I’ve wasted my time serving in these spaces.” Now, if you ask him whether he felt that way, he will emphatically say no. But it’s hard not to think it was a waste when the evangelical world has taken serious steps back in the fight for ethnic unity.

Being a minority Christian immersed in a majority-white culture is akin to being an “estranged pioneer,” Christian sociologists Korie Edwards and Rebecca Kim say in their book by the same name. But while the two may have coined the phrase, the concept is as old as the story of Jonah. God invites Jonah, a Jew, to engage in the missionary task of preaching the message of repentance and God’s forgiveness to the very ones who were abusing his people. One commentator I read says Jonah walking into the city of Nineveh and calling people to repent is the equivalent of a Jewish rabbi standing on a street corner in 1941 Berlin and begging Nazi Germany to turn to God. Nobody is clamoring for that job.

But the beauty of Jonah shows God using a member of a minority group as his vessel to bring the majority culture to himself. When Jonah finally walks into Nineveh and preaches a message of God’s mercy, the people repent. Instead of rejoicing, Jonah expresses his frustration to the Lord and sets out to leave the city (Jonah 4:5). In many ways, the story is a cautionary message to Black evangelicals that it’s possible to minister to people you don’t like. Like me, minorities who minister cross-culturally in traditionally evangelical environments often set themselves up for lives marked by loneliness and frustration. And if we don’t deal with those emotions appropriately, they will manifest in unhealthy ways, like bitterness, hatred, and sometimes even abandoning the faith altogether.

So what are Black evangelicals to do?

First, I advise them to seek out institutions that welcome their full selves. I remember a time in my ministry when some of our white evangelical siblings courageously expressed biblical issues of diversity and ethnic unity. But they soon encountered pushback from some who accused them of becoming too “woke” or embracing “critical race theory.” As a result, Black evangelicals who worked with them also became victims of the fallout.

Anyone can stand on a stage and proclaim a vision, but if the culture of the place cannot house the vision, catastrophe will come. You cannot put new wine in old wineskins (Luke 5:37–39). Any Black evangelical who chooses to push for racial justice in an environment where so many are against it needs to be secure in Christ. Like Olaudah Equiano, a Black evangelical who advocated for the dismantling of slavery in England, we can’t be intimidated or fearful. A great crowd—including some of the men I’ve mentioned earlier—has taught us how to work with our white spiritual siblings without leaving our Blackness at the door. They have spoken prophetically against racism and injustice, showing they love white evangelicals enough to speak truth to them. If we are too enamored with white evangelicals, we will hesitate to do this. But if we’re bitter or harbor unforgiveness, we will wield the truth like a knife to kill instead of a scalpel to heal. And at this point, the last thing we need is Jonahs who end up burned-out and bitter.

Second, Black evangelicals must unashamedly embrace the ministries to which God has called them. To be a Black evangelical means you not only live under the white evangelical gaze but also have your Blackness questioned by other African Americans who do not share the same ministry calling. As church leaders, we tend to moralize what we do. And when there are racial implications attached, I often see the temptation to judge the authenticity of one’s ethnicity based on how and where they serve—a sad truth as old as the Book of Acts. When God called Peter, a Jew, to take the gospel to the Gentiles, his fellow Jews immediately condemned him (Acts 11). Instead of rejoicing in the work of the Spirit to bring about conversions among the Gentiles, the Jews criticized Peter (vv. 1–2). And truthfully, not much has changed.

Recent calls from fellow Black Christians to leave evangelicalism “loud” reveals this same spirit. There should be a cease-fire among Black believers. Those of us called to labor in white evangelical environments must not grant anyone the power to pressure us out of what God has told us to do. I don’t allow anyone the right to question my Blackness or ministry, and neither should you. Not every Black Christian in ministry is called to minister to white evangelicals. But in this season of my life, I know God has called me to do that. And that knowledge has kept me sane over the years.

Third, we need to include people who look like us in the discipleship process. Too often, we think about discipleship only in terms of what’s being transferred spiritually. But it’s impossible to be molded without carrying some cultural fingerprints of the one who is forming you.

I’ve seen the tragedy of what sometimes happens when Black people come to faith in a white environment and are subsequently discipled there. They become captivated by white evangelicals and begin to critique—and even look down on—the Black church. I’ve heard complaints that Black preachers are not “gospel centered” or expository. Sometimes, they’re even ridiculed as entertainers because they “whoop.” But when these same critics eventually encounter an inevitable racial slight or incident in the evangelical world, disappointment and disillusionment seep in, giving way for the Enemy to plant seeds of doubt about the faith. One way to avoid this is by having Black Christians mentor, coach, and disciple us—not exclusively but as part of our overall process. Personally, I’ve been sustained in ministry because of my father, my Black godfather and pastor Bishop Kenneth Ulmer, and many others to whom I often turn for counsel.

Fourth, Black evangelicals need regular furloughs. Like missionaries whom God sends overseas to engage other cultures, we need to “come home” periodically to recharge in our own culture and community. Many of us know it can be exhausting to be the only Black person—or one of few—in a room. It’s tiring when people constantly examine your social media posts about race or can relate only with the version of you that operates in white spaces. Some of the loneliest days of my life were when I led a predominantly white church plant in Memphis for 12 years. My all-Black golf group, which met once a week for four hours, sustained me. With them, I didn’t have to filter my words or code-switch. And the time we spent together allowed me to recharge and engage my white kingdom siblings from a full and healthy heart.

Finally, Black evangelicals need a specific kind of economic empowerment. After the police killing of George Floyd, a lot of Christian colleges and universities took giant leaps forward in race relations. But since then, some institutions have backtracked. The Trump administration has made clear that it is opposed to diversity initiatives. And because predominantly white Christian organizations tend to have politically conservative donors who side with the current administration, these entities typically follow the money.

The older I get, the more I’m convinced we need to cast a vision for minorities to give generously to Christian organizations so we can be truly free in our activism. But what’s true for us as a group should also be true for the individual. If you are a Black evangelical working these institutions for the check and not the calling, I believe compromise will surely follow.

If you ask me how I think about my place in evangelicalism today, I will tell you I’m comfortable seeing myself as a missionary to white evangelicals who need the whole gospel. And maybe that’s what we need. We probably won’t make many converts, and I’m okay with that. God has called us to faithfulness more than fruitfulness.

Bryan Loritts is the Teaching Pastor at The Summit Church. He is an award-winning author of ten books, including Grace to Overcome: 31 Devotions on God’s Work Through Black History.

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Church Life

What It Takes to Prosecute a Child Rapist in Uganda

Morgan Lee

Assertive parents and a Christian ministry take on the country’s hamstrung criminal justice system.

On her way back from school each afternoon, six-year-old N. K. walked past acres of leafy cassava plants, corn stalks, and bushels of bananas dangling over lily-white coffee blossoms. The sun shone brightly on the fertile volcano-soil fields in Bukumbula, a village outside the southwestern Ugandan city of Masaka.

Before entering her courtyard, N. K. walked past Maalo Mohammed’s food stall selling rolexes, a popular Ugandan street food made of fried egg and a flatbread known as chapati. The 70-year-old man, better known as Jajja (grandfather) Roma, often kept an eye on the kids living in the block behind his business for a few hours until their parents came home.

N. K.’s parents were close with Maalo and trusted him. Yet unbeknownst to them, Maalo was following their daughter home, cornering her in the house or latrine, and forcing her to undress. Then he would rape N. K. Before he left, he would point a knife at her, warning her he would kill her if she reported him.

On July 17, 2023, N. K.’s mother, Namatovu Joyce, noticed discharge on her daughter’s underwear while doing laundry. N. K. had been feeling sick, and her mother was suspicious. (Because of the nature of the crimes done against the children in this story, CT is using their initials.)

Namatovu sobbed as N. K. told her that Maalo had been assaulting her. Namatovu and her husband, Sserwanja Dick, contacted the authorities. When the police arrived later that day, they asked Sserwanja for more than a month’s wages to transfer Maalo to jail and treat N. K. at the hospital. Sserwanja begrudgingly paid, and the police arrested Maalo on charges of defilement (how Uganda refers to sexual assault) and took him into custody.

Corruption is just one of numerous challenges that Uganda’s citizens face when navigating the criminal justice system. Lack of funding and personnel regularly impedes arrests, trials, and defendants’ bail and speedy-trial rights, according to interviews with ten professionals connected to Masaka’s criminal justice system.

N. K.’s family faced many of these obstacles: After the arrest, they didn’t receive any updates on a possible trial for two years. Sserwanja visited the district jail every three months to confirm authorities hadn’t released Maalo. (Desperate families may try to bribe officials.) But their determination, in tandem with the efforts of a local ministry, helped secure justice that eludes many sex abuse survivors.

In 2020, Okoa Refuge opened the first of six centers across the Masaka area to help sex abuse survivors file police reports and send their cases to the prosecutors, and to support law enforcement by offering transportation and arrest support. The day after Maalo’s arrest, a social worker from the ministry came to help fill out a police form that documented the crimes to send to the state. By then, three additional families, who all shared a courtyard with Namatovu and Sserwanja, had reported that Maalo had assaulted their daughters, whose ages ranged from five to eight.

The social worker took all five girls to a clinic to see if they had Maalo’s DNA inside them and to test them for sexually transmitted diseases. Tests confirmed that the DNA was a match and that the girls had syphilis.

As the parents tended to their daughters’ health concerns, they could do little to move the case along. The High Court, which had jurisdiction over capital punishment and life imprisonment cases, had a backlog of 1,114 cases. (Ostensibly, each of Uganda’s 135 districts should have their own court, but here 6 districts fell under the Masaka High Court.) It did not hear a single case in 2024. The regional jail held defendants who had been arrested in 2018 and had never had the opportunity to make bail.

Photography by Troy McGee

Okoa Refuge Center

In February of this year, Tyler Workman, Okoa’s CEO, ran into the outgoing High Court judge, who asked Workman if the ministry would consider underwriting a court session later that year. After deliberating with his board, Workman agreed but wanted the funding to be strategic. He and his colleagues decided the session would include cases from only a single district. The ministry also reached out to the (overcrowded) prison to ensure it would have space for up to 40 new prisoners. The ministry requested that the court hear a portion of the cases where staff at one of their centers had counseled or supported the victims.

For its part, the court decided to focus on more recent cases where it believed the victims (many of whom were children) would be more likely to remember incriminating facts and where witnesses were less likely to have moved away.

In April, a police officer came personally to the village to inform N. K., her parents, and the other three families that their case would be heard the first Wednesday of June of this year. On June 4, the families left the village at six in the morning and arrived at court at seven.

The trial commenced at two o’clock. As the families entered, an official escorted the girls away from their parents to a space with balls, puzzles, dolls, and toy cars, which the court hoped would distract the girls and calm their nerves as they prepared to testify. Still, they shook when Maalo walked in, stared at them, and waved.

“I didn’t want to see him,” said N. K. “I refused to make eye contact.”

As the trial opened, Judge Bwanika Fatuma read out the charges against Maalo. But before she could call anyone to the stand, Maalo pleaded guilty to everything.

What It Takes to Prosecute a Child Rapist in Uganda

N.K., age 9, stands between her parents Namatovu Joyce and Sserwanja Dick.

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N.K., age 9, stands between her parents Namatovu Joyce and Sserwanja Dick.

Photography by Troy McGee

Nante Sulinah stands next to her daughter, N. S., age 12.

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Nante Sulinah stands next to her daughter, N. S., age 12.

Photography by Troy McGee

Nantumbwe Rose stands next to her daughter, N. T., age 11.

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Nantumbwe Rose stands next to her daughter, N. T., age 11.

Photography by Troy McGee

Namuyiga Asfah stands next to her two daughters N. A., age 8, and N. A., age 9.

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Namuyiga Asfah stands next to her two daughters N. A., age 8, and N. A., age 9.

Photography by Troy McGee

The girls and their parents were furious. “We were ready to give him hell,” said Namatovu. When a parent in the room started crying, an official reprimanded her.

The lead investigator, the prosecutor, and the judge all later identified the case as the most emotionally disturbing of the session. At court, Nassuna Rehema, the lead investigator, cried. (“He wasn’t remorseful.”) So did the judge. Then Bwanika sentenced Maalo to 10 years, 1 month, and 23 days in prison for each girl he raped.

Maalo is now incarcerated in a prison holding more than five times its intended population.

The criminal justice system put the perpetrator away, but recovery has been tougher at the personal level. In the beginning, classmates bullied the girls for being Maalo’s “wife.” Others accused them of having HIV. (They do not.) All but one family transferred their daughters to other schools.

Still, Maalo’s family’s house sits along their school route. The empty rolex kiosk stands just steps from their home.

After Maalo’s arrest, Namatovu began coming home earlier from work. “Children are more important than money,” she said. At one point, she got so sick thinking about her daughter’s trauma she nearly went to the hospital. She has turned to prayer, asking God to give her strength and courage, and confides in her neighbors, some Muslim, some Christian, about their daughters’ challenges.

All the girls still deal with stomachaches, headaches, and leg pain. The girls need monthly treatments, which include IV injections (“They are so painful,” said N. K.), and often must stay at the clinic for three to five days at a time. The price of the treatments and the transportation to these sessions can overwhelm their families.

“Whenever I feel sick, I remember what happened, and I feel worse,” said N. R., who was five when Maalo raped her.

The girls have also realized how few victims can seek justice. Maalo’s stepson committed a sex crime against a girl around their age, but no one spoke up for her because she was related to him, the girls say.

“I want her parents to encourage her to speak up,” said N. R., “and not block her from saying what happened.”

- More from Morgan Lee

Ideas

I Lost Three Babies in a Year. No One Knew What to Say.

Brittany Lee Allen

Christian misconceptions around miscarriage are not new, but need to change.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash, Pexels

On a mild spring day, I paced back and forth in the newly green grass while on a phone call. A friend’s words stopped me in my tracks. She spoke of a mutual friend: “She’s been trying for a baby for ten years. At least you can get pregnant.”

I had lost three babies in a year, with none in my arms, and these words, though spoken to encourage, sent a shock wave of pain to my heart. I was weary of these kinds of statements from fellow believers: “At least it was early” or “You’ll have another baby.” For those of us who have miscarried, these comments feel as if someone has crumpled up the lives of our babies like a piece of paper and thrown them in the trash. Their words diminish the value of our unborn children and invalidate our grief.

But how did we get here? How did we as evangelical Christians, with our predominantly pro-life stance, overlook the way our words undervalue babies lost through miscarriage? We can begin to answer these questions by looking to history.

We often forget that for many centuries, people were left to guess about the happenings in the secret place of a mother’s womb. As far back as the time of Aristotle (384–322 BC), it was widely believed that a baby gained a soul at the quickening—the moment a woman felt the baby’s movement (typically between 16 and 24 weeks’ gestation). Augustine and Thomas Aquinas believed this was also the time of “ensoulment.”

A baby lost earlier in pregnancy was considered a false conception or a “potential” child. Some still held to this belief even into the 19th century, as we see in one woman’s letter to her husband after her miscarriage: “The imaginary Number 10, whom I had already begun to love, is not a real entity as yet.” But at that time, Western culture had a sharp turn toward another belief.

Around the late 17th century through the late 18th century, many people believed in preformationism—the belief that a miniature, preformed human was in either the woman’s egg or the man’s sperm. Because they thought a fully adult person resided like a Russian nest doll inside one of the sex cells, many began to believe the soul existed at conception. German biologist Oscar Hertwig disproved preformationism when he discovered the process of fertilization somewhere around 1875–1878. This new discovery caused renewed confusion among scholars about when life truly began.

Today’s scientific and technological developments have led nearly all biologists, including those who consider themselves to be pro-choice, to agree that life begins at conception. Fetal doppler monitors detect a heartbeat as early as 8–10 weeks’ gestation, and the ultrasound allows us to capture the heartbeat of a preborn child as early as 5 weeks: a heartbeat that thumps with the truth of life, its rhythm an anthem of praise to the Creator.

Many of us have heard our babies’ heartbeats or witnessed their wiggling on screens. But the fetal doppler monitor was created only in 1964. The ultrasound wasn’t routinely used in American hospitals until the late 1970s. Many women, including my mother, didn’t receive this care even in the late ’80s.

Still, even with all the knowledge we have today, many choose to ignore—and even attack—the personhood of the unborn. We would be amiss to deny the impact this has had on our language around children in the womb, including inside the church.

I shudder to remember my own mistakes in this area when a friend of mine experienced a miscarriage. My thoughts then revealed a wrong view of children in the womb. It seemed to me as if she had lost a dream. But my friend didn’t lose a dream; she was grieving a life, a relationship, the severed connection to her baby. It wasn’t until my own losses that I recognized my ignorance.

When a woman receives comments from fellow believers about her miscarriage, like “You’ll have another baby,” “At least you have other children,” or “It’s so common,” what she hears is “Your baby doesn’t matter,” “Your baby wasn’t real,” and “Your baby isn’t worth grieving.”

Though most Christians uphold the sanctity of life, many of us still speak of babies lost to miscarriage as if they were almost babies. Women are grieving real children whom they carried in their bodies, and we address them as if they have merely lost an aspiration. But God does not view preborn babies this way.

In scientific terms, the loss of a preborn child before 20 weeks is considered a miscarriage, whereas a loss after 20 weeks is classified as stillbirth. When we read about stillbirth in Scripture, however, the Hebrew word nephel includes both stillbirth and miscarriage. The word shakol, often translated to “miscarriage,” means “to be bereaved, to miscarry, to lose children.”

It appears God does not differentiate between types of infant loss. To say to a woman, “At least it was early,” is to align ourselves more with the world’s understanding of personhood than with God’s.

Scripture affirms both the humanity and the personhood of every baby conceived in a mother’s womb, regardless of how long the baby is there. Psalm 139 declares that God forms babies’ “inward parts” and that even before they were ova, zygotes, embryos, or fetuses, they were known by our Creator—their days numbered by him (vv. 13–16, ESV). Ensoulment as Augustine and Aquinas considered it is false; babies have souls from the moment they are conceived. Not only that, but they are also created in his image (Gen. 9:6, ESV). They have intrinsic value that can never be stripped away.

Views about life in the womb and personhood in the culture and past centuries have influenced the way many Christians speak of babies in the womb today. But we of all people should refine our speech surrounding miscarriage to align with the view we find in Scripture.

When our gut reaction is “You’ll have another baby,” we can instead say, “I’m so sorry for the loss of your baby.” Rather than dismissing the pain of this great loss with “At least it was early,” we can say, “Every life lost—no matter how young—is valuable and worthy of grief.”

By my first Mother’s Day post-miscarriage, I had lost two babies. A friend walked up to me at church bearing flowers and said, “You are a mother. Happy Mother’s Day.” She exemplifies how we might acknowledge infant loss.

Instead of treating women as if they’ve merely lost pregnancies, we can comfort them in the grief of whom they really lost—their babies. After all, women are not only grieving their babies; they are also grieving the loss of getting to kiss them or look into their eyes. These women carry the grief of never seeing who their children would have become. They’re grieving an entire future they had already planned.

In past centuries, even before technology could prove it, some Christians understood that every life conceived was a person with a soul. There’s a poem by Mary Carey, written in 1657, where she shares about her own early miscarriage.

“What birth is this; a poor despised creature? / A little embryo; void of life, and feature,” she begins. She had lost a baby early enough that the baby’s features were indiscernible. Yet she also says,

I also joy, that God hath gain’d one more;

To praise him in the heavens; then was before:

And that this babe (as well as all the rest,)

since ’t had a soul, shall be forever blest.

Carey knew her baby, though “void of life, and feature,” had an eternal soul and was a child. And she grieved her child. She wasn’t the only one. Sir William Masham wrote to his mother-in-law in 1631 that his wife was “young with child and hath miscarried this day.” He continued: “It is the greater grief to us, having been thus long without; I pray God sanctify this affliction to us.”

May we, too, learn to uphold these young lives who are tragically lost as the image bearers they are, through our words and actions. And in doing so, may we allow women in our church pews to grieve their babies.

Brittany Lee Allen is the author of Lost Gifts: Miscarriage, Grief, and the God of All Comfort.

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News

The Biggest Planned Parenthood in the Country Is Closing

Phoebe Suy Gibson in Houston

In Houston, pro-life Christians prepare to meet the growing demand for women’s health care and crisis pregnancy resources.

Planned Parenthood Prevention Park in Houston

Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle

Gulfcrest Street curves sharply and rises slowly as what had been the nation’s largest Planned Parenthood facilities comes into view.

The blue-windowed building stairsteps into the sky, looming over Houston’s Gulf Freeway as a bastion to abortion rights advocates and an abomination to pro-life supporters, many of whom prayed for the center to close.

Soon their prayers will be answered, with the clinic set to shutter at the end of September, part of a restructuring plan due to funding cuts.

When Planned Parenthood Prevention Park opened in Houston in May 2010, more than a dozen protesters demonstrated outside the 78,000-square-foot edifice, picketing, singing, and even weeping. This location gained widespread attention in 2015 when the Center for Medical Progress published clandestine videos from the clinic.

Many of the city’s pro-life organizations sprouted within a 15-mile radius of Prevention Park. Demand for their services has been on the rise since the Texas abortion ban took effect in 2022, and pro-life expect the trend to accelerate.

The closure “still feels a bit surreal,” said Mary Whitehurst, CEO of The Source, a pro-life, “Christ-centered” women’s health care clinic. Rivaling Planned Parenthood always felt “a bit like David and Goliath,” she said.

But by offering medical care beyond pregnancy tests and counseling—including well-woman exams and contraception—The Source hopes to fill in the gaps left by Planned Parenthood shutdowns.

In October, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast’s operations will be taken over by Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas, per local media reports. With the consolidation comes the closures of Prevention Park and a clinic in southwest Houston, leaving four remaining facilities on the outskirts of the city.

In neighboring Louisiana, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast announced it will cease operations entirely, shuttering both the Baton Rouge and New Orleans clinics. Planned Parenthood confirmed the closures but did not respond to requests for further comment.

Pressure on Planned Parenthood has been intensifying for years, with Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin stripping away state dollars, mostly by removing Planned Parenthood’s eligibility for programs like Medicaid or Title X.

“This is definitely something for pro-lifers to celebrate,” said John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life. “This is a symbolic victory that Planned Parenthood has really lost its prominence and its power. That building specifically, the largest Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion clinic before Dobbs, it really represented the height of Planned Parenthood’s impact on our culture and politics.”

On the federal level, Planned Parenthood was essentially cut off from federal funding via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Congress last month. Legal challenges claiming the move amounts to legislative “punishment without a trial” are making their way through the courts, but if the cuts stand, Planned Parenthood estimates a third of its facilities, about 200 clinics, would be at risk of closing.

In addition to national defunding efforts, abortion restrictions have stymied the organization’s operations in 41 states, per reproductive health policy group the Guttmacher Institute. As a result, Planned Parenthood pivoted to facilitating out-of-state abortions.

With clinics in Houston and Austin, Texas, The Source aims to serve as an alternative to Planned Parenthood, focusing on holistic and preventative care for women.

Patients can receive medical services like well-woman exams, tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, contraception, and professional counseling and case management, all for free. They provide spiritual care too, with 203 women making “decisions for Christ” through its ministry last year.

“Our philosophy and how we are approaching care is that if we can help women have access to excellent health care, be equipped with education and resources to prevent unplanned pregnancy, then we’ll be able to have, ultimately, the long-term impact that we want: fewer women needing abortions,” Whitehurst explained.

Whitehurst doesn’t shy away from using the term reproductive health care, saying it refers not just to abortion but to a range of services women need.

Last year, The Source served 6,215 patients in-person and virtually. Already this month, its clinics have seen an uptick in appointments thanks to the launch of a new TikTok account.

The Houston Coalition for Life’s Blue Blossom Pregnancy Centers has also seen traffic increase each year since the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. In 2024, a record 5,051 women visited the organization’s headquarters and four mobile centers.

Like many pro-life ministries, Blue Blossom offers free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, counseling, parenting classes, and material help like diapers and wipes. Its biggest mobile center is permanently stationed outside Prevention Park. (For now, the ministry doesn’t plan to move the 44-foot-long “Big Blue” bus.)

“We’re just going to continue doing everything we’re doing, because nothing has really changed except the law,” said Christine Melchor, executive director of the Houston Coalition for Life.

In Texas, abortions now take place at home behind closed bathroom doors rather than in a clinic operating room.

“We want people to realize abortions have not ended. There’s still a lot of work to do,” Melchor said. “Our numbers have increased since Roe was overturned. We’re still here, and we’re not going anywhere.”

Texas ministries report more women seeking aftercare following medication abortions—they offer emotional support and if needed, refer to medical providers for follow-up.

Darlene Kearney has found, regardless of the law, there will always be pregnant women who need help. Kearney runs God’s Lovely Butterflies Maternity Home, serving expectant moms coming out of incarceration or experiencing homelessness.

For these women, she becomes their village of one, providing housing, teaching parenting and life-skill classes, driving moms to prenatal appointments, throwing baby showers, and helping women sign up for public assistance.

A former teen mother herself, Kearney guides women through motherhood in the trenches. Her ministry has served 30 moms and their kids since 2021 and stands to double its capacity after opening its second location in Houston’s north side this August. She said it’s the city’s only Black-owned maternity home.

“I will give what I have, my all in all, to believe in and to help these young ladies,” said Kearney, who shared that God gave her the vision for the ministry in a dream 15 years ago. “I’m not rich. I do what I need to do to make sure these ladies keep their babies, they’re safe, and have the proper support they need. Everybody needs support.”

The need for more robust community support for mothers with unplanned pregnancies will only increase as Planned Parenthood loses ground, Kearney predicts. As it is, the demand for housing outpaces Kearney’s capacity to help. She hopes to one day launch a 20-unit apartment complex to serve even more mothers in crisis.

Local congregations also have a role to play in meeting community needs. Church-based support groups, organized through the national ministry Embrace Grace, offer both material help and a sense of community for women experiencing unplanned pregnancies.

With around 183 groups in Texas, including 19 in Houston, “the church can play a big role in helping save lives through loving people,” said cofounder and president Amy Ford.

“Now more than ever, these moms are pregnant, and they are going to need support,” Ford emphasized. “We can’t just say, ‘Good luck, I hope it works out for you.’ We need to walk alongside them, to be in the trenches and help get them back on their feet.”

In the midst of the policy shuffles and the evolving abortion landscape, the reality on the ground for pro-life groups like the Houston Coalition for Life and Texas Right to Life is that much of the fervor for advocacy and volunteerism has waned.

For instance, the Houston Coalition for Life has found it more challenging to enlist prayer and sidewalk volunteers. These volunteers serve on the frontlines of the pro-life effort, praying for women as they walk into abortion clinics.

Fifteen years ago, Melchor stood outside Prevention Park as the former bank building was converted into a Planned Parenthood facility, and she and other pro-lifers will be present in full force the day it closes—both to celebrate what the closure represents and to mourn the lives lost.

- More from Phoebe Suy Gibson in Houston

News

Died: James Dobson, Who Taught Evangelicals to Focus on Family

Daniel Silliman

The child psychologist answered hundreds of thousands of parenting questions and urged Christians to fight in America’s “civil war of values.”

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

James Dobson, author and child psychologist who told millions of evangelicals how to raise children and order their families, died on August 21 at the age of 89.

Dobson believed in strict-but-loving discipline and obedience, which he held out as the antidote to America’s cultural permissiveness and slide toward moral chaos and social disorder.

The founder of Focus on the Family, Dobson wrote more than a dozen books, including Dare to Discipline, Parenting Isn’t for Cowards, and The Strong-Willed Child, and answered questions on radio programs broadcast on thousands of stations across the United States.

His advice was embraced by Christian parents who were eager to hear from a medical professional who also upheld traditional family values. By the mid-1990s, Focus on the Family received upwards of 12,000 letters, emails, and phone calls every day.

“For nearly five decades, he was one of the most influential Christian leaders in our country,” evangelist Franklin Graham wrote in a tribute on social media. “Dr. Dobson was a staunch defender of the family and stood for morality and Biblical values as much as any person in our country’s history.”

Dobson appeared on the cover of Christianity Today in 1982. The profile called him the “one man behind the profamily phenomenon,” working to “snatch the tottering institution” of the traditional family “from the brink of the grave.”

Part of Dobson’s power, the magazine noted, was his gentleness and moderation.

“His writings have a sensible tone,” wrote Rodney Clapp. “He rejects extremes, fishes methodically for the ‘logical middle,’ advocates being open-minded but not letting ‘brains leak out.’”

He grew more political as time went on. Dobson also had a large political impact, mobilizing Christians to vote for conservative candidates who prioritized opposition to abortion, pornography, and the social acceptance of homosexuality.

The activism was not always welcome. The late Michael Gerson, a conservative political columnist who became a speech writer for President George W. Bush, complained Dobson was “a moralist and a populist” who didn’t understand the complexities of politics but went around “demanding rapid, immediate progress to fit a flaming moral vision.”

Critics have also accused Dobson of replacing the gospel with “family values.” Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez argued that evangelicals were “inspired by men like James Dobson” to embrace an ideology of militant masculinity in the home and in politics.

Some critics of Dobson’s politics, however, nonetheless praised the positive impact of his parenting advice. Historian John Fea noted that Dobson’s ministry had a transformative effect on his father.

“Dobson taught my father that he should exercise paternal discipline because children had strong wills that needed breaking, but that such discipline should never be delivered in a spirit of anger,” Fea wrote in The Atlantic. “For all the bad that’s come out of this movement, there are still countless stories of personal transformation leading people to become better parents, better spouses, and better members of their communities.”

Dobson was born in Louisiana on April 21, 1936. He was the only child of Myrtle and James Dobson Sr., traveling evangelists with the Church of the Nazarene.

Dobson recalled being close to his parents. He said he was heartbroken when they left him with an aunt so they could travel to tent meetings and revivals around the Southwest and in the Great Plains states. As a young boy, he started acting out.

“I was kind of a troublemaker in church and in the neighborhood,” he told biographer Dale Buss. “I can look back and see that apparently I had felt abandoned even though I wasn’t angry with my parents.”

When Dobson was six, his mother decided to stay home to raise him. She doted on him but was also a strict disciplinarian. She especially would not tolerate sassiness, Dobson said.

When he started rebelling as a teenager, Dobson’s father stopped traveling so he could have a larger parenting role. The family moved to Texas, where the elder Dobson took a job as a pastor.

“He came home and canceled four years of meetings with one stroke,” Dobson said. “He took a church in order to be home with me. He saved me.”

He considered following his parents into ministry but was inspired by his classes at Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University) to study psychology. Dobson went on to earn a doctorate at the University of Southern California medical school and do academic research at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. He oversaw a $5 million study of dietary treatment of children with a rare genetic disorder that caused developmental disabilities, and he wrote multiple scientific articles and a textbook.

At the same time, Dobson became acutely concerned with family structures. He was alarmed by the growing number of children born out of wedlock, the frequency and ease of divorce, and how many kids were sent to daycare. Views on sex were changing rapidly—and respect for authority seemed to just disintegrate.

The cultural transformations of the 1960s were, according to Dobson, wrecking families and harming children.

“All those things assaulted family life,” Dobson said. “I was watching everything I cared about being mocked and vilified, and it gave me this passion to do something to protect and preserve it.”

He started teaching a Sunday school class answering the questions of young parents and then decided to write a book. He dashed off Dare to Discipline in six months.

“Children thrive best in an atmosphere of genuine love, undergirded by reasonable, consistent discipline,” Dobson wrote in the introduction. “In a day of widespread drug usage, immorality, civil disobedience, vandalism, and violence, we must not depend on hope and luck to fashion the critical attitudes we value in our children. … Permissiveness has not just been a failure; it’s been a disaster!”

The book sold 2 million copies in 22 years. An updated edition, released in 1992, has sold another 1.5 million.

Dobson launched Focus on the Family as a 15-minute, weekly radio program in 1977. Early listeners found the psychologist couldn’t say much in that time, though, and often barely made it through a question. The producers revamped the format in 1981, turning the show into a daily, half-hour conversation with Gilbert Moegerle, an experienced host and father of three.

Focus on the Family was then packaged and distributed with Chuck Swindoll’s half-hour program, Insight for Living, and the show took off. By 1982, Dobson was on 800 Christian radio stations every day. By the 1990s, when Focus on the Family moved from Southern California to Colorado Springs, the ministry had to to hire 350 people to respond to the daily mail.

Focus on the Family expanded into a $140 million multimedia enterprise, with books, magazines, television shows, and, of course, a slate of popular radio programs that reached an estimated 220 million people in more than 150 countries.

Perhaps the most influential program was Adventures in Odyssey, a radio drama narrating the adventures of a group of youngsters who hang out at a small-town soda shop and ice cream emporium, learning life lessons from the grandfatherly proprietor and inventor, John Avery Whittaker. The show became one of the most-listened-to programs on Christian radio and “an important cultural touchpoint for many evangelicals of a certain age,” according to Relevant magazine.

Dobson also founded Family Research Council, a political think tank and advocacy organization. Dobson was always interested in American politics but became more active and outspoken in the 1990s.

He was deeply offended by President Bill Clinton’s immorality—and the fact that the country seemed to only care about the state of the economy. He started regularly urging listeners to call Congress, the White House, or particular government agencies to make their voices heard.

Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, who went on to become a TV commentator, recalled that Dobson’s listeners “melted down our phone lines” over an education bill. Democratic leader Tom Daschle’s staff reportedly decided to change the office phone number after thousands of Dobson’s listeners clogged lines to protest a procedural maneuver he was making in the senate.

Dobson told CT that he could not tolerate Christian “isolationism” when the stakes were so high.

“Hanging in the balance is the essence of the Christian faith—purity, reverence for life, family stability, love for God, and receptivity to the gospel itself,” he wrote. “We can’t afford to tremble now!”

Dobson endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in 2004, backing George W. Bush’s reelection bid and urging the president to support a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. He turned leadership of Focus of the Family over to Jim Daly, the current president, the following year.

Dobson launched a new radio show, Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, and started the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, where he continued to speak out on political issues.

“Nobody … has done as much to align evangelicalism with hard-nosed partisan politics,” CT reported in 2006. “‘Family’ no longer goes with baseball and apple pie. It has become a fighting word, and a politicized one at that.”

Dobson said he knew his political activities offended people and many evangelicals wanted him to stick to parenting advice. He couldn’t accept that, he said, when America was locked in a “civil war of values.”

“Do we as Christians need to be liked so badly,” he asked, “that we choose to remain silent in response to the killing of babies, the spreading of homosexual propaganda to our children, the distribution of condoms and immoral advice to our teenagers, and the undermining of marriage as an institution? Would Jesus have ignored these wicked activities?”

In his final years, Dobson was a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump. Dobson said that while he shared many evangelicals’ concerns about Trump’s private behavior and caustic rhetoric, the candidate’s commitment to support pro-life justices to the Supreme Court mattered more than anything else.

The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, after Trump appointed justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, proved that was the right decision, Dobson said.

Dobson is survived by his wife, Shirley, and their children, Danae and Ryan.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated Tom Daschale’s party affiliation. He is a Democrat.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Church Life

Is Vacation Bible School Worth the Effort?

Kristy Etheridge

I wasn’t quite sure what would happen when I signed up my children for three straight weeks of VBS at three different churches.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye and Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

This summer, I signed my children up for three back-to-back vacation Bible schools—one in Brooklyn, where we live; one in Manhattan; and one in the suburbs of Philadelphia near extended family. Our vacation Bible school (VBS) boot camp spanned three consecutive weeks and three different denominations.

I wasn’t sure how my kids would respond. Would three weeks of Jesus camp turn my nine-year-old son off to church or draw him closer to God? How would my three-year-old daughter fare in a trio of new environments without me? Was this a little too much VBS for one month?

I’ll admit my VBS immersion plan was as much logistical as it was spiritual. Earlier this year, I had scrolled through the family calendar and counted nine weeks of blank squares in July and August. I told my husband I was starting to panic. After years of working limited hours as a freelancer to maximize time with my children, accepting a new job opened my eyes to the stress millions of parents face every year. Piecing together the summertime childcare puzzle requires time, money, and first-rate organizational skills.

The cost of local summer camps involving sports, art, nature, and all kinds of niche activities was staggering ($800 a week to play chess?!). Our newly planted church didn’t have the resources to hold its own vacation Bible school—or kids’ week, kids’ camp, or my favorite: kidz camp (VBS’s edgy cousin).

Feeling discouraged and a little cross-eyed after several hours of research, I prayed for help and started looking up VBS programs at churches where our family had a connection. My anxiety lifted as the blank calendar squares filled up with day camps that were both Christ centered and blessedly affordable.

The one in Manhattan, at a large Presbyterian church, cost the most, but it was also the only full-day program, running from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday to Friday. The church intentionally chose those hours to meet the needs of working parents. To wrangle enough volunteers, church leadership asked parents of campers to spend one of the five days serving.

The Brooklyn camp took place at a small, nondenominational community church and was free to attend. It ran from 9 a.m. to noon, Monday to Friday.

The third camp was held at my mom’s midsize Lutheran church in southeastern Pennsylvania. It cost $50 per child, with a promise to help families who couldn’t afford the fee. It also ran from 9 a.m. to noon during the workweek.

I was curious to see how the three VBS experiences compared to one another. Each church invited parents to watch a portion of the programming, so I was able to make some first-person observations in addition to interviewing my own children.

Both kids enjoyed all three camps but liked the Pennsylvania one best. I expected this from my daughter, given that her grandmother was one of her VBS teachers that week. But my son surprised me by picking the most traditional of the three.

The church still called its program vacation Bible school, not some cool new pseudonym. Each day began and ended in the sanctuary, with its stained-glass windows, long red carpet, and golden chandeliers. And many of the teachers were retirees.

The kids didn’t care about any of that. They were wowed from the moment they stepped out of the parking lot and into the Alaskan wilderness. The theme was True North: Trusting Jesus in a Wild World, and the church went all in. White, fluorescent ceiling bulbs were replaced by green, blue, and purple hues to invoke the Northern Lights. Someone had dragged undecorated Christmas trees out of the attic to create a coniferous forest. My daughter squealed with delight when she spotted a little stuffed otter swimming in the make-believe mountain stream.

A quick search shows that this ready-made VBS program from Group Publishing was a popular choice this year. A Pentecostal church in Tennessee, a Presbyterian church in Canada, and a Roman Catholic church in Trinadad and Tobago are among the long list of congregations that deployed the curriculum this summer.

For about $300, churches could order the True North starter kit, including a program guide, leader manuals, music, and basic student resources. The church my kids visited purchased add-ons like colorful wristbands, T-shirts, and scenery backdrops.

Ready-made programs like this one are the most accessible for many congregations. They can also tip VBS toward social media homogeneity, the same “tyranny of the algorithm” that makes “every coffee shop [look] the same.”

But the globalization of VBS programming isn’t necessarily problematic if church leaders carefully vet their curricula. It’s beautiful to think that my kids were studying the Book of Matthew, learning lessons like “When we need hope, we can trust Jesus,” as children from Ontario to Trinidad were hearing the same message (delivered perfectly by Bruce the Moose).

The Manhattan church chose Lifeway’s Magnified! curriculum, which focused on Psalm 34:3 and encouraged kids to discover “the bigness of God in the smallest of things.” The church decked out its space with colorful backdrops, giant daffodils, and jumbo ants made from black balloons.

This congregation did an outstanding job of keeping the key point front and center, judging by the frequency with which my toddler continues to randomly shout, “Made to magnify God!”

She also still talks about “that silly frog.” Some brave soul donned a neon-green, inflatable costume in the July heat. His antics kept the kids laughing all week.

The final stop on our Tour de VBS, on our home turf in Brooklyn, was another win. The church used a ministry called Orange for its program, Live It Out: Discover How to Love like Jesus.

Compared to Lifeway and Group Publishing, Orange is the new kid on the block and seems to emphasize digital content over VBS’s physical spaces. For my kids, that cut down a bit on the wow factor, but they still had plenty of hands-on fun. They could also rattle off the five key lessons by heart—“love one another,” “be kind to one another,” “forgive one another,” “pray for one another,” and “serve one another.”

VBS falls somewhere between weekly Sunday school classes and overnight Christian camps. For preschool and elementary-age kids like mine, it can be a spiritually significant, immersive experience without the time constraints of Sunday mornings or the higher stakes of sleepaway camp. As NPR reported last year, VBS is also an easy entry point for non-Christians facing significant childcare needs.

And yet the number of churches that offer VBS is dwindling. CT covered the trend in 2013 after Barna published “The State of Vacation Bible School.” At that time, Barna reported that 68 percent of Protestant churches in the US offered VBS in 2012, down from 81 percent in 1997.

It’s hard to find comparable recent numbers, but it appears VBS programs were already declining when the pandemic hit. A 2022 study by Hartford International, which surveyed more than 600 churches representing 31 denominations (both Catholic and Protestant), found that only 36 percent of churches held VBS the year before the pandemic. After a sharp drop-off in 2020 and a rebound in 2021, just 31 percent of churches said they were planning to hold VBS in 2022.

There are many reasons churches may skip vacation Bible school. It’s time-consuming and logistically challenging. It requires a significant time commitment from volunteers. It’s messy, loud, and can be costly. Plus, results are difficult to measure. But couldn’t we say the same about most worthwhile evangelism and discipleship efforts?

I may never know whether three weeks of VBS boot camp in the summer of 2025 had a long-term impact on my children’s faith, but I’m seeing evidence that the experience captivated the little hearts in my household.

It’s been more than a month since the first week of VBS came to a close in Manhattan. I asked my son if he could recall any important lessons he learned there. He answered almost instantly: “God loves me. God cares about me. God sees me. God forgives me.”

Not to be left out, my daughter piped up to share her most important takeaway: “I know! Trusting in Jesus!” Then they both broke into one of their favorite new VBS songs as I soaked in the sounds of their high-pitched little voices. These lyrics say it best: “The greatness of God is magnified in the smallest of things.”

- More from Kristy Etheridge

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