Announcing Christianity Today’s International Essay Contest

We’re looking for wisdom, perspective, and theological understanding from Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Bahasa Indonesian writers.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Nguyen Dang Hoang / Unsplash / WikiMedia Commons

In the past year, we’ve published more than 500 translations of Christianity Today articles into 14 languages. We’re excited that so many of our essays and news stories have resonated with readers around the world. Now we want to bring wisdom, perspective, and theological understanding written in your first language to our English readers.

This year, we’re holding an essay contest for Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Bahasa Indonesian writers. Write and submit a piece in Portuguese, Spanish, French, or Bahasa Indonesia. It will be judged by three to five Christian leaders and theologians from regions that speak this language. The winning essays will then be translated into English and published on Christianity Today’s website in both languages.

Your contest entry should be factually sound, well researched, and—as our title suggests—pertain to modern Christianity. We are interested in essays that are expertly written and well supported, provide a fresh perspective, and connect the eternal message of the gospel with current trends, culture, events, and news. Please don’t tell Christians what they should be doing; instead invite them to think through their faith better as it pertains to a particular event or issue.

We’re interested in reading unique, surprising arguments that communicate the Gospel's perspective on a particular issue that will disarm readers and make them more curious. First-person articles should apply your personal experience to a broader concept of faith and biblical truth. We are most interested in stories of Christians living out their faith in unique ways that impact the world for the better and communicate truth in a way that is deep, nuanced, and challenging.

Prizes

We will have one winner in each language: Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Bahasa Indonesian.

This year’s contest winners will win $250 and a three-year Christianity Today print and online subscription. They will also have their essay published on Christianity Today’s website.

If your submission does not win, we may still publish it. In submitting your piece, you agree to have your essay considered by Christianity Today’s editors for future publication.

Details and submission information for the following languages:

News

28 Abducted Baptist School Students Freed in Nigeria

Ibrahim Garba and Sam Olukoya - The Associated Press

Parents reunite with sons and daughters at Bethel high school, yet more than 80 children remain with Kaduna kidnappers.

Parents are reunited with released students of Bethel Baptist High School in Damishi, Nigeria, on Sunday, July 25.

AP Photo

Armed kidnappers in Nigeria have released 28 of the more than 120 students who were abducted at the beginning of July from Bethel Baptist High School in the northern town of Damishi.

Church officials handed those children over to their parents at the school on Sunday. But Israel Akanji, president of the Nigerian Baptist Convention, said more than 80 other children are still being held by the gunmen.

So far 34 children kidnapped from the school on July 5 have either been released or have escaped from the custody of the gunmen. It is unclear when the other children will be released. The gunmen have reportedly demanded 500,000 Naira (about $1,200) for each student.

Akanji said the church did not pay any ransoms because it is opposed to paying criminals, but he added the church was unable to stop the children’s families from taking any actions they deem fit to secure their release.

A spokesman for the Nigerian Police, Mohammed Jalige, said security forces and civilian defense forces were on a routine rescue patrol July 12 around the forests near the village of Tsohon Gaya when they found three exhausted kidnapped victims roaming in the bush. Two other students escaped on July 20 when they were ordered to fetch firewood from a nearby forest. Jalige said they were undergoing medical examinations.

Parents are reunited with released students of the Bethel Baptist High School in Damishi, Nigeria, on Sunday, July 25.

Gunman called bandits have carried out a spate of mass abductions from schools in northern Nigeria this year, mainly seeking ransoms.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who won election on hopes that he would tackle Nigeria’s security challenges, has not been able to do much in addressing the growing cases of mass abductions from Nigerian schools.

The BWA ranks Nigeria as the world’s second-most vulnerable country for Baptists on its inaugural Baptist Vulnerability Index, which assesses ministry challenges—including religious freedom, violence, hunger, and livelihood—in the 126 countries and territories with BWA members.

Nigeria leads the world in the number of kidnapped Christians, with 990 tallied by Open Doors.

In the watchdog’s 2021 World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian, Nigeria broke into the top 10 for the first time, rising to No. 9 from No. 12 the previous year.

Parents are reunited with released students of the Bethel Baptist High School in Damishi, Nigeria, on Sunday, July 25.

When the abduction occurred, Baptist and evangelical leaders in Nigeria explained to CT why the time has come for Christians to increase their self-defense measures.

“Christians in Kaduna State have suffered too much from the hands of their attackers, whether Fulani herdsmen, bandits, or terrorists,” said Samson Olasupo Ayokunle, president of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and a Baptist pastor.

“… We have seen that though prayer works, prayer alone cannot do it because faith without works is dead being alone.”

Additional reporting by CT

- More from Ibrahim Garba and Sam Olukoya - The Associated Press

News

Former Mars Hill Elders: Mark Driscoll Is Still ‘Unrepentant,’ Unfit to Pastor

Kate Shellnutt

Dozens of leaders from the preacher’s former congregation are calling for him to resign from The Trinity Church, where departing members are raising familiar concerns.

Once a multisite church based in Seattle, Mars Hill locations became independent churches following Mark Driscoll’s resignation in 2014.

Emmett Anderson / Flickr

More than 40 elders who served with Mark Driscoll during the final years of Mars Hill Church are publicly calling for him to step down from his current pastoral position and seek reconciliation with those he has hurt.

“We are troubled that he continues to be unrepentant despite the fact that these sins have been previously investigated, verified, and brought to his attention by his fellow Elders, prior to his abrupt resignation” from Mars Hill, they wrote in a statement originally released Monday to CT. “Accordingly, we believe that Mark is presently unfit for serving the church in the office of pastor.”

Driscoll founded The Trinity Church in Scottsdale in 2016, two years after resigning from Mars Hill at the conclusion of an investigation into his leadership. In recent months, several former Mars Hill elders have heard directly from members leaving The Trinity Church over concerns around Driscoll.

The leaders who signed onto the statement say they felt a responsibility to clarify the charges against him as a way to warn current members of his church and continue to call the well-known preacher to the kind of repentance and restoration process he was never able to complete under Mars Hill.

“This letter isn’t new information. It’s just information that hasn’t been widely spread,” said Ryan Welsh, who had been pastor of theology and leadership at Mars Hill. “Our hope is not just to point a finger. Our hope is to protect people and, by the Spirit’s work, that Mark would respond.”

The 41 signatories represent the majority of the pastors who served at the church between 2011 and 2014, when formal charges were raised against Driscoll. The list includes former executive pastor Sutton Turner and former teaching pastor Dave Bruskus, who made up the executive team alongside Driscoll.

Their statement also includes a never-before-released document from October 2014 that details how the church investigation, conducted by members of the elder board at the direction of Mars Hill’s board of overseers, found Driscoll to be quick-tempered, arrogant, and domineering.

The church asked him to repent and seek reconciliation as a result of these patterns of sin and set out a restoration plan. Driscoll resigned before the plan could be implemented.

Some of the findings were shared with Mars Hill members the Sunday after Driscoll resigned, but those gatherings were sparsely attended and the full statement had never been made public. After its founding pastor left, Mars Hill dissolved, with some of its locations becoming independent churches.

Upon leaving, Driscoll mentioned past sin that he had already “confessed and repented of” and said he “had not disqualified [himself] from ministry.” He later described how he and his wife sensed God calling them to leave Mars Hill and referenced opposition wanting him out.

The recommended restoration plan, though, involved returning him to ministry and leadership at Mars Hill. “We hoped to see him restored and are grieved that Mark chose to leave before we were able to walk alongside him through this process,” the elders wrote at the time.

Seven years later, after reaching out to him privately and individually, those elders are again pleading with 50-year-old Driscoll “to participate in and submit to Christian conciliation” and resign from any position of spiritual authority “for the foreseeable future.” Monday’s statement represents the largest-scale effort to call their former pastor to repentence. The signatories recognize the parallels between the allegations made by former Trinity members and the situation at Mars Hill.

“We are saddened to learn that Mark Driscoll has continued in a pattern of sinful actions towards staff members and congregants as he pastors The Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona,” their statement opens. “These sinful leadership behaviors appear similar to what he exhibited in his leadership role at Mars Hill Church in Seattle.”

Several former members of The Trinity Church, including its recently resigned director of security, Chad Freese, have begun to share their experiences online. Their accounts and criticism predate Christianity Today’s recent podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, which looks back at the factors around the former church’s growth and collapse under Driscoll.

The outgoing members have raised concerns about the relational health of the Arizona church, citing specific examples of severed relationships in the congregation, including within families. Some of these people, according to Freese, had been barred from church grounds. He also described what he sees as favoritism, distrust, and threats from Driscoll, including threats of legal action.

Last month, the church acknowledged some of the claims made by Freese, referencing an incident report made in children’s ministry. The church wrote in a newsletter that the statements were “categorically false” and considered them “part of an effort to ‘take down Trinity’ and ‘destroy the church.’”

Freese wrote that he had originally come to Trinity “aware of issues at Mars Hill,” but was drawn to Driscoll’s sermons and wanted to see for himself.

Similarly, when the Eneas family joined The Trinity Church last year, they felt like they fit in as fellow transplants from the Pacific Northwest. Every once in a while, Tiffany Eneas said, Driscoll would reference “another church in my past,” but not mention Mars Hill by name. (The church Driscoll led for 18 years also doesn’t come up in his bio on the Trinity site.) “We were even telling our friends, ‘Don’t google him, just come and see it for yourself,’” she told CT.

Eneas and her family left the church over what she saw as controlling and bullying behavior. She was disturbed by how pastors related to church members, including scrutinizing her relationships with former attendees.

“[My husband] said if he knew, he would have never even driven into the parking lot,” Eneas said. “I don’t feel like people knew … I had such a great experience growing up in the church. I just walked up and trusted.”

She’s grateful for the counsel she received from some former Mars Hill elders who joined an 85-member Facebook group of people who left Driscoll’s congregation in Scottsdale. She estimates that over 100 people in the church she now attends had also left Trinity.

Even with departures and renewed online discussion around Driscoll, the recent tension has not been felt across The Trinity Church. New attendees continue to join the church and appreciate Driscoll as its pastor and preacher.

The former Mars Hill elders acknowledge that they have “no formal authority in this current matter” over Driscoll’s current role, but also raise concerns that the leaders who backed his decision to plant The Trinity Church had not considered the charges he left behind in Seattle.

Earlier this year, The Trinity Church website had listed Texas pastors Robert Morris and Jimmy Evans as well as Christian consultant Randal Taylor as “wise counsel.” Their names no longer appear on the site, nor are any elders listed.

In the latest tax filings for Mark Driscoll Ministries (also called Real Faith), Taylor is also listed as a trustee, alongside Brandon Thomas, who pastors Keystone Church in Keller, Texas, and Josh McPherson, who leads Grace City Church in Wenatchee, Washington. McPherson is a former Acts 29 board member.

“This ‘translocal’ advisory structure has allowed Mark to avoid the accountability he needs,” the former Mars Hill elders wrote. “We hope and pray, by the grace of God, that Mark will submit himself to a prolonged season under the Godly leadership and direction of a local church body and Elder team.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated July 28 as the total number of elders signing onto the public statement rose to 41. The statement listing the 41 elders is available here.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Christianity Today Announces New ‘Viral Jesus’ Podcast

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Ed Gilbreath
Phone: 630.384.7288
E-mail: egilbreath@christianitytoday.com

Carol Stream, IL – July 23, 2021 – What does it mean to live out our faith in a digital world? How are Christian leaders and creatives using social media to share the Good News? These are the themes explored in Viral Jesus, a new podcast from Christianity Today about communication and the power of social connections.

In each episode, communications scholar Heather Thompson Day takes her listeners on a deep dive with ministry leaders, content creators, and social media influencers to find out how they’re making their faith go viral.

“There are so many opinions and ideas swirling around social media that it’s easy to think we’ll never have anything worthwhile to say,” says Thompson Day. “But what if we could learn from Christian influencers who are really good at knowing how to connect online? That’s what Viral Jesus is all about.”

For Viral Jesus’s inaugural episodes, Thompson Day has assembled a dynamic array of guests including theologian and Reading While Black author Esau McCaulley; English professor and culture critic Karen Swallow Prior; and comedienne, blogger, and prolific YouTuber Kristina Kuzmič. Topics covered range from building community naturally to using TikTok as a tool for discipleship. The first episode, featuring McCaulley, is called “Tweeting While Black.”

Beyond the Twitter tips and Instagram insights found in the conversations on Viral Jesus, Thompson Day also draws from her expertise as a professor of communication at Colorado Christian University (and soon Andrews University) to show real-life examples of communication theory in practice.

Adds Thompson Day: “The goal of Viral Jesus is for all Christians to hear from people they respect on how you build online community, but more specifically I hope this podcast will also be a resource to church and ministry leaders as they navigate social media engagement.”

Christianity Today’s vice president of strategic partnerships, Ed Gilbreath, says Viral Jesus is the first of several new podcasts in development from CT’s Big Tent Initiative, “which is a focused effort to help CT reach and represent more of the racial, ethnic, and generational diversity of God’s church.”

Viral Jesus’s trailer and first episode with Esau McCaulley are available now, with new episodes releasing every Wednesday. Find it at ChristianityToday.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever listeners get their podcasts.

Listeners also can join the Viral Jesus conversation on social media by following Heather Thompson Day @HeatherTDay and @CTmagazine on Twitter.

Find Viral Jesus and other original podcasts from CT at https://www.christianityto day.com/ct/podcasts/.

Christianity Today is an acclaimed and award-winning media ministry that elevates the storytellers and sages of the global Church. Each month, across a variety of digital and print media, the ministry carries the most important stories and ideas of the kingdom of God to over 4.5 million people all around the planet.

News

Cheer on These Christian Olympians from Around the World

Morgan Lee

Meet the women and men who make their faith a priority as they compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

VCG / Getty Images

The Opening Ceremonies have just commenced, but the 2020 Tokyo Games already feel weird. The Japanese government made a last-minute decision to bar spectators, and a number of athletes had to drop out after testing positive for COVID-19 or quarantine after being exposed to those who have tested positive.

Like their fellow Olympians, Christian athletes have made sacrifices, worked through mental health crises, and pushed themselves to their physical limits to make it to the Games. But they’ve been able to do so with the conviction of where their ultimate identity rests. Many have also used their platform to share about God’s work in their life and to give back in response to what they’ve achieved. Here’s 14 athletes currently in Tokyo from around the world.

©Tokyo 2020

Lucas Lautaro Guzman, Taekwondo (Argentina)

@lucastkd94

In 2012, Sebastián Crismanich became the first Argentine to win a taekwondo gold medal at the Olympics. Lucas Lautaro Guzman hopes to become the second.

In 2019, he won a bronze medal at the 2019 World Taekwondo Championships in the men's flyweight category. His achievement came just three months after his mother passed away from a brief battle with breast cancer. Though losing her has been hard, Guzman deepened his faith and today says he has much to be thankful for.

Just before the start of the Olympics, Guzman celebrated his 27th birthday in Kazakhstan. In a caption accompanying his “last photo as a 26-year-old,” he wrote, “I don't feel I deserve all that I am experiencing. … I cannot ask God for anything more, because he gives me so much that I am more than complete and full. Regardless of all the external [success] that I am receiving, I must confess that Christ is the best that has ever happened to me. And I don't want to convince them to think the way I think. In the end, what we say is useful as long as there is evidence in our actions and conduct.”

©Tokyo 2020

Nicola McDermott, high jump (Australia)

@nicolalmcdermott

“What would a surrendered life in sport look like?” High jumper Nicola McDermott poses that question in her Instagram bio—and then goes on about living a life seeking to give the query a deserving answer. On the field, McDermott, 24, won a bronze medal at the 2018 Commonwealth games and set a personal record last year after leaving Australia to train in Europe during the pandemic. Off the field, she cofounded Everlasting Crowns, a ministry where she hopes “fellow athletes transformed by Jesus’s perfect love, planted in churches and discipled to be a blessing to every place they are sent.”

“My faith is the reason I have stayed in the sport so long,” she told The Guardian earlier this year. “Faith is the confidence in things you haven’t seen, right? Two metres—when I was an eight-year-old, jumping 1.15m—you need a bit of faith to believe in that. I pursued sport so hard until I was 20 that I thought that was what would make me happy—once I was an Olympian, once I reached something, then I’d be happy. I got to a level where I had everything I ever dreamed of, but I was still dissatisfied—I realised I had put my identity into performance and achievement. Faith for me was realising that I am loved regardless of performance—high jumping is simply a way to connect me to God.”

©Tokyo 2020

Ítalo Ferreira, Surfing (Brazil)

@italoferreira

Surfing made its debut at the Olympics and 2019 world champion Ítalo Ferreira won the men’s first gold medal. The 27-year-old athlete used social media to praise God for the victory, repeating the mantra he had taken with him to Japan: di amén que viene el oro (roughly, say amen and the gold will come.) Ferreira said he prayed these words from his bed, starting at 3am in the morning, asking God to help his dream come true. “And here it is! My name in the history of surf,” he said. Winning the gold required Ferreira to overcome choppy conditions, an incoming storm that forced the surfers to consolidate the competition from two days to one, and a board that snapped within the first minutes of his gold medal round. Overcome with tears, he continued: “I’ve trained much in the last months and God has made my dream come true. I only have to thank God for giving me the opportunity to do what I love.”

From a small town northeastern Brazil, Ferreira won his first surfing competition two months after his father, a man who purchased fish from fisherman and resold them to restaurants, first bought his son a board. As Ferreira quickly ascended into world of elite surfing, he earned enough money to buy his parents a house on the beach. "The ocean holds a lot of weight in my life. Starting with my dad, who made a living off the sea, selling fish, and I do it by surfing,” said Ferreira in a video spot encouraging ocean conversation. “A future without the ocean? It would be terrible. I think the ocean is God’s special gift to the people.”

©Tokyo 2020

Charles Fernandez, Modern Pentathlon (Guatemala)

@charlesfernandez_5

When Charles Fernandez was seven years old, his family moved from the United States to his father’s home country of Guatemala to serve as missionaries. Years before his son was born, Carlos Fernandez competed in the pentathlon, which consists of fencing, freestyle swimming, equestrian show jumping, and a combined pistol-shooting and cross-country-running event. Carlos and his wife, Esther now run a ministry in the mountains outside of Antigua, Guatemala, that serves the surrounding Mayan community.

After competing in the 2016 Olympics in Rio at age 20, where he placed 15th, Fernandez won the Pan American Games in 2019. “Coming back to my country with two medals, it is definitely a huge blessing to be able to share these moments with these people who fight every day to get out of poverty and to give them the hope of Christ,” said Fernandez, after winning two regional events in 2018. “That is why I do what I do, to be a light of Christ unto the nations in this sport.” Throughout the pandemic, Fernandez, who also considers himself a social worker, has been traveling between the US and Guatemala to try and help his fellow citizens. “My aim as an athlete is to bring hope to them, showing them that anything is possible when you work hard,” he said in an interview last year. “The two ways I support the country (socially and through sport) are different, but thank God they fit together in a very special way. This is the reason and motivation for what I do at the Olympics."

©Tokyo 2020

Jonatan Christie, Badminton (Indonesia)

@jonatanchristieofficial

No country has a larger Muslim population than Indonesia. But one of their most beloved athletes is a 23-year-old badminton player who loves Jesus. Here’s one reason why: In 2018, five years after Christie won his senior title at age 15, he promised God that if he made the badminton men’s singles’ final at the 2018 Asian Games, he would give half his bonus away. Just weeks earlier, an earthquake struck the island of Lombok, killing more than 500 people and displacing close to half a million.

Christie won the Asian Games—and then paid to rebuild one school and two mosques, hoping this gesture would help bring his country together. Despite these accolades, Christie remains humble. “I am not a perfect man. I am far from being a good person. I think I am not someone who can be a good role model because I myself still struggle with many sins,” Christie, who is currently ranked seventh in the world, said earlier this year. “I learned a lot from the people around me about how to go through it together with God. My spirituality life doesn't always run smoothly. To follow Jesus doesn't always mean that everything will be okay. I still have to face many trials. But for me, whatever trials God allows us to face, we must continue to learn and grow. If we can get through a problem with God, there must be a new door that opens, so we can be more mature in dealing with our problems.”

Screenshot / Edits by CT

Raelin D'Alie, 3×3 Basketball (Italy)

@rmdalie11

Raelin D’Alie is five-foot-four and grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. But over the next couple of weeks, she’ll be representing Italy as a member of their three-on-three women’s basketball team. The 33 year old, who has represented Italy for the past 10 years, made the basket that qualified Italy in the Olympics after going 0-9 to start the game.

Last year, D’Alie’s season with Virtus Bologna was shut down because of the pandemic. “I’m a person of faith, so how I respond to suffering is I pray and I sing to God. I told my roommate, ‘This is a real hard hit for Italy.’ And we prayed that God would use this moment to also give them one of the greatest joys that they ever experienced in a short amount of time,” she told The Journal Times. “I know that Italy is so proud that we’re going to the Olympics and I really hope to do something incredibly special for Italy, especially because of the suffering they’ve gone through for the last 18 months.”

©Tokyo 2020

Yohan Blake, Sprinter (Jamaica)

@yohanblake

Usain Bolt won’t be around this Olympics, but his longtime training partner, Yohan Blake, will be competing. In 2012, Blake finished behind Bolt in the 100m and 200m sprints and together, along with two other Jamaican teammates, took gold in the 4x100m relay. In 2016, they repeated their success. Beyond his athletic goals, Blake aspires to help people. According to his website bio, he “sees himself as being placed on earth by God to help and care for the sheep like a loving shepherd. That mindset has made him into the kind, self-sacrificing individual he is today.”

Blake, whose social media presence alternates Bible verses and plugs for his new website, will compete in the men’s 100m.

©Tokyo 2020

Odunayo Adekuoroye, Wrestling (Nigeria)

Only one Nigerian female athlete has ever won a gold medal at the Olympics. Wrestler Odunayo Adekuoroye believes she is “definitely” going to be the second. “I believe by the special grace of God; it’s my time to shine,” she said earlier this month. “So, I will definitely bring gold to Nigeria by His grace.”

Adekuoroye grew up in southwest Nigeria and, as a child, hawked goods on the street. Sprinting was her first interest before her desire to travel encouraged her to start wrestling, a decision her parents initially did not support. As a teenager, Adekuoroye hid her hobby from them. When they found out she had been wrestling behind their backs, they only relented when her coach offered to pay her school fees and have her live with him. Her career has transformed her family’s financial situation; Adekuoroye was able to purchase a car for her father and opened a shop for her mother. “Wrestling gave me fame, took me out of poverty and gave me a name. We didn’t have anything at home, but when I started making money, at least now we are not rich, but we are comfortable,” she said last year.

Adekuoroye is a two-time Commonwealth Games winner and reached the quarterfinals in Rio. “As a Christian, I believe in the principle of work and pray as directed in the Bible,” she said before a competition in 2015. “I and my coaches are working, so it’s now left for the Nigeria people to pray for the team.”

©Tokyo 2020

Nick Willis, distance runner (New Zealand)

@willisnick

After four Olympics, Kiwi Nick Willis is back for his fifth. “This is not a boast or brag, but it simply amazes me that I can do a two hour run and finish feeling like it was a 10minute jog. To be this fit is a unique experience few in the world can comprehend,” he tweeted in 2019. Sometimes I want to retire, but God has given me this gift, so I’ll run and run!”

Run he has. Willis has twice won Olympic medals for New Zealand in the 1,500m; he won the silver medal in 2008 in Beijing and a bronze in 2016 in Rio. Despite representing a country in Oceania, Willis lives on the other side of the globe after moving to attend University of Michigan. It was there that, at the encouragement of his brother, he got involved with Athletes in Action and reconnected with his childhood faith, an act that helped him cope with the grief he still felt at losing his mother at a young age. “Something started tapping on my heart, telling me that my mom was watching my life from heaven. I tried to fight it off with more alcohol, and late nights, but the knocking on my heart became louder and louder,” he wrote. “This became impossible to deny. I knew God was chasing me, and had been for many years. I decided to finally stop running from Him.”

Instead, Willis is running today, almost as a way to worship, as a conversation he recounted in a tweet several years suggested:

“Dad, why do you always run?”

“Because I’m thanking God for giving me fast legs”

“Do you feel his power in your legs when you run?”

“I guess I do, yes!”

©Tokyo 2020

Wayde Van Niekerk, Sprints (South Africa)

@waydedreamer

When Wayde Van Niekerk won the 400m in Rio and shattered Michael Johnson’s longtime record, he immediately opened his mouth and praised God. “I have dreamed of this since I was a little kid,” he told BBC. “The only thing I can do now is to give God praise. I went on my knees each and every day and I told the Lord to take care of me and look after me every step I asked the Lord to carry me through the race and I am really just blessed for this opportunity."

The following year, Van Niekerk thanked God again after he won a gold medal at the IAAF World Championships. But the South African runner has barely competed since, after he tore his ACL at a charity rugby event. Yet his faith seemingly hasn’t wavered. Bible verses adorn his Twitter and Instagram posts. “Be courageous in the Lord,” he tweeted in an announcement for a recent race. In another: “The Lord's faithful love steadies me.”

©Tokyo 2020

An Baul, Judo (South Korea)

@anbaul

Before he went into his gold medal match at Rio, Baul An prayed. “I didn't pray for An Baul to win the gold medal. I just prayed that I could do my best and come back without regrets. … Even if it's not the Olympics, I tend to pray like this before every game.” A 2015 world champion and 2016 medal favorite, An was upset by Italy’s Fabio Basile, ranked 29th in his weight class.

Want to pray for the South Korean judoka this Olympics? Here are his prayer requests: “I hope to finish the match well with all the support of others. Please pray for our safety and health during the Olympics, so that we can do well as much as we practiced, with no regrets.”

©Tokyo 2020

Latisha (Yung-jan) Chan, Tennis (Taiwan)

@latishayjchan

Latisha Chan and her older sister Chan Hao-ching will be playing for the second straight Olympics as they attempt to get past the quarterfinals, where they lost in 2016. Currently ranked 21st in the world, the sisters were eliminated in the quarterfinals in both the French Open and Wimbledon earlier this summer. As a women’s and mixed-doubles player, Chan has won nearly three dozen tournaments, including the 2017 US Open alongside Martina Hingis and the 2018 French Open, the 2019 French Open, and the 2019 Wimbledon Championships with Ivan Dodig.

In 2015, Latisha, her sister, and her mother were all baptized together. To cope with pressure, Chan has often found a quiet corner, turned on music, and prayed. “Most of my prayers to our heavenly Father are not about winning the matches, but about asking for guidance,” she said in 2017. “I pray that we would not get injured, and that we would have a good game. Also, that regardless of the eventual result, we would be able to accept it and learn a humble attitude through the process."

©Tokyo 2020

Cherelle Thompson, Swimming (Trinidad & Tobago)

@cher_ellet

Cherelle Thompson wanted to make the Olympic team last year. But as her fellow athletes know so well, things don’t always go as planned. Unable to enter a pool during the first months of the pandemic last year, Thompson recognized her need to cling to her faith during this time. “I am acknowledging my limited view on life and my future, and trusting it to Him because of His sovereignty and track record in taking good care of His own,” she wrote. “As much as I like to be in control of all the details and know what each step is going to look like, I am trusting God by surrendering my future to Him. I am not giving up hope (for all that I want to accomplish), but I am transferring authority over the parts of my life that I thought I had figured out.”

Now back in the pool, the 29-year-old qualified for the Olympics the last week of June and will compete in the women’s 50-meter freestyle.

©Tokyo 2020

Joshua Cheptegei, distance running (Uganda)

@joshuacheptegei

In 2017, Joshua Cheptegei praised the accomplishments of decorated fellow distance runner Mo Farah on Twitter. Then a fan replied, “Joshua, Now it's your turn to champion.” Cheptegei accepted the affirmation. “Just watch the space, GOD has so many Golds for me in store, HE will strengthen me, I am the Lord's worrior,” he tweeted.

In 2020, Cheptegei set the world record for the 5,000m and 10,000m races. Despite this success, the Ugandan runner is deeply acquainted with failure.

When Uganda hosted the 2017 World Cross Country Championships in 2017, Cheptegei was the host nation’s best shot at gold. Just four months before he posted that tweet, Cheptegei was on the verge of winning the senior 10km race. But on his final lap, in front of the home crowd, he slowed to the point where he took 30th place, a loss that left him so depressed he tried to avoid people for weeks after. Today, he uses his voice to advocate against female genital mutilation.

©Tokyo 2020

Simone Manuel, Swimming (USA)

@swimone

In 2016, Simone Manuel took home four Olympic medals, two gold and two silver: She won gold in the 100m freestyle and the 4x100m medley relay. She took silver as part of the 4×100m freestyle relay and in the 50m freestyle event. The 24-year-old co-captain of the swim team will return to the Olympics this year, but struggled making it to the games.

For months, Manuel was afflicted by overtraining, a condition that left mentally depressed and her body exhausted, and compelled her doctor to order her to halt working out for three weeks in March of this year. At the Olympic trials in June, she failed to qualify for the finals of the 100m freestyle. But she is now in Tokyo after qualifying in the 50m freestyle. “I just had to take a moment to praise God,” Manuel told NBC Sports after winning that race and securing her spot in Tokyo. “I mean, this year has been difficult, especially the last couple months, but before I dove in, I felt like it was my moment, and I’m so thankful for the blessings that God has given me.”

With translation assistance from Giselle Seidel, Maria Fennita, and Juhyun Park.

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From Eric Liddell to Allyson Felix: Why Faithful Fans Are Drawn to Olympians

Clayton Trutor

Christian athletes testify to the gospel in competition and beyond.

Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

“I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast,” Eric Liddell wrote in a letter to his sister Jenny before competing as a sprinter for Great Britain in the 1924 Summer Olympics.

The 1981 film Chariots of Fire (for my money, the best sports movie ever made) follows the lives of the devoutly Christian Liddell and his Jewish teammate Harold Abrahams at the Paris Games, and actor Ian Charleson, playing Liddell, intones these lines over the film’s sublime final race scene.

Liddell wins the gold medal in the 400 meters, a race that the 100-meter specialist had never run at an international competition. The son of Scottish missionaries, Liddell refused to compete in the 100 meters, which was won by his friend Abrahams, because the opening heats had been scheduled for a Sunday.

Liddell’s decision to remember the Sabbath and forgo the 100-meter competition transformed this national hero into a role model for Christians around the world. This man of remarkable talents was willing to pass up his best shot at athletic glory for the opportunity to properly honor his Lord and Savior.

Certainly, many Christians had competed in the previous modern Olympiads, but none took such a public or principled stand for his faith. Following his Olympic triumph, Liddell returned to China, where he had been born during his parents’ mission in the country. He spent much of the rest of his life in China, serving the poor and teaching the gospel.

During World War II—the last time the Olympics were called off—Liddell was taken prisoner by Japanese forces and devoted the last two years of his life to ministering to his fellow inmates at the Weixian Internment Camp in Shandong Province. He died just a few months short of the camp’s liberation by American forces.

Liddell continues to be remembered by Christians as a modern-day martyr. And nearly a century after he won the gold, his witness has empowered subsequent generations of faithful Olympians to speak out about a purpose beyond the podium.

As millions of fans around the world tune in to the Tokyo Olympics, they aren’t just watching for record breakers and feats of strength. They want to hear stories with echoes of Liddell, people whose faith makes them bolder competitors, caring teammates, and humble victors.

Competing on the highest levels of a sport and on an international stage takes almost supernatural dedication. Christian faith can be a source of hope and inspiration for athletes who feel like the odds are against them.

In my own childhood, I found the story of Dan Jansen, who spoke frequently and openly of his faith, particularly striking. In 1988, the World Champion speed skater learned the morning before competing for Team USA at the winter games in Calgary that his sister had died of leukemia. Jansen, a favorite in both the 500-meter and 1000-meter sprints, fell in both races. Four years later, he again failed to medal despite his world-class status. Finally at the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics, Jansen persevered and won a gold medal in the 1000 meters.

Our draw to Christians in sports is not specific to Olympic athletes, as the mass appeal of figures such as David Robinson, Tim Tebow, and George Foreman has demonstrated over the years. But Olympians find themselves on a unique stage—representing their country before the rest of the world. As outspoken Christians, they, too, become global representatives of the faith.

Today’s Olympic lineup contains Christian athletes whose faith shapes how they compete and how they live their lives outside the games.

American sprinter Allyson Felix, a six-time gold medalist and three-time silver medalist, says her Christian faith inspires her to put on sports clinics for children in the US and abroad, working as a State Department envoy. Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, a six-time medalist who will be competing in her fourth Olympics in the 100 and 200 meters, has used sports as a ministry and developed a large social media following based on both her prowess on the track and her consistently positive, gospel-informed message.

Why do Christian athletes, both past and present, serve as such a source of inspiration for faithful fans? I spoke with a friend of mine the other day about this very question. He responded with a story from his youth about athletes not on the international stage but on a decidedly local one. He remembered the time a dozen or so players from the local college football team visited with his church’s youth group right after a game. None of these players made it to the National Football League, but that made them no less inspiring to the youth to whom they witnessed. The standout of the evening was the team’s star running back.

“I had watched him explode through holes, shed tacklers, and rush for long touchdowns on several Saturday afternoons,” my friend said. “His reputation made me excited to hear him talk, but what struck me was his size and strength and his utter kindness and humility. He had the largest smile and conveyed genuine concern and goodwill for each person in the audience. I don’t remember a word he said, but I remember his presence—strong, kind, compassionate, and winsome. Utterly Christlike.”

This juxtaposition is part of why we find Christian athletes so compelling. We see the fire and fury they display in competition set against their ability to be good sports between the lines and exemplars of the Christian life outside the lines. It’s a version of being in the world but not of it. They demonstrate the control and confidence necessary to compete as athletes while displaying the magnanimity of true disciples.

That’s why we look to history and to our own times for examples of what was once known as Muscular Christianity. The term took off particularly in the British Commonwealth. (I’ve joked to more than a few friends that share my enthusiasm for Chariots of Fire that the picture should have actually been called Muscular Christianity: The Movie.) Long before Liddell took his stand, British intellectuals such as Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley articulated a vision of sports as a ministry.

To them, sports was an institution that cultivated the Christian virtues of discipline and self-sacrifice. Echoes of Hughes’s 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days can be heard in every coach who speaks to the character-revealing benefits of sports or in every player who speaks of the brotherhood or sisterhood that develops among teammates.

In the greatest Olympic triumphs, we celebrate that with God all things are possible. Or as Eric Liddell put it, “in the dust of defeat as well as the laurels of victory, there is glory to be found if one has done his best.”

Clayton Trutor teaches at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, and is the author of Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports, which is being published by the University of Nebraska Press.

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News

Christian and Muslim Leaders Agree on Legitimacy of Evangelism

Jayson Casper

World Evangelical Alliance and Nahdlatul Ulama sign the Nation’s Mosque Statement on sidelines of the 2021 International Religious Freedom Summit, seeking a “harmonious world order.”

Nahdlatul Ulama leader Yahya Cholil Staquf presents World Evangelical Alliance leader Thomas Schirrmacher with a festschrift at The Nation's Mosque in Washington, DC, during the 2021 International Religious Freedom Summit.

Courtesy of World Evangelical Alliance

The world’s largest Muslim organization accepts that Christians will try to convert its members. A new partnership with evangelicals seeks to ensure this does not lead to conflict.

Last week, the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) signed a statement of cooperation with Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Indonesian association that claims 90 million members worldwide. Established in 1926 to counter Wahhabi trends issuing from the Arabian Peninsula, its name means “Revival of the Religious Scholars.”

“Evangelicals very much aspire to proselytism, and so does Islam. So naturally there will be competition,” said NU secretary general Yahya Cholil Staquf. “But we need to have this competition conducted in a peaceful and harmonious environment.”

Staquf spoke from the stage of the 2021 International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit in Washington. On its opening day, he and WEA secretary general Thomas Schirrmacher signed the Nation’s Mosque Statement, along with Talib Shareef, imam of Masjid Muhammad, the first American mosque built by the descendants of slaves.

Calling for “the emergence of a truly just and harmonious world order,” the statement seeks a global alliance “to prevent the political weaponization of identity” and “the spread of communal hatred.”

Schirrmacher called the WEA’s cooperation with NU the product of deep theological dialogue, counter to the academic tendency to downplay truth claims. And as evangelicals, evangelism is at the heart of their effort.

“We are working together for the right to convert each other,” the German theologian said. “Religious freedom does not mean that we agree but that we live in peace with our deep differences.”

But alongside evangelism is coexistence and common ground.

“There have been centuries of jihads and corresponding crusades,” said Thomas Johnson, senior advisor to the WEA’s Theological Commission. “It is time to set a conscious new direction.”

This includes recognition of “deep agreement” in terms of love of neighbor, human dignity, and helping the vulnerable. Johnson is also the WEA special envoy for engaging Humanitarian Islam, the title NU gives to its East Indies cultural manifestation of the faith.

Together with NU’s North Carolina–based institute, they released a festschrift in honor of Schirrmacher entitled God Needs No Defense: Reimagining Muslim-Christian Relations in the 21st Century.

The book prominently features a rebuke to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for converting Istanbul’s historic Hagia Sophia cathedral-museum into a mosque.

“That speaks a lot clearer than my voice as a follower of Jesus,” said Sam Brownback, co-chair of the IRF summit. During a plenary session, he held the book aloft, praising it as emblematic of the gathering’s interfaith cooperation.

“There are joyous engagements between Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Jews, meeting like old friends,” he told CT. “This is what I have dreamed of—deeper relationships at the leadership level, finding ways to stand up for each other’s religious freedom.”

The anthology’s title comes from Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia’s first democratically elected president and the former chairman of NU. A champion of religious dialogue, he and NU sought to model a conciliatory Islam in opposition to trends emerging from the Middle East.

About 87 percent of Indonesia’s population of 275 million follow Islam; roughly 10 percent are Christian. Hinduism and Buddhism comprise the remainder.

In 2019, a gathering of thousands of NU scholars abolished the religious category of kafir—“infidel,” or “non-Muslim”—replacing it with the concept of citizenship in a modern nation-state. The fatwa built upon their 2018 Nusantara Manifesto, criticizing the imposition of sharia law, and their 2016 Jakarta Declaration, decrying extremism and its alleged Islamic justifications.

“If necessary, traditional societies must make changes in their own values,” said Staquf from the IRF stage. “Abolishing the legal relevance of the category of ‘non-Muslim’ will enable us to coexist peacefully with others.”

Officially secular, Indonesia still maintains blasphemy laws. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom counted 39 cases of prosecution between 2014 and 2018.

Indonesia ranks No. 47 on Open Doors’ World Watch List of the 50 nations where it is hardest to be a Christian.

“I appreciate that Humanitarian Islam’s efforts to recontextualize problematic tenets of Islam will take time and much discussion,” said Kyle Wisdom, WEA’s deputy coordinator in the NU working group. “I’m hopeful that this step will lead to a larger discussion within the Muslim world, but that remains to be seen.”

Even so, participants at the Nation’s Mosque Statement signing ceremony compared Indonesia and NU favorably against the Arab world.

“[NU documents] are consistent with Indonesian society, unlike other Muslim nations whose declarations do not match, even if they are correct,” said Shareef. “The ‘word became flesh’ in Nahdlatul Ulama.”

Schirrmacher said he was impressed to find in Indonesia that converts from Islam walk around freely. In signing this cooperative agreement, he said WEA leaders were eager for dialogue to “change something”—even if that is not necessarily the faith of their NU partners.

“We need to continue obeying our religion, but at the same time make peace with others,” said Staquf. “We hope the world will join us.”

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Platt’s McLean Bible Church Hit With Attempted Takeover, Lawsuit from Opposition

David Roach

The suburban DC megachurch’s recent scuffle over race and politics is symptomatic of a broader evangelical rift.

Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images

The Washington-area megachurch led by best-selling author David Platt has affirmed three new elders—but only after a public tussle over politics, race, and alleged liberal drift, plus a lawsuit filed by dissenters.

The conflict at McLean Bible Church is significant not only because of the congregation’s size and influence—with several thousand attendees and a prominent place in the DC church landscape—but also because the incident marks the latest salvo in an ongoing clash within American evangelicalism.

After new elder nominees failed to be elected for the first time in the church’s history, Platt told the congregation in a sermon in early July that “a small group of people inside and outside this church coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church.”

At a June 30 meeting, nominees Chuck Hollingsworth, Jim Burris, and Ken Tucker had failed to receive a clear 75 percent majority, the margin required for elder election. The total was either just above or just below 75 percent, depending on whether provisional ballots were counted, so a second vote was held July 18, at which all three nominees received at least 78 percent of the vote.

The weeks between the two votes were tumultuous. Platt said in his July 4 sermon that people told voting members, in person and by email, that the elders up for nomination would have sold the church’s Tysons location to build a mosque, with proceeds going to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

Online posts on blogs, Facebook, and email charged Platt with pushing critical race theory, revising biblical teaching on sexuality, and aligning with the SBC despite McLean’s constitutional prohibition of affiliating with any denomination.

Opponents of McLean’s current leadership wrote in a blog posted by the right-wing Capstone Report that Platt—who became pastor of the DC church full time in 2018—was attempting to “purge conservative members.”

Platt also described one email circulating that claimed “MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.”

“I know it’s so ugly and painful to even hear, but I want to point out the approach that’s being used by people giving leadership to this group in these meetings,” he told the congregation, calling the claims made about him and the incoming elders “unquestionably untrue and in many cases completely unreasonable.”

Platt, the author of Radical, is known for his passionate call to evangelism, missions, and Scripture. What opponents claim as being Platt’s “liberal” or “woke” politics, supporters see as the 42-year-old preacher’s commitment to Christ above all.

“We will not apologize for our increasing diversity or our commitment to humbly address racial issues from God’s Word as we unite together on a glorious mission to proclaim this good Word and our great God in a city where five million-plus men, women, boys, and girls are on a road that leads to an eternal hell and need the good news of God’s love for them,” he said.

While Platt raised concerns that the opposing group deceived members at the Tysons location into voting against the new elders, a lawsuit filed July 15 alleges that church leaders at McLean illegally barred some of their opponents from voting in the follow-up elder election. The suit is pending despite the announced vote outcome. “The heart of the complaint really comes down to truth, transparency, and a free, open, and uncoerced process,” plaintiff’s attorney Rick Boyer told RNS.

Sarah Merkle, an attorney and professional parliamentarian, said the incident highlights the importance in any church of establishing and following sound voting procedures. She added that she is not familiar with the specific policies and procedures at McLean.

“When you don’t follow the rules and it has an effect on a consequential vote, you have now created a huge distraction from your mission,” Merkle said. “If you’re the Red Cross, that’s problematic. If you’re the church of Jesus Christ, that’s really problematic.”

Church leaders say the current round of conflict predates Platt’s pastorate. He became a teaching pastor in 2017 and left the presidency of the SBC’s International Mission Board to dedicate his ministry to McLean the following year.

Under founding pastor Lon Solomon, McLean launched a church planting partnership with the SBC’s North American Mission Board in 2016 while remaining nondenominational. As Solomon transitioned from leadership following a 37-year pastorate, McLean made major budget changes, scaling back the percentage of income spent on personnel and incentivizing staff departures. Both moves raised questions for some members.

“Over the last several years, we’ve watched David take the church—the church we built, the church we love, the church we’ve poured are hearts and souls and lives into—and turned it into a political, stripped-down version of what it used to be,” wrote former elder Mark Gottlieb, who is encouraging members of a group called Save McLean Bible Church to “admit defeat and walk away” after the July 18 vote.

Under Solomon, the congregation had been known as “a holy destination for GOP senators and Bush aides.” Tensions ramped up the past two years amid political turmoil in the DC area and nationwide.

In June 2019, then-President Donald Trump showed up at a worship service and Platt prayed for him from the stage, an action that drew criticism from some in the church. A year later, Platt and African American McLean pastor Mike Kelsey participated in a Christian march following the death of George Floyd, which was construed by some as support for the Black Lives Matter organization. McLean stated in a Q&A on its website that Kelsey’s son held a poster that read, “Black Lives Matter to God.”

Platt’s 2020 book Before You Vote also drew criticism from some church members as being soft on traditional evangelical issues like abortion and sexuality.

Allegations that leaders were seeking to join the SBC in violation of the church’s constitution led McLean to suspend all contributions to SBC causes this month.

In its Q&A, McLean states that it is not Southern Baptist and links to an undated letter from SBC Executive Committee employee Ashley Clayton stating, “The SBC Executive Committee recognizes that McLean Bible Church is an independent, nondenominational Bible church, and they are not affiliated denominationally with the SBC.”

However, Baptist Press, the SBC’s news service, stated in a July 21 article, “McLean Bible Church is a cooperating church with the Southern Baptist Convention, yet like all Southern Baptist churches, remains independent and autonomous in its functionality and governance.”

To some observers, McLean’s conflict seems like a replay of other recent episodes from American evangelicalism, where leaders who appeal to Scripture to address social issues are accused of theological liberalism or secular influence even if they continue to hold traditional Christian views. The level of suspicion around such leaders appears to have grown during the Trump administration and during the reckoning over racism following George Floyd’s death last year.

College Park Church in Indianapolis was accused in a blog post this spring of caving to “ever-increasing social justice infiltration.” Dallas pastor Matt Chandler and former SBC president J. D. Greear both have been accused of being “woke,” and the SBC’s emerging Conservative Baptist Network (CBN) has charged some convention leaders with advocating critical race theory and downplaying the Bible’s sufficiency. CBN-backed candidate Mike Stone received 48 percent of the vote in last month’s SBC presidential election, finishing second to Alabama pastor Ed Litton.

Chuck Hannaford, a Memphis clinical psychologist who has helped churches mediate conflicts for 30 years, said McLean’s troubles are the latest iteration of a broader conflict between younger Reformed Christians and older generations of white evangelicals.

“There is some resistance from what some would consider the old guard in evangelical circles to younger guys” accused of being soft on doctrine in an effort to reach a more diverse audience, Hannaford said. Some older evangelicals “see it as sort of a coup.”

Meanwhile, leaders like Platt see the pushback as its own sort of coup and remain concerned about the influence of opposition fueled on social media and watchdog blogs.

“We want MBC to be a place where people with all kinds of convictions on matters of conscience can thrive,” the Q&A stated. “So wherever possible, we want to work together to move forward together on mission even with our different perspectives.”

Hannaford advises pastors not to make changes too quickly and recommends cooperation from both sides, allowing believers to differ on secondary doctrinal and ethical issues. He also warned against letting tensions swell.

“We have to address conflict intentionally” and “face to face,” Hannaford said. “Putting it off is only going to make it worse. It never goes away on its own.”

Back at McLean, Platt and his fellow elders are urging the church in that direction.

“We have walked through tumultuous days over the last year in the world, surfacing many challenges in our lives, families, our country, the world, and the church,” Platt told CT. “We all need God’s grace to love one another well and to live for the spread of his love in a world that desperately needs what only he can give. And as we walk faithfully with God during these days, keeping our eyes fixed on him, I trust that he will work all these things together for our good and ultimately his glory.”

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

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Review

Trusting God with Your Illness Is No Prescription for Passivity

Agnes Howard

Early Americans bore energetic witness to bodily suffering. What can their example teach believers today?

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

Sarah Pierpont often found herself bedridden by sickness. Living in colonial New Haven in the 1750s, she considered it a duty to make record of her pain and its spiritual lessons by writing. She tried to interpret her sickness through her faith and felt worse when poor health left her unable to write. Pierpont lamented both physical and spiritual weakness, noting that her “earthly Tabernacle is often shaking and now seems to be very Tottering.”

The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America (North American Religions)

Philippa Koch (Author)

NYU Press

280 pages

Pierpont found consolation in God’s mercy and wanted to bear witness to it in ways recognizable to those who might pray similarly today. Still, her urgency to write about being sick might startle us. Though the pandemic claimed plenty of recent attention, we don’t usually endorse sickness as a favored topic of conversation. Complaints about one’s aches and pains might cause hearers to wince. Someone too diligent at sharing details of sickness risks sounding like Debbie Downer to contemporary ears.

Not so in the world of 18th-century American Protestants, for whom writing was an important response to the experience of illness. In The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America, Philippa Koch brings to life believers from this era who were confident of God’s direction in their earthly affairs.

Koch argues that 18th-century Protestants upheld trust in God’s providence in distinctive ways during sickness. Health and suffering are perennial concerns for Christians, as Koch insightfully observes (and as our current pandemic amply confirms). The author, who teaches religious studies at Missouri State University, trains attention on research currents in the history of the human body and lived religion.

Analyzing a period usually associated with enlightenment and secularization, Koch contests certain common assumptions about the way Americans of the time understood illness. As the conventional narrative has it, in the 1600s American colonists submitted to illness, ascribing their bodily misfortunes to God’s good (if inscrutable) will. Just one century later, however, under the influence of new scientific thinking, they had shifted toward conceiving of bodies as machines that might be fixed when broken, whether God willed it or not.

But this narrative is wrong at both ends. Koch shows that trust in providence invited not passivity but active response to God’s goodness. And later 18th-century ideas about physical matter stayed rooted in providential imagination.

Narrating sickness

The outmoded contrast Koch refutes—between a pious colonial period followed abruptly by a secular age—deserves some blame for letting us think early Americans submitted passively to illness. Misunderstandings of predestination are at fault too. Even colonists most persuaded of the doctrine of election did not think predestination left humans powerless in everyday life. Trust in providence was no prescription for idleness.

To the contrary, Koch shows, divine providence expected much in the way of human action. Sickness was a “pedagogical opportunity,” and pastors proposed many tasks the sick might do in response. For starters, sickness might prompt repentance. While pressing repentance on the sick might seem harsh, Koch insists that calls to repent of personal or communal failings were received positively, as active invitations to grow closer to God.

Repentance and prayer had roles in the sickroom, but the first order of business was reflection. The sick person’s primary obligation was to think. Ministers urged the sick to do what Koch calls “retrospecting,” a particular way of considering the past and “its meaning in terms of their life story and God’s superintendence.” Thinking, speaking, and writing combined in efforts to narrate sickness, a process Koch describes as “a fundamental practice for eighteenth-century Christians, who sought to organize and integrate the physical and spiritual experience of suffering within their life story.” Casting back beyond present difficulties would recall occasions of God’s provision for oneself, for one’s family, or even for forerunners in the faith known from the Bible. Narrating personal pain in the context of a broader arc encouraged sufferers to see how they fit within God’s continual care and mercy.

Koch’s argument drives the book, but her richly textured chapters do more than establish the persistence of providence. She features spiritual writings from both better-known ministers, like Cotton Mather and John Wesley, and some who are less familiar, like Heinrich Helmuth (a German-born Philadelphia pastor), Richard Allen (founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), Absalom Jones (America’s first Black Episcopal priest), and Samuel Urlsperger (who oversaw a pietist community in Ebenezer, Georgia). In paired chapters, Koch studies ministers’ counsel on health alongside the perspectives of laymen and laywomen. The pairing illuminates. Clergymen’s guides and sufferers’ diaries reflected a shared understanding. Conversation was not just dictated by elites but went both ways. Ministers like Mather advised readers how to interpret feelings, but these “Wholesome Words” were shaped by their personal contact with suffering, their own weakness, or their witness of the deaths of wives or children.

This reciprocal retrospective writing, Koch argues, both “imagined and created a community .” Religious leaders adapted their teachings on providence in accordance with both the needs of their congregants and 18th-century intellectual developments. New ideas about health and medicine informed responses to colonial epidemics, from smallpox in Boston in 1721 to Philadelphia’s yellow fever in 1793, but prevailing scientific understandings of the body were still shaped by consensus opinions on providence.

To illustrate this persistent providential thinking, Koch devotes one chapter to counsel surrounding birth and motherhood. Unfortunately, she sounds almost defensive about this focus: “Maternity is not a typical focus of intellectual inquiry into topics like providence, the enlightenment, and secularization; yet maternity is a widespread and significant human phenomenon, deeply considered in Christian thought and lived experience.”

The first half of that sentence deserves a richer tang of triumph as the author, locating a scholarly blind spot, demonstrates our need for her analysis. But the latter half underscores the absurdity of that blind spot. That Koch feels compelled to affirm maternity’s status as “a widespread and significant human phenomenon” would be almost humorous if its absence from discussions of “providence, the enlightenment, and secularization” weren’t so scandalous. Maternity is, after all, the precondition of everybody’s existence. At least in “Christian thought and lived experience,” maternity has drawn more due consideration. Christians have viewed birthing and nursing as signs not only of sacrificial love and promise but also, given the dangers associated with birth, of the frailty of human life.

Koch rightly recognizes maternity as relevant to her research. In the 18th century, “male midwives” with more mechanistic models of the body and more interventionist techniques contested traditional midwifery. Nevertheless, debates around women’s health continued to draw on providential views of nature and motherhood. Koch addresses subjects like birth and nursing, although she says less than I would have wished about pregnancy, surely an experience that summons thoughts of providence more than most.

Better “retrospecting”

The Course of God’s Providence provides perceptive analysis of the imaginative world in which Americans at an earlier time experienced sickness and God’s care. Readers should want to understand this for its own sake. But of course, as Koch intuits while writing amidst the pandemic, readers are also looking for insights into themselves and their own era.

The idea Koch excavates from the 18th century is serviceable for our time too. Narrative is a necessary response to sickness. The sick, now as then, might learn to position immediate afflictions in a larger context of faith. We might seek to understand the meaning of suffering and then share insights gleaned from that reflection. This practice goes one better than the current exercise often described as “making meaning,” since it applies shared meaning to the vagaries of individual life. Clear-eyed reckoning with health and God’s purposes is suitable not only for epidemics but also for private suffering, great and small.

Most of us could do better retrospecting about sickness. Mulling this way over every sore throat or stomach bug may sound dangerously self-absorbed, but it also could shift the focus from one’s own sorrows to empathy for others. Among the most painful parts of illness, as Pierpont illustrates, can be its power to silence or marginalize sufferers. The act of writing can draw the sick out of isolation. Thinking in providential ways about sickness both proceeds from community and helps reinforce that community.

The relevance of Koch’s argument is not just that 18th-century Americans could believe in providence but what they did about it. That the voices in this book cast positive light on difficult situations seems not just an example of providential belief but an exercise of that belief—that is, hope. Koch mentions hope, but hope radiates from these characters oftener than acknowledged. The virtue of hope is an active one, anchoring frightful events in sure promises even when the good is hard to see.

That is why retrospecting is so healthy a response. Looking back in that way does not oblige believers to embrace simplistic explanations about God’s purposes. But it does, amid the sorrow of bodily suffering, keep the constant goodness of God squarely in view.

Agnes R. Howard teaches humanities at Christ College, the honors college at Valparaiso University. She is the author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human.

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Wire Story

A Dozen Female Victims Sue Liberty University Over Abuse Policies

Emily McFarlan Miller - Religion News Service

The college is looking into “deeply troubling” allegations from victims who say its procedures were “enabling on-campus rapes.”

Amanda Andrade-Rhoades / AFP

A new lawsuit against Liberty University claims the Lynchburg, Virginia-based evangelical Christian school has “intentionally created a campus environment” that makes sexual assaults and rapes more likely to occur.

The complaint points a finger at the “weaponization” of Liberty’s student honor code, known as the Liberty Way, which it claims makes it “difficult or impossible” for students to report sexual violence. It also claims such violence, particularly by male student athletes, was excused while the women who reported it faced retaliation.

In a written statement, Liberty University said it was looking into the allegations, which it called “deeply troubling, if they turn out to be true.”

The suit, brought by 12 women who chose to remain anonymous, was filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York and first reported by ABC 13 News in Lynchburg. The women are said to include former Liberty employees and students and one woman who attended a summer camp on the school’s campus as a minor.

Liberty was aware its “policies and procedures, as written and implemented, were enabling on-campus rapes,” according to the lawsuit.

Some of the women, all identified as Jane Doe in the suit, allegedly were discouraged from reporting they had been assaulted because they were told they would be disciplined for violating the Liberty Way, according to the lawsuit.

Some women who reported their assaults to Liberty’s Title IX office or campus police allegedly were subjected to investigations that presumed they had consented to sex unless they could prove otherwise, the suit said.

Some allegedly were fined or penalized under the honor code, which the lawsuit claims has discouraged other victims from coming forward.

“The Liberty Way and its weaponization by Liberty University, as well as Liberty University’s well-documented pattern of discrimination against women victims and in favor of male assailants, created an atmosphere on campus that was permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule and insult that was sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the education and create a sexually hostile environment” for the plaintiffs, according to the complaint.

The Liberty Way includes guidelines for students’ dress and entertainment and does not permit “sexual relations outside of a biblically ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman.” Disciplinary measures for violating the honor code include points, fines, community service, and expulsion.

The code also prohibits sexual harassment, discrimination, and assault.

In its statement, Liberty noted that the honor code includes an “amnesty policy” to encourage victims to report any assault or discrimination without fear of discipline for their involvement in activities such as drinking or extramarital sex.

“It would be heartbreaking if those efforts had the results claimed in this lawsuit,” the statement said.

“We will immediately look into each of these claims to determine what needs to be done to make things right, if they turn out to be true. Because the claims are made anonymously and go back many years, in one case over two decades, it will take some time to sort through.”

The 12 alleged cases include unwanted touching and harassment by a coworker and rapes by both strangers and acquaintances. One student alleges that she was threatened with expulsion if she didn’t marry her boyfriend after becoming pregnant.

In one case included in the lawsuit, a woman identified as Jane Doe 12, who had attended a debate camp at Liberty in summer 2000 when she was 15 years old, said she was grabbed by a man in a women’s dormitory and carried into a shower, then thrown into a chair in an atrium and grabbed again. She held him off with her feet while he groped her legs and breasts, then bit him when he tried to strangle her, according to the suit.

When Jane Doe 12 called the Liberty University Police Department, she allegedly was forced to ride to the police station in the same car as her attacker, where she allegedly was accused of fabricating the assault and told if she did not withdraw her claim, she would be criminally charged with filing a false report.

She alleges that she was held for eight hours without food or drink, and neither her mother nor a child psychiatrist was contacted. She also was allegedly photographed while naked by a female debate coach and required to wash her hands, destroying any DNA evidence that may have been captured under her fingernails during the struggle.

She said her assailant turned out to be Jesse Matthew, who later was convicted of murdering two female students from Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia, according to the suit.

The women are being represented by attorney John Larkin of Gawthrop Greenwood, PC, which has offices in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware.

- More from Emily McFarlan Miller - Religion News Service

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